The Charnel Prince - J. Gregory Keyes [192]
He was interrupted by a commotion of some sort. There was a good bit of distant shouting, and the knights mounted and rode out from the clearing, followed quickly by the five men dressed like monks. They returned perhaps a bell later, leading more captives. These were all men, one of middle years and three younger, the youngest looking barely thirteen. All of them were wounded, though none seemed seriously so.
The older man they tied as Cazio was tied, just a perechi away from him. Then they went back about their business.
When none of the enemy was near, the new captive glanced over at Cazio.
“You’d be the Vitellians, then,” he said in Cazio’s native tongue. “Cazio and z’Acatto.”
“You know us, sir?” Cazio asked.
“Yes, we’ve a couple of friends in common, friends of the fair sort.”
“Anne and—”
“Hush,” the man said. “Pitch your voice very low. I think those are all Mamres monks, but some may be of Decmanis. If so, they can hear a butterfly’s wings.”
“But they’re alive, and well?”
“So far as I know. My name is Artoré, and I was helping them to find you. It looks as if I’ve done at least part of my job, though I would prefer that the circumstances were different.”
“But they escaped? The knights didn’t see them?”
Artoré shrugged. “I can’t say for certain. My sons and I held them off as long as we could, but the monks are deadly shots. They wanted us alive, or we wouldn’t be.”
“How can the Church be part of this?” Cazio whispered. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“All men are corruptible,” Artoré said, “and the more easily if they can tell themselves they are doing holy work. But in fact, I don’t know much more about this than you do. My wife would be the one to ask.” He looked glum. “I would have liked to see her one last time.”
“We’ll escape somehow,” Cazio promised. “Just watch. I’ll find some way.”
But as he pulled at his intractable bonds, he still couldn’t imagine how.
Neil sat his horse, his hands crossed on the pommel, thinking he didn’t like the looks of the forest that lay before him. He didn’t know much about forests to start with—there weren’t any on Skern, and besides the pretty thin ones he’d passed through on his way to Vitellia, he hadn’t seen much of them on the mainland, either. But once, when he was about fifteen, he’d gone north with Sir Fail de Liery to Herilanz. The trip had started as an embassy, but they’d been set upon by Weihand raiders. It had come to a sea fight which they’d won, but not without damage, and so they had put ashore for repairs. Beyond the narrow, rocky strand there had been nothing but forest, a holt of fir and pine and black cheichete that seemed to Neil like one vast cave. Facing your enemies on the open heath or the great wide sea was one thing, but fighting where concealment was everywhere was quite another. They’d gone in to find a good mast, and come out with half their number, pursued by a tribe of tattooed howlers that recognized no king or crown.
This forest had that look, only worse, for while the one in Herilanz had been of straight, clean-boled trees, these twisted and wove together like a gigantic bramble-bush.
It hadn’t been hard to follow the Hansan knights. The land between Paldh and Teremené was a rural one, the kind of place where people noticed strange things. A group of foreign armored knights and men-at-arms traveling hard and asking after two girls was a bit out of the ordinary. Even though he was a stranger himself, it wasn’t hard to start people talking if he was polite and bought something.
Near Teremené he’d met the knights at a bend in the road, headed back toward Paldh. By the time he realized who they were, it was too late to try and hide. Instead he could only ride forward, reckoning that they wouldn’t recognize him. They didn’t, and the girls weren’t with them.
There wasn’t much he could do then but keep going. Either they had found Anne and Austra and killed them, or they had given up the chase. The last seemed unlikely, and so it was with a heavy heart that he entered Teremené. It was there, with