The company dismounted silently and left two men behind with the horses. Köthen drew his sword. Several of the soldiers armed their crossbows. They left the roadside and crept into the trees, seeking the quietest path through the sodden leaves and matted underbrush, avoiding the brighter patches of snow and ice where a man’s footfall would sound as loudly as a shout.
Those ahead did not seem to be making any great effort at silence. They’d lit two torches already and soon a third flared to life. Erde could hear horses milling and snorting, and voices that were restrained but not muffled. Wender waved his company forward, signaling one man to Köthen’s right and taking up the left-hand guard himself.
They were well within range when a voice ahead sounded an alert and the torches were doused in an instant. But that single word of command told Wender what he needed to know. He signaled his men down, then whistled sharply, three ascending notes and one falling.
“That’s Hoch,” he whispered. “I’m sure of it.”
A whistled reply came back immediately, the same four notes in reverse order. Wender rose and moved on ahead.
They came down into a snow-swept clearing, broad enough for a circle of moonlight to make its way through the overhanging trees. Hoch’s men relit the torches while Hoch came forward to meet them. Erde saw in the man’s eyes the dread she’d been shoving aside. Köthen saw it, too.
“What is it, Hoch? What have you found?”
Hoch had a thin, intelligent, worried face. Erde thought he looked more like a guildsman than a soldier. He swallowed nervously but looked his baron in the eye. “The worst, my lord.”
“The Prince?”
Hoch dropped his glance, nodding.
“Dead? Already?”
“Dead, my lord. Within the hour.”
Köthen swore and looked away. Then he glared around at the waiting men as if searching out someone to blame for this outrage he’d been so sure he could prevent. His men stood their ground silently, their heads bowed, absorbing the heat of his rage and giving him back their trust. It moved Erde deeply that Köthen, even as he was at that moment, a dangerous and angry man swinging a naked blade so that it flashed in the torchlight, would never turn his rage on his men. Her father’s men would have retreated well out of range, as far as was possible with honor, in such a situation.
Prince Carl dead. Murdered, she supposed, and she had no doubt by whom. The mad priest’s plot was proceeding. Was it possible that he—and evil—would somehow win the day?
Finally Köthen took a breath, lowered his sword, and sheathed it abruptly. “Show me,” he growled.
Hoch offered a slight bow. He motioned to one of the torchbearers, and led the way.
The young Prince lay crumpled at the foot of a big tree. He was small for his age, having not inherited his father Otto’s height. His feet were bare and battered. Not at all the figure of a King or warrior, Erde mused. He’d been a studious boy, she recalled Hal mentioning. Her heart went out to him: a scholar, doomed by birth to be a pawn in the vicious games of men more powerful and ambitious than himself. He was dressed in the soft robes he would have worn for retiring to bed. Clearly, he had not been armed. One torn end of a long sleeve had been folded back to cover his face.
Erde searched for blood or wounds. There were none anywhere on his slim body, except on his torn and muddy feet. Then she noticed the rope disappearing beneath the covering sleeve. Hoch took the torch in his own hand and raised it in order to illuminate a stout overhanging branch of the tree. Another length of rope dangled there, its loose end hastily slashed.
Hoch cleared his throat. “We cut him down not five minutes before you came, my lord.”
The men in Wender’s party shifted and muttered.
Köthen stared up at the offending rope. “He will call it a suicide and discredit the whole of Otto’s line. Why? This Prince was not his enemy. Are there no depths to which this man will not sink?”
No, Erde wanted to shout at him. Not a one! I could have told you that! Hal tried to tell you in Erfurt, but you wouldn’t listen!
Köthen raised his voice to be heard around the clearing. “Let not a man of you believe that the Prince died by his own hand!”
Wender laid a feather-light hand of warning on his baron’s sleeve.
Köthen shrugged him off brusquely. “Yes, yes, Wender, I’ll be quiet. For now, at least. But later . . .” He knelt beside the body and briefly lifted the concealing sleeve. “Forgive me, my Prince. I tried to keep you safe as best I knew how.”
