The Knight

“I spent much of my boyhood in a peasant’s house,” Beel told me. “It was my nurse’s, outside my father’s castle of Coldcliff. When my older brothers were at their lessons in the nursery, my nurse would take me home so that I might play with her own children. We had great games, and ran through the wood. And fished, and swam. Doubtless it was much the same for you.”

I nodded, remembering. “Yeah, I did all that, and I lay on my back in the grass, sometimes, to watch the clouds. I don’t think I’ve done that since I came here.”

Beel turned to Idnn. “It’s good for you to hear all this, though you may not think so now.”

She said, “I’m sure it is, Father.”

“You see our peasants plowing and sowing, and their women spinning and so forth, hard work that lasts from the rising of the sun until its setting in many cases. But you need to understand that they have their own prides and their own pleasures. Speak kindly to them, protect them, and deal fairly with them, and they will never turn against you.”

“I’ll try, Father.”

He turned back to me. “I must explain to you what has been running through my mind. This hill country is by no means safe, and the mountains will be worse. We have Sir Garvaon and his archers and men-at-arms to protect us. But when I saw you, I was minded to keep you with me. A young knight—and more than a knight—brave and strong, would be a welcome augment to our force.”

“It’s really nice for you to say that,” I began, “but—”

“Examining you more closely, however, I feared you might prove overly attractive to Idnn.”

I felt my face get hot. “My Lord, you do me too much honor.”

His thin smile came again. “Of course I do. But so might she.” He glanced sidelong at her. “Idnn’s blood was royal, not so long ago. Now it represents the cream of the nobility. Soon she will be a child no more.”

Thinking how it had been with me I said, “For her sake, I hope she stays right where she is a while longer.”

“As do I, Sir Able. When I had considered those things, I thought to give you the horse you asked of me and hurry you on your way.”

“That’s—”

“But a peasant!” Beel’s smile was wider than it had been. “A peasant lad could not hold the smallest attraction for the great-granddaughter of King Pholsung.”

Idnn’s left eyelid sort of drooped when he said that. He did not see it because he was looking at me, but I did.

“Therefore, Sir Able, you are to remain with us for as long as we have need of you. Sir Garvaon’s pavilion will hold one more cot. It must, and Garvaon himself will welcome a companion of his own rank, I know.”

“My Lord, I can’t.”

“Can’t ride with us, and eat good food, and sleep like a human being?”

Idnn added her acoustic guitar to her father’s gargly tenor. “For me, Sir Able? What if I’m killed because you weren’t with me?”

That made it rough. “My Lord, My Lady, I promised—no, I swore—that I’d go straight to the mountains to take my stand, as His Grace Duke Marder and I had agreed.”

“And stay there,” Beel said, “until midwinter. Nearly half a year, in other words. Tell me something, Sir Able. Were you riding swiftly when you came to us? Did you gallop up to this pavilion and leap from the saddle to stand before me with Master Crol?”

“My Lord—”

“You had no horse. Isn’t that the fact? You came to me to borrow one.”

Not knowing what to say, I nodded.

“I am offering to give you one. Not a loan, a gift. I will give it on the condition that you will travel with my daughter and me until we reach the pass you intend to hold. I ask you this single question. Will you travel faster by riding with us, or by walking alone? Because you must do one or the other.”

Mani poked his head above the table to grin at me, and I wanted to kick him.

Chapter 49. The Sons Of The Angrborn

Upward, always upward sloped the land that day and the next, and as day followed day I came to understand that we were among the towering, rocky hills which I had glimpsed a time or two from the downs north of the forest in which I had lived like an outlaw with Bold Berthold, and that the true mountains, those mountains of which we had scarcely heard rumors, the mountains that lifted snow-covered peaks into Skai, were still before us, and still remote.