The Cup of the World by John Dickinson Read Free Book Online Page A

fierce. And always hungry’
    They came out of the grove and the track rose, keeping the lake on their left. Near the top they halted. Looking back, she could see the rest of their party emerging from the trees.
    ‘Trant is just over this rise.’
    ‘I should like to see it.’
    ‘We should wait here. My father will want us to top the rise together, blowing his horn.’
    ‘Let us go forward and look, all the same. I do not know how long this place will be my prison. I shall feel easier to see it first in your company’
    He kicked his mount forward. She followed reluctantly, for she did not like what she had heard him say. The rise dropped away to show the familiar mass of Trant bulking on the next hillside. It was just the same as it always had been, after all her long journey. Beyond it the lake stretched away to the north and was lost to sight. She was home.
    ‘Hm. Strong,’ said the baron.
    ‘It is not so big as the King's.’
    Trant was a single compact courtyard, closed in with five huge towers. Below it were other buildings and a wide area surrounded with a dyke that ran down to the lakeside.
    ‘No indeed. But your father has no need to house a thousand men-at-arms in a night, nor to feed and protect a city My own walls are not so high as these, and yet mine is not the least strong place in the south. What other castles are nearby?’
    ‘There are not many. Tower Bay must be the closest, but it is more than a day’
    ‘Whose lands are those, then?’ He pointed across the lake.
    ‘The mountains you see are beyond the Kingdom. The hill people there are heathen. But the lands on this side of them are the March of Tarceny’
    The baron looked sour. ‘The Doubting Moon. I cannot commend you on your neighbours.’
    ‘So they say, sir. Although it has also been said to me that the evil that was done – the harrying of his people and his neighbours – was the work of the old lord there. He died at his hearth some years ago. I have not met the new march-count or his house, and they did not come to Tuscolo for the King's feast. Our sail folk have some dealings with theirs. Otherwise they do not disturb us. Father always left us a strong guard when he was abroad in the recent troubles. But it was not needed.’
    ‘Hm.’ The baron was scowling across the lake now.
    She should have remembered that he was one of those whom Tarceny could have helped by attacking from across the lake during the uprising. Maybe he and his friends hadbeen begging Tarceny for such a move, as the King's men had closed in on their last strongholds. If it had come, maybe he would not have been a prisoner now. And all this land that he had admired for its greenery would have been black with the trails of war. He would not have cared.
    She had to breathe deeply for a moment, and feel the sunlight on her skin, to remind herself that the vultures of Tarceny had stayed at home, and that Trant flourished in its delicate green.
    ‘So,’ said the baron. ‘No visitors then? No suitors yet?’
    ‘A few.’
    ‘And what do you do here, between waiting for them to come for you?’
    ‘What I please, sir.’
    ‘What? I did not suppose you were a prisoner, like myself!’
    ‘I am my father's daughter, sir!’
    ‘Of course.’
    Father was riding up with the rest of his party. She might now just watch him come, and that would be the end of this conversation. But she knew that she would have to spend many hours in this man's company. Once he had understood that she would talk to him as an equal, or not at all, there was no more point in fencing with him. Like it or not, they would know one another better before long.
    ‘I read sometimes,’ she said. ‘Often I walk and think by myself
    ‘You read?’
    ‘Yes, and I have learned arithmetic’
    ‘This is rare. My own lady can do neither. Nor can I.’
    So he had a lady of his own. Of course – Father hadtalked of his family. And now Father himself had laboured up the slope and reined in, six yards