Honour Among Thieves

The chieftess laughed bitterly, and spat between Mörget’s feet. But then she hurled her flagon at the wall, where it burst harmlessly, well clear of the contest. “I’ve tasted blood. I’d rather have the westerners alive, as my thralls.”

“And you shall, as many of them as you desire,” Mörget told her, his words bitten off before they left his mouth.

“And steel? Will you give me dwarven steel, better than the iron my warriors wear now?”

“All that they can carry! Now, aid me!”

“I shall,” Mörgain said. “I’ll pray for your success!”

That was enough to break the general silence, though only long enough for the gathered warriors to laugh uproariously and slap each other on the back. The shadow of a smile even crossed Torki’s lips. In the east the clans had a saying: pray with your back turned, so that at least your enemies won’t see your weakness. The clans worshipped only Death, and beseeching Her aid was rarely a good idea.

“Did you hear that, Torki?” Hurlind the scold asked. “The Mother of us all pulls against you now. Better redouble your grip!”

The champion’s lips split open to show his teeth. It was the first sign of emotion he’d given since the contest began.

And yet it was like some witch’s spell had been broken. Perhaps Death—or some darker fate—did smile on Mörget then. For suddenly his arms flexed as if he’d found some strength he’d forgotten he had. He leaned back, putting his weight into the pull.

Torki’s smile melted all at once. His left foot shifted an inch on the boards. It was not necessarily a fatal slip. Given a moment’s grace he could have recovered, locking his knees and reinforcing his strength.

Yet Mörget did not give him that moment. Everyone knew that Mörget, for all his size and strength, was faster than a wildcat. He seized the opportunity and hauled Torki toward him until the balance was broken and the champion toppled, sprawling face first on the coals. Torki screamed as the fire bit into his skin. He leapt out of the pit, releasing the panther skin and grabbing a mead jug to pour honey wine on his burns.

The longhouse erupted in cheers and shouts. Hurlind led a tune of victory and bravery against all odds, an old kenning every man and woman in the longhouse knew. Even Mörgain joined in the refrain, Mörgain of whom it was said her iron ever did her singing for her.

In the chaos, in the tumult, Mörget went to his father’s chair and knelt before him. In his hands he held his prize, the singed pelt. Orange coals still flecked its curling fur.

“Great Chieftain,” Mörget said, addressing the older man as a warrior, not as a parent, “You hold sway over the hundred clans. They wait for your instructions. For ten years now you have kept them from each other’s throats. You have made peace in a land that only knew war.”

Ten years, aye, in which no clan had feuded with another. Ten years without warfare, ten years of prosperity. For many of those gathered, ten years of boredom. Mörg had united the clans by being stronger than any man who opposed him, and by giving the chieftains that which they desired. Instead of making war on each other, as they had since time immemorial, the clans had worked together to hunt such game as the steppes provided and to raid the villages of the hillfolk in the north. Yet now there were murmurs in the camps that what every warrior wanted was not ten more years of peace but a new chance to test their mettle. Mörget had been instrumental in starting those murmurs but he had only fed a fire that was already kindled by restlessness. Eastern men, eastern chieftains, could not sit all day in their tents forever and dream of past victories. Eventually they needed to kill something, or they went mad.

Mörg the Great, Mörg the Wise, had pushed them perhaps as far as he could. As he turned his head to look around at his chieftains, how many eyes did he meet that burned with this new desire for war? Now that the mountains lay open to them, how long could he hold them back?

“All good things,” Mörg said, looking down at his son again, “should come to an end, it seems. Just as they say in Old Hrush. You’ve won the right to make your say. Tell me, Mörget, what you wish.”

“Only to stand by your side when we march through this new pass into the west, and crush the decadent kingdom of Skrae beneath our feet.”

“You lead many clans, chieftain. And I am not your king. You do not require my permission to raid the west.”

