20
The messenger came at midnight. He bore Langmyr’s royal crown-and-sun on his breast, and traveled under a peace-banner that—surprisingly, given tensions along the border—had been honored by both sides. What he came to say, no one in Bulls’ March knew, although rumors ran wild from the moment he came into sight. Leferic heard his servants, and no few of his knights, whispering like roaches in the rushes. The whispers vanished when he came near and sprang back up as soon as he was past.
The messenger spoke to Leferic briefly in the privacy of his library and was gone before daybreak. He left two sealed letters behind; one of the servants caught a glimpse of them before Leferic tucked them into his cloak, and that spurred rumors of its own, especially when their lord told no one what the letters said.
Whatever the news was, it must have been direly troubling, the gossips agreed. For two days and two nights after, Leferic did not sleep. He grew haggard and clumsy, and the castle folk murmured that the messenger must have bewitched him with the same foul magic that had killed his brother and made a soul-broken husk of his father. Several muttered that the Langmyrne should have been given a quick death and sent to the pyre rather than being allowed to ride away, peace-banner or no.
Heldric reported all these whispers to his lord, but Leferic did nothing. Rumors are poison dropped in the ear, Inaglione had written, and can be deadly if not swiftly cured. There was truth in that, Leferic knew, but grief and indecision made him too weak to act on it. He was beginning to understand why his father had retired to his silent bed.
Then, cold and early on the morning of the third day, a new messenger arrived. This one came from the north, not across the river from the west, and he wore King Raharic’s green oak wreath on a surcoat of snowy white. Unlike the last rider, this one stayed through the day; and as he lingered in the castle, and exchanged courtesies with the knights and servants, word of his tidings began to spread. It was in that fashion, slowly, that the people of Bulls’ March came to see the true shape of things.
Or so they imagined, Leferic thought dourly as he sat at the paper-strewn desk in his library. The real truth, and the burden of its guilt, were his to bear alone.
He ran a hand through his lank blond hair, trying to force his thoughts into something like order. By all rights he should be preparing to meet Raharic’s messenger, but the royal herald had sent word that he was exhausted by his travels and would prefer to reserve the formal audience for tomorrow.
The real reason for the delay, Leferic suspected, was that the herald was using this time to quietly feel out his liegemen and how they had reacted to the news of Albric’s betrayal. He wondered what the messenger would make of the fact that most of them hadn’t heard it. The knights, for their part, would probably assume that Leferic’s delay in sharing Albric’s confession with them meant that he’d plotted along with the dead man. They had little love to spare for him as it was: easy enough to believe he’d been part of a treacherous conspiracy.
They’d be right about that, of course. Which was part of what made this so hard.
Leferic raked his fingers through his hair again. His gaze strayed to the books that filled the shelves on every wall. Nearly three hundred volumes of scholars’ research and sages’ wisdom, histories and legends, religious precepts and secular wit.
Three hundred volumes, and no answers.
Even Inaglione, that wisest and most cynical of courtiers, could offer only limited counsel across the chasm of centuries and the great silence of the pyre. Leferic had recognized, that first day when he came up to the library after learning of Galefrid’s death, that he would have to rely on his own wholly inadequate wits to survive. It was not a new thought. But it had never been as brutally urgent before.
Now, for the first time, he saw just how lonely a path he had chosen.
He’d have no friends on this road, no close confidants. His only guide was the shade of a dead courtier, writing to him across the gap of ages and a culture that had fallen from Rhaelyand and Ardashir’s golden palaces to this miserable pile of rocks in the woods.
Any friends he might make would eventually be sacrificed to the needs of his position. Leferic didn’t know if he could bear that again, even if the choice were open to him. Better to keep his friends limited to books and ghosts. Better to be lonely and remember the real price of power: that everyone in his life, no matter how loyal or how beloved, was a pawn he might someday have to give up on the board. Everyone.
He thought he’d understood that, thought he’d accepted it with Galefrid’s death. But his brother had never meant much to him, and Leferic now saw that he’d understood nothing.
