"No sign, is it? No sign of which he dares tell the world!" The queen turned away to the tall, multipaned windows and stared out at the courtyard, unseeing. "He has spirited her away to some secret bower where he can have her at his mercy for as long as he wishes! Oh, a pox upon this gilded prison!"
She turned to catch up a porcelain vase and hurl it into the fireplace. The crash echoed hugely in the stone-walled room, in spite of all the tapestries and thick carpets; Lady Ashmund suppressed a start of shock.
The queen strode the length of the solar and back, raving, "I have silks and satins, I have grandeur and silver and servants, but I cannot go to find the poor child who needs me! Curse the day that ever I met that snake Drustan! Curse the day that I sought a southern princess for my son! How could I ever have believed that she could alloy his spirit with some gentleness, some courtesy, some grace? All that has happened is that Gaheris taught her his roughness and hardness, and that my husband has set his lecherous course toward her! Alas, the poor lady! How shall I ever save her now?"
Lady Ashmund sought for a word of hope to give her. "Might it not be that the Lord Wizard of Merovence has rescued her by his magic?"
The queen turned to give her a stony, contemptuous glance. "You know nothing of the old, old sorcery with which this land is imbued, my lady. Even I, who have learned some magic, can only guess at the weight and mass of this cold northern runimancy! It is heavy enough to drown any magic I seek to work, I know that, and I cannot believe that the Lord Wizard could fare better than I! Oh, a pox upon this false husband of mine! A murrain upon him, for the cruel ox he is!"
Lady Ashmund blanched at hearing the curse.
The queen raised her fists before her, calling out, "O elves and sprites of Bretanglia! O pouks and ghasts and night-walkers all! If you hear me and can do it, strike down this false king who has foisted himself upon your land! Pouks, smite him! Ghasts, fill his sleep with nightmares! Elves, aim your bolts at his temples! One and all, hear this foreign queen he has brought to misery! Save the southern princess, save the land, and lay him low!"
The king was at dinner the next night, with Prince John at his right hand and Earl Marshal at his left. Two dukes and their duchesses sat at the head table with him, the lower table filled with lesser aristocrats. Drustan was in high good spirits in spite of the nasty surprise Rosamund had left him—he was, after all, the victor, and knew that the queen who had caused him so much frustration and pain with her deprecating remarks and encouragement of his enemies was now eating her heart out in isolation.
The Duke of Boromel, sensing His Majesty's mood and its reasons, rose and lifted his cup, crying, "A toast!"
"A toast!" the others cried, and rose, then fell silent with their cups on high.
"To our sovereign liege, who dines upon the rich fare of victory in glittering company—and to our queen, who drinks the bitter wine of defeat in solitude!"
There was a moment's shocked silence, and Earl Marshal frowned—it was a most ungallant toast. Then the king crowed with delight, surging to his feet and lifting his cup. "To the queen!"
The other aristocrats took up the cry with relief. "To the queen!" they cried, and laughed and drank.
The king set his goblet to his lips, tilted its base high—then turned rigid, eyes bulging, and let out a single hoarse cry as he fell, the goblet slipping from his fingers and dashing wine all over Prince John.
There was another moment of shocked silence. Prince John broke it with a cry of distress and dropped to his knees by his father, lifting the older man by the shoulders and feeling for his pulse.
For himself, King Drustan knew only sudden darkness that after a while lightened. He seemed to float in a void of mist, hearing voices talk around him.
"Yes, Your Highness, I am sure he will live."
"Praises be!" said John's voice, though it was shaking. "But will he be well?"
"Ah! Nicely asked," the older voice sighed. "No physician can answer that while he sleeps. We can only wait and see how he fares when he wakes."
"I am awake," King Drustan grumbled—but why were the words so slow to come, so hard to form? He forced his eyes open and saw Prince John and Dr. Ursats, staring at him. Behind them he saw the tapestries of his own bedchamber, and the curtains between them and himself were those of his own tester bed. He sat up, assuming his most arrogant posture—then realized that he hadn't, that he had scarcely stirred. Panic gripped him, and he hid it by shouting. "A pox upon you! Do you not hear me? I am awake!"
