Bedtime Story (66 page)

The magus half turned to him. “I’ve carried that with me since the day we left,” he explained.

“You knew?” David gasped. “All along you knew that Captain Bream—”

The magus cut him off with a glare.

“What about Captain Bream?” his mother asked, setting mugs of ale in front of them.

“It’s nothing,” the magus said placatingly.

His tone was so smooth, so comforting, that David knew his mother would see through it immediately. To his surprise, though, she said nothing, only turning back to the counter for mugs for Tamas and herself.

“I’ll keep yours waiting,” she said to Arian. “For when you get back.”

Arian took another look at the note in her hands, at the red wax seal. “Yes, ma’am,” she said, the decision to accept the errand made for her.

As she passed behind David’s chair, he felt her fingers brush against the back of his neck.

“I think I’m just about done with that girl,” his mother said as the door shut behind Arian. “I’m not even sure why I keep her around.” She was still at the counter, cutting meat from a large joint. “I’m fully capable of running the place myself. Did it for years …”

She seemed to be talking to herself, but David could feel every word twisting his belly. Dafyd wasn’t liking this.

“And it’s not as if she’s a great help,” she continued as she carried a tray of meat and cheese to the table. “With all the mooning over the shore boys that she does.”

She set the tray on the table, then looked at David. The air hung heavy for a moment, then everyone began to laugh. Everyone except David.

She ran her hand gingerly over his bare head. “Best not to make jokes,” she said. “Someone takes that one a little seriously.”

Cat Took drove with both hands on the wheel, her gaze fixed ahead on a series of increasingly narrower roads. She kept off the highway altogether, her route taking us first through several small, weather-beaten subdivisions outside the gaudy heart of Seaside, then onto a winding country road that offered occasional glimpses of the ocean as the car steadily climbed along the coast.

“So you grew up around here?” I asked.

“I’ve been here my whole life,” she said, watching the road.

The trees, dark and lush from the fine mist that clung to them, pressed in on both sides, as if someone had cut the smallest possible path through the forest.

“Did you go to school in Seaside?”

“My mother taught me at home, actually,” she said.

“All the way out here?”

“It’s not that far,” she said, turning onto a gravel path barely wide enough to accommodate even her little Volkswagen. It rumbled and shuddered on the rough surface.

“So it was just you and your mother?”

“Lazarus chose this house because of this forest,” she said, ignoring my question. “I think he liked the fact that it was so secluded, so surrounded by nature. And I think he liked the irony of it.”

“The irony?”

“The man who owned it before, who built it, owned one of the biggest lumber companies in the state.”

“A logger baron.”

“Right. Only he refused to allow any logging within sight of his house. He said that he valued nature too much to have it decimated around him.”

That struck me as precisely the sort of irony Lazarus Took would have appreciated.

As she spoke, the road widened and the shuddering of the car ceased as the tires gripped paving stones. The house itself appeared with a breathtaking suddenness—with a flash of unexpected sunlight, we emerged into a huge circular driveway.

“Wow,” I muttered, unable to help myself.

“Yeah,” she said, pulling close to the front steps of the house. “That’s what everyone says.”

It wasn’t the stately manor that I imagined Took owning in England, but it seemed a close cousin. The brown stone walls stretched three stories high, broken with mullioned windows, grown over in places with ivy. The windows were dark. The building seemed wilfully imposed upon the landscape.

“You can’t see it from here,” Cat said, turning off the engine. “But there’s a tower around the front, overlooking the ocean.”

“Let me guess.”

“Yes, that’s where Lazarus’s study is.” Of course.

As I climbed out of the car, I was shocked by the sudden cold in the shadow of the house. The ocean rumbled nearby.

I followed her up the wide staircase and through the heavy front doors, noticing only as I passed under them the words etched above the entry:

R
AVEN’S
M
OOR
.

“So,” his mother said, in a tone he recognized well. “Is one of you going to tell me just what in the name of the gods happened? You’re taken by the King’s Men, then you stumble back in here a month later in the dead of night, no word—”

“A month?” David gasped. “That’s how long we’ve been gone?

His mother looked at him as if he might be an idiot. “Almost five weeks.”

He knew that she must be right, but all the days and all the nights, the riding, the rowing—they had all blended together.

“Where have you been in that time?” she asked, first glaring at the magus, then setting her eyes on David, as if daring one of them to answer her.

David was about to speak, but the magus shook his head slightly as he raised his ale to his lips, a tiny gesture that Mareigh missed.

“That, dear Mareigh,” said the magus, wiping his mouth, “is a very long story, and one which we’ll have time to tell soon. But right now—”

“Don’t you try to work that gilded tongue on me again, Loren,” she said, her voice icy, threatening. “It worked once. It won’t again.”

“You don’t seem to have suffered,” he said, his voice now matching hers in strength.

“You would be best not to tell me what I have or have not suffered.”

Tamas glanced at David, looking for some explanation. David had none.

Clearly there’s some history
, Matt said.

