The Fall of Neskaya

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Taniquel wished she were a telepath, that she might read the thoughts of the assembled Comyn, or at least enough of an empath to catch their emotions. All she could sense was her own battering fear. Who would they believe? Who did they want to believe?

  “Let us hear from the woman herself,” said a younger man in the Ridenow colors of green and gold. A century and more ago, Allart Hastur had brought the long feud between Hastur and Ridenow to an end, so that Serrais and Thendara might well be considered allies.

  “Taniquel Hastur-Acosta,” the old man said.

  She lifted her chin, so that everyone could see she had no fear. “Vai dom.”

  “What have you to say? Is this marriage, this alliance of peace, welcome to you?”

  Answer only what you are asked.

  “It is most definitely not, my lords.” She looked directly at Deslucido, eyes steady. “I never consented to it.” As she spoke, Taniquel felt the unwavering light shine forth from her face.

  She felt rather than heard the ripple of reaction around the room. Triumph sparked within her. She had faced Deslucido and been borne out by truthspell itself. Who would dare question her now?

  “Do you now wish to remain in the household of your uncle, Rafael Hastur?” another of the Comyn asked.

  I wish to rule Acosta as is my right, to preserve and hold it for my son.

  She did not say the words aloud, only in her heart. She said, “I do.”

  “More to the point,” the bushy-bearded lord in Alton colors said, not to her but to the assembly, “will she do as she is bid? Will she honor our decision and the commands of her King? Or will we have another round of this running about the countryside, following her own whims, thinking only of herself, heedless of the consequences?” By his tone, he indicated she ought to be married off at once to someone manly enough to keep her from causing any more trouble.

  Stung, Taniquel bit back a reply. Was he trying to goad her, to test her, or was he simply thoughtlessly rude?

  Truthspell blazed from Rafael’s face as he said with perfect politeness, “I am this woman’s kinsman, vai domyn, and I am responsible for her behavior. If you have anything more to say on that subject, Alton, you had best say it to me.”

  “N-no—not at this time.”

  “Are there any further questions?” the old lord said. “Then we will hear the response.”

  For a long moment, Damian Deslucido looked down at his hands, spread palms down before him on the table. The fingers were wide and strong, callused from swordplay, the back of one hand crossed by an old scar. He wore no rings, although whitened, shiny skin at the base of several fingers betrayed their absence. These were the hands, Taniquel thought, of a man other fighting men would respect.

  He lifted his head so that all could see the shimmering blue light on his face. “My lords, what can I answer except the truth? War is war, a thing women cannot understand. I do not deny that I defeated Padrik Acosta on the field of battle and now rule his kingdom. When words failed to resolve our differences, steel triumphed and that was an end to it. We men know this is the way of things, and so did the men of Acosta. They knew, as do we all, that after such a quick, decisive victory, bloodshed ends and the new order prevails. Once the castle was secure, every courtesy was extended to the late King’s widow. Attended by her own ladies, she remained in the security of her own quarters with all the familiar comforts. What cause had she to complain of that?”

  Around the table, heads nodded. The old man said to Taniquel, “Were you mistreated—molested, starved, humiliated, thrown into a dungeon?”

  “I was—No, none of these things happened.” But that is not what happened.

  “She was offered an honorable marriage to my son,” Deslucido went on, his voice becoming ever more silken with confidence, “who, as I have told you, is my sole heir. She would have been Queen not just of Acosta but of all the lands of Greater Ambervale.” With the briefest gesture of one hand, he managed to convey the vastness of his conquests.

  Taniquel flushed as Old Alton snorted his disapproval. She saw in the faces of the Comyn that they all thought her a weak-minded fool for turning down such wealth and power.

  She shook herself a little, realizing she had missed a beat of Deslucido’s speech.

  “. . . gave due consideration to the sensibilities of a woman who is young, inexperienced, and newly a widow. Despite the urgency of a smooth and complete transition of power, my son was willing to be patient. She was given leave to sit vigil in the chapel at her husband’s body and to see him properly buried, before her answer was required.”

