“Prospero,” she called, but in a whisper, afraid to make a loud noise in the confined space.
The air stirred, purling around her, enough of a flow to make her blink. Freia stood and let gravity draw her down, step by step, and twelve steps later she stopped.
The stair ended, and another doorless opening was before her. The rush of air was strong here.
“Prospero!”
Her voice bounced, boomed and echoed, rattled off an unseen roof, and clattered into the hollow space around her where she stood in the opening.
She listened to the echo until it had quite gone, and then, with a sudden surmise, called “Caliban!”
Again the word was lost, shattering and fading in shards. No answer came.
The air stirred against her face, and it brought her a quick whiff of the moist darkness under the overarching arms of trees that covered streams. Wet stone, wet leaves, moss, water.
Freia turned her face, following the scent. This had to open somewhere, then. She took a hesitant step from the doorway and then stopped to light one of her candles from the lantern and balance it there in a corner, at the base of the steps, a lone flame-beacon to guide her back. The light guttered in the draught, but stayed lit. Then she found the scent again—a sniff of sun-warm roses preceded it—and struck out into the dark.
Dark it was, and that was all. Dark above, dark below, and nothing else, not for many steps until she passed a huge black pillar like the one that held the stair. The stone beneath her feet was cold and flat. Freia paused, looked back; her candle was a spark. Well. She set another candle down at the foot of the pillar and went on, but the scent was becoming more complex. It had acquired a bloody undertone and a cold edge of ice. And flowers came and went, bruised petals and leaves, and the scents of herbs she knew well, always moist and damp.
Freia stopped again and looked back: she saw only one spark now, the second; the first was lost in darkness and distance.
To come so far, and turn back— Not yet, then. She looked ahead, and then turned her head carefully to not-look ahead. At the corner of her eye was a gleam. She moved toward it slowly, carefully; in three dozen paces she could see it straight on, a distinct light down low. She began to hurry, not checking her candle-beacon, and the sounds of her steps became a confusion of haste-noise in the darkness, a clutter-clatter that masked the other noise until she was nearly at the light.
The light was a round hole in the floor, which was full of soft-shining water, and as she slowed she heard a sound like rain. Water was falling into the hole from nowhere.
“Prospero!”
He lay on the other side of the luminous pool. The water made a pleasant pattering sound. Freia skirted it, knelt beside him, pulled him gently onto his back. He had a scrape on his cheekbone, but seemed unhurt otherwise.
“Papa, wake up.”
He was limp, breathing through his slack mouth; his eyes were rolled up beneath his lids; pulse slow and strong, hands cold. He’d been stunned, she thought. Freia swung round and cupped her hand, dipped it in the pool.
The pool erupted. With a boom, water shot straight upward, and droplets showered Freia and Prospero as it fell back; a brilliant white mist spread out from the pool. Freia knelt, immobile with surprise. She felt no danger, only startlement.
“Prospero,” she said again, touching his face, and he snorted, sneezed, coughed, and jerked his hands. Freia trickled the remaining water in her palm against his lips. He licked, tasted, coughed again, and now his eyes opened.
They looked at one another; the water subsided into its pool, as if satisfied. The mist condensed and dripped. Freia shook drops from her hair.
“Freia … Freia. What dost thou here, child?” Hoarse and uncertain, his voice frightened her.
“Looking for you.”
“And where—” Prospero tried to rise, but his arm wobbled beneath him and Freia caught his shoulders, moving behind him, to help him sit. He looked around him. “The Spring,” he said then, rubbing at his elbows and his back.
“It’s gone now.”
“Gone? ’Tis there.”
“Gone from the isle. We’re—there’s a tower now. I came down stairs inside it to find you.” Freia studied the shining pool, understanding belatedly what Prospero had meant: this was the Spring. He had changed it. She scooped water from it again, and again it erupted, startling her as much as the first time. Freia drank the water in her hand under the strange rain; its taste was familiar and it refreshed her greatly. It subsided, as before, and she felt its subsidence deep within her, as an ebbing of some part of herself. “But,” she began to say, leaning toward it, to look in.
The candle in her lantern guttered and went out.
“Oh, no!”
Prospero ignored it. “Down stairs,” he repeated, a blurred face in the faint light from the water. “Stairs,” he muttered to himself.
“A long stair, stone, this kind of stone. They go around, like a sea-shell, a spiral.”
He nodded.
“Come, Papa. Let’s go up again. I can find the other candle.” Freia stood and tugged his arm, but she had to kneel again and put her shoulder under his to help him stand. They rose together, unsteadily. “Papa?” Certainly he had hit his head on the stone, she thought.
He nodded, taking his weight from her to sway unaided. “Very tired, Puss. Nay—leave me. To myself. Here have I buried my heart.”
This made no sense to Freia; she disregarded it. “We’d better go up now, Papa. Before the candles I left there fail. I’ll help you.”
Freia guided him around the pool—the Spring, he had said—and stared into the darkness for her beacon. She thought she saw a glimmer and set off toward it, but lost confidence and returned to the Spring. The air had settled; the outside-smelling currents were gone, and only damp, enclosed stillness remained.
