Echoes of Betrayal

by Elizabeth Moon

  They did not stop except to rest the horses and in the dusk met the first outer guards of the household. A messenger rode on to alert the household that the Duke was on the way.

  When they reached the house, torchlight glittered on the snow outside and the house windows blazed with light. Servants came with a padded chair to carry the Duke inside; Beclan started to follow and then looked back at Dorrin. “My lord?” he said just as his mother, Celbrin, appeared, wrapped in a fur cape.

  She grabbed Beclan and hugged him, then turned to Duke Mahieran. “If that person is out there in the dark, I will not have that person in my house! She nearly killed our son—and now you come home injured—”

  “If by ‘that person’ you mean Duke Verrakai, she is welcome here as my guest,” Mahieran said.

  “You can’t mean that! And I won’t have it.” She pushed past Beclan to scream at Dorrin. “You sent your own mother to her death; you killed your own father. You nearly killed my son and the Duke! You should have been killed with the rest of the Verrakai—better ones died and you still live!”

  Before Dorrin could speak or move, Celbrin yanked a long curved knife from under her cape and thrust it at Dorrin. Only the years of training and war made it possible to flinch aside; the knife grazed her shoulder but did not penetrate her mail.

  “I’ll kill you!” Celbrin said, lunging again. But Beclan had moved, grabbing her arm and pulling her away. “Let me go!” she cried, flailing at him with her empty hand.

  “No,” Beclan said. He took hold of her other arm, and held her firmly.

  “Then she’s enchanted you—”

  “She’s saved my life,” Beclan said. “And Father’s. It was not her fault.”

  “Drop the knife, Celbrin,” Mahieran said. He waved servants forward. “Take it, if she will not drop it.”

  “You will find out!” Celbrin said, her voice still high and shrill. “She is not what she pretends to be. She brings doom with her.” She spat at Dorrin, but the gobbet fell short. Beclan turned her around, and servants moved in to take the knife and force her up the steps and into the house.

  “You are welcome here,” Mahieran said. “You saved Beclan and me, and whatever Celbrin feels—”

  “I would not intrude,” Dorrin said. “You have outbuildings. I have slept on hay many a night. I can stay there overnight and leave at dawn.”

  “No,” Mahieran said. “We have much to discuss—what other dangers you foresee, how best to meet them. I will not lose the value of your experience and knowledge, or so ill repay what you have done for me and mine to satisfy her. And I need to know what set her on this road.”

  “Fear for her son. Fear for you.”

  “Not alone. As you suggested. Please, as my fellow peer, enter my house and take refreshment and rest.”

  Dorrin hesitated, but it would be an insult to Mahieran—to the royal house—if she refused. She was tired and in pain. A bath, a night’s sleep … She bowed slightly and went up the stairs; the servants carried the Duke in his chair through the wide doorway and shut the great leaves of the doors behind them both.

  Mahieran’s house was larger than her own and far more luxuriously appointed. Mahieran ordered his servants to carry him into his study and another servant to summon his physician. Dorrin followed him, as he asked her to do, and found herself in a large room with a fireplace at one end.

  More servants brought food and drink and at Mahieran’s orders poured mugs of sib for them both.

  “Father, I told her maid to give Mother a quieting draught,” Beclan said as he came into the room. “I went with her to her chambers and tried to talk to her, but she burst into tears and would not answer me.”

  “Thank you,” Mahieran said. “And now will you take care of ensuring that Duke Verrakai has a room far away from your mother and that it is prepared for her?”

  “Yes, sir,” Beclan said. He looked at Dorrin. “My lord, I will have your baggage taken there unless you wish it elsewhere.”

  “Thank you,” Dorrin said.

  “My lord Duke, I hear that you are injured.” This was a physician by his gown. One shoulder bore the Mahieran crest, and his robe was belted with crimson. Behind him, servants carried his paraphernalia.

  “We both are, Gans,” Mahieran said. “Duke Verrakai sustained wounds in the same engagement.”

  “Yours are more serious, my lord,” Dorrin said.

