The Cup of the World (18 page)

She could not see the skyline now, or the two lights on the rim of the world that had been there so many times. Her feet were guided only by what seemed to be the angle of the slope on this rough ground. Still she stumbled upwards, skirting a double-peaked crag to emerge upon a lip of rock in the last sun. Beside her, Ulfin caught her arm and exclaimed,
We have done it, my love! Trant is ours, with not a life lost. And your father is our prisoner
.

Another day's rising, heavy with tiredness, facing another day on the road. But this was different. Today she would finally end days of travelling. They would be at Tarceny by sundown. She would soon say farewell to her fellow traveller, with perhaps a little regret as well as relief. She would be home.

A great door in the wall around her had opened. Ulfin was safe. Trant was theirs. So was Father, although he must be fit to be tied at this moment: less likely than ever to listen to his daughter's voice. Still, there must be a chance
now to solve this quarrel. Somehow she must find a way.

She rode in silence for much of the morning, thinking round and round her problem. The tiredness of rising did not lift from her, and no answers presented themselves. In the afternoon, as she lay in the litter, a sudden and heavy shower of rain drenched the landscape. Sleepy as she was, Phaedra roused herself and had the whole cavalcade halt while she insisted that Evalia diManey join her in the cramped shelter of the litter. It was not made for two, and her companion's outer clothes were wet. But they laughed at their discomfort, and watched the good rain soak the land while their retinue trailed muddily behind them. By the time they passed the turn for Aclete, the clouds were breaking, and when at last they reached the edge above the olive groves of Tarceny the skies were clear. A cool breeze was in their faces.

‘This is the best place from which to see it,’ Phaedra said. ‘And the best time of day – look!’

‘Wonderful,’ said Evalia diManey

They had come in the early sunset of Tarceny. The sun had touched the crest of the mountains. The air was moist. Below them, the olive woods were in shadow. But the castle opposite still stood in light, and its walls and towers glowed the colour of pale amber, floating above the clouds of moon roses upon the spur. There were flags flying from the turrets – long bannerets blown out by the March wind. The armour of the watchers flashed on the battlements with fragments of sun. Phaedra felt her heart lift as she looked out across the valley to her new home. And in that moment she had the answer to the problem that had been troubling her all the day long.

She would bring Father here. He would be made to give his word not to fight or run away, so that they might keep him in gentle captivity at Tarceny as indeed he had done for Aun of Lackmere. He would be a difficult guest. She would be prepared for that. She could rule him, if she had to. And difficult or not, she knew she had been missing him. She could think of his big, turbulent presence with fondness. She would attend him, read to him, walk with him. She would show him the wide lands of Tarceny and the nobility of the house. She would teach him to see the tragedy of its past not with loathing, but with sadness. And she would let him understand how Ulfin and she loved one another and could only be together. She would win Father round, however long it took. She would beat a path to peace through his heart.

The litter swayed as the road dipped towards the olive groves. Squire Vermian had the horns blow, and at the same time voices from the bannermen at the head of the cavalcade cried for room on the road. Some fieldsmen from one of the villages had met them on the slope, toiling upwards with their donkeys laden with huge bales of firewood. It was a bad place for the horsemen, and tricky work edging the litter downhill in the narrow way, while the fieldsmen held the donkeys at the very lip of the track to give them room. There were three upturned faces marked with sweat and dust, and a fourth beneath a hood. Phaedra was lost in her mental campaign to win Father, and it was a moment before she stirred, and then started with the memory of what she had seen. She lurched to the side of the litter, craning back through the drapes to catch another sight of the party of fieldsmen as they
gained the ridge. She saw the last one turn in the track to look down: at the horsemen, at the litter, at her. In a gleam of sun he stood clear on the path, and his face was shadow beneath his hood. Then he disappeared after the others.

‘Vermian! Vermian!’ The litter swayed as she leaned out to shout ahead. The riders checked their horses. The squire lumbered back up the track towards them.

‘My lady?’

‘That party of men who passed us. The last man in it. Bid him come to me. I want to speak with him.’

The squire took a second to understand what he was being asked to do. Then he dug his heels into his horse, and the litter swayed again as he pounded past and up the hill, waving to the tail riders. Huge steeds jostled and whickered in the track. Iron clashed. The wet earth shuddered with hoofbeats, fading.

They waited. Phaedra glanced at Evalia diManey's face, and saw how her skin glowed softly in the light. She had paid no attention to what was going on. There was some thought, or memory, behind her eyes as she looked across the gulf to the castle. The dim echo of the gate-horn came to them. Phaedra remembered that Ulfin would not be at home. It would be the first time she had entered the place without him. She shifted in the litter.

‘What is holding them?’

As she spoke the riders appeared again. One bore a man in front of him. They lumbered downhill towards the litter with their prize. Phaedra muttered an exclamation as they came near.

‘Not this one! Not this one!’ she said as they drew rein. ‘I asked for the last man in the party. The
last
man.’

Vermian grunted something that must have been an oath. ‘Your pardon, my lady, but there were three, and this was the third.’

The fieldsman seemed caught in a world beyond his understanding. She found his look almost painful, and wondered whether rabbits stared this way at an oncoming stoat.

‘Put him down, you idiots. There were four. The last one in a robe and hood, and walking a little after the others.’

The riders exchanged glances.

‘Call me a fool, my lady, but there were three when we came up with them.’

‘Angels' Knees, Vermian!’

They were milling around her, these huge, clumsy simpletons. Big men on big horses, and the fieldsman still pinned to the saddle.

