I nodded, too surprised by her decree to think about what it meant. I don’t think, at that moment, I understood the emotional impact of exile. I just knew it meant I’d keep on breathing. That was something to be grateful for.
Planice stood back from the door. “Let him go.”
“What about Gabriella?” I asked.
Between my bouts of guilt and remorse over Orin, I’d spent much of the past three days clinging to the image of Gabriella. We used to joke about how life would be so much easier if I wasn’t a prince, if the hopes and ambitions of Gabriella’s father didn’t rest so firmly on her shoulders. Always the optimist in those days, even after my sentence had been pronounced, I still dared to hope. Perhaps this would be our chance.
Perhaps, out of this nightmare, something good might happen.
Gabriella loved me, after all. I never doubted that for a moment. With her by my side, I had no fear of anything.
Planice seemed less sure of my fiancée’s undying devotion. She even smiled at my naivety. “Even if she’d still have you after this fiasco, do you really think I’d still let the wedding go ahead?”
Her scorn worried me. “Don’t you think that should be Gabriella’s decision?”
Planice stared at me for a moment, as if debating something, and then she shrugged and stepped back from the door. “Fine. Ask her. Ask your beloved if she’s willing to go into exile with you and become a pauper’s wife.”
I emerged into the sunlight blinking, the snow’s reflection hurting my eyes, which had grown used to the darkness of the meat store. Everyone had gathered in the dun’s yard. Thraxis was there, glowering angrily. Several of my brothers were standing beside the dun lord; the two brothers who had arrived in Dun Cinczi were there, too, in addition to several others who must have accompanied Planice from Lakesh. They looked ready to hold Thraxis back if the need arose, although there was nothing sympathetic toward me in their demeanour.
And Gabriella was there, her face pale. I stepped toward her.
She spat on the ground in front of me.
“Gabriella?”
Her dark, devastating eyes blazed angrily. “Don’t come any closer, you unfaithful cur!”
“What?”
“Was the child yours?”
I stared at her in confusion. “Child? What child?”
“She means the pregnant woman you claim you didn’t know that you killed your best friend to defend,” Planice said behind me.
I glanced over my shoulder at my sister, as it dawned on me that somewhere between the young couple seeking shelter in Thraxis’s hall a few nights ago and now, the child the pregnant young woman was carrying had apparently become mine.
“No!” I protested. “It wasn’t like that…”
“I can’t believe you had to gall to arrange for your whore to follow you to Lakesh for our wedding,” Gabriella spat. There was nothing in her eyes but hatred, nothing in her words but scorn.
“I swear on the Tide Star, Gabriella, I never saw her before—”
“So you killed the heir of Dun Cinczi over a perfect stranger?”
I realise now how it must have sounded, but what can you do when the truth is so unbelievable?
Gabriella’s scorn was acidic. “How noble of you, Prince Cayal. Is this something you do often? Were you planning to tell me of your hobby of rescuing damsels in distress after the wedding?”
“Gabriella…”
“She doesn’t want you anymore, Cayal,” Planice pointed out, taking more than a small degree of pleasure from my pain. I wasn’t surprised. She’d set out to deliberately hurt me often enough when I was a small child for me to have no doubts on that score.
“Shut up, Planice.” I had no reason, any longer, to keep the peace with my sister. And at that moment, I couldn’t have cared less what she thought.
I turned to look at Gabriella, unable to comprehend how easily she was abandoning me. I was young and naive enough to think love could conquer anything. In truth, even then, as she made a mockery of every whispered declaration of our undying devotion to each other, a part of me was looking for a sign, looking for some secret indication that this was an act put on for the benefit of our large audience.
If there was a sign, it was too subtle for me to find.
“Go, Cayal,” Planice advised behind me. “Before I change my mind.”
As if to emphasise the queen’s rejection, Gabriella turned her back on me and walked the short distance to where Orin’s mother stood off to the left with the other women of the dun, their eyes swollen and bloodshot from crying. A sea of faces surrounded me, all full of accusation, but the only one that still stands out clearly in my mind—after all this time—is Gabriella’s.
There was no word for my hurt, no scale large enough to measure it, no vessel great enough to contain it.
One of my brothers drawing his sword prompted me to move. Blindly, numbly, I turned toward the gate. The crowd parted for me, leaving a corridor of muddy, trampled sludge pointing to the snow-bound countryside beyond the dun. I walked without thinking, my pain a gaping wound that should have left bloodstains on the snow, it felt so real. As I reached the open gates, a woman began to keen, the cry soon taken up by the other women of Dun Cinczi.
To the wail of unrelenting grief, my own as much as of the women of the dun, I stepped out onto the rutted road and turned to face the accusing audience who were watching my disgrace, several of them with a degree of malicious satisfaction. Of the young woman for whom I’d thrown away my entire life, there was no sign.
But she was there, witnessing my banishment with no more emotion than someone watching an ill-behaved dog being locked out of the hall on a stormy night.
Gabriella. My beautiful, magnificent, cruel Gabriella.
“Set foot in Kordana again,” Planice called after me, “and you’ll be sorry, Cayal.”
