The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [125]
“I’m asking this as a favor,” Anne replied. “I’m asking you to agree to stay here while I speak to my mother. I will take only fifty men. In turn, you will send word to your men to allow me free access to the castle so I can verify the truth of these things you say. Then—and only then—might you and I come to some sort of agreement.”
“Even if I trust you,” Robert said, “I have already made it plain I don’t trust your followers. How can you be sure they won’t murder me while you’re gone?” He glanced significantly at Artwair.
“Because my personal bodyguard, Neil MeqVren, will defend you. You may trust him absolutely.”
“He is only one man,” Robert pointed out.
“If anything happens to Sir Neil, I will know I have been betrayed,” Anne said.
“That would be a small comfort to my corpse.”
“Robert, if you are serious about your good intentions, here is your chance to prove it. Otherwise, I will not trust you, and this war will begin in earnest. Most of the landwaerden are on my side. And Sir Fail will arrive soon with a fleet, do not doubt it.”
Robert stroked his beard for a moment.
“One day,” he said at last. “You return to Eslen with my word, on my boat, and I will stay here under the care of Sir Neil, whom even I do not doubt. You will speak to your mother and determine her condition. You will assure yourself that I am honest in my intention to give you the throne. Then you will return, and we will discuss the way in which you will take your place.
“One day. Agreed?”
Anne closed her eyes for a moment, trying to see if she had missed something.
“Your Majesty,” Artwair advised, “this is most unwise.”
“I agree,” Sir Neil said.
“Nevertheless,” Anne said, “I am to be queen, or so you all say. It is my decision to make. Robert, I agree to your terms.”
“My life is in your hands, Majesty,” Robert said.
DANGER TINGLING at his back, Stephen paused to catch his breath.
Behind him Ehan said something, but although his ears had begun to heal, it was still too muddled to make out, as if he had water in his ears. He tapped the side of his head to indicate as much, something they had all gotten used to in the past two ninedays.
“Rest?” the little man repeated a little louder.
Stephen nodded reluctantly. During his time with the holter he’d thought his body had hardened to travel, but the trail was too steep to ride the horses, so they had to lead them. His legs, it seemed, had not been strengthened by months on horseback.
He settled onto a boulder as Ehan produced a waterskin and some of the bread they’d bought in the last village they’d passed through, a gathering of a dozen huts named Crothaem. That lay someplace far below them now, beyond the unnamed valley below and the folds of the Hauland foothills that ran along it.
“How far up do y’ think we are?” Ehan asked. Now they were facing each other, and it was easier to communicate.
“It’s hard to tell,” Stephen replied, because it was, even in the most visceral sense. “We must be in the mountains themselves by now.”
“The trouble is there aren’t any trees,” Ehan offered.
Stephen nodded. That was the problem, or at least one of them. It was as if some ancient saint or god had ripped up a monstrous expanse of pasture from the Midenlands and settled them over the Bairghs like a sheet. Stephen reckoned that what he saw was the result of two thousand years of Mannish activity: cutting trees for house timbers and firewood and to clear pasture for the sheep, goats, and hairy cows that seemed to be everywhere.
The effect, though, was a disorienting loss of perspective. The grass soothed over the steepness of the slopes and tricked the eye about distance. Only when he focused on something specific—a herd of goats or one of the occasional sod-roofed steadings—did he have some appreciation of the vastness of it all.
And of the danger. Inclines that appeared gentle and friendly