C. Dale Brittain (60 page)

He was flustered but certain.
 
“No.
 
No chance at all.
 
I have never lain with any woman at Arane’s court.”
 
He paused uncertainly.
 
“I can swear on steel and rowan if you like.”

Karin looked questioningly toward Arane but the queen had turned her head away.
 
Roric had said he knew for certain he was not Hadros’s son—and had he not said Arane herself told him?

Someone else, then, had also enjoyed the favors of the queen’s maid, though the queen had managed to make Hadros believe the baby was his to ensure him a good upbringing.
 
Whosever son he might have been, he was not the son of King Kardan.

Roric’s father was another man.
 
She did not know how relieved she was to learn this until she found herself throwing her arms around her own father, just on the edge of sobbing again.

Queen Arane rose briskly, pulling up the hood of her cloak.
 
“The girl is exhausted and drained,” she said firmly.
 
“She can tell you the rest of her story in the morning.
 
What she needs now is sleep, which she can best have in my tent.”

Before Karin could protest, the queen had her by the elbow and was propelling her across the camp.
 
Now that she had begun telling her tale she would have been willing to continue, but there seemed no chance of that.
 
“Well, goodnight!” came her father’s voice, belatedly and behind them.

Karin entered the queen’s tent resignedly, ready to be tucked back into the blankets where she had slept that afternoon.
 
Her life seemed rather empty and pointless, now that she knew the lords of voima would not let her rescue Valmar.
 
It would be best perhaps to let others make the decisions for her until the baby within her quickened and gave her again a reason to live.

But the queen put the lantern between them and sat on her cushions, eyes glittering.
 
“Now, Karin.
 
I want you to tell me how Roric died.”

“King Eirik had captured Valmar, there in the Wanderers’ realm,” said Karin slowly, wondering why Arane did not want the kings to hear this.
 
“Roric freed him, but Eirik was such a short distance away that we had very little chance of escape.
 
Roric pushed Valmar and me into, well, a tunnel that led to safety.”
 
There would be time enough to mention their brief visit to Hadros’s court.
 
“Roric guarded our backs, and there he was killed.”
 
She was almost able to say it calmly now.

“Did you see him die?” asked the queen sharply.

“No, but he would have come behind us if he had lived, and he did not.”

“I would not yet give up hope of him,” said Arane very quietly.
 
“But if he is gone he died to save his beloved and his foster-brother.
 
I shall commission a bard as soon as I am home to put it into song.”

When the queen did not speak again Karin asked, “Is there a reason you did not want Hadros to hear about his death?
 
Were you afraid it would reflect dishonorably on Valmar?”

But the queen did not answer her question.
 
“You know I only ever spoke to Roric once as an adult, after he left my court where, it is true, he was born.
 
Tell me:
 
did he carry any charm?”

“He had a little bone charm, cut in the shape of a star.
 
He was told it was in his blankets when he was found—though I gather now he was not a foundling?”

Still ignoring her questions, Arane reached into her belt pouch and pulled out something that she placed on Karin’s palm.
 
It was a star-shaped bone charm.
 
“Did it look like that?”

Karin stared at it.
 
“He
gave
you his charm?”
 
She tried to remember if she had seen Roric thumbing it, as he had so often, in the period between when they had been reunited outside Eirik’s castle and when Eirik and his men had slain him.
 
She could not remember.

Arane smiled slowly and sadly.
 
“This is not Roric’s.
 
But you have answered my question.
 
This in your hand is the twin of the charm that I sent with him, all the meager powers of voima that I dared give him.
 
For you see, Roric was my own son.”

Just when Karin thought she had become calm she found herself weeping wildly again.
 
She had not felt entirely sure of Hadros’s story, but this—
 
This she believed.

“Oh, Karin,” Arane said, stroking Karin’s hair as she lay with her face in the queen’s lap.
 
“It seems very long ago, but I too can remember how miserable and how wonderful it can be to be young, to feel intense love and great sorrow without the experience to deal well with either …”

“If he was your son,” Karin brought out, trying to overcome her tears, “why did you send him away?
 
And which man fathered him?”

“He was called No-man’s son, I understand,” said the queen slowly.
 
“And even if he had lived I would never have wanted him to know his father’s name.
 
He was
not
Hadros,
not
your father, only a man who may never even have known he had fathered a son but whom I loved very much …”

This, thought Karin miserably, was what Arane had suggested to her back when they had first met, that as long as a queen was very discreet she could enjoy an occasional man in her bed.
 
But she had also spoken of jealousies and rivalries—had Roric’s father been killed by some other would-be suitor of the queen, even before the baby was born?
 
Perhaps it was better not to know.

“The Witch told Roric he could never know his father’s name,” she said through her tears.
 
She had not mentioned the Witch before, but it did not matter.
 
“But it—she—also said that having the name, having the answer, would take away Roric’s goal of trying to live up to an image of a glorious father.”

“Well, Roric cannot know his father’s name now,” said the queen reasonably.
 
“And I had never intended to tell him.
 
The man I loved came to me in secret, and I have always honored his secrecy.
 
He gave me these two little charms before we parted for the last time, and I thought his son should have one, but no other information.”

Karin felt a sudden horrible suspicion.
 
