Lissa scowled. “Precisely what I told her—”
“—All the way here!” Gail laughed. “She must have said it a hundred times. But I left Deron in charge. I don’t see what’s so wrong with…” She faltered before Val’s astonishment and Lissa’s frank disapproval. She turned beseechingly to Mark. “He seems like a nice young man.”
Lissa rolled her eyes.
Mark barely suppressed a laugh. “And once you knew Val had gone, how did you manage to follow him? Those keen hunter’s eyes, I guess?”
Gail blushed. “Well, not exactly…”
“Ten gamekeepers,” Lissa said succinctly. “They’re waiting down the path. They were only too happy when Gail told them they didn’t have to come to the Red Keep proper.”
This time Mark couldn’t help himself. “Ten g-g-gamekeepers!” he roared, gasping with laughter. He slid whooping to the grass. Lissa shot him a quick glance, her blue eyes alight with merriment.
“What?” Gail said, smiling and confused. “What’s so funny?”
Lissa blanched and swiftly turned the conversation. “I think the Duke should be aware of Richard’s scheme.”
Gail’s eyes grew hard and narrow with remembered anger. “Scheme?” Mark asked.
Gail burst a drift of cherry leaves with a vicious kick. “He’s going to my father, you see. I could have stopped him, but there are some things I won’t do, not for you or any man.”
“Stop! Whoah! Slow down,” Mark pleaded. “Explain, please.”
Gail scowled. “That night after dinner, when you stormed off to our room and I had to show Richard around Borders: he told me if I didn’t agree to be his mistress, he would have my father fix you with the blame for summoning these ghosts and order you hanged.”
Mark’s heart turned slowly to ice at the thought of Richard touching Gail, peeling back her clothing as a man might pull the petals off a flower. “And you said…?”
Gail snorted. “I told him to swive himself, of course.”
“Of course.” Mark laughed out loud. “I didn’t think they taught young ladies to talk that way.”
“The Princess speaks that particular language fluently,” Lissa observed.
Gail glanced over her shoulder at Mark, almost embarrassed, the ghost of a smile on her thin lips. “Actually, I think I taught Richard a good few phrases of that tongue in a very short time. Then I kicked him in the leg. Then he left.”
She blew out a little breath and stumped forward, battered brown cloak flapping at her knees. “So you see, my father’s troops will be coming to string you up.”
“My life wasn’t worth your honour, eh?”
Gail shrugged. “No, it wasn’t that exactly. In the first place, I didn’t want to sleep with that toad, and as I told you once, I am accustomed to getting what I want. In the second place, I didn’t think you’d want to be married to a woman tangled up in something that…base. I would have been miserable, and made you a miserable wife.”
“When Gail suffers,” Lissa reflected, “everybody suffers.”
Val bit his lip and fiercely polished his spectacles.
“But why?” Mark asked. “Even if you were his mistress he could never come at the Crown. I always thought he wanted your power, not your body.”
“Revenge,” Lissa said simply. “If Gail gave in, then he was in part revenged on you: especially if he could get a child on her. If she chose to resist, then he could get Astin to hang you and would once more be in line to wed the Princess. I warned you that the Duke was not a gracious loser.”
Walking beside Gail, Mark reached to take her hand. It was small and hard; not the hand of a Princess at all. “You are the cantiest, bravest, boldest woman in the world,” he said softly. “And I’m the luckiest man to have you.”
“From time to time you seem to forget this,” Gail said drily.
“I won’t again, I promise.” He gave her hand a squeeze. Down the path one of Mark’s Vagabonds had spotted them, and raised a cry. Mark waved back and grinned. “But I think we’d better make a trip to see your honoured father.”
The Winter Room of Swangard Palace was intended to be cozy. An enormous fireplace took up most of one wall; beside it stood a long trestle laden with hot punch.
Hoop skirts, Mark noted, were no longer the fashion. The women now wore long gowns that fell in tiers down to their ankles. The ankles themselves were cleverly exposed by cutting a circle out of all the ladies’ shoes.
Liked the butter churns better.