“Hast lost thy way,” Prospero said.
“I—I’m not sure where the way lies,” she admitted. “I cannot see my candle.”
Prospero looked into the darkness also. “The way,” he said in an undertone.
The illuminated Spring burbled up again, sending a jet of bright water from its middle in a single burst; the jet fell sideways, splattering the black stone, and the water was quiet again.
Freia felt Prospero lean, and thus prompted she took a step. He moved with her, stiffly. They walked in the direction pointed by the Spring, and many slow steps later the candle gleamed lonely before them, and she hurried as much as she could. It was a knuckle-sized stub when they reached it, but she lit a fresh candle for the lantern and sighted the first candle from there too, and Prospero said nothing, leaning on the pillar with eyes closed. In the lantern-light, his face was lined and weary. Freia nudged her shoulder under his again and he whispered “Yes, yes,” and so they went on. The first candle went out before they reached it, and Freia froze a moment in terror when it vanished. But Prospero kept going, and she carried on in as straight a line as she could. Lifting her lantern high after a few dozen steps, she saw the darkness-in-darkness of the doorway ahead, to the left, and nearly wept with relief.
The stairs were difficult. Prospero stumbled, knocked her down, muttered that he could climb alone, insisted she leave him and he’d climb alone when he’d rested, and Freia must wrestle him on and up, grim, saying nothing. She dared not argue with him; he was not like himself, which frightened her, and she wished now she had brought Scudamor and Utrachet, who could have carried him more easily. He would not let her lift him across her back as she carried elk carcasses from the forest, but insisted that he walk on his own legs, and they ascended slowly, until the last candle was consumed. They went up in darkness, and Prospero said nothing at all now, but he became heavier and heavier, and Freia dragged them both upward until the flat floor tripped her feet. Then Scudamor and Utrachet rushed into the tower to help, and they were home.
The simply-built table had been scoured smooth and white with sand, then polished with beeswax; its pale wooden
top was decked now with a clutter of platters and bowls and the remains of a meal that was not supper, nor breakfast, nor anything usual in the cycle of the day. Here the sun, bright and hard through a deep-silled unglazed window, made a glowing jewel-pool beside a wine-bottle; there it made a sparkle from the tip of a black-handled knife. A pair of roasted fowl had been denuded to the bones; a slab of meat, red and bloody within, black with char and pepper outside, stood in its dripping, a last carved but uneaten slice moist in the juices. Beside a soft, oozing cheese, a flat brown dish of yellow apples shone fair as gold in the sun, and Freia, one of the three for whom the meal was spread, selected one and bit a white circle in its sweet flesh. Prince Prospero cracked nuts from a broad-rimmed bowl that also held a mound of dried blue-black grapes, and Dewar, making slow concentrated effort, tore a piece of bread from a hard-crusted brown loaf, as though separating each crumb from its fellows with regret. The table was unclothed, but white napkins lay crumpled here and there, three of them, beside the clay plates and goblets of the table’s company.
“We ride now to Landuc,” Prospero said, pushing away his plate, scattering nutshells. “Thou, Freia, prepare for the journey; we must away within this hour.”
“I don’t want to go back there,” Freia said. She lowered her apple half-bitten.
“Thou’lt come,” Prospero told her. “Thou shalt come with me, and cease this eternal contrariety. I’ve had a bellyful of thy sour naysaying and heavy foot-dragging these days past, and thou shalt come with me, and swallow thy draught of the trouble thou hast so diligently brewed for us. If I cannot command gratitude in thee, I shall at least have obedience.”
Freia jumped to her feet, walked toward the door; Prospero rose and stood in front of her, blocking her departure.
“Nay,” he said, and they locked gazes. “None of thy running to the Threshwood.” Prospero shook his head slightly.
He was taller than she, broader than she, and Freia, looking up at him, saw only hard determination in his face. She waited a few heartbeats, but his expression and stance did not change. He had never struck her, but she had been beaten hard and long of late and Prospero’s anger frightened her; he had never been so angry before, and he still would not see her alone or listen to her. They had returned from the island, they had slept a few hours, he had closeted himself with Scudamor and Utrachet, he had roused Dewar to eat, and in all that time he had not spoken to her kindly, when he spoke to her at all.
Her shoulders went down. She turned away and left the doorway and Prospero.
Dewar did not look at them. Freia’s eyes rested on her brother as she hoped for an instant that he might take her side, but he remained silent.
“Papa, I don’t want to go there,” she pleaded in a whisper. “I’m afraid.”
“Hadst thou proper fear of the place the first time, ’twere not needful now that thou go there again,” Prospero said coldly. “A curb to thy whimpering, baggage, ere thou drivest me all out of patience with thee. Hast been of little aid; beware lest thou become an impediment. Be ready to ride in a turn of the green glass.” He watched his suspiciously submissive daughter closely, her bowed head seething, he was sure, with schemes to give him the slip; and with his hand he flicked the glass, that stood in a rack of timing-glasses on the sideboard.
