I passed between the first two elms with what would have been a wild grin, but for the mask. I could lose myself in the forest, be rid of the gag, sort myself out a safe passage to Umbertide and damn their hides. The Slavs would swear it wasn’t me and I would, in the fullness of time, deny the whole thing. “You must be mistaken. Me in a liar’s mask? How can you even tell who the wretched traitors wearing those things are? You should have taken it off—then it would have been obvious. Lucky Isen didn’t murder the poor fellow!”
Panting, scratched and sweaty I paused, lost among the trees, mostly tall copper beeches. The ground beneath them lay thick with the rustling remains of last year’s leaves, overgrown with brambles. I set my back to the thickest trunk in sight and started to work on the leather straps around my head again. This time wedging my sword hilt between my feet and going at it with considerably more care.
Applying a sharp edge to your face with sufficient force to cut old leather whilst trying to preserve your boyish good looks is a tricky business. In fact the task took up so much of my concentration that I almost missed the faint crunch of dry leaves beneath approaching boots.
Somehow the need to be able to talk over-rode the sudden rising panic and I kept sawing just long enough to break through the last of the straps. I pulled the damn thing free, working my sore mouth but careful not to spit or make any other sound that might draw attention.
“Stevanas? Poe?” More rustling, a muttered oath. “Sir Kritchen?” Count Isen’s voice booming out far deeper than might be expected from so small a man, and far closer at hand than I’d thought he was. “Jalan Kendeth! Show yourself!” He sounded rather hoarse, as if he’d been shouting quite a bit.
With agonizing slowness I set the mask down and started to turn my sword around so I could grasp the hilt. Despite the utmost concentration my hands, slippery with sweat and blood, managed to do the exact opposite of what I asked them to and dropped the weapon. It landed with a muffled crunch among the dry leaves.
“Ah ha!” Count Isen appeared, rounding the bole of the forest giant next to mine, arriving from a completely unexpected direction and turning out to be far closer than I thought he was—the tree he skirted stood so close to the one at my back that their lower branches interlocked above us like the fingers of praying hands.
We both froze for an instant, eyes fixed to each other’s, me sat on my arse with my sword on the ground before me, the silent forest all about us, lit here and there by irregular patches of sunlight, golden in the dappled gloom. Without further warning Isen charged, some wordless and murderous battle cry on his lips. I dived for my sword, shrieking that I was unarmed.
Just two yards short, with me still rising from my roll, the count’s foot snagged on some hidden root and his lunge, intended to skewer me, became an ungainly thing, jolting with those overlarge strides we take in such circumstances to avoid falling on our faces. He ended up impaling the beech tree, his blade buried two or three inches deep in the exact spot my head had been resting against the trunk.
To the little bastard’s credit he reacted swiftly, whipping out a knife fit for gutting oxen, and spinning round to brandish it at me.
“See here, Isen . . . bit of a misunderstanding . . .” The words felt wrong in my mouth after so long biting on the mask’s bit.
Still he came on, holding that hideous knife up high so I saw his eyes one to either side of it, their pupils tiny black dots of madness, mouth twitching.
“Wait!” I held my blade between us at arm’s length to fend him off. I struggled to think of a good reason for him to wait and of its own accord my mouth said, “Free your sword, man. I won’t have it said I beat you unfairly!”
Count Isen paused, frowned, and glanced back at his sword still jutting from the trunk. His frown deepened. “Well . . . knife fighting is beneath men of noble birth . . .” He shot me a look that showed some doubt on the question of whether I were truly sprung from royal loins, then backed toward the tree.
Genius! Years of habitual lying had left me with a tongue capable of invention without requiring any conscious input from my mind. I tensed up, preparing for the sprinting away stage as soon as he started tugging on that sword hilt. As I did so however, I noticed my right foot was resting on a sturdy-looking branch, about three foot in length—a splintered section broken from the tree in some recent storm.
Count Isen sheathed his knife and set both hands to his sword hilt, his back to me as he got ready to heave. I swapped my sword to my left hand, picked up the stick and advanced on stealthy feet. Slow steps brought me up behind the count, the gentle crump of leaf litter under my boots inaudible beneath his grunting as he strained to work the trapped blade free. I glanced at the stick. It had a good weight to it. I shrugged and—trusting to my longer legs to win me clear if anything should go wrong—I whacked him squarely around the side of the head. I’d had poor experience before pitting vases against the back of a man’s head, so I thought I’d try the side this time.