The Langmyrne messenger hadn’t just delivered their Lord General’s message and a copy of a prayerbook confession. He’d brought an unwanted truth, one that Leferic’s thoughts kept circling like a sparrow trying to find a roost on a razorspine tree.
The only way out of his predicament was to let Albric take the blame for a crime of which he was blameless. The sins were Leferic’s, and his alone. But he would have to shove them onto his friend’s corpse if he was to keep his throne. Or his head.
And Albric had known that, and had opened his arms to take them before he died.
Leferic struggled to grasp the enormity of that choice. Albric had warned him away from the Maimed Witches since the inception of their first plan. When his warnings weren’t heeded, Albric had accepted death and dishonor as the cost of shielding Leferic from his own folly. He hadn’t fought his fate, hadn’t complained; he had simply done it, accepting as his duty a sacrifice that Leferic could never have asked for.
And Leferic would have to let that go. There was nothing he could do to lessen the stain on Albric’s honor without bringing suspicion onto himself and rendering that sacrifice worthless. He had little use for the empty mouthing that “honor” often was, but Albric had prized it, and it was a grievous irony that he should have given up his to save his lord’s.
It still might not be enough. Even if Leferic stood silent, even if he joined the mob spitting on his friend’s good name, his liegemen might seize on the excuse to be rid of him. They’d claim he’d turned a blind eye to Albric’s plotting, allowing the treachery to go forward so he could seize the throne. Or they’d say he had only been allowed to keep his father’s chair because he was a puppet to Ang’arta, bowing to the Thorns’ every whim.
With more time he could win them over, as he’d won Sir Brisic and Sir Merguil. Leferic was sure of that. Bit by bit he could chip away at old alliances, exploit old enmities, weld competent men to his side, and replace fools with loyalists. But to do that he needed time and money. At present he had neither. Without those, all roads led to the same end: a fall from power, maybe to the headsman’s block. All those deaths for nothing.
Albric had bought him a chance, not a certainty. His thoughts circled that, trying to find a safe place amidst the bristling barbs and failing, failing every time.
A knock sounded at his door. Leferic lowered his head into his hands, hoping futilely that he’d hallucinated the sound in his grief and exhaustion.
He wasn’t that lucky. Another knock came, this one louder. Leferic dropped his forehead to the tabletop. The rough wood felt as welcoming as a pillow. “Leave me.”
“That might be unwise.” Cadarn’s voice was muffled but grim.
“Why? Is the herald calling for an audience? He said he wasn’t ready—”
“No. Ulvrar found some travelers on the road. Badly hurt but alive. Andalya sees to them now. She says they will live.”
“Bandits?” Leferic forced himself out of the chair and to the door, letting Cadarn in. He saw no one listening in the hall, but this was not a conversation to be shouted through three inches of wood.
The exile shook his shaggy blonde head. “Ghaole, Andalya called them. Corpses of men made into monsters by foul magic. She said they were the work of Thorns.”
Leferic sank nervelessly into his chair. His elbow jostled a sheaf of papers, spilling them across the floor. “Who did they attack?”
“A girl, a knight and a baby. Andalya said the knight is from Bulls’ March.” Cadarn’s blue eyes were steady and appraising. No accusation there, not yet. Leferic wondered if the skar skraeli had heard the rumors about Albric’s treachery.
“Can they tell us what happened?”
“Not yet. Andalya said the girl might be awake by sundown. She was not hurt so badly as the knight.”
“The baby?”
“Cold. Hungry. Not hurt. The other two fought hard to keep it so.”
“Where are they being housed?”
“The sickrooms. For now.”
“See that they have guest quarters when they are well enough to take them. Until then, keep a watch on the sickrooms. Only your men, or those you know well enough to trust.” Leferic hoped the northerners would do it themselves, but he thought it best to give them some leeway. Neither Cadarn nor any of his men used Blessed Andalya’s title, and all seemed uncomfortable around her. “I do not want anything untoward to befall them.”
Cadarn furrowed his brow. “You think they are in danger?”
“I would prefer not to risk it. If a Thorn sent monsters to attack them, who knows? Better to be safe. You said the girl would be awake by nightfall?”
“So Andalya said. Nightfall.”
