Ah. Yes. That would tend to give her a different view of such things. “Dondo was no Ias, my lady. He was corrupt—debauched—impious, an embezzler—and I am almost certain he had Ser dy Sanda murdered. Maybe even by his own hand. He was colluding with his brother Martou to gain complete control of the House of Chalion, through Orico, Teidez—and Iselle.”
Ista’s hand touched her throat. “I met Martou, years ago, at court. He already aspired then to be the next Lord dy Lutez. Dy Lutez, the brightest, noblest star ever to shine in the court of Chalion—Martou might have studied to clean his boots, barely. Dondo, I never met.”
“Dondo was a disaster. I first encountered him years ago, and he had no character then. He grew worse with age. Iselle was distraught, and furious to have him forced upon her. She prayed to the gods to release her from this abominable match, but the gods…didn’t answer. So I did.
“I stalked him for a day, intending to assassinate him for her, but I couldn’t get near him. So I prayed to the Bastard for a miracle of death magic. And I was granted it.”
After a moment, Ista’s eyebrows went up. “Why aren’t you dead?”
“I thought I was dying. When I awoke to find Dondo dead without me, I didn’t know what to think. But Umegat determined Iselle’s prayers had brought down a second miracle, and the Lady of Spring had spared my life from the Bastard’s demon, but only temporarily. Saint Umegat—I thought he was a groom—” His story was growing hopelessly tangled. He took a deep breath, and backed up and explained about Umegat and the miracle of the menagerie, and how it had preserved poor Orico in the teeth of the curse.
“Except that Dondo, before he died, when he still thought he was about to be married to Iselle, told Teidez it was the other way around—that the menagerie was an evil Roknari sorcery set up to sicken Orico. And Teidez believed him. Five days ago, he took his Baocian guard and slew nearly every sacred animal in it, and only by chance failed to slay the saint as well. He took a scratch from Orico’s dying leopard—I swear, it was only a scratch! If I had realized…The wound became poisoned. His end was…” Cazaril remembered who he was talking to. “…was very quick.”
“Poor Teidez,” whispered Ista, staring away. “My poor Teidez. You were born to be betrayed, I think.”
“Anyway,” finished Cazaril, “because of this strange concatenation of miracles, the death demon and the ghost of Dondo were bound in my belly. Encapsulated in some kind of tumor, evidently. When they are released, I will die.”
Ista’s grieving face went still. Her eyes rose to search Cazaril’s face. “That would be twice,” she said.
“Ah…eh?”
Her hands abandoned the tortured handkerchief, and went out to grip Cazaril’s collar. Her gaze became scorching, almost painful in its intensity. Her breath came faster. “Are you Iselle’s dy Lutez?”
“I, I, I,” stammered Cazaril; his stomach sank.
“Twice. Twice. But how to accomplish the third? Oh. Oh. Oh…” Her eyes were dilated, the pupils pulsing. Her lips shivered with hope. “What are you?”
“I, I, I’m only Cazaril, my lady! I am no dy Lutez, I am sure. I am not brilliant, or rich, or strong. Or beautiful, the gods know. Or brave, though I fight when I’m trapped, I suppose.”
She made an impatient gesture. “Take away all those ornaments—stripped, naked, upside down, the man still shone. Faithful. Unto death. Only…not unto two deaths. Or three.”
“I—this is madness, now. This is not the way I intend to break the curse, I promise you.” Five gods, not drowning. “I have another plan to rescue Iselle from it.”
Her eyes probed him, still with that frightening wildness. “Have the gods spoken to you, then?”
“No. I go by my reason.”
She sat back, to his relief releasing him, and her brows crimped in puzzlement. “Reason? In this?”
“Sara—and you—married into the House and the curse of Chalion. I think Iselle can marry out of it. This escape could not have been available to Teidez, but now…I am on my way to Ibra, to try to arrange Iselle’s marriage with Ibra’s new Heir, Royse Bergon. Dy Jironal will seek to prevent this, because it will spell the end of his power in Chalion. Iselle means to slip away from him by bringing Teidez’s body back here to Valenda to be buried.” Cazaril detailed Iselle’s plan to ride with the cortege, then rendezvous with Bergon in Valenda.
