The Lascar’s Dagger

by Glenda Larke

  Sweet nonce and hell’s tomorrows! “Are – are they alive still?”

  “Saker will never bother you again. Celandine, she tricked me, scared me halfway to death. She has a witchery – a glamour.”

  “I need her, Ryce, I need her glamour talents.”

  He stared at her, appalled. “You knew all along? That she had witchery?”

  She patted him on the arm, smiling. “Of course! And I don’t want anything at all happening to her. Do you understand me?”

  “I brought her back with me. But I’ve been thinking. It may not be wise to take a Shenat witch to Lowmeer, especially one with a glamour. I’ve heard Lowmians see it as the witchery of deceit. Use it at court, and she could be accused of spying for Ardrone, and you could suffer as well, by association.”

  “They’ll never know,” she replied complacently.

  He shrugged. “So be it. Your fate rests in your own hands when you leave our soil.”

  “Do you think I don’t know that?” she asked bitterly. “Did you kill Saker?”

  “What do you care?” He turned on his heel and left her.

  “That was enlightening.”

  Sorrel let her glamour fall and stepped away from the corner of the room where she’d merged herself into the colours of the wood panelling. “As far as I know, Saker’s still alive.”

  Mathilda gasped in shock. “When did you come in? How did you get in? How dare you listen to my conversation with my brother!”

  She shrugged, indifferent. “You’re the one who wanted me to be a spy. I arrived back in Throssel at dusk with the Prince. I sneaked in here a couple of hours later by following the older nun back from her evening prayer. You were already asleep, so I went straight to bed. I’ve spent the better part of five days on the back of a horse, you know. I’m exhausted.”

  “And you reached Saker in time?”

  “No thanks to Prince Ryce, but yes, I did.”

  “You had no right to tell Ryce that Saker—”

  “Was innocent? You have a strange idea of what’s right and wrong.”

  “You impudent lightskirt! He wasn’t exactly innocent. And you will treat me with respect.”

  “If your behaviour merits it. You call me a lightskirt? Milady, let’s make one thing clear. I’m not your handmaiden any more, nor your maid, nor your lady-in-waiting, nor your friend. I’m not quite sure what I am. Your conscience, perhaps. You can do what you like to me, but if you do, there’s always the chance I might bring you down with me. You can’t ever be sure of me, any more than I can trust you. You asked me to come back, and I have. I’ve said I would help you, and I will. I was forced into an unpleasant marriage to someone I barely knew and didn’t love. Believe me, you need someone at your side who understands what that means.”

  Mathilda was silent, considering. As her indignation drained away, she appeared younger, more vulnerable. “How can I get you to Lowmeer? The King wants you dead!”

  “There’s going to be chaos today. There’ll be a hundred people in and out of here, packing your dresses and so on. The wardrobe mistress will be in charge, but she’s too old and fat to be going with you to Betany. I’ll make myself look different. You point me out to her, call me – oh, um, Jannis will do – call me Jannis and tell her I’m the person who’s in charge of seeing that the wedding gown and your wardrobe reach the port and are loaded on to the Regal’s ship. Tell her to make sure there’s a place for me on the luggage coaches going to Betany.

  “Once we’re on board and Prince Ryce has left, Sorrel will suddenly reappear. You tell your Ardronese ladies she’s your new attendant. No one knows the real me. No one has ever seen me before, not even Aureen. You were right. In Lowmeer, I can be Sorrel Redwing. And now, milady, you had better get out of bed, because any moment, there will be people knocking at the door. There’s a lot to do today.”

  28

  The Anger in the Aftermath

  “The only reason I can see for you doing this was complete insanity. Raving, inane, juvenile lunacy.”

  Saker held himself ramrod straight. As was her norm when she was agitated, Fritillary Reedling strode up and down her sanctum as if it was too small to contain her passion. He’d assumed this meeting would not be easy, but he’d underestimated the full extent of her fury.

