A Man Rides Through

  “Choose soon.” Now Margonal spoke to him harshly, as he himself had spoken harshly to the lady Elega. “Festten will not be patient with your uncertainty.”

  In response, Kragen stiffened his spine. “Perhaps not, my lord. Nevertheless our doom will be Cadwal’s as well. Until the issue is proven, I will do my best to teach the High King better uses for his impatience.”

  Slowly, the Alend Monarch relaxed until he was sprawling in his chair once again. Unexpectedly, he smiled. “Festten, I have heard, has many sons. I have only one. I am inclined to think, however, that I have already bested him in the matter.”

  Because he didn’t know what else to do, Prince Kragen bowed deeply. Then he withdrew from his father’s presence and went to watch a vague brown shape rise above the walls of Orison and wreck another of his best catapults.

  Fortunately, his men escaped without injury this time.

  His face showed nothing but confidence as he went to consult with all his captains.

  TWENTY-EIGHT: A DAY OF TROUBLE

  Castellan Lebbick stood with the three Imagers on the ramparts of the northwest wall and watched as the brown shape which Adept Havelock had translated reduced the second Alend catapult to firewood and splinters. At this elevation, behind the defensive parapet built into Orison’s outward face, he had a good view despite the distance.

  Judging by the old scowl cut into the lines of his face, the knot of his jaw muscles, the bleak glare in his eyes, he wasn’t impressed.

  He ought to have been impressed. He had had no idea that this mirror existed – or that a creature with no more definition than dense smoke could be translated and controlled, could be made to carry rocks as heavy as a man anywhere the Adept commanded. And that wasn’t all. In plain fact, he had had no idea that Havelock was still sane enough to cooperate in Orison’s defense – that plans could be designed on the assumption that the Adept would carry out his part in them. In some way, the Castellan’s warrior spirit probably was impressed. Unquestionably he ought to have been.

  He wasn’t conscious of it, however. He certainly didn’t show it. The truth was that only a harsh act of will enabled him to keep his mind on what he was doing, pay any attention to the situation at all.

  “Well done,” Master Quillon breathed as the airborne shape returned to Havelock’s glass, gusting easily across the wind. “You surpass yourself, indeed you do.” And he actually patted the Adept’s shoulder like an old friend – which would have surprised Lebbick under other circumstances, since Havelock’s lunacy had made friendship with him impossible for everyone except King Joyse. Who was himself, the Castellan thought sourly, no longer particularly sane.

  “Fornication,” Adept Havelock replied negligently, as if he normally performed such feats of Imagery standing on his head. “Piss on the slut.” In spite of his tone, however, he was concentrating so hard that his misaimed eyes bulged slightly.

  “Of course,” murmured Master Eremis. “My thought exactly.” He was the only other man near the mirror, although a number of guards and several Apts were clustered a short distance away, watching raptly. “Yet it occurs to me that you have been a bit too coy with your talents, Adept Havelock.”

  Nominally, Eremis was here only because the Castellan wasn’t done with him. Too many questions remained to be answered. Nevertheless his interest in what happened was intense: his wedge-shaped head followed everything, studied every movement; his eyes gleamed as if he were having a wonderful time. “If the Congery had known of your resources, we might have made different decisions entirely.”

  Master Quillon glanced rapidly at the taller Imager. “Is that so? Such as?”

  In response, Master Eremis smiled distinctly at the Castellan. “We might have decided to defend Mordant ourselves, rather than waiting politely for our beloved King to fall off the precarious perch of his reason.”

  Lebbick really should have replied to that jibe. Eremis intended to provoke him – and provocation was his bread and meat. It fed the fires of dedication and outrage which kept him going, sustained him so that he could continue to serve his King past the point where his own common sense rebelled and his instinct for fidelity turned against him. In addition, he had work to do where Master Eremis was concerned – issues to resolve, explanations to obtain. But this time the Master’s sarcasm didn’t touch him. His heart was elsewhere, and without it he wasn’t able to think clearly.

  His heart was in the dungeon, where he had left that woman.

