The Bitterbynde Trilogy (99 page)

Caitri turned her head, emerging from the haze of her musing. She had been scandalizing at the amount of world that had heretofore been denied her, imprisoned as she had been in Isse Tower.

‘Is my lady to be Queen?' She was clearly thunderstruck.

Viviana pranced to the window, grasped the little girl, and whirled her in another polka.

‘Yes! Love is the season of the year! What is more, Caitri, when Dain Pennyrigg lifted me from his eotaur just now, he called me his little canary and kissed me.
Kiel varletto
! And he only a stablehand! Oh, but it was
taraiz
delicious. His kiss thrilled me like lightning!'

Rohain nodded. ‘Passion's current. In both senses of the phrase.'

‘Skyhorse travel is eminently more pleasurable than Windship travel,' pronounced Viviana. ‘Oh, and Master Pennyrigg found this in his saddlebags.' Rummaging in her pocket, she produced the crimson vial of Dragon's Blood.

Rohain clapped her hands. ‘Happy day! It is returned to me! Was it companioned by anything else? An aulmoniere perhaps?'

‘Why yes, m'lady. Here it is, but it is now putrid with a stink of goats, and I thought to cast it away. I shall have it cleansed for you.'

Her mistress took the dirty purse and felt around inside it. ‘Curses! 'Tis empty! Was there naught else?'

‘No, m'lady, there was nothing else which Master Pennyrigg himself did not pack. Only an
ensofell
of smelly hair, tied with string—it comes from a dog or a goat methinks—and the bedraggled feather of some fowl. Shall I throw them away?'

‘No, give the feather to me. It is a powerful talisman.'

Rohain tucked the feather inside a tapestry aulmoniere, fastened with buttons of jet. It seemed that Pod was at least capable of thanks for his rescue from Thorn's wrath. However, his return of the vial did not hint at a reversal of his dismal prediction. After all, he was supposed to be a prophet, not a maker of curses.

‘Come now, my two birds,' said Rohain, absently retying a seditious lace on Caitri's gown of forget-me-not blue. ‘I have been from
his
side for too long. It is fully an hour since we arrived from the Stormrider Tower. That is more than enough time to wash away the stains of travel and recostume ourselves.'

‘Look at us!' prattled Viviana, ever conscious of appearances. ‘My lady dark-haired in crimson, I fair in daffodil, and cinnamon Caitri in a sky-coloured gown. What a motley bouquet!'

‘Yet some among us do not
smell
as a bouquet should,' said her mistress, holding a perfumed pomander to her nose to block out the last odorous traces of siedo-pod oil wafting from Viviana's hair. ‘Hasten!'

A rapping at the door announced the Master of the King's Household, a gray-haired gentleman of middle age. ‘His Majesty sends greetings, my lady,' he said, bending forward from the waist, ‘and regrets to inform you that he has been called away on a matter of uncommon import.'

‘So soon?' murmured Rohain. ‘We have only just arrived!'

‘These are fickle times,' said the gentleman. ‘Even the best-laid plans may go astray.'

‘I thank you, sir, for your advice.'

The palace seemed suddenly devoid of substance and character during Thorn's unexpected absence. Rohain grasped the opportunity to visit Sianadh in the dungeons.

‘You are to be set free,' she told him.

He would not believe her. ‘'Tis kind of you to try to cheer me,' he said in a morose mood, ‘but these hard-hearted
skeerdas
would not free their own grandmother if she was in leg-irons.'

‘I tell you, I have heard the King-Emperor say so!'

‘Ye must have been dreaming,' he said mournfully. ‘Ach! I'd give me right arm for a drop o' the pure stuff.'

Thorn returned two days later. He sent a message to Rohain asking her to join him in the Throne Room. Swiftly she made her way through the long galleries and passageways, eager for the reunion.

The columns of the Throne Room aspired to a forty-foot ceiling. This huge space was lit by metallic lusters pendant on thirty-foot chains, and flambeaux on brass pedestals. Twin thrones beneath their dagged and gilded canopy stood atop the grand dais. They were reached by twelve broad stairs.

Around the walls, the history of the world reenacted itself perpetually on adjoining tapestries that reached to a height of twenty feet and represented years of painstaking stitchery. Above them, every inch of the plasterwork crawled with painted murals—not scenes, but geometric designs, stylized flowers, vegetables, flora and fauna, and fantastic gold-leaf scrollwork that did not stop at the ceiling merely because that was too high to be easily viewed, but surged across it in a prolific efflorescence with the vigor of weeds.

