The other two of Gillard’s attendants waited straight-backed in the gloom. One had apparently donned trousers and jerkin just in time, his tardiness betrayed by the hem of his nightshirt dangling from under his jerkin. Both bowed as deeply to the king as their master had, and Abramm sensed again an awe that bordered on fear. Both scrupulously kept their eyes from meeting his. He studied them a moment, then asked, “Did either of you witness the prince’s awakening?”
“No, sir,” said the more appropriately attired of the two, fixing his gaze upon a point somewhere in front of Abramm’s polished shoes. “Though I did hear a cry coming from the room that was much too deep for Master Gregory, sir.”
“And . . . have you told anyone of this?”
“No, sir. We’ve been locked in ever since.” Resentment tinged his voice.
Abramm turned to Gregory. “What of you, sir? Who have you told?”
Gregory bobbed and waved a hand at his companions. “Well, these two, o’ course. And the man I sent to inform you.”
“No one else?”
“That Lord Crull who came t’ question me later. But that’s all, sir.”
Abramm told them to see it stayed that way, adding, “I’ll see him now.”
Gregory fumbled again with his key ring, unlocking the chamber’s innerdoor and stepping back for Abramm and his party to enter.
The suite’s second chamber was much smaller than the first and sported but one window—also hidden by drapes—in the center of the far wall. A canopied bed stood to the right, a hulking wardrobe to the left, facing the bed’s foot.
Again the only light came from the coals on the inner-wall hearth to the left, and a night candle on the bedside table. Abramm could easily have conjured a kelistar to improve things, but found himself unwilling to do so. He strode to the bed, Simon at his side, Trap moving to the other side as the door closed discreetly behind them. Channon stood guard on the inside, while Will Ames and Ian Crocker took up posts in the outer room.
Every time Abramm came up here to look in on his brother, the shock hit him anew, like a kick to the stomach. Gillard, once so tall and strong, now lay pale and waiflike, hardly bigger than Jared. In fact, one might take him for a boy were it not for his thick beard and long pale hair. His white bed shirt gapped open at the neckline, revealing a bony chest bereft of its former musculature and furred with a pale blond pelt. The hawkish face was narrower, the bone structure almost delicate—all but a measure of what the morwhol had done to his entire frame.
Simon glanced at Gillard, then strode to the window on the outer wall and cast back the drapes, his back to the room as he gazed on the darkened city beyond the window’s iron bars. Abramm noted the action peripherally, his attention commanded by the frail form before him and the tangled emotions roiling within him.
How are you even alive, brother? he wondered, not for the first time. You’ve neither eaten nor drunk anything for six months. You should be dead by now. . . .
Whatever the morwhol had done to Gillard’s great physique, it had also worked a magical sleep on him, letting him waste away even as it bound him to this world—until today, when the Light had briefly awakened him.
For what purpose? Was the end near and Eidon giving him another chance?
“He might be pretending,” Simon said from the window, his gravelly voice harsh in the silence. “Perhaps one of us should pierce his arm to make sure.”
Abramm frowned at him, repelled.
He and Gillard had a shared history, a shared parentage, a shared knowledge of what it was to be male and royal and Kalladorne. Even beyond that, he sensed they were in many ways alike. Having lost all his blood kin but Simon, Carissa, and Gillard, Abramm could not help hoping someday he might share with his only surviving brother the closeness of family ties neither of them had ever known. But even as he hoped, he gave uneasy acknowledgment to the Words’ warning that a man’s enemies were often members of his own house.
“Why have you hated me so much, brother?” he murmured. “You were always stronger. Faster. Better. Everyone admired you. . . .”
Or did they? Was your confidence all an act? And your hatred directed more toward yourself than me? He was struck with a sudden pang of insight. He’d always believed Gillard had never felt inadequate as he himself had—never felt he didn’t measure up, never felt the pressure to perform. But that was not true. Abramm had been condemned as worthless from the start and never really tasted approval. But Gillard had—and must’ve known deep down how easily it could be lost.
Gillard had been no better off than Abramm, enslaved to the ever-present fear of failing. Looking at him now, Abramm felt a sudden depth of compassion for the man. A Star of Life bloomed at the end of his fingertip, surprising him at first, for he had not consciously thought to make one. Surely the Light had already visited Gillard today and been rebuffed, so why did he now offer again?
And then Abramm understood.
He drew a breath and prayed aloud, “My Lord Eidon, Sovereign Father . . . please, don’t take him yet. Give him another chance, as you gave me. All those times I slapped your hand away, yet you persisted. . . . Surely you can persist a little longer with him.”
His brother slumbered on, unmoving save for the slight rise and fall of his chest.
Then his uncle’s familiar gravelly voice sounded out of the darkness, sharp with bitterness and closer now as he had come to stand at the foot of Gillard’s bed. “Why are you praying over him? You should execute him.”
Abramm arched his brows. “Isn’t it enough he lies here weak and helpless, wasting away before our eyes? He can’t last much longer.”
