The Demon Lord (13 page)

The wan light of pre-dawn trickled through his bolted bedroom shutters, making vague shapes of the furniture. Familiar shapes, and comforting. Aldric rolled over in the narrow bed, hoping to find more peaceful sleep— and instead encountered warm, smooth flesh.

He sat bolt upright, drowsy eyelids snapped wide open, and thought for just a moment when he saw the tumbled blonde hair on his pillow that he was dreaming again, and much more pleasantly this time. “Kyrin… ?”

Gueynor.

The Jouvaine girl looked up at him and smiled shyly. “You are embarrassed,” she said. “I’m sorry. I should have woken earlier and left you alone.”

“Embarrassed… ? Not at… Not very.” He raked hair out of his eyes and knuckled at their sockets. “But I thought—”

“Kyrin?” Gueynor, he thought, was most perceptive for so early in the morning. Too perceptive for his liking. He nodded, only once and curtly.

“A lady I… once knew.” Aldric breathed deeply, and changed the subject. “What happened?”

“Last night—or rather, earlier this morning? You slept. Even standing, on your way here from the bathhouse. I have never seen a man so tired. It was… not a natural weariness. Do you…” She hesitated uncertainly, searching for words.

“Just say it.”

“Do you use
ymeth?”

“Dreamsmoke… ?” Aldric stared at her a moment and began to chuckle to himself. Not loudly, but with a quiet, honest amusement she had not seen from him before. “No, lady, not I. Indeed, I don’t take any sort of smoke at all. Perhaps…” The laughter faltered and was gone. “Perhaps I should; I might sleep soundly every night.”

“Not last night,” murmured Gueynor. “You cried out. I held you close and kissed your lips, and you were still again. But you did not wake…”

“I… have bad dreams. Of death, and loss, and darkness. Of my father. I held his hand in mine and I could only watch. All the time and money spent to make me skilled in bringing death, yet I was incapable of bringing him one moment more of life… He bade me live, to avenge him. I took that great oath, I set aside my honour and I swore that I would keep faith. But he was already dead…”

Aldric’s grey-green eyes were cold and distant, bright with unshed tears, and Gueynor shivered as she tried to imagine the mind controlling them. It was as if he read her thoughts.

“Not mad, Gueynor,” he whispered, half to himself. “I think too much about the past, that’s all. A common Alban vice. But no, not mad.”

His left hand, with the heavy gold ring on its third finger, stroked down the line of Gueynor’s jaw until it cupped her chin. She could feel the warm metal press against her as his grip closed. Its pressure was neither rough nor painful—but it was inescapable. For just an instant the girl started like a frightened animal, and then she relaxed. Completely. Her behaviour puzzled Aldric, so that the notch of a slight frown inscribed itself between his brows. Although he had often heard of people resigning themselves to the inevitable, this was the first time he had ever seen it happen and the experience was not particularly pleasant. Yet another question, he thought despairingly.

“Since we seem for once to be exchanging intimacies, my lady,”—and there was no sarcasm in his employment of the title—”I grow curious about what secrets you might choose to tell me.”

The mere prospect of answering his questions seemed to frighten her, as it invariably did; the Alban suspected that physical assault would affect her less than a verbal interrogation. But why… ?

“What do you want to know… ?” Gueynor faltered timidly.

Match one question with another… What
don’t
I want to know? “Tell me…” Aldric paused a moment, marshalling his thoughts into some semblance of order. The task rapidly assumed monumental proportions and he shrugged, abandoning the attempt. “Tell me everything,” he concluded bluntly. “From the beginning.”

Whether or not the girl would do it was another matter. In the event he was to be surprised… by many things.

“I have lived here since I was a child,” Gueynor began, and if Aldric felt any lack of patience that she should begin by stating the obvious, it did not show on his face. Because just then a tiny, disapproving voice inside his skull said: Hold your tongue, just once! There is no such thing as what you think is obvious! The voice was unmistakably Gemmel’s.

Get out of my head
... ! Aldric caught the words before they reached his lips, and those same lips twisted in a sheepish smile.
It’s private
—
isn’t it
? he finished, plaintively inaudible. There was no reply.

“My uncle Evthan,” Gueynor was saying when the Alban refocused his attention, “has always been like a father to me; he took my real father’s place early in my life, when my parents were… When they died.”