  “We shall see,” the physician said. He attended Mahieran first, however, tut-tutting over the most serious wound. He offered Mahieran numbwine before he started, but Mahieran refused with a quick glance at Dorrin. She hoped he wasn’t making a competition out of bearing pain. Soon the sharp smell of herbs steeping in hot water replaced the fragrance of the food the servants brought. Mahieran ate one-handed while the surgeon worked on his arm.

  “Not too much, my lord,” Gans said. “It’s been long enough with only a field dressing to bring up a touch of fever. You’ll drink this—” He offered Mahieran a goblet of water mixed with an infusion of herbs; Mahieran grimaced but drank it down. “—to purify the blood. Anything else?”

  “No,” Mahieran said. “Barring a few scratches.”

  “Scratches can go bad,” the surgeon said in the voice of one who had said that many times before. Dorrin repressed a grin; he sounded so like the surgeons of Phelan’s Company.

  Then it was her turn. In the interim, she had eaten soup and bread and cheese and was thinking of starting on the slices of roast, but the surgeon had the servants move her table away. “First we see how bad yours are, my lady—er, my lord—and then I’ll advise you.”

  “Bruises under the mail, but no skin broken there,” Dorrin said. “I’ve got some cuts …”

  He sighed, then cleaned the gashes she’d taken and laid herbs in them before wrapping them again. “It will do you no harm to have a dose as well,” he said. “One of those has puffed up a bit. Hurts the least, I daresay.”

  “True,” Dorrin said.

  “You’ll do better for restful sleep,” Gans said. “But I suppose you won’t take numbwine either.”

  “No, thank you,” Dorrin said. “It turns my stomach.”

  “Then take your bitter brew and keep it down,” Gans said, the corner of his mouth quirking. “I advise you both to keep to your beds a day. I don’t expect either of you will agree.”

  “Hardly,” Duke Mahieran said. “Not with the safety of the realm at stake. But I thank you for your care, Gans. See if my lady needs anything.”

  “Her maid came to me for a dose of numbwine when I was on my way here—I haven’t yet—”

  “Give it to her, by all means. She was overwrought with concern for Beclan and for me.”

  “Do not sit up late tonight, my lord. The safety of the realm can last until daylight.” With a swirl of his robe, the physican was off again, snapping his fingers for servants to bring his things along.

  “My apologies,” Mahieran said. “He’s—”

  “He’s a surgeon,” Dorrin said. “The ones Kieri hired were all like that. Are you going to tell him about Beclan’s injuries?”

  “No. Don’t want him fussing or questioning what you did to heal him. Boy seems fine to me.” He turned to one of the servants standing along the wall. “I need to send word to Vérella—send my scribe and ready a courier. The rest of you may go.” He turned back to Dorrin. “And now you and I can discuss what is best to tell the king.”

  When the servants had gone, Dorrin said, “My lord, if you would rather have no one else aware of what is in your message, I write a tolerable hand.”

  “You do not trust my scribe?”

  “I do not know your scribe. Nor do I know how important secrecy is.”

  “Mmm. Well, this is what I plan to say: Mikeli has lost forty Royal Guards to this adventure, Beclan is alive and unstained, and once more Mahieran owes a debt to Verrakai.”

  “Who owes a far larger one to the crown and to Mahieran,” Dorrin said. “For I count the king’s
mercy outweighs all my deeds in one.”

  “Gracious words, and I do not doubt you mean them. But yet, Dorrin, my son lives as himself—as my son—because of you. Had we not arrived in time—”

  “It does not bear thinking of,” Dorrin said.

  Once she finally had a bath and a bedroom—large and luxurious, both of them—with no servants about, Dorrin placed a chair before the door, eased into the nightshirt laid out for her, and lay awake a long time thinking about the implications of everything she had heard and seen. Sonder Mahieran’s wife hated her: she could understand that as concern for Beclan.

