The Boy Bride (Lion & Snake #1)

The Boy Bride

It had been three years since the cry was on everyone’s lips: “The Lion of the Summer Pass has been taken!” Whether that was true or not, Lill didn’t know, because if they’d taken Vanu Urártu, why hadn’t they killed him?

Instead, the Great King’s men had wanted the local people to be satisfied that they’d immured the Lion in one of his mountain strongholds.

Lill remembered explaining to one of the younger boys of the Order that “immured” didn’t literally mean they’d walled him up, like in the stories.

Except, he realized as his palanquin was set down with a bump, and he slid back the shutter to peek out, apparently it did mean exactly that.

It was late afternoon, the shadows long in the waning spring sunlight.

They had left the shelter of the trees, and the road had flattened out.

The shoulders of the mountains rose up on either side, the bare rock yellow-grey, the evergreen forests like patches of dark fur on their slopes.

In between, perched on a flat promontory above the pass below and constructed of the same yellow-grey stone, as if it had grown there, stood the fortress of Umtúshta.

The arched doorway in its massive outer wall had been entirely filled in with a mixture of cut stones and tumbled rubble from the surrounding mountains.

The ground around the walls had been cleared of trees and shrubs, making a broad ring of barren earth across which any fugitive could easily have been spotted running away.

But how could anyone get out, when even the arrow slits in the walls had been sealed with mortar and stone?

“There must be a door around the other side,” Lill murmured to himself.

But the bearers, who had grumbled all the way up the mountain slope about having to carry a young man with two feet capable of bearing his own weight, had set the palanquin down here, for some reason.

And the guide who had accompanied him from Radush, Halza, had dismounted and was coming over to offer a hand to help Lill out.

“You look surprised,” Halza said, glancing from Lill up to the walls of Umtúshta and back again. “Did you not know what you were getting into?”

Lill climbed to his feet and shook out his skirts. He settled his headdress, firming up the pins that anchored it to his braids and flicking back the edge of the veil. He ought not to have shown surprise. He composed his expression.

“It’s symbolic, isn’t it? People can get in and out somehow.”

Halza’s eyes widened. “Oh no, it’s not symbolic. They can’t risk him getting out.”

A flock of birds took off noisily from the trees behind them, rattling the branches and flapping up into the grey sky above the sealed stone walls.

“Then how am I meant to get in?”

“I’ve been wondering about that all the way up the mountain,” Halza confided. “I suppose you go over the wall. Which, the way you’re dressed … ” He looked down at the full sweep of Lill’s layered skirts and grimaced.

Near the edge of the cleared area was a square stone building, much newer than the fortress wall and flat-roofed like the houses of the Akramarran plains below the mountains.

A man in leather armour strolled out of it toward their party, carrying the heavy spear of an infantryman casually over one shoulder.

“Who’s she?” He jerked a thumb at Lill.

“He is the boy bride Lord Davanu arranged to have sent,” Lill’s guide explained.

The soldier frowned at him and called back inside the guard house: “Hey, are we expecting anybody? A boy bride from—where did you say you’re from?”

“Torakand,” Lill supplied.

“Yeah, yeah.” Another soldier emerged, this one unarmed and holding a half-eaten, slightly shrivelled apple. “Boy from Torakand, I heard about that. Gift from one of the Hawa lords down there.” He looked at Lill and gave a low whistle. “Hello. You’re not a boy. She’s not a boy, is she?”

That was new: his first time actually being mistaken for a girl instead of just told he ought to have been a girl, he was like a girl, and so on. How much simpler if he had been clearly one thing or the other.

“He is,” said Halza, “and—”

“We’re supposed to send him in?” the first soldier interrupted.

The apple-eater nodded, mouth full. “Orders from Captain Barzana. Send him over.”

“How?” the first soldier demanded.

“There’s that ladder sort of thing.”

“Oh, that. Where’d we put that?”

“The problem is,” Halza cut in finally, “the way he’s dressed, as you can see, it is going to be tricky for him to get up there. And I don’t know what the arrangements are for getting down on the other side … ”

The first soldier spat on the ground. “Somebody should’ve thought of that before dressing him up like that.”

“I’ll be fine,” said Lill. “But how do I get out again?”

There was a short, awkward silence.

“I don’t think you do,” said Halza apologetically.

“I, uh … ” That certainly complicated matters.