  Curse her, anyway, curse her. She was the source of all the trouble, all the harm. He was even starting to think that she was the reason for King Joyse’s weakness, even though the King had been walking that path for years before her first appearance. But now Lebbick would get the truth out of her. He would tear her limbs off if necessary to get the truth out of her. He would take the soft flesh of her body in his hands—

  He would do anything he wanted to her. He had permission.

  Now you’ve done it, woman. You’ve done something so heinous that nobody is going to protect you. That was true. The Tor had tried – and failed. You’ve helped a murderer escape.

  Now you are mine.

  Even though he had been warned.

  Mine.

  If only he could control the way he trembled whenever he thought of her.

  He answered Master Eremis for no reason at all except to mask what was happening to him, disguise the tremors in his muscles.

  But he wasn’t thinking about what he said. He couldn’t. He was too busy remembering the way her arms felt when he ground his fingers into them.

  “No,” he heard her whisper. Her protest was like the horror in her soft brown eyes, like the quivering of her delicately cleft chin. She was afraid of him, deeply afraid. His anger touched a sore place in her – he could see that vividly, even though she had stood up to him in the past, had lied to him, forced him to swallow his passion against her time and again. She feared him as if she deserved to be terrified, as if she already knew that anything he might do to her was justified. “No,” she whispered, but it wasn’t his accusations she denied; it was him, the Castellan himself, his authority and violence.

  “Yes,” he replied through his teeth, smiling at her fiercely as if she made him happy for the last time in his life.

  Holding her as hard as he wished, without regard for her pain – or for the way the Masters and guards looked at him despite the chaos of Nyle’s murder and Geraden’s disappearance – he escorted her to the dungeon himself.

  Along the way, she babbled.

  “No, you don’t understand, it’s a trick, Geraden didn’t kill Nyle, please listen to me, listen to me, Eremis did this somehow, it’s a trick.”

  He liked that. He liked her fear. He wanted her prostrate in front of him. At the same time, however, her reaction disturbed him. For some reason, it reminded him of his wife.

  For no good reason, obviously, since his wife hadn’t been a babbler. In fact, she hadn’t been afraid of anything, not since King Joyse had rescued them from the Alend garrison commander who was having her raped so imaginatively. Not since he, Lebbick, had ripped that dogshit Alend apart with his teeth.

  But before that she had been afraid. Yes, he remembered her fear as well. She babbled. Yes. He heard her – watched her – was forced to watch her – and couldn’t do anything about it, anything at all. He heard and saw her do every desperate and terrible thing she could think of to try to make those men stop.

  Castellan Lebbick wasn’t going to stop. Never. Let her babble to her heart’s content, cry out, scream if she wanted to. She was his.

  Yet it disturbed him.

  When he thrust her into her cell so that she nearly sprawled on the cot against the far wall, he had no intention of stopping. But he didn’t start right away. Instead, he closed the iron door behind him without bothering to lock it, folded his arms across his chest to keep them from shaking, and faced her past the light of the single lamp. Its wick needed trimming; the flame guttered
wildly, making shadows dance fright over her pale features.

  Still smiling through his teeth, he demanded, “How?”

  “I don’t know.” Babbling. “Somehow. To get rid of Geraden. Geraden is the only one who doesn’t trust him.” Terrified. “Eremis and Gilbur are working together. And Vagel. He lied to the Congery.” Trying to distract him. “Eremis brought Nyle to the meeting of the Congery. He said Nyle would prove Geraden is a traitor, but that was a lie. They set this up together. They planned it.” Trying to create the illusion that she made sense. “It’s a fake. They staged it. They must have.”

  Deaf to the illogic of her own defense, she insisted, “Nyle is still alive.”

  Watching her, the Castellan wanted to crow for joy. “No, woman.” His jaws throbbed with the effort of not sinking his teeth into her. “Tell me how. How did he escape? How did you help him escape?”

  Finally she caught hold of herself, closed her mouth on her panic. Shadows flickered in and out of her eyes; she looked as desirable as an immolation.