“You’re the one who’s going to be sorry,” I shouted back. And then I added thoughtlessly, “Curse your wretched kingdom, Planice, and everyone in it!”
I said the words to Planice, but it was Gabriella I couldn’t tear my eyes from.
Gabriella for whom I meant the curse.
She didn’t seem to care. Spitting contemptuously into the mud again, Gabriella turned her back on me once more and put her arms around Orin’s grieving mother.
It wasn’t until later—after Tryan had laid waste to Kordana—that I would remember my unthinking curse and wonder if I wasn’t to blame, after all.
I’ll spare you the details of the next few months after I was thrown out of Kordana. Other than my complete and utter humiliation, not much happened, really. I was ill equipped for a life on the road. I’d no skills to speak of, other than my ability to hold a weapon competently and hunt well enough to keep myself fed, but those were skills owned by every man in Kordana and any of the score of nameless kingdoms that populated the land of my birth eight thousand years ago. Cayal, the Exiled Prince, had nothing with which he could barter. I had no trade or craft to fall back on, no money to speak of and no notion of how one went about earning a living.
After traipsing alone and friendless with my heart ripped to shreds by Gabriella’s betrayal, across first Kordana and then north through Senestra, I grew weary of the continent of my birth, and the rumours that followed me. Rumours that lingered like a clinging fog and refused to go away. I heard in Harkendown that Gabriella was betrothed again—less than three months after I was banished—to Daryen, one of my older brothers. I was shattered by the news.
Love had little to do with marriage in Kordana. I understood that. The alliance my wedding to Gabriella would have brought was still important to Planice, I appreciated that, too. I tried to tell myself I couldn’t have cared less. She was my past. She was my lesson hard learned. A memory turned sour by bitter reality.
I fled north, thinking distance would dull the pain.
It took me eight months to reach Magreth.
In hindsight, I suspect my journey northwest wa
s prompted by the desire for warmth as much as any real yearning to visit the fabled country. In Magreth, at least sleeping outdoors didn’t mean risking frostbite.
The truth was I was running away, trying to find somewhere my pain might be eased, but it’s easier and so much more “manly” to blame the weather.
Survival demanded I move on, although my heart wasn’t listening. No matter how much I told myself otherwise, I still missed Gabriella like an amputated limb. News of her betrothal simply drove home how badly I wanted my life back. I was hungry and desperate enough by then that I didn’t care if Planice hated me. I just wanted to go home and the only way I could do that was to somehow redeem myself in my queen’s eyes.
In my heart, I didn’t accept Gabriella no longer loved me. I had turned her rejection of me into something far more noble and selfless. By then, I’d managed to convince myself she’d spoken so cruelly to protect my sister’s holdings from her father’s wrath. In my lovesick blindness, I began to imagine there was some hope for us. Perhaps, I lay awake at night telling myself, if I can find a way to restore my reputation in Planice’s eyes, I will be allowed home.
I’m sure a part of me realised I was clutching at straws. But desperation can blind a man better than a hot poker, which might have been less painful.
But my hopefulness meant I had begun to look for something noble to do; some great act of heroism to prove my worth to my heartless sister and my poor, misguided Gabriella.
Tides, what a naive fool I was in those days.
Such a quest wasn’t easy to find. Delusion, misery and desperation brought me to Magreth. Being a hero without a cause is a depressing state of affairs. Magreth, on the other hand, was the home of the Eternal Flame. The High Priestess of the Tide resided there. Perhaps there was some task I could undertake for her. Perhaps the High Priestess of the Tide needed the services of a well-intentioned, albeit disenfranchised, prince.
I’m not sure who put the notion in my head to go to Magreth, or where I got the idea such a quest were even possible, but with nothing better to do with my time, it seemed as good a plan as any.
I managed to find a berth on an oared sailing galley making the perilous voyage across the Jade Ocean. As manning an oar required brute strength rather than any particular skill, I was able to play down my lack of experience with the ship’s master and convince the man I could do the job. An hour out of port, my shoulders burning from the unaccustomed exercise, I was already regretting my decision. Two days later, so sick I could barely stand, my hands rubbed raw by the oars, I was ready to throw myself overboard.
By the seventh day, I was convinced I was about to die. My hands were blistered and bloody, my body wretched, thin, worn out and dehydrated from the constant vomiting. My back was a slab of raw meat exposed by the lash of the oar-master who had no sympathy for any man who couldn’t take the pace. My life blurred into such a litany of pain, misery and woe that even the memory of Gabriella’s rejection seemed less painful in comparison.
I doubted I had the strength to go on, not even for another day. Unfortunately, Magreth was a couple of thousand nautical miles from Senestra and I came to this conclusion several hundred miles from the nearest coastline, so there wasn’t much I could do but endure.
The voyage took another thirty-seven endless, nightmarish days.
Somehow, I made it. It would be an exaggeration to claim I began to enjoy the cruise, but by the time we docked in the island harbour of Taal, I’d come to terms with the notion of hard physical labour. My hands were calloused, my back scarred from the oar-master’s lash, and I was quite determined never to set foot on an ocean-going vessel ever, ever again.
