Here be Monsters Read online

  “A cascade of monsters pouring from a whirlpool of fog,” Geoffrey answered, “and a bloodthirsty horde of people riding distorted mounts behind them, hell-bent to ravish and slay all the folk of Gramarye.”

  Alain paled. “Could there be any truth in so horrible a vision?”

  “I cannot believe that,” Geoffrey said, “but I dare not take the chance. If there are monsters loose, I shall not let my little brother face them alone—nay, nor even with his bride beside him.”

  Neither of them had to say that they did not yet entirely trust Allouette.

  “If you ride, I ride,” Alain said with determination, “you to ward your brother, I to ward my people.”

  Geoffrey scowled. “We dare not risk the heir to the throne.”

  “That old song again?” Alain sighed. “It was worn thin when first my mother began to sing it—and now you? Have you sewn patches on it?”

  “Still, as your vassal, I must protect you,” Geoffrey said stubbornly, “not lead you into danger.”

  “And as your suzerain, it is my duty to protect you,” Alain retorted, “you, and all my people.”

  “But what if . . .” Geoffrey bit off the question before it was too late.

  Too late it was; Alain grinned in answer. “If I were slain? Who would rule? Come, you know the answer! There is an heir and a spare.” He frowned. “Come to think of it, the spare should know where I go and the reason for it. Do you bide here while I speak to him.”

  Neither even mentioned the king and queen, who would have forbidden the foray on the spot—but Geoffrey reminded Alain, “There is someone else to whom you should speak of this.”

  “I shall tell her indeed.” Alain braced himself visibly. “Somehow I think there may be more danger in your sister than in your brother’s monsters. Wish me well, comrade.”

  Diarmid was a slender young man some four years younger than his brother, almost as tall, almost as blond, even more serious—but there the resemblance ended. Diarmid was lean where Alain was stocky, wiry where Alain was muscular, quiet and reserved where Alain was open and direct.

  “Ever the knight-errant, brother?” Diarmid actually smiled. “Well, good hunting to you.”

  “Thank you for kind wishes.” Alain returned the smile, then turned serious again. “You know, Diarmid, that if I should fail to return, you would be heir apparent.”

  The younger prince shuddered. “Heaven forbid! That I should have to forgo my books and spend empty hours in entertaining ambassadors and enduring the debating of lawyers! Take good care of yourself, brother, for I long to be back on my estates in Loguire, where folk speak to the point and do not waste my time in bandying words.”

  “Ever the scholar,” Alain said, amused. “We must watch you closely, brother, or you shall be off to build a cottage in the shadow of Gregory’s tower and spend your days in study.”

  Diarmid’s face turned gaunt with hunger. “Do not tempt me, brother.”

  Alain was taken aback by his intensity and resolved never to mention the ivory tower again. He changed the subject. “I cannot understand how you can administer the whole of a dukedom, and administer it well, in only six hours a day!”

  Diarmid shrugged. “It is only a matter of delegating authority—and of choosing good people in whom to entrust it.”

  “You may yet prove more fit to govern than—”

  “Do not say it, my liege-to-be,” Diarmid interrupted, “for the plain and simple fact of my efficiency in governance is that I do not really care tremendously for the people or the land.”

  “Diarmid!” Alain cried, shocked.

  Diarmid shrugged. “I do what I do out of duty, brother, not fascination. You, on the other hand, care for the common folk so deeply that you will spend hours agonizing over a ten-minute matter to be sure your decision is as right as it can be.” He shook his head, smiling with amusement. “I do not truly understand it—and have no doubt that you will be a far better ruler than I.”

  “I thank you, brother.” Alain clapped him on the shoulder. “Soothe our parents for my absence, will you?”

  “As well as I can,” Diarmid promised. “Give me the note you have writ for them.”

  Alain handed him the scroll, then left, squaring his shoulders and bracing himself to confront Cordelia.