David was startled. With the flood of Dafyd’s memories and emotions, it was almost as if Matthew had been swept away, or drowned out, for most of the day. David found it comforting to hear his voice.

Clearly
, David thought.

“And now you’re back here and I find it’s you who is responsible for taking my son, bringing him back home half-dead—”

“Mareigh, I’m—”

“I’ve a mind to—”

“Mareigh—”

“Mother,” David said sharply, his voice cutting into the air between them. “It wasn’t his fault. It was the—”

The magus slammed his mug on the table, but the word was already spoken.

“—Queen.”

Mareigh pulled her lips between her teeth, her eyes narrowing as she looked at the magus.

“The
Queen?”
she asked, her voice dripping with venom.

At that moment, there was a loud whistle from just outside the back door, and an answering whistle from the front of the tavern.

“Dafyd,” the magus cried out, jumping up from his chair.

A large log bashed the back door open. Two guardsmen dropped it to the floor and drew their swords. Another crash from the next room as more guardsmen came through the tavern’s front door.

“They’re back here!” one of the men in the kitchen called.

Guardsmen rushed in from the tavern, dispersing around the edges of the kitchen, swords drawn, encircling them like fish in a net.

David reached carefully toward the knife in his boot, but the magus warned him off with a glance.

“Well,” said a voice approaching through the tavern. “What have we here?”

As Captain Bream stepped into the kitchen, David marvelled at the change that had come over the man. When he had first seen him in the tavern yard the captain had been a towering figure of strength and command. Powerful in everything he said and did.

The captain who entered the kitchen now was diminished, pale and drawn.

Not weak, though
, Matt said.
Still strong enough to drive that sword through you
.

The captain advanced on David, his teeth bared in a feral grin. The point of his sword came to rest on exactly the same spot it had pierced in the chamber of the Sunstone.

“I warned you,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “I warned you of the cost of mercy. And now you’ll pay that. In spades.” He pressed the tip of the sword through David’s shirt and the blade sliced through the thick fabric, breaking the skin with ease.

“Stop,” David’s mother cried out, pushing between them.

The captain rounded on Mareigh, slapping her so hard with his gloved hand that she spun and stumbled to the floor.

“Don’t—” David said, desperate to protect her, stopped only by the cold steel of the sword against his chest.

“Or what, whoreson?” the captain spat. “You’ve done your worst. You had me in your power and you stayed your hand. Now it’s my turn.” He held David’s eye, neither of them flinching, neither of them blinking.

The sword-tip drove deeper into David’s chest. David flinched, but he did not look away.

“Captain?” one of the men said. Then, after a moment, he repeated, carefully, “Captain?”

Bream flinched. “What?” he snapped.

“The Queen,” the man said, sounding uncomfortable.

“Don’t tell me about the Queen.”

The man tightened his lips and took a step back.

It was enough for the magus, however. “So the Queen wants us alive,” he said, moving toward the captain.

“The Queen just wants the Stone,” he said, his attention wavering between David and the magus.

David saw the opportunity that Loren had provided him and took a half-step back, away from Bream’s blade. The front of his shirt was wet and warm with his own blood.

“I could bring her your heads at the end of a pike and she would be more than pleased.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” the magus said. “I think she gave you explicit orders that we were to be brought to her unharmed.” Something flickered in the captain’s eyes. “And you know how the Queen treats those who disobey her orders.”

“As you will soon know first-hand,” the captain said.

“I expect I shall.”

David released the breath that he had been holding. This was probably only a momentary reprieve, but it was better than being slaughtered in his mother’s kitchen.

The magus extended his hands. “And will you be binding us to take us to the Queen?”

David didn’t understand: with his hands tied, the magus would be helpless, unable to draw on his powers.

The captain looked at him scornfully. “I don’t think that will be necessary,” he said. “Your herbs will do you no good now.”

Then David caught a hint of a smile, little more than a twitch in the corners of the magus’s mouth.

“Let’s go,” the captain barked to his men. “Take the prisoners.”

“All of them, sir?”

The captain looked at Mareigh, and at Tamas, sitting white-faced at the table. “No, leave these two.”

The captain’s eyes met Mareigh’s.

“But make sure they know we were here,” he said coldly.

He pushed David roughly by the shoulder, guiding him through the doorway into the tavern. As they followed, the men responded like animals in a burst of concentrated fury, attacking the tavern, overturning tables, smashing chairs and glasses. David could hear Mareigh crying out from the kitchen, but there was nothing he could do.

“That’s enough,” the captain said after a minute. “Let’s go.”

Not a piece of furniture remained whole, the floor scattered with chunks of wood and shards of glass. Mareigh gasped as she came through the door, but when the captain looked at her she kept her face expressionless.

“To the Queen?” the magus asked.

“Of course to the Queen,” he snapped. “Who else?”

“Perhaps the King might have an interest in this.”

Mareigh stiffened.

“The King has no interest in you whatsoever,” he said, his voice flat. “Your time as his trusted adviser is clearly at an end.”

The captain shoved him forward, driving them into the night.