It was the first time Caris had seen him up close. His former glimpses had all been brief, and the last one—in the yard of the roadhouse on the way to Angelshand last summer—had been blurred by the changeable flicker of torchlight. This was the man who had legal power over Pellicida, Caris thought, feeling oddly cool—this doll-like, dainty, evil little creature with his painted eyes and bitten lips.
The boy in white was gazing around with wide eyes the color of ripe blueberries, his rouged mouth parted. He breathed, “Oh, my lord, it’s beautiful. Thank you! Thank you.”
Pharos smiled and reached up to pat the rosy cheek. “No more beautiful than you, my lovely Leynart. It was time my charming cousin Cerdic learned that, even though he’s the biggest moneylender in Angelshand these days, the property of the Imperial House is mine to do with as I wish. If I wish to install you here for a year, ten years, or in perpetuity ...you’ve certainly given me more pleasure than he ever did or is ever likely to.”
The boy laughed and hugged him, the dark velvet curls mingling with the pomaded gold. Then he straightened up again—he topped the older man by a good five inches—and looked gravely down at the Regent, his hands resting on the bullion-stitched shoulders. “I wish I could travel with you.”
“My pet,” the Prince said, his rather shrill voice quiet, “you know that’s not possible.”
Leynart broke away from him, walked around the great desk of inlaid fruitwood to the pink marble mouth of the fireplace, close enough that, if Caris had reached out from his hiding place in the window, he could have touched a velvet sleeve. He extended his hands to the blaze, and the shape of them shone pinkly through the flawless lawn of his sleeve ruffle with the saffron glow. “Why not?” he demanded after a moment. “You know you can do anything you want. Who is she to object if you bring me with you?”
“She,” said Pharos, folding his arms and regarding the boy inscrutably, “is my wife.”
The scene he had glimpsed in the silver depths of the pool returned to Caris again, with cold and sinking dread, like the news of a cancer one has tried for months to tell oneself is indigestion. He felt no surprise, but only a grief that filled his body and hurt it to the marrow of his bones. As if it had been spoken aloud, he knew now where Pharos was bound, and why, and what it was that he had seen.
Leynart laughed, trying to be boyish and ingenuous and only sounding tinny. “I still think yours is the best description of her: one of those big black mares decked out to pull the processional cart on a peasant’s saint’s day. I still have nightmares thinking about that awful yellow riding habit...” The tone was of a familiar gambit, rallying for a response that he did not get.
“She’s welcome to wear what she pleases,” Pharos began impatiently.
“Not the lavender satin, surely!”
“I certainly don’t have to look at her all the time. But I wasn’t fooled by that tarradiddle about the cold. Her? Cold? Pah.”
The young man shuddered with exaggerated delicacy. “What a bruiser! I’ll bet she takes baths in rainwater straight out of the barrel! I can’t think why you simply didn’t take a crop to the slut when she slapped you.”
“Can’t you?” Pharos cocked his head a little, his pale eyes in their insomniac circles glinting oddly in the dancing light. “She would have taken it away from me and flogged the daylights out of me. A filthy little brute, that dog—but hers.”
“As I am yours.” Leynart turned from the fire and walked back to where the Prince still stood. Taking one lace-cuffed hand, he raised it to his lips. “You’d be welcome to torment any number of pets, for all of me. You know that.”
“Yes,” said the Prince softly. The boy’s head was still bent over his hand, so Leynart did not see the glint of contempt in those pale eyes. “Yes, I know that.” Pharos turned abruptly away and walked out of the narrow field of Caris’ vision. By the sound of his voice, he was near the other window, close to the pedimented niches where the statues of the Old Gods clustered between Cedric’s beloved books of occultism and quackery. Leynart stood where he had been, anxiety and apprehension in his face.
“I won’t be at odds with her, Leynart,” Pharos’ voice said at last. “I need a child.”
The boy laughed crudely. “Is that all? Since when has a man needed to ask permission to mount his own mare? I’m astounded you can even rise to such an occasion. I certainly couldn’t.”
