Verè shook his head. “Well, it’s an entertaining tale, and certainly one that shows you in an unexpectedly heroic light.” He didn’t believe a word of it, though at the same time he wouldn’t have laid a single base coin on a bet that it was false.
“I’ve told you the truth, Captain Deconniy. If it does not please you, tell me what tale would, and I will be glad—”
“To tell me what I wish to hear,” Verè interrupted him. “I’m sure.”
Quòn shrugged.
He was certainly very difficult to read. Verè ordered, “Look at the wall to your right. Look at it!”
The prisoner turned his head, examining the tools that lined that wall without expression.
“You’re telling tales to frighten children. Is any of that the truth? I have severe doubts about that, I truly do. And I’ve the tools to be sure. Do you think you have the strength to withstand the kind of questioning I can bring to bear?”
Quòn turned his dark eyes back again to rest on the captain’s face. “I sincerely doubt it,” he answered without emphasis. “I’ve no intention of trying. I have told you the truth. If you wish greater detail on any part of it, simply say so. I’ll be glad to go into as much detail as you require.”
“I wouldn’t believe that, either,” Verè said, letting his voice lift with open scorn. He leaned forward aggressively, trying to frighten the man, wanting to see whether his tale might falter. “You’re a servant of the Fortunate Gods? Of course you are! That’s why Nomoris took you in the first place! Yet you got away from him, so you say. You attached yourself to his own command and he didn’t notice? A sorcerer like that?”
Quòn shrugged as well as he could—not very well, bound as he was. “I’m a resourceful person. And the bond I bear to the Fortunate Gods, though deep, is quiet. It is truly unlike the tie to a Power.”
“I’m not so sure you bear any tie at all. Shall we see whether the Fortunate Gods protect you?” Verè gestured to the soldiers. Stepping forward, they drew their knives and cut the prisoner’s shirt off his body. The shreds of it settled to the table and the floor in several pieces.
The skin of Quòn’s back shivered and tightened at the delicate touches of the knives, though the soldiers did not nick his skin. But his tone when he spoke was merely exasperated. “What would you believe? That your own Eänetén Power destroyed the Irekaïn soldiers but missed me by mere chance? I wished to disembody the aspect of the Power possessing Gheroïn Nomoris. I did so. Now I wish to find the Raëhema heir, who I believe will prove important in what is to come. I have no personal interest in who rules in Eäneté, nor by what means.”
Verè stood up, walked forward, and leaned his hip against the table a few feet from the prisoner. He held out his hand, and one of the soldiers took an implement from the wall and handed it to him. It was one of the little whips, the one with tiny metal hooks set into its braided thongs, which were now coiled loosely to fit into the hand. It wouldn’t have been his first choice, but he did not say so. He brought it forward to touch the prisoner’s shoulder, gently, letting him feel the sharp bite of the hooks. “Does this frighten you?” he asked. “It should. There are heavier whips, but this is one of the cruelest. The scars it leaves will last all your life. Even if that should unexpectedly be long.”
To the side, Lhiyré put a hand over his mouth and turned his face away. Neither Verè nor Quòn glanced at him.
“Of course it frightens me,” the prisoner said calmly. “Whatever you want to hear from me, I will tell you. But in the end, if you will not accept the truth, you will find that you have been satisfied with a lie, and what benefit will that be to you, or to your duke?”
Verè shook the little whip out across the table. Its spines scraped across the polished table with a small, deadly sound. That would be work for some unfortunate servant, later, who would have to come down to this room and polish those scratches out of the wood.
“Have you leave from your duke to do this?” Quòn inquired, in a tone of academic curiosity, dark eyes fixed on the captain’s face. “Should you not carry my tale to His Grace and permit him to decide whether he believes any part of it? I ask you to do so. I think you will find the Power of Eäneté recognizes my bond even if you do not.”
“His Grace is not here,” Verè told him. “If he were, this would be his duty, and his pleasure. But in his absence, I have all authority.”
