Love-in-a-Mist Page 4

  “Well or not, he’s the Lady’s heir until she announces otherwise, and as she hasn’t through all his absence, it may be because there isn’t anyone else of proper stature or skill.”

  Magistra Aurelia Anyra, the professor of magic I had met at Tara, had proclaimed herself a great mage. She had also said she had met the Lady Jessamine (whom she rather resembled) in the course of trying to find out more of her birth family, she having been abandoned as an infant, so it was not as if the Lady of Alinor didn’t know of her existence.

  Well, there would be politics at work.

  It was none of my business, anyway, except at the most tangential. Thank the Lady.

  “Here you are, then,” Hal said at last, folding the paper cleverly into a semblance of an envelope. “Shall I use a glob of mud to seal it, do you think?”

  “Did you sign it with all your titles?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” he replied. “It’s with a family nickname, to my sister’s.”

  “And will your sister appreciate the mud?”

  “Probably not. She’s quite finicky, Elianne. Probably why she’s all for marrying her mathematics tutor.—Oh, that’s not common knowledge yet, Miss Dart, so I would appreciate it if it didn’t turn up in the New Salon’s gossip pages until after our announcement at the ball.”

  “I shall keep it as close as the trees.”

  “Do. And do go on, Jemis, we’ll keep bantering with or without you.”

  I hastily aborted the rude gesture I began in his direction, tipped my nonexistent hat to Jullanar Maebh, and after tucking the notes into my waistcoat gladly lifted my feet into a proper distance-eating pace.

  Oh, how good it was to be moving again!

  Chapter Four

  We were farther from Finoury’s Inn than I had estimated, or else the distance was longer than Marcan had thought, for it took me a good hour and a half to reach it. The run would have been exceptionally pleasant had I not come out of the trees onto a ridge, half an hour or so along, and seen ahead of me the mountains reaching up until their peaks disappeared into quickly-developing dark clouds.

  I paused at the ridge to examine the terrain. The road slanted back down a steep hillside, through another conifer-thick forest, towards what seemed a more open and cultivated valley bottom some miles away. To my left was one more range of wooded foothills and then the mountains proper. Ahead and to my right the hills fell into the wooded rolling western marches of Lind, with smoke rising here and there from various habitations. It was not a thickly populated part of the country by any means.

  I could see, down in the middle of the valley below, something like a minor mansion or small stately home. It was built of a pale stone that caught the eye, set as it was into wide gold-green lawns cut out of the surrounding woods. It looked as if it were set well back from the road, assuming that followed the central line of the valley as was logical, and I guessed it had been built for a reclusive lord of one sort or another.

  Further to the north a cross valley met the one I was looking into. I reckoned this might be at the right distance for the expected road up to the passes into Chare and the Coombe, and the bigger road leading down into central Lind. There was a worryingly thick column of black smoke rising from somewhere near the intersection.

  In the hopes that it was not my destination, I set off carefully down the hill—no sense spraining an ankle if I could avoid it—and picked up speed once the road levelled out again on the relatively flat valley floor.

  This road was hardly better travelled, and even muddier than the portion closer to the hunting lodge had been. I had to edge my way alongside great ruts, calf-deep and full of yellow mud at the bottom. They meandered across the road in slow curves, evidence of another drunken carter or perhaps some oddity of the road, which did seem to have a leftward slant about it.

  What could have caused them was something of a mystery; even our wagon, pulled by heavy horses as it was, had nothing like this wheel span or depth. I ran alongside the tracks at an easy, mile-eating lope, rejoicing in clear lungs and clear, crisp air, resolutely ignoring those blue-black clouds boiling up over the mountains, and pondered.

  Where was this heavily-laden wagon coming from, and whither was it going, and for what purpose—and to whose profit?

  When Mr. Dart and I had left Ragnor Bella in my grandmother’s falarode (drawn by six possibly-fairy Ghiandor horses, but of narrower wheel-rim, I thought, than these tracks), we had left at dusk according to the coachman’s strict insistence. We had not made it out of the Arguty Forest bordering Ragnor barony to the north without being accosted by three different sets of highwaymen.

