The Charnel Prince

by Greg Keyes

  “I think we can trust to his honor,” Gramme replied.

  “Not where my purse is concerned,” the duke huffed.

  Leoff cleared his throat. “If it please you, Duke, hum a snatch of some favorite tune of yours.”

  “Well . . .” He considered for a moment, then whistled a few notes. The crowd murmured laughter, and Leoff wondered exactly what sort of tune it was.

  Leoff spied Areana in the crowd. “And you, my dear,” he said. “Give me another melody.”

  Areana blushed. She looked around nervously, then sang:

  Waey cunnad min loof, min goth moder?

  Waey cunnad min werlic loof?

  Thus cunnad in at, is paed thin loof

  That ne nethal Niwhuan Coonth

  She had a sweet soprano voice.

  “Very well,” Leoff said, “that’s a start.”

  He began with Areana’s tune, because it began with a question: “How will I know my lover, good mother? How will I know my true love?” He put it in a plaintive key, with a very light bass line, and now the mother answered, in fuller, more colorful chords, “You’ll know him by his coat, which has never known a needle.”

  He separated the two halves of the melody now, and began weaving them through each other, and as counterpoint added in the duke’s whistle near the top of the hammarharp’s range. When they heard that, almost everyone laughed, and Leoff himself smiled. He’d guessed the juxtaposition of the lover’s riddle song against the other, probably vulgar tune, would amuse, and now he made it a dialogue: the girl asking how she would know her lover, the leering lecher who overheard her, and the stern mother warning the fellow away, bringing it all to a head with a sort of bang as the mother threw a crock at the man and he ran off, his melody quickly fading, until only the girl remained.

  Waey cunnad min loof? . . .

  Raucous applause followed, and Leoff suddenly felt as if he’d been playing in a tavern, but unlike the polite and often insincere acknowledgment he’d had in the various courts he had entertained, this felt sincere to the bone.

  “That’s really quite remarkable,” Lady Gramme said. “You have a rare talent.”

  “My talent,” Leoff said, “such as it is, belongs to the saints. But I’m glad I pleased you.”

  The lady smiled and began to say something else, but then a sudden commotion at the door made everyone turn. Leoff heard a clash of steel and a howl of pain, and grim-faced men in armor bearing swords burst into the hall, followed by archers. The room seemed to explode into chaos; Leoff tried to get up, but someone bumped into him from behind and he tumbled to the floor.

  “By order of the emperor,” a heavy voice thundered above the general din, “you are all arrested for collaboration against the throne.”

  Leoff tried to rise, but a boot struck him in the head.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SWANMAY

  NEIL TENSED HIMSELF AND saw all his roads go black. If he killed Swanmay, he would protect Anne’s destination and serve the queen in the only way he now could. But to kill a woman he had promised not to harm would be the end of any honor he could claim.

  Either way, he was certainly dead.

  He stared at Swanmay’s white throat, willing her closer, wondering how he could have been so wrong about her.

  She bowed her head slightly, and wisps of her short hair fell across her face. “I wish I could grant you your wish, Sir Neil,” she said. “But I cannot take you to Paldh. I am nearly free, do you understand? If I help you more than I have, I jeopardize everything. And you would probably be killed, which I would not see.”

  He let his head relax on the pillow. Bright spots danced in his vision, and for a moment he wondered if she had enchanted him somehow.

  But he recognized the onset of the battle rage. It was leaving him now, but his blood was still moving too fast, and he was beginning to shake.

  “Are you well?” she asked.

  “I was dizzy for a moment,” he said. “Please. What did you mean—about me being killed?”

  “I told you that your friends’ ship escaped the harbor, and that much was true. But they were followed—I saw the ship sail after them. If they are not caught at sea, they will be caught at Paldh. I imagine there will be a fight then, and you are in no condition to fight.”

  “I beg you, lady. Take me to Paldh. Whatever your trouble—whatever it is you are fleeing—I will protect you from it. But I must reach Paldh.”