“Maybe,” breathed Ista. “Maybe…”
He was unsure what she was referring to. She was still giving him an extremely unsettling look.
“Your mother,” he said. “Does she know of all this? The curse, the true tale of dy Lutez?”
“I tried to tell her, once. She decided I was truly mad. It’s not a bad life, being mad, you know. It has its advantages. You don’t have to make any decisions. What to eat, what to wear, where to go…who lives, who dies…You can try it yourself, if you like. Just tell the truth. Tell people you are pregnant with a demon and a ghost, and you have a tumor that talks vilely to you, and the gods guard your steps, and see what happens next.” Her throaty laugh did not incline Cazaril to smile along. Her lips twisted. “Don’t look so alarmed, Lord Cazaril. If I repeat your story, you have only to deny me, and I will be thought mad, not you.”
“I…think you have been denied enough. Lady.”
She bit her lip and looked away; her body trembled.
Cazaril shifted, and was reminded of his saddlebag, leaning against his hip. “Iselle wrote you a letter, and one to her grandmother, and charged me to deliver them to you.” He burrowed into the bag, found his packet of correspondence, and handed Ista her letter. His hands were shaking from fatigue and hunger. Among other things. “I should go get rid of this dirt and eat something. By the time the Provincara returns, perhaps I can make myself fit for her company.”
Ista held the letter to her breast. “Call my ladies to me, then. I shall retire now, I think. No reason more to wake…”
Cazaril glanced up sharply. “Iselle. Iselle is a reason to wake.”
“Ah. Yes. One more hostage to go. Then I can sleep forever.” She leaned forward and patted his shoulder in an odd reassurance. “But for now I will just sleep tonight. I’m so tired. I think I must have done all my mourning and wailing in advance, and there is none left in me now. All emptied out.”
“I understand, lady.”
“Yes, you do. How strange.”
Cazaril reached gingerly out to the bench, pushed himself up, and went to let the weepy attendants back in. Ista set her teeth and suffered them to descend upon her. Cazaril hoisted his saddlebags and bowed himself out.
A WASH, A CHANGE OF CLOTHES, AND A HOT MEAL did much to restore Cazaril physically, though his mind still reeled from his conversation with Ista. When the servants set him to await the Provincara’s return in her quiet little parlor in the new building, he was grateful for the chance to marshal his thoughts. A cheerful fire was set for him in the chamber’s excellent fireplace. Aching in every bone, he sat in her cushioned chair, sipped well-watered wine, and tried not to nod off. The old lady was not likely to stay out very late.
Indeed, she soon appeared, flanked by her cousin-companion Lady dy Hueltar and the grave Ser dy Ferrej. She was dressed in gala splendor in green satins and velvets, glittering with jewels, but one look at her ashen face told Cazaril that the bad news had already been blurted to her by some excited servant. Cazaril lurched to his feet, and bowed.
She gripped his hands, searching his face. “Cazaril, is it true?”
“Teidez has died, suddenly, of an infection. Iselle is well”—he took a breath—“and Heiress of Chalion.”
“Poor boy! Poor boy! Have you told Ista yet?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, dear. How did she take it?”
Well did not describe it. Cazaril chose, “Calmly, Your Grace. At least, she did not fly into any sort of wild pelter, as I’d feared. I think the blows her life has dealt her have left her numb. I don’t know how she’ll be tomorrow. Her attendants
have put her to bed.”
The Provincara vented a sigh and blinked back tears.
Cazaril knelt to his saddlebags. “Iselle entrusted me with a letter for you. And there is a note for you, Ser dy Ferrej, from Betriz. She did not have time to write much.” He handed out the two sealed missives. “They will both be coming here. Iselle means to have Teidez buried in Valenda.”
“Oh,” said the Provincara, cracking the cold wax of the letter’s seal, careless of where the sprinkles fell. “Oh, how I long to see her.” Her eyes devoured the penned lines. “Short,” she complained. Her gray eyebrows went up. “Cazaril will explain everything to you, she says.”
“Yes, Your Grace. I have much to tell you, some of it in confidence.”
She waved out her companions. “Go, I will call you back.” Dy Ferrej was breaking open his letter by the time he reached the door.
