“Ascolet,” said the Prince Marshal.
“Sir.”
“And Lys.”
“My lady wife, sir, Luneté, who comes to take oath for Lys.”
Luneté dared look up and met the Fireduke’s gaze on her. “Your Highness,” she said, dry-throated. He hardly seemed to see her; the Countess of Lys was no part of the deeper matters that held his attention at the moment; she was an ephemeral movement in the landscape around his thought. But the Countess saw the Prince Marshal, a being from whom all adjectives had long been burned away, leaving only the essence of what he was. She tried to picture him later, and despite the daylight, despite the clarity of her vision, she had only an impression of vast height (of course, she nearly knelt), of brightness, of a balanced and pensive soul pausing in its business to glance at her. A crimson cloak, and the pale horse beyond. She did not think he had spoken to her.
Prince Gaston looked away from the Countess of Lys; it had only been half a heartbeat that he saw her at all, perhaps. No one else in the pack of disputants raised his head, all waiting to be addressed or dismissed, all hoping to be overlooked.
“What’s debated here?” the Prince said to Otto.
“Lys House has been wrongly given to kin of Sarsemar’s to use,” said Otto.
Prince Gaston nodded once, up, down; no further explanation was needed, as Otto had guessed. “Go to the Palace,” he said. “Tell Lord Teppick to accommodate thee.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Whatever else may pass, th’art Sebastiano’s son,” said Prince Gaston, in a voice only Ottaviano heard.
Otto looked down. “Yes, sir,” he agreed, the blood flushing over his face.
The Prince turned away; he mounted his horse; the foot-soldiers remained behind him, going to the house of Valgalant (four went in, no doubt to its back gates). Before the hoofbeats of the Prince’s horse had faded in the air, Ottaviano had tugged Luneté to her feet, was wordlessly bundling her into her coach, pushing the stunned maid Laudine and the page in after her. Sarsemar’s son and servants looked at one another, discomfited, as the Lys coach and the Ascolet horsemen clattered off down the street, following the Prince Marshal, and the soldiers that stood before the Valgalant house watched the knot of people dissolve into the afternoon’s usual foot-traffic once more.
“Best of the day to you, Lord Dewar.” Utrachet sat down, across the table from Dewar and the woman with whom Dewar had passed waking and sleeping hours of the night.
“And to you, Castellan.” Dewar swallowed a piece of leathery brown dried fruit, the second course of his breakfast. The first had been a pot of porridge, enriched with interestingly pepper-flavored seeds, lacking salt. There was no third course. It reminded him of the food Freia had shared with him when they had travelled together on her gryphon, in Landuc, searching for Prospero.
“Tauvis is fetching the clothing you wore,” said Utrachet. “I have told her not to fuss over you, that you are not an invalid though you slept long. She thought you were ill, but Sulishon has told her you are not. So had I told her, for Lord Prospero said you would sleep so.”
“I was very tired, that was all,” Dewar said, faintly embarrassed by the implied public discussion of his good health and its symptoms.
Sulishon, Dewar’s bedfellow, said something.
“She would like you to come to her people tonight,” said Utrachet. “They have gone up to the new fields, ploughing.”
“I may go, but I may not too,” Dewar said. “There are things I must do here, I think.”
Utrachet conveyed this. Sulishon shrugged; Utrachet said something else, and she made a face at him, stood, and kissed Dewar’s mouth (with a nip) and left them.
“I hope I haven’t offended,” said Dewar, a purposefully broad statement.
“Offended? No. She wants what she wants, and it will be or it will not be. Some would offend, yes. Dazhur would offend. Sulishon, not.”
“Good, then. Utrachet, is Scudamor here now? You said he would be back.”
“We can inquire for him. If he is not here now, he will be soon. It is early yet, but he travels quickly.”
“I have thought of something else to find,” Dewar said. “When I came here, with Prospero and Freia, I had a bag and a staff. I know I carried them to the island. Where are those now?”
“Scudamor will have them,” said Utrachet confidently. “The Lady will have put them in his care.”
