Dreamwalker (30 page)

The king looked at her outstretched hand, then at her face. Beulah smiled at her father again, batting her eyelids in the coquettish manner she had seen some of the court ladies use on the young noblemen who came to Candlehall. It was as unnatural a mannerism to her as could be, yet it seemed to sway the king. Shuffling wheezily, he edged himself off the throne, taking her hand to steady himself. Seneschal Padraig was at his side in an instant, wringing his hands like a penitent.

‘Your Highness,’ the seneschal said. ‘Is this wise? In your state of health?’

‘I’ve been feeling much better since this morning,’ the king said, the faintest hint of the old commanding tone of his father edging into his voice. ‘And besides, what will all my gathered nobles think if their king has not the health to dance with his own daughter on her majority?’

‘At least allow me to ask the players for a slow tune,’ the Seneschal said.

‘By the Shepherd man, no,’ the king said, leaning heavily on Beulah now. As ever, his touch made her skin crawl, but she could feel the anger growing in him now, sense the strain on his heart as it pumped faster, reddening his face in a haze of tiny burst blood vessels.

‘This is a formal occasion,’ the king continued. ‘From this day on, Princess Beulah has a measure in the responsibility for the state. I will honour her with the Processional. She is my heir, after all.’

Beulah allowed herself to be led down to the dancefloor by her father, lending her strength to him so that he did not falter on the steps. Looking over her shoulder, she could see Padraig still standing beside the Obsidian Throne, wringing his hands helplessly. He had always been ambitious, growing his power base ever larger as the king slipped deeper into his drunken stupor, but he couldn’t bring himself to disobey his monarch when the time came. In a way Beulah was grateful to him. Without Padraig’s warnings and nursemaid concerns to egg him on, her father might never have agreed to dance. As it was, he had played into her hands perfectly.

They reached the floor, now surprisingly clear, as the music came to a halt. Those few who had been dancing still looked around nervously, unsure what to do now that they found their king in their midst. There was a moment of unease when the master of ceremonies announced the Processional. At least five other couples of high birth would be required for the dance, and yet all of a sudden no one wanted to join in. Finally Merrl, perhaps the last person Beulah would have expected, stepped onto the floor with a slight-looking young woman on his arm. Beulah eyed them suspiciously as they approached, unsure what to make of this potential rival. She was a head shorter than Beulah, her hair tied up in an intricate shape atop her head to make her seem taller, though it had the opposite effect.

‘Your Highness. May I present my sister, Anwyn,’ Merrl said, again making an extravagant bow. If he had overcome some of his earlier terror it had been transferred to his sister. She stared, goggle-eyed before remembering to curtsy. ‘We would be honoured to be witness for your Processional.’

‘What? Oh, yes. Of course,’ the king said. ‘It wouldn’t be much of a Processional if there was just the two of us.’

Other couples, emboldened by Merrl’s bravery, soon joined the party and in short order four sets had assembled. The musicians played the introduction, everyone bowed, and then the dance began.

It was an old dance, formal and precise. Traditionally it was danced by a ruling monarch in recognition of his chosen heir, and so danced only seldom. Beulah could remember the endless hours of tedious training she had undergone as a child, the seemingly random steps and counter-steps, bows and curtseys. She had always been better taking the lead than following and now she had to allow her father to guide her about the floor whilst trying to maintain her delicate contact with him.

Safe in the constraints of the dance, the assembled guests soon forgot the courtesies of rank. On the dancefloor they were equals. The Processional required that they each move from partner to partner within the set, always returning to the original as the music progressed. Each time Beulah was returned to her father, she renewed the contact, and each time she leached a little more of his life out of him. Never enough to make him stumble, but enough that he began to sweat, his bloodshot skin turning ever paler and greyer as he went. Still Beulah knew her father, he was too stubborn to stop the dance. He would carry on until the music ended or he dropped.

