The Fatal Child

by John Dickinson

  ‘But I have a question for you now,’ the King said, leaning forward. ‘It is this: I think you did not come here alone. Where is the one who helped you?’

  ‘I did come alone – unless you mean my servant.’

  ‘That is who I meant. Where is she?’

  ‘She is sick. She lies in the inn.’

  ‘Did she fall sick on the way?’

  ‘She was ill to begin with, but she has become worse.’

  Melissa wondered why she did not say that the woman might die.

  ‘How long has she been your servant?’

  ‘As long as I can remember.’

  ‘Was it her choice that she should come with you, or yours?’

  The girl looked puzzled by the question. ‘I was coming to find you. Of course she came with me.’

  ‘Remember that I did not ask you to come. And I did not ask you to bring one who was sick and might suffer on the journey.’

  The girl said nothing.

  ‘Who is caring for her now?’

  Again the girl did not answer.

  ‘I believe,’ said the King, ‘that your servant has given many years for you. I fear she may now be giving her life. You should give what care you can to her in return. Shouldn’t you?’

  The princess looked at him coldly. ‘Is this your judgement?’ she asked.

  ‘Not yet. Later, when we know what becomes of her, I will judge both you and me.’

  She did not bow or grovel as the red knight had done. She turned and walked back to her place in the circle. She looked small and alone, but also, Melissa thought, very, very fine. She had not been frightened at all. And she had spoken so beautifully – all the time! She had even stopped the King, who seemed to know everything, and had made him think. How wonderful, to be able to speak like that!

  Melissa’s eyes followed the princess in the dark-grey hood. Even as she admired her, she felt sorry for her. Because the King had been right. She was very calm and strong on the outside but still there was something wrong. Melissa knew that. She remembered the way the princess had sat in the long room with the wails of her servant filling the air around her. She hadn’t been lifting a finger to help. She had just been sitting there, as if she were fixed by some great, quiet pain and were as feeble as the woman on the bed. Maybe it was just knowing that the woman was dying. Maybe it was something even worse. Melissa could not guess.

  She wanted to go after the princess, to comfort her if she could and to tell her that she would help look after the hillwoman at the inn. But her legs were weak. She did not know if she would be allowed to get up from where she had been made to sit. And the princess had not stopped when she had reached the edge of the circle. She was still walking away, followed by two men from the inn. Melissa knew she would never be able to catch her without help.

  She watched the small, hooded head and shoulders disappear below the brow of the hill.

  VII

  Over Wine

  ay I speak to you,’ said Padry, ‘as a master to a former pupil?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Ambrose of Tarceny.

  They were at supper together outside the big stone lodge that stood on one side of the bay at Aclete. Lex was there. So was the Baron Lackmere, who had brought Ambrose’s invitation just as Lex and Padry had been contemplating another meal of root broth in their mean lodgings. Now there was pale wine in the bowls before them, and on the table were olives, fresh bread and spitted lake-fish that gave off a delicious scent of seared oils. The wind had dropped (thank the Angels!). Only the lightest airs stirred the vine-leaves above their table. A little warmth had stolen into the evening. The great hillside across the bay was alight with the sunset.

  ‘Well,’ said Padry, ‘as a master, praise first. I have seen many a lord hold his court and I could have wished that some of them had been with me in yours today. Too many lords judge as if justice were an instrument of their lordship. Others treat all judgement as a waste of their time and a demand on brains that they do not like to use. You, however, judge as if justice were truth, and it is your task to find it. This is good.’

  ‘If you flatter me, Master Padry, I shall flatter you back. Develin taught me. I try to follow as I was taught.’

  Padry nodded. Even now, supping with this young witch-king, he could feel the little glow of a teacher who sees evidence of his own work in the man before him.

  ‘I have two more points,’ he said carefully. ‘Will you listen to them?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘My first is the Lady Astria diBaldwin.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ambrose wryly. ‘I did not think to be put so firmly in my place by a twelve-year-old.’

  ‘She is fourteen, although she looks younger. She is of great interest to the King.’