I soon learned another valuable lesson in Taal. One could, I discovered, run away from their problems, but one could never really escape them. I was just as unemployable in Magreth as I had been in Senestra, only now I had the added complication of not speaking the language.
Magreth was a breathtakingly beautiful place. A cluster of volcanoes had grown up out of the ocean floor over the eons until they formed a small island continent, the rich soil fertile enough for seasoned timber to take root. Surrounded by treacherous reefs, startlingly white coral sands encircled the continent, stretching for miles with pristine beaches shaded by tall palms and populated by laughing, naked, brown-skinned children who thought the tall, pale stranger sleeping on their beach was quite a novelty.
The children poked fun at my fair, sunburned skin and told me I’d never survive the heat. They also taught me enough of the language to discover that even getting in to see the High Priestess was next to impossible.
I scoffed at their warnings about the High Priestess, but they were right about the heat. I soon abandoned my Kordanian leathers for the sensible local custom of wearing a wrap. The only difference between the male and female mode of dress in Magreth, in fact, seemed to be the place at which one tied on their garment. The women wore theirs tied just above the breast. The men wore them tied around their waists. They were bright and colourful, but most importantly, they were cool. I felt ridiculous and self-conscious at first, wearing nothing but a scrap of cloth tied around my middle, and it was a stolen scrap at that, but common sense and the risk of sunstroke won out over fashion sense. I decided I’d rather be cool than care if anybody noticed my lash-scarred back or my pitifully protruding ribs.
The Temple of the Tide was located in the foothills of the Hanalei Mountains, a fabulous place built of marble and gold, some two hundred miles from Taal, no distance at all given how far I’d already travelled. By the time I reached it, I was tanned almost as brown as the beach children, thin to the point of emaciation, but healed from my ordeal on the galley, although I still bore the scars on my back and the calluses on my palms.
And I was driven. Driven by the thought that every day I spent as an exile was another day closer to Gabriella marrying my undeserving brother; another day closer to the end of hope. I had no idea if the High Priestess was even in residence, certainly little hope she would agree to see me, but such is the power of self-delusion that still I dared to dream.
After ten days on the road, within sight of the Temple of the Eternal Flame, I was set upon by bandits.
I never understood why they attacked me. Perhaps it was because I was a foreigner. I had nothing of value. Anything I had ever owned worth selling was long gone, sold or bartered in exchange for food.
But attack me they did, and when the bandits realised I had nothing worth taking, they beat me some more, as if that somehow made ambushing this weary traveller worth the effort. I tried to resist, but the fight had gone out of me by then. Months of lonely exile and near starvation had left me a mere husk of my former self. As I lay on the ground, blows raining down on me, I was certain I was going to die and for the first time in my short life, the prospect didn’t bother me unduly. As I was battered, punched and kicked without mercy, even the pain faded into the distance after a time. I barely felt the boot that ruptured my kidney, or the punch that burst my spleen.
I did see the foot coming that ended it all, however. A boot in the face is a memorable thing, even for a man in the process of being beaten to death.
I felt nothing after that, convinced I was dead, a feeling that only got stronger when I felt gentle arms lifting me from the road. The pain receded. Oblivion beckoned. I opened my eyes to find a woman leaning over me. She was smiling. Dressed in a white wrap, her fair hair glinting like gold in the sunlight. She was more than beautiful. She was exquisite.
“Rest easy, young traveller,” she murmured in a voice woven from silk. “You are safe now.”
“Who…who are you…?” I managed to stammer through my broken jaw. I remember tasting the metallic tang of my own blood, the jagged feel of my broken teeth, the odd thickness of my swollen tongue, but I was in no pain—a sensation (or lack of it) which merely exacerbated the feeling that I had died and crossed into the afterlife.
“A friend,” she assured me in a silken whisper, smiling,
smoothing the blood-matted hair from my forehead.
“I am Cayal…,” I must have told her.
“And I am Arryl,” she said. “The High Priestess of the Tide.”
Chapter 26
Once again, the spell of Cayal’s story was broken by the appearance of Timms, come to escort the duchess from Recidivists’ Row. Arkady acknowledged him with a nod and rose to her feet. Cayal watched her closely, as if he was trying to gauge her reaction to his tale.
“Well?” he asked, when she offered no comment.
“Well, what?” she asked, putting away her notebook. Once again, she had only pretended to take notes, Cayal’s hypnotic voice distracting her from her purpose. Once again, the pages were almost blank, her scientific objectivity forgotten as she became engrossed in the world he created with his fabulous tale.
“Do you believe me yet?”
“I believe you’ve studied the Tarot. Your tale says exactly what the cards say. The Immortal Prince travelled the world looking for adventure.”
“You don’t allow for the fact that your wretched cards are based on my truth and not the other way around?”
“Not for a moment.”
“Then more fool you, my lady.”
Arkady turned away, afraid he’d read her uncertainty. It was gloomy in the cells. She shivered a little as the temperature dropped with the setting sun, wondering idly how these prisoners got through the night with nothing but a thin blanket for warmth.
The Immortal Prince Page 21