SUNDOWN FOUND LEFERIC IN THE WHITEWASHED sickrooms. There were three such rooms on the castle’s southwestern face, between the chapel and the kitchens. In peacetime two of them were used to store flour, smoked meat, and other foodstuffs, but one was always waiting for the wounded. Peace was never that sure on the banks of the Seivern.
Blessed Andalya was tidying up and preparing to leave her charges for the night when Leferic arrived. She was a short woman whose hair had begun graying when she was sixteen; now forty, she had a round, youthful face under a braided coil of starry white. The Blessed patted Leferic’s shoulder as she passed through the door in a rustle of sun-yellow robes.
“Be careful of them,” she said. It was not a request. “They’ve been through seven hells to get here.”
Leferic bowed in response, and closed the door after the Blessed.
Glassed lanterns hung from hooks on the walls, shedding a warm golden light and perfuming the sickroom air with the fragrance of vanilla and cloves. The Blessed forbade torches in her healing rooms; she said their smoke polluted the air, and insisted that the sickrooms be illumined by lanterns that burned the scented oils she brewed. The fragrance was supposed to ease the dreams of the wounded, or something of that sort.
It didn’t seem to soothe their current guests. Certainly the big man sleeping on the first linen-draped pallet was not resting easily. His coarse black hair was a rumpled mess and his clothes were spotted with sweat; his jaw clenched in his dreams and his hands kept twitching toward fists. Thick-wrapped bandages swathed a wound on his calf and another on his side.
Leferic knew that man. Brys Tarnell: one of his brother’s knights, not long sworn to his service before Galefrid died. Albric had never liked him, calling him an up-jumped mercenary with the honor of an alley cat. All true, so far as Leferic could see, but the man was alive when Galefrid and his other knights were dead, so perhaps there was something to be said for alley cats.
He did not know the girl on the next bed. She had the look of peasant stock: callused hands, thick legs, broad plain face. There was no hint of beauty about her, save in her wide brown eyes, which watched him with the fear of a doe beset by hounds. She held a baby in her arms, and she was humming a cradle song to the child as Leferic came to the foot of her bed.
Leferic studied the baby carefully. Brys Tarnell had been with Galefrid in Willowfield, and there was only one child in this world that an honorless man like that would risk his own hide to protect.
He barely remembered his nephew’s face. Children of that age all looked much the same, and he’d never paid much attention to Galefrid’s family. But why else would a mercenary fight off ghaole to save a baby? The child had to be Wistan.
The absurdity of it made him want to laugh. Or hit something. All that plotting and agonizing, all those deaths … and all he’d had to do was wait for some peasant girl to bring the child home.
Or not. Perhaps it might have turned out differently without those ghaole on the road. How much was the world changed by each word spoken, each decision made? How many ripples did each drop make on a rain-hammered pond? Leferic would never know. What he did know, looking at the peasant girl and the baby sleeping in her arms, was that he had the opportunity to remove one of the myriad threats that plagued him. The Blessed had already declared that the child suffered from the strains of the road; it would be the easiest thing in the world to leave him on the windowsill, let him take a fatal chill, and put him back to be found safely dead in the morning.
Should he do it tonight? Or wait until tomorrow evening, and have both Brys and the girl dosed with dreamflower dust first?
The girl stopped humming. Leferic glanced at her, wondering if some hint of his intentions showed on his face. She watched him warily, clutching the baby tightly to her breast. “My lord?” Her accent was Langmyrne, and as lowborn as he’d guessed.
Leferic shook himself inwardly. The girl had done nothing to offend him, and she was a guest under his roof. That he was planning to kill the baby she held was no reason to treat her with discourtesy. He offered her a half bow and the ancient words of greeting: “Be welcome under my roof. Bright Lady bless your presence in my halls.” With a slight, reassuring smile, he added, “It was a long road to get here, wasn’t it?”
“It was.” A little of her wariness faded, but the girl still looked like a doe who might spring wild in panic at any moment. “We’re grateful to your men for bringing us in. We’d likely all be dead without them.”
“‘For the road is long and dark, and no man sure of safety,’” Leferic quoted. “It was one of your countrymen who penned those lines, was it not?”
