The King's Hand (20 page)

Eamon gaped. Anderas tried to steady his uncertain breathing.

“Anderas, do not be afraid – least of all of me.” Eamon laid a light hand on Anderas's shoulder. “Go and rest, captain. The quarter will have need of you in the morning. I will come and find you when my duties permit me to do so, and we will speak of all of this.”

“Yes, Lord Goodman,” Anderas answered, and bowed low. “Thank you.”

Eamon watched the captain return to the East Quarter College. Anderas supported himself a moment on the threshold and then went inside.

Drawing a deep breath, Eamon walked back to the Four Quarters.

He desperately needed rest.

The streets were quiet and the music from distant alley inns was faint. Ashway's words burned in his mind. As he considered them he felt himself turn cold.

How could Ashway have been there at the battle where Ede had fallen? And when the voice of Edelred had spoken, what exactly had the seer seen? Was he truly to die – in his own blood?

I spoke it, Eben's son!
the voice proclaimed, with such force that Eamon staggered.
You shall see how truly I did so!

Eamon turned from the voice, shivered it away. He pressed his hands into his eyes, drew deep breath. He would not choose to believe it. He would choose the King's way. He was the First Knight.

Have courage, Eamon.
The other, quieter, voice stirred in his mind. He wondered at it.
Courage.

He looked up. Something came down the Coll towards him. At first he could not make out what it was, but it became clearer as torchlight pooled upon it. He stopped.

It was a low, open-topped, horse-drawn wagon whose driver, a militiaman, yawned as he urged his beast on. Eamon realized what grisly load the wagon bore through the streets in the dead of night: bodies, for the pyre.

The wagon reached the Four Quarters and the driver turned his vehicle towards the North Gate. Eamon stepped back to let him pass, shadows shifting over man and beast. As the driver spoke quietly to his horse, the voice drew Eamon's attention. He looked up to measure the man, and doing so, saw the wagon's burden clearly.

Suddenly his eyes were caught, his breath stolen. He rushed forward and, as he saw, his heart was torn in two.

“Stop!” His cry throbbed in the empty street. “
Stop!
”

The driver halted and turned to stare at him, his lips parted to the platitudes of lordship to which a Hand was entitled. Eamon did not care. He saw nothing – nothing except that one face, lying among a dozen others.

“Stop!” he cried, as though he could somehow undo what had been done. He could not.

The driver stared at him, his mouth voicing words. Eamon did not hear them.

With shaking hands Eamon tore down the back latch of the wagon. But the face before him did not change – it was still
that
face, a face he had long loved.

It was unreal. It could
not
be true…

He reached, touched the pale forehead, traced bloodied hollows where bright eyes had once lived and laughed, reached for hands that had once clasped his own in friendship. They were hewn at the wrist.

Eamon's chest heaved with grief as his shaking fingers confirmed what his eyes saw so unwillingly. It would never, could never, be
un-
seen. He opened his lips to cry out – but no cry came, and no tears could unbind his eyes.

It was Mathaiah.

He reeled. His breath came in ragged gasps through the constricted, contorted passageways of his breast. That this could be done… that this could be done to any man, had been done to many a man before, was known to him. But that this could be done to
him
…

Again and again he looked – the eyeless hollows violated his sight. Robbed of their light, they mocked him. Grief lay thick in his stomach.

The voice of Edelred crawled amidst his thoughts.

Look
, it told him.

Eamon looked, and the dull, blackened voids consumed him.

With a cry he reached out. He could not look, he could not, and with his hands he sought the face and covered the hateful hollows. Suddenly there was blood and gore on his hands and it seemed to slip inside of him and work its grisly way into his very heart. He cried out again and clenched his eyes shut. But the hollows were there and met him in the darkness, and the voice taunted him with the story of their making.

He retched. He tore his hands away, forced his eyes open. His whole body shook as the maelstrom gripped him.

“Who did this?” His voice was nearly a scream. The driver shook before him.

“My lord, I do not –”

“
Who did this?”

