The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) (60 page)

“That,” Tyrone said, “explains the beribboned package you carry?”

Galing gave the flat parcel under his arm a little hug. “Precisely. I would not want it to go astray. So you’ll understand if I survey the artwork and vanish.”

“Perfectly,” Condell smirked. “Then let us proceed into the room where it hangs. Historical paintings, are they not? Very educational, no doubt. I myself always believe— Good god!”

At his side, Tyrone murmured, “Who would have guessed that history could be so exciting?”

They were staring at powerful images of a naked man, his body washed blue in the moonlight, dappled by midday leaf and shade, or licked by the light of flames.

It was the underside of all the fusty images you found in old carvings and stained glass panels: the kneeling deer, the horned king, the deer-headed man; they had all seen the formal representations a hundred times. Ysaud’s paintings were a dream of those things, raw and vivid as a nightmare, or a scene remembered out of childhood.

The images were everywhere, up and down the walls of the salon, on canvases large as the walls themselves and small as the pages of a book.

When they had stared for some time, Tyrone observed, “It’s all the same man.”

“Is it?” asked Condell, entranced.

“Certainly. Observe the arms, the turn of the leg. And the neck—when it’s not covered in fur. What’s that on his chest?”

“Leaves, I think.” Condell leaned in closer. “No, they’re painted—meant to be marked directly on the skin, I mean; see the way they crease here, and the shadow? What a pretty pattern. Perhaps I should have it done myself.”

“Perhaps you should.” Tyrone stepped back. “This is a year’s work, this is. She painted someone for a year—”

“Indeed she did,” Condell drawled, “and not so long ago. And I know who. What do you think, Galing?”

“I think,” said Galing, “that if I were that man, I would be very displeased by this night’s work. Was Lady Randall invited, do you know?”

“I don’t. But I do think someone should tell her about it. Are you her particular friend, Galing?”

“Not yet,” said Nicholas.

They heard a curious sound behind them: a sort of collective sigh from the group of people who had just entered, all struck dumb, all gazing at the vision that surrounded them.

“One hears,” Condell murmured, “that our hostess has quarreled with her family. That is old news—now fully reconstituted, like a slice of dried apple soaked in very potent wine. I would now raise that ‘quarrel’ to a declaration of war.”

Around them, the room was erupting into a frantic buzz. Condell added, “I am so glad we decided to come.”

JESSICA WAITED UNTIL THE NOISE WAS LOUD ENOUGH TO SIGNIFY that speculation was in full cry. Then she signaled to a footman to call for silence. She stood just inside the doors. Purple and turquoise and crimson and gold, she was a work of art in her own right, and those with a taste for history might have remembered the ancient Southern queens who led armies in royal chariots draped with silk.

“My lords, my ladies.” She pitched her voice to carry melodiously into the eight corners of the room. “Noble friends. You all honor me with your presence this evening. I have been absent from my native city for many years. In that time, you have maintained the well-being of our land. You have nourished it with your sons and your daughters, your tears and your laughter, your toil and your watchful care. My thanks I offer, most inadequately, in the display of these pictures, this complete work of genius that renders the ancient soul of our country for all to see. After tonight, they will be gone, so I beg you to look your fill, and to accept the offering in the spirit of thanks with which it is meant.”

There was a smattering of applause. Jessica smiled. “A moment ago, I called you ‘friends.’ And it is as friends that I make bold to speak to you now. The work you see around you celebrates our country’s past with the handiwork of the present, and I believe it will resound to our honor long into the future.” Murmurs, now, of approbation. “The past,” she went on, “can be a source of glory. And it can be a source of shame, but only if we let it be. For what are we, friends, if we cannot rewrite the past by creating a present glory that eclipses it and shines forth the way to an even nobler future?”

