Ravens Shadow 02 - Tower Lord (42 page)

“I
will not wear that.”

The Lady Veliss smiled, holding the pale blue dress up as Reva backed away. “But it complements your hair so,” she said. “At least try it on.”

“Where are my own clothes?” Reva demanded.

“Burned, I hope. Such rags are hardly fit for the niece of the Fief Lord.”

“Then leave me as I am.” She wore a plain cotton shift left by the maid who had brought breakfast. Her uncle’s guards had brought her to this room the night before, the manor in an uproar as Veliss commanded every room and closet searched for more intruders. Reva had little awareness of the commotion, dazed by a welter of despair and grief that left her drained, capable only of stumbling along as she was bade, deaf to any question.
Kill her,
the priest had said.
Kill her . . .

The room held a large bed onto which she had collapsed almost immediately, curling up to hug her knees, hating the tears flowing down her face.
Kill her . . .
The sleep that claimed her had been dreamless and absolute. When she awoke she was naked beneath the bedclothes and a maid was placing a breakfast tray on the dressing table as a guard stood by the door. She had never imagined she would be so senseless as to allow herself to be undressed without waking.

Veliss’s eyes tracked over her with unabashed admiration. “I should love to. But I think your uncle would appreciate a tad more modesty.” She tossed the dress onto the bed and continued to stare at Reva, a faint smile curling her full lips.

“You are unseemly,” Reva muttered, reaching for the dress.

Veliss laughed a little, turning to the door. “A guard will escort you down when you’re ready.”

◆ ◆ ◆

Her uncle was in his garden, seated at a small table amidst the topiary in company with a bottle of wine, already three-quarters empty although Reva judged the hour as somewhere past the ninth bell. Lying next to the bottle was the sword she had stolen the night before. The Lady Veliss stood nearby, reading from a scroll.

“My brave niece!” The Fief Lord’s smile was broad and warm as he rose to greet her. She allowed herself to be embraced, grimacing a little at the stain of wine on his breath as he pressed a kiss to her cheek.

“How did you know my name?” she asked as he drew back.

“Ah, so your grandparents named you for her.” He returned to the table, gesturing at the empty chair. “I’m glad.”

“Grandparents?” she asked, staying on her feet, casting her gaze around the gardens.
So many guards.

“Yes.” He seemed puzzled. “They raised you, did they not?”

At that moment Reva abandoned all thought of escape. She went to the empty chair and sat down. “My grandparents are dead,” she said. “My mother is dead. My father . . .” She fell to silence for a moment. He needed little education on her father. “Why didn’t you let them kill me?”

He laughed and poured more wine into his glass. “What kind of uncle would that make me?”

“You knew my mother?”

“Indeed I did. Not so well as your father, obviously. But I remember her very well.” His reddened eyes roamed her face. “Such a very pretty thing. So lively too. Little wonder Hentes fell for her so. When I saw you I thought her ghost had come to save me. You are her very image, but for your eyes. They are all Hentes.”

Fell for her?
The priest had left her no illusions about her parents’ relationship.
Your mother was a whore,
he had told her simply.
One of many to tempt the Trueblade before the Father graced him with His word. Now you have the chance to redeem her sin, give meaning to your misbegotten life.

“If only she hadn’t been a maid, they might have married,” her uncle continued. “Your grandfather’s rage was a thing to see when it transpired you were on the way. There had been other girls over the years, of course, a smattering of bastards, but none he wanted to keep. Reva was packed off back to her parents’ farm with a suitably large purse, and Hentes sent to the Nilsaelin border to deal with a particularly nasty band of outlaws. When word reached him of your mother’s death in childbirth, I wondered if it wasn’t his sorrow that made him so reckless. The old Hentes would never have charged a bowman standing thirty feet away.”

“‘Though a sinner, the man who would become the Trueblade never shirked his duty,’” she quoted. “‘He was wounded in service to the people, taken by the arrow of a lawless man. For days he lay in pain, senseless to the world, until the Father’s word woke him to a new purpose.’”

