The Witchwood Crown

  But even before he had finished the sentence, the doors swung inward, and Drusis strode in. “Forgive me,” the duke’s brother half-shouted, as if to a crowd. “I am filthy from the road, and I intrude on you even in your own chamber, dear sister-in-law!”

  Jesa, who could be timid at the best of times, leaped in surprise at the newcomer’s loud voice: she had never been in a small room with Earl Drusis before, though she had seen him at court functions, and he was always the subject of much conversation. Taller than his brother the duke and impressively muscular, Drusis was also daunting in other ways, with a handsome, full-lipped face and thick, curly hair, brown with a brassy shine. He wore the armor of a cavalry general, although technically he was neither, or at least that was what Jesa had heard Saluceris complain many times. He also seemed to seethe with strength and youth, although he was but a single, slim hour younger than his brother. It was almost impossible not to stare at him, though Jesa was terrified at the idea of meeting his eyes.

  “You are welcome any time, good Drusis, of course,” said Duchess Canthia, holding out her hand to him. “This house is yours, also, and always will be.”

  “You are too kind, sister-in-law.” He bowed and then kissed her hand.

  “Of course you are welcome,” echoed Saluceris, but after the thunder of his brother’s entrance, his words were spoken quietly, even reluctantly. “We are merely surprised to see you, brother. We thought you were at Chasu Orientis.”

  “And so I was. But I wasted no time getting back. I could not bear to think of you and your young family sitting here in the Sancellan, oblivious to the dangers that threaten.”

  “Dangers? What dangers?” the duke demanded. Jesa thought he seemed split between genuine worry and annoyance at his brother’s sudden, loud presence.

  “The horse-eaters. They have attacked us! They have attacked Chasu Orientis!”

  Duchess Canthia put her sewing down. “That is terrible, Drusis. When did this happen?”

  “Just a sennight ago.” Drusis walked to the window, looked down on the harbor and all the sails bobbling there like resting gulls.

  “I cannot believe the Thrithings-men would be so mad, to attack your home. What did they do?”

  “Oh, they did not besiege the castle itself,” said Drusis, waving his hand as if to swat away a troublesome fly. “But they attacked Drinas Novis, a town within a few miles of the castle, on the edge of my land.”

  “A settlement.”

  “Yes, I suppose. What does the name we give it matter? The barbarians killed a score of our people, wounded three times that many, and burned half the houses to the ground. Nearly twenty people dead, Saluceris—men, women, and children! Does it matter that their town is new?”

  Saluceris shook his head. “Of course not. But it matters to the Thrithings-men that we are building towns on what was once their land.”

  Drusis shook his head in outrage. “Are you defending these murderers, brother? What kind of thing is that for the duke of Nabban to do, when our own people are being killed by savages?”

  “It is terrible,” said Canthia, looking to her husband. “Surely there is something we can do for them?”

  Jesa thought Saluceris looked like a man who had just discovered that the widow he was marrying already had eight fat, hungry children. “Of course we can help, wife. But you, brother, I don’t understand what you want. Do you not have two score knights or more at Chasu Orientis, and pikemen a-plenty?”

  When Drusis scowled, his entire face changed, the strong, handsome features becoming almost a mummer’s mask of sullen anger. “Do you think this is the only thing that has happened of late? Lesta Hermis had his land raided three times in Feyever. Last Novander the cursed Thrithings-men attacked the party of Escritor Raelis on his way to Kwanitupul. How long must we wait before we do something? Until they have set fire to the Mahistrevan Hill, murdered our children, and raped our women in their own homes?” His dark face had grown even darker with anger, but his eyes caught Duchess Canthia’s and it seemed to fluster him. “I beg your pardon for my harsh speech, my lady. I am upset and careless because of it.” He turned back to his brother. “Do not think because you wear the ducal ring by a fluke of birth, Saluceris, that I will stand back and see our land overrun by savages, our villages burned, our people slaughtered.”

