“He will return, if I summon him. Or, I have no doubt, if you summon him. Later, perhaps. He could be useful to me. Indeed, I am certain he will be. However—Trevennen! Declare yourself.”
From his place only half a dozen seats down the table, the mage stood as Lelienne lifted her voice in that summons. His expression was composed, his gaze level. The Bastard saw that he was not surprised or offended or afraid, and understood suddenly why his mother had hidden Cassiel in a fall of light behind a mirror, and yet the one mage of the Kingdom who had looked behind every mirror and every fall of light had not found him there. Rage rushed into his throat and choked him. He made no sound. He was not certain what might have shown in his face. But no one was looking at him. Trevennen was looking at his mother, and his mother was watching the court. Only Ellis, the Queen, spared a quick glance for the Bastard, her own face showing remarkably little. Her hand had closed hard around the stem of her wineglass, and he was momentarily terrified she might fling the glass the length of the table. But she did not. He had not imagined her capable of such restraint, and learned otherwise in that moment.
“Lelienne. Madam,” Trevennen said. He bowed slightly.
“Whom do you serve?”
The tall mage bowed again, more extravagantly, a hand over his heart. “Madam, I am your servant.”
The court had been listening in frozen anticipation, and for the second time whispers exploded down its length, with a sound like the rising wind. Neither the mage nor the white lady paid any heed to the murmurs. “Approach me,” Lelienne commanded, and the mage left his place to make his way to the head of the table, where he kissed the hand she offered him and then straightened attentively.
“You have been listening to our conversation,” Lelienne said severely.
Trevennen bent his elegant head in an acknowledgment that seemed to the Bastard only faintly guarded, as though he believed he knew the limits of Lelienne’s humor. Even fighting rage, the Bastard wondered whether he really did.
“You have heard what my son has said. Is this truth?”
“I was intrigued to hear it, madam. I believe it could be true. Your son is an interesting and subtle man, and ambitious. And born of the royal house, as of course you intended.”
“And thus able to see into the eternal City.”
“Likely so, madam. Everyone knows he goes to Tiger Bridge at dusk, to look at the City in the Lake when the Lake becomes a mirror of the eternal dream.” The mage gave the Bastard a look both assessing and curious. “Yes, I think that is quite likely. It would explain a great deal. If you did not, ah, remove the King yourself from this ephemeral City . . .”
“No.” Lelienne sipped wine and glanced at the Bastard, who set his teeth, got to his feet, refilled her goblet, and resumed, without comment or expression, his place kneeling at her side.
“I shall need him,” she said, not to the mage, but to the Bastard. “You will bring him back for me.”
Had they been alone together, the Bastard might have risked a refusal. Amid this assembly, he did not dare, and only bowed his head against her dark, dangerously perceptive gaze.
It was extraordinary how quickly the City accustomed itself to the rule of a woman it had not seen in thirty-four years, and who had been at that time thought to be only a woman who had caught the passing fancy of the King. The City, the Bastard reflected, sensed power, as though authority were a fragrance carried on the wind that blew off the Lake and through every street and alley and byway.
Everyone knew the Bastard had been brought to heel by his mother, though she made little show of it after that first banquet before the court. Everyone knew the Queen was pinioned in her tower, and everyone knew from her women that she was most uncharacteristically quiet and meek in her new captivity. Everyone knew that the most powerful mage in the City had kissed Lelienne’s hand and bowed his head under her dark gaze, and that the other mages hid from her in fear. No one dared offer defiance to Lelienne, and no one dared openly slight Trevennen.
The guard had been reordered, so that men stood at the Queen’s door, and the Bastard’s, and throughout the court at the door of this man and that, but not at the doors of the King’s own apartment, which Lelienne had appropriated for her own use. The guardsmen reported the movements of those they guarded to their captain. And their captain reported to Lelienne.