  He could have coped if that had been all. Trouble was, she was so Va-damn hurt. And that swamped him with shame. At the same time, he was boiling with anger himself.

  I didn’t think I could feel any worse. I was wrong.

  “Whatever made you think you could bed a princess? Are you so naive as to think you could get away with behaviour like that? And to think I sent you there as her spiritual adviser! I trusted you. You’ve shamed me. You’ve shamed the Faith, the clergy, yourself. You took advantage of a half-grown girl.”

  He stared resolutely at the floor, somewhere in the vicinity of her feet. Every word she said was true, which made any reply impossible. That was doubly annoying, because he had not yet had a chance to express his fury at her.

  She hadn’t finished, either. “I couldn’t believe what I read in the Prime’s report. I didn’t believe it. Rape? That was out of the question! You can have no idea how shattered I was. I thought you’d be already dead and there was nothing I could do. I thought an innocent man had just died, the man I’d mentored. I – I grieved for you.”

  The pain in her voice startled him with its intensity. He raised his head to look at her. She was unnaturally pale, her mouth pinched.

  She took a deep breath. “I suppose you imagined you were in love with one another! But how could you think that made it all right?”

  “I – I don’t believe I did much thinking at the time,” he admitted.

  She picked up a piece of parchment from the table and waved it at him. “Fox had a lot to say on the matter. Even after hearing your explanation, I don’t think I’ve ever been so disappointed in anyone in my whole life as I am right now with you.”

  A slow flush started in his neck and suffused upwards. He felt the heat rise to brighten his cheeks.

  “Have you nothing to say for yourself?”

  “I can only say I’m sorry. Otherwise – otherwise everything you say is true.”

  “I suppose I shouldn’t rail at you too much, in the light of her manipulation of you, and your subsequent fate.”

  He shrugged. “I’m trying not to blame her. She had a right to attempt to avoid marriage to a man almost three times her age with a reputation for unpleasantness and dead wives.”

  She ceased her pacing. To his astonishment and mortification, she had tears in her eyes, tears on her cheeks, and such profound sadness in her expression that he wanted to take her in his arms and pat her on the back.

  He looked away, embarrassed.

  She didn’t dab at her tears, or try to hide them. Instead, she waved at the chairs at the other end of the room. “Let’s sit down and discuss what is to be done. First, I want to know everything in detail. From court politics to how you got back here alive.”

  “I think – no, I need to put something else out into the open first. I’ve good reason to think you’ve lied to me.”

  She sat motionless, not even breathing. Then, “Go on.”

  “For a start, you didn’t tell me all you knew, or guessed, or felt, about Prime Fox.”

  She dragged in a breath. “True. I didn’t want to prejudice you before you’d met him. I wanted a fresh point of view from someone who hadn’t been hearing the sort of things – albeit nebulous things – that I had.”

  “Well, fortunately I bumped into Gerelda Brantheld, who did have several things to say. But not even that warning was sufficient, because I’d heard nothing from you to indicate he might be a dangerous man. Dangerous to Shenat and the Way of the Oak. You sent me into a war I didn’t even know was being fought.”

  “Ah. For that, I am sorry. I misjudged. I didn’t think there was any way he would involve a mere spiritual adviser.”

  “I believe
you also lied about something else. I went to see my father. He told me you forbade him to say anything about my mother to me. You told me it was the other way around. He also seemed to think he may not have been my father. Which would explain his irrational dislike of me as a child, and his determination to make sure I didn’t inherit the farm. You said you bargained with him to let me go, but in fact, everything points to him being delighted to have me leave. You lied to me?”

  “Yes, I did. What did he tell you about your mother?”

  “Nothing, except that she left me before she died. I – I always believed I lost her because she died.” He waited for her to say more, but she was silent. “Aren’t you going to explain?” It was difficult to keep his rage to a simmer when he wanted to fill the room with it, to lash her with sarcasm and white-hot protest.

  “Later.” The words were calm enough, but the colour had drained from her face.

