by David Keck
“The minstrel gallery, I suspect,” said Heremund. “At the back of the hall. It’s a good place to watch what’s going on below.”
“Please,” said the queen. “He will kill our son!”
Durand nodded. “I will see the king.” The beggar corpse was bowing now, torn bone and brain there above his eyes, and the queen was offering thanks.
Durand stalked toward the minstrel’s door. The Lost were drawn after him, their numbers swelling and building in the passageway. Durand came to the small door and shook the handle. He could hear the king raging behind.
It squeaked open, and there was Durand in the dark loft under the ceiling of the Painted Hall, where the king held his son in his fists.
“Your Highness,” said Durand, stepping out onto the creaking floor.
“Who disturbs me?” said the king. He stood at the rail.
“Durand Col.”
“Aah, the new Duke of Yrlac.” He laughed. The boy—the prince and Ragnal’s son—met Durand’s glance with wide, terrified eyes.
“Have you sons, Duke Durand? Have you?”
Durand creaked nearer. “I have not,” he said.
“Very wise,” said Ragnal. “A son is a perilous thing, do you know? The wise women are quiet on that score, oh, yes, but a son is a creature whose whole fortune hangs upon the death of his father. Still, nothing is said.” The king drew his four-foot High Kingdom blade from its scabbard. The gilded hilt of it nearly rapped the low ceiling. The boy cowered against the rail high over the floor.
“Your Highness,” said Durand, stealing closer still. Only a few steps left.
“Here he is, sniveling now. And you would not believe it, ‘Duke’ Durand. But this sniveling thing is to be my death.” He stopped a moment, jamming the heel of one hand to his temple.
He grimaced, a kind of smile. “My wife. Without the boy, she is nothing. With me dead, she is outcast, swept aside as a new king—a new household—takes Eldinor: Biedin, lest Eodan can convince the Council he’s no traitor. A beggar at my brother’s table. But with a son,” said Ragnal. “With a son, she may act. The smallest thing: a saddle strap, a bit of bad meat, a hunter’s arrow.” He twisted the dark glint of the blade an inch from his son’s throat.
“Look at him. Respect is due a father, but here you see fear. She has bred this in him. Day by day since his birth, she has poured her poison words into his ear. I saw love when first I knew her, but no more. There is only dread. For she has made this thing you see before me. A weapon of flesh and blood, a living blade at my throat.”
It was dark up there under the black ceiling. An iron wheel of a chandelier hanging beyond the railing gave them a weak and wobbling light. And the dead crowded the loft. Even the king seemed to feel their uncanny presence. He tottered and the lethal point swayed, nicking a fat drop of blood at the boy’s chin. The king twisted his fist against his temple.
“I will be free!” He blinked, his eyes very wide. “I will be free.” He spoke these words in the breathless tone of a man who had reached a decision, and, to Durand’s horror, he swept back the blade.
Durand leapt.
A dozen years of tiltyard fools and battlefield brawls sent him springing into the arc of the man’s swing, clashing Ouen’s sword against the king’s cross guard. The king roared in shock and pain; the force of it must have stung the man’s hands.
For a heartbeat, they were in the worst sort of bind. A twist of the king’s blade might have had Durand’s guts out, but the king only leapt back.
Bare blades in shirt sleeves was madness enough.
The king’s eyes flickered. He gripped the sword. “Bastard! How dare you? How dare you!” To Durand’s eyes, the king and his blade were in the midst of a packed crowd of Lost onlookers. Durand wanted to lead the boy from the loft. There was an open door behind him, and the rickety stair down into the hall. But he daren’t signal the boy. He knew what the king must do.
“Highness. There’s no need.”
“You’d lay hands on your king? This is the queen’s doing! She has champions who will brawl for her babe.”
The big man darted, his blade glinting in the dark loft, but Durand knocked it ringing aside.
“Highness. He’s a boy—your son!”
The king lashed out once more, the blade darting slick as an adder’s tongue. Durand slipped and clashed the thing aside. Fiendish point and edges scissored at his face and shins. The blade slid with sudden wet terror over Durand’s jaw. And Durand was no dancer. This could not last.
