The Path to Power

by Karen Miller

  Unwilling, Ercole lowered his gaze.

  “For the last time, Argante’s death was never intended. Your sorrow is my sorrow. But I won’t let it weaken this council or our duchy. For Clemen’s sake, can you set your grief aside? If you can’t, you’re no good to me.”

  Still, glowering silence. He could see in Humbert’s face that his foster-lord was willing Ercole to quit the council. And Humbert wasn’t alone. Not a man present wanted Argante’s half-brother to remain. The decision to keep him had been politically prudent, not popular.

  And because Ercole knew it too, knew how deeply his presence irked, he shook his head. “I would stay a councillor. Your Grace.”

  “Then be warned, Ercole. I’ll tolerate no more of your outbursts.” He turned to Aistan. “To answer your question, my lord, I don’t doubt Berardine’s offer was genuine. As for why she made it clandestine, I didn’t ask.”

  Aistan was scarcely containing his contempt. “Because you knew she’d lie?”

  Spirits save him. Aistan loathed Cassinians as though they’d done him some mortal harm. “I assumed it had something to do with the vipers’ pit of Cassinian politics.” Masking irritation behind a smile, he added, “Or else at the last moment she regretted her choice of gown, and preferred not to display her poor taste in public.”

  A ripple of uneasy amusement from the council, defusing the tension.

  Lord Egann, elderly and most often timid, chosen councillor by Harald for his accommodating ways, cleared his throat. “My lord, how did you know Berardine was in Eaglerock?”

  He made sure not to look at Humbert again. “I was told.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” said Ercole. “Why did you meet in secret with the widow?”

  This time Ercole’s comment sparked no furious outcry. Instead, Farland nodded. “Yes, Your Grace. Why?”

  And here it was. The first real challenge to his authority. If he didn’t meet it, his rule would be over before it truly began.

  “My lords, as Clemen’s duke there will be times when I keep my own counsel,” he said. Addressing all of them, but looking at Humbert. “Best you become accustomed to that.”

  “But now the matter’s in the open,” Humbert said, his right hand tight on the arm of his chair. “And we can talk of it. We must talk of it. Roric, you can’t marry the widow’s brat.”

  “Humbert’s right,” Aistan agreed. “Marrying Ardenn would yoke Clemen to every duchy in Cassinia, mire us in their festering feuds. We’d never know peace again. Nor can we wink at the hornet’s nest such a marriage would stir with Harcia. You can be sure Aimery would view it as a grave threat.”

  “He might even declare war!” said Scarwid.

  Hyett was frowning. “Indeed. Balfre would urge him to it. Given half a chance.”

  Fervent exclamations as the council imagined the worst. Remembering the damage Harald had caused in the past by trying to mute them, Roric waited for their consternation to die a natural death. Instead let his mind wander, to contemplate Catrain. An unusual girl. Beautiful, yes, but beauty had limited uses. A duke was better served by a wife of wit and intelligence and courage, who could pass those attributes onto his sons. Catrain was in abundant possession of all three. And she was compassionate. He wanted that in a wife, too. The thought of marrying an Argante broke him into a cold sweat. So it was a pity he couldn’t risk Berardine’s daughter. But even though Catrain had caught his interest, stirred him, he could never put personal desires above Clemen’s welfare.

  Do that, and he’d be no better than Harald.

  “My lords,” he said, judging they’d had enough time to express themselves. “Rest easy. I’ve no intention of wedding Catrain. The advantages such a match would bring us–and there are many, you can’t deny it, in trade and influence–still don’t balance the scales. Cassinia’s arrogance is well known. The prince’s regents would soon be citing history as precedent, and seek to dabble their fingers in our business. Berardine has no power to stop them.”

  “Perhaps she doesn’t mean to,” said Farland. “Perhaps she’s come at their behest.”

  “I don’t think so,” Roric said, after a moment. “Else there’d have been much public display. I suspect she hoped to settle things before ever the regents’ council sniffed her intention.”

  Aistan grunted. “All the more reason to refuse her. If she thinks to hoodwink her own liege lord’s advisors she proves herself the most poisonous viper of all.”

  “And then where would we be?” said Hyett. “We mustn’t forget–like mother, like daughter.”