  “He’s no Imager,” Lebbick went on. “And there isn’t any way he could have left those rooms except by Imagery. So you did it. You translated him somewhere.

  “Where is he, woman? I want him.”

  She stared at him. Her dismay seemed to become a kind of calm; she was less frantic simply because she was so afraid. “You’ve gone crazy,” she whispered. “You’ve snapped. It’s been too much for you.”

  “I won’t hurt him.” The Castellan’s face felt like it was being split apart by the stress of restraint. “It isn’t really his fault. I know that. You seduced him into it. Until you arrived, he was just another son of the Domne – too clumsy for his own good, but a decent boy. Everybody liked him, even though he couldn’t do anything right. You changed that. You involved him in treachery. When I get my hands on him, I won’t even punish him. I just want him to tell me the truth.”

  Suddenly, like dry brush on a smoldering blaze, Lebbick yelled at her, “Where IS he?”

  She flinched, cowered. Just for a second, he believed that she was going to answer. But then something inside her stiffened. She raised her head and faced him squarely.

  “Go to hell.”

  At that, he laughed. He couldn’t help himself: he laughed as if his heart were breaking. “You little whore,” he chortled, “don’t try to defy me. You aren’t strong enough.”

  At once, he began to speak more precisely, more formally, tapping words into her fear like coffin nails. “I’m going to start by taking off your clothes. I might do it gently, just for fun. Women are especially vulnerable when they don’t have any clothes on.

  “Then I’ll begin to hurt you.” He took a step toward her, but didn’t release his arms from his chest. “Just a little at first. One breast or the other. Or perhaps a few barbs across your belly. A rough piece of wood between your legs. Just to get your attention.” He wished she could see what he saw: his wife being stretched out in the dirt by those Alends, her limbs spread-eagled and staked so that she couldn’t move, the delicate things the garrison commander had done to her with small knives. “Then I’ll begin to hurt you in earnest.

  “You’ll beg me to stop. You’ll tell me everything I desire, and you’ll beg me to stop. But it will be too late. Your chance will be lost. Once I begin to hurt you, I will never stop. I will never stop.”

  She was so vividly appalled – the fright on her face was so stark – that the sight of it cost him his grip on himself. His arms burst out of his control; his hands caught her shoulders. Snatching her to him, he covered her mouth with his and kissed her as hard as a blow, aching to consume her with his passion before it tore him to pieces. Then he hugged her, hugged her so urgently that the muscles in his shoulders stood out like iron.

  “Tell me the truth.” His voice shook, feverish with distress. “Don’t make me hurt you.”

  She had her arms between them, her hands against his chest. But she didn’t struggle: she surrendered to his embrace as if the resistance had been squeezed out of her. If he had released her without warning, she would have fallen.

  Nevertheless when she spoke all she said was, “Please don’t do this. Please.” The way he held her muffled her words in his shoulder, but he could still hear them. “I’ll beg now, if that’s what you want. Please don’t do this to me.”

  For a moment, the gloom in the cell grew unexpectedly darker. It rose up around the Castellan, swept over his head; it made a roaring noise like a black torrent in his ears. Then it cleared, and the back of his hand hurt. The woman was slumped on the floor; the wall barely braced her up in a sitting position. Blood oozed like midnight from the corner of her mouth. Her eyes seemed glazed, as if she were scarcely conscious.

  “The lady Terisa is too polite,” someone else said. “I will not speak so courteously. The next blow will be your last. If you strike her again, I will not rest until you are sent to the gallows.”

  Staggering, Castellan Lebbick turned and saw the Tor at the entrance of the cell.

  “My lord Tor—” The Castellan croaked as if he were choking. “This isn’t your concern. Crimes committed in Orison are my responsibility.”

  The old lord was as fat as a holiday goose and as pasty-faced as poorly kneaded dough. Yet his small eyes glinted in the lamplight as if he were capable of murder. Under his fat, there was strength which enabled him to support his immense weight. “Then,” he shot back, “you will be especially responsible for crimes you commit yourself. What if she is innocent?”