  “You grow hot too quickly, Drusis,” said the duke. As his brother had grown darker, Saluceris had grown paler, so that they seemed opposites rather than the product of a single womb. “Stand back and see our land overrun? I have said nothing of the sort—those words are all yours.” He took a breath, and even Jesa could see the duke was fighting for control. When he lifted a hand up to stroke his beard, his fingers were trembling. “No, we will discuss the problem and deal with it as we always have, in council with our fellow nobles in the Dominiate. Now, you have had a long ride, I doubt not, and little in the way of rest or refreshment—the dust of the road is still on you.” Saluceris clapped his hands and within a moment two servants had stepped through the door. “Take my brother to his accustomed chamber and see that he has everything he needs,” the duke told them. “We will speak again later, Drusis.”

  Jesa saw that the earl’s face was still red with anger, but thought she saw something else too, a gleam in Drusis’ eye like a hunter whose prey had finally broken cover. “Very well. But I will not hide my feelings in front of Ingadaris, Albias, Claves and the rest. If you will not help me to stamp out these grassland vermin, brother, I will do it myself!”

  With that, he turned and strode out of the chamber, the two male servants scurrying to keep up with him.

  Little Serasina was crying again, and this time the duchess came and took her from Jesa, pressing her daughter close against her and giving her a finger to suck until the baby’s hitching sobs had quieted. “Fetch the wet-nurse,” she told Jesa. “Too much shouting. The child will need feeding before she’ll sleep again.”

  As Jesa was on her way out, she heard her mistress tell the duke, “I would forgive your brother much if I thought he was truly angry.”

  “What?” The duke sounded confused. “What are you saying, Canthia?”

  “That I think it is an imposture. That he wears that angry face and those stormy sentiments like a mask.”

  “You do not understand Drusis, wife. He has always been strong-headed since he was a child, hot as fire. He has always leaped first and looked afterward.”

  “Oh, I think he looks exactly where he is going to leap,” Canthia said, and it was surprising for Jesa to hear the harsh undercurrent in the duchess’ sweet voice. “I think he looks very carefully.”

  The door fell closed behind her and Jesa did not hear any more.

  29

  Brown Bones and Black Statues

  “What difference should it make that I didn’t come to the Inner Council meeting?” Morgan demanded. He and his grandfather were alone in the throne room, or as alone as a king and prince could be in chamber where so many Erkynguards stood at silent attention. “You’ve never cared about that before.”

  Simon let out a weary sigh and waited to compose himself before replying. “That’s not true, Morgan. We haven’t argued with you every time you have chosen to ignore us about councils or many other things, but that doesn’t mean your grandmother and I don’t care.” He was angry, of course, but as always, he found it hard to look at the prince without seeing his lost son. The same heavy, scowling brows, the same handsome features—at least, when they were not twisted in a childlike pout, as they were now. Morgan was not as tall and thin as his father had grown to be, but he had John Josua’s sharp features; Simon sometimes felt as if he were chastising poor, dead Johnno when he scolded his grandson. “But things are different, now, Morgan. It is time for you to step up, to take some responsibility, not disappear with your friends into the stews of Erchester when all the rest of us are worrying about going to
war.”

  “Responsibility, oh, of course,” said the prince bitterly. “I’m supposed to act like a man because I am the heir—yes, yes, I know. But you refused to let me fight when we were attacked by the Norns.”

  At least this was a complaint Simon could understand. “That was not by my choice. The queen was worried for you. We did not know the strength of the enemy—”

  “No one else was kept away from the fighting! Even Grandmother was out among the soldiers. The queen!”

  Simon had to fight back another frustrated sigh. He wished Miriamele had been able to talk to him that night before making her decision. It was one thing to protect the prince, another to do it in such a way that the lad felt unmanned and humiliated.

  “What’s done is done,” he said at last. “But what will come is still up to you, lad.”