It was true. It was law. Mörg was the Great Chieftain, but he ruled only by the consent of the clans. “I have the right, aye, to raid the west. But I don’t wish just to scare a few villagers and take their sheep,” Mörget explained. “For two hundred years that’s all we’ve done, ever since the Skraelings sealed off the mountain passes. Now there is a new pass. Once, long before any of us were born, our warriors spoke not of raiding but of conquest. Of far greater glories. I wish, Great Chieftain, to make war. To take every mile of Skrae for our people, as has always been their destiny!”

Alone in that place, Mörg carried iron, in the form of a sword at his belt. All other weapons had been stacked outside, for no warrior would dare bring a blade into the house of the Great Chieftain. Should he desire it, if his wishes countered those of his son, Mörg could draw his sword and strike down Mörget this instant. No man there would gainsay him for it.

They called him Mörg the Wise, sometimes, when they wished to flatter him. Behind his back, they called him Mörg the Merciful, which was a great slander among the people of the east. If he struck the blow now, perhaps those whispering tongues would be silenced. Or perhaps they would only grow into a chorus.

The chieftains wanted this. They had made Mörget their spokesman, and sent him here tonight to gain this audience.

And Mörg was no king, to thwart the will of his people for his own whims. That was the way of the decadent west. Here in the east men ruled through respect, or through fear, but always honestly—because the men who served them believed in them. Mörg was no stronger than the chieftains he’d united. He lived and died by their sufferance. If he did not give them what they wanted, they had their own recourse—they could replace him. And that could only be done over his dead body. Great Chieftains ruled for life, so murder was the sole method of their impeachment.

On his knees, Mörget stared up at his father with eyes as clear and blue as a mountain stream. Eyes that never blinked.

Mörg must decide, now. There was no discussion to be had, no council to call. He alone must make this decision. Every eye watched his face. Even Hurlind had fallen silent, waiting to hear what he would say.

“You,” Mörg said, rising and pointing at a thrall standing by the door. “Fetch boughs of wet myrtle, and throw them on the fire. Let them make a great smoke, that all will see, and thereby know. Tomorrow we march through the mountains to the west. Tomorrow we make war!”

CHAPTER TWO

There was a mountain, and then there was no mountain.

It had been called Cloudblade, for the way its sharp summit had once cut through the sky, and it had possessed a long and storied history. It stood at the eastern frontier of the kingdom of Skrae, tallest of the Whitewall Range. Beneath it, in centuries long gone, the dwarves had built a city they called the Place of Long Shadows. Later on, elves—the last of their kind—had moved into that hollow below the world. For eight hundred years they had hidden there, unknown to the humans above.

Then five fools from the west came along and ruined everything.

Cythera climbed up a high pile of rubble, picking her footholds carefully, testing each rock with her hands to make sure it was stable before she put her weight on it. She was sweating by the time she reached the top. There she could see the new valley that lay where Cloudblade once stood. It ran as wide as a road right through the Whitewall, and a constant chill wind coursed over the endless field of stones like a river of air. Over there to the east lay the great steppes where the barbarians ruled. Behind her, to the west, lay Skrae, the country of her birth.

“How many years did Cloudblade stand? When we first saw it, I would have thought it could last forever,” Malden said, coming up behind her.

She turned and saw the thief leaping from one rock to another as nimbly as a goat. She couldn’t help but smile at the ease with which he moved. He was a small man, and skinny as an alley cat, but he had an effortless grace that always made her gasp.

“Cloudblade stood longer than you can imagine,” Cythera said. She was the daughter of a witch and thus privy to some of the secrets of the universe. She knew if she tried to explain to Malden just how long an eon was his eyes would simply glaze over. Which was not to say he was a simpleton. He was bright enough in his own way, if reckless. “Here,” she said, and held out a hand. He took it, holding her fingers as delicately as he might a bundle of flowers. When he had climbed up beside her he kissed her fingertips, one after another.

“Don’t,” she said, though her heart wasn’t in it. She wanted to embrace him, to drag him down behind these rocks and … well. She had to be careful now, at least for a while. She took her hand back and turned to face the west. Down there below the foothills of the Whitewall she could still see the column of elves as they made their way toward a distant forest. They were on foot but they moved quickly, desperate to reach any shelter from the blue sky. They found the broad stretch of the heavens terrifying, for none of them had ever seen it before. “Do you think they’ll make it?” she asked. The forest they headed for was only the first stop on a long journey.

