Corambis

by Sarah Monette

  And how many Trials after that was it before she seduced you? But I didn’t ask that question, because I didn’t want to have that fight again. I said, “This must be thirty years old, at least.”

  “Yeah,” Mildmay said, looking at the trees standing in the middle of what had once been the larger room. He was stone-faced and seemingly uninterested, but he betrayed himself by asking, “What d’you think happened?”

  “How should I know?” I said. “Probably the chimney caught on fire—that would happen to a house like this, wouldn’t it?”

  “Happens to tenements often enough.” Pin-scratch frown between his eyebrows, quite visible in my witchlights. Then he shook himself. “Well, there’s a stream, and it’s flat, and the trees’ll keep out the wind.”

  “And it’s dark,” I agreed.

  “Yeah.” We looked at each other, and didn’t need to say what we were both thinking.

  We did not put our camp within the boundaries of the ruined house; neither one of us would have been able to sleep, and we knew it. Mildmay took care of Rosamund in grim silence, and when he sat down by the fire, I could see he was still frowning.

  To distract him, I said, “So why name her Rosamund?”

  It took him a moment, but he said, “Well, Rosamund’s lover—”

  “Arbell,” I said to prove to him that I’d been listening, and he gave me one of his sidelong looks that were as close as he allowed himself to get to a smile.

  “Yeah. Well, it sounds a lot like Arvelle, which is what the locals call the mountain we just climbed over. And since Rosamund in the story tames Arbell when he’s been enchanted into a beast—”

  “Maybe our Rosamund will tame the mountain. Clever.”

  It was hard to tell, but I thought he blushed. Certainly, he waved a hand at me in a dismissive gesture.

  “I’m perfectly serious,” I said, a little offended. “It’s very clever.” And then, when he still wouldn’t look at me, a horrible thought entered my head. “Mildmay, I’ve never thought you were stupid.”

  “You’ve said it a time or two.” He was staring at his hands, with their scarred, broad knuckles, where they rested on his knees.

  And I’d said it recently. Get away from me, you stupid little rat. The memory was abruptly, terribly vivid: standing in the hallway outside my suite, blood on his face, blood on my rings. Black, howling fury eating everything inside me. I’d wanted to hurt him, wanted it so badly I could feel it, the foreknowledge a bitter ache in the bones of my hands, in the tense muscles of my forearms.

  And here was proof that I’d succeeded.

  Guilt was like the taste of ashes. If I could not deny my own culpability, my own cruelty, I could at least indict a coconspirator: “And Kolkhis said it again and again. Am I right?”

  “Let’s not talk about her,” he said, his voice gone flat, and he did meet my eyes then. Not defensive, not upset: simply telling me plainly and without dramatics to back off.

  Six months ago, I probably would have pushed. Pushed until he fought, until one of us was yelling. Or maybe both. But I was desperate tonight to prove I could learn from my mistakes. “All right,” I said. “But I don’t think you’re stupid. And Rosamund’s a great name. Means ‘the world rose’ in Midlander.”

  That got his interest, eased us away from the point where a fight could have started. “Rose like the flower?”

  “Yes. It’s a conceit I’ve seen used in old Imperial texts, that the stars are all roses, each with the potential to bloom as our world has.”

  “So the sky’s a rose garden,” he said. His eyes had softened; he liked the idea.

  I’d made myself think of the Khloïdanikos, of its backward stars. I knew there were roses there, but I’d never paid much attention to them. I wondered if the Troians were familiar with the conceit of the rose of the world.

  Mildmay’s voice brought me back sharply: “So there could be other . . .” He waved his hand, indicating the ruined house and the trees around us and the mountains looming in the dark. “Other whole worlds? With people and everything?”

  “It’s a theory,” I said. “I don’t find it terribly likely myself.”

  “Oh.” He seemed a little disappointed.

  “I don’t know everything.”

  “You don’t?” Bright, bright mischief in his eyes, and I couldn’t keep a straight face well enough to glare at him.

  “No, twit.” He ducked his head, and although he didn’t smile, never smiled, he looked absurdly pleased. “And I’m not an astrologist. Just because I don’t think it’s likely doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

  “Huh,” he said, and then his breath caught, and he slowly eased his right leg straight, bending his head over it so I couldn’t see his face.

