Yet the duchess showed that strong endorsement short shrift. ‘Someone had to drag in that misbegotten desertman.’ The disturbed bowl resettled, and rag back in hand, she gently began to administer broth to the comatose man on the bed. ‘If Lord Taskin realized the degree of his peril, he was a rash fool not to delegate. The risks should have fallen to others who bear Sessalie less critical responsibilities.’
‘You don’t understand.’ Jussoud’s grey eyes shone fierce in the dimness as he, also, reclaimed the solace of work, and took up mortar and pestle to grind herbs for a poultice paste. ‘Captain Mykkael is the one grievously wronged. The sealed accusation for treason set a bind on the desertman’s honour. He had to choose between a lawful detainment that would assuredly see him condemned, and the freedom to act he dared not set at risk, to defend the life of Princess Anja.’
‘And her Grace perchance is still alive?’ cracked the duchess, no room in her grief for vain hope.
Jussoud spared her astute mind no grace of ambiguity. ‘Mykkael struck down Taskin upon that belief.’
The granddame who had succeeded Queen Anjoulie as mistress in the king’s bed weighed that startling viewpoint in silence, while the scent of crushed tansy wafted through the pungent smell of cedar burning in the brazier. Her voice was steel, when finally she spoke. ‘You’re suggesting I made a mistake to shield Isendon from the unpleasantness?’
‘Lady Phail,’ said Jussoud, his threadbare anguish revealed, ‘how could I presume? My word does not offer one shred of proof to appease the High Prince of Devall, or to sway the unsettled fears of the council.’
The duchess sopped more broth from the bowl. Her profile still recalled the sweetness of youth, as with tender patience, she nursed her unconscious charge through another lifesaving swallow. ‘The seneschal would not bend now for hard proof. Nor will the council risk the advantage to trade by leaving the high prince dishonoured and slighted.’ Her head turned. Blue eyes held the sorrow of hard wisdom as she said, ‘Time passes. The day must arrive when Sessalie’s welfare is no longer our burden, but our legacy. Would you leave Crown Prince Kailen the role of a child? Force him to back down from his first test of sovereign authority, and I tell you, the strength of his spirit will stay stunted.’
Yet Jussoud remained adamant. ‘His Highness can’t blood his sword on this peril. Do you know what we face? Have you words for the concept? Mykkael is the only weapon we have to stave off a cold-cast invasion by sorcery.’
Lady Phail sighed. Her aquamarine earrings flashed like iced fire as she raised her chin in staunch resignation. ‘If the tiresome strivings of politics matter, the king never came lucid this morning. I pretended otherwise. The implied threat, that his Majesty might intervene, was the only tactic I had to restrain the irate tenor of the council. If the High Prince of Devall and the seneschal had prevailed as they wished, Crown Prince Kailen might have received council endorsement to stand as legal regent of Sessalie.’
The duchess let that bald-faced effort to placate work through the widening pause. Ever tactful in aggression, she reached for a napkin and blotted an undignified dribble from Taskin’s slack lips.
Yet the nomad’s scorching rage failed to abate, a departure of shattering precedence.
Though mystified by his doomed loyalty to a murderer, the Duchess of Phail could not abandon her backbone of moral compassion. ‘If the king wakens tonight, I can ask his Majesty whether he’s willing to hear your appeal for the cause of Mykkael’s good character. Oh dear, Jussoud, no! This affray is too cruel to allow for such hope. I’ve known his Majesty since we were children together. He is not going to rule on this matter quietly. With eight guardsmen down, and one of them Taskin, I can already say that your desertman stands little chance of receiving a royal reprieve.’
‘Someone must try,’ Jussoud insisted. He broke off as a heavy tread approached from the corridor outside.
Captain Bennent’s bass tones carried through the closed door as he broke the morning’s ill news to young Vensic. ‘I’m sorry, soldier. I did all I could, but Jedrey’s been reinstated. Command of the garrison now lies in his hands, unless King Isendon reviews the case and countermands council edict. You haven’t eaten? By all means, go on down to the kitchen. My sword will guard Taskin throughout your absence.’
When the expected sharp rap demanded an entry, the nomad arose, wraith-silent, and lifted the latch.
