Leda

Chapter Two: Shame

"We can't turn them away, Arec." Hal lowered herself from her horse with a groan. "They'll starve out here."

"We've not enough food for ourselves, Hal."

"I'm aware of that," she snapped. "But what little we have, we'll share. I won't see them starve."

Davic's sneer soured further. "You'd take the food from the mouths of your own people to feed strangers?"

The force of her own fury surprised her. "By all the spirits, boy, I'll feed you to them if you don't shut your mouth."

With a wince, the young man slunk away. Luc opened his mouth, ready to apologise for his son's poor grace, but she shook her head. Too many times she'd witnessed his embarrassment at Davic's petty hatreds and spiteful humour. How was it, she wondered, that such good fathers bred such bad sons?

Arec's lips tightened and his eyes turned hard as flint. But then he nodded, and with a grind of cogs and pulleys the portcullis rose. Some of Pæga's tenants embraced, but many appeared too exhausted to register what had happened, traipsing through the gate in silence clutching bundles of clothing to their chests.

Hal looked up at Arec again. "I'll go and talk to Pæga."

Arec snorted in response, following her through into the fortress as the portcullis dropped back into place behind them.

"Hal? What's happening?" Her hair loose and tumbling down the back of her shawl in long, fawn locks, Meracad ran towards her across the courtyard.

Hal's smile was bitter. "You wouldn't think a man could bear a grudge for so long."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that Pæga has waited twenty years to repay me for his humiliation."

"Elis!" Meracad called out to the old woman who now stood at the entrance to the keep, her arms folded across a tattered, stained apron, loose strands of grey hair peeling out from beneath her headscarf. "Elis, give them soup! And bread, if you can spare some."

Elis loped back into the keep, Pæga's tenants in tow.

"I'll come with you." Meracad turned back to Hal. "You shouldn't go to Pæga by yourself."

"No, I'll go alone."

"I said I'll come!"

Running her hands down her face, Hal sighed. "Very well."

***

Out on the plateau, the wind was fierce. It blasted the moorland in such violent gusts that Meracad gripped her reins tightly for fear she might fall. Heather rippled beneath their horses' hooves and the sky was a constant war of clouds, pierced by occasional rays of weak sunlight. The forest sprawled steeply down the banks on either side, Brennac glittering like a distant jewel to the south, while to the north the woodland dipped and then rose to meet the moorland which lay between Hannac and Dal Reniac.

Meracad thought of her daughter so far away, flung into a world of power and politics, now ruling over the empire's second greatest city. So young! And though Marc had assured her that Leda was a skilful negotiator and an astute politician, gravely conscious of her responsibilities and her duties to the crown, Meracad still had her doubts. To her, Leda was still the headstrong child who returned from the forest with mud in her hair and torn dresses: who never walked if she could run, and who found hiding places in every nook and cranny of the fortress ˗ even in places that Hal had never known existed.

At least, though, Leda wasn't alone. Edæc was with her: shy, strong and capable. And once Leda received the Emperor's dispensation, they could be married in the spring. Nothing, Meracad knew, would make Leda happier.