  After a moment, when his shoulders hadn’t relaxed from that tight defensive hunch, I said, “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. Fine.” He didn’t raise his head.

  “Just tired, then?” That got his head up, and I smiled at him to let him know he hadn’t fooled me.

  He gave me a one-shouldered, unhappy shrug. “Little bit of a muscle knot, that’s all.”

  “And you prefer to suffer nobly in silence rather than letting me do something about it?”

  “It’s no big deal,” he said with another unhappy shrug, as if I’d put my hand on his shoulder and he was trying to dislodge it.

  “It will be a big deal if it turns into a cramp,” I said. That had happened a couple of times since we’d left Mélusine, and both times, he’d been sick and sweating with pain by the time he’d confessed to me anything was wrong. I realized now, shamefully, that his reticence had been partly caused by my own deplorable behavior—although I could at least say for myself that, both times, I had helped him, not savaging him when he was already hurt. “Mildmay. Don’t be stupid about this. Let me help.”

  He held my gaze for a moment, though I couldn’t tell what he was looking for. Then he sighed and said, “Yeah. You’re right,” and began carefully maneuvering out of his trousers so that I could massage the scarred mess of his right thigh.

  He wouldn’t look at me as I worked, his head tilted back as if he were staring at the stars. It irritated me, and I finally said, “What is it, exactly, that you’re embarrassed about here?”

  He twitched, but didn’t move his head. Or give me an answer.

  And then I thought I knew. “You know this isn’t your fault.”

  That got a snort.

  “How is this your fault?” I dug into the knotted, damaged muscles of his thigh harder than I’d meant to—which at least got a reaction out of him, a faint yelp, although he still wouldn’t look at me.

  “Should’ve been more careful,” he said. “Like Rinaldo said.”

  “That’s a little easier to do when you’re not saving your idiot brother from drowning,” I said reasonably.

  “Well, yeah.” And he sighed and relaxed, and I was able to feel as if I was actually doing him some good.

  Kay

  I was taught as a child that forgetfulness was one of the Lady’s darker mercies; I had not understood then, but I came to in the wake of Gerrard’s death, for I woke in perfect blackness and had no memory of falling asleep, much less any idea of how I had come to be where I was—wherever that might be.

  My first, confused thought was that I had been taken prisoner by the Usara, for their prisons, deep in the caverns beneath the Perblanches, were lightless: oubliettes in truth, for one both forgot and was forgotten while one lay there. I was aching with cold, which I also remembered, but I could not remember riding against the Usara since the summer of four indictions back, and I knew I had returned thence to Rothmarlin, for I had found waiting for me . . .

  Ah, Lady, dost hate me so? If forgetfulness was but a dubious blessing, memory was most certainly a curse.

  It had been Gerrard’s cousin waiting for me, Dominic Hume, who had died in the first battle of the Insurgence, bringing me the summons to Barthas Cross and the star
t of Gerrard’s most ill-fated war.

  And now Gerrard was dead. I had surrendered to the Duke of Glimmering, and I was, it seemed, truly blind. And still I remembered nothing of how I had come to be in this place. I remembered nothing after my signet being taken from me in the room of the engine.

  For a moment, my heart almost locking immobile in my chest, it occurred to me that I might still be there, but I realized on my next painful, half-panicked inhale that I could not be. There was no scent of blood.

  I took stock of myself as best I could; I did not seem to have taken any hurts. I was naked and knew not what had happened to my clothes. I was lying on cloth—burlap, I thought, something coarse—and as I tried to move, I found there was a manacle around my right ankle. I sat up and felt it: Corambin make, for it had a lock, and the chain was padlocked to a ring in the wall. The blood had been cleaned from my hands. And there must surely have been blood on my face, in my hair. I felt that I had drowned in Gerrard’s blood.

  What else had I lost? What might I have done that I now knew nothing of? What might have been done to me? I shut my eyes—a damned pointless gesture—and strove with the darkness in my mind, a perfect match for the darkness in my eyes. I pressed the heels of my palms against my eyes, hoping even for false colors, but there was nothing.