Captain Bennent strode in armed in chainmail and sword, the immaculate gleam of his spired helm catching the slice of light through the curtain. His surcoat brushed the waxed shine of his boots, a sure sign he had come straight from the council hall.
The fresh pungence of horse wafted from him, regardless, ingrained in the stained saddle blanket draped in the crook of his forearm. ‘I need you to look at this,’ he announced point blank, and offered the item for Jussoud’s inspection. ‘The physician downstairs could translate the lettering. But the language as written was strange to him.’
Never one to be hurried, the nomad set aside his mortar and pestle. He flattened the horsecloth against his crossed knee, his eyes running down the fuzzed strings of characters under the glow from his brazier. ‘Where did you get this?’
‘The trapping came off the lance captain’s mount, recaptured at large in the countryside. The groom found the marks when he stripped off the saddle. As you see, the message was scrawled on the underside, where no casual observer would find it.’
‘Mykkael’s?’ Jussoud’s inquiry was sharp as he moved to the window, and widened the curtain to let in more light.
‘The physician thinks so.’ Armour flashed, blinding silver, as Bennent nodded to acknowledge the duchess. Then he settled with laced hands on the brocade chair, away from the rippling blaze on the hearth. ‘It doesn’t carry worked sorcery, so he said, since the talisman we wear doesn’t warm to it.’
‘This is no sorcerer’s line,’ Jussoud affirmed.
Bennent turned his harried glance towards the figure swathed in the bed. The face, with its imperious hawk nose and wide brow, remained still as a carved marble effigy. ‘How’s Taskin? No change?’
‘His pulse has strengthened, an encouraging sign.’ Jussoud stated without looking up. ‘The progress is slow, but we’ve managed to lessen some of the shock caused by blood loss.’
Bennent shifted his boots, distinctly ashamed for the haste that deferred the propriety of house stockings. ‘No wound fever?’
‘Too soon to tell.’ The daylight limned the nomad’s absorbed profile, and nicked leaden highlights through his jet braid. He shifted the horsecloth, and spoke at last, his heartsore regret leashed behind an unshakable dignity. ‘The message is Mykkael’s, and yes, I can translate.’
The desert-bred warrior he had embraced as a brother might lack birthright knowledge of the Sanouk royal ideographs, yet he spoke all three castes of Serphaidian dialect with native nuance and fluency. The words written here had been framed in that tongue, but marked in the phonetic characters used by merchants for trade correspondence.
Lady Phail broke through the conflicted pause. ‘Did Mysh kael send an appeal for a stay of clemency?’
‘He did not.’ Jussoud’s gaze stayed fixed on the cloth, as though the sight burned. Or else he still agonized over the script, stained into fabric with an ink mixed at need from blood and crushed charcoal. The eastern-bred nomad roused himself finally, shook his head, then resumed his lagged explanation. ‘By Mykkael’s strict code, he has not broken faith with King Isendon.’
‘Three slain lancers, and five others wounded would give that specious statement an argument.’ Captain Bennent jerked off his helm, worn ragged from battling unsubtle intrigue and the outcries of shaken chancellors.
The Duchess of Phail pressed the anxious question. ‘Presuming we aren’t being duped by a liar, what did the desert-bred send?’
‘Instructions. In depth.’ Jussoud gentled his wounding delivery as hope died on the old woman’s face: that the renegade captain had not, a
fter all, delivered first news of the princess.
‘Just share what he says,’ Bennent barked, out of patience.
Silk shimmered in the draught through the casement as Jussoud closed his eyes and recited. ‘Mykkael warns that the balk of his capture will cause the sorcerers against us to unmask. We must prepare ourselves for attack. Devall’s enemies will most likely seek to unseat Sessalie’s crown at one strike. The common folk should remain unmolested, at first. Chosen targets will be King Isendon and his trusted circle of warded supporters, for the plot as it stands is spearheaded to unseat the crown quietly. According to Mykkael, the realm’s best chance, and ours, to bid for survival, is to withdraw to the tallest, most fortified stone tower, and to lay down drastic measures in warding. The particulars brought to our attention are precise, and clearly listed.’
