She took both of them in with a penetrating look. “You know who Nylan’s real father is, don’t you?”
Flannery nodded and looked down at her hands. Jarlyth blew out his breath. “Emperor Savoni.”
“Good. Otherwise, this entire story might have seemed like the ramblings of an old woman to no good purpose, but I assure you, there is a purpose.”
She focused on Jarlyth then, and he felt caught in her bright golden gaze. “You’ve come here for my help.”
“Yes.”
“I would have sent you any if I had it to give, child,” she whispered. “I am sorry. I can only advise you.”
“I just need more people to help search—” he began, desperate not to be shunted off again and shocked that Tristella seemed to be doing just that.
“That isn’t going to make any difference. You’ll never find him by searching the world a length at a time.”
“But—”
She shook her head, silencing him. “If anyone is going to have answers, it will be Savoni. If he doesn’t have answers, he is in the best position to help you find them.”
Jarlyth shot up from his chair and backed away from the woman, aghast. “Go to the Blood Emperor? Are you insane?”
“Jary—” she began.
“No! He’s a waerlok! You know better than anyone that he’s a murderer. And a tyrant. He sends waves and waves of raiders to tear my country apart. That village where I met Vail? His men had destroyed it. He’s responsible for what happened to me!”
“And my daughter loved him very much.” Tristella said this quietly, but the regret filled her voice, overflowing into the room so strongly, even Jarlyth’s weak Sensitivity could feel it.
Flannery looked from the queen to Jarlyth and back again. “How could she love him? Did he enchant her?”
The regret grew, and Jarlyth felt tears stinging his eyes at the strength of it. He focused and centered and rubbed at his nose. And hoped the queen would answer.
She did, at last. “It is a mistake to think that people who do evil must be hateful. Often, they are quite the opposite: beautiful, charming, lovely. He had changed too much for me, and I could never overlook what he’d become, but he is still an amazing man. Like nothing Veda had ever before encountered. I thought I’d lost her forever.
“And then, very abruptly, she left him. She came home. Almost at once, she left again for Serathon. She’d already made the arrangements. She promised me she’d redeem herself in my eyes and form a great alliance of the two houses at last. SanClare and Voyavel together.”
“She was already pregnant.” Jarlyth put the pieces together as the queen wanted him to. “But...a year?”
Tristella smiled. “It is one of our little secrets, dear boy. We Voyavels take more than a year to bring our heirs into the world. All that extra life takes a bit longer to build into a child, I suppose.”
“She wanted him to be SanClare.” Flannery’s expression had grown more closed and unreadable than ever.
“She wanted him to be seen to be a SanClare but without the dangers attendant on being the SanClare,” Tristella said.
The SanClare. Jarlyth had known, but he hadn’t truly thought about what it meant.
“First Born of the First Born,” he breathed.
“True heir to the throne of the One Kingdom,” Tristella said. “Which makes Nylan—”
“A threat to Teodor’s throne,” Flannery finished.
Jarlyth turned sharply and stared at the young woman. “You think he was behind Nylan’s abduction?”
“He has motive, and he certainly would have known how to get around the priory’s protections.”
Tristella looked doubtful. “I don’t know...but it’s somewhere there. At that Court. I hope you’ve been careful.”
“We have,” Jarlyth promised, but he felt stupid. He’d been so focused on finding Nylan, he realized he’d all but overlooked this more dangerous question. Who did have Nylan taken? And why?
Tristella saw it in his eyes and gave him a very sad smile. “I wish I knew the answer to that, but if I did, I would have destroyed them myself already. No. This mystery is still all tangled. I can only help point you toward a better chance of solving it, child. I wish to Vail I could do more.”
“But Savoni?” Jarlyth felt wrung out and sick and exhausted. And scared.
“Veda was already pregnant when she learned that he didn’t want an heir. He wants to go on ruling as long as his power allows. Even a long-lived heir is a threat, especially when one has enemies who might prefer a younger, less established, more-easily-led ruler over, as you say, a tyrant.”
Jarlyth crossed the room and dropped back into his chair. He stared off at nothing, the carpet blurring before his eyes. This was a mistake. She’s insane. “Why would he help me if that’s true?”
“Because I believe he really loved Veda. He made her promises, and he never broke any of them. He allowed her to leave him and marry another and have their child because he knew it was what she wanted, and he wanted her to be happy.”
Jarlyth flailed for an argument. “What if I’m wrong? What if Nylan is dead, and I’m mad, just like they all say?”
“You aren’t mad—” Flannery said, ever-patient.
At the same time, Tristella said, “Of course you aren’t wrong. You are his warder, blessed by Vail. If you say he lives, then he lives. It is your gift to know this.”
Silence enveloped them, and they all sat with their thoughts for a long time.
Finally, Jarlyth rasped, “It’s treason. I can’t do it.”
“Of course you can,” the queen said, and she stood up as if the matter were decided. She held out her charm, breathed, “finished,” and strung the chain back around her neck.
“But—” Jarlyth stumbled to his feet in her wake, horrified.