  I began to shiver with cold that had no bodily source. How much time had I lost? What time was it now? Without sight, without knowledge of how much time had passed, how could I hope to know? Anyone I asked—assuming I was even given the chance—could lie to me, and how would I be able to tell?

  My hands clenched in my hair, and I was struggling with the urge to rip out a double handful, from frustration and fear and the desire to control something, even if only my own pain, when a voice said, “So this is the Margrave of Rothmarlin.”

  I reached reflexively, uselessly, for the sword that was not there.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” the voice—reedy, nasal, Corambin—said with savagely patent insincerity. I heard footsteps come closer, boot heels against flagstones. “You really can’t see me, then, for I’ve been watching you for five minutes, groping about like a mole. And even Rothmarlin’s legendary cunning does not, I think, stretch that far. You are blind.”

  A blind beast, my mother’s voice said calmly in my head, and I straightened my spine as a man might flinch from a blow. She had told me the stories of the usar, the presiding spirits of the Usara, until the winter I was ten, when Intended Hervey had died and the new intended said my mother’s stories were pagan superstitions and were corrupting me; my father, more for the sake of the peace than my morals, had bid her stop. I remembered only bits and pieces of the stories now, but the clearest of those memories were the stories involving the Veddick, who had been beneath the mountains before the usar came and would be there still long after they were gone, blind and hungry and trapped by its own bulk in caverns so deep and dark no man would ever find them. The country people around Rothmarlin called the occasional earth tremors Veddick’s footsteps, though none of them had any idea who “Veddick” was or why his footsteps should shake the ground.

  I had gone in fear of the Veddick as a small child, but I had left that fear behind, along with other childish things, when I first rode to war. Had not even thought of it for a wheel or more, but now I remembered my mother’s voice, with its soft Usaran lilt: a blind beast, lost in the darkness beneath the world. It calls out as it walks, but there is none to answer it, for all its kind perished long ago. Blessed Lady, I had feared the Veddick. Had never thought what it would be like to be the Veddick. But now I knew, and I wished with all the painful, useless fervor of my heart that I did not.

  “Who are you?” said I.

  “I suppose we weren’t properly introduced,” said he; I could hear the truth of him, anger and festered grief and raw personal hatred, and for the first time since I assumed the margravate of Rothmarlin, I feared another man. “My name is Thomas Albern. Thanks to you, I am the Duke of Glimmering.”

  I knew instantly what he meant, for it was thanks to a certain warrior of the Usara that I had become Margrave of Rothmarlin at fifteen, but Glimmering continued regardless, “My brother Geoffrey stood against you at Angersburn, where you cut him down and beheaded him like a dog. I have five oath-sworn Caloxan soldiers to testify it.”

  Not Corambin. No Corambin soldier who had marched into the Anger River’s narrow valley against us had come out of it again, marching, limping, or crawling. We had slaughtered all three hundred of them. I had beheaded their commander, and I remembered the rich satisfaction I had felt, remembered that my arms had been blood-soaked past my elbows. I had not let my men take the head as a trophy.

  “An he had beheaded me, would you reproach him thus?”

  The blow rocked my head to the side; I tasted blood. Had I not been blind, it would not have touched me.

  “You will not speak of him,” said Glimmering, his voice rising in pitch and volume. I felt the bone and heat of his fingers against my skin as they clenched on my shoulders, and he dragged me forward so that his breath was hot and foul on my face when he spoke again: “You will keep a civil tongue in your head or I will have it cut out. Do you understand me?” He sounded more than half-mad, and I was not fool enough to believe his threat an idle one. Had myself done worse on provocation no greater.

  “I understand,” I said and shut my eyes, since I could not judge well enough to lower my gaze. At this moment I wanted to do nothing to cause further offense. Blind was horror enough; blind and mute—I shuddered away from my own imaginings.

  Slowly, Glimmering’s fingers relaxed. He let me go with a shove so that I fell back on my elbows. “See that you remember,” said he, and I knew he used the word ‘see’ deliberately. “And the proper address for a duke is ‘Your Grace.’ ”

  I knew that—was not my brother-in-law a duke of more ancient foundation than Glimmering? But was no place here for my pride. “Yes, Your Grace.”

  “There,” said Glimmering. “Even savages can be taught.”

  And someone else said, “Yes, Your Grace.”