  ‘Really?’ said the Baron Lackmere. ‘I thought that pup was interested in nothing this side of his harbour wall.’

  ‘The King,’ Padry said rather grimly, ‘is interested in everything that he should be interested in. To some extent this is the duty of his advisers.’ And he wondered just how widely in the Kingdom Gueronius’s hair-brained dreams of exploration were known.

  ‘I see,’ said Ambrose.

  ‘My advice – my very firm advice – is that you have nothing to do with her suit and that you return her at once to Tuscolo. My colleague and I can escort her, at least until I can command better protection. If you choose to send messages of loyalty to the King at the same time, I suspect it is possible that the King will in return confirm you in your ancestral holding of the March of Tarceny, and perhaps even your mother’s manors around the fortress of Trant.’

  ‘This is the sort of gift that costs a king nothing but paper and ink,’ growled Lackmere. ‘The March, such as it is, is beyond his reach. And Trant is waste, and the fortress a ruin. If we were to part with the heir to one of the seven houses, particularly that house, it would not be for less than’ – the baron knitted his brows – ‘fifty thousand crowns.’

  ‘Out of the question,’ said Padry promptly.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it would cost the King less to come and fetch her – and hang any who stood in his way. Of course’ – Padry shrugged elaborately – ‘it is not impossible that the King might agree to defray any costs of the child’s keep that a loyal subject had incurred, but—’

  ‘We can’t send her back,’ said Ambrose.

  ‘Why not?’ said the baron.

  Indeed, why not? thought Padry, carefully putting down his wine bowl. He had been prepared for a ransom demand (although how he might slip fifty thousand, or even five thousand, out of Gueronius’s starving treasury was another question!). He had also weighed the risk that his hosts might imagine he himself would be worth a ransom.

  But he did not at all like the finality with which the young lord of Tarceny had spoken. She must come back. One way or another, she must.

  ‘She appealed to me for justice against Gueronius,’ said Ambrose. ‘Before witnesses from many places. Gueronius will consider that treason. The penalty for treason is—’

  ‘But these were the words of a child!’ Padry protested. ‘A child well-schooled in speech, to be sure, but she knows nothing of politics. And Gueronius does not execute children.’

  ‘Children can be made to die without ever climbing a scaffold,’ said Ambrose.

  ‘True,’ said Lackmere. ‘Although at fourteen a child is old enough to marry or stand trial as may be. And I would say that one who calls for justice against a crowned king must accept what follows, be they child or no.’

  Padry gritted his teeth. The baron was right. Atti would have known exactly what she was doing. After the fate of her family, after seeing the storming of the castle at Velis herself, she knew that death came swiftly to those who meddled in politics. It was dreadful to think that she valued her present life so little that she was willing to risk it on a wild adventure.

  Atti! Wilful child!

  ‘She will not be harmed if she returns,’ he said. ‘You
have my word on it.’

  ‘And what is your word worth?’ asked Lackmere.

  ‘In this case, my life,’ said Padry.

  They looked at him curiously.

  ‘I myself rescued her from the sack of the citadel at Velis,’ he said. ‘In a sense I adopted her. I arranged for her to be placed in the convent at Tuscolo. She was not happy there. I was thinking that perhaps I should take her directly into my own care, but…’

  Their faces hardened. And of course there were difficulties. He knew it as well as they did. He had not the time. And a clerk, however exalted, could hardly be given charge of the raising of a young aristocrat – well, except as a very temporary measure, perhaps. (How stupid the world was!)

  ‘She knows me as “Uncle Thomas”,’ he said.

  ‘I see,’ said Ambrose carefully.

  They did not trust him. He could read it in their eyes.

  ‘I think … Despite what you say, Master Padry, I do not think she should return to Tuscolo. I am sorry.’

  ‘May I at least see her and speak with her?’ Padry pleaded. ‘It may be that of her own free will—’

  ‘No.’