Dewar leaned back. His greatest concerns alleved, he could relax. “When he has given me back those notes, I wish to go see that tower, the thing Prospero made.” It must have been a mighty work, and he was chagrined to have slept through it. If only Freia had brewed him one more cup of that drug!
“There are boats. I will row with you, or Scudamor will. The river has gone down, but you do not know the current. The tower is a very strange place: I have been just a little inside it, and it is quite dark and empty. Prospero has desired that we move certain house-things there before he returns. But it is empty now.”
“I thank you for your help.”
“It is Lord Prospero’s wish,” said Utrachet. “He said you are his son, and we are to provide you with all you ask.”
Tauvis brought Dewar’s clothes to the bedchamber where he had slept. Through Utrachet, he requested water, soap, a towel, and a comb, and put himself in reasonable order while Utrachet went out to see if Scudamor could be found. He had grown a beard while he was working like a maniac and then sleeping, and there was no razor nor knife to shave with, so Dewar left it.
He did not have a conscious plan, beyond collecting his belongings and seeing the tower. A flow of action had seized him. There were things he must do here, things he must do elsewhere; he seemed to float effortlessly from moment to moment, with a feeling of predestination. Things would happen; he would act.
Someone tapped at the chamber door as he pulled on his boots, and Dewar looked up and said “Come.” Utrachet entered, and with him came Scudamor—whom Dewar knew, having met him before—and a very fair, very beautiful woman, a woman who wore the coarse clothing of Argylle with such grace and dignity as would distinguish her in any society.
Dewar wished he had met her last night.
“Lord Dewar,” said Scudamor, “here is Cledie Mulhoun.”
Dewar stood and bowed. “I am honored.” He could not stop looking at her. Her features, her bearing, her gestures were all impossibly fine. She could not belong here: she must be some foreigner, some friend of Prospero’s.
“Cledie asked me many questions, which I could not answer, about the Lady,” said Utrachet, “and you, who travelled with her, might know more.”
“I will answer if I can, madame.”
All this time Cledie had been studying him, her bright, wide brown eyes moving over him and weighing him, her face alive with an intelligence that was uncommon anywhere. She spoke, and Utrachet nodded.
“She asks, Is the Lady well.”
Dewar hesitated, and saw that Cledie saw his hesitation, and knew that even though they could not speak directly, she was not to be misled. “As to that, Castellan, you folk who have been here will know as much as I, nearly. The Lady was badly treated in Landuc. She was hurt; she was not ill, but she was weary and sore. I brought her here to mend and rest, but as I have worked steadily the whole time I have been here, and did not observe her much, I do not know how she fares.”
Utrachet translated this. Scudamor looked grave. Cledie frowned and spoke.
“Why then did Lord Prospero take her away again?”
“I don’t know—I do know, a little. You, Scudamor, you, Utrachet—you saw that treaty. It involved her, involved marrying her off. He had no choice but to take her back with him, if there were vows of that sort to keep.”
There was a brief discussion following this answer.
“Cledie finds the idea of marrying off peculiar, as do we all,” said Scudamor. “It is to mate people who would not?”
“Yes. It is not uncommon in
Landuc.”
“Will you be married off as well?” was Cledie’s next question.
“No,” said Dewar, smiling in spite of the seriousness of the conversation. “It is done to women, giving them to powerful men, and sorcerers do not bind themselves with marriage.”
Cledie Mulhoun spoke again. “When will they return?” translated Utrachet.
“I am sorry. I do not know. Prospero has been defeated; he is under the Emperor’s foot now, and so is Freia for she is his, and all that was his, is the Emperor’s,” Dewar said.
This caused another brief discussion, and Utrachet asked Dewar, “What then of Lord Prospero’s declaration that the Lady must stay here?”
“He did not mean quite that, I think. He bestowed these lands on her, certainly, hoping to keep them from the Emperor. I don’t know if that will hold water there. The Emperor will not be inclined to let her go, and Prospero ceded to him the right to choose her husband.”
Cledie said something sharp-sounding when this was translated to her and left.
“She says, if Argylle is the Lady’s, then the Lady is Argylle’s,” Utrachet said, “and she cannot be given or taken away.”
