The Fatal Child (41 page)

‘Your Majesty,’ he gasped.

He saw other things. The guards and servants, aghast at his sudden appearance. The Baron Lackmere, glaring up at him from where he sat; a small table with a board of chess pieces set upon it; a torch on the wall, flaring and sputtering by a black slit window that showed the night outside.

He lifted the Cup in both hands and pushed it towards the King.

‘Your Majesty,’ he said again.

The King stared down at it. ‘Take it away,’ he said hoarsely.

Padry shook his head and held it out to him again.

‘Take it away,’ said Ambrose. ‘I don’t want it.’

‘Your Majesty, I beg you.’

He did not add:
You betrayed me
.

He did not say:
The Prince Rolfe has died to bring you this. Two good men have died. I have walked a day of darkness and nearly died myself
.

He only repeated: ‘I beg you.’

Beyond the King the Baron Lackmere rose to his feet. He was watching Ambrose.

Slowly the King lifted his hands and took the Cup from Padry.

‘Very well,’ he said heavily. He drew breath. ‘And I suppose … I suppose now is the time to look in it, if ever.’

‘There are also messages from your mother.’

‘Later,’ said the King. He looked at both of them. ‘Neither of you may follow me.’

He left them, passing into his own bedchamber. Padry heard the door bang shut behind them. He sank onto the nearest seat – the King’s own stool. Across the room he heard the splash of liquid. Someone – a servant – was pouring something. Still the world of the brown rocks clung in his brain. He could lift his head and see, beyond the walls of the chamber, that dreary landscape stretching away in all directions, and the shape of the monstrous prince moving distantly among them.

‘Here,’ said the Baron Lackmere, putting something down on the small table beside him. ‘Wine. You need it.’

He will not want to look, thought Padry. He will think that he will not look into the Cup. He will decide that he prefers to trust her and that he will simply come out and tell us she is innocent. He will think that
we will believe he has looked and seen that all is well.

He betrayed me. And yet – what do I feel? Not much. Just pity, perhaps. He is trapped now.

Padry bowed his head. The wine was at his elbow but he did not touch it. His eyes rested on the chessboard. They must have been playing, the two of them. The Baron and the King had been playing together while they waited for news. The King had been white. He had more pieces on the board. But black had taken the centre squares. His knights and rooks were dangerous.

Padry frowned at the board, trying to clear his head. Wispy images of the brown rocks still circled in his mind. He did not like this position. What could be done to strengthen it?

He will think that he will not look, Padry thought again. He will sit and wait, counting, perhaps reciting something to pass the time. He will watch the Cup sitting before him, waiting until enough time has passed and he can plausibly emerge to announce the Queen’s innocence.

And his eye will rest on the Cup. And then he will think: Why not look, after all? He is a man. She is his wife. Why
not
look – not because his servants demand it, but because he
can?

And then …

There was no way out of this position. The white pieces pointed aimlessly. The power of black was concentrating against the King. There would have to be a sacrifice to gain time. The Queen? Only as a last resort. But perhaps it was coming to the last resort.
There had to be a sacrifice. There must always be a sacrifice, if Heaven were to be appeased. And now…

A cry shook the next room. A cry of rage and despair from beyond the door. And a crash of stone breaking!

Padry gasped and clutched the table. The pieces scattered and spilled. For a moment it had seemed to him that the whole world had shaken. He had seen it – the brown rocks, rolling and tumbling. He had seen the monster-prince fall to the ground as if stunned by a giant blow. He had felt the earth groan in his very bowels. He could still feel it – a long roar of rocks lifting, and a noise like a thousand far-off thunders as the dragon of the world took the strain.

He blinked. He was in the chamber. Nothing had changed. The chessboard was upset but he had done that himself. The torches burned steadily in the brackets. Their flames had not even flickered. There was no sign in this world of what had happened in the other.

Across the room the baron was staring at him.

‘That was him,’ he said. ‘The King!’

Padry scrambled to his feet. Together they strode across the room and flung open the door to the King’s chamber.

The King was standing at the window with his back to them. His hands were clutched together behind him. On the floor were the broken shards of the Cup, brown and scattered. The whitewash of the wall was marked where the King had flung it in his rage. The heavy stem lay within a yard of Padry’s toe.

In the corridor they could hear people asking questions. Footsteps were approaching. A guard was knocking at the antechamber door. And above the others rose the voice of a woman.

‘Ambrose!’ she cried. ‘Ambrose!’

‘Your Majesty …?’ Padry began.

‘Very well,’ said Ambrose at last, in a hoarse, dry voice that was barely his own. ‘Very well. When she returns, you may arrest her at the gate. I do not want to see her.’

Neither of them spoke. The voice of the woman came again, nearer now, speaking it seemed out of the air. ‘Ambrose! What have you done? Ambrose!’

Padry knew it. It was Phaedra.

When he looks, I shall be as close as I can
, she had said.

With a snarl like a beast the King fled from the room. And crying
‘Ambrose! Ambrose!
’ the voice pursued him down the corridors of his palace.

P
ART
III
T
HE
D
RAGON

here were no more ladies-in-waiting, no garlands or musicians, no more silk-clad young knights to greet the Queen. Hard-faced men in steel surrounded her on her return to Tuscolo. She was escorted to a high-ceilinged room above the middle gatehouse. The room was furnished, with a hearth, but it was dark. There was just one long window looking inwards over the middle bailey. There she was held, alone, with the door locked and guards on the stair. The King did not come to see her. No date was set for her trial.

