The Fall of the Dagger (The Forsaken Lands) (40 page)

“She was a remarkable woman, your mother. She made everyone around her happy. I’ve never met anyone else with that capacity. Of course, our feelings for one another had a bitter side. It hurt Fritillary
deeply. She and Iris were close. It was a betrayal of her by both of us. There were huge arguments, bitter recriminations. Fritillary did forgive Iris in the end, but not me. Never me.”

Saker still said nothing, and after a long silence Deremer took up the tale again. “Va knows how it would have ended if Iris hadn’t suspected she might be pregnant. She didn’t tell me, but she did tell Fritillary. It was almost the end of the university semester and we were all supposed to be heading off in different directions.

“Fox was transferring to another university. My cousin was going to take over the spying on him there. I was recalled home, unaware of Iris’s condition. I looked for her to tell her I had to go, but she’d already left for her farm. I returned to my family and told my father I wanted to marry Iris. Va knows what I thought I was doing. Any wife of mine would find out about the Dire Sweepers, and that would have devastated Iris. She could never have lived with that knowledge. I never let her see that side of me.”

There was another long silence before he continued.

“Iris had a pragmatic nature. She knew I came from a rich family, titled. She wanted me to be free to choose our future and she wanted me to know that it was my choice. Before I left Oakwood, she’d given a letter to Fritillary for me, telling me she was pregnant. She returned to her parents without saying goodbye and waited to hear from me. When she didn’t, she married Robin Rampion. Gave birth to a boy.”

“Me.”

“Yes. You are my son.”

“Forgive me if I don’t regard that news with unalloyed joy. I can’t think of anyone I would less rather call my sire.”

“Can’t say I blame you. Do you want the rest of the story?”

“There’s more?”

“A lot.”

“Go on.”

“I was hurt. I never did get the letter. I didn’t know about the pregnancy. I thought she’d tired of me. I told my family the affair was over and I’d do what they wanted. Life went on. I tried to get over Iris.

“Three years later, I returned to Oakwood with my father and one of my brothers on Dire Sweeper business. There had been rumours
of an outbreak of the Horned Death in the Shenat Hills. After we’d dealt with that, I couldn’t resist searching for Iris. I still ached for her. After finding out she’d married Robin Rampion, I sent a messenger to her with a note, asking her to meet me in Oakwood on a certain day, at the alehouse. Va knows what I hoped for: I don’t. She never turned up. I waited three days and then went home. Tried again to forget her.”

Saker frowned, puzzled, unable to imagine where all this was going.

“Years later,” Deremer continued, “my brother was badly injured. On his deathbed and feeling guilty – which is odd, as acknowledging guilt was something that was deliberately omitted from our upbringing – he told me how he and Father had intercepted my message to Iris, read it, and sent it on its way. Afraid of what she knew, they killed her on the way to meet me.”

Saker closed his eyes. He wanted to lash out, hurt someone, something. No, not anyone, just this man. His father.

His mother, murdered.

He damped down the rage. Her death was hardly Herelt Deremer’s fault.

He took a deep breath, unclenched his hands from around the rungs of the chair back. “You still didn’t know I was your son? When
did
you find out?”

“Fritillary told me recently.”

“So, if you didn’t know I was your son when I was at Grundorp University, why did you take an interest in me?”

“Your name, of course. Rampion. I realised you were Iris’s son.”

Rage bubbled. “Yet in Dortgren you were quite prepared to kill Iris’s only child?”

Deremer looked away, unable to meet his gaze. “Yes, I was, for what I imagined to be the greater good. As I say, regret, guilt, compassion – Deremers aren’t supposed to possess any of that. Would I have done it differently if I’d known you were also
my
son? Possibly. I don’t have any others…”

He’d rarely felt so repulsed. “Va help you, Deremer, for I cannot.”

Sir Herelt gave a twisted smile. “I wish Va would. But there’s no help for me, except to spend the rest of my life trying to be a decent
human being. I’m not sure I know how. Sometimes I even wonder – what we did: were we really always wrong? A lot of people would have died if we hadn’t killed all those twins. The premise we acted on was incorrect, but the result was often beneficial. Many of them were already infected by the Foxes’ ‘Horned Plague’.”

