The Tale of Oriel Read online

  What his purpose could be for the goading mockery, Griff didn’t know, and had no care for. “Griff, Earl Sutherland,” he named himself.

  Tintage laughed aloud. His laugh rang untroubled, as merry as a lad at the dance with no thought of livelihood or marriage, with thought only for the circling dance, and the notes of the fiddle that lifted his feet, and all watching him with admiration and envy. “Yet you trust me not to have you slain, here? now?”

  “I don’t trust you for anything,” Griff answered quietly.

  In the silence that followed his answer, two men pushed out of the Inn door, crowding by Tintage. They dropped swords and knives on the stone. He was blind to their passage across the meadow to where the line of mounted soldiers waited.

  “You don’t come well armied, for all the riches of Sutherland, which are now yours,” Tintage said.

  Three more men pushed by him, and two behind them.

  Two scurried along, bent over for protection, around the far corner of the building.

  Others moved inside, girding on swords, strapping on breastplates.

  “Traitor,” Griff called out, “I sue for your surrender.” He knew, had known from the first word, that Tintage wished battle.

  “I scorn your suit,” Tintage called in answer from the doorway. “As I scorn your claim to the Earldom. And this,” he unsheathed his sword and raised it high, “is my answer to you, and to all who would bend me to their wills. Scorn is my answer.”

  Even as he declared his defiance, cries arose from the Inn. Tintage knew what they were. “You have played me false!” he cried, and then he laughed, “I thought too little of you.” Before Griff could answer, Tintage had run back inside, his sword out and ready.

  Griff gave the signal, the guidonier blew attack, and his soldiers rode out of the wood. The thunder of hooves mixed now with cries from within, and the shouting of the men who came out of the Inn to wage their battle in the meadow.

  Griff was down from his horse and heading for the Inn door, to meet the first wave of those driven out by Verilan’s soldiers.

  When Tintage was taken, that would be the end of fighting.

  The cry in his throat rose up again, and he opened his mouth wide. There was noise all around him, and his own Wolfer cry filled the air in front of him. At the same time, there was a deep silence through which he moved.

  “Guard, there,” came his own voice in that silence, as he drove his sword into an attacker, “parry—turn—quick, danger!” The noise, and some of it was cursing and screaming, seemed to come to him from far away, although the bodies were close all around him, some fighting, some fallen. The noise was deafening.

  He moved through the deafening noise, in his silence.

  “Tintage,” he reminded himself, as he fended off a sword, with a ringing of metal, and felt something sharp along his upper arm as he swept his own sword back, and his sword grew thick as it cut through flesh, and the smell of blood—

  The man screamed into his face, but he didn’t see Griff, for death had already blinded him. His scream might well have been soundless, for Griff didn’t hear it.

  “My lord.” It was Wardel standing in the main room of the Inn. Most of the soldiers in the room wore green shirts, and were his own men. Griff took a moment to assess, and then headed off.

  “Sir,” Wardel was at his side, a bloody bruise on his cheek, “keep safe—”

  Griff didn’t dare to stop to think, and choose. He pushed on, pushing around his own soldiers, once barely escaping a blow from the fist of one of his own officers—who saw at the last chance who it was he threatened, and flushed red, and then laughed, and then bent his shamed head, until Griff’s laughter excused him and both men went on about their tasks.

  Griff didn’t know how long it had been. His chest heaved. He didn’t see Tintage, but he thought there were fewer of the traitor’s band who offered combat now. He heard groaning, and moans, now, more than steel on steel. He heard voices calling support to one another. “I’m behind you.” “At your right.” “Any of the bastards left in that room?” Then he stepped out of the back door to the Inn and into the flagged yard.

  “Tintage!” he roared.

  Tintage and four or five men were running across the stones. Tintage halted, and turned, to hear his name called. The men with Tintage stopped at the sight of the soldiers, Verilan among them, who blocked their way. They crouched with drawn swords and held daggers in their other hands, awaiting attack.

  As soon as he saw flight was useless, Tintage strode back towards Griff.