The Processional reached a slower part of its progress and Beulah once more linked arms with her father, stepping slowly up the dancefloor towards the great empty bulk of the Obsidian Throne. Her hand clasped his and through that touch she could feel his confusion, his fear.

‘You’ll not sit on it again,’ she said, leaning close to whisper in his ear.

Startled, the king missed his step, staggering to try and get back into the persistent rhythm of the music. Beulah could feel his heart racing, trying to pump sluggish blood through veins grown thick with decades of indolence. She reached out for it with a thought, slowing it until it matched the speed of the music.

‘I should thank you, really,’ she whispered. ‘You gave me to Melyn because you didn’t want to be reminded of mother. You sent us all away as if we were no more important to you than serfs. But I’ve learned so much from the Inquisitor, the power of the warrior priests is mine to wield.’

The tempo of the music increased as the dance moved towards its end. Beulah once more released her father, leaving him just enough strength to keep going as she twirled around the set. She felt a curious surge of excitement as the seconds went past, building to an almost uncontrollable glee. She wanted to laugh, realised as she came face to face with young Merrl that she was grinning like a mad woman. It didn’t take a genius to see that the boy was infatuated with her, nor that his sister looked at her with ill-concealed hostility. Had she not other plans for this evening, she might have risen to that challenge. Perhaps she would later on, if the opportunity presented itself. Merrl would be easy to seduce, easier to discard, but Anwyn was another matter.

The cycle of the music took her away from the pair, past other less memorable faces and finally returned her to her father. He looked extremely unwell, the sweat stringing his lank yellow-grey hair, his eyes red and bleary, his face ashen. He seemed to be having difficulty breathing and as Beulah once more took his hand she felt the trembling in his heart as it struggled to beat.

‘Not long now, father,’ she said, laughing. In her mind she took his heart in her hand, felt its warmth and the surge of blood that accompanied each pulse. The music swelled to the crescendo as they took the final spinning steps of the Processional and then, as the last chord rang out, all the dancers back in their original positions, all the spectators looking on with awe and regret, Beulah squeezed.

King Diseverin did not cry out. In the end, Beulah knew, he didn’t even feel any pain. He looked at her with a mixture of surprise and understanding on his face and as the last echoes of the music were soaked up by the massive hall, he crumpled to the floor.

A smattering of applause began, congratulating the band for their performance, the dancers for their skill. It quickly died away as Beulah dropped to her knees, letting a low wail escape from her lips. She clung to her father’s arm, feeling the last of his life ebb out of him, drinking the last of his being like the wine he had so enjoyed. Within moments others were kneeling beside her. She recognised Seneschal Padraig, bending towards the man who had been his king.

‘My lady,’ the old man said. ‘Please, let me near.’

Beulah clung to her father, making sure that his heart had stilled, that there was no chance of recovery.

‘Please, Princess Beulah,’ the Seneschal said again. ‘I must attend to the king.’

Beulah felt a familiar hand on her shoulder. Steady strength flowed from it into her, though she did not need the help.

‘Come, your Highness,’ Inquisitor Melyn said. ‘There’s nothing more you can do here. Leave this to Padraig.’

Beulah held onto her contact with her father for a few seconds longer, until she was absolutely sure that he was dead. There was no spark in the body at all, the connection she had made now nothing more than a touch on cooling, clammy skin. Slowly she let go, allowing herself to be lifted from the floor and led past silent revellers towards the stone steps that climbed to the Obsidian Throne. Behind her she could hear the increasingly desperate sounds of Seneschal Padraig trying to revive her father’s corpse. It really should have been a job for Archimandrite Cassters. The Order of the Ram were meant to be the healers, after all, but the old priest simply stood on the edge of the dance floor staring in disbelief.

‘Well played, princess,’ Melyn said as he saw her settled on the small chair beside the throne. ‘Now let us see how Padraig picks up the tune.’

Beulah watched and waited as the huddle of people around her father’s body grew. She noticed the other members of her dance set hovering nearby, anxiety writ large across their faces. Merrl still clung to his sister’s arm and Beulah wondered whether he would be a tender lover, or try to dominate her. She doubted he had any experience at all in that direction, but that could be an advantage.