6
THERE ARE AS MANY WAYS OF entering a Palace as there are visitors. The Emperor’s Palace in Landuc, seat of a powerful man in a powerful realm, receives thousands of visitors through its doors each day, and each comes in the appropriate style. The preferred doors for entering the Palace, as with any Landuc house, are on the east side, and a loiterer at the top of the white stairs there, below the Proclamation Balcony and the great golden dome, may watch the world come and go in a morning.
The potentate might arrive in a sedan-chair shaded by lofty, rippling feathers dyed the hues of the rainbow, riding a high-stepping panoplied horse, or in an open carriage or closed coach discreetly or ostentatiously blazoned with arms and devices. The lackeys might be naked, or nearly so, or plainly dressed, or frothed with gold and silver lace; they might be men or not, armed or not, imposing or not, but they would be legion, and would affect to be unawed at the sight of the famous gold-leafed dome of the Palace, at the sweeping stairs leading to the impossibly tall white doors inlaid with gold flames, at the ranks of cold-eyed guards, never at ease, who watch the approach of all who come.
Beneath the eyes of the guards, even the potentate is diminished, for the guards know that all are subservient to the Emperor, from the mightiest to the lowliest, and that, be the petitioners ever so powerful, their petitions might be denied, their plans dismissed, their kingdoms taken from them and sucked dry as an orange, on the Emperor’s nod.
The guards’ eyes watch the arrival of lesser creatures too, as closely and as cynically as they watch the monarchs and magnificences who travel in state. Goldsmiths, jewelers, architects, armorers, usurers, playwrights, poets, portrait-painters, philosophers, fools, sea-captains, shipwrights, bankers, guildsmen, dwarves, landscape-designers, ladies’ maids with messages, gentlemen’s men with gifts—all pass to and fro in compact review of the realm before the eyes of the guards. Among them go counts and earls, barons and lords, knights and marquises, swarmed by their followers, friends, and companions, full of the importance of themselves and their errands and never admitting that the guards, at any instant, might step forward and seize any one of them, for any reason. It had happened once: Baron Beort of Gonlingfast had been taken on the third step—the very spot struck a thousand times a day by slippered soles and booted heels—taken and hauled to the sixth step and beheaded, and his body thrown to Prince Herne’s yellow-toothed pack. Everyone knows it; but it is history now, and such things cannot happen to loyal supporters of the Emperor.
Not all visitors come to the Palace through the east door. Some come to the side doors with laces, linen, perfumes, poisons, gowns, gloves, shoes, hats, tapestries, carpets, furniture; some come to the rear doors with laundry, music, dogs, horses, candles, coal, wood, beer, wine, vegetables, poultry, meat, fish, flowers to sell, buttons to peddle, alms to beg, fortunes to tell. Some—a very few—scale ivied walls or copper-green drain-spouts and slip in through the thousands of windows or down the hundreds of chimneys, and most of those are clever enough not to boast later if they succeed in leaving. And some of those who come and go thus furtively are as those who enter through the east door, but do not wish their calls to be noted by the gold-cuffed clerk who stands at a tall writing-desk inside the door and sets down names in his great ledgers.
The Princes of the realm come and go freely through any door or window they please, Prince Marshal Gaston or Prince Herne causing a nearly imperceptible straightening and stiffening of the spine to ripple through the guards; Prince Heir Josquin’s leisurely arrivals and departures, borne along in a chattering cloud of noble admirers dimming their glories and giving their ears, eyes, and anything else he might desire; Princess Evote aloof and Princess Viola running an appraising eye over the ranks; blue-coated Prince Fulgens scowling over some slight new-minted (genuine or imagined); and, but recently after long absence, brooding Prince Prospero, unaccompanied save by his muffled daughter. A wave of alert apprehension had gone through the guards as the Prince of Air passed, his dark cloak floating and casting swirling shadows on the white stone, for although the guards saw everything and everyone come and go, all sorts, all day, if there was one kind of visitor they would gladly never have seen at all, it was a sorcerer.