Simon stared down at the younger Kalladorne. “So long as he does, sir, he remains a danger to you. If your enemies steal him away, they could use him as a figurehead indefinitely, claiming him to be alive when he is not. In fact, after what happened in the Hall of Kings this morning, I’d say your Mataian friends will be desperate to get him and do just that.”
Abramm glanced aside at him sharply. After what happened this morning? Has Eidon finally gotten your attention, as well, Simon? His uncle hadn’t been among the multitudes who’d received the mark of the shield today, but perhaps there had been a softening.
Nevertheless, he was right about the Mataio.
“If they get him, they can say anything, and who could prove them wrong?” Simon went on. “Probably claim to heal him right off. Then get some stooge to be his stand-in.”
“I thought you loved him, Simon,” Abramm said softly.
His uncle shifted uneasily beside him and did not answer at first. Abramm could hear his breathing, interposed with Gillard’s faint, regular snores. Then the older man let out a long breath and said, “He’s a traitor. Tried to kill you, tried to take the Crown for his own gain. And in the end he sided with the Mataio. Whatever I felt for him has long since died. And so should he.”
His words faded to silence. The fire popped. Gillard slumbered on.
Abramm sighed and shook his head. “I can’t just kill him. Not like this. Look at him, Uncle. He’s a shell of what he was. And after what Eidon has done on my behalf today, what reason have I to be needlessly cruel? If he were awake, could look into my eyes and spit in my face, maybe then. But not like this.” He bent and placed the Star on the table beside Gillard’s bed, watched as it rolled slowly over the uneven surface and came up against the base of the candlestick. Simon frowned at him darkly, but said no more.
Abramm glanced again at Gillard, at Trap, then strode for the door.
————
A low, distant boom echoed through Gillard’s darkness, followed by jangling keys and the grating of a lock. He opened his eyes, but still the darkness enshrouded him, soft, deep folds of it cradling his body from beneath and pressing down upon him from the top. He opened his eyes wider, turned them all around, seeking something besides the darkness. There was a faint gray glow to his left, but the darkness kept his head from turning to see its source.
/> He blinked and stared at what must be the ceiling, seeing folds and streaks of greater darkness in the shadow above him.
Where am I?
He recalled awakening earlier to a blinding light that hovered directly in front of him as he sat upright. Then the darkness had swooped upon him again, a thick, woolly presence that blotted out all sound. Or almost all sound.
He’d heard voices briefly. Men speaking from somewhere above him, one to his left, the other somewhere down by his feet. One he’d recognized as Uncle Simon. He couldn’t recall the words, but the pleasure he’d felt at knowing his uncle still cared warmed him now as he recalled it.
The other man’s voice had been familiar, too, deep and strong with a lilt of foreign accent. He thought of it in recall, trying to match it with various names and faces, none the right fit until at last—
His breath caught. Abramm lives!
The realization unleashed a tumble of memory—the battle between them; the trap Gillard had set for his brother at the Temple of Dragons; the feel of the morwhol’s bloodlust as it loped inexorably toward them; the euphoric anticipation of his coming victory: Abramm vanquished by the beast Gillard would slay to take his brother’s place as the heroic killer of monsters. But the thing had turned on Gillard instead, closing a twenty-foot gap in a single leap and toppling him backward to the stone. Its teeth had sunk into his shoulder, and he felt himself being pulled into it. . . .
He stared at the folds of shadow, trying to recall more and finding only darkness. The creature had intended to consume him, revealing that intention only at the last. Was he inside it now? Feeling like a man, but really a beast?
A shudder swept through him, setting his limbs jittering against the bed of darkness upon which he lay face up, arms at his sides, legs out straight. A beast could not lie like this. . . .
Am I even still alive?
New fear gripped him. Then he heard a distant bang, and men talking amongst themselves, excited but not afraid. He smelled a whiff of smoke as from a fireplace, and when he pressed his hands against the surface upon which he lay, it felt for all the world like a feather-stuffed mattress. He was lying in a bed, then.
But how did I get here? And what happened to the beast? Perhaps it only thought me dead and turned to Abramm before it finished. Perhaps it killed him, and they’ve brought me back to Stormcroft, the only surviving heir to the throne.
But no . . . the voice had been Abramm’s.
Horror seized his heart and for a moment he thought he might suffocate with the power of it. Pox and plagues! He must’ve won! Somehow, some way he must have killed it. I must be his prisoner.
Urgency set his heart slamming against his chest. He stared around, eyes open as wide as they would go, as if that might somehow enable him to see his surroundings. The shadows overhead were the draped fabric of a canopy. On the wall to his left, beyond the door, he saw the red glow from the hearth fire, probably burned down to coals from the look of the light and the silence. And that faint gray glow at his side was probably a night candle. His fingers gripped and twisted the linen sheets upon which he rested. Yes, it was a bed, all right.
Then he heard the low familiar tolling of the University clock in Springerlan marking the second hour of the morning and went completely rigid. He’s put me in the tower. Yes, he recognized it now. The suite at the top, the same one in which he himself had imprisoned their brother Raynen.
