Luneté straightened, subtly disengaging her arm. “I have given a great deal to Ascolet already,” she said. “I do not wish to utterly lose myself in it. You, you are not really Ascolet; you don’t know what the bond of Lys is like to me, how it feels, how the Well in Lys beats like a second heart to me. You’re an outsider, appointed by accident! You have no blood-ties to Ascolet, as I do to Lys. You’ve no idea what that is, and you seem to think I can just walk away from Lys whenever I wish, as you wander away from Ascolet.”
“In other words,” Otto said, “the ancestral burden of Lys is more important to you than, say, your husband.”
“No—”
“That’s what you just said.”
“Then that’s what I just said, very well, yes. You never considered Ascolet as anything but a strategic asset, and Lys was an ally. You could rule Chenay as easily as Ascolet, it doesn’t matter a whisker to you as long as you profit.”
“Is that what you think,” said Otto, with a dangerous glow coming into his face.
“Yes. And it’s the truth. I’ve heard of the way you switched sides, back and forth, during the war, Baron, looking for the best advantage, and about how you used and murdered poor Lady Miranda, and then Lady Freia the same—stabbing her to silence her—”
“I did nothing of the sort! Golias—”
“Oh, certainly,” said Luneté, “blame it all on dead Golias, your good friend, and that’s just as—as ignoble and ungentlemanly as admitting it. Everyone knows, Otto. I’ve heard the tale from several people.”
Ottaviano stared at Luneté, anger and insult seething in his gut. So he was being pilloried for Golias’s crimes, all around the Empire no doubt, wherever tongues wagged.
“It is not true,” he said levelly.
“Then why did she go mad and kill herself,” Luneté asked, and the momentum of her fury seized her and carried her on. “How many love-notes did you send her afterward? Don’t you think that was in poor taste?”
“What?” he yelped.
Luneté opened her pocket and took out a piece of folded, once-crumpled paper. “I was rather shocked to receive this,” she said. This morning she had found it in a plain, plainly-sealed envelope among the rest of her letters. She unfolded the letter and held it so that he could see it.
His own hand.
To the worshipful Lady Freia, with most respectful greetings. We have met and parted in vile and harrowing circumstances, and since then my heart is deeply weighed …
“Where did you get— Give it to me,” Otto demanded, and she kept it from him, darting back.
“You admit it, then.”
“I admit nothing! Who gave that to you?” Dewar, he thought. It had to be Dewar—he had been hot after Luneté since they’d met, flirting, teasing—
“Is this not a declaration of love, here? ‘For I do love you as my cousin and as the most courageous and right noble lady in the Well’s great realm of Pheyarcet?’ How convenient that your affection should have turned to her as she was proclaimed Prince Prospero’s heir and successor to his lands!” Luneté folded the note again, returned it to her satin pocket, glaring at Otto. “How convenient. What a pity she did not welcome your attention. Of course, our marriage had not been acknowledged yet, had it? And Prince Prospero’s daughter is certainly more profitable than Lys.”
“She’s, she was a nice girl! I was trying to, to, to—”
“The letter speaks for you very well, Baron,” Luneté said icily. “It needs no explication.”
“Tell me about Odile,” Freia said. “She’s your mother?”
“She is,” Dewar said. They were sitting on a sunny gravel flat in the midst of a broad stream, an hour’s walk from where they had slept. Upstream, four waterbirds worked the stream bottom, clucking to one another when they popped up from under the water. Freia had shared her food with Dewar, and now he lounged against a recently fallen tree-trunk washed up on the gravel spit, Freia sitting beside him. He wanted to put his head on her lap, but refrained. They were struggling with distance and intimacy, and he would make it more difficult.
Freia waited for him to continue. He didn’t. “Dewar, I’d like to know more than that. Tell me about her.”
Dewar glanced at her. “Her malevolence is endless.”
“And.”
“Freia, I don’t like to talk about it.”
“When Trixie gets back here—”
“Trixie?”
“—I’m going to the city, where he must be, and if this woman is there too—”
“—you’ll be dead in hours.”