  She feels what I’m thinking. She knows how angry I am. Well, it serves her right. Aloud he said, “Fox knows more about my parentage than I do, and something about it made him dislike me enough to want me dead. I have a right to know what it’s all about. My ignorance hobbled me. I was always at a disadvantage with him, from the beginning. You have no right to keep secrets like that from me. Who was my mother? Did she really leave me? If so, why? Is Robin Rampion my father? What was your relationship with my mother? What is it about my birth that made Fox despise me so?”

  She still didn’t answer. Instead she said, “Tell me what happened between you and Fox. Everything.”

  “Your reverence, I want answers.”

  “And you’ll have them. Later.”

  “I’ll hold you to that. Before I leave this room.”

  “Very well.”

  It took him almost three hours to cover everything. Even then, he didn’t mention the lascar’s dagger or anything about his continuing trouble with birds, but they were the only two topics he dodged. She rarely interrupted, but when he’d finished his tale, her questions told him that nothing had escaped the sharpness of her mind. “This Celandine Marten. Do you trust her now?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know why she helped me, unless Lady Mathilda told her to do so. But I no longer make assumptions about the Princess’s actions.”

  “Celandine’s so-called attempt at a glamour just before she left you up there in the high country – it was pointless.”

  He digested that, knowing she was waiting for him to make sense of her statement. Oh, pox. “You mean that wasn’t the glamour.”

  “Of course not. She showed you the real person, but you were so caught up in distrusting her, you didn’t recognise the reality. The mouse was the glamour.”

  Blood rushed to his face. Va rot you, Saker. When you’re an idiot, you do a thorough job of it, don’t you? “She made herself hard to see. Why – why would she want everyone to think her such a nonentity when she’s beautiful?”

  “Perhaps because she was a spy for Mathilda. Or for someone else. Or maybe because her looks had previously brought her nothing but trouble.”

  “She as good as told me her name was not Celandine Marten. And when I overheard her talking to Prince Ryce, she said something about gaining her witchery at a shrine in Melforn, the day she met the Princess.”

  “I know the place. The oak there is truly a tree to behold.” She paused, thoughtful. “I heard something about Melforn recently. Now what was it? Ask Secretary Barden to come inside, will you, Saker?”

  He did as she asked, and when the man shuffled in, she said, “We need to poke into your memory for names and places, Barden. An incident at Melforn, within the past year or two? Concerning a runaway woman, I think.”

  Saker hurriedly offered the old man a chair to sit on. He was over seventy, by how many years no one was sure, and he’d outlasted some ten incumbents of the Pontifect throne. His knees might be troublesome, his teeth sparse and his hands gnarled, but there was nothing wrong with his memory. He’d soaked up fifty years of gossip and secrets during his tenure as secretary, and he wasn’t going to forget one drop of it.

  “Hmm,” he murmured. “Not a good tale, I’m afraid. A Shenat woman, the wife of a landsman.” He thought for a moment. “She murdered him. Pushed him down a set of stairs in front of witnesses. Now what was his name? Ferret. Weasel? No, Ermine. Nikard Ermine. Her name was Sorrel … and some kind of bird. Redpoll? Redstart? Redshank? Nikard’s brother wanted to claim his estate because Nikard and Sorrel left no children. He had to have the local Va arbiter’s permission to overrule any claim the missing widow could have, which is why we came to hear of it.”

  “That’s it. I remember now. Considering the woman’s crime and her subsequent disappearance, I told him to approve the man’s petition,” Fritillary said.

  “Was there anything about a dead or missing child?” Saker asked.

  “Not that I remember, master witan. Redwing, that was it. Sorrel Redwing.”

  After Secretary Barden left, Saker shook his head in disbelief. “That doesn’t sound like Celandine Marten! That mouse? A killer?”

  “How did she come to be the Princess’s attendant?”

  “I never asked.” He felt shame yet again. He’d never been interested enough to ask. I failed her as a witan.

  Fritillary said, “There’s no proof Sorrel and Celandine are the same person. We may never know. But let’s press on. What is your witchery?”