Caris was aware of the pain in his palm from the crush of the dagger’s hilt in his grip and forced himself to relax it. There was the faint slither of satin against lace, the muted creak of the corner of the desk taking the Prince’s slight weight perched upon it. “They’re trying to murder me, Leynart,” that soft, edgy voice said. “All of them are plotting against me—Cerdic, Magister Magus, the Council of Wizards who wouldn’t let me skin and slice Windrose when I had the chance to do it. Who’s to say they weren’t behind his escape? Or that the Bishop Herthe wasn’t, with her sanctimonious whining? The only reason I married that musclebound Amazon was that Cerdic is my heir, and I won’t have the country given over to a pack of superstitious dog wizards when I’m dead. But having married her, the least I can do is give her the respect due to my wife.”
Tears gleamed suddenly in Leynart’s cornflower eyes. Impulsively he strode out of Caris’ line of sight, leaving only Kanner in view, standing impassively, arms folded, near the door. There was the swirling flounce of laces and silk as the boy flung himself to his knees. “So what do you think she’s going to do?” his voice demanded, suddenly trembling. “Drive you out of her bed with a stick? She has to want a child as badly as you do, to make her someone at Court and not just the jumped-up provincial nobody she is! Your child for preference, to keep the family looks, but I’m sure anyone with blond hair will do! Pharos, I love you! I don’t want anything from you except your love! If I don’t have that, I swear I will die!”
Caris turned his face away, sickened, staring for a time out into the thin darkness beyond the windows’ misted glass. Against a leaden sky, the Devil’s Road was nearly invisible; the long stretch of open garden and lawn was lost in a lake of shadow, broken at the very edge of his sight by the gleaming white island of the gazebo’s dome. He had no business here, he thought; no business hearing that spoiled child’s hysterical sobs, or the dry swish of lace as, uncaring of his bodyguard’s presence, Pharos stroked the dark, ruffled head.
Leynart wept, Caris knew, because he saw in Pharos’ eyes the dawning of respect for his wife. And like Caris, he knew what that respect might become.
In the gray pool he had seen them together, Pharos and Pella, sitting side by side in talk while Kyssha slept on Pella’s swollen lap. Pella’s face had been grave, but in her eyes had been no fear, merely her matter-of-fact willingness to take people as she found them. Her husband’s pale eyes, so shifty with everyone else, had been on her.
I will never have her, Caris thought, the desire for her consuming his flesh at the same time cold grief drowned his heart. When the sasenna had arrived to search the island, he had thought the scene was one of betrayal, but now he understood. In a way, for Pella to be tricked or forced into telling her husband of their whereabouts would have been preferable to what he now knew the scene had been. It was as it should be, he knew. He never could have had her anyway—neither her, nor magic, nor the brightly colored life that he sensed stirring like a perfumed carnival beyond the dark boundaries of his destiny. He wondered despairingly if it was a mark of love to wish that her husband would continue to hate her, so that she could be his, at least in his heart for the little that remained of his life. But having no experience of loving, he did not know.
“Antryg?” Joanna said softly and felt the movement of his pectoral muscles beneath her cheek as he turned his head. They had lain a long time in silence, twined together in a stone burial niche in the ruined chapel’s wall. At some distance, in the center of the ruin, two small fires burned a few feet apart. The light of them filtered through the hanging curtain
of brown vines, dappling Antryg’s face in a moire of shadow and light. He’d put his spectacles back on, and fragments of red and orange skated across the cracked lens and glinted in the diamond of his earrings. “What are the long-range effects of magic upon inanimate objects?”
“I don’t know.” His mellow baritone was little more than a vibration in his chest against her ear. “In that, I’m like Suraklin, except that Suraklin always refused to believe that there were any at all. He has always discounted reasons for not doing what he seriously wanted to do.”
“You said that the stones in the circle had voices, spoke to one another, because of all the magic that had been drawn through them over the years.”