Quòn’s eyes widened slightly. “If he is not here, where is he?” And, immediately answering his own question, “He has already gone through the pass into Harivir.” And then, “No wonder Gheroïn Nomoris came so near destroying the Eänetén Power, if His Grace is not even here in Eäneté to support it. How very fortunate I was at hand to balk Irekaìmaiäd at the last. And Her Highness? Of course His Grace took her with him?”
Verè cursed inwardly. He had not meant to give so much away. He was thoroughly annoyed with himself. He snapped, “That the King of Harivir sent you, I certainly believe! You are an assassin, sent to murder His Grace and recover your princess.”
“I came to give Her Highness what assistance I am able. I am not interested in your duke at all.”
“Why you?”
Quòn shrugged. “I’m a helpful sort of person.”
“Because you’re a servant of the Fortunate Gods.”
“Yes.”
Verè and the prisoner looked at each other. Lhiyré watched them both in tense silence.
Not breaking his gaze, Verè flicked the little whip back and then sent it curling forward. It wrapped in a deadly line around Quòn’s shoulder and across his back. He hardly knew how to handle any whip, much less this spined lash, and so flicked it back with a little more strength than he intended; the metal hooks tore savagely through the prisoner’s skin and flesh, leaving deep and bloody tracks.
Quòn did not try to pretend that it did not hurt. He threw his head back, body recoiling as far as the manacles would allow, and cried out without inhibition. His short, hoarse scream echoed in the confines of the stone room. Lhiyré flinched, and even one of the soldiers hissed between his teeth.
Verè, coiling the whip back into his hand, laid the gathered bloody loops of it gently against Quòn’s face to turn it back to his. “You’re an assassin,” he said levelly, “and you came to Eäneté to murder the duke.”
Face white with pain, Quòn answered raggedly, “Yes. Of course. As you say.”
“You can’t believe that!” Lhiyré cried, almost as pale as the prisoner.
Verè tossed the whip down on the table. “If necessary, one can bring a man through all hope of deception, past all the lies, back to the truth. Is that not so?” he added sharply, speaking now to the prisoner.
Quòn, his breath still coming a little unevenly, said, “Yes.”
“Yes. Of course, it helps if one is able to recognize the truth when one hears it, at the end.”
The prisoner knelt, arms spread wide across the surface of the table, blood trickling down his back from the cuts of the whip. He said, “Why go to the trouble? You’ve already had the truth from me.”
“Indeed.” Verè paused.
“Send him to the duke,” suggested Lhiyré.
Verè lifted an eyebrow at the prisoner.
Quòn bowed his head. “I would be glad to explain myself to your duke.”
“What, shall I send His Grace a possible assassin? I’ve heard better notions.” Verè turned to the soldiers. “Put him back in his cell. Give him a blanket and coal. And I want one of you where you can watch him at all times.”
“Sir,” said one of the soldiers, and bent over the manacles.
Quòn slumped back on his heels as his wrists were freed, and then stood up carefully, letting the soldiers take his arms without protest.
When he was gone, Verè said to Lhiyré, “I don’t like him, or his story.”
“But do you believe him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know.” Frustrated, he ran a hand through his hair and shoo
k his head. “I don’t want to. Gods and Powers, disasters and miracles! I need to send a message to His Grace, but what to put in it, I confess I don’t know.” He drew a breath and let it out. “Is that true, what he said about the Gods and the Wall of Winds?”
“I don’t . . . I was never a scholarly man, Captain Deconniy. Something of the kind happened, I believe.”
“Something of the kind.” Verè glanced toward the cells. “I promise you, I’ll have the truth out of him eventually. And he knows it. Let him think about that for a while. I’ll question him again in the morning and see whether he tells the same tale then.” He walked toward the stairs.
The new seneschal, following him, winced slightly.
“You don’t have to watch.”
“I don’t know that I have the nerve,” Lhiyré admitted. He set his foot on the bottommost stair, cast a misgiving look over his shoulder back toward the table, and shuddered. “Poor man. I wouldn’t be in his place tomorrow morning for any possible reward.” He followed Verè up the stairs, closing the door behind them with open relief.