“I don’t care,” Freia said. “I want to tell Papa I’m all right. I—I think he must be upset. And it looks like things haven’t gone well here.”
“It does.” Dewar slid down against the log and let himself edge over to lean on Freia’s shoulder. She didn’t understand how dangerous Odile was, how deadly and how merciless. She had probably never met anything so utterly hateful and evil, he thought, not even in Landuc. He closed his eyes. “I ran away from her house in Aië when I was very young,” he said. “She was angry with me; I’d tried to transform back some of the men she’d turned into swine and cattle and horses. That’s her specialty, transformation; I suppose that’s why Prospero sought her out. She keeps her women shaped like peahens and geese and other birds until she needs them for something, then turns them back afterward. When I realized what she was doing, I hated her. Some men came to her to do business or something—I never knew why—and she changed them all. I was watching from the shadows. She’d been teaching me a little sorcery, dribs and drabs, and so I filched one of her books and tried to restore them. They’d been kind to me. I’d never seen men before, only women, Odile and her bird-women.”
Freia’s heart was a steady thud under his cheek. Her arm was around his shoulders. The sun was hot on his face. Dewar kept his eyes closed and continued, “I got caught, of course. I didn’t know what I was doing. Odile took the book away, told me she’d transform me to a calf and geld me, and turned me into a calf. She left me that way for a long time. It wasn’t enjoyable, I assure you. Three times she tied me up and made all the preparations, but she didn’t castrate me; instead, when she got tired of the game, she turned me back and set me to sorting a pile of beans. If I could do it all and get it right, she’d let me stay human and whole.
“I didn’t believe her. When she had left me there to sort the damned hill of beans, I kept at it until dark and then went into the house. The Temple, she calls it. She has a vast opinion of herself. I knew how to get into her workroom, and the birds didn’t raise an alarm. She must have killed them for that after I got away. I stole four of her books and fled the house.
“When I passed her Bounds she detected my going and pursued me with Sendings and storms. I ran for my life as far as a crossroads, where I took protection under a thornbush at a standing stone, an outpost of the Stone of Blood. When she paused to rest, I ran again, at first erratically through Phesaotois to try to shake her, then inward. After a few years, I came to Noroison and Morven where Paracelsus dwells, and I apprenticed myself to him. For it I gave him three of the books, which I’d copied, and I still have the fourth and the copybook.”
Dewar listened to Freia’s calm heart. “I stayed a long time in Morven. Odile had set curses on me, which I’d been screened from—I won’t go into that—but Paracelsus lifted them and put me under his protection while I was his apprentice, so that Odile would be picking a fight with him if she struck at me. She wasn’t willing, probably wasn’t able, to risk that, and so I passed sixteen very pleasant years there, pleasant as apprenticeships go, far pleasanter than the first sixteen had been. There was another fellow, Oren, who was doing some advanced studies—he was a journeyman, not a proper apprentice—and after some initial spatting, we got along passably. When I finished my apprenticeship, Paracelsus booted me through a Way into the middle of nowhere, and I looked up Oren and found out he was Paracelsus’s something-or-other nephew—in
the line of Primas through Proteus, so we’re actually cousins in some terribly remote degree. I must tell him that sometime. He’s keen on family connections. He was a congenial chap when he wasn’t being a journeyman; he invited me to live with him and I did awhile. That was pleasant, too. But Odile was always out there, and I always had to be on my guard because of her attempts against me. For that reason I left Phesaotois and went to Pheyarcet. And it is a great evil that she has come here, with Prospero.” Somehow Dewar had slumped round to lie in her lap, after all.
Freia stroked his forehead, comforting and affectionate, admiring his inverted nose and brows and smoothing the tight lines there. “You are afraid of her.…”
“Oh yes.” His eyes were closed.
She considered this. “Do you mean to kill her?” she asked softly, not to challenge him but to prepare herself for the horror of such a thing, if it happened. She realized, thinking of it, that she had never seen Dewar kill anything, or anyone, despite the violence that had surrounded them.