  The first (the Hunter in Green) had requested our conveyance of himself to Yrchester, the second (Myrta the Hand) that we convey a load of barrels of illegal whiskey, and the third (Moo of Nibbler’s gang) that we take possession of five kittens.

  I had forgotten about the kittens. I hoped Cartwright was taking care of them for us.

  The road took a bend and a stone wall emerged out of the woods to run alongside it. It was built of a dark grey stone, much encrusted with lichens and patches of ferns, thick festoons of ivy making mock of the vertical slate coping at its crown. I could without any trouble have contrived a crossing, even with the eight-foot height to climb before the loose slates. Though of course I would have followed the wall away from the corner at the road until I was out-of-sight of any passersby before I hazarded the trespass.

  That first night, Mr. Fancy, the coachman, had taken the falarode and the barrels after leaving us in the care of Mrs. Cartwright, who had been shocked at the request but valiantly rose to the challenge of accommodating two gentlemen and her son for the night. She made perhaps the best Linder rarebit I’d ever had the joy of tasting, along with a jug of fine home-brewed ale that I hoped she was able to sell to supplement her widow’s portion.

  Both falarode and coachman, not to mention the six Ghiandor horses, were ready and eager to continue on the next morning, so I had not enquired any further into their dealings. Mr. Fancy was a strange and uncanny person, and I much preferred to keep on his good side. Not to mention I was already in unfortunately deep with various nefarious goings-on in Ragnor Bella without actively searching out trouble.

  That was a lesson I should take good heed of, I suspected. I turned my thoughts back to Violet and began composing a letter in my mind.

  After a time I ran past the entrance to the great house I’d seen from the ridge. A pair of ivy-encrusted stone pillars with stone pineapples as their finials bracketed a high, ornately worked iron gate. There was no gate-house, and the gate stood open, which I found curious for such a remote place.

  The heavy, wide, cart-tracks turned into the gate. I paused a moment and considered what the track told me. I was no great woodsman or tracker, but Mr. Dart was no slouch at the art, and possessed of a deep investigative curiosity to boot, and moreover took delight in informing me of his ways.

  So: on the turn, the rear wheels had crossed to the inside left of the outer, which indicated that the cart had gone in, not out. Which I could see anyway by virtue of the direction of the hoof prints, but it was good to have confirmation. There was some confusion amongst them, as if a rider or several had crossed the wagon-tracks after they’d been laid.

  I had no idea what the weather hereabouts had been the past few days, so couldn’t guess at age, but they looked fairly fresh. Several small piles of horse droppings seemed to confirm this.

  A few steps onward, and I discovered that the wagon, now even heavier if the ruts were anything to go by, had turned out again and was continuing along the road in the direction I was heading. This time the wheel tracks distinctly went over the incoming hoof-prints.

  This was perhaps even more curious. A heavily-laden wagon turning into a country manor: well, some sort of delivery was obvious, even if the origin of it was not. (It could easily enough be a back-country distiller or brewer or indeed even something so mundane as a load of firewood.) For the same cart to re-emerge, equally heavily laden, and continue on away from either its origin or the house, was more puzzling. Country houses did not, in my limited experience, tend to send out heavy loads.

  Unless of course they were like the Talgarth’s, and occupied in growing drugs under the pretence of studying the inheritance characteristics of sweet peas.

  Whatever riding party had entered between the cart’s arrival and its departure could have had something to do with it.

  What the people at this country house were doing was absolutely none of my business but occupied my thoughts pleasantly for the next mile and a half, at which point I reached the crossroads and the still-burning Finoury’s Inn.

  A dozen men stood around with buckets of water, but the building was far too well gone to do anything but keep the fire from spreading. It was obvious they’d been hard at work for hours already, so sweaty and grimy were they. I slowed down to a more ordinary walk as I came out of the woods and into the cleared area around the inn.