  Morgan stared at him, and for a moment Simon thought he saw a fearful hint of Miri’s mad father in the boy’s bright, furious stare. “Let me do something,” the prince pleaded. “I can wield a sword perfectly well. Astrian taught me—”

  “Astrian has taught you tricks,” said Simon. “I have seen it. Yes, the Nabban-man is an able fighter, but he has shown you clever stratagems for knife-fights, for tavern brawls. Fighting in a real battle—in full armor, in hot sun—it is the strongest man who has the best chance to survive. A battle is not a tournament. You will not be able to rest between bouts and measure each opponent.” His voice got louder as he warmed to the subject. “No! Arrows will be flying at you! Enemies will attack you from behind even as you fight with someone else.”

  “I am strong,” Morgan said. “How could you know? You don’t care, you don’t ask. The only time you talk to me is to tell me what a fool I am—how I always embarrass the High Throne.”

  Simon knew he had lost control of his feelings, but at the moment he could only see his grandson following his son into early death, no matter how different their paths. “God’s Bloody Tree, boy,” he cried, “do you not hear me? A warrior who prepares for battle in a tavern will likely not live long enough to see that tavern again. Is that why you do not pay the folk who sell you and your friends all that ale? Do you plan a martyr’s death to clear your bills? Then you are not just a fool, but a heartless fool, because you will cause grief to all you leave behind. Have your grandmother and I not suffered enough?”

  Morgan opened his mouth, and for a moment Simon thought that the prince might say something that neither of them could ignore nor forget, and he knew it would be in large part his own fault. To the relief of the king’s more reasonable self, which was still fighting against his fury for mastery of his feelings, his grandson said nothing, only turned and walked out without asking permission or bowing. Simon watched him go, biting back the angry words he knew would only make things worse.

  “Well,” he said to the air, to the chair of bones and the ancient banners hanging from the ceiling, “what other cheerful things will this day bring me?”

  “At least one, I am hoping,” said a voice from the doorway.

  Simon looked up to see Binabik. These days the troll dressed not for the cold of his homeland, but in soft linens. Simon thought it made him look a little like one of Tiamak’s folk. “Has the noon hour struck already, then?”

  “It still lacks a quarter-hour or such, is my thought,” Binabik said. “But I wished to be speaking to you first, just us two, because I know the queen does not like the matter. I was waiting for you to be finishing to speak with your grandson, then I saw him go by with a face like a Mintahoq blizzard, so it seemed the conversation was ending.”

  “It never ends. It’s always the same.”

  “Ah, the stubbornness of the young. Nearly as difficult it is being as the stubbornness of the old.”

  Simon raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean by that?”

  Binabik might have smiled, but it was hard to know because it was gone in an instant. “It is having no importance, my old friend. An old Qanuc saying, only. No, I came now because of wishing to ask you something. Are you still having no dreams?”

  Simon decided he did not mind a change of subject. “None at all, and I cannot tell you how strange that feels. Not even of my poor, dead harper, though I see his face when I am awake all the time. What do you think has happened to me?”

  “I have no way of saying, Simon-friend. It could be nothing—since, as Miriamele was suggesting, for many people it is always being that way. But to me it has the feeling of a different thing. Still, I can be offering no wisdom, and neither Tiamak nor his lady wife have any knowing of it either, though we have searched most strenuously in their books when they were not tending the Sitha.”

  “Ah, yes.” The king sighed. Another missed opportunity. “Does she show any sign of getting better?”

  The troll shook his head. “No—she grows slowly worse, if I am any of a judge. But sometimes she is speaking in her fever. Her name is Tanahaya, it seems. Have you heard such a name before, perhaps during your living in Jao é-Tinukai’i? It might shine some light on why the Sithi were sending her to you.”

  “No. But I met so many Sithi there, and very few told me their names. Most of them didn’t think much of mortals.”

  Binabik looked up at the Dragonbone Chair on the daïs behind Simon, squatting above the king’s and queen’s more modest thrones like a gargoyle perched on a cathedral wall. “I see King John’s seat of bones is still being here. What of all the times you told me of your wish for hiding it away?”

  “Miri won’t let me. But I hate it. Every time I look at it, I think of the lying stories about Prester John all over again. I wish I’d never found out.”