“You can do whatever you have to do to save him,” Tristella said, firm. “It’s what you were born for. It is what Vail made you for.”
She smiled her beautiful smile at him one last time. “You love him, and that gives you greater power than any the Blood Emperor or anyone else possesses. Don’t be afraid. Vail walks with you.”
# # #
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Michael quickly lost track of how many days had passed since he’d been branded and outcast. The constant struggle for the most basic survival consumed everything. He was always hungry now, always cold, always exhausted. Everyone seemed to immediately notice the brand, and after that, any help he might otherwise have been able to beg from them was withdrawn.
Sometimes he was even chased off by people who seemed angry that he existed. They’d run after him, hurling cruel words and hurtful objects to make him go away.
They could just have told me to leave. I wouldn’t have stayed if they’d said to go. But no one would help him. Even the other kiska children who roamed the streets in small packs avoided him.
After a few days, Cyra found him. She looked as if she’d had her own difficult adventures, and Michael could easily imagine the vengeful Mabbina harming the small cat because he had healed her. He didn’t bother to wonder how she’d found him in the maze of Fensgate; he was only glad that she had.
Most people wouldn’t even meet his eyes. Michael felt as if he’d turned invisible the moment the brand had touched his hand. But he wasn’t invisible enough. While most people ignored him, some took his heretic status as a license to do as they wished to him.
Just like Robyn said. No one cares. He’d known this was true, but living it was worse than he could have imagined.
He’d believed he would be safe in the daytime, especially if he stayed near people, but everyone had diligently ignored what was happening. They’d pretended not to notice as that first man had dragged him—screaming and struggling—down an alley.
After that first time, Michael was forced to accept that he was truly alone. The man had called him the worst names he’d ever heard, though he only understood them due to his witch powers. The
man seemed to be blaming Michael for what happened, blaming Michael for his beauty, blaming him for being unprotected. Blaming him.
“If you want to survive...” He heard Robyn’s words in his head several times every day as if they asked a question whose answer might change at any moment.
So far, the answer had always been, “Yes, I want to survive.”
Michael tried to teach himself to be alert and wary, to notice everything and everyone all the time, to always know where the dangers might be hiding, to always have more than one escape route picked out. He could hide well and had always been a fast runner, but his greatest skill from before turned out to be climbing.
He remembered that people tended not to look up and had rarely ever known he was sitting in a tree right above them unless he’d called himself to their attention. He turned that fact to his advantage.
He climbed the ragged sides of the rundown Fensgate buildings and came to know some of them so well he could climb them very quickly.
He next mastered the trick of sleeping on the narrow ledges under the eaves of those same buildings, though the learning process had involved a few very scary moments of almost-falling. He still wondered at his own determination not to fall, but he tried not to think about it too much. He knew if he began asking himself such questions, he would never be able to stop until he’d worked himself into despair.
But he learned all of his new skills far more slowly than he wanted to, and he learned everything the hard way, since there was no one to help him and no one to even ask. As the moons passed, he escaped the predators more and more often, and Cyra always found him, no matter how far he’d had to run from their last hiding place.
He learned to find food by foraging in refuse bins behind inns and pubs. After only a very few days, his hunger did away with any revulsion. Food was food, though he never seemed to find enough to feel truly satisfied.
He did find some places that seemed to always throw out good things—almost as if they knew scavengers would be hoping to find something—and he frequented those bins as often as he could. He thought of those places as friends and imagined names and faces of the kind people who left the food. He wished he had paper and pencil to draw them so he could see their faces somewhere besides his mind.
But he learned that there was no way to escape from danger entirely. Though it happened much less often as he became more streetwise, there were still times he couldn’t get away from the predators. Sometimes the same ones would track him down again. More than once, there had been too many of them, working together to trap him. Sometimes they only wanted to scare him, shoving him around and taunting him for being a heretic. Usually, however, they wanted to look at his face while they used his body.
Some of them even seemed to think they were doing him a favor, and they would give him coppers or food as if that made it all right. What he hated most was that he couldn’t bring himself to refuse these horrifying gestures. He spent the money and ate the food and hated himself for it and hated them all the more.
He hated almost as much the excited feeling that would come over him when one of these people actually spoke to him as if he existed, as if they saw him.
Because worse than anything that was happening to him was the utter loneliness of his situation. And it was this loneliness which led him to risk the Festival of Kings.
The festival was something Michael had only ever heard of before—JhaPel had never allowed its children to attend anything so frivolous—but he knew it had something to do with the old SanClare kings and the One Kingdom, and it was the one time every year when people felt really free to talk about that part of their history. Pol had said that the royal family still pretended they paid allegiance to the SanClares, but it was all for show.
At least the festival survived—a day when roles were reversed and servants and lowborns played and ate like highborns and the highborns fetched their own slippers and brewed their own tea. That it was also the final night of autumn allowed those who feared to even mention the One Kingdom to enjoy the day as a celebration of the harvest.