  “I believe you would try to protect me,” Swanmay said. “But you would fail. Don’t you understand? The people who attacked your friends—I flee them also. Your enemy is my enemy. I took a greater risk than you can know saving your life. If they had noticed me, recognized my ship, all would have been done. If I follow them, they cannot fail to know me.”

  “But—”

  “You know you would not be able to protect me,” she said softly. “The nauschalk cannot be slain. He beat you when you were hale and whole—do you think you could do better now?”

  “Nauschalk? You knew him? Know what he is?”

  “Only from the old tales. Such things are no longer supposed to exist, and until a short time ago, they did not. But now the law of death has been broken.”

  Her voice had gone a little eerie, as if she spoke to him from a great distance. Her eyes were mirrors.

  Neil tried to sit up. “Who are you, lady, to speak of such things? Are you a shinecrafter?”

  She smiled weakly. “I know something of those arts, and others you will not have heard of.”

  “I cannot believe that,” Neil said, feeling cold. “You are too kind, lady. You cannot be evil.”

  Her brow dropped in a frown, but her mouth bent up at one side. She steepled her fingers together. “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t think I’m evil. But why would you think I am?”

  “Shinecrafters are evil, milady. They practice forbidden arts, abhorred by the Church.”

  “Do they?” she asked.

  “So I have always been told. So I have always believed.”

  “Then perhaps you have been wrong. Or perhaps I am evil, and we merely disagree on what evil is.”

  “There can be no disagreement there, milady,” Neil said. “Evil is what it is.”

  “You live in a simple world, Sir Neil. I do not begrudge you that. In truth, I envy you. But I believe things to be more complicated.”

  He was about to retort, when he remembered the choice he had been facing only moments before. Maybe it was more complicated. He was no churchman, to debate such things.

  The law of death has been broken. Fastia had said that, in Eslen-of-Shadows.

  “Lady, my apologies. You speak of things I don’t understand. What is the law of death?”

  She chuckled. “Simply that things that die stay dead.”

  “Are you saying that the man I fought was dead?”

  “No, not exactly. But he exists because someone who should be dead is not. Someone has passed beyond the lands of fate and returned. That changes the world, Sir Neil, breaks something in it. It allows things to happen that could not before, creates magicks that have never existed. It is what allowed me to escape.”

  “Escape from where, lady? Who pursues you?”

  She shook her head. “It is an old story, yes? The woman locked in the tower, awaiting a prince who would rescue her? And yet I waited, and did my duty, and no man came. So I had to escape myself.”

  “What tower?”

  She combed her fingers through her hair and then dropped her head down, the first motion he had seen from her that resembled defeat. “No,” she whispered, “I cannot trust you that much. I cannot trust anyone that much.”

  “Your crew? What about them?”

  “With them I have no choice—and I believe they love me. If I were wrong about them, you and I would not be speaking now. Still, in a day or a month or a year, one of them will betray me. It is the way of men.”

  “You have seen this in some vision?”

 
“No. But it is most likely.”

  Neil sighed. “You are nothing if not a mystery, Lady Swanmay.”

  “Then perhaps I am nothing.”

  “I do not think so.”

  She smiled wistfully. “I would help you if I could, Sir Neil. I cannot.”

  “Then put me off at the next port,” he urged. “Let me make my own way. I won’t tell anyone about you.”

  “Is my company so tiresome?” she asked.

  “No. But my duty—”

  “Sir Neil, believe me when I say that the pain of leaving behind your obligations will fade.”

  “Never. And you cannot think so, either. You are too good for that.”

  “A moment ago you called me evil.”

  “I didn’t. I said you couldn’t be.”

  She considered that. “I suppose you did, in a roundabout way.” She shrugged. “But whether you are right or not, I must believe that there is more to life than duty.”

  “There is,” Neil said. “But without duty, the rest of it is meaningless.”