  It reminded me quite a bit of Grightmire’s Cross, up in the Crook of Lind fifty or sixty miles north of here. Like that inn, it was built right at the crossroads, something that was simply not done in South Fiellan on the other side of the mountains. We buried suicides, traitors, and murderers under crossroads, and considered it very unlucky indeed to build within a furlong of one.

  Also like Grightmire’s Cross, there was no community to speak of around the inn. Even the Green Dragon, the most isolated of the public houses in Ragnor barony, had a handful of houses trailing off down the road from it. Approaching Finoury’s Inn I had crossed a couple of fields after leaving the woods, both fallow stubble after the autumn harvest, but seen no houses.

  From what I could see, the inn had been built ou
t of elaborately carved wood, with a wood-shingled roof. Another building a few dozen yards away must have been the stable, with a corral of spooked and restless equines next to it. It was strange that the stable was so far from the inn building, but presumably there was a good reason. Perhaps there was a spring over there for watering the horses and mules? The placement had saved animals and building today, at any rate.

  I hovered at the back of the group even as a brick chimney in the middle of the inn suddenly gave way and collapsed in a huge fountain of sparks. The gathered men let out a shout and hastened to put out the flakes of burning tinder before anything else could catch. I stamped on a few glowing strands that floated in my direction, but most were soon extinguished.

  “It’s fortunate that the wind is calm,” I said to no on in particular.

  A rotund older man next to me startled, jerking back with an oath and then apologizing in almost the same breath. “Sorry, lad, I didn’t see anyone behind me there, like. What was that you said?”

  “Nothing of consequence,” I hastened to assure him. “Merely that it was fortunate that the day is calm.”

  He scowled up at the column of thick black smoke, which rose straight for perhaps a hundred feet before angling sharply sideways. I felt foolish, but it had not looked like that half an hour earlier.

  “There’s a storm coming,” he said bleakly.

  “Surely the rain will help put it out?”

  “It’ll be snow,” he said flatly. “Coming over from the Coombe, this time of year? First of the Lady’s Snows. It’s never good when it comes before Winterturn Eve.”

  “We say the opposite,” I murmured. “First Snow in November makes for a fair Spring in February. But that’s the other side of the mountains.”

  “Were you hoping to cross, then? Your accent says you’re an educated man. Going down to Chare are you? Or over into the Coombe?”

  I looked resignedly at the burning inn. “I was hoping to hire mules and make the pass to Fiellan before the snows closed it, yes. My party’s back along the road yonder—our, er, cart caught a rut and overturned.”

  “I’d hire you the mules but you’d not make it over. That’s a treacherous height to the fork down to Chare, lad, and worse along the Fiellanese side. Takes lives every year. You’d be best going back up north and down again. A longer journey but a safer one, I tell you.”

  I eyed that dark cloud. “How long do you reckon before that storm hits?”

  He shrugged, attention on the burning building. “An hour, two at the most. The wind’s already started, as you can see. At least it’ll put out the flames.”

  A shout went up from the other direction, and we both turned with alacrity to see a lone rider come cantering down the road I had just arrived from. “That’s the Post come along from Hillend,” the man said. “I must go meet him.”

  I let him go, then remembered my letters and and followed despite feeling like an utter imbecile for wanting more when the destruction of the inn was clearly the deserving focus of everyone’s attention. By the time I arrived the Post-rider was being regaled with the story.

  “It began around dawn,” the man I’d been talking to was saying. “One of the grooms woke me to say he could see smoke coming out of the roof. I thought he meant the chimney, but then when I saw what he meant it was unmistakable. We couldn’t figure out what was causing it … there aren’t any rooms up there, just old lumber and broken furniture and the like. Well, we got everyone out and sent a boy down to the village for help, then started with the water buckets, but …” He shrugged helplessly. “So you see.”

  “I do,” said the Post-rider. “Do you have any messages you want me to take back up the line? I’ll come to Orwells within the hour.”