‘My lady – what is it?’ asked Evalia diManey

‘It's a circus – what does it look like? All right. Put him down, Vermian. And give him silver. You can do that, can you? Send some people back to have another look. I want that man. Promise him whatever you like, but for Michael and Umbriel get him to come to the castle. Now, let's be on our way’

She turned abruptly in her place and faced forward, so that she need not see the looks she knew the horsemen were giving her and each other. They were idiots.

‘He can't have walked fifty yards,’ she muttered to Evalia diManey

‘Who, my lady?’

‘If it was the man I think it was, he has caused me
much trouble,’ said Phaedra grimly. ‘Trouble and embarrassment – albeit unwittingly. It is the priest who wed me to my husband. I am going to find out for myself whether he will not accept a position when I offer it; if not, why not, and at the very least what his name and order is.’

The litter swayed into motion beneath them.

‘What man?’

‘The last one in that—’ she broke off ‘You didn't see him either?’

Evalia diManey was looking at her as one might at a friend or guest who, halfway through an evening, has suddenly become drunk.

‘I saw three fieldsmen and two donkeys.’

‘You can't have been looking! He was there!’

‘You saw a priest in that party?’ There was something urgent in the diManey's tone.

‘A man with a long pale robe and a hood. My lord chose him.’

Her companion looked back up the path in the growing dusk. ‘I did not see him,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘I did not see him.’

To Phaedra that answer was the last insult. She was the lady of Tarceny queen of the wide March. She had a score of men immediately at her command, each armoured and mounted at the cost of the harvest of several farms. She could not have the slightest task done for her, be it ever so important. A golden chance to set things right had just been let fade away into the evening. She clamped her jaw shut and watched the olive trees passing.

After a moment her companion spoke again. ‘Phaedra – I am not sure who your priest is. But if you do see him again, I think you should be careful.’ Phaedra ignored her.

he did not understand, then, why her mood swung so heavily against her companion that evening The only thing she could blame Evalia diManey for was that she had used Phaedra's first name without being bidden. But Phaedra was not able to recover from the disappointment of missing the priest. The evening passed in long silences, while Phaedra brooded and Evalia diManey stared curiously around her at the high, black-and-white rooms of Tarceny They both retired early.

Nor did Phaedra think it strange that she found it so difficult to rise the next morning. She dragged herself from her bed at last, in time to say a few meaningless goodbyes to the Lady diManey, who was about to set off with her party and a half-dozen of Vermian's riders on the final stages of her journey home to Chatterfall. Phaedra dismissed her companion's thanks with a smile and a wave of her hand. After that, there was another of those looks, but no more words. Evalia diManey left the gate in Phaedra's litter, and Phaedra turned to re-enter the maw of Tarceny.

She was busy with thoughts that would not wait to be
ordered. Ulfin had won a breathing space by the passage of arms. It would not last for ever, and there were things she could be doing to help put a settlement in place. She wrote to Ulfin, urging him to send Father across the lake, as soon as his word of honour could be secured. Then she penned a description of the priest of Talifer's Knoll, had it copied and instructed that it be sent to each of the seventy manors and settlements of the March, to be borne by special messengers from each to each so that news of the man's whereabouts might reach her without delay.

She found Vermian more difficult than she had expected about dispatching half his troop to ride over the March. Bullying him into compliance left her ill at ease and exhausted.

Her mind was restless, and would not concentrate. She decided to begin work on a great robe for Ulfin, such as Mother had used to make for Father. She told herself that this would make it harder for Father to pretend that she had been carried away against her will. She began to draw up lists of silks and materials to be ordered from Baer or Watermane. And, using the draft of her letter to Maria, she started composing an appeal to Septimus himself, to be delivered when Father's heart was won and her marriage proved. In it she would beg him to leave his quarrel and honour the new house of Tarceny as it would him. It was to be a great piece – the decisive victory. In her mind's eye she saw herself once again before the thrones of Tuscolo, speaking this time not of Obedience but of Love. She tried to imagine the strum of the lyres that would carry her words in song down the years. But the words dried on the page. The image of the thrones shifted,
too easily, too quickly; channelled by her memory into a scene of shadows and swords: the flickering torches, the murmuring crowd; and a woman on trial for witchcraft.

She waited, fretting, for news.

The house was full of echoes. Ulfin was away. (So also were his knights and most of his men-at-arms, but it was Ulfin's absence that she felt most.) Without him, the castle was strange. The household, a collection of ordinary people whom she hardly knew, moved about their hundred tasks behind closed doors, and left her. She lay in bed in the mornings, watching the light move and grow on the walls and ceiling. She took down books from the shelves, and read them.
The Death of Aurelian. Of Taliver and Velis. The Sacred Life of Tuchred among the Pagans
. Book after book, in scrolls or in great volumes that bound works such as
The Heraldry of the Seabord
with
A Discourse of Good and Evil
and
A Treatise of the Northern Seas
together under the same covers.
The Tale of Kings
appeared three times. She found that Ulfin had added short notes in the margins on many pages of the histories, and had written a number of scrolls of his own, so she hunted through his library to discover each jotting and trace the big curves of his letters with her finger. Then she might sit and hold the book against herself while she looked out of the window, missing him.

She looked for the small comfort of things that reminded her of him – clothes, brooches, his drinking cup: signs that in spite of his absence this was his home, and always had been. There were no portraits of him, nor of any of his family except the sad-faced Paigan in the War Room. She began to visit the War Room, in its emptiness, to look at the face framed by the twisting snake, and to
imagine the subtlest broadening and strengthening of the artwork that would make it not Paigan's face, but his. Then she would sit on the stool to the right of the war throne, and lay her hand in her imagination upon her husband's arm. The little chest was gone from where it had stood under Ulfin's left hand.