  “So it’s settled,” said Humbert. “You’re refusing the widow’s offer.”

  Roric raised an eyebrow. “Haven’t I said so?”

  “But you will marry,” said old Lord Egann. “That’s not in doubt?”

  Their eagerness to settle Clemen’s future he could well understand, but he was starting to feel like a prize stallion. “Yes , Egann. In due course, I’ll marry. In the meantime, leave me to deal with Berardine. To you, my lords, I leave what we’ve already agreed upon: the preparations for my acclamation and the restoration of the merchant district. And now we’re done.”

  To his complete lack of surprise, Humbert lingered in the council chamber until they were alone. Being private, his foster-lord let slip his deferential mask.

  “So what’s all this, boy?” he demanded. “I thought we’d decided to confront the widow together and afterwards, once we’d learned her intentions, agree on what the council should be told.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  Humbert stared. “Without consulting me?”

  “My lord—” His fists were clenched so tight behind his back he could feel his fingernails biting his palms. “The spirits know I never hungered to be Clemen’s duke. But now I am, and so I will be. Must be.”

  “You’d be a duke in secret?” Humbert retorted, red-faced. “Treating your councillors with contempt? Roric—”

  “No, Humbert,” he said fiercely. “Not here. And not now.”

  Humbert’s jaw worked as he throttled his temper. “Fine. At Arthgallo’s, then. Three bells. Don’t be late.”

  Watching his foster-lord stamp out of the chamber, Roric relased an unsteady breath. Defying Humbert was difficult. Painful.

  “I’m sorry, my lord,” he murmured. “But I must be my own man.”

  The leechery’s treatment chamber stank worse than a slave-infested Zeidican galley. Stripped to his linen drawers, snuffling through his stench-stuffed nose, Humbert glared around the caverny room crowded small and cramped with its laden shelves and roof-beams, its stacked boxes and burlap sacks and reeking barrels. What a collection of foul, pestilent concoctions. Filthy foreign powders! Galling, misbegot twisteries of nature! There, that bottle. Full of some animal’s eyeballs. And that one? Birds’ claws, shrivelled and knobby. He’d cut his own throat before swallowing one of them. And those knotted ropes of herbs, dangling from above. Looked like dried-up, sun-bleached lengths of horse intestines.

  Faugh.

  Every time he came here he swore he’d never come back. But then his head would start aching, or the twenty-years-gone sword thrust through his left thigh would wake again, complaining. The swollen joints in his right hand. His right knee, cracked in a joust the same year he won his spurs.

  I’m getting old. That’s my misery. All my years and youthful follies are finding me out.

  The trouble was, as everyone knew, there couldn’t be found anywhere in Eaglerock township a better leech than Arthgallo. Not in all of Clemen. No, nor the Marches and Harcia, either. So it was suffer in silence, suffer loudly at the hands of some inferior fool… or put up with whatever remedies Arthgallo decreed were required.

  His movements as neat and precise as a chicken pecking wheat, the leech pinched up yellow powder from a stained wooden box on his bench and dropped it into his stone mortar. Pinched blue powder, and black powder, then a rustling snatch of dried leaves from a green silk bag. The bag was scrawle
d over in odd-looking runes. Foreign writing. Maybe pagan.

  Humbert sniffed. An exarchite would raise a fuss and confiscate the bag and its contents, most likely. As a councillor of Clemen he should express his own dismay. But he wasn’t going to. No exarchite he’d ever met could ungripe him like Arthgallo. Not even Badouim with his incense and mumbled prayers. Show him an exarchite who had the healing touch and maybe he’d raise a complaint about pagan runes and so forth. But until then…

  The leech looked up from his cluttered bench, smiling cheerfully. He was always smiling cheerfully. Most likely because he never swallowed his own potions.

  “Not much longer, my lord. Nearly done. Not cold, are you?”

  Four coal-burning braziers breathed heat into the leechery. It saved a nearly naked man from freezing, with the disadvantage of warming every stinking thing in the place to eye-watering strength.

  Humbert sneezed. “No.”