The nomad smoothed the horsecloth beneath disturbed hands. When he steeled himself to confront Captain Bennent, his affable features showed fear. ‘Guardsman,’ he ventured in sober entreaty, ‘I beg you to take this advice seriously’
For the closing, scrawled line, now decently masked beneath the damp clasp of his hand, had used desperate words, couched in the most sacred privacy of the Serphaidian idiom. ‘Jussoud, as you read this, my breath as word, sworn under the sure vengeance invoked by the fires of Sanouk royal dragons: had Prince Al-Syn-Efandi done these few things, as advised by his vizier Perincar, he may have held out with his life. Willing servant, under the stars of your ancestry, consider my sword your right arm. After Isendon’s charge to safeguard Princess Anja, expect I will try to send help.’
‘Isn’t that nesting the good eggs in one basket?’ said the Duchess of Phail, smashing through tensioned silence. ‘Quite a risk, to place the king’s life at the bidding of a foreigner we have no firm proof we can trust.’
Jussoud strangled his rushed protest. Denied Taskin’s cool intellect, he must rest his appeal on the palace guard’s ranking captain. Yet hope crashed headlong. Through the experienced eyes of a healer, Jussoud watched Bennent weigh Mykkael’s warning, not as information dispatched at great risk by the hand of a hard-pressed ally, but coloured by the prevailing suspicion of outside blood cast as adversary.
‘Bad tactics,’ said Taskin’s second in command with the flint of a fixed decision. ‘We dare not hole up with the king in a tower. We’d just become sitting targets. What better way for a sorcerer to destroy Sessalie’s crown, than to mew up the royal defenders? If we didn’t die in the pre-emptive first strike, we’d be pinned down to starve in confinement.’
‘We’d stay alive,’ Jussoud stated in clashing reproof.
‘I will not see King Isendon held hostage on my watch!’ Bennent arose, resolved, and offered his arm to the Duchess of Phail. ‘Lady you’ll have my escort back to the palace. Please stay with his Majesty, as Taskin directed. I’ll be rearranging the guard and bolstering the noon watch.’ As he eased the old woman’s frail step towards the door, the guard captain issued his last order. ‘Jussoud? You are to burn that horsecloth, forthwith. Best not to take foolish chances.’
Left alone to guard Taskin behind the shut door, and bearing the distress of a loyal man’s earnest message, the nomad wrestled his shocked disbelief. The saving grace of this hard-won knowledge, wrested out of the ruin of a shattering past failure, had been repudiated at one stroke. The rejection begged a repeat of the tragedy that had once destroyed Mykkael’s life. Jussoud could have wept for the terrible irony. The desert-bred’s effort to settle in obscurity as a garrison captain in Sessalie had not brought him the respite of peace.
Lamed and alone, he would shoulder bad odds and strive under his oath of protection to another doomed king. And if he survived, and again he won through, his sacrifice would be wasted. He would live to see another royal family slaughtered, and a second proud princess reduced to a lifetime of purposeless foreign exile.
Jussoud stared straight forward, stunned beyond thought. First-hand, he had witnessed the horrific damage a sorcerer could inflict on the living. With the sight of a healer, he had looked into Orannia’s eyes. There he had sounded a madness of such scope, the dark depths would have shredded and drowned him. He masked his bleak fury, that he had renounced the way of the Sanouk warrior. Taskin’s helpless trust stung his heart like reproach, set alongside the lesser betrayals that galled like stuck thorns in the flesh: that Vensic had not been allotted due time to finish his meal in the kitchen, nor Lindya, to return from her promised leave to visit her child in the nursery.
Jussoud flung the horsecloth aside as though scorched, his anguished entreaty a whisper bent towards the commander laid out on the bed. ‘Taskin, my friend, you must waken and fight. More than ever, your king’s people need you.’
For the sorcerer who stalked Sessalie had been freed to step through the breach of a sheltered courtier’s rank ignorance.
The palace guard captain appointed for his staunch reliability under pressure now danced with a peril outside the scope of imagined precedence. Faced by the unknown, Bennent lacked the courage to grapple the shadows, where precepts of honour became entangled with the mercy of human integrity. So often, the still, quiet doubts of the heart became strangled as the rigid assumptions of law struck them mute.
In all of Sessalie, only Taskin had the tenacious perception to question appearances with unbiased strategy. His anxiety became a springboard for deeper thought. He mined fears for their hidden advantage. In daring to see past tried ground and experience, he accepted the pitfalls only as they became proven as facts. The flexibility left at play between mistrust and honesty had let him discern Mykkael’s unassailable character.