  Diarmid looked after him with a pensive frown. If the horrid visions had been enough to rock Gregory from his studies, they must have been vile indeed—and there was a chance, no matter how slight, that Alain might find himself in greater danger than he knew. Diarmid made up his mind on the instant, for blood is thicker than ink. He would miss his books, but he couldn’t take the chance that Alain might be slain. He would follow him in case he needed to be pried loose from trouble. After all, he had only one brother.

  Then, too, he really did not want to have to become king.

  Prince Diarmid had been easy to tell; he took it in stride, used to his brother’s gallivanting in Geoffrey’s wake and quietly certain that the issue was more a matter of young men adventuring than of any real danger to the realm. Cordelia was another matter.

  “Now? A month before our wedding? Have you a crack in your skull, that your brains could leak out and let you think of such a thing?”

  Alain caught his breath at the vivacity of her, the way she seemed to glow with anger, her face only inches from his . . . He forced his mind away from that train of thought and said firmly, “If my people are endangered, I must go.”

  “Aye, if! But what chance is there of that ‘if’ being true—and how great is the chance of your leaving me standing alone at the altar while you and my scapegrace brother go jaunting about the countryside?”

  “I doubt highly that we will be gone more than a week,” Alain told her, then remembered what Geoffrey had told him about courtship and let his feelings show. He dropped his voice a few notes. “Besides, I am near to losing my wits with being so close to you, and so close to being your husband, and able to do nothing about it.”

  Cordelia thawed on the instant. “There are always kisses,” she breathed, swaying even closer.

  Alain took the hint, and the kiss—it lasted a long time, but as it ended, a groan escaped his lips.

  Cordelia was instantly on fire again. “Are my kisses so distasteful as that?”

  “No,” Alain gasped, “but they ignite a pain within me that shall not be quenched for a month and a day.”

  “A day?” Cordelia stared at him, almost affronted. “Why the day?”

  “Because I suspect you shall be exhausted at the end of your wedding day.”

  Cordelia’s eyes lit with a different sort of fire. She pressed her cheek against his chest with a husky laugh. “Have more confidence in me than that, my love. I have more energy than you think.”

  Alain’s moan was halfway to a mew.

  Instantly Cordelia was three feet away from him, eyes downcast, the very picture of the chaste and demure maiden. “I shall not taunt you, then. Nay, it is wrong of me to tease you.” She looked up, meeting his eyes again. “And wrong of me to withhold you from your duties. Go assure yourself that all is well with your people, and that Gregory’s . . . betrothed . . . is only beset by megrims.”

  “Take heart, my love,” Alain said softly. “If you do not yet trust Allouette, be sure that I do not either.”

  “It had crossed my mind that she was enticing you both away at a most inopportune time,” Cordelia admitted, “but it is an unworthy suspicion. Go, my love. Chase phantasms for a fortnight—but do not dare be a single day longer, or you shall face a far more terrible monster than ever my brother could dream!”

  Quicksilver was practicing jousting, riding at the quintain with a blunted lance. She knocked it spinning, turned her horse to trot back for another pass—and saw her true love riding toward her with bulging saddlebags and simmering anger in his eyes. Her heart dropped and she kicked her horse to a canter, rushing to meet him. “Geoffrey! What troubles you?”

  “My idiot brother,�
� he said, fuming. “He and Allouette have endured a waking nightmare, seeing monsters come ravening out of some fantastic whirlpool of fog to despoil all of Gramarye. Now they have ridden to discover its whereabouts and have left me with a warning to be on guard.”

  “Gone on a quest?” Quicksilver cried. “But it is only a month until Cordelia’s wedding!”

  “All the more reason, says Gregory, to rid the land of whatever menace seeks to disrupt their nuptials,” Geoffrey said grimly.

  Quicksilver caught his undertone and frowned. “You suspect something.”

  Geoffrey went still, then nodded sheepishly. “It is wrong, I know, but it did occur to me that this might be some stratagem of Allouette’s to avoid having to face the whole family at the wedding.”

  Quicksilver frowned, reviewing what she knew of Allouette and assessing it in a flash.