  War, as Deslucido had said, was war, Taniquel thought miserably. No pouting or ranting could bring back Padrik or undo what had been done. As a woman, she was expected to accept what had happened and to make the best future she could.

  “The very night she disappeared, she dined with my son and me. She toasted the future of Acosta with us. She gave every indication that the match was acceptable to her. What were we to think when no trace of her could be found the following morning? We feared for her safety, we searched everywhere. Why should a bride who had appeared so content leave the comfort and safety of her own home, unless something terrible had happened to her? But we found no body, no trace of assassin or kidnapper.”

  No, it was not like that. It was not like that at all. Taniquel remembered the hours of terror and exhaustion on the trail, never daring to rest for long lest they find her.

  “Now I discover she is safe when we thought her dead or worse, she has been so all along, and,” Damian raised his hands in a gesture of incomprehension of such capricious-ness, “it does not please her to go back. Perhaps life at Acosta has paled beside the entertainments of a big city like Thendara. Perhaps she has found some other suitor, one more biddable to her whims. Who can tell?

  “Should she come to her senses and decide to return to her home, we will accept her gladly and on the same terms as before. A proper marriage di catenas, to be Queen of Acosta and consort to the heir to Greater Ambervale, the security of everything she had known. However,” and here Deslucido’s golden voice darkened to brass, “we are not Dry Towns barbarians, to impose our will on a woman who is truly unwilling, if she has just cause. Those who are weak of will or simply misled can be guided and the ignorant given instruction.”

  He shook his head. “I leave it to your wisdom, my lords, to decide which is the case with Taniquel Acosta. I ask for nothing which is not fair and right. If you feel she has good reason to break her implied assent, then simple justice demands the payment of a dowry in recompense.”

  The border lands!

  So it had come to this, even as she had feared. Taniquel rose to leave the room as she was commanded. A cralmac servant escorted her and Lady Caitlin back to the apartment. The touch of the slender furred fingers on her own brought no comfort, for the creature had no speech. Thoughts jumbled together in her mind, all the things she would have said, should have said.

  The cralmac left them at the door. Taniquel had not realized how tense she was, her muscles tight as the strings of a rryl. Something gnawed at the back of her mind, something which was not right.

  Caitlin reached out with a feather touch, her fingertips under Taniquel’s arm as she led her into the sitting room and to a chair. “My dear, you are shaking like a leaf.”

  Taniquel accepted a cup of cool herbal tisane, although she was not thirsty. Caitlin had blended mint and honeyleaf along with something astringent.

  “It is no use,” Taniquel said. “We should never have come. The Council will surely demand that the King either return me or surrender the Drycreek lands. Deslucido—damn him to Zandru’s coldest hell!—has won.”

  24

  “You do not know the verdict of the Council yet,” Caitlin cautioned Taniquel.

  “If they meant to dismiss his case, why not do so at once? Why take so long? Unless—unless he has already gotten what he wanted, to be accepted as one of the Comyn, to be counted as a
member of the Council. No,” Taniquel went on, answering herself, “it’s got to be more than that. He’s a proud man, but not in that way. It isn’t rank and recognition he wants, but power.”

  “Now you are sounding just like your uncle,” Caitlin said with a smile.

  “I mean to take back Acosta to hold it for Julian,” Taniquel replied. “I could do worse than learn the ways of the great lords from my uncle.”

  Caitlin settled back in her own chair and reached for her sewing. “It is a pity women cannot rule, for some—like you—have the mind for it, just as others have a talent for cooking or baking bread or matrix work, as I have. For all I know, there are women with a talent for swordplay. Even if you had laran, you would have been wasted in a Tower—

  “What is it, child?” she exclaimed as Taniquel leaped to her feet and began pacing.

  “Oh! I do not know! Yes, I am upset because the Council sided with Deslucido. There is something more—something that man said—wrong, wrong! I wish I could remember what it was. Ah, what is the use?”