  “About who really was killing the dragon? Would you have been preferring to keep your ignorance than to know your ancestor’s great deed and of King John taking the credit?”

  “No, of course not. But leaving the cursed thing out this way for everyone to see seems like . . . like saying that the truth doesn’t matter.”

  Binabik nodded gravely. “Perhaps. But sometimes, I am thinking, a lie is only the truth that is believed at that time. Nobody meant to teach you something that was wrong, I am thinking.”

  Miriamele appeared from the chapel, trailed by Sisqi and Qina, looking like a mother bear with two cubs. “Ah, yes, the old throne,” she said. “We kept it outside for a while, but the common people hated that. They loved my grandfather Prester John—they love him still—and they’ll always think of it as his throne. So at last I convinced my husband to put it back here, in the Great Hall.”

  “Convinced?” Simon let out a snort. “More like ordered.”

  “Decisions between wife and husband have sometimes complication,” Sisqi suggested with a smile. “Some things I am thinking must be explained by one to the other.”

  “Yes, very often,” Miri agreed. “Especially to husbands.”

  “If everyone is finished amusing each other with how stupid and stubborn I am,” Simon said darkly, “perhaps we could go outside and talk there. I’m tired of dust and statues and old bones. And also old stories that aren’t true.”

  “We can’t go out until Eolair arrives,” said Miriamele. “He is coming to meet us here.”

  Simon scowled, but knew there was nothing to be done. He got out of his chair and lowered himself onto the top step of the daïs, pointedly ignoring his wife’s frown. She disliked his habit of doing unkingly things, even when only friends were around to see. “Morgan is not going to join us,” he told Miri, but did not explain farther. “Who else are we waiting for?”

  “Ah, here you all are,” called Eolair as he entered through the ornate throne room door.

  “And now we are going outside.” Simon clambered to his feet. The most important thing about leading, he had learned, whether the thing being led was a kingdom or a small group of friends, was simply to take initiative, then others would follow. Miriamele knew this too,
of course. Sometimes it became a race between the two of them to see who would get to implement a decision first.

  A dozen Erkynguards followed the company out of the throne room, trailing the king and queen as always, like a pack of helmeted hounds in green livery. Simon sometimes said trying to go anywhere without them was like trying to sneak through the kennel yard with a handful of meat scraps.

  “We may be grateful for that, one day,” was Miriamele’s usual reply.

  Outside, as the sun climbed high in the sky, Simon led his friends toward the Tower Garden, as it was called, because it was built beside the spot where Green Angel Tower had once stood. The garden had high walls and, after all these years, tall trees, along with a complicated braid of pathways marked by hedges. They left the guards outside, except for a pair inside the only gate. The largest remaining piece of the angel herself, the statue’s head, sat on a plinth of stone at the center of the garden. A group of servants had just finished setting out a noontide meal of cold meat, fruit, cheese and bread on the shady grass; Simon thanked them and dismissed them. He was determined that at least this once, he and his friends could pour their own wine. “We need only wait for Tiamak,” he said. “He has some business to attend to, but he said he should be here by the time the bells ring noon. Pasevalles, too.”

  “You planned all this, didn’t you?” his wife said.

  “I told you I didn’t want to be inside. Look, Miri, it’s a lovely Avrel day. Why shouldn’t we be out in the sun with our friends?”

  She laughed. “Why shouldn’t we, indeed? I think it’s a very fine idea, husband.”

  • • •

  Tiamak arrived a short while later, but Pasevalles sent a message begging forgiveness: a small crisis in the counting house was going to prevent him joining them, so they toasted him in his absence. But despite the warmth of the afternoon and the extreme pleasure of the company, Simon drank very moderately, and saw that Miri did the same. Without discussing it, they kept the conversation to pleasant subjects. Qina and her father sang a Qanuc song about a clever snow rabbit outwitting a fox, and the girl acted out the part of the rabbit with such shrewd charm that everyone laughed.