  I jerked myself upright again, drawing my legs up as best I could, although the chain kept me from bending my right knee more than halfway. Was an unmistakably Caloxan voice, without even the Corambin veneer that education often gave. It was worse, far worse, to be seen thus—blind, naked, and chained—by a Caloxan. Glimmering and his soldiers were northermen; they mattered not.

  Glimmering said, “Intended Marcham has come to hear your confession.”

  The Intended of Howrack, a sour-faced man, older than myself, a bitter despot as back-country priests often were. He had not opposed Gerrard, too cannily aware of his dominion’s views to do anything so unpopular, but I was not surprised to find him bending the knee to Glimmering. Caloxan or Corambin, Eadian or Caddovian, no priest was ever entirely free of his loyalty to the Descent Esmerine, that last withered vestige of the kings of Corambis. Priests now, and they claimed descent through augury and portent, not through blood, a dynasty of celibates: the current Prince Aethereal had no more blood-right to the Corambin throne than I did. But that mattered not, for his power, despite the title, was not the power of princes. He commanded the honor of every priest in our two countries, and if he was loyal to the Convocation, as every Prince Aethereal since Saint Edgar had been, then so were they.

  “I have nothing to confess to Intended Marcham,” said I.

  “No?” said the intended. I had not realized before how much his voice sounded like the raucous cry of a crow. “Thou hast brought death and strife to every corner of Caloxa and thou hast nothing to confess?”

  “I did as my lord commanded me, and that has never been counted a sin, either in Caloxa or out of it.”

  “And what of thy lord?” said Intended Marcham with horrible slyness. “What of his death, most blood-boltered and terrible? Hast nothing to confess there, either?”

  “Nothing of evil. Of stupidity, yes, and arrogant folly. Of blindness, a
nd for that I am fitly punished.”

  Was a silence which I found both frustrating and frightening, for I could imagine in it the duke and the intended conveying much to each other with their eyes. And was in fact the duke who spoke next: “Then you consider yourself innocent of all wrongdoing?”

  “Is not what I said. I said I have nothing to confess to Intended Marcham, and that much is truth.”

  “Would you rather make confession to a different intended? I’ll call in my private chaplain, if you’d rather.”

  “No, I thank you.”

  “Let me put it to you this way,” said Glimmering, and his hands were on me again, pinning me back against the wall. “It wasn’t an offer. You may confess to Intended Marcham, to Intended Albern, or even Intended Gye, but you will confess. I will have you pronounced a penitent by sundown or I will have you drawn and quartered and fed to the pigs.”

  I knew a dozen ways to remove his hands from my person, had I not been blind and chained to the wall like a dog. But I was helpless, twisted and pinned and unable to free myself, and a dark little voice, very soft, whispered that he could do to me anything he wished, and I could not stop him.

  “Who is Intended Gye?” said I, and my voice was steady, even if hoarse.

  Glimmering’s grip on me loosened slightly, and part of my mind imagined viciously and hopelessly what I might do to him, while the rest attended to his answer. “He is chaplain to my foot soldiers. He is undominioned and poor.” And thus looking for preferment. But if my choices were Marcham, Albern—clearly kin to Glimmering by his name—or a poor foot soldiers’ priest . . . “I will make confession to Intended Gye.”

  “Very well,” said Glimmering; he sounded suspicious, as if he thought I mocked him. But my choices were few and wretched, and I did not wish to die at the Duke of Glimmering’s pleasure.

  Glimmering let go of me. I heard his footsteps crossing the floor again, and then a confused jumble of sounds that had to be him leaving the room, perhaps holding the door for Intended Marcham to precede him? I heard the door close again. I pushed myself away from the wall, moved to a position where the chain would not drag the manacle against my skin. I was shivering, I realized, though for a moment I could not think what that meant nor what to do about it. Then it came to me, as if I read it from a book: I was cold. Awkwardly, groping, I managed to find the edge of the topmost . . . sack. Was a pile of burlap sacks, used for conveying potatoes or the like, and set thriftily by against further need. I wrapped the sack around my shoulders, curling in on myself as best I could, and listened to Glimmering’s voice rising in argument with someone outside the room. By the time I heard the creak of door hinges again, I was no longer shivering, although I was not warm.