Fifty-Four
Now, the Dark Age has come.
Plant the Ursuham, the Name of God.
It is not the season to plant other seeds.
Do not wander lost in doubt and delusion.
-Sage Imbeth Atanambyl
AMBRIDGE
“Aye! And then her Baldiness said she was pregnant by the King, and she still says she is.”
“Well, he ain’t the king no more!” Old Martin said as he took a plug from his ale. “Osric Wulfstan sent his head in a bag to the palace.”
“Can you imagine that?” Ned wondered beside him, forgetting his beer long enough to lean over the bar and smile.
“The Baldies sitting down to table, and old Queen Edith, haughty as ever, saying, ‘I do say, Allyn, whatever is for dinner?’ And then, just like that, a head in the bag! Her husband’s.”
“Ah, but I doubt she was too troubled by it,” Matilda the barmaid said. “After all, for twenty-five years they barely touched each other. She hated him as much we hated them. My sister worked in the palace. She always said the Queen looked like she was smelling something bad.”
“I heard,” Gus looked around for King’s Guards, “that she had him killed and passed it off on Osric and Myrne.”
“And then did she have the head sent back and pretend she was Osric and Myrne?”
“Now, that I don’t know. No one knows.”
“I had heard, and I believe this, for my cousins live up in Budic, across the border, that the Queen lied and had Edmund locked away in Hale so what she could take over. Then young Osric hears about, snatches up Edmund an’ chops off his head quick as butter.”
“I heard that it was the Queen Myrne herself. That as she did it she said, ‘Vengeance for my family!’”
“How can you blame either of them? The King murdered their father and grandfather.”
“I don’t blame either of them,” Mallory said, over the noise of the pub. “I just don’t want Osric Wulfstan to burn our city down.”
“Here! Here!” Ned said. “Does it matter what the great and the mighty do as long as they do not do it to us? I don’t give a damn if Osric is crowned king in Ambridge.”
“But I do care if it’s Allyn Baldwin. King Allyn!” Mallory screwed up her face and the barmaid Brenda laughed.
“It matters a little who rules, surely,” said a man beside them, new, a little rough looking.
“You have the look and sound of Hale about you?” Ned said.
When the man looked surprised, Ned said, “What do we care about that? Kings and princes make wars across imaginary borders. What is that to us? Half my family be in Hale. A third in Westrial.”
“I had heard war comes down there,” the new man said, “And in a way it does matter, a little, who rules here. Can the Baldwins lead us? Protect us? Will there be some tyrant marching across us. It matters a little.”
“Right enough,” Ned agreed. He felr loud and raucous next to the thoughtful country burr of this northman.
“Sir,” Ned said, “did you come in here with that dark haired lass a moment ago?”
“I did.”
“She is fair. Fair spoken. One of us, I think.”
“I am one of us,” the girl said, returning.
“What’s that?” Brenda said and turned, looking at her.
“Hill! Hill!” Brenda cried.
Brenda looked between Hillary and Cynric.
“Is this your man?” Brenda said. “Where have you been? What is…?”
But as she went from the beginning of one question to the beginning of another, Brenda’s eyes widended and tears ran down her face.
“I never thought,” she was clapping her hands together and looked like she might faint.
Justin, the old innkeeper came beside her and murmured, “Why don’t you and your sister go back and have a talk for a bit. Catch your breath, Girl.”
Brenda nodded rapidly, fanning her face, and then she looked at Cynric.
“He’s a nice one. Would you like to come back with us?”
“I would, Ma’am,” Cynric nodded. He nodded to the other men at the bar and pushed himself off the stool, throwing back his brown cloak. As the three of them headed out of the common room, Justin shouted, “Why don’t you just take the day off!”
“Oh, I thought I would never hear from you.”
“I told you I was leaving,” Hillary said. “Bren, you were the last person I could see before we had to flee.”
“I know,” Brenda moaned, “and it all seemed so dangerous, and I never knew who you were leaving with. And then the war came. And now you come back with this handsome, gentle young man. A bit rough looking, like he knows how to hunt.”
Cynric blushed beneath his thin beard.
“I went with the war,” Hillary said.
“Explain,” Brenda said, sitting down after she had poured both Hillary and Cynric a drink.
And so, leaving out her rape by Edmund, she talked of fleeing to Saint Clew, and then joining up with Myrne and Wolf.
“King Osric! And Myrne! You know them?”
“They weren’t king and queen then,” Hilary said. “They weren’t really anything. It happened so fast.”
Cynric looked like he was about to say something, then did not, and Hilary told, now that they were relaxed, in great detail the story of Myrne and Wolf coming to Ambridge, and Myrne agreeing to marry Allyn Baldwin, then sending Wolf north separately from her while she traveled to Herreboro pretending to ask for Allyn’s hand in marriage, only to declare war. She told of how Wolf had gone into the hills and met Cynric and Eryk and this was when Brenda slapped her thigh and shouted, “You are the Queen’s cousin!”
“But I’m not royal, ma’am.”
“But he is a powerful lord,” Hilary said while Cynric went red. “Cynric is Lord of Slico and has holdings here, for his mother is from Senae. He’s half Inglad though you’d never know it.”
Hilary told the whole story of the war and wrapped it up neatly and when she was done, Cynric noticed that Hilary had conveniently left out that he had a wife, and it was not her.
For the last couple of months, tales of the rage of Osric Wulfstan had blazed across Inglad. His armies had swept across the Riverlands and were heading, quickly, east toward Ambridge. Chester, Shrewbury, Eastland and Senae fell before him quickly. Indeed, there did not seem to be much of a struggle, and it had been reported that the people of the fens, who never seemed to care for anyone and lived in a place where, frequently, taxmen went to collect and never returned, leaped out, fighting for him. The exiled barons from Hale and the priesthood called for Osric’s blood and Myrne’s humiliation. The Archbishop declared that the proper thing to do would be chop off the prretender king’s head and marry Myrne to Allyn Baldwin. For this the city of Ambury, the Archbishop’s seat, was burned to the ground, and he taken into custody.
In the south there was little support for the Baldwins, but then the southern lords had suffered most under Edmund and remembered what henchmen the Baldwins had been. The Evanses remembered as well as the Thomlinsons and the Verins. Godric Verin remembered for the sake of his wife, Alaina, who had been born with the name Flynn and seen her brother dispossessed and her nephew, Michael, flee into the woods to became an outlaw of legend.
“Only the Eastern Corner remains to be taken,” Brenda reported to her sister and to Cynric, both of whom knew this. “And Ambridge.”
“Yes,” Cynric said, finishing up his drink, “and the Wulfstan armies will arrive in Ambridge any day.”