  She stood and paced away from the lamplight, then turned to regard him with a slightly feral glint in her eye. “When you fell in the water,” she said, her words measured carefully, “you were still conscious. Yet you didn’t try to take off your armor. Not a single catch was unfastened.”

  “I didn’t think to take it off, at least not until it was too late,” Neil replied.

  “Why? You are not stupid. Armor is not new to you. Any man who was drowning would have tried to take it off, and instantly unless—”

  “What, lady?”

  “Unless he thought of his armor as so much a part of himself that he believed he could not take it off. Unless he would rather die than take it off. As if, perhaps, he wished to die.”

  He felt a moment’s disorientation. How could she—? “I have no wish to die, Swanmay,” Neil insisted.

  She stepped back into the light. “Who was she? Was it Fastia?”

  Now it felt as if he had been struck by a spinning bolt. He opened his mouth before his sense overtook him.

  “I don’t know that name,” he lied.

  “You spoke it many times as you slept. She is the one you love, yes, not the girl on the ship?” She lowered her voice further. “The King of Crotheny had a daughter by that name. They say she was slain at Cal Azroth.”

  “Who are you, lady?” Neil demanded.

  “No one,” she replied. “Your secret is safe with me, Neil MeqVren. The only reason I ask these questions is to satisfy my own curiosity.”

  “I cannot trust you about that.”

  “I know. Did you really want to die?”

  Neil sighed and laid his head back. “You change targets so frequently, lady.”

  “No. This is the one I have aimed at all along.”

  “I did not seek to die,” Neil said. “But I was—I think I was relieved. Relieved that there was nothing I could do.”

  “And then I spoiled it all.”

  “You saved my life, and I am grateful.”

  Swanmay regarded her nails. “There was a time, Sir Neil,” she said, “when I stood with a razor in my hand and contemplated my wrists. There was another when I held a goblet of poison, fingers away from my lips. Of anyone I have ever known, I think you might understand why, how the unstoppable crush of duty can extinguish the flames in us.”

  “Duty is the flame in me.”

  “Yes. And when you fail it, or worse, when it fails you, there is nothing left.”

  “No.”

  “I shed my armor, Sir Neil. I did not drown. I will find better things to fill my life with, better reasons to rise one day to the next.”

  “But you haven’t found them yet.”

  “Now you shoot at my target.”

  “It seems only fair.”

  “You’ve missed,” she said. “I’ve no longer any target to shoot at.” She came and sat by him again.

  “I do not care who you are, Sir Neil. I do not care whom you have served. But I would like you to serve me. I need someone like you, someone I can trust.”

  Neil smiled faintly. “If I betray one master, how could you ever trust me not to betray you?”

  She nodded. “I suppose you have a point. I was hoping you wouldn’t make it.”

  “But you’d already thought of it.”

  “Of course. But it seems to me you have been the one betrayed, not the other way around.”

  “The one I serve has never betrayed me.”

  “That isn’t what you mumble in your sleep,” Swanmay said. “I will go now. Think about what I’ve said.”

  “I do not think I will change my mind. I beg you once more—let me off at the next port.”

  “If you decline my offer, I will put you off when you are well enough to travel, though not before,” she said.

  He watched her leave, and through the open door heard the squeal of gulls. He waited a moment, then, ignoring the pain in his side, he went to the porthole.

  The sapphire sea danced beneath the sun, and less than a league away, he made out a coast.

  Then it wasn’t a trick. If their course had been set for Paldh, they would be in deep water. No island in the southern Lier Sea was as big as that.

  He sank back down onto the bed, wondering what he mumbled in his sleep. Or had that been a guess? The queen hadn’t betrayed him, but . . . he did feel betrayed. She had sent him away from her, and she was surrounded by a dangerous court. If she were attacked, there would be nothing he could do. He had begged her to keep him near.

  But he had been relieved when she finally did send him away, because part of him felt her death would be on her own head, that he wouldn’t be responsible. In Vitellia, he had felt truly alive again, actually competent, facing foes he could see and fight, even if they didn’t die when he cut them. Even that was easier than the knife-bladed shadows of the court.