  But the slow poison that contaminated her relationship with the other peers and with the king had not started with the squires’ injuries or even with the war … it had started long before. Rumors of the crown had preceded her to Vérella … that must have begun as soon as the king announced her as the new duke. She had not anticipated—even after the coronation, even after proof that her relatives still had the power to invade others—that they would also be working against her this way, seeking to isolate her, destroy her relationship with the king.

  She should have seen that. She should have done … what? What could she have done? They already had a network of spies and tattlers; she had never developed any such thing. Her contacts had been in Aarenis, and few enough there. Arcolin had been the one to gather information; he had always been easy in any company, less reserved than she.

  What you could not do, waste no time regretting. Kieri had said that to one of his squires; she had found it unexpectedly helpful then, when as a young woman she had worried so often that she should have done something about her family. And now … She fell asleep and woke the next morning to a soft knock on the door.

  “A moment,” she said. She would gladly have rested in that warm soft bed another turn of the glass. With a quick stretch, she slid from under the covers, swept the robe laid on a chair around her, and padded barefoot to the door. Moving the chair took only a moment.

  “It’s Beclan, my lord. I know it’s early, but if I could have a word—”

  “In a moment. I’ll dress.” When she let Beclan in, he wore his Verrakai squire’s tunic with the Mahieran knots on his shoulder.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  “I’m still your squire,” he said. “I’m not going to abandon you and break the contract, no matter what Mother says.”

  “Beclan—”

  “Unless you send me away. Please don’t. Please, my lord, there’s a reason—”

  “And reasons I should send you away, as you surely realize. Your mother’s hostility is only one of them.”

  “Please, my lord. Please listen.”

  He sounded truly distressed. Dorrin nodded. “Have a seat, Beclan. You must know that I have not heard the full story of what happened.”

  “Yes, my lord. I was wrong, to start with. I didn’t listen to Sergeant Vossik …” He went through it all—she could tell he’d told it before—not sparing himself, admitting his mistakes and the pride behind them. She asked questions only to keep the narrative moving, when he seemed blocked by memories too vivid to bear, near the end.

  “I should have died—he showed me how—but I was afraid they’d take me over even if I did. The way we’d heard about, like that groom at the coronation. They wanted to. They said so.”

  “How did you fight off the attack, Beclan?” Dorrin asked. She hoped her voice did not reveal her sudden fear.

  “It must have been Gird, I think,” Beclan said. “But there was something else, too. They offered—you can imagine what, if I would yield of my own choice. Vile ideas … the throne, in the end. They were in my head; they seemed to know that I’d thought Camwyn a fool often enough … thought myself a better younger brother for the king, had things been different. And I’ve been angry with Roth, for treating me like a child. They worked on that, hinting how easily he could die.” He gulped; tears marked his cheeks. “But kill my own brother? Connive at his death? Never!”

  “You stood fast,” Dorrin said, to give him time to recover himself. “You have great courage, Beclan, worthy of your family.”

  “I have great stupidity, too,” Beclan said. “Time after time, if I’d done what Sergeant Vossik told me, none of this would have happened. They wouldn’t have died. He wouldn’t have died.”

  “But Gird and your own courage saved you,” Dorrin said. Surely it had to be that.

  He flushed. “And … maybe something else. My lord, before you regained your magery, did you ever … feel things?”

  The hair on her arms rose before she had time to think what this might mean. “Feel things?” she managed to say calmly.

  “Yes, my lord. I could feel them in my head, the pressure—and then—it was like ice breaking, when the water pours out over the skin of it.” His voice trembled as he went on. “I’m afraid … I’m afraid, my lord, that … that even if they didn’t invade me, they forced me into magery.”

  Dorrin’s mouth was dry. She got up, poured water from the pitcher by the bedside, and offered him a glass. He shook his head; she drank. “What did you do, Beclan?”

  “I … I pushed back against them. And it seemed to get stronger … I didn’t mean to …”

  Her own magery, when she touched him with it, found his—weaker than hers, at least for now, but undoubtedly of the same origin.

  “Did you kill them with it?” she asked.