“Please, Highness,” Durand managed. In an instant, he must strike back. But Ragnal was the king, and all of Errest the Old was bound to the man. All the wards. Every oath. If the maragrim could fight through now, they would run free with the wards thrown away.
“I will not endure it,” Ragnal panted, mashing a hand against his brow. “There are whispers within whispers within whispers. Circles and circles. The boy is the knife at my throat.”
The dead were all around. The shadows lapped cheekily even at the king’s sword, the old blood there. The man huffed a breath through his flared nostrils and leapt—not at Durand, but at the boy: the boy of four or five years cowering as his father raged. The sudden blade nearly struck home. But Durand half threw his sword in the king’s way, crashing bodily into the man and the railing. With the top-heavy force of it all, the king’s blade cracked wood and the two men pitched sickeningly over the brink. For a yawning instant, Durand felt the king’s hands upon him. He snatched at a rope—something from the iron chandelier. Then the stone floor struck like the end of Creation.
Blood filled Durand’s nostrils.
He could not draw a breath. There was a ringing.
A spinning flash revolved a step past his hand—the Evenstar crown of Saerdan the Voyager, rolling like a red-gold coin on the hall floor.
Above him, caught in the rope of chandelier, was the King of Errest, like a hooked fish thrashing. Durand saw the soles of the man’s boots.
“Hells,” gasped Durand. The flat fall had stamped the wind from him. He could do little more than gulp as the king kicked and kicked and then finally swung still.
Although the hall’s narrow windows had been shuttered and stopped with rags, slivers of light still reached the floor. Then the light wavered like guttering candles and the hall went dark. This would be the Vault of Heaven above them. Above Gunderic’s tower—above Errest the Old—the Heavens would bear the mark of a king’s murder. Durand had seen it before—rings upon the firmament as if a stone had plunged into still waters.
The rope creaked over Durand’s head—the only sound for an instant. A foot from Durand’s hand lay Ragnal’s High Kingdom sword. The hilt was corded with gold and studded with blobs of carnelian. The goldsmiths had made stern eagles of the cross. Durand noted this as he lay, twisting, on the floor.
A gale like a living thing was on the move over Creation, roaring over hills and forests and plowlands. It stormed around Gunderic’s Tower, rattling shutters and snatching the rags and finally blasting the shutters from their frames.
Durand pressed his face against the stone and the rushes, fighting tears. He felt wild flocks churn around the tower: there were starlings, sea eagles, even rooks in the maelstrom.
He heard a scream from the loft above him: the queen in the door, certainly. Engeled rushed to her son, catching up the little boy—the uncrowned King of Errest. Lifting him to her cheek. Durand saw her gazing down in astonishment at the corpse of her husband, her king. When the wind subsided, leaving its burden of leaves and thatch and branches heaped over Acconel, the first lords tried the doors of the Painted Hall.
Durand heard the child, the mother, the storm. The doors shook. Men bellowed their indignation. Damned Ragnal must’ve barred the doors.
Durand blinked hard, trying to crush the stupor from his skull. The crown of Errest with its fat sapphire was within arm’s reach. Then the doors were breached and the first fifty men roared through. Fighting men, priests
, and clerks. They screamed at the sight of the king, his purple tongue, his pop eyes. They roared at Durand, still gulping for air. The more capable found the cleat that hung the big chandelier and lowered the royal corpse to the floor. The most direct got hold of Durand Col and, railing against all traitors, ripped him from the floor, nearly jerking limbs from their sockets in their ardor to be first to exact their revenge.
“Here!” said a voice against the clamor. “Here, what is this?”
A man stood practically on top of Durand, arms raised, even throwing men back. Biedin, the youngest brother of Ragnal, calling the mob to heel.
“My brother is dead. We can all of us see that! But there is no rage or haste of ours that can do a thing to alter it.”
Men panted like hounds. Already, men had found the boy and brought him and his mother down by the little stairs. All of them saw it: the trembling child, the ashen mother.
All of them knew.
“He has not been as he should,” said Biedin. “I say only what we all must know.”
A knot of court functionaries bobbed in their black robes. Durand saw jowled Hod among them. In their faces, he read more glee than sorrow. Heremund Skald seemed to notice as well.