  “Good, good,” Arthgallo said, beaming. Stringy strands of his grey hair had escaped his canvas leech’s cap to straggle about his cadaverous face. Their tips were swiftly staining blue, black and brown. Similar stains marred the front and sleeves of his worn roughspun robe. “Not to fret, my lord. I’ll have you hoopish in a tricket.”

  Feeling more and more apprehensive, even as his taut guts griped, Humbert watched Arthgallo pour a thin stream of dark green oil out of its glass flask and into the mortar. Frowned as something grey and chalkish was crumbled in after.

  “What’s that?” he said, suspicious.

  Arthgallo waved a dusty hand. “All part of the cure, my lord.”

  Well, yes, but that wasn’t an answer, was it? However, there was no use pressing the curs’t man. When it came to his cures Arthgallo was as close-mouthed as a cold oyster.

  A short time pounding the slop of ingredients with his pestle, and the leech was done at last. Trying not to breathe too deeply–the stench from the mortar paled every other stink in the room–Humbert blinked.

  “You don’t expect me to swallow that muck, do you?”

  “Swallow it?” Arthgallo’s spare frame shook with laughter. “And kill my favourite patient? No, my lord, no. This is a liniment, of sorts.”

  “Oh.” Liniments he understood. It was the “of sorts” that had him fretsome. “And that’s all? You’ll not bleed me?”

  “Lightly, my lord,” Arthgallo said, pulling on a pair of supple calfskin gloves. “A little leech-kissing, I think. You’re not fevered, so a proper gushing would do more harm than good. Now, if you’d be kind enough to lift your arms?”

  Stoically, Humbert endured the slathering of his armpits, his belly and the soles of his feet with the putrid slop in the mortar. Then he grimaced and winced his way through the attachment of ten thread-like, wriggling bloodsuckers to his shrinking flesh.

  “Very good, my lord,” said Arthgallo, standing back to admire his handiwork. “I doubt you’ll need more letting than that, but we’ll see.”

  Eyes stinging from the fumes, Humbert nodded. “Good.”

  “Now, my lord, if you’d care to—”

  The bright jingle of a bell, as the outer door to the leechery was opened. Frowning, Arthgallo turned. “How peculiar. I set the door sign to ‘Closed’. I’m sorry, my lord, I’ll just—”

  Humbert cleared his throat. “I think you’ll find your visitor’s come to see me. Pass him through, Arthgallo, then wait outside till we’re done. And should someone else turn up wanting you, see to them best as you can out there, with no mention of me or him. Understood?”

  “My lord,” said Arthgallo, comfortably incurious, and did as he was told.

  Soon after, the thick leather curtains dividing outer leechery from inner treatment room parted, and Roric entered. Nose wrinkling, he pushed back his concealing hood then flung aside the folds of his long woollen cloak.

  “My lord,” he said, with a sharp nod. “You couldn’t think of a sweeter place to talk?”

  Considering him, Humbert swallowed a sigh. Beneath the dark grey cloak Roric wore a plain brown doublet and brown hose. Good enough clothing when a man wished to draw no attention. But since he’d worn the same clothes in that morning’s council meeting, it seemed the boy needed reminding yet again that he must peacock or else be thought a common lob.

  “I can think of half a dozen easily, but we’ll not be noticed here.”

  Roric grinned, briefly. “True.” Then he frowned. “You’re all right, Humbert? What’s amiss?”

  A week hence and this man would be formally acclaimed Clemen’s duke. Already, anticipating it, there was a change in him. The hesitant, conscience-wrung Roric of Heartsong had vanished. In his place stood this man who, despite his feeble attire, was grown bold and decisive, the man he’d urged this former foster-son, the son of his heart, to become.

  How disconcerting to find himself… disconcerted.

  “Amiss?” he said, striving to sound as cheerful as his leech. “Nothing turbulent. Gripe. The old trouble. Not to fret. Arthgallo will see me hale and hearty.”

  Still frowning, Roric cast a doubtful look about the shadowy chamber and then at the dangling, gorging leeches. “I know you set great store by his cures. But you’re a braver man than I am, Humbert, to throw yourself on this mercy.”

  “Wait till you’re my age,” he grunted. “You’ll find then it’s less courage and more desperation. Roric, when do you mean to refuse the widow?”

  A hint of temper in Roric’s eyes. “It’s not even a full day yet since she made her offer. Don’t mankle on it, Humbert. I said I’d deal with her, and I will.”