By comparison to this busy overabundance the polished floor seemed austere, parquetried as it was with wood every shade of brown between palest blond and burnt umber. These coloured woods formed the heraldic device of the House of D'Armancourt in repeated tiles six feet square. The hall was so vast that to enter the doors was to dwindle immediately to the proportions of a mouse among cornstalks.

Rohain entered, accompanied by her small entourage and a froth of footmen and alert courtiers who had entangled themselves in her wake as she sailed through the corridors. Like every chamber in the palace, currently the Throne Room was arrayed with a flotsam of courtiers and servants. One of the former—a familiar, foppish figure—bowed low before her.

‘My Lady Rohain, His Majesty yet walks in the gardens with the Attriod but will shortly join us here in the Throne Room.'

‘Please show me the way to the gardens, Lord Jasper.'

The courtier bowed again, but before he could fulfil her request a footman, whose wig resembled a white rabbit, dropped to his knee. He elevated a silver salver from which Lord Jasper plucked a parchment. The nobleman's brow furrowed as he squinted at the writing of some palace scribe.

‘Er—a gentleman begs audience with Your Ladyship. It appears His Majesty sent for him. An Ertishman with an unpronounceable name.'

‘Send him in,' said Rohain.

Uproar and a torrent of Ertish curses emanated from outside the Throne Room, reaffirming Sianadh's contempt for formalities. The doors crashed apart and he burst through like a boulder from a mangonel. Catching sight of Rohain, he stood blinking as though dazed. Two footmen who had been shed from his brawny arms stood helplessly by.

‘There ye are,
chehrna
,' said the Ertishman meekly, the bear now a lamb. ‘The
skeerdas
would not let me through.'

‘Mo gaidair,'
said Rohain warmly. She proffered a hand. He clasped it with the utmost delicacy and a bewildered look. Nothing else being offered in the way of courtesy, she drew it back with an appreciative sigh.
‘Mo gaidair
, your lack of etiquette is a refreshing draught.'

‘Chehrna
, in one breath I am thinking it might be me last, the next they're turning the key in me cell-door and I am a free man. How is this? What have ye done?'

‘Lord Jasper, is there some minor chamber where I can converse in private with my friend? Somewhere less cavernous and popular?'

Lord Jasper's eyebrows shot up to meet his hairline. ‘But of course, m'lady,' he said, trying to conceal his disapproval by dabbing his brow with a kerchief of embroidered lawn. ‘Methinks the Hall of Audience is unoccupied for the nonce. Allow me to conduct you there.' Calling for footmen to bring lighted tapers, he indicated the Hall's direction with a courtly flourish and a neatly pointed toe.

In a corner of the Hall of Audience, Viviana and Caitri played Cloth-Scissors-Rock. Despite the fact that the chamber was virtually deserted, one hundred and sixty candles blazed in gold candlesticks, like banks of radiant flowers. Rohain and Sianadh conversed in another corner, she imparting an outline of all that had occurred at Isse Tower. As she spoke, he grew progressively more restive, jubilant at what he was hearing.

‘So you see, I did not find what I sought,' she concluded, ‘but I found instead something far dearer to my heart.'

‘Dear to anyone's heart, the riches of royalty!' he crowed.

‘You mistake my meaning. I have no ambition,
mo gaidair
. I did not seek this. I have never desired anything that is theirs—wealth or pomp. Perhaps I have desired respect and ease, who has not? Yet I had hope for an ease that does not live by battening on the toil of others, and a respect that grows from genuine friendship, not social status. I do not need so many jewels, so many costly possessions. All this obsequiousness and etiquette is foreign to me. I suppose I shall get used to it for
his
sake and I doubt not that in time I shall have forgotten that it could be otherwise, and it shall all be enjoyable—for, mistake me not, I am not ungrateful. I entered the world beyond the Tower looking for three things: a face, a voice, a past. In the searching I found the first two, discovered a fourth desire, and lost the third. Now my past matters no longer. The present is all I could desire.'

She fell silent. It occurred to her that now, at last, she was at rest, if not at peace—not seeking anymore. Yet even as she surveyed the luxury surrounding her in the Hall of Audience with its one hundred and sixty lighted candles and three times as many waiting to be lit, a musty wind came funneling out of a past she had forgotten that she had forgotten. Troubled by Pod's words, by a couple of abandoned loam-worms, the lingering breath of forest mold, and withered foliage sprinkled like scraps of torn manuscript in the ruined bedchamber, she shuddered and shrank from remembering. History was too dark; far too dark.