The girl’s expression closed in on itself, as though she suspected him of mocking her ignorance. She looked down to the child. “Might’ve been. I wouldn’t be able to say, my lord.”
“It was. Casubel of Craghail, one of the great poets of his age. There aren’t any Oakharne who come near matching him, I’m sorry to say. But I came to talk of roads, not verses. Which one brought you here?”
“I’m from Willowfield, my lord.”
“My brother met his end there.” Leferic said it casually, attaching no great emphasis to the fact, but he watched her reaction intently.
“I know.” Her eyes flickered up toward him and back down to the baby’s face. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“We all die in the end. What matters is what we do with our lives before then. Galefrid died young, it’s true, but he left the most important legacy behind.” Leferic paused, wanting the full import of his words to sink in. “He left a child.”
The girl nodded. Her head stayed bowed, and her shoulders hunched in; she looked like a servant cringing before a clout. Her arms drew the baby closer to her chest, shielding it within the curl of her body. Leferic realized, with a twinge of uneasy surprise, that the girl was crying. The sobs were nearly silent, but the ragged catch in her breathing gave them away all the same.
He hadn’t expected her to become so emotional over a stranger’s child. Neither had he expected his thoughts to be so clear to her. If she already knew what he meant to do, then neither she nor Wistan could live. Regrettable, but unavoidable.
Leferic’s voice softened, almost without his willing it, as he asked the final, fatal question. “And you saved that child, didn’t you? You brought Wistan here.”
The girl shook her head mutely. She brought her face up, red and shiny with tears, and in her wide brown eyes there was nothing but anguished shame. “No.”
He couldn’t have heard her correctly. “What?”
Laughter was his answer. It was a bleak, awful sound, the laughter of a criminal reprieved from the gallows only to be sent to the Thorns. It did not come from the girl.
Brys Tarnell was awake. And laughing. The mercenary sat up against his pillow, his face pale as death but his green eyes burning bright. At last his black mirth trailed off and he gave Leferic a wolfish grin, little more than a baring of teeth. “She isn’t lying. Though she should be, if she had half the sense the gods gave turnips.”
Leferic shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m sorry.” Tears ran freely down the girl’s cheeks, dripping from her chin and vanishing into her blouse. The baby whimpered toward wakefulness as her tears spattered onto his blankets. “I tried—I tried so hard,” she whispered. “But he died. It’s my fault, I should have done more. I’m so sorry.”
“But you’re holding him,” Leferic said blankly.
“No. We were going to—I would have told you this was Wistan, and let you raise him for your own, but I can’t lie to you, my lord. I’m sorry. I can’t. This is my son. Aubry.” She wiped at her eyes, keeping her gaze averted from Brys’. Leferic gave her a bandage from a basket on the shelf and she blew her nose into it loudly. It seemed to calm her a little, and she managed a weak smile. “Thank you.”
He brushed off her thanks with a wave. “Begin again. What happened to Wistan?”
The girl twisted the sodden bandage around her fingers, dabbing alternately at her eyes and nose. “He was—I think he was hurt in Willowfield, I don’t know how, but he was weak from the first time I saw him. We went to Tarne Crossing, hoping to find the Blessed, but she was gone. I would have waited for her to come back, truly, but …”
“But what?”
“But he was so weak, and … and there was a dead man.” Her eyes darted up to meet his and away again; she made an uneasy try at a laugh that came out as a sob. “I know how ridiculous that sounds. I do. But it’s true.”
“It is true,” Brys said flatly. “The same Thorn who killed Willowfield used one of the men murdered there as her puppet. Caedric Alsarring. You might remember him: he served your father and your brother. She turned him into a monster and sent him to hunt Wistan.”
“I believe you,” Leferic said. The mercenary’s expression did not change in the slightest, but those three simple words seemed to relax the girl more than anything else Leferic had done or said. She gave him a grateful glance and went on, wringing the scrap of cloth unconsciously as she spoke.
“We had to leave Tarne Crossing so she wouldn’t find him. We went with the Vis Sestani. I tried to find a healer among them, but … I couldn’t, my lord, and he died. I left him in the snow with a candle. I know it wasn’t right, but we didn’t have time for a proper pyre. I’m sorry, my lord. I hope it was enough for his soul to find its way home.”