“You have all seen,” Biedin continued. “This was no mere man-slaying. It is tragedy, but it is no murder. And it is finished now.” Biedin looked over them all. “He is dead. There is only the boy now. And so we must get to Eldinor. The king is dead, and we must crown his son.”
From somewhere in the back ranks, Leovere put himself forward. “You mean to leave things as they stand?”
“Lord Leovere, the king is dead. You cannot expect the Great Council to meet without a king. We must return to Eldinor.”
“And Yrlac?”
“Without a contrary ruling, things must stand as Abravanal has left them.”
Durand had not seen Oredgar the Patriarch, but before Loevere could speak, Oredgar strode into the circle of lords, daring any to meet his terrible gaze. “It is enough, Lords of Errest. Ragnal is dead, and the land is unbound. In tatters fly the Wards of the Ancient Patriarchs.”
He crossed to the astonished boy; the men were only just covering the king’s livid face.
There was Lady Maud of Saerdana, seemingly ready to shelter the child, till a glance from the Patriarch made her reconsider. The old man raised his hands to Heaven.
“Host of Heaven, the king is dead, but here stands his heir!” he intoned.
Beyond the windows, a great croaking chant groaned up from every quarter, trembling in against the shutters and thrumming in the bones and stones and rolling like the sea.
“Heir, I anoint him. Reilan, I name him to you, son of Ragnal. King-to-be of Errest the Old.” The Patriarch stooped like a striking eagle. He marked the Eye of Heaven on the boy’s brow with his long thumbs.
Durand saw the Herald of Errest, silent as ever, bow low to the boy.
“By our prayers, now, we hold the wards—every priest and monk and brother, by will and prayer alone, until the Rite in Eldinor is complete.”
The Patriarch flashed fierce eyes at the Lord of Penseval.
“The wards are parting,” he said. “We will sail half-blind under a ragged sky and still not see Eldinor for two days more. My brothers will not eat. They will not sleep. The boy must keep vigil of his own: three days under stone. Three days in the crypt of his fathers. Three days to test the mettle of his heart. My brothers will not take a drop to drink while they keep this vigil, while they hold the parting threads of the wards in their hands.”
Leovere did not answer.
“Not in a hundred winters has our vigil been so long. And you speak of biding in this place and playing court. Not in a thousand winters have the wards been so sorely tested! And not in all the days since Saerdan Voyager have the thralls of the Enemy stalked the roads of our realm. You would squabble till the kingdom falls.
“We must leave at once. The boy must be taken to the high sanctuary of Eldinor. The right of kingship cannot be delayed. He must be given over to the venerable Semborin the High Patriarch and keep his vigil under stone or the realm will be swept away and all your titles, lands, and jealousies with it!”
Leovere looked to Durand, then turned on his heel.
What would he do?
Biedin offered Durand his hand. “Watch Leovere. He will not wait now, but there is nothing for it. We cannot stay.”
Durand looked into the prince’s face. So much could have gone so badly wrong. “I thank you, Your Grace.”
“My nephew is to be king. There is time for neither blame nor mourning. Eldinor is a hundred leagues, and there isn’t a moment to be spared.” Biedin ordered his grim cadre of fighting men to search the harbor and seize the likeliest ship for the prince. Maud of Saerdana comforted the queen and the royal heir while sending her best men to the quay to do the same. In an hour, there wouldn’t be a rowboat left in Acconel.
Ragnal’s court lackeys scuttled out on the heels of knights and princes. Durand saw Heremund watching his old friend, Hod, among them.
* * *
WITHIN MOMENTS, MESSENGERS on the swiftest horses were flying from the gates of Acconel. The rest roared for the strongest ships in the harbor, and the contingent from Gireth gathered Durand up.
In the Painted Hall, the time had come for a council of war. On one hand, there was the iron-wheel chandelier with its upset candles. On the other, the smeared patch where Ragnal’s men had dragged the bear.
“I had no thought of killing the man,” Durand began.
“Oh, of course not,” said Deorwen. Two of Gireth’s allies had not joined the mob heading to the harbor. Durand knew Alret, Duke of Garelyn, with his long mustaches, and the dark, lean swordsman, Moryn of Mornaway, son of the aged Duke of Mornaway—and brother to Deorwen. The two men bowed.