  “Surely we shall have riddled out this muddle in a fortnight! And if we fail to, fear not, sweet one.” Geoffrey leaned forward and kissed her, then assured her, “I shall haul Alain home in good time for the wedding if I have to knock him senseless to do it—not that he is showing overmuch sense as it is. Farewell!”

  With that, he turned and rode through the gatehouse, leaving Quicksilver staring behind him, trying to decide whether to laugh or to shout in anger. She bit her lip in uncertainty, not willing to admit a lingering fear that Geoffrey might have wearied of her. Nonetheless, the feeling nudged at her, and to quell it, she kicked her horse to a canter, pulled him up at the door of the keep, tossed the reins to a groom, and strode up the steps to rally Cordelia.

  Rally? She came into Cordelia’s room to find her in a sturdy traveling gown, packing her saddlebags. “How now, sister-to-be! What will your prince say if he finds you on his trail?”

  “Naught, for I shall make certain he does not find me,” Cordelia said, thin-lipped, “until he has need of me.”

  “Sound enough,” said Quicksilver, “but what if he does not?”

  Cordelia shrugged. “Then he will be none the worse.” She looked up. “This is no surprise to you. Has Geoffrey, then, already bade you au revoir?”

  “He has,” Quicksilver said grimly, “and in so swift a fashion that I could scarcely protest—especially if the common folk are in danger.” She was herself the daughter of a squire and had grown up learning to care deeply about the land and the people. The common folk had repaid her by joining her outlaw band when the only choices left her were to go to her lord’s bed as she was bidden, or to rebel.

  “Well, Alain is certainly not going into danger without me to ward him,” Cordelia avowed, “whether he knows it or not.”

  “Indeed,” the reformed outlaw captain agreed. “Why should we stay at home and wring our hands?” She pursed her lips. “Nonetheless, it might be wiser to let the boys go ahead of us.”

  “Yes,” Cordelia sighed. “They will take it ill if they see us trailing after them.”

  “They would be affronted to know we doubt their abilities to deal with whatsoever danger they may find,” Quicksilver pointed out. “Then, too, if they fall into disaster, they may welcome others who follow to aid them in fighting off the enemy.”

  “Not if those ‘others’ are their fiancées, I suppose,” Cordelia said sourly. “I will chance that, though, rather than chance their dying.”

  It never occurred to either of the ladies that they might run into a predicament that the four of them together might not be able to solve.

  “But with only a month till your wedding!” Quicksilver protested. “Will not the ceremony fall apart if you do not keep the arrangements in train?”

  “It will fall apart even more if my fiancé does not come back,” Cordelia said sharply. “If I wish to be sure of a wedding, I must see to it that my groom stays alive!” She leaned closer and confided, “And truthfully, I am nearly driven to distraction by all this fuss about the church and the food and the gown and the guests! My wedding will proceed just as well for a week gone, and I shall be far more likely to emerge sane and cheerful.”

  “But your lady mother—”

  “My mother was once a bride, too, and I have no doubt she will cheer my leaving.” Cordelia gazed off into space a moment.

  Quicksilver knew she was telepathically discussing the issue with her mother. It still gave her the megrims, to see mind reading used so casually.

  Cordelia nodded briskly and finished folding a spare bodice. “She applauds my going and will keep all the preparations in progress while I am gone.” She looked up at Quicksilver, eyebrows raised. “You will accompany me, will you not?”

  Quicksilver felt her lips curving into a smile. She chuckled and said, “Of course. What else is a sister-in-law for?”

  So the Gallowglass Heirs set off on a quest, Gregory and Allouette forging ahead, blithely unaware that Alain and Geoffrey were half a day behind them, and Cordelia and Quicksilver half a day behind them.

  None of them could know that Diarmid followed with half a dozen hand-picked men-at-arms, all very loyal to him—so loyal that none of them had breathed a word as to where they were going to anyone except their knight, and had told him only that the Duke of Loguire had summoned them. The knight would therefore not be able to tell the king and queen that both their sons were playing the knight-errant.

  Of course, Diarmid was quite sure that they would learn that little detail—when he failed to appear at breakfast the next day, and his valet found Alain’s note. In fact, he was counting on their parents’ reaction. It gave him a certain sense of security to know that his father would be a day’s march behind him with a small army.