“But Mark,” Duke Richard said, “What you say is very well, but does not change the fact that you loosed a darkness on the kingdom. Our people still are troubled by terrifying dreams, and other wraiths now walk the night beside this ghostly King you claim to have destroyed.”
“Things are now as once they were in grandfather days,” Valerian said impatiently. “Duke Aron dammed a stream; when Mark pulled out the keystone, of course there was a wash of magic through the land. That will settle, but it will not drain entirely away, nor should it. There is magic in our world and in our past. We only hurt ourselves when we deny it.”
“You are as ever free with your opinions,” Duke Richard snapped, “But let the Duke defend himself.”
Val quivered indignantly but Mark held up his hand. “Duke Richard’s right. I will speak for myself.” He looked slowly around the room, until every eye was locked upon him. “I, Shielder’s Mark, Duke of the Ghostwood, Lord of Borders, do here before this witness and the Crown call Richard, Lord of High Holt, a villain base, and traitor.”
The room was shocked into silence.
Well, so much for the prepared bit he’d worked on with Lissa. He began to speak more plainly, in a clear voice that carried to the back of the room. “When I came from the Ghostwood I was new to Court. I didn’t understand the rules by which my sword was taken from me, or know why a brilliant young musician could be shamed without someone crying foul. I still don’t understand the rules; but now I know I don’t have to play the game.”
Shift the ground, shift the ground.
Satisfaction was building in Mark like a thunderhead, tall and fierce and fraught with lightning. He felt like laughing. “When the ghosts came, Duke of High Holt, you ran. You sent your own steward to his death to cover your escape. Then, while your people went half-mad with fear, you had no thought but scheming and plotting. You came under my roof, and told my wife you’d have me killed unless she slept wi’ you. Said you’d set the King against me.”
Richard blanched, his gaze flicking around the room. Every eye was fixed on him. “These are lies! Patent, gross and palpable untruths!”
A shiver of pure gladness ran down Mark’s spine. “You’re welcome to prove that on my body,” he purred. “I b’lieve that’s grounds for a challenge, ain’t it? Or do I need to tell a few more truths about you?”
Richard stopped, jaw working, then whirled to face the King. “This peasant knows he cannot best me any way but with a knife. You saw him try to goad me to a duel. Let him catch the tiger by the tail! As Duke of High Holt, to whom you swore to give your youngest daughter, I demand the service of your champion!”
“Eh now, this is a matter of honour,” Mark said. “Besides, you haven’t got Lord Peridot’s excuse. You’re plenty fit, from all I hear.” In fact, you could probably carve me like a Christmas cake, but you don’t know that. The question is, do you have the stomach to put your precious body on the line?
“I will not dispute on duelling technicalities,” Richard said coldly. “The Crown knows it is unthinkable for the Duke of High Holt to soil himself by crossing swords with you. I demand what is my right: support from my sovereign and friend against invidious calumny.”
Mark blinked. “Against what?”
Astin fretted. At last he glanced unhappily at his champion. “William?”
Sir William scratched his beard and sighed. “The years are growing on me, sire. I think I shall retire soon.” The old knight looked steadily down at Richard; ther
e was little love in his eyes. “Very soon. Perhaps today. I pray you to look elsewhere for a champion.”
“What, William! You too? Is everyone afraid of this, this Nobody?” Richard cried.
Sir William’s gaze abruptly lost its weariness. “Did I just hear you call me coward, Duke?” His right hand fell to the pommel of his sword. “I do not think your honour would be hurt if you crossed swords with me, cousin. Nobody’s Jervis’ Richard, I ask again: did I just hear you call me coward?”
Fear and fury chased each other across Richard’s face. The room held its breath.
At last the Duke of High Holt’s eye, drawn as if by magnet, fell to the sword beneath Sir William’s hand, and stuck there. “No,” he said at last. “Of course I meant nothing of the kind.”
“I thought not,” Sir William drawled. “That would be—ungentlemanly.”