  “My – my witchery? I don’t have one!”

  “Of course you do. I can feel it. Witcheries recognise one another. If you delve inside yourself, you’ll feel mine. You haven’t looked in the mirror lately, have you?”

  “They don’t have mirrors in the kind of hostelries I’ve been staying at.” He fingered his cheek, saying, “I suppose you’re referring to the scar having healed so quickly. But I didn’t do that. It was part of what happened to me at the shrine.”

  “Ah.” The look she was giving him now had a smidgeon of pity in it, and not a little mockery. “Come with me.” She stood up and he followed her into the next room, which turned out to be her bedchamber. If he’d thought about it, he would have guessed it would be austere, in keeping with her monastic existence. The room was indeed small and plain, but there were touches of femininity, even luxury, that surprised him. Fresh roses on the washstand, paintings of bucolic scenes of country life and nature on the walls, a prettily embroidered bed cover with a lace fringe. There was also a mirror with a carved oakwood frame.

  “Take a look at your face,” she said. “You told me you were branded. The Prime took great delight in telling me you were branded. You both said it was done on the cheek. Well, tell me why I can’t see it.”

  He stared at his image. The picture reflected back at him was almost free of distortion, unlike the cheap looking-glasses he was accustomed to using. And that made what he was seeing all the more shocking. He expected to see a white or red puckering, something, to show where the brand had burned him. But his cheek had no scar at all. It was as if he had never been scarred, and yet he could feel the roughness of it.

  He turned to look at the Pontifect, knowing that she must see how shaken he was. “This may be a glamour, a permanent one. But it’s not mine,” he said flatly. “And I don’t have any healing power.”

  “So what is your witchery? Ask yourself what changed immediately after your night at the shrine.”

  The birds … He suppressed a shudder. “Birds,” he said finally.

  “Birds?”

  “I know what they’re thinking about. Well, they don’t think, not really. They just … feel things. Which I sense. It’s muckle-headed nonsense! Who wants to know when the local sparrows are hungry?” He was getting good at ignoring them now, though. Even the flocks of town pigeons that followed him around as if they were demented.

  She stared at him, but he had nothing further to say. Shrugging, she led the way back into the main room to sit again. He felt exhausted and leant back against the cushions as if all e
nergy had drained from him.

  “We who draw on the power of the Oak have only one thing in common,” she replied. “We have all endured something extreme. Extreme grief, or pain, or fear, or horror. And in the course of that experience, we surrendered ourselves. We gave up part of our life, part of our independence, to the service of the Way of the Oak. In return, we were granted the powers of witchery. If you don’t truly understand yours, I suspect it’s because you’re holding something of yourself back. When you truly commit yourself, the full extent of your witchery will be revealed to you. And remember this: it comes with a terrible price.”

  “You mean something more then being unfrocked, branded and left for dead?”

  “Oh yes, indeed. Part of your life belongs to the Faith now.”

  “It always did,” he protested. “I am – was – a cleric, remember?”

  “And can be again,” she said. “After all, I’m the Pontifect, and it is ultimately my decision who serves the Faith as a cleric and who doesn’t. Though I have no intention at this point of restoring your position. You can serve the Faith better as my spy.”

  His relief was immediate. No more court life.

  Then, unexpectedly, she said, “I’ve always known this moment would come. I’ve been waiting for it.”

  He was appalled. “You can’t possibly have known that I was going to be nullified!”

  “No, no, of course not. But I did know that one day you would be offered witchery.”

  He pondered her words, exasperated because she didn’t seem able to say anything clearly. “Has this something to do with my mother?”

  “It has something to do with the blood you’ve inherited. Witcheries run in your family. But it’s more to do with what I’ve sensed inside you. The potential.”

  At least he realised now the meaning of that feeling of expectation he’d sensed in the Pontifect from time to time; she’d been waiting for him to tell her that something like this had happened.

  “I’m not sure that I want this.”