He wiped his damp hands on his shirt as he walked down the stairs. If I step outside, he told himself, before they begin to pound on the door, she won’t awaken. An uncomfortable feeling moved under his ribs. She could have warned me, though. I could’ve been long gone, running, before my time was up—
The mounted subthane formed a bulky nucleus surrounded by his men. They seemed too thin to be of the same species, but the flat planes of their faces were like the bones under the subthane’s jowls would be. As Daenek stepped outside the house, carefully pulling the door shut behind him, he heard the large man’s voice break off in mid-sentence to his men.
The subthane’s equine, a circle of white showing around its wildly staring eyes, bucked and reared beneath him. His face flushed with anger, the subthane clouted the animal near its ear with a solid blow from his gloved fist, then spurred it forward towards Daenek. His men men followed, forming a rough V behind him.
Daenek looked up at the coarse-pored face of the subthane.
Rivulets of sweat had formed in the creases and folds of his skin.
Only once before had Daenek seen the man, across the length of the village marketplace, but even from a distance the sense of something like the odor of blood had been apparent. Now, the subthane was rubbing the back of his leather glove over the bristles on his chin.
“Well, Daenek,” wheezed the subthane, sounding pleased. The skin of his cheeks tightened as his lips drew apart in a parody of a smile. “Are you so surprised at our coming? Don’t you know? Didn’t anyone tell you?” He glanced quickly at the laughing faces of his men on either side.
Beyond the half-circle of equines and men, Daenek could see the stalks in the field bend with a light breeze. “I know why you’re here,” he said quietly, looking at but not seeing their faces for a moment. He noted a dark bank of clouds cradling the morning sky at the horizon. “But take me someplace else and do it,” he said, focussing upon the subthane again.
“Oh, but it’s not that simple, boy.” The subthane lowered his head beside the neck of his equine. “You’ve got a choice to make, you have.”
Daenek took a step backwards from the malicious grin. “I don’t care how you kill me,” he said. “Suit yourself.” I’ll die, he thought, without knowing the truth about my father’s death, but I’ll die—like him, maybe.
“Kill you? We don’t want to do that, boy,” the subthane said gleefully. He sat up in his saddle and beckoned the militia captain over to himself. The man reined his equine closer to the subthane, then took a small black case from a pouch dangling on his saddle and handed it to him.
“Just look here.” The subthane snapped the case open and, holding it by its lid, thrust it in front of Daenek. “What do you see?”
He suspected already what the shining chrome tube in its plush-lined niche was, and said nothing.
“You see,” said the subthane, holding the case in the crook of one arm and stroking the object inside it with his forefinger, “we take this little gadget and put it against your head, right up over the ear. And not even a drop of blood, but no one ever worries about you again. Because everything in your head is all chopped up and muddled around. Harmless.” He laughed. “Have you ever seen that idiot that works in the quarry? The one that look like a shaved ursine, and never talks?”
Daenek nodded slowly, feeling his eyes draw into slits as he looked at the grinning face.
The subthane’s smile widened even further. “He used to be a very powerful man. Your father’s right hand. But the thane’s been dead a long time, and the big man had one of these put up to his skull.”
A spasm of rage and contempt welled up inside Daenek. “If those are my choices,” he spat out, “then I’d prefer a knife.”
“Ah, but maybe I lied when I said you had a choice, boy. I really want to see how one of these things—” He fell silent, his eyes looking up and past Daenek.
The Lady Marche was standing in the doorway of the house, Daenek saw as he turned around. Her face was white with the strain of moving under her fever, and the hand that gripped the silver head of her stick trembled. “You are a day too soon,” she said in a tone of fierce authority and loathing. She raised the point of the stick at the subthane.
“What’s a day?” mumbled the obese figure on his equine. “The damn kid’s old enough—why should we wait? Come on,” he whined, “let’s get on with it.”
“The Regent’s orders,” intoned the Lady Marche, “said that for seventeen years the son of the old thane would be protected. The Regent would be interested to hear how you heed his wishes.”
“Who’s going to tell him?” blustered the subthane. He glared at the old woman but looked away after a few seconds of her sharp gaze in return. “All right, then,” he said, jerking on his equine’s reins and wheeling the animal around. He pointed to one of his men. “You—stay here with them. To make sure they’re here,” he glared over his shoulder at Daenek and the woman, “when we return in the morning.”
The trail through the fields erupted into dust as the men rode away from the house in its little clearing. The guard left behind glanced at the Lady Marche and Daenek with a smoldering hostility submerged somewhere beneath his narrow, hard-planed face. He dismounted from his equine, then walked to the edge of the field and stamped a wooden stake into the ground with his boot. When the equine was securely tied—it seemed to be always trembling in a state of constant hysteria—the guard pulled something wrapped in cloth from one of the pouches on the saddle.
“C’mere,” the guard called, but Daenek remained where he was standing, with the Lady Marche a couple of meters behind him in the doorway. The guard crossed the space between them and held out the object, nested in the unfolded cloth. “Know what this is?” he said. “Don’t touch it.”
Daenek looked at the man’s extended hand. “It’s a gun.” An old one, he thought. The kind that shoots metal bullets, like in the old stories in the books. A very old one. Maybe so old that—
“Uh-uh, I know what you’re thinking,” said the guard. His eyes darted to the Lady Marche and then back to Daenek. “But it works. One of the last ones around here that does.” A note of childish boasting tinged his voice as he picked at one of the rust specks on the long barrel. “And I know how to use it, too.” Threatening. “So don’t try running, boy. Or I’ll drop you.”
Silent, Daenek turned and walked back to the house. The Lady Marche put her hand on his shoulder but he pushed it away and stepped beside her into the dark interior.
Stepke’s books weighed in his hands like stones. The words on the pages flowed over his eyes like water, leaving nothing behind.
He put the last faded volume on top of the pile and leaned back against the wall of his room. My father spoke that language, he thought. And all the others. A sense of loss opened inside him, like a phantom heart. It’ll end with me—no one will know all those words again. Regret, but no fear, moved inside him when he thought of the coming morning.
He heard the Lady Marche calling him from downstairs. With a sigh, he got to his feet and walked to the stairway. She was waiting for him at the bottom step.