“You know the Eleventh Book then?”

“Every word.”
Beaten into me, until I knew it better than he did.

“That man last night,” the Fief Lord said. “You knew him, didn’t you?”

She nodded, finding herself unable to speak of the priest.

“Then you know his name,” Veliss said, looking up from her scroll. “His companion, the one you maimed, seems reluctant to tell us.”

“It’s unlikely he knows it. The Sons rarely use their true names, even to each other.”

“The Sons.” Her uncle sighed, sipping more wine. “Of course. Who else? Always the bloody Sons.”

“Except,” Veliss observed, regarding Reva with the same brazen interest she had shown in the bedroom. “Now we have a daughter in our hands.”

“A niece,” the Fief Lord said in a flat tone. “
My
niece, counsellor.”

“Do not mistake me, my lord. After all, like you, I owe this
interesting
young woman my life. I wish nothing more than to please her . . .”

“The maimed prisoner,” he interrupted. “Did he have anything else of interest to impart?”

“It’s all here.” She tossed the scroll onto the table. “Usual fanatical nonsense. Reclaiming the fief for the World Father, ending the Heretic Dominion. It took some time before he became cooperative.”

Lord Mustor picked up the scroll, squinting as he read. “The maid?” he asked. “That’s how they got in.”

“It seems she was sympathetic, didn’t expect her reward to be a slit throat. I must be more rigorous in selecting future employees. I’m having her room searched now, though I doubt we’ll find anything.” She turned again to Reva, her expression harder now. “The name,” she said.

“I never knew it,” she replied. “Priests do not share the names given them by the Father.”

Veliss exchanged a glance with Mustor, a faint look of triumph on her face. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he said in a warning tone.

“Perhaps not yet.” Veliss moved back from the table with a brisk flex of her wrists. “Though it does give me another avenue to explore with our prisoner. If you’ll excuse me, my lord.” She bowed to Reva. “My lady.” She began to walk away then paused at Reva’s side, resting a hand on her shoulder. “Oh, I’ve arranged for a gift for you. A token of my esteem you might say. It’ll be here presently.” A final wink and she was off, striding along the gravel path back to the manse, full of purpose.

“Is she torturing him?” Reva asked.

“Nothing so vulgar,” he replied. “At least not until it becomes necessary. Lady Veliss is skilled in the concoction of certain herbal mixtures that can have a loosening effect on the tongue, and also the mind, which makes the questioning fairly tricky. My counsellor’s manner can be somewhat . . . unsubtle, at times. But she is loyal to this fief, and to me. Have no doubt.”

“I don’t like the way she looks at me.”

Lord Mustor laughed as he poured the remaining wine into his glass. “Take it as a compliment. She’s very choosy.”

Reva found this was a topic she didn’t wish to explore further and reached out to touch her fingers to the sword’s hilt. “You saved it,” she said. “Kept it. I should thank you for that.”

He frowned in puzzlement. “Your great-grandfather’s sword has been hanging on the practice-room wall for as long as I can remember. I was curious as to why you should go to such lengths to steal it.”

“Great-grandfather?” She groaned, withdrawing her hand. “I thought . . .”
I have come so far, for nothing.

“You thought this belonged to Hentes?” His eyebrows rose in understanding. “The sword of the Trueblade. A great and holy relic indeed. I wish I had it.”

“You do not?”

“Lost in the High Keep when he died. Vanished by the time it occurred to me to retrieve it. I would have asked Al Sorna to force those dungeon rats in his regiment to give it up, but my stock wasn’t particularly high at the time.”

“All a waste then,” she said, voice soft. “I have travelled so many miles, lying, hurting and killing along the way. All in search of something that can’t be found.”

“The priest. He set you on this path?”

“He sent me to die. I see it now. Al Sorna was right. I was to be the new martyr, the rallying cry for the reborn Sons of the Trueblade. That’s what the priest made me, ever since I was old enough to walk, he raised me to be a corpse.”