“The poor devil,” said Kieren, “it was too much for him. Kingship. By all accounts, he was a good man. But you saw him at the end. Now, it will be the boy.”
“The realm will fall if Reilan goes as his father did,” said Deorwen, and they all felt the Powers in these words.
Abravanal stared into Deorwen’s face, his pale blue eyes almost opaque.
Kieren intervened. “Your Grace, my men at the West Bridge tell me that our friend Leovere is over the bridge and riding for Ferangore already. You were meant to have stopped him before he left, I suspect. You’ll never make a tyrant at this rate.”
“The devils! We should have hung the man ten years ago!”
Kieren looked to Durand then. “I’m not sure about you either, Your Grace. It’ll be your dukedom that Leovere’s after, I’d guess.” The man blew out his cheeks.
“We will need to muster the host,” said Abravanal. “We have no priests left to us. And he has summoned God-knows from the forest. We must strike him down!”
“He might be made to cast the thralls back across the mountains,” said Deorwen.
Alret of Garelyn spoke with a narrow eye. “Or they scatter when he’s dead.”
“Coensar, you must summon the host,” said Abravanal.
“Your Grace.”
Lord Moryn interrupted. “Coensar, you must do what you can. But, Abravanal, you will have no time to call them all. And half, at least, will be locked up in their halls with these maragrim thralls banging at their gates.”
Durand hadn’t expected the man to know so much about the maragrim. Moryn must have seen something in Durand’s face.
“My sister is not mute, Durand Col,” he said. “And I have with me three score men of my father’s household guard. They are yours if you wish them.”
Abravanal grinned, clutching the man’s arm, and rawboned Alret of Garelyn winked.
“You’re welcome to me and mine as well,” said Garelyn. “I didn’t come with the whole pack of knights back home, but I’d planned on bringing enough company with me to keep the rest of Their Graces from starting anything. Such men as might be useful now, I think.”
Dura
nd cast him a grateful look.
“Now then,” continued Garelyn, “I say gather up every man who will answer today, and we will see what we have. I won’t throw my lads away.”
Garelyn and Mornaway bowed and took their leave.
Ships were found. Riders pelted off in a hundred directions. The queen, the prince, and the king-to-be—and all the starling functionaries of Ragnal’s diseased court—left for the quay of Acconel.
Durand sat with Abravanal, Kieren, Deorwen, and Almora in dazed silence. Around the perimeter of the Hall, Durand’s dead companions milled and shuffled. He saw Sir Waer from the cliffs of Tern Gyre and the moon-faced giant of Valdura.
Now, he only waited for the king.
“I know it is foolish,” said Abravanal, “but I feel so damnably pleased with myself.” He glanced in Durand’s direction, and Durand could not guess what he saw there.
“Oh, Durand. Do not think me mad. I know all of this about the king and Leovere, but I feel so very alive now. You cannot understand because you have always been an active man. But I have sat at the high table in this black hall and let events wash over me for a good long while now. It is true and I know it. That Great Council, Maud and Beoran, and that Highshields spider, their vote would have snatched Yrlac from us.” He gave his palm a fierce smack.
Then he faltered, a cloud of doubt passing over his features. “Almora, you are happy, aren’t you? I did not mean to harm you.”
Almora smiled. It was a very gentle thing. She reached out and took Durand’s hand. “I am happy, Father. Sir Durand has cared for me since I was a child.”
“I would do nothing against your will,” said Abravanal. “Everything I would undo, if you should say so.”
“I know, Father. I have always known it.”
Durand felt the girl squeeze his fingers. He saw Deorwen looking on, her face unreadable. Here he was trapped in women’s business—marriages and deaths and children.
“Your Grace,” prompted Kieren. “We’ll need you down to the quay, and we should round up the captains we can find. If you would join Coensar and I, we can begin assembling a host before this fleet of peers can ship anchor.” Abravanal nodded. He touched Durand’s shoulder, then cupped Almora’s cheek. And in a swirl of bluff talk and flying cloaks, dukes and stewards left.