  CHAPTER

  2

  On the morning of the second day, Allouette and Gregory climbed into some high and rugged hills. The trees grew more and more stunted, the roadside grass shorter and browner, until they were riding through rock and hardened clay bearing only scrub brush and dried grass. By that time, the path had grown so steep that they had to dismount and lead their horses—so as they neared the crest, they were not in the best position to have an ogre step out from a behind a boulder to block their path.

  Its bandy legs looked more like the roots of hundred-year-old oaks; its shoulders seemed like kegs set on either side of a neckless head that was all lumps and slashes with a matted thatch of dun-colored hair. Two-inch fangs protruded from the corners of the bottom-most slash—presumably its mouth—and tiny eyes gleamed from two more, higher up. Its log-thick arms were so long that its ham-handed fingers drummed on a knee, and for clothing it wore only a tattered tunic and moth-eaten hose. It roared, swinging high a huge cudgel, and waddled down the slope toward them, pig-eyes ablaze with bloodlust.

  Gregory stared. “From what nightmare came this?”

  “Yours,” Allouette snapped. “Step aside! Let the horses deal with it!”

  The ogre’s rank odor hit the beasts and they reared, screaming, fire in their own eyes, for alien and horrid though the creature might seem, these were well-trained warhorses who knew to strike rather than flee.

  The ogre screamed back and swung its club at the striking legs, but one of the horses cracked a hoof against its shoulder and the swing went wide, turning the creature half around—toward Allouette. Its piggy eyes fixed on her and it waddled toward her with menace, club swinging up.

  Gregory shouted and leaped into its path. The ogre turned and swung its club at him. Gregory ducked; the club whistled over his head. Then a huge foot caught him in the stomach and lifted him into the air. He landed in a ball and rolled to his feet.

  “Caitiff!” Allouette screamed, and snatched a dagger from her belt.

  The ogre turned to her with a snarl, swinging its club high again—but her hand swung in a blur and a dagger-hilt seemed to sprout from the ogre’s shaggy chest. It looked down in surprise, then wrenched the blade loose, ignoring the gush of blood that followed, and stepped toward her with a howl of rage—but it lurched as it stepped. It looked down with a puzzled frown, as well it might have—for there
was a lump of gray goo where its left foot had been, and as it watched, its right foot seemed to melt. It howled in horror as it shrank, its whole form sliding down and flowing in seconds until only a huge gray heap remained.

  Allouette drew a sharp breath and said, “Well and quickly thought, my love.”

  “It threatened you!”

  Allouette looked up, surprised; she had never seen Gregory angry before. His eyes blazed, his face had reddened, his whole body was shaking—but she knew the cause and reached up to embrace him. “I was never truly in danger, love,” she said softly.

  “But that club!” Gregory’s voice was muffled by her hair as he pressed his cheek against her head. “It might have hurt you!”

  “I was faster than it was, dear—it could never have caught me,” she said, her tone soothing. “Still, you thought most amazingly quickly. How could you tell it was made of witch-moss?”

  Gregory shrugged. “All monsters are, on this world of Gramarye. Some granny who does not know she is a projective telepath has been telling her grandchildren tales of night-stalkers again, and bits of witch-moss in the forest nearby flowed toward one another until there was enough of them to form the monster of which she spoke.”

  The substance wasn’t properly a moss, it was a fungus, and for some strange reason, natural selection had made it sensitive to telepathic thought. A trained esper could fashion it into anything she wanted, even living forms, since it was already alive.

  An untrained one could turn it into anything he could imagine—sometimes with disastrous results.

  “It was worth a try,” Gregory explained. “If dissociating had failed, I could always have hurled it away with telekinesis.”

  Allouette thought of the rage she had seen in his eyes and didn’t doubt that he could have summoned the emotional power to have lifted the huge mass and thrown it like a twig. The thought was frightening, but reassuring too; she felt a warm glow at the reminder of the intensity of his love for her, the more amazing because she hadn’t manipulated him into it.