But in the morning, the cell was empty and the prisoner was gone. The guard set to watch the prisoner lay dead on the stones of the floor, stripped of clothing and weapons.
Very soon after that, Verè found out about the dead men at the mouth of the pass, and the heavy gates standing open.
It was the worst possible failure of duty he could imagine.
“I’d meant to send a man,” he told Geran Lhiyré, trying to keep the grim fury and worse, the edge of terror, out of his tone. “But I don’t see that I can send anyone else to carry this word to His Grace. I’m the one who saw Gheroïn Nomoris die the second time; I’m the one who spoke to the prisoner, and lost him, and let him through the pass. I’ll have to go myself. I’ll ride light, with two spare horses.”
The new seneschal only nodded, but Verè’s senior lieutenant objected. “His Grace left you in charge of the men here, sir.”
Verè was acutely aware of this. Disobedience if he went, dereliction of duty if he stayed; the choice was plain enough. He said, “And I’m leaving you in charge, Lieutenant Tejef, under Lhiyré’s authority. You’ll get a promotion out of it, I expect, since I’ve no doubt you’ll do a fine job. Two spare horses. See to it.”
“He’s not wrong, though,” murmured Lhiyré once the lieutenant was out of earshot.
“I know,” said Verè, rather through his teeth.
“His Grace won’t like this tale—”
“I know,” Verè said again. He hardly needed anyone to point this out to him. “I’ll count on you to advise Tejef if anything comes up. You’re both sensible men. You’ll do fine.”
“I wish Gereth were here,” Lhiyré muttered.
Verè didn’t answer. But he wished that too. Very much. Or better, that the seneschal was with His Grace, so that a man might count on his calming influence when he had an uncomfortable report to make.
But there was nothing to do but wait the few minutes necessary for the animals to be readied while he tried to find a way to change his mind about what he had to do. He already knew there was no way. He could hardly send Lhiyré. He was aware, to his shame, that he would have sent another man in his stead if it had been possible. But it was impossible. When the horses were brought up with their light-loaded saddlebags, he swung up onto the foremost gelding without a word and rode out of the yard without looking back.
20
The weather was bad, mudslides and freezing rain had made an appalling mess of the road, and the uncertainty of this whole winter was worse than either weather or road. All this exacerbated the tension between Riheir Coärin and the Wolf Duke.
Everything was hard for poor Riheir. Kehera knew it, and she did sympathize, she truly did, but she found herself impatient as well. Surely he understood that this was hard for her, too. It was hard for everyone.
She knew perfectly well that part of her impatience was just embarrassment. Only this past spring she had accepted a courting poem from poor Riheir. And now the Eänetén duke had declared he would marry her and she . . . well, she had not refused. She had even more or less agreed. All right, to be fair, in the end she had agreed. Only events had flown ahead of them so that the actual wedding had been delayed once and then again. And yet they were all still acting as though they were allied. It seemed to Kehera that they might all perfectly well go on just as they were: as allies, with no need for the bonds forged by marriage. If they chose.
Though she couldn’t help but be acutely aware of the tension between Riheir and Innisth. If she were married to either one of them, that situation, at least, would surely become easier. Only she didn’t want to wed the Wolf Duke of Eäneté . . . or she thought she didn’t want to, or at least she thought she shouldn’t want to.
It was difficult to sort out her own knowledge and feelings from Raëhemaiëth’s. Now that a deep tie had once again awoken in her, she had rediscovered how very challenging it could be to sort out what was hers from what was the Power’s. And Raëhemaiëth wanted this alliance. Or the proposed marriage. Or something.
Kehera also had to admit that somehow, Raëhemaiëth aside, she kept finding her gaze wandering to the Wolf Duke. She liked to look at him; she couldn’t deny it. She almost fancied she could see his Immanent Power surrounding him, like a shimmer of sunlight even in this dreadful weather. But even without the tie, she suspected he would make a compelling figure. Those yellow eyes. That spare, ascetic face. The cold manner beneath which hid such depths of heat and anger . . . He was compelling.