  He frightened Griff.

  “So we will duel for the Earldom,” Tintage said.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Griff said.

  Tintage had fought his way out of the Inn, and his shirt showed that. He had lost, and his eyes showed it; for which reason he was determined to match swords with Griff. Griff could almost hear Tintage’s thought: The glory of it, if you cannot be Earl, to be the man who slew two Earls. A man who took two Earls into death with him could not be said to have made the journey ill attended.

  “We will, whether you choose it or not,” Tintage said, approaching with outstretched sword. “Oriel would have fought with me thus.”

  “Oriel was the better swordsman,” Griff said. His pride was for Oriel, not himself. “If you will have a duel, take Verilan,” Griff said, stepping aside to let Verilan—who was at his side now, and eager—come into place.

  But Tintage didn’t care for the risk of dueling Verilan. He tried to run, and was met by soldiers. He tried to fight his way through them, and he was unweaponed, caught, and bound.

  It was finished.

  Tintage’s men threw down their weapons.

  Griff leaned against the stone wall of the Inn. He smelled smoke, and saw green-shirted soldiers in a line, passing buckets of water to put out a fire in the barns. He heard voices again, from within the Inn. Soldiers cursed and reported to officers, and asked if it was over. “Quick,” they said, and “Short.” “Not a proper battle.” “Aye, and that’s the best kind.” “Aye, and that’s what the Earl devised.” “It’s what we all wanted, isn’t it—a victory.” “A good victory.” “Where is our Earl, he isn’t killed, is he?”

  Griff stood straight, and walked into the Inn kitchens, and across and through the main room, and out onto the meadow.

  It had taken no time at all, as the sun measured time. The first daylight was just staining the eastern sky and gilding the river.

  It had taken all the time they had, for the three green-shirted soldiers who lay dead.

  THE PRISONERS WERE SET TO building two pyres, one for their own dead, one for the dead of the Earl Sutherland’s soldiery. The wounded were tended by their friends. While the business of cleaning up was being taken care of, Griff looked around for Reid, to see how the youth had fared.

  He found him crouched in a corner of the barn, weeping silently, holding his right hand tight against his chest. When Griff approached he stood up, wiping his face dry, wiping his nose, making his face brave. Griff reached out to look at the wound.

  A wide slash across the forearm had been bound, to stop the bleeding, but the cruelty was that the fingers of Reid’s hand had seized up, and were curled into a claw. Griff couldn’t force them open. The sinews that worked his hand had been severed.

  “Aye, and it’s a hazard of the game,” Reid said as bravely as he could manage.

  Griff couldn’t deny that. “The lady who came among the villagers, she is a healer. The lady with child. I’ll send her to you,” Griff said. “When we return, and ask her help. The wound could fester, grow gangrenous—she will know.”

  “Thank you, my lord.”

  The boy wished to be left alone. Griff would oblige him, soon.

  “Afterwards, will you come back to my castle?”

  The boy shrugged.

  “There will always be work for soldiers who have fought in battle for the Earl Sutherland,” Griff said.

  “Aye, and what wo
rk can I do like this?” the boy cried.

  “What task you can do, that you will be set to,” Griff answered, and then he turned abruptly away, that the boy might have his privacy before he came out into the day and had to act the man.

  ONLY TINTAGE REMAINED TO BE done with.

  “What think you?” Griff asked Wardel, who thought hanging, and “What think you?” he asked Verilan, who thought hanging. “Let us do it now, and then bury him, and then sleep before we return to Yaegar’s city,” Griff said.

  “You dare not!” Tintage cried, when his sentence was told him. “You cannot! You will not!” he maintained.

  A soldier made the halter, tied the death knot. Tintage was sat upon his horse. The rope was thrown over the high limb of a tree. The soldiers gathered. They wanted to be ribald, but Griff silenced them. “This is a man’s death,” he said, and they were quiet.