Galef had tried to resign his post. The white lady had turned the hands of one of his lieutenants into the talons of a bird, and his voice into the cry of an eagle. Then she had, more prosaically, taken the newest and youngest recruit the guardsmen had among their ranks and hung the young man by his wrists over a bed of white-hot coals made from burning glass. When Galef had tried in desperation to draw his sword against her, it had shattered into light and mist in his hands.
Lelienne had relented only when the guard captain knelt at her feet and pleaded, in the most abject terms, for forgiveness. She had left the man with the voice of an eagle, although she had restored his hands and Galef’s sword.
“You should have known better,” the Bastard said when the captain came to set men on his door and beg his pardon for it. “You knew perfectly well she would punish your defiance with the pain of those for whom you are responsible. You were there when she did it to me. How is the boy?”
Galef, shadows of humiliation and rage hidden in his eyes, bowed his head. “Badly burned.”
“Will he recover?”
“He will. Though likely he is ruined for a guardsman. Not for his feet,” the captain added when the Bastard raised his brows. “But how can he trust those he serves, if they would command such a thing to be done to him? Or me, as his captain, if I cannot prevent it? He thought all he faced were the moods of the King and the high temper of the Queen, and he found this. All he will want now is to go back to his mother’s house in the City, and who can blame him?—My lord, if I do not report to her as she commands, I think she will know it.”
The Bastard moved restlessly to his window and looked out across the City. From above, and to an ignorant observer, the City would have looked peaceful. The air was cold and still. Crystalline. Fine threads of smoke led straight up in narrow lines from chimneys. There was no movement to the air, and little upon the frosted streets. To the Bastard, the City’s quiet seemed . . . fraught.
“My lord . . .,” said the captain tentatively.
“Of course you must report to Lelienne,” the Bastard said impatiently. “Of course she will know it if you do not. She hears everything. I think she sees a great deal. Don’t defy her. Report to her as she demands. Obey every command she gives—especially those directed against me.” He looked straight at the captain, held his gaze.
The captain took a slow breath. “My lord. Yes, my lord.”
And whether he understood what the Bastard had not said was hard to guess. The Bastard said a little more explicitly, “If she is not made angry, everyone will be safer. Far better she should hear nothing that will anger her. Least of all defiance from you. Now, is that quite clear?”
“Yes,” breathed the captain.
“So don’t try to protect me.” The Bastard emphasized the last word with no stress in his voice, only with a sudden direct stare into the captain’s eyes. “We want no more boys hung over fire. Do we, Galef ?”
“No,” said the captain with only the faintest downward flicker of his own eyes to suggest he had heard the Bastard’s meaning. He said, with absolute sincerity, “I would eat a great deal of humiliation to prevent that. As you have done, Lord Neill. As you do. Very well. If I must be her man, so I will be. There will be men on your door. They will go where you go. I will ask that you do not try to prevent them.”
“No,” said the Bastard distantly, and turned back to the window, resting his hands on its narrow sill. “Has she commanded that you cease reporting to me? Or that you refuse my orders?”
“No, my lord.”
“Has she ordered a guard set on Trevennen?”
“No, my lord.
”
“No?” The Bastard thought this was interesting. “Very well. I order it, then. As my mother does not seem concerned with Trevennen’s movements and activities, perhaps you need not trouble her with this guard’s reports. Although of course you must decide what risks you will take, Galef. In any case, unless you are prevented, you may bring such reports to me.”
“Yes, my lord.”
The Bastard turned back to the guard captain, crossing his arms and resting his hip on the sill of the window. “Very well, then. Thank you, Galef.”
“My lord,” acknowledged the captain, bowing, and withdrew.
Turning back to the view, the Bastard gazed out of his window with eyes that saw nothing of the City. What he could not understand was why his mother continued, over these quiet days in which she amused herself torturing his guardsmen, to wait. He had no doubt whatsoever that she intended some precise object in her presence here, in all that she had done. So why, then, did she hold her hand?