  Taniquel sat down again, picked up the cup, set it on the table once more. Her body refused to be still, her arms and legs in constant motion. She wanted to jump, to scream, to throw something.

  “Everything Deslucido said was wrong!” Taniquel exclaimed. “And yet his words were true, they must have been. I saw the truthlight on his face—and it never vanished.”

  Serenely, Caitlin inclined her head over her stitching. “Truthspell is the trust that makes the Council possible.”

  “And what good is the Council?” Taniquel’s temper flared. “Where were they when Deslucido used aircars and smokebombs to trap Padrik at his own gates?”

  “The Council,” Caitlin replied, lowering her work to her lap and gazing at Taniquel with darkened, serious eyes, “is the one place on Darkover where warring kingdoms may work together for their mutual benefit. Where issues of laran can be openly aired and knowledge exchanged. Without such communication, the breeding programs might have gone unchecked, with horrors beyond even the lethal recessives and energon mutations we know about.”

  Taniquel brushed aside the comment. No one in these times forced marriages between brother and sister, father and daughter, in a misguided attempt to strengthen rare laran. What had this to do with bringing Deslucido to justice?

  “Perhaps,” Caitlin continued, as if thinking aloud, “some day the Council will evolve into a body capable of resolving differences without fighting. Rafael shares that hope, which is why we are here.”

  Taniquel realized then that while Rafael would never give in to Deslucido’s demands, he would consider himself bound by the united will of the Council. It was the price of using that same Council to stand against Deslucido, to eventually contain and subdue him.

  “It is one thing for ordinary men to bash each other with swords because they have neither the wit nor the patience to control themselves,” Caitlin went on. “It is quite another when the Towers devote themselves to mindless destruction. Do you think laran is but a toy, useful only for detecting lies and sending messages quickly?”

  Taniquel flushed. “I have seen aircars swooping down from the sky on my home! I am not ignorant of clingfire.”

  “But have you ever seen what it can do? The burning that never stops, that eats everything in its path?”

  “Even before we came here, we knew that Deslucido had commanded the workers at Tramontana to begin making clingfire,” Taniquel said.

  And his word cannot be trusted, she thought. She felt it, rather than knowing exactly why. The sense of wrongness about Deslucido’s testimony sizzled along her nerves. Perhaps it was seeing him again in the flesh, listening to his words. No, more than that: something . . . something had happened.

  Sweet Evanda and all the Blessed Ones.

  The vigil for Padrik.

  “Zandru’s coldest curse upon him!” Taniquel whispered.

  Deslucido lied under truthspell.

  No, it wasn’t possible. Yet it had happened. He had, almost in passing, said a thing which was the very opposite of what had happened. It was such an insignificant detail, it hardly mattered—so small he need not have guarded his speech, and yet he said it. The pale blue light had not faltered on his face.

  She had thought him devious, unscrupulous, willing to use trickery and to twist his words to accomplish his aims, but no more so than any other ambitious lordling. The ruse at the Acosta gates, the swift assumption of power, forcing her to marry his son in order to ensure legitimacy—these things, while unpleasant, were actions an ordinary man might take during war.

  He lied under truthspell.

  Her uncle was making a terrible mistake in thinking to contain Deslucido, to include him in the Comyn Council, to use their combined influence to restrain his use of laran weapons. If Deslucido had devised some trick of laran that rendered him immune to truthspell, he could promise them anything and then do exactly what he liked.

  Taniquel’s knees turned to water. She caught herself on the arm of her chair. Her skin turned icy, as if she had fallen into the river again.

  “What is wrong?” Caitlin cried, clearly alarmed. She rushed to Taniquel’s side. “What has happened? Are you unwell?”

  Taniquel opened her mouth to reply when footsteps sounded outside the door and Rafael Hastur entered. Although the morning was mild, a chill breeze swirled in before him. His eyes were clouded, stormy, his mouth set. Gerolamo closed the door behind them.