  Serving Swanmay had its appeals, and part of him yearned for it.

  You have forgotten me, Fastia had told him.

  I haven’t.

  Have, will. It is all the same.

  There were tears on his face, and a hundred yards of pain knotted beneath his chest began to loosen and uncoil, as he turned his face to the bedclothes and cried.

  She came back six bells later, when the sun had gone into the wood beyond the world. He pretended he was asleep, and she did not try to wake him. He listened to her settle on the cot beyond the screen, heard her shift and toss for a while before her breathing softened and become shallow and regular. Then he rose, holding his bandaged side, and shuffled across the wooden deck.

  The hatch was latched but not locked, and he cracked it and peered out. The deck was mostly quiet and only faintly lit by a moon he could not see. Two men were standing by the wheel, speaking in soft accents. Another stood against the steerboard rail a few kingsyards away. There was no one to backboard, however.

  Keeping low, he pushed the door a little wider.

  He nearly hit a man with it. He sat just beyond the hatch, a spear across his knees.

  She was right. She needed better guardians. But Neil couldn’t be one of them.

  No one called out as he approached the side of the boat. He strained in the moonlight, trying to make out whether or not the land he had seen earlier was still close. He thought he saw distant lights, though it could have been sparks from the fire in his side.

  With no further hesitation, he slipped over the rail.

  He hit the water with a splash. The cold shocked him, but he managed to turn onto his back and begin stroking and kicking with his feet, hoping the wound in his side didn’t come open again. He had no plan for what he would do when he got to shore, but every day on the ship took him farther from where he had to go.

  “Hwas ist thata?” someone shouted. “Hwas fol? Airic?”

  “Ne, ni mih.”

  Neil grimly kept stroking with dogged determination. He knew the language—it was Hanzish, the tongue of the enemy.

 
; The sound of voices receded. Once he thought he heard Swanmay’s voice, but he wasn’t certain. Then there was only his own struggle with the waves.

  His arms became leaden all too quickly, and despite the fire in his ribs, he felt the warmth draining from his body. If shore was not near, then he would complete the death Swanmay had saved him from.

  Was she right? Did he want to die?

  He summoned an image of the queen, her pale face and dark hair, and hands reaching for her from every direction, but he could not hold it. Instead, in the half-face of the moon, he saw Swanmay’s blue eyes. A strange despair seized him, and more questions, always questions. If she was Hanzish—and he was now certain of that—then why had she helped him? Whom was she fleeing?

  The ocean swelled beneath him, and his face went under. He sputtered the water from his mouth and nose and turned to swim on his belly. He heard a faint shushing that might be surf and might be the dying beat of his heart.

  He swam on. It was all he could do.

  He woke to a blue sky and the warm crackle of a fire. For a moment he thought he’d been dreaming, but then Swanmay’s voice broke through it. He felt immensely better, as if he had slept for ten days. The pain in his side was only a dull ache now, and for a moment he thought that perhaps everything that had happened since he had left Eslen was merely a dream.

  But then he heard the chatter all around him, in Hanzish, and reached for his sword.

  “You are a very stupid man,” Swanmay’s voice informed him.

  He opened his eyes and sat up. He lay on a blanket. The fire was nearby, and beyond it there was a sandy shingle and the sea. Two langschips were pulled up on the beach, and Swanmay’s ship was anchored a hundred kingsyards offshore.

  In the other direction was a plain covered in short, wiry grass. Swanmay sat beside the fire, on a small stool. Her men seemed to have set up camp. Nearby, two of them were dressing a small, odd-looking deer.

  Swanmay wore a broad-brimmed hat, as if she really were a Sefry, but her face looked drawn and weary. The blue in her eyes had dulled, as if something vital had left her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I had to try.”

  “I understand that now,” she replied. “It makes you no less stupid.”