Panic exploded in him and he tried to sit up but couldn’t move. Am I tied down? Shackled? He could feel nothing binding either arms or legs and concluded he must have been drugged. Abramm had learned that sort of thing during his years as a Mataian. Fire and Torment! I can’t believe he won! He heard strange grunting sounds and felt his teeth grinding together. I have to get out of here.
He strained mightily to move just one arm until sparkles of white glittered at the edges of his awareness and the darkness overtook him again.
When he regained consciousness, the room no longer seemed as dark, the light from the night candle on his bedside table casting a pale glow across the quilt that covered his body. He tried to turn his head enough to see the candle, his breath soon coming in loud desperate gasps as slowly, a hairsbreadth at a time, he managed to tip his head to the left. . . .
And stared with incomprehension. The night candle had burned itself down to a nub and gone out. But on the table at its base stood a perfect sphere, no larger around than his thumb tip, and it was from this that the light emanated: a pure white incandescence that hurt his eyes to look at it.
So he turned them away, frowning fiercely at the canopy. This was a Terstan thing! Raynen had conjured one for him once, promising it would burn a shield on his chest just as it had in Raynen’s. He recalled the day as if it were yesterday—the horror he’d felt to know Raynen was truly one of them, and the difficulty of refusing him without offending when every fiber of his being wanted to howl with outrage and revulsion. That moment was overlaid by another: Raynen as he had been at the end, eyes occluded with the white curd, jabbering his madness as they had locked him into this very suite. And now someone . . . Abramm! sought to bring all that to Gillard.
Outrage blasted through him in a red heat of energy, enough that his arm twitched violently on the bed beside him. He tried again, wanting nothing so much as to knock that hideous orb out of his sight . . . but the blackness overtook him first.
The jangle of keys awakened him in time to hear the door creaking inward. Light stabbed his eyes so brightly he could only perceive his visitor by squinting. The man was cloaked and cowled. Gillard caught only a glimpse of his form before the door swung shut again. And now an irrational terror swept over him. It was Abramm come to murder him in his bed—just recompense for all the evil Gillard had done against him.
His visitor swept up to his bedside as silent as a spirit. The light of the Terstan orb illumined the rough weave of the cowl—but not the face. And then the man bent toward the table and made a sharp movement, and the light winked out.
Which for some reason only added to Gillard’s terror. He opened his mouth, felt his tongue move and his throat flex, and somehow managed to croak, “Please!”
The man’s hand pressed against his arm, and he felt its coldness even through blanket and sleeve. “Fear not, my lord,” came a low musical voice. “I am a friend.”
A friend? Why don’t I recognize your voice? Gillard swallowed nervously, but a thread of hope tempered his fear. He opened his mouth to speak again, but the hand tightened on his arm. “No, Your Highness. Let them think you sleep on. You must regain your strength before we can move you.” The hand patted his arm. “Take courage, sir. And wait.”
CHAPTER
8
The next day, sunlight finally broke through the early morning fog to flood the hills across which Lady Madeleine and Princess Carissa rode, igniting the muted gray landscape to vibrant emerald. Against the green flared new-blooming patches of brilliant white summersnow, while thickets of lavender gullberry shimmered along the road, their sweet scent gilding the freshening breeze. Here and there rafts of yellow daffodils nodded amid stiff green leaves, and out on the hillsides, newborn lambs gamboled under the watchful eyes of their mothers. Overhead, white-and-gray gulls soared on the updrafts against ever-widening patches of blue.
It was as if all the world had suddenly awakened, amazing Maddie by how much a simple change of lighting and the feel of the sun’s warmth seeping through her woolen garments could lift her spirits.
Maybe things weren’t as bad as she had thought.
She’d passed another night plagued by unsettling dreams that, this time, had obviously originated from Leyton’s grim report on the state of her homeland. Finally driven from her bed, she’d stoked up the fire and pulled one of the overstuffed chairs into the corona of its warmth, where she’d huddled under a throw, reading the Words of Revelation and praying for guidance until dawn.
Carissa had arrived that morning during breakfast, sliding into
the chair across the table from Maddie to declare without preamble, “It was him. At the coronation, at the banquet, and again last night after the ball. I’m sure of it.”
Maddie set down her teacup and regarded her friend with concern. “Rennalf, you mean. Here. In Springerlan.”
Carissa claimed to have seen her ex-husband—Abramm had granted her a divorce six months ago—three times while they’d been in Stormcroft waiting for Abramm to heal, then twice within two weeks shortly after they’d returned to Springerlan. Unfortunately, no one but Carissa had seen him, and with no other evidence to support her story, some feared the sightings were no more than the product of terrible memories and the lingering fears that he would yet return to abuse her. No one had come out and said as much to her face, but it was clear Carissa knew she was not wholly believed.
“It was him, Mad,” she repeated fiercely. “He was in the little alcove with the flying horse on the way back to my chambers, and he wanted me to see him. Stepped out of the shadows right when I’d get the best look. He’s shaved his beard and pulled back his hair, but it was him.” She paused, then added, “Hogart saw him, too. I told Captain Meri . . . er, Duke Eltrap, last night, and he said he’d tell Abramm . . . but I’ve had no word yet.”
Maddie picked up her teacup again and sipped. “Hogart saw him?”