“Yes.” His bony arm tightened around her shoulders under the pile of blankets, coats, and cloaks, as if to protect her against whatever lay beyond the black fog of the night. “Magic isn’t a science, as the Council of Wizards claims it is, nor an art, as Suraklin always said. It’s life itself. It imbues all things, and particularly those things it touches for long periods of time. I keep thinking about that poor scientist, playing the Dead God in Far Wilden, gradually poisoning himself by the very thing that kept him alive. You’re right, Joanna—software is only as good as the hardware it travels through. Suraklin believes that, because the teles-balls that make up the power-relays, and the stones along the energy-lines that convey the life-force to him, don’t speak to him, there will never come a time when they might. But they do absorb magic. The teles-balls are practically indestructible, and some of them are older than any memory. There were two or three in Suraklin’s collection that—frightened me. I don’t like to think of them, lying hidden in the Bone Well beneath the Citadel with the black carrion strippings of half demons he called into existence and then imprisoned there because he couldn’t quite kill them when he was done.
“Those teles, those stones, are now going to be in use constantly and have magic pouring through them twenty-four hours a day. It may all go as Suraklin believes it will for a year or two or ten—but how long will it be before those voices begin to bleed into Suraklin’s mind, his self, locked in the computer and at the mercy of his input? All magic is balance, because all magic is individuated. When it all gets bound together into one giant interlocking web, we have no idea what could happen. Neither has Suraklin. But he’s dangerous because he thinks that nothing will.”
The travelers remained for three days in the ruined chapel on the north bank of the River Glidden, waiting for the next spell of deadness. The weather was cold, though not the brutal, piercing cold of the Sykerst; sheet ice broadened out from the banks, a film of it entirely covering the river between the shore and Tilrattin Island by night, only to crack away at midday. It was a still time, but desperately unrestful.
Antryg spent a good deal of his time in the stone circle and refused ever to get very far away from it. Though Caris knew he should have been concentrating his energies on honing his warrior’s skills—on hunting the shy beasts of winter to sharpen his reflexes or on swordsmanship and shooting that he had perforce neglected during the days of steady walking—he found himself accompanying the wizard there. Hungrily, guiltily, as he had learned healing, he learned from him a little of the lore of the stones and that of the energy-trails, listening down the lines for the voices alive in the air. The wizard tried to instruct him, too, in the arts of divining and of seeing things far away. For two nights Caris sat near that tall, gangly figure bent over the fire, gazing into the embers with his spectacles throwing back the fulvous glow, watching the roads for the approach of danger or, indeed, of anyone or anything that might come upon them and spread word of their presence. The Regent had departed the morning after his arrival, and Antryg kept an eye on Leynart at Devilsgate. But the boy remained listless and seldom left the house.
Tormented by the knowledge that he should not be doing so, Caris tried to fan his own slight talents into sufficient strength to do the same. If the wizard guessed why, he did not say so, and Caris never admitted that what he wanted, as well as a glimpse of Pella, alone at Larkmoor, was to know where the Regent slept that night and how soon he would reach his wife’s side.
The circle at the node of the lines was silent. The brown earth dreamed undisturbed under the mantle of coming winter. Joanna, thin and grubby as a shabby little wood-elf, alternated between reading Suraklin’s incomprehensible files and checking and rechecking the contents of her backpack and the hardcopy, as she called it, of her own “worm” that she planned to feed into Suraklin’s computer to destroy everything on its disks. Caris reflected bitterly that, like her, he should have been readying himself for the coming battle, not spending his time in pursuit of what would not help them and in any case could never be his.
Once in the night he slipped away from the chapel to wade the ice-skinned river and knelt in the circle’s darkness at the side of the divining well. But its unfrozen waters showed him nothing, save the chilly blaze of the watching stars visible above the rising river fog, and he found that being in the circle alone troubled him. He was hideously conscious of the stones standing behind him in the cold starlight and prey to the uneasy sensation that as soon as he took his eyes off them they might move. By day he was seized with a violent restlessness. Once or twice Antryg stripped out of his cloak and voluminous green coat and fenced with him, using trimmed saplings for swords instead of the razor-sharp weapons. Caris invariably felt himself worsted and cursed his sloth still further. At other times he merely patrolled the woods, as if by constant movement he could outwalk his burning awareness of how far Pharos must be on his journey and how soon he would be at Pella’s side.