  “But you ordered her home to Ardenn, at least?”

  “Of course. She leaves tonight.”

  Well, that was something. “Then you’ve time to tell her the answer’s no before she sails.”

  “What?” Roric laughed, disbelieving. “You want me to go back to her? In broad daylight? Humbert, have those leeches drained the sense from you, along with your blood?”

  “I don’t say meet her again! Spirits forfend, boy. One mistake of that stripe is enough. Send her a note!”

  “And make it look like I’m falling over myself to reject her daughter?” Roric shook his head. “I don’t think so, Humbert. She’ll be wounded as it is. You think it’s clever politics to add insult to the injury?”

  Humbert scowled. It would be easier to argue if he weren’t standing in his drawers, painted with foul-smelling slop and hosting a feast of leeches.

  “Clever politics is making sure that if word of the offer is ever breathed about Clemen, or reaches Harcia’s ears, your refusal is long since writ in stone! For if it’s not you can be certain someone will make mischief!”

  A pinching of Roric’s brows acknowledged the truth of his observation.

  “And I’ll say this, Roric, since we’re blunt speaking,” he added, feeling his own wounded feelings prick. “It hurt that you broke this business to the council with me not a whisper the wiser beforehand.”

  Eyes hooded, Roric made a great show of poking about Arthgallo’s crowded bench, as though the muckery of leechcraft was of deadly importance.

  “I’m sorry,” he said at last. “That wasn’t my intent.”

  What did intent matter? It was deeds that counted. But even worse than being hurt, he’d felt his fellow councillors’ surprise as they realised he’d not known of Berardine’s offer. It was galling. And it weakened him… which made him angry. After all he’d risked for Roric, the boy owed him more loyalty.

  “Why did you meet the widow alone the moment my back was turned?”

  “I told you. I’d have Aistan and the others know I’m my own man.”

  “Fine. But why not at least tell me first thing this morning, what you’d done? Why leave me looking a fettled fool in front of the council?” A nasty thought jabbed. “Did you keep clap-tongue because you’re tempted?”

  “By Catrain?” Roric picked up a dried bassa root. Stared at it closely, as though he were interested. “No.”
r />   But his denial was too slow. Humbert felt his belly churn. “You’ve seen the girl? Berardine risked bringing her to Eaglerock?”

  “And if she did? If I saw Catrain? What does it matter? I’ve said it plain. I’ll not wed with her.”

  “What matters is you never told me! Roric—”

  Roric looked up sharply. “I’m not blind, Humbert. Or deaf, or wanting wit. People wonder if I’m not too beholden to you. They wonder if I can’t make a decision without first I seek your opinion. Or your permission.”

  “What people?” He laughed, disbelieving. “You don’t mean that little cockshite Ercole?”

  “Not just Ercole,” Roric insisted, mule-stubborn. “Aistan and the rest stood with me against Harald because they had no other choice. But if they come to doubt me—” He banged his fist on the bench, making cups rattle and boxes jump. “Harald was right. I’m vulnerable.”

  Breathing deeply, Humbert waited until he could trust himself not to shout. “All the more reason to refuse Berardine sooner rather than later. Then marry a fine Clemen girl who’ll give you fine Clemen sons.”

  Another silence, as this time Roric inspected the contents of the nearest slumped burlap sack. He was frowning again. At length he turned, wiping his ochred fingers down the side of his cloak.

  “I was angry at first, when Harald told me I’d never marry,” he murmured, his eyes blurring as he gazed at the past. “But in time I came to see he was right. Look at the strife noble bastards have caused in the Danetto Peninsula.”

  “That’s Danetto,” he said. “And Harald is dead. Now marriage and siring sons is your duty.”

  “I know,” said Roric, his voice edged. “It’s just… I’m not in love.”

  Caught unawares, Humbert banged his chest, coughing. “Not in love?”

  Roric’s cool gaze narrowed. “You’ve dropped a leech, Humbert.”

  “I’ll drop you, boy!” he said, still wheezing. Refusing to look at the gorged and bloated bloodsucker plopped from his cheek to the floor at his stinking feet. “Not in love? What mumfoolery is this?”