Lord of Snow and Shadows (15 page)

“I don’t want that kind of power!” Gavril cried.

“Then you are as much of a fool as your father.” For a single moment, all pretense melted away, and he glimpsed an unmistakable glint of contempt in her languorous green gaze. “Volkh could have conquered Tielen, Khitari, Muscobar; he could have crushed the Grand Duke and ridden into Mirom in triumph. But what did he do? He denied his true nature, he denied his powers. And that was his weakness. The fatal weakness that led to his downfall.”

“But he was a monster.”

“Power can be quite an aphrodisiac, Gavril.”

Gavril stared at Lilias, at a loss for words. If he was not mistaken, his father’s mistress was making him some kind of sexual overture. There was nothing more to be gained from this meeting. If he had hoped to forge some kind of truce between them, he had failed.

“More tea, madame?” Dysis appeared in the doorway.

“Did I ask for more tea? I think not!” Lilias snapped.

Gavril, grateful for the distraction, curtly thanked Lilias for her hospitality and withdrew.

“You must excuse my mistress, my lord,” Dysis whispered as she opened the outer door for him. “These last days of pregnancy have made her very irritable. She says things she would not normally dream of saying. . . .”

Outside, a servant was lighting oil lamps in the shadowed passageway. Autumn nights came fast in Azhkendir.

A stormwind had begun to whine outside the kastel, rattling shutters and gusting spatters of sleet against the windowpanes. Gavril stopped at a narrow window and gazed out into the rapidly darkening night, his breath clouding the cold glass.

A few streaks of bloodred light still gashed the night sky, casting a lurid glow across the distant ridge of jagged mountain peaks. The prospect chilled his spirit.

“There’s a kind of darkness about you . . .”

Was it true? Was it so obvious? Was it already too late to stop it happening?

Back in his chamber, he poured water from the jug into the bowl and splashed his face. As he plunged his hands into the clear water, the darkness of his fingernails caught his eye. The stains of blue were still there, dark as bruising.

He thrust his hands into the water again, frantically scrubbing at his nails with a sliver of soap. When he raised his fingers from the bowl, he saw that all his efforts had been to no avail: each fingernail was still as blue as ground cobalt.

With a cry of frustration, he took up the empty water jug and brought it crashing down on the floor. Fragments of pottery and drops of water spattered the dressing room.

Shaking with rage, he stood staring down at the shattered jug. What was happening to him?

Gavril leaned his burning forehead against the cold, rough stone of the wall, trying to conjure up memories of Astasia Orlova, her voice, the scent of her hair. . . .

Memories of a time when he had never heard of Azhkendir.

“Astasia,” he whispered.

By the light of a little lantern, he sketched swiftly, several times stopping to dash down his pen and crush the paper in his hand and start again.

But at last the obsessive penstrokes began to shape a portrait that pleased him: the outline of her face; her sweet, dark eyes with their silky lashes; her mouth, gravely smiling—then curving upward with spontaneous pleasure when she spoke of dancing. . . .

If Kazimir had gone back to Mirom, then Mirom was the place he must go.

He piled on extra layers of clothes against the bitter cold and lay down on the bed to wait for midnight.

“Gavril . . .”

The air in the bedchamber had turned freezingly cold. Gavril blinked in the darkness, knowing he was no longer alone.

“You still do not understand, my son.”

The stern voice shivered through his mind. The tall spirit-wraith materialized at his bedside, a shadow towering over him, limned in silver moonlight.

“Watch—and learn.”

And then, as if a dark gauze has been peeled away from his vision, Gavril sees he is in the hall of the East Wing. The oriel window is whole; vast gold-framed paintings hang on the walls.

Smoke begins to drift into the hall below.

Men are shouting, women screaming.

“They’re in! They’ve broken in!”

“Where’s Volkh? Get him to safety! For God’s sake get him out of here!”

Two women come running into the hall. One carries a little child in her arms.

“Volkh! Where are you?” cries the other. “Dear God—where is he? Have they found him?” Her voice breaks with anguish.

“Drakhys, you must hide.”

The little child starts to cry. The woman clutches him closer to her.

“Please come with me, Drakhys. Come now.”

“I can’t go without Volkh. I must know he is safe.”