According to Pol, who had gone to the festival back when his mother was still alive, there would be plenty of dancing and plenty of food and drink, and it would be free to any and all.
Michael couldn’t resist such a promise, living so close to starvation as he did. He was always hungry and always cold—except on the worst days of summer when the bricks and tiles and stones all burned and roof tar melted.
He felt sick and weak most of the time, now, and sometimes he would become so dizzy while climbing, he’d have to cling to the building wall until the feeling passed. He was lucky never to have fallen. Or unlucky.
He’d stolen a few times but feared being caught and burned for the crime. The rare hunk of bread here, a piece of fruit there, a somewhat less tattered shirt another time. He only did this late at night when no one was around to catch him and the opportunity too easy to pass up.
Maybe I’ll find Pol at the festival. Practically everyone in Fensgate would be there—that’s what everyone at JhaPel had always said.
He hadn’t tried to look for Pol or any of his friends since he’d been branded. He knew he was nothing but bad luck and danger now. If Pol were the friend Michael knew him to be, he would risk his own safety to help, and Michael couldn’t let him do that.
But if we happen to meet up at the festival...
Michael climbed down from his hiding place a little before sundown and used the rain barrel behind the baker’s shop to wash up in. He knew he was a mess. The weather had been miserable and rainy, though it had miraculously cleared up that day as if in anticipation of the night’s celebration, and he felt damp and muddy and thoroughly disgusting.
He’d been caught only once that quarter-moon, but his knees still hurt from when the man had shoved him to the ground. He had been abrupt but single-minded. At least he hadn’t been the sort who liked hurting more than anything. It had been straightforward, revolting, but mercifully quick.
Michael had been able to sleep more this quarter-moon, too. Compared to his usual state, he felt almost well. Anticipating the food he’d be eating this night made him feel even better.
He washed himself as clean as he could get without a change of clothes. His hair had grown longer than ever over the endless days and nights since his banishment, but all he could do was comb it out of his face with his fingers. He didn’t have anything to tie it back with, and so it was always in his way. He wished he could just cut it all off, but he had nothing to do that with, either.
He tried not to think ahead to the coming days and the already-encroaching cold weather which would only grow colder. He always tried not to think ahead. Nothing good could come of that, and he wanted to enjoy this night at least.
No one seemed to be around when he emerged from the alley after carefully looking in all directions to see if any dangers awaited him. The sun was setting, and the streets were empty. The festival must be getting started.
Michael slipped out from the shadowed alley, staying close to the buildings as he hurried toward the promised feast. He could hear the music and voices grow louder as he approached, and he had a moment of almost-remembering—of having been in such a place before, experiencing such things—that was so strong he was nearly sick.
He’d never had such a moment before, and it frightened him. Now wouldn’t be a good time to remember, he thought miserably. What good would it do to remember now that I’m damned?
He did his best to shake off the feeling and started toward the festival lights once more, but his initial excitement was dampened until he rounded the corner and found the festival stretched out before him.
It was far more than he’d dreamed. He’d never seen such a beautiful sight, as if all of Fensgate had been set ablaze with color and light and happiness. A large stage was set up at the far end of an enormous open space he hadn’t even known existed in Fensgate, and at least twenty musicians were playing music so cheerful,
Michael couldn’t help but smile.
Some people had already started dancing, but most were gathered around what seemed countless tables, filling plates with tastes of all the foods arrayed there. Michael hoped if he slipped carefully amongst the crowds, few would notice his brand. He hoped they’d assume him to be someone’s son. There were plenty of boys and girls around his age and younger.
He started looking for Pol as he moved toward the food tables, but as he drew nearer, the delicious smells wiped all thoughts of his friend from Michael’s mind.
Carefully not-hiding his branded hand, he nevertheless tried not to show it too obviously as he began to select food stuffs from the nearest table. No one seemed to take any notice of him except to bestow distracted, even welcoming, smiles. Michael knew this would not last, but while it did, he was determined to appreciate it as completely as was possible.
For the next hour, Michael ate his fill for the first time since his stay at Robyn’s house. He hadn’t eaten so well even at the charity hospital, and after the first rush of starved bolting, he slowed and began to savor each new taste.
He ate until he felt he couldn’t manage another bite, and a grin spread across his face in delight at this practically-unknown sensation.
Full but still dazzled by all the food, he wandered away from the tables to look at the little kiosks set up, all offering cheap, pretty things as part of the celebration. If he had a copper, Michael knew he would have spent it just to have a memento of this sparkling night.
The dancing caught his attention next, and he wished he could join in. The music was so joyous and free, he wanted to fall into the whirl and be swept away in it. Everyone looked so happy, and their emotions flowed all around him. He almost cried at the beauty of it. I wish...
So in tune was he with the mood of the crowd, he noticed at once when it altered. Outsiders had come. Highborns. Dressed as if for a Masque, they had slipped in around the edges of the festival and were now beginning to make their presence known, profaning this single night’s promise of plenty and equality for all with their expectations of being entertained.
SanClare Black (The Prince of Sorrows) Page 18