The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) (61 page)

“No. Not now. This—” He gestured at the forest of canvas around him “—this is amazing.
You
are amazing—even more than I thought, I mean. Tell me all about it.”

“At least get up off the floor.”

That he could do, with her help. She settled him by the library fire, in a chair with blankets. Then she sent for wine and food for them both. Theron found that he wanted to eat everything on the tray: cheese and fruit and smoked goose and fish and meat. As he ate and drank, he seemed to feel his whole self becoming more solid. His hands were his hands, not something in a painting, not something like a dream on a forest path. The meat smelled good to him. The blankets were comfortably scratchy and warm. He gnawed on a cold joint, and Jessica drank red wine and answered his questions.

“How on earth did you get the paintings?”

“Worship me,” she commanded around a mouthful of bread and cheese. “God, I’m starving. I didn’t dare eat until it was over. And I was stone cold sober the entire time. Drink some wine, it’ll settle your nerves. If I’d known they would affect you that way, I’d have kept you away from those pictures.”

“No,” he said, “it’s all right. Really, it is. I feel fine—better than I have in days.”

“I was wondering if you’d even ever seen them before. If not, the shock could kill you. I should have thought of that. I mean—she did show you them, didn’t she? That woman is capable of anything.”

She sounded simultaneously smug and appalled. Theron looked closely at her, and decided not to ask. “What did your guests think of them?”

“They were impressed.”

“By the sight of my naked ass?”

“Now, now.” She wiggled a drumstick at him. “They don’t
know
it’s your naked ass.”

“Don’t be naïve, of course they know.”

“Nah.” She took a deep swig of wine. “They may
suppose
it is. They may even be right in that supposition. But the only way for them to
know
, is to get a look at the sketches—which we now possess. Gossip is like ginger nuts: delicious, ten to the copper, and worthless cold. As I am leaving in a week or so to sell these abroad, it will all be forgotten in a fortnight, and your—body remains your private property, to dispose of as you will.”

Theron irritably shrugged off one of the blankets. “Unless Galing chooses to tell someone.”

“But he will not. For the same reason you’re not getting married.”

“Which is what?”

“I am contesting your claim to Tremontaine.”

He stood up. He was quite warm now. “Jess! Are you serious?”

“Only temporarily. My mother was an actress, remember? I’ve got about a week left to be very serious about it, then I can leave and you can forget the whole thing.”

He said, “My mother is a surgeon, but I’m not always trying to cut people open. How are you contesting my claim?”

“By pretending to be legitimate. I got one of my old friends to forge me some documents: it’s not hard to do Alec’s signature, and Rose could barely write.”

He heard a brittle sorrow behind her words. “Jess,” he said gently. “You know if you really wanted the duchy—”

It was her turn to jump up, waving her wine goblet like a banner: “No! I
don’t
want the duchy! Even if I
were
legitimate. I’ve spent my whole life avoiding the duchy and what it means—can’t you get that through your head? It’s all a diversion—to convince the Randalls that you’re a bad bargain after all.”

“The Randalls! Were they here?”

“I’m not crude. They’ll hear what they have to. But the paintings are not the point. If you think they didn’t already know about you and Ysaud, you underestimate your soon-to-be-former future in-laws. What’s a bit of talk about a man they already know can’t keep his breeches closed, when the end of it is their daughter being installed as Duchess Tremontaine? No, my dear; what will scare off the Randalls is the notion that the girl might be stuck with you, without the title.”

He said admiringly, “Katherine will never speak to you again.”

“Yes, she will. I warned her, and I got her to finance my down-payment to Ysaud. Best investment she’ll ever make. She’ll thank me. They all will. No one liked this marriage but you, Theron. Katherine liked the idea of you being married, but the Randalls are no great catch. You can do better. As for Sophia, not to mention Marcus and Susan . . . I think they’ll forgive my methods.” There was a pause while she refilled her goblet. “By the way, you’ve missed something.”

“What?” The wine and meat sat warm in his belly. He felt comfortable, unburdened, soft as warm wax.

“Galing! This also took care of Galing for you. He very nearly gave the sketches directly to me, since he thinks I’m trying to unseat you, something he’s theoretically in favor of. But he’s cautious, and he’s a political creature. I could easily lose, and if I do, he doesn’t want to risk being on Katherine’s bad side. Never underestimate the advantage of powerful relatives.”

“That’s what Katherine’s always telling me.” Jessica grimaced at him. “I have just one last question,” he said, rolling crumbs on the tabletop.

“Yes?”

“How did you know I didn’t really want to get married?”

“Oh . . . lots of ways. You never talked about the girl, for one.” She forbore to mention the fight near the Apricot. “When Galing threatened you with the sketches, you didn’t even worry about how your betrothed would feel. That was pretty telling. But most of all . . . Most of all—you said Katherine talked you into it. I knew that was a bad idea.”

Theron grinned at his half-sister. “How well you know us all.” He leaned back in his chair. “You know, it’s not that they’re not both splendid people, Katherine and Marcus. But don’t you find that their vision is a little narrow?”

Jessica idly sliced a grape into tiny pieces with her knife. “Council and taxes, you mean?”

“Taxes and Tremontaine. Tremontaine and the City. They don’t really have a feel for the Land,” he said with newfound certainty. “The whole land, I mean. It’s all there, if you are looking for it. Metaphorically, of course: nobody can see it all with their eyes open. But if you close them, thus . . . I can see corn growing in Morpeth, and the worm gnawing at the root. The fish in the river—salmon racing past Buckhaven, and the way the rain falls to make the waters rise.