He shook his head, a confined rolling movement on her legs. “You don’t understand, Freia, you don’t understand how it is with sorcerers: one can’t kill one’s blood-kin, not without hurting oneself. That’s how it is in Phesaotois, and I see no reason for it to be different here. Blood is blood. I cannot kill her; the destruction would turn back on me.”
“But you said she wanted, wants, to kill you.”
“No, I did not. She wants to harm me as much as she can—and she can harm me greatly—without killing me. If she cannot do it by sorcery, here, she will do it otherwise. You have never known anyone like Odile, Freia. She will be poisoning Prospero against me, subtly, secretly, with a word, another word, day upon day. She will be painting me in blackest colors to him, and he will hear her, for I stole from her and he will believe I stole from him. Sorcerers do not give something for nothing, ever, and he gave me priceless knowledge by letting me copy his books.”
“Where are the copies?” Freia asked softly.
“In my tower. Safe. She’ll not find them, or it, I warrant. I suspect she has not passed the Fire at the Well—Avril’s in no mood for granting such favors, even if he had the ability to deliver them—but she may have drunk of your Spring.”
“I wish I had let you drink, taken you there and given it to you,” Freia said. “I’m sorry. I was so afraid Papa would be angry with me for having you there at all. He made me swear never to tell anyone from Landuc—at least you’re not from Landuc. I wish I had done it then.”
Dewar cleared his throat. “Well …”
Freia looked down at him, shading his eyes with her hand. “Did you—” she said, with instant certainty that he had.
“He left with you,” Dewar said, looking up at her, “and he hadn’t said not to, you know, and, and, Freia, I had been searching for it for years. Literally years. It has been the whole focus of my work, and I’d even begun narrowing it down to an approximate area to search for it—I simply had to drink. Besides, I couldn’t have made my Way to Landuc if I hadn’t. I wonder if Prospero has realized that,” he added in an undertone.
His eyes pleaded for leniency.
“Oh, Dewar.” It wasn’t supposed to be funny, but it was: Freia smiled. She should have guessed.
“I’m a reprehensible and amoral gentleman, or a very good sorcerer,” he said unhappily.
“I’d change that around.”
“Helping oneself to the finest from one’s host’s cellar in his absence is ungentlemanly, madame. But thanks for your mercy.”
“I told you I bathed in it,” she said, still smiling, teasingly now.
He smiled, then laughed. “You didn’t. I bet Prospero took a fit. Whatever inspired you to do that?”
“I was tired and hot and dirty, and it was water. It was just water seeping out of a rock and making a nice little puddle, so I had a drink and then a bath. It was refreshing.”
“I’m sure it was,” he said, awed. “Did you tell him?”
“No.” She stroked his hair away from his face. “I learned later it was special. Funny; I ran away too. Prospero was cross with me, and I ran away and didn’t go back to him for seven years.”
“Why did you go back?”
Freia shrugged. “I was lonely. There wasn’t anybody else here, then. I liked it better that way. Not that some of the people aren’t good people, but—I liked it empty. And now I’ve come back again. Maybe he truly doesn’t want me here, though, Dewar. I’m just something he made, like Caliban. People might rather I was dead. I’m not one of them. I’m not much use to anyone.”
Dewar sat up and embraced her. “When you are there, I think you’ll see you’ve been missed,” he said, “and if they try to pretend they don’t need you, you can come away with me, after all.”
“What a choice you offer me.”
“If Prospero and his people don’t know what’s good for them, I certainly do,” Dewar said.
The garden-party duel between the Baron of Ascolet and the Countess of Lys had heated in a few words from dull red to white-hot and altered its terms from first blood to the death. They had each taken wounds and given telling return strikes, and a moment of breath-catching silence had followed the Baron’s last expert and damaging sally brandishing the Countess’s behavior vis-à-vis a certain sorcerer of their acquaintance. Possibly he would have carried the day, were they not interrupted by a pair of servants with messages that both Countess and Baron were wanted most urgently at the Swan Summerhouse.
