The Price of Blood and Honor

by Elizabeth Willey

  Odile watched through half-lidded eyes as Prospero thought aloud. She could see him frowning in the dawn light, suspicion waking and driving out repose.

  “Must have done it,” Prospero said softly after another pause. “Ah, the sorcerer compleat is he, and in no part a son.”

  “Surely Scudamor would have told thee of it,” Odile said. “Why would he not speak, an he knew?”

  “An he knew, he must have told me. I’ll think on’t further. Trouble thyself not o’er this, Odile; ’tis not thy affair.”

  Odile murmured acquiescently and said, “Let me then divert thee from thy affairs to mine.”

  And Prospero smiled and was diverted.

  Scudamor waited for Lord Prospero to explain what was amiss.

  “Scudamor, my friend,” Prospero said, “for so have I thought of thee, thou hast done me an ill turn in thy liberal hosting in my house.” The high black stone chair-back was cold on his spine. He gripped the arms, also cold, and felt his hands becoming chilled.

  “My Lord, how so?” Scudamor asked, taken aback. “Tell me what wrong I have done, and I shall strive to right it.”

  “There is no righting this matter,” Prospero said. “When I departed for Landuc, Dewar was left behind; is’t not so?”

  “Aye, Lord, he slept.” The Seneschal gazed at Prospero earnestly.

  Prospero damned the man’s ingenuousness. “How long slept he?”

  “Four days, or less by some hours,” Scudamor said.

  “And what did he on arising?”

  “Why, and he bathed in the River and walked about and ate, and slept again and ate—” Scudamor tried to remember. “He talked to us,” he offered, “about the River and the fish in it. We did offer him all hospitality, Lord Prospero, as you commanded ere you and Lady Freia left.”

  “Ah. All hospitality didst thou offer him, and all hospitality did he have. Did I not remind thee and Utrachet as well that none was to approach the Spring, and bid you two set guards upon it lest any come in my absence?”

  “Aye, Lord, and that we did.”

  “Yet by clear signs I do understand that Dewar hath been to the Spring.”

  Scudamor’s expression became blank, then aghast. “My Lord, we did not think …” His voice faded as his apprehension grew.

  Prospero’s mouth hardened. “You did not think; nay, you thought not at all, none of you! I said none, you thought to better my command! He was allowed to pass, then!”

  “Aye, my Lord. You—you had so favored him, by look and deed, and named him as your son and—”

  “And gave no word that he was permitted the Spring.”

  “Nay, Lord,” Scudamor had to agree softly. “That is so.”

  Prospero eyed him icily. “I’ll think further on this,” said he. “Go.”

  Betrayed by one he had trusted most, the first-made of his Argylle men, Prospero stalked bile-humored from the hall, whither he had summoned Scudamor, to the tower. He could not allow the failure to go unpunished. If he were to rule Argylle—and Fortuna had placed it again in his hands though he had tried to pass it to his daughter—he must rule unwaveringly. Prospero strode through the tower’s double door and paused, then went to the stair and climbed up to the very top of the building. He would think better there, able to see the place spread out as on a map.

  He opened the door that led outside and a scent tickled his nose: Odile’s. She stood at the parapet gazing out toward the sea, veiled, one arm draped gracefully over a corner of the stone.

  “Madame,” Prospero said, and closed the door behind him.

  “My lord,” she replied.

  “It is a sorry world I have made, and a sorry people,” he said, standing beside her. “For the simplest order do they disobey. Must have learnt the trick from my daughter, who’d argue the color of the grass or the sky.” A twinge of conscience panged; he knew Freia had not been so contrary as that. Indeed, she had accepted his will in most things. Yet she had balked and failed him at the test, and so now had Scudamor. “Now we’ve great evil afoot indeed, for Dewar hath partaken of the Spring, and he’s set against me.”

  “I feared as much, my lord, but thou hast allowed thy desires to color all thou seest, and wouldst not see his perfidy at all. But ’tis e’en what I fear for thee, that he would plunder thee of all and then dispossess thee of thy life.”

