HALE
“She cannot go down there,” Eryk Waverly said, almost angry. “Can’t you see her?”
He sat astride Dark Moon, his black horse, and beside him in the wagon, wearing the same dark blue cloak he wore over his armor, was his cousin, Myrne Herreboro, looking a little bit tired. Above them, the sky was grey brown with the approach of rain, and all around them rose the tree covered heights of the Giants, those mountains which made the spine of northern Ossar.
“Let me down,” Myrne ordered her servants.
“What are you doing?” her cousin, the Lord of Waverly demanded.
“I,” Myrne replied as Alyce and Lindir let her down from the wagon and onto the ground, “am going to meet our allies.”
“But you are big as a house and that baby could come any day now.”
Myrne laughed and said, “This baby is not due for two months, and if these would fight for me, then I can at least come to meet them.”
But these, whom they were speaking of, were in no ordinary house. Eryk’s brow furrowed, and Myrne thought how handsome he had always been and how part of his handsomeness was in the lack of perfection. Rabbit teeth they had called him.
“Come, Rabbit,” she said to her broad shouldered cousin.
“I will go ahead of you,” he told her.
Myrne chose not to argue him. Let Eryk have something.
They had arrived at a round door like the entrance to a warren for some monstrous bunny, and all over this land about the mountains, like warrens, were the burrows that wound their way into the mountains.
“Not far, Lady,” said the voice of the one who had come to greet her.
They traveled in semi darkness, lit by a were light torch until Eryk grew nervous as they turned, and the light of the sun, such as it was that day, was gone. Myrne seemed not to care.
“You know the stories of these people!” Eryk had said.
“But they are our stories, from across the sea, which then must mean of a people who looked like them.”
“Here, we are, Lady,” the speaker ahead of them said in a thick voice, and as he began lighting torches, Myrne could see they were in a large, round, underground room. Even before the torches were lit she saw the eyes, like giant almonds, burning with a luminous fire.
Ah, but they only use the light for us. They would not even need it. The tallest of them came to her hip, but then Myrne was a tall woman, and they were red brown with elongated heads and mouths and small noses which almost made snouts. Many of them had pointed ears and their hair shot up or out to the side in great patterns like burning flames or the branches of trees. The Hill People, the Underground People. Duegar… but that was the Hale name for them, from their legends. Svart elfs. They called themselves the Dwarrow. Mostly, Myrne noted, as the light shone on many of them with their hammers, their aprons, their squat bodies and wide apart legs, they were called Dwarves, though having seen the little human beings called Dwarves in courts, Myrne now knew there was no similarity. These creatures, so bizarre, so wonderful, had nothing of the human in them.
“We have come to speak to your King,” Eryk Waverly announced.
A round, round eyed one with a wide mouth and a white beard circling his face said to Eryk, “No one is here to talk to you. We are here to speak to the Queen.”
“I am not Queen yet,” Myrne said.
“You are,” the old Dwarf argued. “They call you in the land above Queen Myrne, and these words have reached the roots of the world. In the south, Edmund’s troops fear you You have the blood of the Ynkurando in you, and it was you who sent for our aid, and so we will help you.”
“As we have helped none before,” added another.
“Save,” said another, “as we helped Deoric to raise the great walls in the days when the Hale and Royan fought and the New Kingdoms were established.”
“Lady,” said the Dwarf who had brought them in, “would you have us raise a wall?”
Myrne stopped to think.
“The truth,” she said, “is that my first thoughts were to bring all the people together. Hale and North Hale are made of many people; the Hale, the Royan they invaded, the Dayne who invaded us, and you, and I have come to all of you even as my husband the King has led his troops across the north to secure it, and now marches them down toward Inglad. When the war is over, I want a land that belongs to all of us, that all of the peoples claim as their own.”
“But your Grace,” said the Dwarf with the white hair branching out like the crown of a beech tree, “how would you do this? There are the Royan holdings, those vast tracts of cities and provinces in your land which separate themselves from the rest of Hale, some who paid tribute to some kings, but who owe their ultimate allegiance to Rheged or Elmet. The Dayne? What of them?”
“They rallied quickly to King Osric.”
“And the practioners of the old religion,” the Dwarf continued in his thick voice, “along with the monasteries? All for you?”
When Myrne looked on him, he continued, “Doubtless you are surprised that we who live under the hills know so much, but we live in burrows which thread through the mountains, an ever connecting web, and you must not forget the Cerendelle.”
The Cerendelle… Half Families, the Stoneburners, the Smiths, the Cleavestones, the Walls, those lordly clans and families who lived in the high hills and were half Dwarrow who married between Hale and Dwarf, shorter than most Hales, but broader and stronger. Cerendelle also referred to the Senalion, the Winders, the Dewyndonins, those families of Royan blood. But after the Hale had lived here so many centuries, all familes were half families, and this is what Myrne said.