He could be cruel. She’d seen that herself. Yet she thought she understood now why he drew such devotion from his people. Because he gave that devotion back. You could see it once you learned how to look.
She found herself gazing at him again, at the lines of his shoulders and back where he rode ahead of her. When he rode ahead of her like this, she couldn’t help but take the free chance to look at him as a gift.
She was at least sure now that she could never imagine marrying Riheir Coärin. She was fairly sure poor Riheir had guessed as much. This made her feel uneasy about everything he said and did, and that made her feel impatient. She knew it wasn’t fair. But she couldn’t help it.
And besides that, they were all tired. She and the Wolf Duke and the Eänetén force had entered Coär’s precincts on the sixteenth day of the Iron Hinge Month and it was now the twentieth day, and Kehera felt none of them had yet had a chance to take a single free breath.
They should have come by now to the town of Viär, in whose precincts Meilin Gap lay, but first they had delayed so that Riheir could arrange for wagons and support from Coär and then the weather had turned cruel, icy rain spitting from a heavy sky. Harivin roads were generally good, but where the road lay through a low place, the stone sank into the mud. These low areas were a torment for horses, worse for men afoot, and especially brutal for narrow-wheeled wagons. This part of the road, outside both Coär’s precincts and Viär’s, was worse than any. When it was no one’s duty to carry the stone necessary to maintain the road, the task tended to be neglected, and of course the problem was worse this year because nearly all the men had been called up by their lords to defend Harivir’s northern border. The Wolf Duke had been freezingly polite to Riheir about the bad sections of the road, and of course Riheir had taken that poorly, especially since he knew very well he should have made sure someone saw to the road before winter set in.
This was the third time they’d had to halt the column and task the men with tearing down the nearest farmers’ walls and hauling rock for the road. The walls were not that close to the road and the rain made the labor still more unpleasant, and if Kehera was any judge, the Wolf Duke was just about to stop being freezingly polite and become cuttingly acerbic instead. She was fairly certain that would not be helpful. Nudging her horse forward, she said soothingly, “Once we’re past this low part, I think it’s uphill all the rest of the way to Viär, so this shouldn’t happen again
.”
“It shouldn’t have happened at all,” snapped the Wolf Duke.
“I know,” Kehera said even more soothingly, before Riheir could retort with unwise heat. “But of course no one could guess your king would be so insanely ambitious as to make sorcerers and then find a way to feed other Immanences to the Power of Irekay and then start attacking everybody in the world. If you had realized, Your Grace, I’m sure you would have sent warning and so we would all have been better prepared.”
She was quite certain it would never have occurred to him to warn Riheir or anyone else, even if he’d known all about his king’s plans from the beginning. Since it was obviously true that they’d all be a little more secure now if he had realized sooner what the King of Pohorir was about and passed warning across the mountains, her comment held enough justice to bring what might have been an incipient tirade to a dead halt.
Kehera added, turning to Riheir, “Of course, obviously once the trouble with Emmer began—”
The Wolf Duke gave a sudden hard gasp, and Kehera forgot what she’d been about to say. She reined her horse a step closer to his, reaching to touch his hand. “Your Grace!” she said sharply. “Are you well?”
He plainly wasn’t. A couple of his soldiers were near at hand, but they obviously had no idea what to do. But Tageiny jerked his horse’s head around, came up on the duke’s other side, and seized his arm, keeping him upright in the saddle. As far as she could tell, the duke did not notice either of them.
“Eänetaìsarè has risen,” she told Riheir. She couldn’t exactly feel it, not in her own heart and body, but she could feel Raëhemaiëth’s response to the other Power’s rising. Probably she didn’t need to tell Riheir; probably he felt it, too. She said, striving to be sensible and calm, “The Pohorin king has moved against Eäneté. I’m sure that’s what’s happened. We expected this.” She didn’t allow herself to worry. Of course Eänetaìsarè would throw back any attack, even from the Great Power of Irekay. Of course it would. Shaking off all possible doubts, she said firmly, “Get canvas up. Don’t argue, Riheir. Canvas, fire, hot spiced wine, in that order. How long is it till dark? A few hours?”
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