Wender waited, sucking his teeth, then said quietly, “We could undo the shame at least, my lord.”
Köthen gave his lieutenant a shocked look that slowly turned to bleak acceptance. He rose, flicking the sleeve back into place. “Do it,” he said, “then swear the men to secrecy.”
“Aye, my lord.”
Wender sent the men scurrying—to untie the rope from the tree, from the Prince’s neck, to burn the evidence and scatter the ashes, and finally to do the necessary violence to the corpse. Köthen moved away, out of the gathered circle of torches, away from the busy clot of men. He moved like a man in physical pain, sorry for the death of an innocent, Erde thought, but also deeply disturbed by the sacrilege of this pragmatic desecration. Köthen would go to confession and do his penitence, and still carry this guilt on his soul forever, even though he had allowed it for all the right reasons, to honor a monarch he himself was trying to usurp. Watching him brood, she ached for him. Her desire to reach out to him grew so intense that she could almost believe it was possible, by sheer force of longing, to walk out of her dream-state and into Köthen’s reality.
This was a new idea, and even as swept up as she was in dream-induced fantasizing, the fact that she was considering it seriously quite took her aback. Her intention shifted a bit more toward the rational with her sudden realization that she had information that might ease Köthen’s guilt: If what Hal and Rose had surmised about Rainer’s parentage was true, a rightful heir to the throne might still exist, that is, if Köthen and her father hadn’t already killed him off unknowingly. But she had heard Köthen’s brief reference to Otto’s “mysterious champion,” and was sure it could be none other. If Rainer lived, and if he was the true Prince, Köthen could forget all this needing to be regent in order to keep the country together. He could join Hal and establish Rainer as Otto’s heir, and this alliance would crush the offending priest like a bug. And then they could all run the country together. Erde thought it a grand and glorious vision, a future one could look forward to. It was nearly—minus Rainer—what Köthen himself had offered Hal at Erfurt. It was a perfect plan and would solve everything. The hell-priest would at last be defeated.
She was very aware of being without substance in her dream-state, but her other senses were fully intact. She could see and hear and smell. Perhaps she could simply speak to Köthen without leaving the dream at all . . . why had she not thought of this before? And what harm could it possibly do to try? She focused on him very hard and thought of speaking, as she did when she spoke with the dragons.
—My lord of Köthen. . . .
Her dream-voice was like the whisper of night wings. She could hear it . . . but could he?
A thrill shot through her when she saw his head lift slightly and his eyes sweep the darkness in front of him as if listening. She had never expected to make contact so easily and now she was almost tongue-tied. What should she say to him? How should she introduce herself, a person he hardly knew, his enemy? How explain to him what was happening? She recalled how long it had taken N’Doch to accept the joining of minds. Köthen, she suspected, considered himself a rationalist, a pious man but not much given to superstition. How could she put words into his head without him thinking he was losing his mind?
—My lord of Köthen . . .
It sounded so formal. Then she remembered what Hal had called him.
—Dolph . . .
His head jerked this time. His eyes widened. She watched a
faint flush of fear race through him. She decided she would not introduce herself at all. It was not her identity that mattered, it was her message, and now she realized she must convey it quickly. Even in her disembodied state, she suddenly felt faint. Each effort to bridge the gap between Köthen and herself sucked energy out of her like water down a drain. It was a greater gap than she’d imagined. She had to tell him her message before she lost the strength to do it.
—Baron Köthen . . . Dolph . . . a Prince may live still . . . find Hal and ask him. . . .
Köthen shook his head hard, then pressed his temples with both hands and let out a strangled cough. “Hal?” he murmured.
A sentry’s whistle off to the left distracted him. Quickly, Wender joined him at the edge of the darkness, and Köthen was once again all business.
“Visitors, my lord.”
“Indeed. How convenient. Have you done what you must?”
“We have.”
“Prepare His Highness for transport, then, with the honor due his rank. And, Wender . . . don’t be too quick about it, eh?”
“Will he come himself, do you think?”