“Then who is the child you carry? Tell me again.”
“Aubry. He’s my own.” She said it fiercely, twisting the bandage until her fingers went white in the knotted linen. “His father died in Willowfield. I’m all he has, and he’s all I have.”
“But you were going to pass him off as Wistan? Is that it?”
“More money in it.” Brys made the admission bluntly, without shame. “Yes. I was going to say he was your brother’s child and hope for some reward. It was my idea, so if you’re going to get angry about it, get angry with me, not her.”
“No,” the girl protested, “no, that’s not true. I mean, it is … but I agreed to it. I thought—I thought it could be a chance for my son to become someone important. If everyone thought he was Wistan. That’s why I agreed. But I can’t do it. I can’t lie, my lord. I’m sorry we ever had the idea. You saved us and brought us here and had the Blessed heal us, and I was going to lie to you. I’m sorry.”
“You needn’t be sorry for that.” Leferic said the words absently, not really hearing them, for the implications of their plot had finally sunk in and they left him thunderstruck.
His first reaction had, indeed, been anger—but that was foolish. Wasteful. Why should he be angry that they’d considered deceiving him? They hadn’t done it. By confessing the deception and throwing themselves on his mercy, they’d presented him with a gods-sent gift.
Adopting “Wistan” was the perfect solution. The simplicity of the idea was staggering. Leferic cursed his own stupidity in failing to think of it earlier. He’d never considered that Wistan could or should survive, but adopting his brother’s son as his heir would solve so many problems. In one fell swoop he could legitimize his own rule, remove a rallying figure from any would-be rebels, and bind Galefrid’s loyalists more tightly to his own side. News of “Wistan’s” survival might even pry loose from Maritya’s parents the money that Bulls’ March so desperately needed.
And if the child should ever become a threat, why, then he could drag out the girl and put her before a Blessed to confess the truth of how she had deceived him by substituting her own son for the realm’s true heir.
Leferic turned the idea over in his mind and could see no flaws. Certainly none that compared with the pitfalls of his current predicament. Both the child’s parents were dead, so there would be no one to say whether the boy looked like them. The peasant girl had roughly Maritya’s coloring, if none of her delicate grace. The resemblance might be close enough to pass.
Oh, perhaps someday the boy might come to believe that he was ready to rule in his own name, but it would be fifteen years or more before he reached his majority. By then Leferic expected to have Bulls’ March firmly in his grasp. If he couldn’t hold Wistan off by that time, he didn’t deserve to rule at all. Besides, the boy might grow up to be a fair ruler in his own right, someday. Especially if he had a wise regent to teach him from the cradle …
Leferic realized the girl was crying again. He touched her shoulder lightly and gave her a smile that he hoped was kind. “Is there any reason, outside your own honesty, that you would not want your son raised this way?”
“No, my lord.” Her voice was hoarse from all that sobbing, but that could not hide the heartfelt honesty in her words. “I’d give anything for Aubry to have a chance at greatness.”
“Then he will.”
“My lord?” She blinked at him in confusion, her lashes wet and eyes puffy with tears.
“I am going to leave you to your rest. I will forget everything we discussed tonight.”
“But … then …”
“Then I will come back in the morning with Blessed Andalya and you will tell me that you and Brys Tarnell rescued Wistan from the massacre of Willowfield and I will believe you. And I will make your son my heir. Do you understand? I accept the lie. I am giving you your chance. Will you take it?”
Her jaw worked as she struggled with the idea; Leferic marveled at the peasant girl’s unworldliness. But in the end she nodded, gazing at the child in her arms. “In the morning I’ll … I’ll tell you that he’s Wistan. But, my lord … can I stay near him, even when he is?”
“Of course,” Leferic said, with all the graciousness of a man handing a cup of sweetly poisoned wine to his rival. He needed her near, in the event that he ever needed to unmask “Wistan” as a fraud. “The child has no mother. He’ll need a nursemaid to raise him. I assume you are willing to serve in the castle?”