“Do you remember nothing before, nothing of your grandparents?”

“There are . . . images of other people, faces I knew before his. I think they were kind. But they always seemed a dream. And he was so very real, his every word the Father’s truth. Except he was a liar. What does that mean, Uncle? What of the Father’s love now?” Tears were coming again and she was obliged to use the lace cuffs of her ridiculous dress to wipe them away.

Her uncle drained his glass and waved it at a servant who trotted off to fetch another bottle. “Allow me to impart a secret, my wonderful niece.” He leaned closer, voice dropping to a whisper. “I may cultivate the image of a godless sinner, but I have never doubted that the Father’s gaze rests upon me. I feel it, every day, a great and terrible weight . . . of disappointment.”

She found she couldn’t contain the laugh, mirth and tears mixing on her face.

“But there’s more,” he went on. “Who but the Father could bring me such a great gift? A saviour and a niece on the very night assassins come to kill me. Tell me you do not see His hand in this, and I’ll not believe you.”

He turned at the sound of the main gate opening. “Ah, it seems my counsellor’s gift has arrived.”

Reva rose in alarm at the sight of the approaching group, four guards, pushing a broad-shouldered youth ahead of them. She ran forward as they came to a halt, Arken sporting a blue-black bruise under his eye. “What have you done to him?”

“Apologies, my lord,” the guard sergeant said as Mustor sauntered over. “The boy saw us coming and jumped from the inn window. Wouldn’t listen to reason.”

Reva touched a hand to Arken’s bruise, wincing. “I told you not to wait.”

He gave a sheepish grimace. “Didn’t want to go to the Reaches on my own.”

The Fief Lord coughed in expectation. “It seems,” Reva said, “we’ll be staying with my uncle after all.”

◆ ◆ ◆

They gave her a maid, a quiet woman with mercifully few questions, but a keenness to her gaze making Reva suspect her principal duty consisted of providing reports to Lady Veliss. She was given more dresses and a suite of rooms on the floor below those her uncle shared with his counsellor. She wondered if there was any significance to the fact that Arken was housed in a separate wing.

“He’s just my friend,” she had insisted in answer to the Fief Lord’s query over breakfast the next day.

“An Asraelin friend,” he pointed out.

“Just like Lady Veliss,” she returned.

“Which gives me a wealth of experience in fending off the jibes of those in this fief who still hunger for independence. If you are to be my acknowledged niece, a certain . . . discretion will be required.”

She chose to ignore the obvious irony of being lectured on discretion by so famous a whore chaser. “Acknowledged niece?”

“Yes. Wouldn’t you like that?”

“I . . . don’t know.” In fact she had little notion of what course to follow next. The priest was a lie, the sword a myth, and the Father’s love . . . “I thought I might journey to the Northern Reaches. I have friends there.”

“Al Sorna, you mean.” There was a sourness to his voice that told her she had finally found someone not in awe of her former tutor. “I don’t think I like the notion of my niece in proximity to that man. Trouble finds him with far too much regularity.”

“So I am your prisoner, now? Kept here to do your bidding.”

“You are free to go where you wish. But don’t you want to stay a while with your lonely old uncle?”

Reva was puzzling over an answer when the Lady Veliss arrived to join them. Breakfast was usually eaten in the large dining hall with the portraits on the walls. Veliss and the Fief Lord had a curious habit of sitting at opposite ends of the long table, obliging them to converse in shouts.

“Any more intelligence to impart, counsellor?” Mustor called to her as she sat down to a plate of bacon, eggs and mushrooms.

“Sadly our prisoner contrived to expire under questioning,” she shouted back, shaking out her napkin. “Too much drum-weed in the mix. All I managed to extract were a few ramblings about some great and powerful ally, able to match the Darkness that perpetuates the Heretic Dominion.” She shook her head. “These fanatics grow ever more deluded.” She cast a critical gaze over Reva. “You’ll need to change, love. Something more formal, and pleasing. It’s the Father’s Day, and we have a service to attend.”