“Dick, you’re yellow as goat’s-piss,” Mark said pleasantly. “Let me tell you one other thing. If you ever trouble me or mine again, in public or private, by hidden slight or open insult, I’ll not answer in the Court.” Don’t fight a spider wi’ webs. “I’ll find you and break your face. Got it?”
Richard’s hands twitched with fury. “I will not stay to savour the treachery of those whose honour is in debt to me,” he hissed at Astin, and turning on his heel he strode from the room.
“The thing about roaches,” Val remarked, his quiet words large in the silence, “is that they cannot abide the light.”
“Beautifully done,” Lissa said afterwards, sipping a tumbler of punch. Brilliantly coloured courtiers hummed and buzzed around them like a hive of wasps, all contentedly sinking their stings into the helpless Duke Richard, who had stormed from Swangard and was headed back to the High Holt. “You will be quite a diplomat, my Lord of Borders.”
Mark’s jaw dropped open like a trap door.
“Your timing was exquisite,” she continued imperturbably, “and you chose well when you gambled on Sir William. Really, Mark, you are becoming subtle in your old age. I begin to hope we shall make a Duke of you yet.”
Gail laughed. “That was subtle?”
Lissa shrugged. “As Valerian remarked, a schemer cannot stand the light. It does not matter if the Court believes the things that Mark just said: they know for sure that Richard is a coward and a plotter. The power of a man like our dear departed Duke is at heart a subtle thing: it rests on his ability to sway the minds and hearts of others. Mark has stripped away his credibility; his influence at Court will rapidly decrease. A man with so much land and wealth cannot be made to vanish overnight, but Richard does not have the knack of using his brute force. I should not be surprised to hear of his retirement.
“Which reminds me,” she said more quietly. “A thing I meant to speak to you before, my lord. We are in Court now: my advice is that you wire Ashes in its sheath, or better, leave it in your room.”
Mark looked at her, mystified. “No other man has to leave his sword at home, so long as he doesn’t wave it at the King.”
“No other sword is bladed in the royal black,” Lissa murmured.
“Aaah!—I never thought of that!”
Lissa allowed herself a small sardonic smile. “Evidently.” She shook her head. “Valerian brave and Duke Mark subtle! The world indeed is strange these days: there must be magic in the air.”
Valerian blinked. “Brave?”
“Oh come on!” Gail cried merrily. “It’s all very well for my husband to go leaping over rivers and slaying ghosts and shambling hither and yon performing heroic deeds generally. But for a scholar to belt on his sword and dare the Ghostwood! Now that is bravery. Lissa and I were both very impressed,” she added slyly.
“Uh: well. I—” Val gulped and gasped and seemed to be praying for a merciful pit to suddenly open in the earth and swallow him. “Er, um…Ow!!”
“Oh, sorry about that,” Mark said blithely. “Didn’t mean to step on your foot there, Val.”
“You left a bruise,” Valerian complained later, peering at his foot as he prepared to lead his horse out of the King’s stables.
Mark shrugged. “You’ll be riding, won’t you? You won’t even notice.” The big bay stood calmly outside his stall, shaking his head and whiffling as Val closed the door and led him outside.
Mark tossed a coin to the stable boy and followed his friend into the courtyard. It was a crisp, cool day, bright with pale November sunshine. “So you’re really going back?”
“Yes.” Val tinkered with girth, reins, saddlebags. “I should have known I could not come into the Ghostwood and expect to leave unchanged.” He pushed his spectacles higher up his nose and glanced at Mark, smiling but serious. “It was…important to me, Mark. To belt on a sword and walk into that Wood. I never imagined doing such a thing; it was not part of anything I was. I thought myself a…a scholar, not a man. Not a man of action, anyway…But looking back I think I made myself smaller than I had to be, in the hope I might be ignored, forgotten, left to go about my business. I made myself so small my father must despair of me.
“But the Ghostwood makes you bigger, doesn’t it? I cannot fit into the self I was before I went there, or faced Hedrod with you. You have made me bigger, Mark, whether you meant to or no.” He cinched his saddle and grimaced. “There are things I need to deal with back home. Things I must talk over with my father.” He laughed, and shook his head, his eyebrows arched with that expression of wonder that Mark knew so well. “The funny thing is, now that I am grown so big, for the first time in my life I feel ready to learn what my father has to teach.”