It was the mage Trevennen who gave him, at last, the answer to this question.
CHAPTER 9
ince there was nothing else to do, Jonas walked in no particular direction, among pillars that were all the same, over a floor that might be made of black ice. The darkness fell through space like light and struck the eye with its presence. The pillars glowed with it, while their shadows drank it in and swallowed it, creating a strange textured blackness.
When Jonas lifted his eyes and tried to look ahead, he found a kind of radiant darkness along what might have been a horizon, far in the distance. It was not like light or even the promise of light, but it was a less heavy kind of darkness. He hoped—since he must hope for something—to reach it eventually and see what it might be.
Although the pillars were abundant, save for their presence this place seemed to Jonas to be absolutely empty. Where he had heard at least wind in the branches when he walked in the forest, here he heard nothing at all. The air was very cold and still.
He walked until he was too weary to go farther, and then sat down and rested, with his back against a cold pillar for want of any other shelter. For warmth he had only his jacket, which was not meant to protect against real cold. It had been only autumn when he left the village, and he had expected to find himself in the City before the descent of winter. Now he longed for warmth even more than for water. Neither seemed likely to be found in this desolate place.
As a young man, Jonas had learned endurance. He had learned it marching down endless roads in summer dust and spring mud and winter cold, and also during battle, when one must go on and on and never stop, not for all the arrows that came down, not for any sorcerous traps that waited to turn a man’s bones to fire at his next step. He had learned it during long brutal months when his army besieged some stubborn town or, usually worse, found itself suffering siege behind its own walls. He remembered those years now, surrounded on all sides by darkness and silence. Pulling his legs up, Jonas wrapped his arms around them and bent forward, leaning his face against his knees. He rested that way, tucked up against the cold, for some indeterminate period marked by neither dusk nor dawn. When cramps in his muscles tormented him, he lay down on the icy floor, stretched out at his full length. And when the cold drove him back to his feet, he walked again, endlessly.
It seemed to Jonas sometimes that he could feel his lungs freezing, and his blood. He shivered continually, sometimes enough to send him staggering a few steps sideways. His fingers were numb, his feet also. He walked with his hands tucked under his arms to warm his fingers, but there was not a great deal he could do for his feet. He only walked on, on feet that eventually he could not feel at all, that might have been lumps of wood attached to the ends of his legs.
Almost as terrible as the cold was his thirst. If the pillars were ice, still he had no way to break off pieces so that he might melt them. His lips cracked with cold and lack of water. There was nothing to be done, and so he did nothing, but only went on, and on.
It was impossible for Jonas to tell how long he walked. He grew thirstier, and more desperately weary, and the tips of his fingers as well as his lips cracked from the cold and the dry air. He might have measured the passage of time by the extent of his misery, except it seemed always on the edge of unendurable. Sometimes he stopped, lay down on the black ice, and waited for either sleep or death to claim him. But he did not die and could not sleep. After a while impatience and cold would drive him back to his feet, and he would go on.
At first Jonas had feared to find himself again face to face with the Hunter, and had listened in terror for the cry of the storm hounds. Then the fear wore out, so that in time he waited with indifference for the sound of the Hunter’s bodiless voice and the sight of the twisting shadows of his crown. Eventually he came to long for this encounter. He remembered what the Hunter had demanded from him—your name, your hands, your heart—and thought he would give the Hunter all he demanded for one breath of warm air and one moment in the sun. Then in the next breath he was angry, so angry he could not think and could hardly breathe, and was sure that he would gladly die before he would surrender anything of his to the dark Hunter.
At last, when the encounter did not come, the anger itself wore out as well and he came to doubt that he had ever met the Hunter or spoken with him; he even doubted that the dark Hunter existed. Jonas thought perhaps he had dreamed the meeting. It even seemed possible to him that he had dreamed the Kingdom and the years in the village, and even Timou. He saw her in front of him sometimes, white hair falling down her back, light sliding through her pale eyes like a hidden laugh, a faint blush rising under her fair skin at something someone had said. He knew she was not really there before him. It seemed possible to him that she had never really existed.