This time, though, he heard his own voice—only a gargling mixed with a sort of braying, a mouthing of vowels with scarcely a consonant. The panic surged higher, and he would have screamed, only John stepped up to him, gripping his hand. "He wakes! How are you, my father?"
"What nonsense to worry!" Drustan said, mollified. "I am perfectly well!"
But he wasn't, and he knew it. He couldn't hear the words he had spoken, heard only a sort of cawing in their place.
Now the doctor stepped up on his other side and took his hand. "I am relieved to see you conscious, my liege. Do you remember what happened?" Then, before the king could answer, "Allow me to remind you. You were about to drink a toast to the queen when you fell down, unconscious."
The king frowned, remembering.
"Suffer my impertinence, Majesty." The doctor leaned over and lifted first one eyelid, then the other, staring intently into each orb in turn. Then he straightened and said, "Squeeze my hand, Majesty."
"What idle game is this?" Drustan snapped, but heard again only an ass' braying. Appalled, he resolved that he would never talk again. He did, however, squeeze the doctor's hand, and Ursats nodded, satisfied. He took the king's other hand from John and said, "Squeeze with this hand now, Majesty."
The king repressed the urge to make a withering comment and squeezed.
The doctor's face was completely neutral. "Have you squeezed my hand, Your Majesty?"
"What the devil sort of question..." Drustan heard his own cawing and clamped his jaw shut. He forced a very stiff nod.
"Yet I felt nothing," Dr. Ursats said sadly.
"What does this mean?" John cried.
"That His Majesty has been elf-shot," Ursats told him, then to Drustan, "Some malicious sprite has aimed his miniature crossbow at you, Majesty, and struck your temple with his tiny dart. Country folk find their minuscule arrowheads in the dust of a road sometimes, after a thunderstorm. This barb has lodged in your brain, though, and will be some time working its way loose."
The king stared, and tried to ignore the fear that threatened to overwhelm him.
"Until it does," Ursats went on, "your speech will be slurred, and the whole right side of your body will move only with difficulty, if at all."
The king brayed denial.
"Peace, Your Majesty." Dr. Ursats patted his hand. "Is not the life a greater thing than the body, and the body itself greater than the ability to walk without a limp?"
"No!" the king shouted, and this time they understood him.
The doctor smiled. "You see, Your Majesty? With effort, you can still make yourself understood! With practice and work, you shall one day speak again, almost as well as you did before."
"But my leg!" Drustan howled. "My arm!"
Ursats explained as though he had understood. "You shall have to work as hard as you did when first you learned swordplay, practice as diligently as when you strove to master jousting by riding at a quintain. But with constant effort, you shall gain in strength and smoothness as the arrowhead works its way free. Then, someday, you shall walk again, perhaps with only the slightest of limps!"
"Learn to walk, as though I were a toddling babe?" The king howled at the injustice of it.
John gripped his hand again. "You shall not face this daunting prospect alone, Father! I shall be here beside you every day, here to comfort and sustain you! Only tell me what you need, and I shall see it fetched!"
"Don't patronize me, boy!" King Drustan snarled.
The doctor looked up with keen interest. "Can you understand him, then?"
"A little, I think. Was I right, Father?"
Drustan stared at him, gears meshing in his brain. Slowly, he nodded.
"We captured the Count of Tundin in battle," John reminded him, "but his youngest son fought in Earl Marshal's entourage. Shall we hold both father and son attainted, then?"
Drustan scowled. "Why speak of such trivia at a time like this?"
"Again, more slowly," John urged.
Drustan realized what the boy was trying to do. Slowly and with great effort he said, "Attaint the father. The son is Count."
"You say the father is attainted?"
Hope thrilled in Drustan; he nodded.
"But the son? What of the youngest son?"
Trying even harder to be clear, Drustan said, "He is now Count."
"Did you say that you declare the youngest son to be Count of Tundin?" John asked with great intensity.