“He expects to find his Christmas goose still trussed and hanging.”
Wender grinned his flat, dark grin. His eyes flicked off through the trees toward the road, where the approach of men and horses was no longer a suspicion. “Sounds like he’s brought a whole regiment. And enough torches to light a town.”
“Or burn it. Better send some of the men into the woods to cover us, in case in his madness, he decides to murder us all and lay the blame for Carl’s death on me.”
“What head will he have left then to crown, my lord, having so long ago lost his own?”
Köthen’s laugh was a short bark. “Why, I suppose von Alte’s next in line, poor fool.”
Wender snorted and went off to prepare the body. Köthen drew his sword, set its point to the frozen ground, and leaned on it gently, awaiting the priest’s arrival.
Now Erde’s terror stirred in earnest. From the time her dreams of home began, she knew Fra Guill would enter them sooner or later. Even in his absence, his black aura pervaded them. Her dream-state connection with Adolphus of Köthen, her supposed enemy, was a mystery and a surprise, if now increasingly a pleasure. But from the day the hell-priest first presumed upon the hospitality of her father’s court, from when his thief’s eyes picked her out and followed her everywhere, when in the barn at Erfurt he had sniffed her out of hiding despite her disguise, she knew that her fate was entwined with Guillemo’s in some grim and awful way. In fact, if there was any way she could manage to wake up, now was the time to do it. But she was unable to wake herself from these dreams as she had learned to with ordinary nightmares. So she withdrew inward as best she could, and imagined concealing herself in Köthen’s shadow.
Even so, when the first of the white-robes appeared, pale ghosts moving between the black columnar ranks of trees, each with its own huge torch, she thought of the lost souls wandering in torment, the souls these white ghosts had put to the torch at Tubin and the other “witch-ridden” towns. And she wondered if it was possible to die of terror while dreaming. Only the thought of the dragon waiting for her a thousand years away gave her the strength and the reason to master her fear, the way the man beside her was mastering his loathing and outrage in order to gain control of himself, and the situation.
The priest’s forces fanned out as they entered the clearing, a long arc of hooded men in white, mounted on tall white horses. Köthen did not move from his casual pose, but his eyes took them in, counting. Erde counted twenty, and was relieved not to find her father among them. Apparently he was not included in this particular conspiracy. Did that imply that Josef von Alte was losing his usefulness to Brother Guillemo? Erde feared for her father’s life if he was.
A space left in the center of the ranks was filled at last by Fra Guill himself, unhooded but wearing a full soldier’s breastplate over his white monk’s robe. His tonsured hair was no longer the madman’s rat’s nest it had been when she’d seen him last, but his face had grown gaunt and sallow. His eyes receded so deeply into their hollows that they appeared as two shards of ice glimmering in wells of shadow.
He spurred his horse forward. “Abroad so late, Köthen? Or is it early?”
If Köthen noticed the lack of honorific in the priest’s greeting, he did not show it. Erde took this as a frightening sign of how far the tables of power had already turned. It occurred to her to worry for Köthen’s safety as well as her father’s.
“Late, Guillemo, much too late, in fact. But so are you, it seems.”
“The battle against Satan knows no clock. Late is early, is it not? And so, what finds you here?”
Köthen tossed a nod behind him. “A little business. What finds you here?”
“Our hardy pursuit of that Satan’s minion, Otto’s treacherous spawn, who’s made a bloody and murderous escape this night.”
Köthen leaned on his sword hilt a little more heavily and replied dryly, “He’d hardly have been trying to escape, Guillemo. He’s barefoot and in his bedclothes.”
The priest’s eyes narrowed until their light was virtually extinguished. “You have news of the villain?”
“I have news of the Prince, if that’s who you mean.”
Erde wondered if Köthen was hoping to make Guillemo beg. He was goading the priest, for some hidden reason or because he could not restrain his hostility completely. Either way, she wished he would stop. Was she the only soul in Christendom besides Hal Engle who understood how venomous Fra Guill really was? When she’d faced him last, in Erfurt, he’d seemed wily but entirely mad. Now he appeared to have regained possession of himself. Erde was unsure if this was better or worse.