“Good! Then you can come and tell me all about Duking,” Mark grinned. “I need to get some damn use out of your being Somebody’s Son. You will come back to Borders, won’t you?”
“I think so. Probably. I want to,” Valerian said.
Old white-bearded Val dipping a black cloth in rosewater. Will it really happen that way? God he’d be there, wouldn’t he? He’d be there.
“For what it’s worth, I think you’re doing right, Val. And I think the Val that comes back will stand a better chance wi’ Lissa too.”
“Perhaps,” Valerian said softly. “I don’t know. So many things are changing now, in all of us. Perhaps there will be something worth loving in me, anyway.”
Mark grasped Val’s shoulder. “There was always that.” Damn it, why can’t you hug a man when you want to? But he couldn’t, not quite.
“There’s summat I want you to have,” he said suddenly. Quickly he took the black dagger off his belt and held it out to Val. “Here’s a tool for dealing with your dad,” he joked. “I had a new blade put on the haft. Just plain steel of course. Nothing—magical…” The iron pommel was heavy in his hand, black as coal. He felt again its realness: true as something that could not be spoken, even to oneself. Like the moment you realized that your mum was singing you to sleep so she and Dad could get at hating one another again: you knew it all your life, but hid it from yourself. That’s what the dagger’s like: that secret, made into a thing that’s plain for all to see, who dare to look.
What a shitty thing to give.
Valerian looked up in awe. “This would be too great a gift!”
“God no!” Mark forced a smile and tapped the sword hanging at his side. “I have one of my own now. The dagger is a spare. It…it’s maybe a bit too grim, to give your best friend at a parting.”
Valerian smiled, a small, pink, solemn, friendly smile. “I’m very good at light, Mark. It’s my darkness I must explore, and this will be my candle. This is a thing of ancient power, and more than that, an emblem of the man I most admire, the friend I love the best. I will treasure it.”
Their eyes met, Val’s grey and honest behind his spectacles. They stood in the courtyard of Swangard Palace, too cold to be comfortable despite the sun, and they looked fully on one another, knowing that they were friends, and would always be.
A lot of water under this bridge too, Mark thought, with something like awe. He was growing old
er. Old enough to feel the current of what he had been flowing under him, leading to his future. Old enough to look back over his shoulder, and see his past behind him, and grieve for what was gone, and honour its memory.
He felt, suddenly, how much it would hurt him if Val died; felt an echo of that pain, knowing that the Valerian he had known, fluffy and peering and hapless and altogether wonderful: this Valerian was already dying. Not physically, of course, but the man he remembered from that first night in Swangard Palace would be gone the next time they met, though his ghost would linger on in Val forever, and in their memories.
Three cheers for ghosts, Mark thought. Three cheers for the dead.
Of course Val would be much the same: better, even. As full of wonder and delight, with big pockets full of puzzles and fascinating stories about the lives of ants and ingenious designs for windmills that would do your washing. And they would still be friends, excellent friends. It could be even better next time.
But it would never be the same.
How much of life is like this? Mark wondered. Is that what being grown up means? Saying goodbye as often as hello? More to wave back to with every step. He glanced down at his hand again, that would never be a soft Court hand, and saw the fresh scar there, white no longer, but pink, like any other scar just starting to heal up.
Gravely Val belted the black dagger at his hip. Then he climbed into his saddle, pushed his spectacles firmly up his nose, and grinned at Mark. “Adventure!” The big bay sidled restlessly beneath him, eager to be moving in the chilly afternoon. “Goodbye, Shielder’s Mark.”
Mark smiled back, feeling the nip in the air, and Ashes heavy at his side. “Goodbye,” he said.
Soon it was time to head back to Borders. He had plans for the Keep, for his duchy and his people. He was looking forward to being home.
Gail frowned. “Lissa, where’s that brown-and-purple thing I dyed the other day—that’ll be good and warm.”