“Except you also killed innocent twins who’d never had contact with a Fox. Or you persuaded others to do it for you.”

Deremer inclined his head, acknowledging that truth.

Saker stood up and replaced the chair where it belonged. “The one question I’d like answered is this: why did Fritillary not give you my mother’s letter at the time?”

“Ask her.”

“Oh, I will.”
She fobbing lied to me, the harridan!
He hid the bitter intensity of his rage beneath what he hoped was a calm exterior. “I don’t know what to say. All my life, I dreamed of finding a parent who wasn’t Robin Rampion. Someone who was going to swoop down and take me away from that wretched farm and care for me and about me. The nearest I ever got to that was Fritillary. I need to think about this.”

“I’m sorry – sorry for everything.”

Saker left the room without replying. Once out in the passage, he leaned against the wall. Thoughts hurtled through his head, colliding and coalescing. Gradually his pounding heart slowed.

His mother hadn’t abandoned him. She’d been murdered. His father was a man who’d made a career out of slaughtering newborn babies, a man from a family who’d propped up the foul line of the Vollendorn Regals for generations. And Fritillary had known.

What did that make him? Beggar him speechless, if the Deremers had known of his existence, he might have been removed from Robin Rampion’s care and brought up as a Dire Sweeper. He might have ended up with all the same murderous history and all the guilt of Sir Herelt.

He peeled himself away from the wall and returned to the room.

Herelt looked up in surprise.

“I’m glad I was never brought up a Deremer,” Saker said. “I’m glad I never had the choices that you had to make, again and again. I feel sorry for you, and sorrier still for my mother. You apologised
just then – but there was no need. You shouldn’t waste any sympathy on me for the life I was left by circumstance. I had the easier road to travel, by far. Be glad of that, for I am.”

Soberly, they regarded each other across the expanse of the room. Sir Herelt nodded. “Thank you,” he whispered. “Go with Va, Saker.”

“Va be with you.” He hesitated slightly before adding, “Father.”

When Saker returned to Fritillary, he thought her unnaturally still and pale.

“So,” he said without preamble, “my real father is a monster from a family that has probably killed as many innocent people over generations as all the Foxes put together. And my mother was murdered by my grandfather and my uncle. That’s quite a family history.”

“I didn’t know that last. Not until recently.”

“Even so, the woman I have looked up to all my life kept the secret of my birth from me and was also at one time my father’s lover.”

He was used to the way she paced when agitated, so the stillness now imposed on her by her injury appeared unnatural. Her hands gripped the arms of the chair until her knuckles were white as if she strained to rise.

“What do you want me to tell you?” she asked.

“The truth. All of it. Then maybe I can just throw it away, forget it, move on.”
After all, I’ve already sold the rest of my life to a king and agreed to do possibly dangerous magic upon a child I adore more than my own life
…

“What can I say? Herelt was a very charming man, once. Rich, polished, handsome – someone I would not have expected to look at me once, let alone twice. I was a novice Shenat cleric from a farming village, overly tall, with no polish, no money, no witchery, no connections, no sponsor – nothing but my intellect and my ambition. I wasn’t even a cleric at heart. I took on a noviciate because the Pontificate paid my way through university. I always fully intended to refuse final ordination.”

Oak and acorn, is there any end to the surprises?

“Sorry, I’m wandering off the point. Herelt did look at me – and he
desired
. That was intoxicating. I’d never had a man attracted to me, let alone one like him. There was an aura about him. He was
dangerous. He was also generous, thoughtful, totally fearless. It’s easy now to wonder how I couldn’t see through the veneer to the darkness beneath.”

“Go on.”

“I was searingly jealous when he fell in love with Iris, but it also opened my eyes to what he was. Utterly ruthless. He went after what he wanted until he got it. I didn’t blame her. She was a victim of his charm, just as I was. I warned her, she wouldn’t listen and somehow, even after all the arguments, we remained friends. She was an easy person to love, you know.