“You’ve caught up with him?” Guillemo sat up ever so slightly to peer past Köthen toward the huddle of men on the far side of the clearing.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“What’s the news, then?”
“Your heart’s desire, Guillemo. The Prince is dead.”
“Ah.” Instantly, the priest crossed himself and bowed his head. A moment later, twenty white-robes did likewise, sending a rustle of wool and rosaries through the damp, still air. “Did he confess his dread villainy and call on his Savior before being given his end?”
Köthen seemed to be working a bad taste out of his mouth. “I doubt he was given the chance. He was dead when we got here.”
The banked glimmer in Guillemo’s eyes flared up again. “Ah! Distraught, then, with the weight of his bloody deeds, as a ray of goodness pierced his heart and made him see his . . .”
The priest had an infinite supply of self-serving rhetoric, as Erde clearly recalled. But Köthen had had enough. “Carl was murdered, Guillemo. By brigands, one supposes, unless you have any better ideas.”
“Murdered? You’ve seen it . . . him . . . yourself?”
“You know me, Brother. I never take anyone’s word for anything.”
“I’ll go to him, then. To offer whatever poor words might be allowed to intercede for his tarnished soul.”
Köthen cocked his head, still leaning on his sword. “Be my guest.”
The white-robes remained in their long array as their leader rode across the clearing. The torches made way for him, and a man-at-arms leaped forward to hold his horse as he dismounted. As he moved into the crowd of soldiers, Köthen jerked his sword out of the ground and strode after him.
Wender met him just outside the circle of light, stooping to pick up Köthen’s hurried murmur.
“I don’t like it. He’s taken it too quietly.”
“Grace in the face of being outmaneuvered, my lord?”
“Not even a possibility. Stay by me.”
They found Guillemo on his knees beside the Prince’s corpse, peeling back the wrapping of cloaks and oilskins with his own too-eager hands. Hoch and Wender had artfully arranged the layers to allow exposure of the Prince’s wounds with a minimum of effort.
Guillemo wished to see a little more. He yanked and burrowed until he was satisfied, and all Köthen could do was stand and watch. Erde wished he would move off a bit. She had little stomach for being forced to observe the poor mutilated body at such close range. But she did note how all evidence of Carl’s true cause of death had indeed been erased by Wender’s careful butchery.
Guillemo studied the wreckage carefully. He touched his finger to a ragged gash, then smoothed the blood between finger and thumb, sniffing at it cautiously.
Wender muttered at Köthen’s side, “More like a chirurgeon than a priest.”
Köthen watched and waited, and soon had his answer.
Guillemo sniffed his bloodied fingertips again, rubbed them together and sniffed again. Abruptly, he cried out and sprang to his feet.
“Water! Ho, water! Quickly, on peril of my soul!”
A man-at-arms grabbed a waterskin off the nearest horse and ran over, shoving it at the priest with both hands in frantic bewilderment.
“Pour it for me, fool! Quickly, on my hand! Or else we’ll both be damned!”
The nervous soldier drenched Guillemo’s hand, water spilling everywhere, even on the Prince’s body. The priest then raised that hand, dripping, and held it out from himself like it carried some treasure or disease. “A torch, now! Bring me a torch!”
A torch appeared, and Guillemo directed the man to angle it toward the ground so that the flame swelled and leaped upward, overfed with fuel. With slow ceremony, Guillemo passed his wet hand through the dancing flame, several times, back and forth, until the soldiers murmured and gasped and took a step or two backward, away from him.
A mere carnival trick, fumed Erde, yet see how it amazes and subdues even these hardened fighting men.
At last, Guillemo withdrew his hand from the flame and held it up to show how it remained unsinged and unscarred. “A virtuous man has no need to fear the purifying flame,” he remarked. Then he turned slowly toward Köthen. “But you, my lord baron . . . what unlawful devil’s ritual have you been enacting here?”
The Book of Water Page 25