The glass in the oriel window shatters. Men clamber in, men with torches and bloodstained sabers. In a blizzard of wings, great white owls swoop into the hall, screeching and shrieking.

“Go, my lady!” begs the woman with the child.

Men of the
druzhina
hurry in, wielding sabers and axes. Metal blades clang and clash. The great owls come scything down on them, tearing at their heads and shoulders with hooked claws and beaks.

Smoke billows into the hall. The invaders have set torches to the tapestries, and the glow of flames reddens the smoky air.

The
druzhina
are falling back now, outnumbered. One warrior starts to scream, a horrible, shrill sound, as a snow owl claws his face, beak pecking at his eyes till the blood streams down like crimson tears.

“Make it stop, Father,” Gavril pleads. “I’ve seen enough.”

“No, not enough, not nearly enough.”
The harsh voice is suddenly choked with emotion.

A man stands in the broken frame of the great window, watching as, one by one, the
druzhina
fall. His hair glints in the torchlight, burnished dark gold. With a curling whistle, he raises his arm and the owls fly to him, perching on his wrist, his shoulders. Now their white feathers are bloodied and tattered, but their great golden eyes gleam like burning stars through the smoke.

Gavril cannot take his eyes off the man. There is a radiance about him, an unnatural golden glimmer. When he moves forward, Gavril sees that his eyes gleam with the same blank, gold light as the owls’. He moves like a man possessed.

“Where is your son, Drakhys?” he asks. His voice echoes with the cold, cruel ring of metal. With a shock, Gavril sees that he is no scarred warlord but young, scarcely older than himself. “Give him to me and I will spare your household.”

The Drakhys, who has stood immobile with shock, suddenly bends down and seizes a pike from the hands of one of her dying
druzhina.

“Give my son to you, Stavyor Arkhel?” Her words burn with scorn. “I would rather kill him myself.”

From elsewhere in the kastel come distant screams and the crackle of flames.

“It is not your fault you have borne a monster, Drakhys. But monsters must be destroyed. I cannot allow your boy to grow to manhood. He must die.”

“Do what you want with me,” the Drakhys flings back, “but you will never make me betray my son.”

“So be it. Kill them. Kill them all.”

And Stavyor Arkhel turns away with a shrug.

Smoke billows up, clouding Gavril’s sight. By the flamelight he sees the Drakhys retreating, trying to defend herself and her companion from the advancing Arkhel warriors, fiercely jabbing and swinging the pike like a scythe. But they are outnumbered. And when the Arkhels seize the child from the mother, when she begins to scream, he cannot look anymore and, tears streaming down his cheeks, hides his face in his hands.

Then comes the silence.

Reluctantly, Gavril forces himself to look, peering between his fingers.

The two women lie sprawled on the tiles below, the child beside them. A little boy, Gavril sees now, with barley-fair hair. Daylight illuminates a scene of carnage: cinders and smoke choke the air, bodies lie stiffening in their own blood . . .

“No more,” he says again, his voice breaking. “Please, Father.”

“Watch,”
comes back the inexorable reply.

A man hurries into the hall below, stumbling in his haste, a young soldier, one of the
druzhina
, with barley-fair hair. When he sees the women and the child, he drops to his knees. He picks up the child in his arms, cradling it, hugging it to his breast, weeping, crying. But although Gavril can see his mouth working, shouting out words of grief and fury, he can no longer hear a sound. The ghost images begin to waver, to evaporate like moorland mist. When Gavril blinks his own tears away, he sees nothing below but darkness and the faint, fast-fading traces of moonlight.

“Who were they?” he asks aloud, his voice still unsteady, although he has already guessed the half of it.

Beside him he can still sense the stern presence of his father’s spirit-wraith, a glimmering shadow.

“Marya Nagarian, my mother. And her companion Zabava Torzianin.”

“Torzianin? But isn’t that Kostya’s name?”

“Zabava was his wife. The boy was little Kostya, Kostyusha, his only son. Now do you understand?”

Gavril nods miserably. “And you?”

“I ran back from the safety of the passageway to call to my mother, to beg her to hurry. But I was too late.”

The bitterness in his father’s voice makes his heart ache.

“They murdered her, Gavril. The Arkhels murdered my mother.”

“No more, Father.”