“Yes. Oh, yes—”
“I’m not,” Brys interrupted.
“No. Nor would I ask you to.” Leferic weighed the man. He needed the girl so that he’d have someone to blame if the secret ever came out, but he only needed one scapegoat and Brys Tarnell was unlikely to be a safe choice for that role. Moreover, while he was fairly certain he could keep the girl muzzled—exposing the truth would expose her son, and a mother as softhearted as this one would never do that—he had no such control over the sellsword. Better if he was gone. Better still if he were dead, but Leferic had had enough of killing for a while.
Maybe that made him weak … but he didn’t think so. The coward and the tyrant call the headsman at any provocation, and fall to him the same, Inaglione had written. Those who were too quick to execute their enemies always seemed to find more of them, somehow, closer and closer to home. A wise ruler used that solution sparingly, and only where it was needed.
It wasn’t needed here. Leferic was sure of that. If Brys tried to threaten him with revelations of Wistan’s true identity, he’d name the man as a blackmailing fraud and have him whipped out of the castle. The sellsword had neither friends nor allies, and no credibility in court; he didn’t pose any serious threat. Even so, it would be safest for them both if he was gone. Brys was probably intelligent enough to realize that himself. The lord of Bulls’ March could always change his mind, after all, and a man alone died easily.
“I think,” Leferic said carefully, “that it would be best if you were honored for your service to Bulls’ March and rewarded for your loyalty to my brother. And if, following that, you found that grief made it impossible for you to continue your service here. I’m sure your skills are in great demand outside the Sunfallen Kingdoms.”
“Cailan,” Brys suggested. “Was thinking of going there anyway once this was done.”
“That would do splendidly,” Leferic agreed. He turned back to the girl. “I will see you in the morning. Have your story well rehearsed. And when we are properly introduced, perhaps you might begin by giving me your name.” He made a last bow in parting and left her in the sickroom, her eyes shining with something more than tears.
Outside the night was well past freezing but Leferic hardly noticed. Excitement wrapped him in a warmth that no wind could pierce. He crossed the courtyard without feeling the cobbles under his thin-soled boots or smelling the manure from the stables nearby. Only the faraway gleam of the stars and a thin fringe of torches lit his way across the icy stones, but he had never felt so sure-footed in his life. He gave thanks to Celestia for her mercy, to the peasant girl for her naive honesty, and to Albric’s shade for his courage.
Then he went up to his library to place his stakes upon this gamble.
For the rest of the night Leferic wrote letters until his ink-stained fingers cramped around the quill and the words blurred together and stung his eyes. He wrote to King Raharic, acknowledging the herald’s arrival and announcing his own intentions to abide by Langmyr’s suggested peace, now that his liegeman’s treachery had been uncovered and the baby Wistan delivered safely by one of his brother’s surviving knights. He wrote the same message to the lords of Breakwall and Blackbough and all the other castles of Oakharn, both on the border and deep in the heartlands.
Lastly, and most carefully, he wrote to Maritya’s parents in Seawatch. To Reinbern and Alta de Marst, whose names were a byword for wealth in a realm where merchants made princes look like paupers, Leferic sent polite expressions of grief, then piety, then joy: for, he told them, through the infinite beneficence of the Bright Lady, their grandson had been saved. He invited them to visit for Wistan’s first birthday, and promised at that celebration to formally declare the child his heir.
By the time he sealed the last letter and set it aside for the morning’s messengers, it was near dawn. Blue shadows crept along the windows’ ledges; the sky was paling through their thick glass. Leferic rubbed his grainy eyes and stretched to ease the ache in his back. He hadn’t seen a sunrise since Galefrid’s funeral vigil.
Standing before the largest and clearest of his library’s windows, Leferic watched the night-tide recede. Dawn came slowly, for the sun was hazy behind a veil of clouds that drew its light off into long ribbons of amethyst and gray and pearling gold. The sky brightened from black to a deep luminous blue that put sapphires to shame. No longer dark, not fully light, the cloudy radiance of the early morning promised a gentle day ahead.
Leferic watched the dawn come to his winter castle, and then he called his messengers to make that promise real.