‘As my first edict,' she said briskly, ‘I shall outlaw the beating of servants throughout Erith.'

‘Very right-minded of ye,
chehrna,'
replied Sianadh, ‘but ye shall start a rebellion with that kind of thinking.'

‘My strength shall be used to shield the vulnerable. All
I
need,' she concluded, ‘all I need is air to sustain me, and the one I love.'

‘And drink,' rejoined Sianadh prosaically, jumping up, ‘and vittles. And him to be good enough for ye.'

Unable to restrain his glee, he jumped in the air and danced, as energetically as Rohain had danced with Viviana not long before. To the disgust of the stone-faced footmen and the door-sentries who for years had practiced outfreezing statues, the wild red-haired man performed an Ertish jig.

‘Free!' he trumpeted. ‘Free, and pardoned, and in favour with the Queen Apparent! I could kiss ye,
chehrna
, I could kiss ye!'

A wintry gust, clean and sharp, howled through the chamber. It billowed the wall-hangings and blew out seventy-five candles.

Several Dainnan knights in chain mail had entered the chamber and positioned themselves on either side of the door. Sianadh seized up in midpose. Rohain's maids jumped to their feet and snapped to attention, and even the guards ossified further.

Thorn stood in the open doorway, a score of lords at his back.

In Dainnan attire, straight as a sword he stood, and as bright. His hair and
dusken
cloak lifted, like shadowy vanes, in the breath of Winter that had entered with him. That cool current blew across the carpets a scatter of leaves from the gardens, leaves that chased each other and skipped like pagan dancers across the floor's rich patterning. Rohain's heart leapt painfully against her ribs, a bird battering itself against its cage.
His beauty is perilous. I could die merely from beholding it
.

Roxburgh, taciturn, stood behind his sovereign's shoulder with two or three others of the Attriod. Like the tail of a comet, a glittering train forever attended the King-Emperor.

This tableau shattered when Thorn stepped forward, crunching dry leaves beneath his boots. Sianadh remained standing. A courtier hissed, ‘On your knees, fellow!'

‘I grovel before no man,' said Sianadh, ‘save the King-Emperor himself.'

‘Behold the King-Emperor, block-brain,' muttered Rohain.

‘What?' Sianadh jibbed, thrown off balance. Stiffly he sank to his knees, bowing the bushy red head.

‘Rise, Kavanagh,' said Thorn, calm as a subterranean lake, as cold.

‘Ye have pardoned me,' said Sianadh, stumbling to his feet and moving to Rohain's side with a mixture of gratefulness and wariness, ‘and for that I thank ye, Your Majesty. I've a strong right arm that has defended Imrhien here and would willingly wield a sword for the Empire, and it has not withered at all despite languishing in your dungeons without so much as a drop of ale to give me fortitude.'

The courtiers murmured against his questionable attitude and his unconscionable manner of addressing the King-Emperor using the second-person pronoun. Their sovereign appeared to ignore these mistakes.

‘Indeed?' he said, raising one eyebrow.
A captivating trick
, thought Rohain.

‘Aye,' said Sianadh. Lifting an elbow from beneath which emanated an odour of stale body fluids, he rolled up a sleeve. ‘Strong, my arm.' Blatantly devoid of finer feeling, he flexed a great pudding of a bicep. Several guards made as if to throw him out for his effrontery. Thorn waved them away.

‘Leave us,' he commanded his retinue. ‘Stay you, Roxburgh, and my page.' Bowing, the attendants reluctantly began to trickle out of the Hall of Audience.

‘You say that arm has defended the Lady Rohain?' Thorn inquired mildly.

‘Aye, and no man has ever beaten me in an arm-wrestle,' replied the Ertishman, whose eyes were boldly fixed on Thorn's. Being a few inches shorter, he had to look up to achieve this; an irksome necessity for him.

‘Sianadh,' admonished Rohain. ‘Do not be
scothy
. Nothing can rescue you this time.'

‘Do you make a challenge?' asked Thorn.

‘A challenge, by—' Sianadh bit off his words. ‘Aye, some might call it that, sir. Now I have said it. There it be.' His face was a mask of defiance.