“Roric’s father—” she said between tight lips.
 
“Was he perhaps King Eirik?”

Arane managed her tinkling little laugh.
 
“No, Karin, I can reassure you quite certainly on that point.
 
I knew Eirik, of course, from meetings of the All-Gemot over the years, and he was somewhat dashing in his youth in a rather coarse way.
 
But you should give Roric’s mother credit for better taste than that!

“King Hadros,” she went on, “in spite of an edge of uncertainty, has always assumed that Roric was his.
 
I did not wish to tell him otherwise, though of course that meant he could not know that Roric was born to a queen, not to a serving-maid.
 
My little deception assured that Roric would receive much the same training and advantages any son of one of the Fifty Kings might receive—though Hadros’s fatherly methods may be rougher than most!
 
If Roric is indeed dead, I would appreciate it, Karin, if you never told Hadros the truth yourself.”

“All right.
 
It doesn’t matter now anyway.”

“I hope you realize, Karin,” the queen continued, “that it is very hard to keep the reputation of a virgin queen if one is seen to suckle a babe!
 
People may have suspicions, but without evidence suspicions are nothing.
 
My household has always been very protective of me and very loyal, but there are limits to what even the most close-mouthed servants can keep hid.
 
And of course I did not want Roric to grow up the target for a dagger-thrust from any man who hoped to win me and father his own sons on me.”

“Did you think never to see him again when you sent him away?” Karin asked dully.

“If he had lived, I would have told him, sooner or later, that he was my son.
 
A little boy would be in too much danger from his relatives for me openly to declare him my heir, especially when he was a child born to a secret union, when I had never married the man before witnesses or with the consent of my kin.
 
Someone like that the Fifty Kings would be very slow to accept!
 
But a full-grown man, someone with the warrior skills of King Hadros, would have been different.
 
Even as No-man’s son, such a man could still be chosen by my kingdom’s Gemot as the next king—and accepted by the other kings—if I had no obvious other heir and swore that he was mine.

“But
your
child,” continued Arane with the ghost of a smile, “will be the grandchild of a king and of a sovereign queen, a fine baby boy or girl to rule Kardan’s kingdom after him and after you.
 
All you need now is a husband—the Fifty Kings will
still
be reluctant to recognize that the child of a woman who has never been wed may inherit royal rule.
 
Of course, as long as you are married before the babe is actually born, you should be all right …
 
I do not, from my own experiences, recommend out-fostering your child on someone else!
 
Now, you said you thought that Valmar may still be alive—”

Karin could not stand it, the plotting, the maneuvering, all ready to begin again and this time around her.
 
“No!” she cried, sitting up abruptly.
 
“Roric is scarcely dead!
 
I cannot start looking at once for a husband, planning whom to fool into thinking Roric’s child is his.
 
I would rather—”

She never had a chance to say what she would rather do.
 
There was a great roar outside the tent, not an animal sound but much deeper, a roar of sea and earth.

Karin and Arane scrambled out into the cold night air to see beneath a moonlit sky the Hot-River Mountains quivering as though shaken by an unimaginably enormous hand.
 
The ground beneath their feet began to tremble and sway.
 
As they clutched at each other the moonlight glinted on a giant wave racing up the salt river.
 
It swept across the pebbled beach where the warriors of the two kings were sleeping and spun around the longship that had been hauled up beside them.
 
Splashing and yelling, the men bobbed to the surface as the wave passed by.
 
The few horses they had with them began to scream, and the dogs barked wildly.

“The end has begun,” said Karin in a very small voice.

They were not far from the burial mound where Gizor and the others were laid, built well above the waterline.
 
Karin heard Hadros’s and Kardan’s voices shouting over the din, trying to find out how many men they still had and bellowing orders to secure the ship again.

But she paid no attention, for her eyes were riveted on the burial mound.
 
It moved, but not with the motion of earthquake.
 
One of the horses—Roric’s stallion, she thought—had broken loose and was striking at the mound with his hooves.
 
It shook as though something—or someone—was coming up beneath it.

The wave, having bounced off the cliffs at the eastern end of the salt river, came pouring back, lower now but sending the men and supplies anew into swirling confusion.
 
The stallion screamed again.
 
The men, snatching their equipment out of the water, scrambled for higher ground.
 
A number pulled at the ship’s mooring lines.
 
Both kings climbed to the top of the burial mound to shout orders.
 
They had not seen the shaking she had seen.

It came again.
 
A great clod of dirt flew from the side of the mound, then another.
 
The dogs went abruptly silent.
 
And someone, black with earth, stepped from within the mound.

That was when the moon went out.

3

Roric glared upward at the renegade king.
 
The sky above was still pale, though everything around them was losing its color as dark came on.

“You’re
definitely
more trouble than you’re worth,” said Eirik with a sneer of his scarred lip.
 
“If it hadn’t been for you, me and my men would still be living peacefully in what’s left of our kingdom, raiding and capturing those who didn’t know better than to come within a hundred miles.”
 
He paused for a second, muttered, “Though that life’s been getting pretty thin lately,” then glared at Roric again.
 
“First you show up with the princess, then it turns out that ship had come looking for you, you free the king’s son I was going to offer to the lords of death, and now between you and him I’ve lost half my men.”