One corner of Drustan's mouth lifted in a leer intended to be a smile. He nodded.
"Excellent!" John squeezed Drustan's hand with both of his own. "Thus shall you rule still, my father! I shall come to you with all the questions of state, and listen until you have made yourself clear! I shall bear all your commands to your ministers, and see that each is carried out as you would wish it! I shall come to talk to you twice a day, three times a day, as often as it takes—and at least once, at supper, only to enjoy your company!" He shivered. "For you must know, Father, how much afraid I am, without your shield to ward me! How badly I need your presence to give me the strength of will to face your ministers!"
Compassion flowed; for a few minutes Drustan's own fear submerged under concern for his son—the only son left him now! He squeezed John's hand and muttered, "Be brave, lad! I shall be here for you, ever at your call! How could I desert you, when you do my work?"
John smiled, reassured, and gave as good as he got. "Courage, my father! You have beaten many enemies, great enemies—surely now you can defeat one so tiny!"
Half an hour later John returned to his own apartments. He closed the door behind him and let out a long sigh, folding in on himself.
"Was it as difficult as all that?" asked a resonant baritone.
John snapped upright, remembering the rendezvous he had set. "It went well enough, Niobhyte. It went just as you said it would."
CHAPTER TWELVE
John went to the side table, his steps unsteady, and poured a goblet of wine with hands that trembled from the release of tension. "The spell worked as you said it would—I understood him, but no one else could. How did you persuade the elves to shoot him?"
"There are some things sorcerers must not confide." Niobhyte didn't tell John that the stroke had been as much of a surprise to him as to everyone else. He had been quicker to take advantage of it, though. "Did I not promise you that you would rule within six months of our pact?"
"You did," John acknowledged. "I had not known it would come at the price of a war, though."
"The war would have come in any event," Niobhyte said easily. "Your parents would have made war upon Merovence if not upon one another. As it is, you can blame the elf-shot on the Lord Wizard, and claim he did it to keep Bretanglia from attacking his queen and wife."
John's eye gleamed. "Yes, I can see that would serve." He sat in a chair opposite Niobhyte's.
"I regret that your road to power came at the cost of the lives of your brothers, and your father's illness." Niobhyte's expression said that he was anything but sorry.
John waved away the half apology. "Believe me, it scarcely tears at my heart. I would have slain my brothers myself, for all Gaheris' hurts and Brion's arrogance and condescension. As to my father, he has suffered only a fraction of the hurt due him." John's hand tightened on the goblet as he remembered his mother's furious denunciations of mistress after mistress. They must have been true, for his mother had said it.
"I understand." Niobhyte nodded. "Always the youngest, always the smallest. It is only your due if, after all, you rise to rule."
"Yessss." It was more a hiss than a word as John gazed into his cup.
"You rule already," Niobhyte reminded him, "in fact if not in word."
"Yes, I must have the shadow of my father behind me for some few weeks more," John agreed, "until all the barons have accepted my authority. Of course, I will only deliver those of my father's commands that serve my own interests, and if I issue a few orders of which Father knows nothing, who will care?"
"Quite true," Niobhyte agreed. "However, you do indeed need your father for some time yet, if your only power is as his regent."
"True, very true." John's nose wrinkled as though at a foul smell. "Curse Brion for having made his body disappear! If I could prove his death, I could be king in my own right."
"Believe me, he could not have transported his own corpse away from us," Niobhyte told him. "I would suspect the Lord Wizard of Merovence of the deed."
John darted a quick, suspicious look at him. "You blame him for all my troubles, don't you?"
"And with good reason," Niobhyte maintained. "His purpose is to keep Bretanglia too weak and too disorganized to attack Merovence. The more confusion he can create, the less the danger to his wife. No, Highness—Majesty that will be—you must wait until you have consolidated your power over the nobles and the Church before your father can pass to his reward. Whether you are crowned or not, they will rebel against you if they can. Even King Drustan has had to put down rebellions from time to time, though the people love him for making the land safe and prosperous."