  Taniquel wished she had no laran at all, because she already knew what had passed in the Council. She followed him with her eyes as he went to the side table and poured a goblet of wine, not pausing to add water. He downed it in gulps, the only sound in the still room.

  The air trembled about her, laden with a sense of deadly purpose. She had, without knowing, taken a step from which she could never draw back. That it might mean her death, and that of her son, and uncounted men she would never know, meant nothing. She wanted to run weeping from the room, to lose herself in the winter-gray hills and that lonely travel shelter. Those memories, like dreams of other impossible things, must remain secret, locked away. As Queen, as comynara, as a woman of integrity, she must speak the truth, no matter what the cost.

  If only she did not know what she knew . . . but she did, and so had no choice but to speak.

  “Uncle,” she said with as much dignity as she could summon, “there is something I must tell you before you speak of the Council’s decision.”

  His look shifted, as if he braced himself against some last, desperate argument.

  “Damian Deslucido has found a way to lie under truthspell.”

  There it was. Simple, unadorned. Deadly.

  She saw shock sweep across Rafael’s face. Behind him, Gerolamo gasped.

  “Don’t talk nonsense, child,” Caitlin cried. Her usually pale cheeks flushed.

  Scowling, Rafael took a step toward Taniquel. For an instant, she feared he might strike her, he looked so angry. Through clenched teeth, he said, “Such things are not to be joked about.”

  He thought she was hurling ridiculous accusations in order to avoid being sent back to Acosta.

  “Surely she does not realize what she is saying,” Caitlin said. Quickly regaining her composure, she turned back to Taniquel and began explaining, as if to a small child. “Men may say misleading things under truthspell, depending upon how the question is phrased. But it is impossible to tell a deliberate falsehood.”

  Certainty, colder than ice and harder than steel, settled over Taniquel. “I know what I heard. He said a thing which was not true. He knew it was not true. And the light shone on his face.”

  “You must have been mistaken—” Caitlin protested, her voice faltering.

  “I know what I know. I heard what I heard.”

  “What thing?” Rafael’s voice rumbled, gravelly with emotion.

  “He said—he said I was given leave to sit vigil for Padrik. Uncle, I will swear by Aldones and Evanda and any god you
name, that I was locked in my chambers and forbidden to do so.”

  “Perhaps this was done by Deslucido’s subordinates,” Rafael said. “He might well have believed you free to do so. Then he would not have been lying, if he himself was deceived.”

  Taniquel shook her head. “I went to him, to demand an explanation when he had previously assured me that I might perform all the proper rites for Padrik. He brushed me off with a flimsy excuse, and then flatly refused to honor his word. It was by his own orders that I was confined.”

  “Clearly, he did not want you in plain sight, grieving over your slain husband, at a time when he sought to establish control over the castle,” Caitlin said.

  Taniquel did not give a rotten fig for Deslucido’s motivations. “He explicitly forbade me. And then, today, he swore I had been free.” She shuddered. “No wonder something felt wrong.”

  Caitlin glanced wild-eyed at Rafael, her former confidence in shreds. No wonder, Taniquel thought with a sudden flash of compassion. Caitlin’s work, her entire world, was based on surety and knowledge of laran. If truthspell, the cornerstone of that certainty, were breakable—and by such a blackguard as Deslucido!—what could be trusted?

  Rafael must have been thinking the same thing. His face congested with blood. His breath hissed between his teeth. With a visible effort, he walked to the farthest chair and sat down.

  Caitlin calmed herself with visible difficulty. “Yet it is your word against his. For such a grievous charge, there must be incontrovertible proof.”

  “I believe her,” Rafael said.

  But Caitlin would not be moved. “This is no private matter. It . . . were this to be known, or even suspected . . .”

  “I need no instruction in what would happen then,” Rafael said. “Everything we have worked for in bringing the Ages of Chaos to an end will be for naught. No man will trust another’s word—”

  “Or the truth of laran, the very fabric which binds our world together—” Caitlin said.