Columns of armed riders clattered through the gate-tunnel under her room. The first, mounted on the day of her arrest, headed for Appleton to demand the surrender of Gueronius. The second, which issued a few days later, took the road for Luckingham, because news had come that Gueronius had remained at his manor there after the Queen had passed. But he was not at Luckingham, and he was not at Appleton, and although riders hunted for him across the Kingdom no word of his capture came to Tuscolo.

It was a miserable time for Melissa. She was allowed to stay in the Queen’s rooms in the keep, which were now empty except for her. But otherwise the castle treated her as if she might be in league with its enemies. Three times a day she went to the gatehouse to attend the Queen. If she carried anything – a basket of sweetmeats, a shawl, a spare blanket – the guards examined it carefully before she was allowed in. They did not search her body but they let her know that they might. And the first time she left the Queen in her prison, a sergeant led her straight to the castle dungeons. There, behind a low, iron-studded door, was a chamber with strange and cruel machines, winches and iron spikes, and a small man with a head like an egg who explained to her, in a wheezy, kindly manner, what the machines did, and what they would do to her if she were ever suspected of carrying a message, pen or paper, a tool, or any other forbidden thing in to the Queen.

Few people spoke with her. No one else seemed to trust her. She seemed to be watched wherever she went. Even when she was with Puck she was tongue-tied and depressed. She knew that eyes were following them as they walked aimlessly around the courtyard together. Those steel-clad men were adding Puck to their list of suspects. Perhaps he, too, would be called down to the dungeon room for a talk with the friendly, egg-headed man about his machines.

When Puck enquired about the Queen, she asked him sharply why.

He shrugged. ‘Sorry for her,’ he answered.

‘You’re a good person, Puck,’ she said. And she wanted to ask if he was not sorry for her, too. But she did not, because she feared he might not be.

‘Don’t bother with the bed, Melissa,’ said Atti in the dark gatehouse room at dusk. ‘And I don’t want you to wait on me. Just make up the fire and talk to me.’

Melissa put the warming pan in the bed anyway. (There was no point in letting it go cold, was there?) Then she crouched by the fire, laid some logs and blew the embers back to life. When she looked up she found that Atti had brought the supper tray over to the hearth herself.

‘We’ll share it,’ she said. ‘One plate between us, just as we did in the mountains. Were you sorry to leave the mountains, Melissa?’

‘Not at the time, Your Majesty.’

Atti sighed. ‘Neither was I. And don’t call me “Your Majesty,” Melissa. I should never have let you do that. How silly I was. We would have been much happier if we had just stayed up there – all of us would have been. I wish I could see the peaks again. Here – you must eat those, because I don’t like them …’

‘Those’ were a small pile of honey-cakes, which the ladies-in-waiting would always squabble over and which Melissa almost never tasted fresh.

‘What did you like best about the mountains, Melissa?’

‘No other people,’ said Melissa promptly. ‘No trouble. And when you did meet them, they said what they meant so you didn’t have to guess.’

‘Of course we miss that now,’ said Atti. ‘Although if you had asked me at the time I should have said that was what I liked least. For me, I suppose …’ She put her head on one side. ‘Oh, those gulfs of air, and the hillside dropping away beneath your feet so that your stomach turned just a little with the thought of it! I feel that I have lived my life on the edge of a fall. But at least I could see it then.’ She paused. ‘And the mountain waters. Do you remember how they turned that grey-blue colour when the snows melted? So cold and so beautiful! I’ve never seen that anywhere else. Oh – and do you remember that kid – the one the hill boy killed?’

‘Yes, Your M— Yes, I do.’

‘I know he was trying to be kind to us but … Do you suppose if we had stopped him, he would have let us keep it? I often wonder.’

‘Maybe. But when it grew there’d have been trouble with the other billy. One of them would have driven the other out. Then it’d have had to live out on the hillsides with no dams. Not much of a life. A wolf or lynx would have got it in the end.’

Sometimes there was just no place for a thing, even if it was beautiful.

‘I still cry for it, you know.’ Atti brushed her cheek as if tears had already gathered there.

‘Tell you something,’ said Melissa, who had now had time to stop being a queen’s servant and go all the way back to being a girl’s companion. ‘That hill boy. Couldn’t talk a word then, could he? Well, he’s here in
Tuscolo. He’s a scholar now. He talks and writes as well as the rest of them.’

Atti’s eyes opened wide with astonishment. ‘Truly, Melissa? You’ve seen him?’

‘Plenty of times.’

And Atti looked at her, and the corners of her mouth turned in that rare smile.

‘And – do you like him?’

Melissa stopped, with her mouth open.

How did she know?

How could Atti, who paid so little attention to others, guess at all the silly thoughts that chased through her head about Puck? How did she do it?

It must have shown in her face, for Atti laughed – a sudden, delighted sound, light and sweet and free of any triumph or fear. And Melissa had to laugh with her. Her chest forced it up through her in great gulps. And they went on laughing until both of them wept indeed.

‘Will you marry him?’

‘Might do,’ said Melissa carefully. ‘I don’t know. All sorts of things to think about, aren’t there?’