It was on one of these patrols that Caris heard the approach of the troops.
It was a clear evening and sharply cold; sound carried a great distance in the colorless ranks of the bare woods. Caris heard the strike of hooves first on the hard-frozen roadbed, and slipped quickly down into the concealment of the overgrown ditch at its side. It was only as the sounds came nearer and he realized that the troop must number nearly a hundred riders and a number of carriages that it came to him that something was fearfully wrong.
Antryg had had no warning of their approach. Yesterday he’d noted the presence of a peddler on the way to the village on the other side of Devilsgate, the passage of a wedding party from the village church. How could he possibly have missed an entourage of that size?
Baffled, Caris raised his head. White facings stood out on the unfamiliar black uniforms of fifty mounted sasenna, like floating bars of moonlight in the gathering gloom; they were followed by nearly as many household cavalry in emerald green. For the most part, the sasenna looked very young, newly fledged, newly sworn, tough and cold and trained to a hair. They surrounded a four-horse traveling coach, while several smaller vehicles with baggage brought up the rear.
He couldn’t have missed it, Caris thought, baffled. Yet why would he lie?
The only place they could possibly have been heading was Devilsgate itself. Moving cross-country through the woods, Caris was at the big rose-red manor before them. Without Pharos’ sasenna in the gardens, the place was far easier to slip into. The marble gazebo with its thin screen of trellises offered ample concealment and a good view, through the spyglass, of the front of the house. With luck Caris calculated that he could be away from the place by the time sasenna or guards were posted around the house or, at worst, pass himself off as one of them in his black coat in the evening gloom.
Leynart was on the steps of the manor, his primrose silk costume glimmering like a ghost in the dusk. He looked weary and haggard, as if he had found the last two days no easier than Caris had; in the dark frame of his curly hair the lines and hollows of his face showed through a careful application of concealing paint. The carriage drew to a stop. Through the glass, Caris could see it was drawn by a team of the showiest matched sorrels he had ever seen, the carriage itself ablaze with claret-red lacquer and gilt. The boy Leynart’s haunted eyes brightened. He strode down t
he steps, his hands held out in welcome as the footmen opened the carriage doors.
A man stepped down from the carriage, and Caris realized instantly why Antryg had not had warning of their approach. It was difficult, he knew, for mages to divine the movements of other mages; even the slight spells that he was able to hold around himself would thwart any but a very powerful scryer. And though Magister Magus was generally spoken of as a charlatan, according to Antryg the dapper little gentleman whom the footmen now assisted down did, in fact, have true power.
Presumably, thought Caris dourly, he had been persuaded to use it in trade for being saved from the Witchfinders.
The footmen and Magister Magus bowed low as the second man stepped down from the carriage, and Leynart came forward to catch the lace-gloved hands in his own. Prince Cerdic was a good bit fatter than when Caris had seen him last and wore a suit of plum-colored velvet which must have cost more than the carriage and team combined. Leynart bent over his hands—though the Regent had taken Devilsgate and given it to his eromenos, it was obvious that, from that moment, the youth considered himself Cerdic’s guest.
It took Caris a moment to realize who the third man must be. There was something vaguely familiar about his face; it was young, not yet thirty-five, yet settled already into hard and arrogant lines. His clothes were simple, a court suit of dark green and apricot, yet the Prince and Leynart both bowed deeply, and Leynart knelt on the icy gravel of the drive to kiss the man’s hand. Perhaps it was the hair that jogged Caris’ memory. It was shorter than anyone but sasenna and laborers wore it, yet familiar. He had seen it...
The man moved, gesturing toward the house. With a chill that was not quite anger nor yet quite dread, Caris remembered.
The face was the face of the man he had glimpsed through a darkened window, whining excuses to Joanna while the chaos of music and drinking went on at the party around the courtyard pool, long ago and in another universe. The face was the face of the hapless Gary Fairchild, but Caris recognized the gesture as typical of his grandfather.
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