She sat with a rustle of fabric, still clutching the paper, and gestured Cazaril to another chair, which he pulled up to her knee. “I must see to Ista before she sleeps.”
“I’ll try to be succinct, Your Grace. This is what I have learned this season in Cardegoss. What I went through to learn it…” That cost, the cracking open of his world, Ista had understood at once; he was not sure the Provincara would grasp it. “Doesn’t matter now. But Archdivine Mendenal in Cardegoss can confirm the truth of it all, if you get a chance at him. Tell him I sent you, and he will deny you nothing.”
Her brows went up. “How is it you bend an archdivine?”
Cazaril snorted softly. “I pull rank.”
She sat up, her lips thinning. “Cazaril, don’t make stupid jokes with me. You grow as cryptic as Ista.”
Yes, Ista’s self-protective sense of—not humor, irony—likely was irritating, at close quarters. Ista. Who spoke for Ista? “Provincara…your daughter is heartbroken, ravaged in will. She longs for the release of death. But she is not mad. The gods are not so merciful.”
The old woman hunched, as though his words grated over a raw spot. “Her grief is extravagant. Was no woman ever widowed before? Has none lost a child? I’ve suffered both, but I did not moan and mope and carry on so, not for years. I cried my hour, yes, but then I continued about my duties. If she is not broken in reason, then she is vastly self-indulgent.”
Could he make her understand Ista’s differences without violating Ista’s tacit confidences? Well, even a partial truth might help. He bent his head to hers. “It all goes back to the great war of Fonsa the Fairly-Wise with the Golden General…” In the plainest possible terms, he detailed the inner workings of the curse upon the history of the House of Chalion. There were enough other disasters in Ias’s reign that he scarcely needed to touch on the fall of dy Lutez. Orico’s impotence, the slow corruption of his advisors, the failure of both his policies and his health brought the tale to the present.
The Provincara scowled. “Is all this vile luck a work of Roknari black magic, then?”
“Not…as I understand it. It is a spillage, a perversion of some ineffable divinity, lost from its proper place.”
She shrugged. “Close enough. If it acts like black magic, then black magic it is. The practical question is, how to counter it?”
Cazaril wasn’t sure about that close enough. Surely only correct understanding could lead to correct action. Ista and Ias had tried to force a solution, as though the curse were magic, to be countered by magic. A rite done by rote.
She added, “And does this link to this wild tale we heard of Dondo dy Jironal being murdered by death magic?”
That, at least, he could answer, none better. He had already decided to strip out as much of the unnatural detail as possible from her version of events. He did not think her confidence in him would be augmented by his babbling of demons, ghosts, saints, second sight, and even more grotesque things. More than enough remained to astound her. He began with the tale of Iselle’s disastrous betrothal, although he did not attribute the source of Dondo’s death miracle, concealing his act of murder as he’d concealed Ista’s.
The Provincara was not so squeamish. “If Lord Dondo was as bad as you say,” she sniffed, “I shall say prayers for that unknown benefactor!”
“Indeed, Your Grace. I pray for him daily.”
“And Dondo a mere younger son—for Iselle! What was that fool Orico thinking?”
Abandoning the ineffable, he presented the menagerie to her as a marvel devised by the Temple to preserve Orico’s failing health, true enough as far as it went. She grasped instantly the secret political purpose of Dondo’s setting Teidez to its—and Orico’s—destruction, and ground her teeth. She moaned for Teidez’s betrayal. But the news that Valenda must now prepare for a funeral, a wedding, and a war, possibly simultaneously, revitalized her.
“Can Iselle count on her uncle dy Baocia’s support?” Cazaril asked her. “How many others can he and you bring in against dy Jironal’s faction?”
The Provincara made rapid inventory of the lords she might draw in to Valenda, ostensibly for Teidez’s funeral, in fact to pry Iselle from dy Jironal’s hands. The list impressed him. After all her decades of political observation in Chalion, the Provincara didn’t even need to look at a map to plan her tactics.
“Have them ride in for Teidez’s funeral with every man they can muster,” said Cazaril. “Especially, we must control the roads between here and Ibra, to guarantee the safety of Royse Bergon.”
“Difficult,” said the Provincara, sitting back with her lips pursing. “Some of dy Jironal’s own lands, and those of his brothers-in-law, lie between here and the border. You should have a troop to ride with you. I will strip Valenda to give you the men.”