In the silence of suspended hostilities, then, Luneté and Ottaviano left the sunken parterre and followed the two servants to the swan-crowned, swan-friezed, swan-flocked summerhouse, which was in another part of the grounds away from the Empress’s reception. Yet the music had become brighter and the party merrier, and the beat of a Madanese changing dance could be faintly heard even at the summer-house a quarter-hour’s walk away.
There was a small crowd at the summer-house, visible to the Baron and the Countess as they came down the slope toward the water. The swans were clustered on the other side of their pretty pond, hardly disturbing the flat-leaved ornamental weeds and flowers that floated on its surface, bright in the sharp afternoon light.
Someone among the crowd of people was sobbing loudly, half-screaming.
Otto began to hurry, perceiving Doctor Hem among the group, and when he glimpsed the Empress, he trotted, leaving Luneté to catch up as best she might in her thin-soled slippers on the gravel path. People drew aside as he came near, and he saw the Empress rising to her feet, saw Doctor Hem approaching him bleating something, saw a young woman in a dishevelled nursemaid’s dress half-collapsed in shrill hysterics on the steps of the summer-house, and saw a little wet bundle on the summer-house floor that he did not at first recognize.
Then Otto did know the nose, the plump cheek, the curly nearly-black hair of the unchildishly still body, and he began shouting.
Dewar persuaded Freia not to approach Prospero alone, but to wait in the forest for him while he returned to his tower to prepare to face Odile. She agreed, reluctantly; he repeated his invitation to join him, and she refused with less sureness than before.
“Please don’t tempt me. I would. I would go.”
He had a fleeting vision of an idyllic life with her, his sorcery and her roaming and returning, constant union and reunion. He knew it would take but little pleasurable persuasion for her to throw off Prospero’s teaching against incest, and he cared nothing for it himself; already, an ache of hunger, of loneliness, was throbbing in him. It wasn’t fair of him to tempt her, no. She wanted to say yes, and she feared to; she was bound to Dewar with her heart, and she was bound to Argylle by Prospero’s gift and her own inclination. She would suffer if he induced her to renounce Argylle, and there was no reason for him to do so but his own desire; and that was not sufficient.
“It’s there if you need it, Freia. Just ask if you ever do. There’s no bar to leaving, and I won’t force you to come there.” His voice wa
s level, serious, and true.
Freia looked up at him and smiled a little. “Someday.”
Dewar lightened his voice, bantering. “When you have time for me,” he said. “When your other businesses are all concluded, your appointments kept, your audiences held, debts discharged—”
“Silly! That wouldn’t take much doing,” she said, laughing. “The only appointment I have is with you!”
“You have one with Prospero, madame, but you have not yet set a term for it, and it shall be a long and involved business the two of you undertake, I am sure of it.”
Freia’s laughter had faded; she heard a note of something firm and immutable under Dewar’s half-mockery. “Don’t make it sound so, so permanent, so much like forever— You’ll be here, won’t you? I’ll wait for you!” She was frightened; missed meetings had meant such ill before.
“I’ll be here,” Dewar promised, and he felt the words as he meant them and the words as she meant them turn and twine and net them both. She would lead; he would let her channel and shape him. “I’ll wait on you, and wait for you, and wait with you,” he said, trying to lighten himself. He clasped her shoulders, then embraced her. “I’ll be here,” he said again.
Clean and dry, gowned in stiff gold-threaded brocade that weighed more than she did, wax-white Cambia lay on a crimson-draped table surrounded by flowers and candles. The casket would be ready in a day, and then her grieving mother, the Countess Luneté, would return to Lys with her, to place her on the family pyre at the Shrine of Stars and then entomb her ashes there.
Whether the Baron of Ascolet would attend was a matter being settled over Cambia’s bier.
“I told you she was an idiot,” Ottaviano said to Luneté.
Luneté sat, straight and composed, at the empty fireplace. “It could have happened to anyone. She is punishing herself; I have no desire to make her suffer more. Moreover, her family has served mine well for centuries, and I will not be the one to break—”
The Price of Blood and Honor Page 39