  Prospero stood staring at the mountains to the west, lower than the great southern peaks and more distant, but visible on this clear bright day. The carpet of forest spread from the fields’ boundaries to infinity, to the feet of the mountains. The faint green of the unseasonable spring was stronger now, the sharp branches softened and purpled by comparison. The sound of water rose to his ears; it was inescapable since the drought had broken.

  He would not believe Odile, yet what she said rang true. Dewar was a sorcerer, and power was a sorcerer’s existence. Surely Dewar would do whatever he could to possess himself of sole use of the power here—such as it now was. It was fully possible that he lurked in the realm somewhere, watching. Prospero would have expected him to take the place in Prospero’s absence, but perhaps Dewar knew he’d get little good of raping it. No, it must be transferred with consent, or at least without murder.

  The question was, should Prospero resist transferring the place to him or not, and—Prospero’s eyes were hard on the in-offensive horizon—was Prospero even empowered to do so? For he had made the place over to his daughter, and Landuc had claimed his daughter ere she died, and thus was Landuc in dominion here? It had been among her dower-lands, and so perhaps it had reverted to himself. Or might it be considered, by the normal laws of heritance, to have passed to her brother, Dewar?

  The Emperor would not allow it to happen so. Though he be ignorant, and corrupt, and ill-fitted to guide Landuc and command the Well that made Pheyarcet exist and Landuc thrive—he was still the Emperor, the ruler, and his will would be law.

  Nor Avril nor custom would permit Prospero to inherit what he’d lost.

  Prospero flinched from the obvious conclusion: that on Freia’s passing from the mortal realm, the Spring and its surrounding infant lands had become Landuc’s. Yet this could explain the straitened flow of the Spring: it was being dominated and destroyed by the Well of Fire. If it was so, then nothing he could do could revive the Spring, nor was he here legitimately, and this present resurgence would soon fail. He doubted that the Spring would accept governance by someone wholly of Landuc, as Prospero was not; the two places must be mediated.

  He smiled as another thought occurred to him: if this realm truly belonged to Landuc, to Avril, then was it not Avril’s duty to hold it against Dewar, when Dewar returned to wrest it from his father? Then Avril would indeed rue his disdain of sorcery.

  “My love, an thou hast found amusement, I prithee amuse me too.”

  Prospero glanced at Odile; he repeated his thought.

  She shook her head. “Meseems better that thou shouldst hold it for thyself, by thyself, for now thou’rt here and Landuc cannot find thee.”

  “An there be truth of the Well in the oaths that have been sworn around this place and all my lands, then ’tis Landuc’s, and Landuc must find and claim it inevitably.” They must cross the widening desert to do it, but find it they would with Fortuna’s favor on them and Prospero’s own web of oaths and promises to support them, his protections become weaknesses.

  And among those, Scudamor. What penalty could Prospero impose upon this fool who presumed to second-guess his will? If he whipped him and spared his life, the example would be harsh but salutary to others who might not obey Prospero’s commands. If he did that and left Scudamor in his position as Seneschal, Scudamor might use position and occasion to plot against him, becoming a still weaker link, and his position was too high for Prospero to tolerate his failure.

  Best thing would be to take humanity from him and send him to dwell in the woods, but that now lay beyond Prospero’s ability, thanks to Freia’s disobedience. Prospero ground h
is teeth.

  Imprisonment was risky; the Seneschal was well-liked and his friends might foment against Prospero, given the living martyr as a symbol.

  Death. Prospero could hang the Seneschal for insubordination, and there’d be a strong lesson to the others and an end to worries about plots and treason from that quarter. He would be forgotten, as the dead always are, as Prospero’s allies executed by Panurgus and later by Avril had been, and there would be an end to it. Argylle would remember it as an abstract, past event: disobedience of Prospero’s orders had caused Scudamor to be hanged.

  Yes: what he had done could well cause Prospero’s own death. Let him die for it now rather than benefit from it later.

  Dewar’s luck at fishing was better than his sister’s in the hunt. When she returned to their campsite, he held up a string of stripe-sided fish he had hooked during the brief autumn afternoon.