“No,” said Cazaril slowly. “You’ll need all your men when Iselle arrives, which may well be before I can return. And if I take a troop to Ibra, our speed will be limited. We cannot hope to obtain remounts on the road for so large a company, and maintaining secrecy would become impossible. Better we should travel outward light and fast and unmarked. Save the troop to meet us coming back. Oh, and beware, your Baocian captain you sent with Teidez sold himself to Dondo—he cannot be trusted. You’ll have to find some way to replace him when he returns.”
The Provincara swore. “Bastard’s demons, I’ll have his ears.”
They made plans to pass his ciphered letters to Iselle, and hers to him, through Valenda, making it appear to dy Jironal’s spies that Cazaril still was in her grandmother’s company. The Provincara undertook to pawn some of Iselle’s jewelry for him on the morrow, at the best rate, to raise the coin he’d need for the next part of his journey. They settled a dozen other practical details in as many minutes. Her very determination made her god-proof, Cazaril imagined; for all her attention to pious ceremony, no god was going to slip into that iron will even edgewise. The gods had given her less perilous gifts, and he was grateful enough for them.
“You understand,” he said at last, “I think this marriage scheme may rescue Iselle. I don’t know that it will also save Ista.” Neither Ista, drifting sadly about the castle of Valenda, nor Orico, lying blind and bloated in the Zangre. And no exhortation of the Provincara to Ista to bestir herself would be of any use, while this black thing still choked her like a poisoned fog.
“If it only rescues Iselle from the clutches of Chancellor dy Jironal, it will satisfy me. I can’t believe Orico made such vile provisions in his will.” That legal note had exercised her almost more than the supernatural matters. “Taking my granddaughter from me without even consulting me!”
Cazaril fingered his beard. “You realize, if all this succeeds, your granddaughter will become your liege lord. Royina in her own right of all Chalion, and royina-consort of Ibra.”
Her lips screwed up. “That’s the maddest part of all. She’s just a girl! Not but that she always had more wits than poor Teidez. What can all the gods of Chalion be thinking, to place such a child on the throne at Cardegoss!”
Cazaril said mildly, “Perhaps that the restoration of Chalion is
the work of a very long lifetime, and that no one so old as you or I could live to see it through.”
She snorted. “You’re barely more than a child yourself. Children in charge of the whole world these days, no wonder it’s all gone mad. Well…well. We must bustle about tomorrow. Five gods, Cazaril, go sleep, though I doubt I shall. You look like death warmed over, and you haven’t my years to excuse you.”
Creakily, he clambered to his feet and bowed himself out. The Provincara’s bursts of irate energy were fragile. It would take all her retainers’ aid to prevent her from exhausting herself dangerously. He found the anxiously waiting Lady dy Hueltar in the next room, and sent her in to attend upon her lady cousin.
THEY GAVE CAZARIL BACK HIS CHILLY, HONORABLE, customary chamber in the main keep. He slid gratefully between heated sheets. It was as much like coming home as anything he’d experienced for years. Yet his new eyes rendered familiar places strange again; the world made strange as he was remade, over and over, and no place to rest at last.
Dondo, in all his motley ghostly glory, scarcely kept Cazaril awake that night. He had become a danger almost too routine to be dreaded. Fresh fears assailed Cazaril now.
Memory of the terrible hope in Ista’s eyes unnerved him. And the reflection that tomorrow, he would mount a horse whose every stride would carry him closer to the sea.
22
Cazaril regretfully gave up use of the Chancellery’s courier remounts when they left Valenda, in favor of secrecy. No merit in handing dy Jironal a signed record of their route and destination. Armed with Palli’s letter of recommendation, they instead arranged exchanges for fresh horses at local town chapters of the Daughter’s Order. At the foot of the mountains on the western frontier, they were obliged to deal with a local horse trader for the sturdy and surefooted mules to carry them over the heights.
The man had clearly been making a fine living for years skinning desperate travelers. Ferda looked over the beasts offered them, and said indignantly, “This one has heaves. And if that one isn’t throwing out a splint, my lord, I’ll eat your hat!” The horse trader and he fell at once into acrimonious argument.