“Do you think men like that will care about that?” Royce asked. Every peasant knew what the duke’s men could be like, and how dangerous it was to be in their way while they were hunting.
“No,” the herder said. He looked Royce over. “What are they hunting you for, then?”
Royce suspected that if he told the boy the truth, it would be too much for him. Yet what else could he do? He could hardly claim to be a poacher.
“I’m… I killed the duke,” Royce said, not knowing what else to say. He couldn’t ask what he was about to ask without telling this boy the truth. “His men are chasing me, and if they catch me, then they’ll kill me.”
“So you’re planning to lead them into my pigs?” the swineherd said. “And what happens to me if I’m still here when they get here?”
“I have an idea for that,” Royce said. He jumped down from his horse, holding out the reins to the boy. “Take my horse. Ride away from here. It’s the best chance both of us have.”
“You want me to pretend to be you?” the swineherd demanded. “After what you did? Half the kingdom would be after me.”
Royce nodded. The two of them didn’t look alike; Royce was much bigger and more heavily muscled, and even though they both had blond hair to their shoulders, it would never be mistaken for the same. Their features were different too: the swine herder’s round and homely where Royce’s were square jawed and sharpened by violence.
“Not for long. You can ride, can’t you?”
“Aye, my da insisted. I used to canter the cart horse over the fields.”
“This horse will go a lot faster than a canter,” Royce promised, still holding out the reins. “Take the horse, ride ahead of them for a while, and then let it go when they can’t see you. They’ll never know that it was you on the horse, and they will still be looking for me.”
Royce was certain that it would work. If the swineherd kept ahead of the foe, then he would be safe the moment they lost sight of him.
“And that’s all I would have to do?” the swineherd asked. Royce could see that he was considering it.
“Just lead them away from any of the villages,” he said. “I need to get back to mine, and you can return to yours the moment you’ve lost them.”
“So you’re just looking for a way to get away with murder?” the boy asked.
Royce understood. The swineherd wouldn’t want to help with anything so callous as that. It wasn’t just that though. It hadn’t been, even in the moment when he’d flung the spear.
“They oppress us in every way they can,” Royce said. “They take and they take, and they never give anything back. The duke took the woman I loved and gave her to his son. He imprisoned me on an island where I saw boys my age slaughtered. I had to fight to the death in a pit! It’s time that we changed things. It’s time that we made things better.”
He could see the boy considering it.
“If I don’t get back to my village, a lot of people will die,” Royce said. “But if I go and they follow, even more will. I need your help.”
The swineherd took a step forward. “Will I be paid for this?”
Royce spread his hands. He didn’t have anything. “If I can find you again afterward, I’ll find a way to pay you back. How do I find you?”
“I’m Berwick, from Upper Lesham.”
Royce nodded, and that seemed to be enough for the swineherd. He took Royce’s horse and mounted it, heeling it forward and setting off through the trees in a direction that had nothing to do with any of the villages Royce knew. Royce breathed a sigh of relief.
It was short lived. He still needed to get out of sight. He moved back among the trees, finding a spot among the foliage where he could crouch down in the shadow of a trunk, surrounded by fronds of holly.
He crouched there, perfectly still, barely daring to breathe as he waited. Around him, the pigs continued to forage, and one of them got closer to him, nuzzling at the patch of foliage where he hid.
“Get away,” Royce whispered, willing the creature to move on. He fell into silence as he heard the sounds of hooves approaching.
Men came into view, all armored and armed, all looking even angrier than they had in the first flush of the chase. Royce truly hoped that he hadn’t put the swineherd in too much danger by making him a part of his escape.
The pig continued to move too close to him. Royce thought he could see one of the men there watching it, and he froze so still that he didn’t even risk blinking. If the pig reacted to his presence at all, he felt sure that the men would fall on him and kill him.
Then the man looked away, and the soldiers surged forward once again.
“Quickly now!” one of them called. “He can’t have gotten far!”
The soldiers thundered off, following the path that the swineherd had taken, presumably following his tracks. Even when they went, Royce held still, clutching the grip of his sword, making sure it wasn’t some kind of trap designed to lure him out.
Finally, he dared to move, emerging into the clearing and pushing the pigs away from him. He took a moment to look around, trying to get a sense of which direction his village lay in. The deception had bought him some time, but even so, he had to act fast.
He needed to get home before the duke’s men killed everyone there.
CHAPTER TWO
Genevieve could only stand silently in the castle’s great hall as her husband raged. In the moments when he wasn’t angry, Altfor was actually quite good looking, with longish, wavy brown hair, aquiline features, and deep, dark eyes. Genevieve always found herself picturing him like this, though, red-faced and furious, as if this was the real him, not the other.
She didn’t dare to move, didn’t dare to attract his ire, and she clearly wasn’t the only one. Around her, the erstwhile duke’s servants and hangers-on stood quietly, not wanting to be the first to attract his attention. Even Moira seemed to be hanging back, although she was still right there where Genevieve could see her, closer to Genevieve’s husband than she was, in every sense.
“My father is dead!” Altfor yelled out, as if there was anyone there who wouldn’t know by now what had happened in the fighting pit. “First my brother, and now my father stand murdered by a traitor, and none of you seem to have answers for me.”
This anger felt dangerous to Genevieve, too wild and undirected, lashing out in the absence of Royce, trying to find someone to blame. She found herself wishing that Royce were there and grateful that he was not, all at once.
Worse, she felt her heart aching at his absence, wishing that she’d been able to do something other than stand alongside her husband and watch him from the side of the pit. A part of her longed to be with Royce right then, and Genevieve knew that she couldn’t let Altfor see that. Altfor was angry enough, and she had felt all too clearly just how easily that anger could be directed at her.
“Will no one deal with this situation?” Altfor demanded.
“That is just what I was going to ask, nephew,” a voice said, his voice hard.
The man who walked into the room made Genevieve want to pull back at least as much as Altfor did. With Altfor, she wanted to shy away from the heat of his rage, but with this man, there was something cold about him, something that seemed to be made of ice. He was older than Altfor by about twenty years, with thinning hair and a slender frame. He walked with what seemed at first glance to be a stick, but then Genevieve saw the hilt sticking out from a scabbard and realized that it was a longsword, still in its sheath. Something about the way he leaned on it said to Genevieve that it was injury, not age, that made him do it.
“Uncle Alistair,” Altfor said. “We were… we were not expecting you.”
Altfor