  Freia dropped a handful of thin yellowish roots before him: her day’s contribution to their sustenance. “I’ve never seen hunting so bad. Those horse people have chased all the game away. We should smoke a few fish and keep them; they won’t last otherwise.” She sat under the cut-bough windscreen they had made that morning. After a moment, she took her arrows from the quiver, one by one, and squinted along each to see if it were straight.

  Dewar began scaling the fish. “Freia, it is uncommonly warm.”

  “That’s why I said to smoke the fish.”

  “In other words, is weather so warm, this late in the year, usual? Is the climate so mild as this?”

  “No, not at all. Usually by now it’s colder, and leaves are down—I can’t imagine why they’re still on and green—and things are withered, and animals have winter coats and so do I, and it’s nearly snow-time. Yes, this is strange. You picked up wood.” She tested the tip of the arrow under scrutiny with a finger.

  “I thought not to be wholly idle,” he replied, and grinned at her to soften any sarcasm she might hear in the words.

  The smile failed. “I tried,” Freia snapped, glaring at him. “I spent the whole day finding nothing, nothing in these woods. Hoofprints, old droppings, nothing. There aren’t any greens—just leaves and buds on the trees, and they’re no good to eat. I was lucky to find the paste-roots.”

  “I meant no slur, madame,” Dewar said.

  There was a taut pause. Freia looked back at her arrows. “Sorry,” she said to them. “I wish Trixie would come back.”

  “Smoking this won’t be easy,” he said, setting the fish aside. “I picked very dry wood to make the least smoke. We’ll just have to eat it tomorrow, cooked and cold.”

  Freia shrugged.

  Dewar built a small pyramid of sticks and sparked flint and steel to light it. It would be as practical to summon a Salamander and bind it while the fish cooked, but the wood-fire was pleasant; moreover, the wood-fire was familiar to Freia, unlike sorcery. Apparently Prospero had used wood-fires for everything she had ever seen him do, and Dewar was chary of appearing too alien to her. He glanced up, checking the smoke, and saw the tops of the trees still gilded with sunlight. It fled as he watched. The fire wasn’t smoking.

  “Dewar—”

  He looked away from the heavens, at her. She was intent on him, her expression troubled and preoccupied. “Yes, Freia?”

  “You said,” she began, and halted.

  “Tell me,” he urged her after she had been quiet too long.

  “When you were talking to—him,” she said, watching Dewar’s face in the blue dusk-light, the ruddy fire, “you said—something you said—”

  He waited, and then said, “Say it.”

  “Prospero never told me,” she said, looking now at the fire. “But what you said, and things he said, used to say, sometimes—I’m like Caliban, aren’t I.”

  “Who is Caliban?” asked Dewar softly, caught by the unexpected current of the conversation. She had mentioned Caliban before, he recalled.

  “Prospero’s, one of his creatures. He digs. He’s made of stones and earth. He doesn’t like the sun, and he’s not quick, not like Ariel.”

  “A bound Sammead, I suspect—unbound from Prospero now, as Ariel was.”

  “Am I a Sammead?”

  Dewar was cold with sweat and apprehension. If he said something wrong or false now, it could never be mended. He swallowed and told her the truth. “No. You’re a human woman. You’re not a, an assemblage of stones and earth animated by an Elemental presence. No. You have a soul, dear heart, Freia, and a life. You’re Prospero’s daughter.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know. It’s—it is sorcery, partly. And if you were a Sammead, you’d be very different: no matter how brilliant a sorcerer your father was, he couldn’t change the nature of an Elemental. You’re not an Elemental. You’re a human woman. Alive. I promise you it is so.” He clasped and unclasped his damp hands nervously.

  Freia considered this, and him, for a few moments. “How did you know he made me?”

  Dewar closed his eyes to escape her gaze. He opened them, looked at the fire now. “It was in one of his books: how it was done. I read it when I was copying.”

  “He gave it to you,” she whispered hoarsely, drawing in a breath.