“My lord –”

His rage crumbled into helpless grief, and, taking Mathaiah's head between his hands, he laid his quaking face next to his friend's. The mess of the sockets smeared him.

The words pronounced by Ashway's tongue came to him: “
You will suffer this very night
.”

He had delayed too long: it was his doing. He could have endured any grief, any treachery, any accusation…

Any but this.

“Lord Goodman.”

He looked up from his place among the corpses.

Ladomer was there. The Right Hand's lieutenant watched him.

Trembling, Eamon choked back the feelings surging in him. He could not weep, he could not cry, he could not howl. He was watched. He said nothing.

“Come down, Lord Goodman.” Ladomer's voice was cold.

It was also a warning. Ladomer's harsh, unyielding stare drove into him. He knew that the Right Hand also watched him through those eyes. Ladomer was right: for his own sake, he had to come down. He knew it as surely as he knew that his place was there, cradling the broken corpse.

What a man you are, Eben's son!
The voice wove deftly among his tormented thoughts.
Twice you would betray and abandon your wretched ward – once to the Pit, again to the pyre.

The jaws of the trap that held him were strong. He could not stay and yet… how could he go?

Where is your brazen courage, Eben's son?
the voice sneered.

A shudder ran through Eamon with the intensity of a blow. As the voice mocked him, it snatched from him even the smallest victory he had ever won against it.

How little it takes to subdue you! But then, son of Eben, there never was much of you to subdue.

The voice deadened his thought and senses. It had to be true: he was defeated, had been from the start. What other explanation could there be? He had been a fool to pit himself against the powers that strove in him. Mathaiah had paid for it – for his folly. Surely there was nothing left except surrender to the voice of the throned?

But the idea of surrendering stoked some last reserve of courage in his heart. Had he not faced this voice before? Had it not been cast down in Hughan's name? Was the voice not, by nature, that of a liar? Hughan had said as much, and, as Eamon grappled for his sense, the King's words came clearly into his mind:

“
It is your heart that the throned will strike, because it is there that he must conquer you…”

The voice might have held sway over him once, and he did not doubt that it would try to sway him again, but its power lay in his own choice. Choosing to heed it now would be the true betrayal of his friend and obeisance of his courage. Eamon realized that, until he yielded, he was neither a traitor nor defeated.

He looked back at the face between his hands. Fresh doubt assailed him. He could choose to renounce the voice and its insidious counsel, but could he truly choose to leave his friend? His throat was taut with grief and he stared at the hollows, their darkness reaching for him.

How could he go?

You would not be leaving him, Eamon.

The words washed over his heart. This voice called him by his name – his true name – and he trusted it. It called him on to courage.
You would not be leaving him; he is not there. Even unto his last hour, he loved you. He loves you still.

The whispered comfort faded. Strange quiet stilled his heavy heart.

Yes, he would go down; it was right and necessary for him to do so. But he would not do so for Ladomer or for Edelred.

Slowly, Eamon bowed and kissed Mathaiah's forehead. It was cold and bloodied, and though that grieved him still it held less fear for him than when first he had seen it. It was not the farewell he would have chosen, was scarcely a farewell at all – but he chose it.

Silently, he stepped down and met Ladomer's hard gaze. The Right Hand's lieutenant crisply closed the back of the wagon before stepping back and gesturing for the alarmed driver to move on.

The driver did not need to be asked twice. Eamon watched as Mathaiah's broken, eyeless body was taken away to feed a pyre where it would be reduced to nothing.

“Lord Goodman, he was a traitor.” Ladomer had followed his gaze. His voice was deathly quiet. Eamon did not flinch from it.

“He was my ward, Ladomer,” he answered simply, turning to face his friend. Emotion surged from him with power and grief he did not understand. “He was my ward,
and I loved him.
”

Ladomer stepped towards him with an ireful look. “You tread dangerous ground, Eamon,” he said, pressing something into Eamon's fingers. It was cold and sharp. As it rested in his hand Ladomer watched him, daring him to move. He stood still. “You are summoned to see the Master in the morning.”