This was all familiar ground to Aldric. Too familiar by far. “But surely his sister Aline is your—”

“Aunt. My adoptive mother, yes—but my aunt for all that.”

“Oh…” Evthan had never actually said that his sister and his niece were mother and daughter; Aldric had merely assumed it. And had been wrong, as was not uncommon.

“My mother was called Sula; she was the youngest of the family and a most kind and gentle lady. That was why my father loved her as he did. Not for her rank and lands and titles, for she had none; and despite her beliefs, which were not his. He loved her for herself alone.”

The Alban knew now why so many things about Gueynor and her uncle had been out of character for their chosen roles: the obstacles between her father and her mother were painfully familiar ones. But he had to hear the girl say it for herself. “Who was your father, lady?” he prompted quietly. “What was his name?”

“My father was… My true father was Erwan Evenou, the last Droganel Overlord of Seghar. Before the Geruaths came.”

Aldric released a long sigh of understanding which was also an unconsciously held-in breath. “Ah… So! Many thing are becoming clear.” He asked no more prompting questions, knowing that with this first hurdle crossed, Gueynor would find the talking—and the remembering— easier.

“Lord Erwan was already married when he met my mother by the river, one warm day in spring. His wife had been chosen for him, to bring an alliance, gold and land to Seghar. You know the custom?”

“I know it.”

“He was young, your age or a little more; my mother, Sula, was not yet twenty. He was the Overlord of Seghar and she a peasant; he could have lain with her there and then or taken her to the citadel. He was the Overlord— he had the right. But he was also a courtly gentleman. Instead of violence and rape, he climbed from his tall horse and spoke softly to my mother, and paid her compliments as he would a high-born lady, and with his own hands gathered flowers for her along the river’s edge.”

Aldric wondered if that was what had really happened or merely what Gueynor had been told—and immediately regretted his own cynicism. The thing was not impossible; many haughty lords were often romantics at heart. Kyrin had once told him that he himself… His mind veered from the memory. Did such long-past facts really matter to anyone but Gueynor anyway? No…

“The law allows a man of rank to take formal consorts in addition to his wife, and my father wanted to take my mother into his household respectably and openly. He petitioned his father, High Lord Evenou, at the Emperor’s Summer Palace in Kalitzim; my mother told me that he rode there himself, wearing the overmantle of the Falcon couriers so that he could use the post-roads. When I was born the next spring, I was his daughter in all but rights of succession, and I lived in Seghar until I was eight years old.”

Gueynor’s narrative stopped and Aldric’s eyes flicked to her face. The girl was lying on her back with the coverlet pulled up to her throat, and she had been talking into the air as if making a speech—her phrases correct and slightly stilted, her manner evidently unfamiliar. If she had spoken to him like that earlier, her pretence of being a peasant would have caused him even more confusion, and some slight amusement as well. It was plain now—with benefit of hindsight—that she had never really been other than what she was: the much-loved bastard of a lord who in all probability showed her more affection than to his legitimate children, because she was much more than the evidence of duty done to family and politics. Which was a dangerous attitude—alike for him, the child and her mother. Aldric had encountered extremes of jealousy more than once…

Gueynor’s lips were pressed tightly together in an attempt to still their quivering, and there was a glisten of unshed tears in her wide-open eyes. The Alban could guess why, for he also had memories like that. Out of consideration and a degree of fellow-feeling, he kept his own mouth shut and waited until the girl regained her self-control. It did not take long—there was considerable strength of character beneath that pretty blonde exterior.

“I was happy for those eight years. My mother and my father were happy too. Then everything went wrong.”

Aldric nodded; he had expected to hear those words sooner or later, because the whole situation reeked of vulnerability. What had happened, and what he was about to hear, was preordained: as inevitable in its way as the final scenes of a classic tragedy. All he had to know was the how and why of it.

“Lord Erwan’s wife died in childbed and the infant died with her. There was no difficulty about inheritance: he had two sons and another daughter besides myself. But he decided that now he could, and would, marry my mother: elevate her, give her rank and style and title before the law as well as before the Gods.”