  Padry sat back slowly and looked out over the water. The sun was down and the bay was in shadow. But the top of the broad knoll opposite still glowed that bright yellow gold that earlier had touched his heart. No longer. He remembered the name of the hill. Talifer’s Knoll: named, presumably, after that same gaunt, deformed Talifer who had led him through the witch-world to this place.

  All that misery, all that trial, for nothing!

  ‘I swear,’ he said, aware that his voice was trembling. ‘If she returns with me, she will come to no harm.’

  ‘It is in my mind to ask you, Master Chancellor,’ said the baron, ‘if she returns with you, what you think might and might not count as “harm”.’

  ‘I forgive you your vile insinuation,’ said Padry heavily. ‘Although I do not like to be lectured in morals by a man who feuds with his own son.’

  Lackmere glared at him. ‘Blood of Angels! If you were a knight—’

  ‘Stop!’ cried Ambrose, slamming the table with the flat of his hand so that the crockery jumped. Padry jumped, too.

  ‘Master Padry,’ said Ambrose, looking hard at him, ‘there is peace between Aun and his son – peace, if perhaps no embrace. And you have strayed from the Path, I think. You should apologize.’

  Apologize! Padry gasped. Apologize for reacting to that filthy, base, shameful charge! He would sooner—

  Someone else was standing by the table.

  It was a woman, dark-haired, in a plain dull robe that hung all the way to her feet. There was something immediately familiar about her – a likeness to the young Lord of Tarceny, who was looking up at her in surprise. Her face was more oval than his and less long. But the stamp of the eyes and nose was the same. An elder sister? A half-sister? Padry had not heard that there was one.

  And he had not seen her approach. Suddenly she had just been there.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ she said. ‘I am late.’

  ‘You come in your own time,’ said Ambrose as the men all rose to their feet. ‘And I give thanks to Michael and Raphael that you have. Mother, may I introduce Thomas Padry, who is chancellor to King Gueronius, and his colleague Lex, who was once a student with me in Develin?’

  ‘Thanks to the Angels, sirs, that they have guarded you on your journey here.’

  ‘Amen,’ said Padry automatically as he rose from his bow to take her hands. He was thinking: Mother! So now this journey had brought him to meet not only a pair of ancient princes, but also Phaedra of Trant, once infamous in the Kingdom as the runaway bride of old Tarceny! Inwardly he was still fired with anger and outrage, but in her presence there was nothing he could do with it. It was embarrassing that such a woman, of such a name, should have appeared and caught him with his feelings running so far ahead of his wits, as if he were a schoolchild with a tantrum.

  His second feeling was one of awe.

  To meet her in the life was extraordinary – this solemn-eyed woman with a lightness to her touch that was … well, not frail, but less substantial than it should be, as if she were not altogether flesh and bone. He studied her curiously as she turned to greet Lex. She looked young – or untouched by age, at least. Certainly she seemed younger than she should be, to be the mother of a grown man.

  They settled in silence around the table again. Ambrose did not call to the house for a place to be laid for his mother. He simply passed down the bread. She took it, broke off a small piece and put it into her mouth, chewing slowly. She was watching them. She looked as if she knew exactly what was going on. Perhaps she did. She had made her appearance, pat, just as matters at the table had started to slide towards disaster. And her interruption had given Padry the chance to think again.

  ‘Sir,’ he said slowly to the baron, ‘I spoke in haste. I beg you to pardon it.’

  The baron looked hard at him, and then nodded grimly.

  Now he could begin once more. (Even though the wretched man had not offered a word of regret for the far, far worse things he had said! Really! But control yourself, Thomas Padry. A philosopher must not be slave to passion. You are here for a purpose.)

  ‘I understand,’ he said to Ambrose, ‘that you would refuse me.’

  ‘For her safety – yes.’

  ‘Well,’ said Padry, taking a deep breath, ‘I had three points. On this, my second, I think you are choosing to offend against the King. Will you hear my third?’

  ‘Of course.’

  At the end of the table the woman broke off another small piece of bread and held it in her fingers. She looked at him as if she could hear his thoughts spoken aloud. Words jumped in Padry’s memory: Such a one eats only because it helps to remember. Her face was like a pool that hid secrets below its surface.