The apple-eating soldier shook his head. “You’re Urártu’s bride. Why would you think you’d be getting out?”

“Unless he doesn’t want you,” Halza suggested hopefully.

The first soldier snorted. “He’s not letting you out. He hasn’t had any fresh blood in there in three years. You can run for it now if you like,” he offered generously. The apple eater nodded. “We won’t chase you—or at least we won’t chase you very fast.”

Lill looked up at the stark, yellow-grey walls, the sealed gate, the bare grey sky beyond. Did Arsha know they didn’t let anyone out? Why had he not mentioned it, if he did? It made this considerably more complicated.

Halza was speaking, something about his horse. Offering to let Lill ride it down the mountain, Lill realized. What would he want in exchange for that?

“Thank you,” Lill said, pinning a sad smile on his face. “But I won’t turn back now. Lord Davanu has taken good care of my family, and I must do this in return.”

That was a motive both the guide and the soldiers could understand, and they nodded solemnly. They didn’t need to know that it was entirely made up.

The “ladder sort of thing” the soldiers had spoken of was a tree trunk with notches carved in it for footholds.

It was lying on the ground by the guard house, and Lill gathered from the discussion as it was fetched and positioned to be propped against the wall that it had not been used since the blocking-up of the fortress three years ago.

It must have been lying in the grass since then, because the wood was grey and weathered.

“I suppose you’re sure there are still people alive in there?” he said conversationally as they watched several soldiers struggling with the cumbersome weight of the ladder.

“Sure,” said the soldier with the spear. “We see smoke sometimes.”

“And you send in food and so on,” Halza prompted.

“We would, but they’ve never asked for any. We haven’t seen anyone put a head above the walls since the day they were sealed in.”

Halza stared in horror. “You can’t be serious. Three years and they’ve had no provisions from outside? What are they eating in there? The smoke—what are they burning? You can’t go.” He seized Lill’s arm. “You don’t know what’s on the other side of those walls!”

Lill’s stomach was beginning to crawl. The desolation of the place, the blocked-up archway, the panic in Halza’s eyes—he felt it settling on him like ash after a fire. The offer of the horse to ride back down the mountain and the slow pursuit seemed tempting for the first time.

“My family … ” he mumbled, looking at the ground. “I must … ”

Must he? He had no family; he didn’t owe Lord Davanu anything, didn’t even owe Arsha very much. He was doing this so that Arsha would owe him. But if he didn’t go over that wall, where would he go?

“He’s resigned to his fate. Let him go.” The apple eater sounded both impatient and grudgingly admiring. “If he was a girl, it would be different.”

“He might as well be a girl!” Halza protested. “Look at him, the delicate flower that he is—you thought he was a girl yourself.”

The soldiers returned stony looks. Lill did not care for being called a “delicate flower,” but it was not the time to protest.

“Is he taking anything with him?” the spear carrier asked. “You know, a dowry? We’ll have to inspect it to make sure there’s nothing on the list of things that aren’t supposed to go in there.”

The other soldier had finished his apple and tossed the core over his shoulder. “Do you even know where that list is?”

“No, but I think I remember some of it. Rope, weapons, uh … ”

“I don’t have a dowry,” said Lill. “They told me it’s not the custom in the mountains.”

“Mm, maybe not. They are savages up here.”

The tree-trunk ladder had finally been propped against the top of the wall.

Lill stepped away from Halza and the soldiers toward the base of it and looked up.

It would be a tricky climb even for someone not wearing layers of skirts.

He took off his shoes and stuffed them into the back of his outer sash, then put one bare foot on the first notch in the log.

Vanu Urártu deserved to die. For more than ten years he had stood against the Great King’s advance into Hawakhurta.

He had held the only two passes through the mountains, and unlike any previous chief or warlord or whatever they called themselves up here, he’d united the raiders of the highland villages.

He’d turned them from a disorganized nuisance into an implacable force, holding back the Great King’s army like a stopper in a bottle.

And with all that, he was basically a brigand.

He robbed the royal supply lines of everything his men could carry.

He set traps in the mountains for the king’s soldiers, bringing rockslides down on them and moving landmarks to make them lose their way.

There were wild stories about the things he had managed.

He slaughtered the lowlanders of the region who dared to ally themselves with the crown, in bloody, middle-of-the-night raids.