  When the booted feet had ceased their twitching, and Tintage had been cut down—his tears still damp on his face and the smell of death about him, his own death and the deaths he’d given that morning—Griff understood truly that Oriel would never again be more than a memory.

  When they had taken the body in a boat across the river, to bury Tintage in the uncleared forests there, beyond the Kingdom’s land, Griff understood that he must always be Earl Sutherland.

  When they had risen from a short sleep and set off for Yaegar’s city, the prisoners to follow under guard, their own wounded to follow as they could, Griff rode at the head of the column. He led the men back along the forest path, in a night that seemed not as dark as the night before. They emerged from the trees once again in silvery predawn light. The voices from the city walls rose up to greet the victorious army, and the Earl who rode at its head. Griff understood then that with Oriel dead and himself Earl, he could once again approach Beryl and ask for marriage.

  Chapter 30

  AS THEY RODE OUT OF the woods, the sun lifted itself up over the trees behind them, and looked across the field to the city walls. Under the sun’s glance, the piled stones glowed, and a veil of light lay gently along the ground, gilding the autumn grasses, shining on the people who waited to hear the news from the Falcon’s Wing. Beryl stepped forward, washed in the golden glow.

  Griff barely heard the cheers and the sound of trumpets that greeted his return. He didn’t notice the gate being raised, to let the city rush out, bringing food and drink, bringing welcome.

  “I am glad to see you well,” Beryl greeted him. “I am glad to see you safe returned.” Sunlight shone in her hair, and he couldn’t gather his thoughts when she looked at him so gladly.

  “There is need of a healer at the Inn; will you go?” Griff asked her. “I would name your uncle Innkeeper—for his fears were correct and none live there. I would ask him to keep the Falcon’s Wing for me,” he said, then wondered, “Would that please him? Is Merlis within the city?” he asked. “For there is news she must hear. When is the baby due, Beryl?”

  She had tried to answer each question but he had given her no time. Now, when he needed to hear her answer so that he could frame his next request, she hesitated. Then she told him, “Midwinter, if all goes well. There is no reason to think all will not go well, so it is not long now. It’s Oriel’s child,” she said, and a smile lifted the corners of her mouth.

  Griff felt his own mouth lift in response. “Beryl, I asked you once before and you refused me, but I ask you again: If you will be my wife. I won’t have your answer now,” he said. “Oriel’s child is heir to the Earldom,” he told her. “You can’t deny me that, you can’t deny Oriel that. I am the Earl for my life, but my heir is this child and I will declare it. I must be wed,” Griff said.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “There needs to be more than one heir, for the hazards of life, and if you were to wed me I would ask for children. More than that I wouldn’t ask of you—and if you won’t have me I will wed elsewhere. It is only that you are the one I wish for, as wife. But my wishes need not move yours.”

  “Yes, I know that,” she said. Her hands rested on her belly.

  “For it was Oriel to whom you gave your heart.”

  Again she smiled.

  “Just as it is you to whom I have given mine.”

  “Aye, but Griff,” she said, speaking in the same tender tone with which she had refused his first proposal of marriage, “and the child might be a girl.”

  “Still Oriel’s heir,” he insisted.

  “It’s a lord’s sons must inherit.”

  “Under the law, that isn’t clear. I’ve read the law, Beryl, and—it’s custom that names the sons, not law. Custom is harder to change than law, but be it girl or be it boy, it is within the law that Oriel’s child can be named heir to the Earldom. So this baby must be raised in the ancient castle of the Earls Sutherland, and thus—unless you leave it in my care—”

  Her face told him she wouldn’t leave it.

  “—you also will live in the castle, and I would have you live there as my lady and my wife. No, don’t answer me quickly this time.” Griff was certain that if she answered quickly she would refuse him, and he judged that she would be wise to accept him.

  But he would not require it of her. He wouldn’t force her, even if he could.

  “I’m of a mind to appoint your uncle the Innkeeper of the Falcon’s Wing. Did I tell you that? Then Merlis—for Tintage is hanged. Merlis can go to the holding your uncle lived in, with whatever servants she requires, until such time as she wishes to do elsewise with her life, or in perpetuity.”