Sometimes he looked over his shoulder, expecting to see burning Kanha behind him. When he turned his head to look, he tended to fall, and since the ruined city was never there, eventually he stopped looking for it. In time he also stopped seeing Timou before him. After that there was just the dark, and the necessity—he no longer remembered why—of continuing to walk forward.
He began to dream while walking. He dreamed he walked through a field beside a river with the sun overhead, but when he bent down to the water it was not there, and when he stopped in the sunlight it faded and lost its warmth. He understood after a time that he was hallucinating. He thought that men he had known from the past walked beside him. He dreamed they all walked through a desert night, thousands of them, so that those at the rear of the column swallowed the dust raised by those in front. He dreamed that huge stones burning with cold flame fell through the air all around them. The flames were dark, and every one gave off its little measure of cold as the stones fell. They shook the road as they struck the ground, and he fell, and blinked, and found himself on his hands and knees, surrounded by textured darkness and pillars of ice that glowed blackly.
“Get up!” commanded his sergeant, stopping beside him, urgent and furious.
“Up, boy!” a different voice seconded—his father’s voice, rougher, from much farther into the past: from a childhood that seemed infinitely distant and infinitely desirable. Jonas moved a little, murmuring, trying to get his feet under him and unable to find the strength to rise.
“You must get up,” said a much quieter voice, much nearer at hand, and Jonas blinked through the darkness and found Timou’s father standing beside him. In this place and in this extremity, this seemed perfectly reasonable.
“You must get up,” Kapoen repeated. He was standing quietly, his hands at his sides, not two feet away. The darkness lay on him like light. “Jonas. You must get up.”
It seemed a great deal to ask. “Help me,” Jonas protested, but though he reached out his hand, Kapoen did not move to take it.
“I would if I could,” said the mage. “You must do it on your own. You’ve come a long way. You can make it the whole way if you are stubborn enough. I know you are stubborn. Up. Stand up.”
&n
bsp; Jonas put his hands on the ice, shoved away from it with arms that seemed to lack all strength. But he made it to his feet, and stood, swaying. When he looked for Kapoen, the mage was not there. This did not surprise him. He took a step, and another.
So he went on. He fell more often now. There was nothing to trip over. He fell when his knees failed to hold him, or when he tried to put his weight on a foot he could not feel. Sometimes he rested where he fell. The cold seemed to bother him less. It entered his bones, until he seemed made of cold, all his bones made of ice. Sometimes it seemed to him that he lay in a meadow, and sometimes in a bed: his own bed, from his boyhood, with his mother singing in the other room.
Then Kapoen would come back and peel illusion ruthlessly away. When Jonas tried to ignore him, the mage’s voice would become a whip in the dark, driving, demanding, punishing, until Jonas fought his way back to his feet. He walked blindly some of the time, eyes shut, letting the mage tell him when he wandered off his course, walking into one icy pillar after another with a bruising force that he thought might mean he was, at least, still alive.
“Where is Timou?” Jonas asked the mage once, thinking that if he was to be harried by hallucinations, he would rather it were she.
“In great danger,” answered Kapoen.
Jonas laughed and said, “Of course. How else?” It seemed to him that this warning had been inevitable from the moment the mage had started to walk through his waking dreams. “I came here to save her, you know,” he confided to Kapoen.
“Foolish and brave,” said the mage, “like so many young men. But it was you the Hunter marked for his need. If you had stayed in your home and barred the door, he would have come there and harried you into the dark even so.”
“He doesn’t exist,” Jonas said defiantly, and laughed again. When Kapoen made no answer, he looked for him, feeling suddenly bereft, and was sorry when there was no one there. It seemed cruel of Kapoen, to force him to keep on and on and on, and then just go away like that.
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