Jussoud took up the condemned square of horsecloth, and hissed a scalding oath through his teeth. Moved by the hammering force of his grief, he shoved to his feet, ripped open his satchel, and dug out his notebook of remedies. Then he took up stylus and ink. Before he enacted Bennent’s rash order, he committed the words of Mykkael’s scribed warning into Serphaidian ideographs. Empty-handed at last, while the flames in the hearth performed their voracious office, he busied himself with Taskin’s welfare, and took up the broth bowl and rag.
‘It’s tragic how the lack of imagination so often shapes our defeat,’ he confided, though the friend who languished near death on the bed was in no state to respond with his usual insightful rebuttal.
XX. Quarry
AFTERNOON SUN BLAZED DOWN ON THE KENNEL BARREL, BAKING THE INTERIOR TO STIFLING HEAT. BENJ’S MASTIFF LAY BELLY DOWN IN THE dirt, hackled growls interspersed with her panting. Between snarls, she rested her muzzle between her splayed paws in the sliver of shade cast by her water trough.
Mykkael could secure no such marginal respite, with the yard outside crammed with lancers.
Sweating under thick straw, knees tucked to his chin, with his nostrils inflamed by the gagging stench of the poacher’s concoction of trap scent, he endured parching thirst with equanimity. His limbs stayed relaxed. The company of guardsmen milling outside scarcely excited his pulse. This mounted party was the third pack of man hunters arrived to raise a crown inquiry. The renegade captain remained unconcerned, as long as the sword hilt under his hand showed no warning hum of raised resonance. Since Mirag’s house had been searched twice over by armed predecessors, and the mastiff had already dispatched one zealot home with a savaged wrist, the Highgate voices declaiming outside sought fresh dogs for the trackers, not fugitives.
Mykkael closed his eyes and let himself drowse. Paradox almost raised his smile of sympathy for the lancers’ confounding predicament. He had once experienced their frustration at first hand: old Benj could spin his laconic lies one after the next like a champion. His hounds were long since gone into the hills. Any huntsman must realize they would answer to no man until hunger wore down their exuberance.
Soon enough, the king’s riders untied their mounts and departed. The mastiff bitch lapped a drink from her trough and subsided back to her panting. The desertman wedged at the back of her barrel lapsed int
o exhausted sleep.
Time’s flow suspended, and he slipped unremarked into the half-world of dream…
Dogs hounded her trail. She had fled their baying for hours, as they worked her scent through the foothills. Hunkered down, breathless, behind the screen of a stunted tangle of balsam, she understood she would be run to earth like any other doomed prey chased down by a fervent pack. Harried into the stripped rock of the ranges, she wrestled to stem the panicked awareness that her position was fast growing hopeless.
Only the horses were safe, left grazing in a hidden glen.
‘May the threefold light of the trinity keep them,’ she gasped between stabbing breaths.
She had thoughtfully kept them well guarded from dogs, tucked away between the clefts of two tumbling streamlets. Huddled into herself, and fighting despair, she cursed the weakness that had prompted her downfall. Hunger had driven her out to try foraging. Had she stayed in the glen, the quartering search party would not have crossed over her trail. Now their pack had wind of her, they were not going to let up…
Mykkael aroused, gasping, the cry on his lips instinctively muffled behind the clamped force of his hands. Anja’s terror still gripped him. His heart raced too fast, and his breathing ran ragged, attuned to the rush of her panic. Cast back into himself with a plummeting wrench, he fought for the presence of mind to regain his own sense of identity.
The fust of straw mould still clogged his turned senses, laced through by the ammonia reek of Benj’s prized trap scent. Mykkael blinked stinging sweat from his eyes, then shuddered through a spasm of nausea. His knee pained him. Jussoud’s pine-gum dressings itched his wounds like hell’s vengeance, and everywhere else the cloth strips did not cover, his stinking, bare skin had been nipped by the mastiff’s shed fleas. He shifted, unable to make himself comfortable. Inside the cramped barrel, the pain of pinched nerves wrung him dizzy, while the puncture from Taskin’s sword-thrust throbbed, tight and hot with fresh swelling.