  “Is there anything more you ask of me, other than to be your wife?” Beryl inquired. “And not to answer you aye or nay right now? And to accept that this child I carry must be your heir?”

  Nothing, Griff thought to answer, but then he thought that was a false answer. And then he thought of how much he was asking of her, twice out of the three. He could find nothing to say.

  An officer approached, and Griff needed to deal with his soldiery and where they might be quartered. Another officer waited behind the first to present Yaegar’s compliments and inquire what his fate might be. Griff dealt with the two, detailing Wardel to find quarters for the troops, sending word to Yaegar that he must wait until the Earl pleased to find time for him, and he turned back to Beryl with a clearer mind.

  “He said you were the best man he knew,” Beryl told him then.

  Grief was a stone he had swallowed, and his words struggled past it. “When I first—when I was a boy, and we lived on the island, and there was no hope,” Griff told her. “When I first saw him, he was a child, but even then . . .” the nameless boy, barefooted on the beach, afraid of the sixth Damall but determined not to give way to fear, his head held high and his shoulders, under rags, held back and brave. “Oriel’s child will have the Earldom,” Griff said, and somehow that completed the thought.

  Beryl watched his face out of her blue eyes.

  “There is healing needful, at the Falcon’s Wing,” Griff said. “The burying has all been done, and the burnings, but some of my soldiers were too badly wounded to travel. There is a soldier named Reid, waiting for you, to look at his arm, and his hand. But when those things are done, I ask you to come back to the castle, and give me your answer, and await the birth.”

  “What if I were to run away?” she asked.

  He hadn’t thought of that. The possibility hadn’t ever occurred to him, and yet he knew how large the world was, and how easily a woman and her child might be lost to sight in it. He could understand why Beryl might prefer to try her own fortune, with the child. He thought, however, that she would send him word so that he might know of it and look out for another wife; he thought she would deal fairly with him. So he must deal fairly with her.

  But he didn’t know what answer to make her.

  “What if that were my choice?” she insisted.

  “You will make your own choices,” Griff said, and didn’t speak of how empty life was, when Oriel was gone and Beryl also. �
�I only ask you to take care of what needs care at the Falcon’s Wing, and then to come to the castle.”

  “He said,” she said again, “you were the best man he knew, and I didn’t deny it.”

  AFTER BERYL HAD GONE, IN company with the people of the village and their Major, who was now also Innkeeper of the Falcon’s Wing, followed by the horse that carried the lady Merlis into the south, Griff turned his mind to Yaegar and his three living sons.

  He couldn’t think, short of hanging, how to answer Yaegar’s perfidy. Yaegar had failed in his fealty—not to Griff, but to the Earl, and through the Earl—whoever might hold that title—to the King.

  Yet Yaegar was a lord, and many of his people were loyal to the man, however much they decried his actions in this event. His sons had followed their father in failure of fealty.

  Griff called Verilan and Wardel to him, and they discussed the matter over bread and ale and cheese, standing before a table that had been brought out from the city to set before them. They were all three tired, and longing for sleep; but they all agreed that the matter of Yaegar, who waited among his sons under the walls of the city, must be determined.

  “Lock him in your dungeons,” Wardel suggested.

  “The sons would try to rescue him,” Verilan pointed out.

  “As they should,” Griff said. “I wouldn’t have any man live out his years in dungeons.”

  “Then they must all four be hanged,” Verilan concluded. “Let’s get it over with quickly.”

  “Were they traitors, then?”

  “Not precisely,” Wardel said.

  “You walk too fine a line,” Verilan answered. “They gave Tintage the support of weapons, food, safe passage. They aided a traitor proven. They wished him success, and Tintage’s success was the same as Lord Griff’s downfall. How can you argue that they aren’t traitors, who wished to bring down your lord?”

  “Do we hang men for what is in their minds?” Griff asked. “There would be many to hang, I think. More than we have ropes for, think you? And who would remain to be the hangman?”