“Their ancestors ruled this land before we came along and took it from them,” Malden pointed out. “They’re tougher than they look. And they have Slag to guide them.”

Cythera nodded. She’d been sad to see the dwarf go, but the elfin queen wouldn’t have followed anyone else.

“Croy will ride ahead of them for a while, to make sure they aren’t spotted,” Malden added. If any human authorities saw there were elves abroad in the kingdom again it could only end in bloodshed. There was a reason the elves had hidden so long under Cloudblade. “He told me he won’t be back until tomorrow dawn.” Malden’s eyebrows lifted in what he must have thought was a suggestive leer. “It’s just the two of us left here now. I’m supposed to look after you while he’s away.”

He moved closer and reached out one hand to touch the small of her back.

For the second time she shied away, despite what she might have preferred. “We need to talk,” she said. “I’m still betrothed to Croy.” That had been the whole point of this adventure. The whole reason she’d left the Free City of Ness. Croy—Sir Croy—had made her promise to marry him. She’d demurred and evaded him as long as she could, but eventually the appointed day had come. At the last minute she had decided she needed to see some of the world first, before he took her to his castle and she had to spend the rest of her life birthing his heirs. She hadn’t expected Malden to come along—frankly, he’d been a temptation she was trying to escape. Life, it seemed, could never be simple. “I made a promise to him—a legally binding promise.”

The expression on his face shifted through a complicated series of emotions. Everything from hope to fear to deep confusion. But then his eyes narrowed and he nodded sagely. “I see.”

“You do?”

Malden dropped his hand to his side. “Down below the mountain, when you thought I was going to die—when we thought we were all going to die—you told me you loved me. Sometimes people in dangerous situations will say things that they wouldn’t, otherwise.”

“You think me so inconstant?” she asked, hurt despite her better judgment.

“I’m trying to be noble,” he told her, in that frank way he sometimes had. Another endearing quality—a man who could speak honestly to a woman was as rare, in Cythera’s experience, as a hen with teeth. “I’m trying to give you an opportunity to change your mind.”

She smiled at him. His love for her came without conditions. He would never want to take away her freedom. It was why she had come to love him back. “Croy won’t be back before dawn, you said.” She looked up and saw the sun was still well above the horizon. “We have all that time?”

Later, in the dark of a night with no moon, he kissed the sweat from her cooling body, while she simply tried to get her breath back. She knew she was playing a dangerous game but she couldn’t help herself. “Do you still think I want to change my mind?”

“You frightened me with all that talk of betrothals,” he said.

“As I meant to.”

He drew back a little. In the dark she couldn’t read his face. “Tell me you’ll break your promise to him. Tell me you love me. Please.”

“I do,” she said, and there was no part of her that disagreed. “And I will. But you know it can’t be so easy. From the moment I tell Croy about us he’ll be determined to kill you.”

“You think I’m afraid of him?”

“I think you should be.” Croy had trained all his life in the military arts. He would be one of the most dangerous men in the world if he wasn’t bound by an iron code of honor. Which in itself was the problem. “He won’t want to do it. He thinks of you as his best friend. Honor will require it, though. And you know how he is about anything that touches his honor.”

“Let him try me! I can’t stand the idea of you marrying him. Not anymore,” Malden protested.

“I’ll tell him everything. I’ll renounce the betrothal and beg his forgiveness,” Cythera said, rearing up to kiss his cheeks and chin. “I swear it. But Malden—I’ll only do it when we’re back in Ness. And when I’m sure you have a generous head start.”

CHAPTER THREE

At dawn—as promised—Croy returned, looking a little tousled after riding in the woods all night. He was all blond hair and muscles and stupid grins but Malden did his best not to hate the man. After all, Croy had already lost the game for Cythera’s heart—he just didn’t know it yet.

The three of them returned to the abandoned hill fort where they’d left their horses and their prisoner. Balint the dwarf looked angry enough to spit blood, but they’d kept her bound and gagged so she couldn’t get into mischief. They threw her over the back of Croy’s saddle and headed out, toward Helstrow. Balint was the last errand they had to run before they could finally head back to Ness.