“You know Jaromir Arkhel is alive. Seek him out. Kill him. Before he kills you.”

“Enough!”
Gavril cries, his voice echoing, raw in his own ears. “No more Seeings. Let me be. Let me be!”

After a while he raised his head. He was alone. It was well past midnight. The only sounds still audible in Kastel Drakhaon now were the whine of the wind from the moors and the distant, monotonous tread of the sentries on night watch.

If he was to get away before the kastel woke to a new dawn, he must hurry. Taking a lantern, he raised the hunting tapestry and opened the secret door.

Darkness entombed him, smelling of dust and mold. He faltered a moment. And then, by his lantern candle, he saw the traces of his and Kiukiu’s footprints in the dust on the floor of the secret passageway.

A rush of chill air hit him as he entered the cavernous hallway of the East Wing. A faint trace of moonlight, pale as phosphorus, outlined the great window, shining through the broken panes onto the tiled floor beneath.

The light from his lantern illuminated traces in the dust below. Footprints . . . and stains. A telltale little trail of brown spots leading away into the gloom. Old bloodstains?

Lantern held low to illuminate the tiles, he began to follow the trail of blood.

Beneath the stairs there were other doorways, boarded up, gray with dust-clogged cobwebs. One door alone was slightly ajar. Gavril gave it a little push; his hand came away powdered with grime, but the door creaked inward.

The passageway beyond was blind, with no windows or vents to give light or fresh air.

If the ceiling caves in, I shall be crushed . . . and no one will reach me in time to pull me out.

He was beginning to sweat; the palms of his hands were damp and clammy. The lantern candle was burning dangerously low, the wick puddled in a pool of hot wax.

And then by the failing candlelight he saw an iron ladder.

Freedom.

Craning his neck, he saw a trapdoor above him. Setting the lantern down on the earthen floor, he climbed up the ladder and pushed the heavy trapdoor with both hands until it began to open.

Fresh night air flooded into the stale atmosphere of the tunnel. Gavril pushed back the door further until he could look out.

Two golden eyes blazed into his and he almost fell back down into the tunnel.

A low, curling hoot greeted him.

“Snowcloud?” he whispered, grasping the rim of the trapdoor to support himself. By the waning moonlight he saw that he was in the Elysia Summerhouse.

He had struggled for so long through the clammy, claustrophobic darkness of the tunnel that he was certain he would emerge on the other side of the kastel walls.

Snowcloud gave another soft, hooting cry and began to move jerkily across the boards toward him.

Gavril put out one hand to stroke the owl’s soft white plumage, and then hesitated.

Snow owls, Arkhel’s Owls. A man with golden glimmering eyes, cruel and
unseeing . . .

“But you’re just a little one, Snowcloud, you haven’t been trained to maim and kill.”

Only now did he recall the full horror of the Arkhel raid on the kastel.

The little child lying so still, the blood trickling through his fair hair. Kostyushka. Kostya’s only son.

The waste and the pity of it overwhelmed him. He put his head in his hands and wept.

A while later, maybe a long while, he raised his head and saw that the night sky was slowly lightening along the eastern rim. In the tunnel below, his candle guttered a thin trail of smoke and went out.

He must find a way to end his father’s torment, to stop him reliving the horrors that had scarred his life—and now threatened to scar his own.

Exorcism. Surely there must be some holy ritual that would bring peace to a troubled spirit?

Abstractedly he ran his fingertips over Snowcloud’s ghost-white plumage. After a while, to his surprise, the owl suddenly hopped onto his wrist, balancing there as if it had been born to it. The thin talons bit like wire through his jacket cuff into his skin . . . but the wonder of holding the wild creature, of sensing its trust in him, made the discomfort easy to ignore.

There seemed a peculiar irony in the situation: the heir to the Clan Drakhaon adopted by one of Arkhel’s Owls.

“You and I, Snowcloud,” he whispered, “if we’re to survive, we have to find a way to escape from Kastel Drakhaon.”

Dawn mists were already rising from the ruins of the neglected gardens, tinged with the musty smell of mold and fungi. Rose briars, red with late rosehips, choked the crumbling stone arches and arbors, their thorns tearing at Gavril’s clothes as he made his way down the overgrown path toward the stables.