  ‘It concerns the practice of witchcraft,’ he said.

  The men eyed him warily. He put both his hands on the table to show that he held no iron in them. Tonight, his weapon would be his tongue.

  ‘I need not remind you that witchcraft is abominated by the Church,’ he said coldly. ‘And that the Church has the ear of King and noble alike. Even in Develin – you may not have been aware of this – we were occasionally troubled by querulous bishops who felt that our studies had gone too far in certain directions. Your house, of course, has the reputation of having gone much further. The manner in which I was brought here confirms to me that this reputation is not unfounded. The manner and willingness with which that man Bavar came to put his head on your block says the same. I believe I heard him say you had commanded him in a dream.’

  ‘I did. Although I would not call it witchcraft.’

  ‘What would you call it, then?’

  Ambrose shrugged. ‘If any speak of it in the March, they give it the name “under-craft”.’

  ‘A name that only conceals its nature,’ said Padry harshly.

  The hands of the baron had slipped out of sight. Padry knew there could be a knife within inches of his belly. Still he did not care. There was just one thing that he was playing for. She must come home. He would risk everything – himself and Lex, too, if he must – for that.

  ‘The Lady Astria has seen you in dreams also,’ he said. ‘I know this.’

  ‘So now you are threatening me,’ said Ambrose.

  ‘I am saying that if you choose to make enemies, you give your enemies the chance to work a great alliance against you.’

  At the end of the table the woman sat very still. But she was not looking at him any more. She was looking at her son.

  ‘Ambrose,’ she said, ‘is this true?’

  He glanced at her, and shrugged again.

  ‘About Astria? Yes.’

  ‘Then – I agree with your guest. I think she should not stay with you.’

  Ambrose frowned. Padry almost cheered.

  ‘Why not?’ said Ambrose. ‘You think she should go back to Tuscolo?’

&nbs
p; She looked at Padry, and his heart sank once more.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  No. Again! Why were they so set against him?

  ‘But she has no claim on you either, Ambrose,’ the woman said.

  ‘I think she may have.’

  ‘Why? You were right this morning. You were right to deny her suit and you were right about her. What thought had she given to her servant, who had come all this way with her? Does she grieve that the woman might die? No. But that she might lose the last thing she controls – yes, that gives her grief, it seems!’

  ‘I thought so, too,’ said the baron.

  In a daze Padry wondered how they could be so unjust to Atti. Gadi was the girl’s last link to her old life. Now she might lose her. She would need him now more than ever, he thought. And they would not let him go to her. They would not let him!

  Ambrose was looking at his mother. A slight smile played around his lips. ‘The judgement – you saw all that?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Hah! And yet if I get Rolfe to show me things, you start to worry.’

  ‘It is different, Ambrose. You know that. And if you have approached her in a dream, then yes, I worry!’

  ‘Don’t. Or if you must worry, worry about something that needs worrying about. Astria has lived well, at least outwardly. But take that other girl they brought to me today. I remember her when she was six. She’d been helping her parents in their fields and in their hut since she could walk. She’s never known anything else. Of course, you say. That’s always been the way, and there are tens of thousands like her across the Kingdom. But it hasn’t always been the way! The priests used to run schools that even the poorest could go to. All that has been lost. Why? If I wore the crown in Tuscolo I could do something about it. Here, I can’t even begin. And now she’s an orphan, because of a stupid, petty act of brigandage that almost went unnoticed. What’s to be done about orphans? That friary we set up today—’

  ‘It isn’t the poor, Ambrose. It isn’t the children. It’s you.’

  ‘Me?’ said Ambrose cheerfully. ‘All right. Then maybe you should worry about this.’ He picked up his drinking bowl, turning it so that the pale liquid swirled around the rim. ‘Wine. This is the only place in the March I can get it, and I can’t get enough. I’m sick of lying on wet ferns and drinking well-water that tastes of someone’s lavatory. Does Gueronius drink wine every day, Master Padry?’