  “ ‘Innocent’?”

  Lebbick was ashamed to hear himself cry out the word like a man who was about to start weeping. With a savage effort, he regained control of himself.

  “ ‘Innocent’?” he repeated more steadily. “You weren’t there, my lord. You didn’t see Geraden kill his brother. I caught her helping him escape – helping a murderer escape, my lord Tor. You have strange ideas of innocence.”

  “And your ideas of guilt have cost you your reason, Castellan.” The Tor’s outrage sounded as acute as Lebbick’s own. “You accuse her of helping a murderer escape, not of shedding blood herself. When I heard that you had brought her here, I could hardly believe my ears. You have no right and no reason to punish her until King Joyse has judged her guilt for himself and given you his consent.”

  “Do you think he’ll refuse me?” countered Castellan Lebbick, fighting to shore up his self-command. “Now, when Orison is besieged, and all his enemies are conspiring against him? My lord, you misjudge him. This” – he made a slapping gesture in that woman’s direction – “is one problem he’ll leave to me.”

  Without hesitation, the Tor snapped, “Shall we ask him?”

  The Castellan had no choice; he couldn’t refuse. In spite of the way his bones ached and his guts shook, so that he seemed to be dying on his feet, he turned his back on that woman and went with the Tor to talk to King Joyse.

  When Lebbick demanded an audience, the King answered in his nightshirt.

  Instead of admitting the Castellan and the Tor to his presence, he opened the door of his formal rooms and stood there between the guards, blinking his watery old eyes at the lamplight as if he had become timid – as if he feared he might not be safe in his own castle in the middle of the night. He hadn’t been asleep: he had come to the door too promptly for that. And he neglected or forgot to close it behind him. The Castellan saw that King Joyse already had company.

  Two men sat in front of his hearth, looking over their shoulders toward the door.

  Adept Havelock. Of course. And Master Quillon, the recently designated mediator of the Congery.

  Master Quillon, who had accidentally contrived to help Geraden escape by tripping Lebbick. Master Quillon, who had mistakenly given that woman time to help Geraden by sending the guards away from the rooms where the mirrors were kept.

  The Castellan ground curses between his teeth.

  King Joyse gaped at Castellan Lebbick and then the Tor with a foolish expression on h
is face. His beard was tangled in all directions; his white hair jutted wildly around the rim of his tattered and lumpy nightcap – a cap, Lebbick happened to know, which Queen Madin had given him nearly twenty years ago. His hands were swollen with arthritis, and his back stooped for the same reason. The result was that he looked small and a little silly, too much reduced in physical and mental stature to be a credible ruler for his people.

  And yet the Castellan loved him. Looking at him now, Lebbick found that what he missed most wasn’t Joyse’s former leadership – or his former trust. It was the Queen: blunt, beautiful, pragmatic Madin. She had done everything in her power to keep King Joyse from becoming so much less than he was. She wouldn’t have let anybody see him in this condition.

  That recognition surprised Castellan Lebbick out of the fierce speech he was primed to make. Instead of spitting his bitter demands in Joyse’s face, he muttered almost gently, “Forgive the intrusion, my lord King. Couldn’t you sleep?”

  “No,” King Joyse assented in a vague tone. “I meant what I told you to tell Kragen. I want to use the Congery. But I didn’t know how. It was keeping me awake. So I sent for Quillon.” As if he believed this to be the reason Castellan Lebbick had come to him, he asked distractedly, “If you were them, what would you do tomorrow?”

  Involuntarily, Lebbick exchanged a glance of incomprehension with the Tor. “ ‘Them,’ my lord King? The Masters?”

  “The Alends,” King Joyse explained without impatience. “Prince Kragen. What’s he going to do tomorrow?”

  That question didn’t require thought. “Catapults. He’ll try to break down the curtain-wall.”

  King Joyse nodded. “That’s what I thought.” He seemed too sleepy to concentrate well. “Quillon and Havelock are going to do something about it.” As an afterthought, he added, “They’ll need advice. And you need to know what they’re doing. Meet Quillon at dawn.