  The innkeeper, as he must be, shook his head. “I can’t think straight,” he said. “Tell them—by the Lady, what am I going to do?”

  I recalled that I, as the (very newly discovered) local lord of St-Noire, had an obligation to assist my (hah!) villagers, including the innkeeper, in their need. “Who lives in the great house down the valley?” I asked. “Would they be able to send assistance?”

  There was a silence. It was patently obvious no one expected help from that corner. “Welladay,” the innkeeper said at last, “they might send us some food and supplies.”

  “Emperor knows they’ve got enough of it,” someone else muttered.

  “The Master there is—eccentric,” the innkeeper said. “You’re from the Coombe, you said? So you’ve probably heard tell of the Witch of the Woods Noirell. Well, she’s got nothing on our Master Boring.”

  “Except for the even more eccentric young heir,” the Post-rider put in. “Slaying dragons he is, I hear tell. You wouldn’t catch anyone at Master Boring’s house doing that!”

  Everyone guffawed at this tall tale. I decided not to mention that I was the eccentric young heir in question. Or that I was quite proud to have slain a dragon, thank you very much, all things considered. I smiled politely instead. “Oh?”

  “A party of bright young things came through here a few days back,” the innkeeper said. “Gone to visit the Master. My guess is that he’s getting old and wants a look-see at his heir before he offs it and leaves him all his money. They’re there for all Winterturn, and much joy may they all have of it!”

  Whatever had happened as they passed by Finoury’s Inn had not endeared them to the locals, it was clear.

  “They won’t take in my guests, that’s for sure,” he said. “Not high enough for the likes of their company, no sirrah! I’ve had to ask for spare beds all through the village, and that’s for just my regulars. The missus and I will be in the stable with the grooms. No one else will get a look-in before the next village up.”

  That was, alas, clear enough. I scratched my head, wishing for my hat, and turned hopefully to the Post-rider. “Will you take a few letters north for me, sir? I was sent ahead after our cart tipped.”

  “Is that the slang nowadays?” the Post-rider asked genially. “Certainly. Where are they going?”

  I pulled out the letters, exceedingly grateful that Hal had thought to be discreet in the address of the one to his sister. “Fillering Pool in Ronderell, and Little Finchely, east of Yrchester in Fiellan. Oh, and one to go back to the king’s hunting lodge in the other direction—they’ll need to know about the cart.”

  The Post-rider’s eyebrows went up at this indication we’d been on a literal cart, not a carriage, but he accepted the letters from me.

  “They’ll not be surprised,” the innkeeper said dourly. “Their carter’s a drunkard in half this county’s inns, I tell you.”

  Right. That would have been helpful to know earlier. Though likely Marcan didn’t know. And anyway we were dependent on Marcan’s generosity, and it would have ill behoved us to ask Jullanar Maebh to walk, after all the hardships we’d already put her through when she’d asked for refuge.

  “A wheatear will see them on their way,” the Post-rider said.

  I fished in my waistcoat pocket for the change, long practice at Mrs. Etaris’ bookstore and at the Morrowlea student-run store letting me distinguish coins by feel. I presented him with the wheatear and a second one for his trouble.

  The innkeeper had gone back to the bucket brigade. They seemed to have things well in hand, and I did not like the look of the clouds now descending from the pass. The column of smoke from the inn was drifting sideways at a sharper angle, too.

  I touched my hand to an imaginary hat to the Post-rider and set off at a quicker run to return to my friends. The wind was cold on my back, and smelled of the cool, dusty, effervescent odour of coming snow. It looked like we were going to have to throw ourselves on the dubious hospitality of “Master Boring” of notable eccentricity.

  Chapter Five

  I found my friends sitting glumly on some rocks at the ridge overlooking the valley. I hadn’t been able to see them on my return up, but evidently they had seen me.

  “Tell us that isn’t the inn burning like that,” Mr. Dart pleaded.

  I could only grimace apologetically.

  “At least that those clouds betoken a storm over Ragnor Bella?”