“Right!” someone shouted. It was not Galing. He was watching with mute fascination as Jessica held out her hand and took from a servant a heavy piece of folded paper, marked with a seal that could be Tremontaine’s. Lord Theron was not here. The woman was clearly poisonous, bent on bringing her half-brother down, or at least on humiliating him. Was this paper his report, his confession of treachery? And was she going to read it aloud, here, now, to the assembled nobles of the city, in the presence of the paintings that exposed him to gossip and ridicule? Galing closed his eyes a moment. She was not, as far as he knew, working for the Serpent Chancellor. But then, he knew so little of Arlen’s plots and games.

Jessica spoke again. “What is the past? For me, it has been a thing of shame. You know of my father, David Alexander Tielman Campion, Duke Tremontaine. You know how I was born of his dalliance with an actress revered in the theatres of this city as the Black Rose. This is the past, this is my shame, though you are kind enough to overlook it, and to treat it as none.” There were sympathetic murmurs from a few women.

“I wonder,” Jessica said, “how you will feel when I show you this?”

She lifted up the paper, and held it high. She really did look like a queen in a play.

“I hope that you will welcome it and me among you as warmly as you always have.”

Galing’s eyes were riveted, waiting for her signal to him that it was time to come forth. She knew he was here; she’d greeted him cordially, and whispered to him not to leave until they had taken care of business. By which he’d thought she meant until she had produced Theron. Now, he thought he understood that she meant him to produce the sketches and finish her night’s work.

“We cannot change the past,” Jessica went on, “but we can reinvent it. Rediscover it, give new meaning to old actions, and uncover hidden truths. And thereby forge a new future, free of shame. And so with pride and joy I tell you, my friends, lords and ladies of this noble realm: I hold in my hand the secret marriage vows made between my father, the Duke Tremontaine, and his love, the Black Rose—sealed with his own seal, and dated six months before my own birth.”

Pandemonium.

Nicholas found that he was crushing the edge of the portfolio. The treacherous bitch. He didn’t for a minute think the “marriage lines” were real, but it didn’t matter, did it? She could have Tremontaine tied up in the courts for years on this one, if she pursued it and the family denied it. What use would the Randalls have for their bridegroom now? His inheritance insecure, his last lover—no, make that his last lover but one—a resurrected scandal . . . And so what power did Galing have left over the mad, treasonous, scheming, lecherous young noble?

“My lord.” Galing did not look up. There were so many lords here. But the servant gently touched his sleeve. “My lord of Galing. Please come with me.”

Jessica was in the middle of a crowd of well-wishers. “I’m sorry,” Galing said. “I have another engagement. But if you would give her ladyship these—” He tried to push the packet of sketches into the servant’s hands, but the man said, “If you please, sir. My lady said you were to follow me.”

Galing followed, thinking furiously.

THERON STARED AT THE DOOR, THE SOLID WOOD bound with metal. It felt as dangerous to him as the forest at night once had. But now it was the barrier he must cross, the boundary between himself and the sacred grove where he would face his trial. He could hear, faintly, the cries of the hunt on the other side: people crying out, and laughing, making a music with their voices that rang with danger for him.

The door opened. Lord Nicholas Galing stood there, dressed in crimson. He was holding out a flat, brown package.

“Lord Theron,” he said, “I give you these. I have no further use for them.” He bowed. “Good night.”

He was gone before Theron could move. The packet lay on the table. Slowly, Theron approached it, as if it were a beast that could spring and pounce. He sniffed at the ribbons before he untied them; they smelt faintly of mildew and sandalwood.

The sketches, though, smelled of Ysaud: her chalks, her pencils, her hands. Theron buried his face in the paper. He felt a chill along the vine etched into his flesh, a fierce pricking tingle like the ghost of the blade that had made it. He peeled off his jacket and his waistcoat, then his shirt, to expose it to the air. He turned the leaf of paper over and saw his own face, eyes closed in sleep. He was looking at a young man he did not really know, with a sweet mouth and wing-like brows, captured in just a few lines; a face washed free of all sorrows by the aftermath of pleasure—drawn by the hand that had given him that pleasure.