The seneschal stood up, motioning everyone away from the body. His face was terrible, doom-laden as he walked away from the dance floor and climbed the steps to where she sat. When he was still several feet away from her, he fell to one knee, dropping his head in a defeated bow.

‘The king is dead,’ he said in a voice that was both quiet and carrying, seeming to echo around the silent hall like a whisper. ‘Long live the Queen!’

~~~~

Chapter Seventeen

Many have remarked on how dragons copy human ways, and one of the most notable is in the adoption of honorific titles. Thus an elder dragon might refer to himself as Sir Ystrad. It is only males who do this; females more often will append a descriptor onto their name, such as Angharad the Fair.

To the casual observer, this may seem amusing or fanciful, but to dragons it is anything but. To be addressed as Sir is to be acknowledge the head of your family, and to be accorded a description is to be recognised as a master of your chosen skill or of possessing the most perfect form of a certain attribute. Thus dragons, who are essentially egalitarian in nature, pay respect to others of their kind.

Dragon’s Tales by Fr Charmoise

Errol had little time to reflect on his strange encounter with Inquisitor Melyn in the weeks that passed. Confined once more to his vast empty dormitory and the endless, lightless vaults of the library archives, the whole episode began to take on the same dreamlike quality of most of his existence.

Andro kept him busy in a room whose walls were lined from ceiling to floor with racks containing rolled up parchments. Each of these had to be taken out, carefully unrolled and scanned to see what its contents were. He would make a note in a large leather-bound volume, assign the parchment a temporary reference number and return it to its place on the rack. The room was not large in comparison to some of the great spaces down in the depths of the monastery, but even so, Errol had made the mistake of estimating the number of parchments in the room at several thousand. On a good day he might manage a couple of hundred, if their subjects were not so dry as to be unintelligible, or so interesting as to absorb him for hours.

There did not seem to be any pattern to the parchments save that they were unbound and all about the same width when rolled. There were sets of accounts for the royal household dating back several centuries; minutes of meetings of the Inquisitors, Seneschals and Archimandrites of the three religious orders; ornately scribed deeds of title to obscure tracts of land; field reports of hunting parties. One series of ten parchments detailed an expedition carried out some five hundred years earlier in search of the fabled Cenobus, seat of Magog, Son of the Summer Moon. From what Errol could piece together, this great beast of a dragon had lived thousands of years earlier still, and was the scourge of men until brave King Diseverin, the first King Diseverin, had slain him in an epic battle that had lasted days and shaken the earth. Fable had long held that the dragon had lived in a great castle in the depths of the forest of the Ffrydd, where great treasures were hoarded, lying undiscovered to this day.

Something about the tale struck a chord with Errol. The theme was familiar, as if he had heard it before but told differently. The account given in the parchments didn’t seem right but he couldn’t pin it down; the details were slippery in his mind. Whatever the truth of the matter, the expedition had been an unmitigated disaster. Led by Prince Lonk, heir to the Obsidian Throne, it had been one misadventure after another, culminating in the party splitting into two, the prince heading on into the deep forest with most of the dwindling supplies and two warrior priests as guardians, leaving the rest to make their way back to Emmass Fawr. The writer of the report, one Father Keoldale, had been the only survivor of that band, discovered near death by a roving patrol as he tried to navigate the treacherous ridges of the Rim Mountains. Of Prince Lonk and his guards there had never been any sign.

Errol knew from his history lessons that the disappearance of the only direct heir to the throne had plunged the twin kingdoms and the House of Balwen into the terrible events of the Brumal War. Had it not been for the bravery of Prince, later King Torwen the twin kingdoms might still be at war, or worse under the control of the Llanwennogs. At least that was how the story had been told to him before. Now he could read the account of how that dark time had begun, first hand, from the quill of the only man to survive the expedition.