“Yes,” observed the first Dwarf who had reprimanded Eryk, “your rabbit faced cousin in the shining armor hardly looks like a Hale at all. There must be some Dauman in him.”
“Enough discussing who is half of what,” a red headed one called out as Eryk went red. This new Dwarf’s eyebrows shot up like hearth fires, and his beard was like a great fire.
“We must discuss strategy and the rest of this horse shit be damned. Osric is our King. Myrne our Queen, and to hell with the House of Baldwin.”
“What do we care?” one began.
“The House of Baldwin means the House of Daumany, and behind that Rufus there is a southern sorcery, and what his magicians will do to us and to all people of the Old Power, when he comes to power I would not like to see, so now let us make some type of plan with our Queen and her rabbit faced companion.”
SUNDERLAND
“How long will it be until you cross the border and pay a visit to your cousin?”
Between the two women, King Raoul was almost absent, drinking a cup of late morning coffee.
“Have you tired of us already?” Queen Hermudis asked.
“Not at all, sister,” Morgellyn, Queen of Essail said with as lighthearted of a smile as she could muster, “only when you go to see King Rufus, you might suggest his troops move closer to Ambridge, closer even to the actual border of Hale he is fighting to help Edmund preserve.”
“But, Morgellyn,” the honey skinned Hermudis replied with equal brightness while she reached across the table for an orange, “the armies are right where Edmund requested them, on his southern border.”
“Which is my northern border,” Morgellyn said, slapping the side of her chair, losing patience.
“I can see how it looks that way.”
Raoul raised an eyebrow. He would not speak. He must not speak. Best to let women have it out.
“It looks like a threat,” the Queen of Essail said.
“My dear—”
“Do not my dear me,” Morgellyn snapped. “Do not mistake me. The House of Aethelyn has made allegiance with the House of Sussail, but when you cross that into Inglad, you tell your cousin to remove his troops from my border. Your daughter is my brother’s Queen, which is as much to say as in his keeping.”
“Well, who is making the threats now?” Hermudis wondered. “And have you not forgotten how entangled we all are? Linalla is, after all, back in the palace in Sussail.”
Hermudis tilted her head, then said, “Well, but that’s hardly a fair trade is it? After all, if I held your daughter’s life over your head I can imagine you wouldn’t bat an eyelash as that girl’s throat was slit.”
“The one who blinks the first loses,” Morgellyn said.
“You are a cold one.”
“Have Rufus move his troops,” Morgellyn repeated, “and when you cross the border, mention to Prince Robert that I have three sons, all unmarried. I know he has daughters.”
“And one of those could be the next Queen of Essail?”
“Or one of my sons could be a prince of Daumany,” Morgellyn shrugged.
Hermudis thought, and knew Morgellyn thought the same, that as Rufus had no known children, perhaps one of Essail’s blood would rule Daumany. Westrial as well, for Isobel’s child might be a girl as far as they knew.
“Lady,” Hermudis said to her fellow queen, “what game are you playing at? Whose side are you on?”
“I am on Essail’s side.”
Hermudis shook her head, smiling.
“You are on your side.”
“When I was fourteen my mother died and my father packed me off to be wed to a man fifteen years my senior who, when he wasn’t fucking his mistresses was fucking me raw. The moment I had my daughter and lay in that bed half open and sore and alone I knew I had to be on my side because no one was on mine.”
Hermudis stood up, smoothing her purple skirts, the orange clasped in her hand.
“Poor Morgellyn,” she said, “not enough love in her life.”
“When can you and your family leave?” the Queen of Essail said, plainly. “I weary of you and everything about you.”
Hermudis smiled on her and lifted a piece of orange to her mouth. Slowly her gaze turned from her husband then back to Morgellyn.
“Everything about us, Sister? Surely not… everything.”
“She knows!” Morgellyn hissed.
“About what?” Raoul said.
“About us!”
The handsome King of Sussail looked absentminded for a moment and then laughed lightly and said, “Well, yes, I imagine she does. You can’t get around that. Hermudis knows everything.”
Morgellyn blinked at her lover in horror.
“She’s a witch, you know,” Raoul mentioned as he rose from the bed, pulling on his briefs.
“You mean this… metaphorically.”
“No,” Raoul said. “She was trained on the Rootless Isle. Like her mother, and her grandmother. Like Izzy for that matter.”
“Isobel,” Morgellyn began, “is a witch?”
“She prefers to be called enchantress, but yes.”
“You let my brother marry a witch? The Queen of Westrial is a witch?”
“She can’t be the first, and all the Royan queens are witches,” Raoul said, kissing her on the mouth, “as is the new Queen up in Hale. With all your potions and curses you’re kind of a witch yourself. And if a witch for a wife is good enough for me, why not Cedd?”
Morgellyn did not answer. She thought of writing her brother immediately, and then thought against it. When presented with new knowledge, best to keep it to oneself until she could learn where to use it.