“And then, suddenly, she left Oakwood, leaving a letter for him with me. She told me what was in it: she was expecting his baby and she was going back to her father’s farm.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Yes, I lied to you when you asked about your parents.”

“Why?”

“Because I needed you, and I didn’t want you to walk away when you found out what I’d done. And perhaps – perhaps I didn’t want you to have to deal with knowing you’d been sired by a conscienceless assassin. Better to be fatherless.”

She had a point.

“Why didn’t you give Herelt the letter? You didn’t know about his family history then.”

“You can believe what you like, Saker. That I was jealous. Or that I thought she was better off without him. Or both. It’s all true.”

“Do you regret what you did?” He was angry, so angry, but he controlled it. The past was gone, and anyway, he didn’t have to express his anger. She knew it. With her witchery, she could read him like a book.

“I can’t look at it any differently now,” she said. “Yes, I took away her chance to decide her destiny, and I did it for all the wrong reasons. But if I
had
told her, if Herelt had married her, I don’t think you’d be alive today. The Deremer family would have murdered her before you were born. I didn’t know that then, of course. Nonetheless my decision did save your life, so I can’t regret it now.

“When I heard she’d disappeared, I thought that she’d run away and left you. I was angry with her. You deserved better than that.
Still later I was told her body was found in the river near Oakwood, and I wondered if she’d committed suicide. Then I was riddled with guilt! Her child became my responsibility. I had to work, earn money to get you away from the Rampions and pay them off. That was when I received my witchery, after I made that decision.”

“But you still didn’t tell Herelt? You didn’t know about the Dire Sweepers then, surely.”

“No, but I went to my clerical mentor at the time, and asked his advice. He told me not to tell Herelt about your existence because the Pontificate was beginning to hear disquieting rumours about the Deremers. So I didn’t. The years passed. Once I had my witchery, my progress upwards within Va-faith was assured, until I was in a position to send you to the university school, and later to become an undergraduate.

“Only when Herelt came here to talk about pooling our resources to fight Fox did I discover that your mother had been murdered by his family.”

“Do you think she intended to leave me?”

“No. I think she meant to return.”

“But we’ll never know for sure.”

“No. But I did know her, Saker.”

“When did you tell Herelt about the letter – and that I was his son?”

“At that same meeting.”

“Why?”

“To punish him for what he did to Iris? Because he had a right to know? Because I was sick of hiding the truth? Take your pick. I blurted it out when he told me how Iris had really died.”

They stared at each other in silence for a moment, then he said, “I am accepting the post of Ardronese Prime, Your Reverence.”

“I would prefer you worked more directly for me.”

“I know, but it’s not going to happen.”

“I assume you are doing this not so much to punish me, but to make sure that Ardrone treats the Chenderawasi Islands with the respect and gratitude due to them?”

He inclined his head. “I hope I’m not as petty as to want to punish you for the past!”

“When do you leave?”

“Sorrel and Ardhi and I will go to Throssel as soon as we can. They will collect Piper and move on to Ustgrind. Would you inform the Regala through your normal channels to expect them in due course?”

“Certainly.” She shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “No matter what happens to your feather pieces, Mathilda’s twins will always need to be watched.”

“Our ternion is prepared to do that for the rest of our lives. We don’t know what the Regala wants with regard to her son, but the Lady Mathilda is not a ninnyhead. Surely she knows Prince-regal Karel will have to be watched.”

“While I am alive, my power to detect an untruth may be handy with the twins.”

“We’ll bear that in mind. And I ask you to remember that we have one more safety net for the future: help from the Chenderawasi Islands – if we treat them as our equals now.”

“Point taken, although I hope I don’t need a reason to be equitable. I’ll do my best.”

For a moment they held each other’s gaze in silence. Finally she said, “I will miss you, Saker. You are the closest I ever came to having a child of my own.”

And that, I suppose, is the closest she’ll ever come to telling me how she feels
… He said, “It made a big difference to my life, always having you there in the background. Knowing someone cared.”

“I’m glad. I did love your mother, you know. And I’m sorry I lied to you.”

He nodded.

“Would you ask Gerelda to come and see me?”

“Of course.”