"Oh, I shall make it safe and prosperous, too," John purred, gazing into the fire. "I shall make it safe and prosperous indeed—for myself."
Two nights later Matt and his companions found an inn as the sun was setting. As they were about to go in, Matt noticed something. He stopped Sir Orizhan with a hand on the shoulder.
"What troubles you?" the knight asked, then followed the direction of Matt's gaze.
"The bird." Matt pointed.
Looking, his companions saw a big black avian, like a very oversized crow, sitting on a windowsill and peering into the inn.
"It hopes to beg a crust or two, I doubt not," Sir Orizhan said.
Sergeant Brock nodded. "It was ever the way of ravens to wait for what was left."
"If you say so," Matt said, with misgivings, and started to follow them in, when the bird turned and fixed him with a bright black bead of an eye. A chill passed through Matt; he felt that he had never seen such malice in a bird's glance, such sheer gloating malevolence and eagerness to pounce.
Then the raven turned its attention back to the interior of the inn, and it was only a large black bird again. Slowly, Matt followed his companions into the inn.
They walked into a blast of noise—conversation, laughter, snatches of song, and the clattering of wooden platters. Serving wenches swiveled through the crowd, trays held high. Glasses lifted in toast.
"Quite a party," Matt observed. "What do you think they're celebrating?"
Sir Orizhan shrugged. "Life."
"Do you think we will be able to stay the night this time?" Sergeant Brock asked.
"We can only hope," Matt sighed.
"I mean no offense, Lord Wizard," Sir Orizhan said, "but this bauchan of yours is proving to be a most pernicious nuisance."
"Not so loud," Matt hissed. "He might hear, and take it as a compliment." Then, in a more normal voice, "I'm really sorry about this, guys, but he isn't my bauchan—not willingly, anyway."
"So long as he does not take us for your family, I suppose we will be well enough," Sir Orizhan said. He surveyed the room and shook his head. "We have come late—there is no table empty."
"There is one in the back corner." Sergeant Brock pointed. "There is only the one man at it."
The one man in question was hunched over, glowering at his tan
kard and muttering to himself.
"Not the world's most savory company," Matt said warily, "but it's the only table with any room. Brace yourselves for an unpleasant meal."
"I would say that we should go on to the next village and chance the inn there," Sir Orizhan said, "save that we have already done so, and the darkness is upon us. It may be that you should stop urging us to just one more village, Lord Wizard."
It was getting to be a running argument. "But we're going so slowly as it is," Matt protested. "We run into so many delays."
Sir Orizhan sighed. "Then we shall have to suffer the company of a drunkard."
"Pooh! We'll only listen for the space it takes him to drink three more stoups of ale," Sergeant Brock told him. "Then he'll fall asleep and we'll be rid of his talk."
"Oh, really?" Matt regarded the drunk with a jaundiced eye. "How is he going to get three more stoups?"
"Why, you will buy them for him." Sergeant Brock grinned. "Is it not a small price for peace?"
"I suppose so," Matt sighed, "and money's no problem yet. Gentlemen, be seated."
Sir Orizhan sat with him, but Sergeant Brock stared, offended. He started to speak, but caught himself.
Matt frowned up at him. "What's the matter? Sit down."
The offense turned into disbelief. "But I am not a gentleman!"
Matt felt a surge of guilt as he remembered that no one below the rank of squire counted as a gentleman in this medieval world, and gentlemen did not dine with lower classes outside of common rooms. He started to correct the error, but before he could speak, Sir Orizhan beckoned the man close. "You are my squire for the space of this venture. I raise you to it, and shall make it lasting with all due ceremony if we succeed in our endeavor."
Conflicting emotions warred in Brock's face for a moment—disbelief, joy, and apprehension. Matt could understand it—peasants were almost never raised to the gentry, and if they didn't succeed, this amazing prize might be snatched away from the sergeant. But he must have remembered that if they didn't succeed, they'd probably be dead, because the joy won the skirmish, and he sat down beside Sir Orizhan, bowing his head. "I thank you, Sir Knight. From the depths of my heart."
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