  “No. Well … I’m not sure.” At her questioning glance, he went on. “They did something to my other men, as I said. I had to kill them; they were coming at me with nothing at all in their eyes. But they weren’t very good, and I killed them with the sword … too easily. And the Verrakaien were pushing and pushing at me. They wanted me alive and unharmed, to be their pony, they called it. So they didn’t attack me until the others were dead. Only the two could fight—and since they didn’t want to harm me, at least not badly, I had the advantage. I killed one. Then the other fought me harder, but his sword broke. It—twisted in the air and broke. And I killed him and the other one on the ground. And then I was sick, over and over.”

  “Twisted in the air?” Dorrin said.

  Beclan’s hands clenched and relaxed. “I—I wanted it to slow down, not hit me. I was trying to resist—and I pushed—and—it didn’t look natural, my lord.”

  “It wasn’t natural,” Dorrin said. “It was magery. And did you tell your father about this, or the king?”

  “No, my lord. I knew I had not been invaded, but I thought—I hoped—that if I had used their magery or they had put magery in me, it was gone. Then when they came to the cottage—they called, and I woke.”

  “They called—”

  “I knew it was magery, and evil, my lord. I knew it before I heard anything with my ears. They—they were calling me to come to them; they thought I had been invaded, that I was one of them.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I tried to think what you would do; I started down the stairs, sword in hand, and I tried to do whatever it was I had done before with the magery.”

  “And?”

  “The next thing I knew I was on the floor and you were falling over.”

  No more useful information, then. The blow had come out of the dark—physical, not magical. A fifth man in the house, someone who climbed into that window? Or had Beclan come down farther than he thought, easily struck from behind by someone in the lower room?

  “But I have to know—do I really have that? What you have?”

  “Yes,” Dorrin said. “And I’m sorry. You do realize what this means—”

  “Am I part Verrakaien? Mother is Konhalt; Konhalten are—were—Verrakaien supporters.”

  There it was, the connection she had suspected. Konhalten had intermarried with Verrakaien; the talent for magery could well have been passed that way. “Perhaps,” Dorrin said. “That I do not know. But one thing I know is that Mahieran was chosen for the throne because they’d lost their magery long before Gird’s
time. A minor house, then, considered lesser for that reason. Acceptable to the Girdish because they were without magery. And it’s in the Tsaian Code: no one with the taint of magery shall succeed to the throne or be considered in the line of succession.”

  “I don’t care about that,” Beclan said.

  “Your father will,” Dorrin said. “Your father will care very much about that, and so will your mother. So, very likely, will the king.”

  She ran her fingers through her hair. What a mess this was. And she could see how easily she herself might be blamed for it. Beclan had been living in the home of an active magelord for almost half a year—had contact with her awakened his buried magery? Surely not … but who would believe that? And what about his mother? What was her role in this? Had she known what she carried? Had someone else, using her without her knowledge?

  “Can’t you get rid of it?” Beclan asked. “I don’t want it. What if I do something bad by accident? Can’t you do something—make it so I can’t use it or something?”

  “I don’t know how, Beclan. The Knight-Commander of Falk did it to me, as a girl.” He looked so miserable that she wanted to comfort him, but she had no comfort to give. “I don’t know how he did it, so I don’t know how to do it to you. But I do know we must tell your father.”

  “Will they—will they imprison me again?”

  “I don’t know. I hope not. I will argue against it, for what good that does. Is your father up yet?”

  “No. But the cooks are.”

  “I need to finish here,” Dorrin said. “Wait outside for me, and we will go down together. Speak of this to no one until we’ve talked to your father.”

  Downstairs they met a line of servants carrying platters of food to a dining room. Beclan led her back to his father’s study. Light came from the open door, and they saw Duke Mahieran at his desk, frowning at a scroll. He looked up. “Come in, come in. Early like me. My arm’s sore; it woke me up. Gans has looked at it, advised me to stay in bed, but if I can’t sleep, why lie abed? Shall we go in to breakfast, then? They’re almost ready, I’m sure.”