Riding west toward the king’s fortress proved far less tedious than the voyage east had been. Back then they’d had to ford the river Strow at one of its wilder bends but now they could approach the fortress directly. The sun had not even reached its apex by the time they saw Helstrow’s towers rising above the rolling hills.

Malden was thrilled by the prospect of returning to civilization, but just outside the gates Croy called a stop. The riders stood their horses in the road so they could watch a field full of archers lift bows all at once and take aim.

Bowstrings twanged and a hundred arrows lifted into the sky, the thin shafts spinning and tumbling, some clattering together in mid-air. Others flew true and arced downward to slam into a pile of rusted armor on the far edge of the field. Their wicked points cut through the old iron as easily as through parchment and lodged in the earth below.

Watching from a safe distance atop his horse, Malden jerked back in surprise.

“What are they doing?” he asked.

“Practicing, I think,” Sir Croy replied, bringing his rounsey up level with Malden’s jennet. “There was a time when every male peasant in the kingdom was expected to know how to draw a bow and hit a target at one hundred yards. The law required them to practice for an hour every day, to keep their arms strong and their eyes true.”

The line of peasants—villein farmers, Malden judged, by their russet tunics and the close-fitting cowls they wore—each nocked another arrow and drew back on their strings. A serjeant in leather jack and a kettle helmet shouted an order, and once more the bowmen let fly.

Most of the arrows landed well short of the target. One, knocked off course in mid-air, came directly for Malden. He flinched, but its momentum was already spent and it landed twenty yards from his horse’s feet. The jennet didn’t even look up.

Cythera shielded her eyes with one hand and looked at the pile of armor. Only a handful of arrows had reached the target. “They’re … not very good.”

Croy shrugged. “The law requiring them to practice every day was repealed a long time ago. Before these men were born, in fact. Most of them have probably never seen a bow before. And no archer hits the mark on his first try.”

“Why did they stop the practice?” Cythera asked.

“No reason to keep it up. In the early days, Skrae was always at war with one enemy or another—first the elves, then with upstarts who would seize the crown. Skrae always prevailed. The Northern Kingdoms were beaten into submission, turned against each other until now they only fight amongst themselves. The barbarians were forced back across the mountains, sealed behind the two mountain passes. Now there are no enemies left to fight. Skrae hasn’t gone to war in a hundred years. There’s been no more than a border skirmish in the last ten,” Croy explained. “The king’s grandfather saw no need to keep a cadre of trained bowmen around. The peasantry were better used by spending that extra hour a day in the fields, feeding a growing populace.”

Malden frowned. All that was probably true, but he could guess another reason. He’d seen what the longbows did to the armor when they actually struck home. No knight in shiny coat of plate would ever really be safe with such weapons arrayed against him, not if the aim of the archer was skillful. He imagined the king had been more afraid of an insurrection of highly trained peasants than a foreign invader.

So why was the practice being resumed? This wasn’t some bit of makework to keep idle peasants from getting into trouble—the training was in deadly earnest. When they’d shot a dozen arrows each, the hundred men standing on the field were replaced by a fresh hundred, with more waiting to take their turn. Clearly every villein in the environs of Helstrow was to be given a chance to learn this skill.

Something was up.

As the three riders headed up the perfectly straight road toward the fortress of the king, they passed through the village where the prospective bowmen had their houses. The three on horseback drew more than the usual stares. Women leaned out of the doors of their cottages, distaffs and kitchen knives still in their hands, to get a good look at the riders. A reeve carrying the white wooden baton of his station leaned on the signpost of a tavern and watched them with wide eyes. Children dashed out of the street as they approached.

These people were afraid, Malden saw. Afraid someone was going to come along at any moment and take away the pittance they had, the tiny scrap of safety and wealth they’d managed to accumulate. Even the village blacksmith closed the shutters of his shop as they drew near, though the heat inside his forge made the autumn air shimmer.

What had them so scared?