  “No. No! Freia, no. He did not. He—I helped myself to that one and put it away again. I was curious.” Dewar had to meet her eyes again, watching the thoughts and emotions flickering through her. He was afraid. “He never told you this,” Dewar asked.

  She shook her head, mute, her eyes looking at and through him. She looked older: it might be a trick of the light, but her canny expression aged her face. “He—there were things he would say. That he shaped me from base beginnings. I thought he meant, from infancy. Now I see. He never said who my mother was. They asked in Landuc. I have no mother, if he made me out of dirt and sticks like Caliban.”

  “Well—no. But you have him. You’re flesh and blood, Freia, whatever your origin. He’s your father. I’m your brother. You have kin, Freia. You’re not alone that way.”

  Freia’s arms were wrapped tight around her knees now; she was a gold-lit statue across the little cook-fire. “I don’t care about kin. He should have told me.”

  “Would it have made some difference to you? Would you have understood it?” Dewar wondered.

  “I don’t know,” Freia said thoughtfully.

  “You should think about that, Freia. Would it be different?”

  “I wish I didn’t know.”

  “I’m sorry. I am sorry, Freia. It is …” Dewar looked for a word, could not think of a fitting one. “It is another regret. I am sorry. —Freia.”

  She attended, her face drawn into an introspective, remote expression.

  “You are human. You bleed; you—you could not be proven otherwise, by any method.” He moistened his dry mouth. “You conceived,” he whispered. “You’re human. More so than many of us.”

  To his surprise, Freia’s look altered. She lowered her head, half a nod, and then nodded once slowly.

  Dewar nodded too, twice. He began arranging the coals of the fire.

  “We’re very close to the island,” Freia said as he set out the fish.

  “I know. I can feel it,” he said, thinking of the tower and the Spring.

  “How?” Freia couldn’t.

  He glanced at her, his eyes dark in the shadows from his cheekbones. The twilight had gone, and the sudden forest night had come. “Because it is there,” Dewar said after a moment.

  Freia’s regard held something distinctly irritated; she said, not bothering to soften her voice, “If I were half as smart as you, I’d never have gotten in a quarter as much trouble.”

  “Probably,” Dewar agreed before he could stop himself.

  Her mouth set in a tight little line, and she returned her attention to her arrows, which needed none.

  The fish cooked quickly; the stringy roots roasted for a few minutes in the coals. They ate without further talk, Freia using her hunting-knife and fingers and Dewar using
more elegant utensils from his bag. He watched her covertly as she ate. Her face had taken on that closed expression he recalled from Landuc, and her posture was hunched and protective. Was she brooding still on her humanity? Why had she become suddenly so quarrelsome and difficult now, after ten days in which they had travelled in good harmony toward the island from the mountains? The hunting had been bad for the whole of the journey, and Freia hadn’t complained; the weather was warm and unseasonable, but she had remarked on how pleasant it was. Dewar puzzled over what could have caused the alterations in her, but found no answer.

  When they lay down to sleep by the embers of the fire, Freia left an arm’s-length distance between them. Dewar left the space and the silence unbridged and closed his eyes, but he was irked; they had slept close-lying every night until this, chastely but companionably. He resolved that in the morning, after she repented the chill and snuggled against him during the night, he would ask what was biting her.

  In the morning he woke as he had stretched out the night before, alone, and when he lifted his head and looked about he saw that he was indeed alone. Freia had gone.

  25

  THE BARON OF ASCOLET SAT IN the apartment he had been given in the Palace of Landuc, in the position many troubled men have assumed for time out of mind. His head was supported on his hands; his eyes gazed down at a polished table-top without seeing the delicate ivory flame-shaped inlay border or the fine grain of the reddish wood. The Baron was seeing, instead, something that was not there: the note his soon-to-be-former wife had brandished at him in the thick of their argument last month, on the day Cambia had drowned.

  How had she come by it?

  Ottaviano dismissed out of hand the possibility that Freia herself had given the letter to Luneté. Poor Freia had not shown any talent for scheming or vengeance, much to her own harm he thought, and he doubted that Freia had ever even met Luneté. Moreover, Luneté could not have had the note for very long. She would have said something about it.