Gueynor laughed, a hoarse little sound, and pushed the heel of one hand against her forehead. “The Gods… Yes, that was the trouble. I know nothing about your Alban beliefs, Kourgath, but here in the Jev-aiden and in Vreijaur we have a different faith from the Imperial lands. In Drusul, Vlech, Tergoves, the Emperor is held to be a god, descended in direct line from the Father of Fires.
Ya an-Sherban bystrei, vodyaj cho’da tlei
. Hah!” She made a spitting noise. “‘Revere all those of the Sherban dynasty, for their words are the words of Heaven.’” So they say. It is even written on their banners… And yet how much reverence have the Grand Warlords shown their Emperors, eh?

“This would be of little account if the Senate had not ruled that all lords owing fealty to the Empire should worship- as Sherbanul. Also their immediate families.”

“Including wives… ?”

“Especially wives—or husbands. If they are of a different faith they must reject it, publicly, before the provincial exark. When my mother Sula refused to renounce the Three Gods, my father Erwan broke with all precedent and adopted the Teshirin holiness. They were married by those rites. It would have been better by far if he had set aside the lordship first, rather than attempt to hold it as what the Drusalans are pleased to call a Tesh heretic.

“The soldiers came, as he thought they would—but not to depose him, as he had expected. To do that, first he would have been granted an opportunity to speak before the Senate and to have been punished by their ruling. Instead—” She broke off, but when Aldric rolled over slightly, expecting tears, he saw instead such a cold hatred as he had never witnessed on any woman’s face— not even on Lyseun’s, and before Heaven ar Korentin’s wife had made her dislike of him all too plain.

“The soldiers killed him?” Though the phrasing was a question, Aldric knew quite well that it was the truth. Gueynor quibbled only with his choice of words.

“They
murdered
him. They cut him down in his own High Hall, and they claimed he had been beguiled and tainted beyond redemption even by the Lord Politark at Drakkesborg. They claimed, too, that my mother had enchanted him—that she was a sorceress. And the punishment for sorcery is… is—”

“Is better left unmentioned.” Aldric knew what the penalty entailed; Gemmel had told him once and had not needed to repeat it. Use was made of slow fires, blades, hot brine and molten lead in a fashion only a sick mind could have created. If that had been done to Gueynor’s mother… He felt nauseated, his imagination briefly touching on—and then crushing out of existence—vile images which had no place in his brain.

“They killed his whole family. My family. I escaped because Evthan was there that day. He was chief forester to the Overlord, and not just because of Sula; he always merited such titles. When he took me out, past the soldiers, he told any who asked that I was his daughter and that we had come to see the great town of Seghar. Two of them tried to stop us, but I remember their officer— he was very tall, with a black beard—commanded them to let us through. He said, If any of my children were in this place, I’d want them out before they saw what we have to do! Get out, you, and quickly,’—this to my uncle—’and don’t come back until things settle down!’ ”

Gueynor’s eyes closed and she lay still and silent for so long that it appeared she was asleep. Then she murmured: “Since that day I’ve lived in Valden. I’ve learned to be a peasant, as best I can, and to accept my place. You learn a lot in ten years. But I haven’t learned how to forget. Or forgive. Oh, you can’t understand what it feels like to have everything snatched violently from you!”

Oh, can’t I
... ? thought Aldric.
Maybe one day I’ll tell you. Or maybe not
.

“Seghar has been ruled by a succession of soldiers—
eldheisartin, hautheisartin
, high ranks but not so high that they suffer from delusions of. grandeur. Two years ago the Geruaths arrived. Father and son, each as… peculiar… as the other. They make a fine pair. It was Lord Geruath who arranged for my father’s murder. I learned this from… from sources who know. Yet he bided his time for eight years until he was invited to the Lordship by his patron Etzel. As a reward for continuing support.”

“Etzel? Grand Warlord Etzel… ?” Aldric had been told that Geruath sided with the Emperor, and had been assured that the Overlord of Seghar was an Alban ally, a means to contact-Goth and Bruda. But now…

“Of course the Warlord. Who else?” Gueynor, brooding on what might have been, was becoming haughty and impatient. There was something else in her voice as well, something which Aldric recognised but could not place. “My uncle Evthan went to Geruath and humbly requested his place as forester, claiming no more loyalty to my father than to any man who could no longer pay him for his duties. That amused our loving lord, for he’s a man like that himself. But one day my uncle will be able to entice Lord Geruath into the Deepwood. Alone. And I’ll be waiting for him. I’ll teach him the cost of Seghar. It will be the last lesson he’ll ever learn…”