Of course, they might just have been surprised to see Balint roped and secured atop Croy’s palfrey. It wasn’t every day you saw a dwarf trussed up like a bird in a roasting pan.

Balint would draw stares in any human village. Dwarves were a rare enough sight outside the big cities, and female dwarves almost unheard of—most of their women remained in the north, in the dwarven kingdom, while their men traveled south into Skrae to make their fortunes. This one stood out on her own merits, too. Balint was accounted a great beauty among her people, but then dwarves had a different notion of loveliness than humans. Balint stood just under four feet tall and was as skinny as a starveling dog. Her hair stuck out from her head in thick braids that looked like the spikes of a morningstar. Her eyebrows met above her nose in a thick tangle of coarse dark hairs and there was a sparser growth of hair on her upper lip. Her eyes were squeezed down to dark beads, the lids pressed tight. As a nocturnal creature she found the sun unbearable.

Even if she’d been more pleasing to the eye, she still would have drawn attention by how she was bound. Once dwarves and humans had been vicious enemies, but a treaty between their two kingdoms had changed that long ago. Now by law no human could touch a dwarf in an offensive manner—not unless the human wanted to be tortured to death. The dwarves had proved too useful as allies to risk the peace between them and humankind. They were too valuable to the king, as they were the only ones who knew the secret of making good steel for weapons and armor and a thousand other uses. That a dwarf should be tied up and brought to justice like a common criminal was unthinkable.

Yet Balint was a criminal, and a particularly vile one. The same treaty that ended the war between dwarves and humans included another law, one that said no dwarf was allowed to use a weapon inside the borders of Skrae. Not even in self-defense, not even one they’d made with their own hands. Balint had broken that law without compunction or remorse. Sir Croy had been quite adamant that she be brought to Helstrow and made to account for her crimes. In all likelihood she would be banished from Skrae—and maybe even exiled by her own people. Where she would go at that point was not to be guessed.

Malden liked it not, even though he was the first person Balint had assaulted. She’d struck him across the face with a wrench with clear intent to kill him and he wanted revenge badly enough. Yet he was a thief by trade, a flounter of the law himself. He lived by a certain code of dishonesty, and the first rule in that code was that you didn’t betray another criminal to the authorities, ever, under any circumstances.

She had turned Malden into a snitch. And for that, he would never forgive her. What if word of it got out? His reputation would be dashed on the rocks of gossip.

He tried not to think about it. Ahead of them lay the first gate of the fortress, a massive affair of stone and iron that towered over every house in the village. Guards in studded leather cloaks stood there blocking the way with halberds. High above, amidst the battlements of the gate house, a pot of boiling oil was prepared to spill down hot death on anyone who attacked the guards. A dozen loopholes in the gatehouse wall hid crossbowmen ready to pick off anyone who even dared approach.

“I had expected a friendlier reception,” Croy called out, as the guards refused to stand aside to let him pass. “Though of course, I’m not flying my colors today. Perhaps you don’t recognize me. I have been gone for a long time. I,” he said, placing one leather-gauntleted hand on his breast, “am Sir Croy, a knight of the realm. With me are Cythera, daughter of Coruth the Witch, and Malden, a—well—a—”

“His squire,” Malden announced, patting the sword tied to his saddle. He couldn’t very well announce himself as Malden the Thief here, not and expect to pass the gate. More than once Croy had offered him the position of squire, and though Malden could imagine few things he’d less rather do for a living—collecting dead bodies for mass graves, perhaps—it was a simple enough ruse.

“Yes. He’s my squire,” Croy said, and it barely sounded at all like a lie coming out of the knight’s mouth.

“Bit old for it, ain’t ’e?” one of the guards asked, studying Malden with a yellow eye. But the guards weren’t there to challenge subjects of Skrae. They were waiting for something else. “That dwarf ye got,” the guard went on. “Is she—”

“An oathbreaker. I’ve come to present her for the king’s justice.”

There was a great deal of murmuring and surprise at that, but the guards stood back and the portcullis was raised. The three of them—plus one disgruntled dwarf—passed through without further incident.

CHAPTER FOUR