“What’s Tremontaine to all that?” Theron asked.

Dear Sophia,

Theron and I are having such a good time catching up
with one another that I’ve asked him to stay here with me
for a few more days. You and Katherine will be hearing
shortly from the Randalls, I make no doubt, and a few
other people as well. Pretend to be annoyed with me, and if
anyone asks, please tell them Theron is shut up with you
there in the Riverside House, sulking and plotting revenge.
He sends his love, as do I—

Jessica

chapter
VI

LORD NICHOLAS GALING HAD PLAYED HIS HIGHEST cards and the pirate queen had trumped them all. He found he could not take his loss philosophically. His conviction that Campion was a threat to the city’s peace was not yet dead, though his reason insisted that Lady Jessica’s action had neatly gutted it. What could the boy do, exposed before all his peers as an artist’s model and plaything? No one would remember how beautiful the pictures were, how fine the compositions, how vivid and living the tints. All the nobles would remember was Campion’s shame. Were he proclaimed king twenty times over, all they’d do was laugh.

Immediately upon returning the sketches to Campion, Nicholas had left Lady Caroline’s Folly and strode off into the night, ignoring the chair-men and linkboys clamoring for his custom. By the time he had turned into his own street, his feet were sore from walking so far and so briskly in thin slippers, and his heart was sore with his failure to bring Campion to heel. It was all very well for the city to be saved, but Galing was too honest, at least with himself, not to acknowledge that he wanted to be the one who’d saved it—not some showy bastard with dyed hair and gaudy, foreign clothes. Waiting for his manservant to let him in, he decided to burn all the paper cluttering his study: Edward’s notes, Arlen’s ambiguous messages, the transcripts of the examinations of Finn and Lindley at MidWinter. All Henry Fremont’s letters. Then he’d drink a glass or two of brandy, go to bed, and put the whole disaster out of his mind. It was what Arlen had told him to do, after all.

But when Nicholas took off his velvet coat and picked up a handful of paper with the intention of casting it into the flames of his study fire, his eye fell on the words written at the top: “From the first days of the Union, the nobles hated the wizards, and plotted to weaken them.”

Basil St Cloud’s words, transcribed by Henry Fremont just as he’d spoken them. They were incautious words by any measure. Seditious words, if heard and taken to heart by men who hated the nobles. Dangerous words, if uttered by a man who believed that magic was real. And hadn’t the magister offered to defend that very proposition before the whole University this spring?

Did Basil St Cloud honestly believe in magic? How could he, when the wizards had been debunked by every major historian of the past two hundred years, beginning with Vespas in
The Book of Kings
, and proceeding through Fleming and Trevor and White to old Doctor Tortua in
Hubris and the Fall
of the Kings
? Why, the man’s lectures were peppered with quotes from them all; how could he be planning to debunk the debunkers? Nicholas ground his teeth. Maybe there was something in Henry’s lecture notes he’d overlooked.

Impatiently, Nicholas began to rummage through the mess of papers. His manservant came in with the brandy and a face like a priest at MidWinter, asking if he’d like something to eat. Nicholas rejected the brandy with loathing. If he was going to make sense of all this and prove that Arlen was wrong, for once, he was going to have to work all night. And if he was going to work all night, he needed chocolate, not brandy.

He ordered the chocolate and returned to the papers. He’d allowed them to get out of order, piling this on that without regard to chronology or subject. Well, he’d just have to arrange them and see what turned up.

It was a tedious process. He needed to read at least a little of each paper before assigning it a pile, and many of Fremont’s reports touched on several subjects at once: the Northerners, the enmity between St Cloud and Doctor Roger Crabbe, St Cloud’s lectures on ancient history. He kept at it doggedly.

Chocolate appeared. He drank it, and ate the cold meat that appeared with it. Afterward, his head was clearer, and the work went faster. Midnight came and went, and still Lord Nicholas read and sorted with increasing excitement. The pattern he had outlined to Arlen was clearer than ever, but now he saw that the figure standing in the center, the figure to whom all paths led, was not Theron Campion, but Campion’s lover, Basil St Cloud. Basil St Cloud, who believed the wizards’ power to be not only true magic but a benevolent gift to the land and its people.

There it was, in plain view, for anyone who bothered to look for it, transcribed from St Cloud’s lectures: “
The ancient wizards
were first, servants of the Land, and second, servants of the Truth.
When they came South with King Alcuin the Diplomat, they learned
to serve political expedience as well. It weakened their magic and
weakened their minds
.” And there: “
The nobles mistrusted the wizards from the beginning and passed law after law limiting their influence and the practice of magic
.”

Basil St Cloud was a careful man, meticulous and scholarly. Surely he would never have posed the challenge if he wasn’t very sure he had the proof to win it.

It was the only thing that made sense of it all. Galing could not imagine what St Cloud had found, but it would have to be something spectacular, something incontestable. It would, he realized reluctantly, have to be something that genuinely demonstrated magic’s potency. Not a letter, not a document. The real thing: a talisman, perhaps, or a wizard’s manual. Whatever it was, he’d use it to win the debate on the Great Hall steps. And then what? Take up the Horn Chair and go tamely back to lecturing and writing? Nicholas laughed at the thought. No. The Horn Chair couldn’t possibly be the point of this ridiculous challenge. If Basil St Cloud had found something to waken a sleeping magic from the past, waken it to life and to his service, what would he—what would any man—do with it but use it to take everything? Say St Cloud had found the means to transform himself into a latter-day wizard. Surely his ambition was to rule the land as the wizards had ruled it in ancient times.