“Yes.”

At last the wagon was gone. Ladomer nodded once to him. “Good night, Lord Goodman.”

Eamon watched him, a shadow that melted into the streets. Then he looked down.

A signet ring was in his palm. The seal that it bore was an owl.

He wept.

C
HAPTER
XI

T
he Coll seemed unreal beneath Eamon's feet, the whole road both familiar and alien to him. The doorways that lined the road, each darkened by the tenebrous night, were beyond his wit and sight, as was any man whom he passed.

Ashway and Mathaiah were dead.

His exhausted limbs grew desperate and heavy. His hands shook and he was unable to muster strength enough to raise his head to face the gates. Mathaiah was dead. As Eamon walked, sorrow and grief fell into step with him, threatening to trip him or crush him with the weight of their burdens.

He passed the Hands' Gate, the long colonnade, the posts of the Hands' Hall, and at last climbed the stairway to his own room. None stirred in the hall – no man met him and none heard him pass. His hands shook as he tried to open his door, the handle slipping between his bloody fingers. He gagged and tore at the handle.

With a silenced sob he pushed the door open. He had to clean the blood from his hands and face, but it would not help him. The bloody witness penetrated him like poison.

You will not wash it away!
The voice laughed at his dull simplicity.
You have not the skill, Eben's son! No man lives who can free you from what you bear.

He closed his door. The very wood watched him. The hateful walls that hemmed him round were dark, for the moon had shifted. Only pale starlight reached him. It was cold and bitter. He looked up at the distant flickers. Stars. Swords and stars.

For a moment bitterness masked his grief. Had Hughan known that he would have to bear this? Had Hughan known, the day he drew Mathaiah into his service, what cost that service would demand? Had he known and yet allowed the boy to go?

Rage reared archly in his breast: rage against the King and against himself. Hughan had known – and done nothing. Eamon had known – had
always
known – that Dunthruik was no place for Mathaiah. Eamon had betrayed the young man to Alessia, and she had drawn Mathaiah's name from her lover, amidst a silken lair of pillows and firelight.

She had done it. She – the one who had spoken out his secrets and betrayed him to his enemies – had done it.

Anguish clawed in his throat.
She
had given Mathaiah to the throned.

And you did not save him.
The voice was there again, cased in the coils of his rage.
Even thus did you betray him, Eben's son. You did it willingly.

“No!” Eamon heard his own voice, a desperate whisper in the dark room. The walls closed around him and the stars grew faint. His throat constricted so that he could barely breathe, and, all the while, the voice laughed and the broken hollows of Mathaiah's dead face rose up before him.

You made no plan, no attempt, to save him. You let her treachery go unchallenged. You let her beguile you. So he burns.

Bile came to Eamon's throat, the smell of burning flesh to his nose, and suddenly he saw the pyre in Edesfield. When he looked up it was not Telo's face upon that pyre but blackened pits where eyes had once been – he saw Mathaiah's face horrifically twisted by the scourging tongues of flame.

He drove his face into his hands with a cry, but still the image ground at him. Suddenly Ashway's voice screamed in his mind; Overbrook's blood touched his feet; Alben's hands were at his throat, and Giles's bloodied sword swooped overhead while young men screamed. In the furious scream he heard Mathaiah shriek also, and the boy's agony ripped through him.

You did all these things.

“No!”

He could not bear it. His grief and rage bred bitter progeny in his heart.

But he could not cry – he could not. The Master's banner hung over him, watching, listening, waiting. He could not howl out his grief into the narrow walls of that room; he would be heard and then be lost.

So had he been heard when he had confided in her.

It was the weakness of your heart that day that condemned him, son of Eben.

His legs lost their strength. He sank to his knees but they could not hold him; he sank until his whole body was prostrate on the frozen, stony floor. The chill met every inch of him and he feebly dashed his bloodied hands against the stone, clawing at it with his quivering fingers. There was no comfort for him – no one to unburden him from his woe – and there could be no grieving and no tears. He could not remain silent, and yet he could not speak.