“Ysaud,” Theron whispered. He had loved the way she looked at him—as if everything in him delighted her and she could never have her fill. Basil looked at him that way, too. Theron’s hand was nearly steady as he turned up another sketch. It was for one of Ysaud’s paintings; he remembered the pose, the way his back had ached from leaning over the silver mirror she’d laid on the floor for him to peer into, half-kneeling, half-rising, his arms braced against the floor. She had tormented him with the placing of candles, moving them here and then there to get just the right reflection. The sketch, though, showed none of that—just his back, his haunches straining to flee and his body riveted by what the pool disclosed: the shadow of horns upon his brow.

Again, the door opened. Warm scented air rushed into the room, and the breeze from the open window rustled the sketches on the table.

“Ah,” said Jessica, “good, you’ve got them. My guests are gone. Do you want to see the paintings?”

NAKED TO THE WAIST, THERON CAMPION STEPPED INTO the room that held the year of his life that he had given to Ysaud so he could love her and she could paint him in numinous, glowing scenes from their nation’s golden history and its dark legend.

The canvases lined the walls of the octagonal salon. They were all light and shadow: acid yellow firelight hit the dull rose of illuminated flesh half-obscured by a green-black tree trunk or a star-dappled boulder. Blue stars danced in black water. Under a noonday sun, sharp green holly leaves pricked out the gently coruscated grays and umbers of an ancient oak. A still, silver pool was tarnished with the shadow of horns.

Theron paced to the center of the grove. Around him oak and holly rustled. He stood under sun and moon and stars. The water of the sacred pool glittered, half-blinding him. He bowed and, kneeling before it, looked into the water. His face was reflected in the pool. He recognized the liquid eyes and soft muzzle of the stag. It was the hunted stag, the king stag, the deer that he must slay.

He was full of power, devoid of speech. And yet he knew himself. If he could speak, he would have spoken his own name.

Instead, he took the stone knife from his belt, the knife the wizard had given him, and raised it on high.

He smelled the man’s approach, smelled his skin and his sweat and his fear. He saw the same fear in his own eyes, and the same pride. One of them must die. Kill the deer and rule as king; let the deer run free, and the man in him would soon be gone.

He thought then of the woods, of the sweetness of new grass and the wild joy of autumn rutting, the quick fighting and the slow dreaming without loss. And he thought of the stony labyrinth of city streets, of running wild in the smoky dark, the strain of sinew and the triumph of blood. He might now cast away the knife in that human hand, and run on four legs to where the hunt would never find him!

No one would ever find him. He would give up all the promises he had made, the duties his blood bound him to. He would be free of his past. Free of the burden of his speaking, and the burden of his dreams—and free of love and kindness, as well. Forget them all. . . .

But he would not. Looking deep into his own eyes, he recognized that he had been born for this moment, trained to it all his life. In the last year, he had imbibed love and power and knowledge and magic. Remembering that, he could not cast away his name, his face, his humanity. He raised the knife. The stag opened his mouth and cried out for the loss of his sure hooves and branching horns, his leaping haunches and keenness of smell, and the green stirring of a spring morning as he felt the knife in his heart.

Then he lay still, a half-naked man on a marble floor, surrounded by art, with a painted ceiling above him depicting the constellations in their seasons.

Theron felt the world fall away from him. Then he was hearing a voice, someone’s voice, saying, “Theron. Theron.” There were hands on him, urging him to speak, and to look. Surely they must be Basil’s, those kind and steady hands invading the darkness; Basil, come to the woods for him at last, to love him and reward him for having stood the trial, to bring him back to himself.

But when he opened his eyes, it was Jessica, his sister, gorgeously dressed and kneeling beside him, holding a cup of watered wine and saying, “Theron. Will you drink?”

He drank deep and came to himself enough to realize where he was—in Jessica’s salon, surrounded by Ysaud’s paintings. He started to shiver. She said, “For a moment, I thought you were dead. You were ungodly pale.” She unhooked her overskirt and wrapped him in it. “You should go to bed,” she said.