For sorcerers arrive differently. They come unannounced, as Prospero did, alone and more dangerous than a phalanx of Lys pikemen, a crackling aura warning even the insects to stay away from them. Oriana of the Glass Castle had lately come in a chariot, drawn by horned creatures which had bitten the throat out of the groom who ran to hold them for her. Esclados the Red had liked to travel in a sedan-chair carried by wide-eyed near-naked virgins chained with rings of gold and ropes of pearls; the Spider King’s method of travel was unnerving to the most stalwart of the guard; Acrasia the Foul came and went in a black, dark-draped closed coach which left a reek of corruption in its wake. But of these only Oriana had been to the east door since the Emperor’s accession.
That a sorcerer had, very lately, been about the Palace, had burgled the place and carried off Prospero’s Well-guarded daughter from under Prince Gaston the Marshal’s very nose (the same girl who now trotted in Prospero’s shadow), was whispered, but the subject displeased the Emperor and was not openly discussed. It had been a long time since the Palace Guard met sorcery head-on, and, when faced with a sudden explosion of flame and a hot draught of ashes beneath the portico, they reacted with admirable aplomb.
As this explosion occurred, the guards ducked and shielded their faces even as they brought weapons to bear on the source. The flames and cinders blew away as suddenly as they had come. Their source, the sorcerer, stood on the white, unscorched marble, nonchalantly brushing ashes off his handsome turquoise-blue cloak’s shoulder cape with a hand gloved in matching leather. He doffed his black hat and blew ashes from the blue-green-silver cockade, then donned it again at a jaunty angle. His other hand held a long black staff. He ignored the guards; he ignored the gasps and a cerise-cheeked baroness swooning on the steps; he stood in a perfect silence, turning on his heel to look over the place with an appraiser’s perspicacious eye. He had not been to the east door before and was wondering how to proceed.
“Let go of me, wolf!” someone cried, and then, “Dewar!”
He whirled.
Some distance below him on the steps was tall, frowning Prince Herne, and Prince Herne’s left hand gripped the upper right arm of a woman whose brown cloak was thrown back to show her gold-and-brown brocaded dress. The woman was struggling, pushing at Herne, who was as little troubled by her resistance as might have been one of the columns under the portico.
The visitors to the Palace discreetly and prudently drew back, out of the way between Herne and the sorcerer. Herne’s choleric humor was famous, and one never knew what a sorcerer might do.
“Why, Prince Herne,” Dewar sa
id, smiling.
“Take him!” Herne ordered the guards.
The sorcerer spun around again, drawing a line on the white marble with his staff-end; a sheet of fire leapt up, rippling in the cold winter air. The guards tried to flank it, and it danced before them, hissing. Dewar descended toward Herne.
“Hello, Freia,” the sorcerer said.
“Let me go!” cried Freia, prying at Herne’s hand, wrapped round her arm as a root grows round a stone.
Herne drew his saber from its scabbard slowly, caressing the air with it. “In a clean fight I’ll gut thee, turncoat,” he said softly, with a joyless smile.
“I’m not interested in fighting with you or anyone right now, Herne. What are you doing trolling young women around by the arm?”
“The baggage sought to steal a horse,” said Herne. “The Emperor’s hospitality is not to her liking. We’ve other things to discuss. Draw.” The steel of his blade flashed as he gestured at the hilt of Dewar’s sword.
“I couldn’t dream of duelling with you, Herne, not with you incapacitated so,” Dewar said pleasantly. “You’re far too honorable a man to, for instance, use her as a shield, eh? Yet you can’t let go of her; she’s quick, she’ll take to her heels and begone.”
Herne laughed. “Aye, I’ll turn her loose to go. And whither? She’s not been to the Well, not passed the Fire. How far to thy earth, tender pretty vixen? Where’s thy Map, thy Ephemeris?” He shook Freia. She kicked him, hampered by skirts and manure-stained cloak.
Dewar’s staff swung in his hand, a glowing haze trailing it, cometlike. “Come, Freia,” he said to her. “Bring me to your father. Herne, I strongly suggest that you release her, now.”
“Take her,” Herne suggested, and moved up a step closer to Dewar, lifting his sword, dragging Freia.
“How now, Herne; what’s toward?” someone called from above. A whisper passed among the onlookers who had not slunk inconspicuously away, fearful of sorcery.
The Price of Blood and Honor Page 9