’Twas an echo of the days when she’d first quarrelled with his judgement, she fractious and sullen in the face of his adamance against her demands on him, and she’d run away into the wood then for seven years and more. To be fair, she’d returned from the wild less feral herself and had sought to please him since, but he knew he had never wholly tamed her—as her flouting and pouting had demonstrated. This time she’d not flee the consequences of her disobedience; too long he’d left her to her own direction. This time she, being of his blood, must and could take her part of the burden of trouble she had brought on them. “Haste thou, gather what’s needful for our journey, provender and gear, and I’ll seek thee out presently.”
Another tense, overlong moment stretched and snapped. Freia turned and, without looking up at Prospero as he stood aside from the door, left him alone with his son.
The Prince sat down across from the sorcerer, whose eyes were closed. In his right hand was a cheese-laden knife, resting on the bread on his plate; he held up his head with his left hand, elbow on the table.
“Dewar.”
“Mm.”
“Art hungry still?”
Dewar sighed. His eyes opened a crack. “Don’t think so. Was I asleep? Sorry. You were saying about … about …” He couldn’t remember.
“Thou’rt best off sleeping again,” Prospero said gently. “I’ll be riding with thy sister back to Landuc.”
Dewar couldn’t remember for a moment that he had a sister. “Sister.”
“Aye. Come. Best lie thee down again. ’Twill be some three or five days ere the drug’s illness leaves thee. Sorry I am to have given it to thee, but ’twas worth it.”
“It was,” Dewar agreed. The books. His vision still ran with words when he closed his eyes, Prospero’s handwriting graven inside the lids. His mouth moved to make a segment of a smile. He let go of the knife with an effort.
Prospero looked at him affectionately—bleared red-rimmed eyes, crumb-dusted beard. “Come,” he said again, and slid his arm under Dewar’s, lifting him to his feet effortlessly.
“Never been so tired.”
“Wert long without rest and must pay the debt.” Prospero walked him from the room, along the high-windowed, wide hall back to the bedchamber where Dewar had rested insensible for nearly a full day already. He was a solid young fellow, muscular and not run to fat the way so many of the better ones from Noroison did, Prospero thought, becoming toadlike at an early age. A Prince’s son indeed. And could use a sword as well as the staff. Wherever the boy learnt that, Prospero thought, ’twas well-taught. That physical strength had made it possible for Dewar to copy for twelve days and nights without halting, though the toll was high.
Dewar was sleepwalking now, stumbling, letting his father half-drag him, flop him onto the bed, cover him with a homespun linen sheet and a woollen blanket. He sagged, sighed, and slept.
5
THOUGH MARRIAGE HAD, AT LEAST IN theory, made the Countess of Lys and the newly dubbed Baron of Ascolet one flesh, it had not brought their respective land-holdings closer together: which lands, though not the most extensive nor the most desirable of the realm of Landuc, were still sufficiently broad that the Baron, upon his formal dismissal from the war-service of the Emperor by the Prince Marshal, found himself in a river-port town in Upper Ascolet, a good four hundred miles from his lady wife of less than two years’ standing, who waited for him in her city of Champlys. Faced with a forbidding journey through the mountains along the whole length of his lands, in wintertime, the Baron can surely be forgiven for hesitating in his warm inn. His small, illicit knowledge of sorcery did not extend to the blind opening of Ways between points, and so he must travel overland by some route. True, the winter thus far had been dry, but this meant that only sixteen feet of snow lay in the passes of Ascolet instead of the usual thirty-two feet or more. True, his command of the Well was sufficient that he might shorten his journey by riding along Leys or the Road; but as he sat and swotted over his Map and Ephemeris, which he knew to be unreliable at times, he found that such a journey by Ley would be little easier than forging ahead without benefit of the Well’s guidance, and the journey by Road would require him to travel so far, and so circuitously, away from Landuc into wide Pheyarcet through Eddy-worlds and outlands, as to consume entirely the brief interval of time between his dismissal and the date on which he was to present himself in the city of Landuc, at the Emperor’s throne, to swear publicly his vows of allegiance and fealty. What benefit to him now his clandestine, dear-bought initiation in the Well’s fire? He dolefully cursed Panurgus, who had shaped the Roads thus, and fretted after his wife in a fashion she would have found most gratifying, had she been present to w
itness it. As the world stood, however, she was not present, and the Baron dissipated his exigent fretting on a plump flaxen-haired chambermaid who bore some resemblance to the Countess in the dark.
Baron Ottaviano spent some days reckoning and re-reckoning the ways to and from Lys and finally concluded that it could not be done. Moreover, by now, he thought, Luneté would have received her own summons to the great midwinter court, via an imperial courier, and he regretted the bravado that had inspired him to refuse Prince Gaston’s offer to enclose a letter from Otto for the Countess in the courier’s pouch. “No, thanks, sir, I’ll be there before the courier,” Otto had declared, and Prince Gaston had said only, “Very well.” Now the Countess would have received that summons to court, with no word from him on what he was about, and as she had recently been eloquent on the subject of correspondence, Otto understood that it would be well for him to contrive some consolation, or conciliation, quickly.
His solution was not quite so perilous as the snow-filled passes of Ascolet, but was nearly as toilsome in its way. Otto gathered together a handful of the Ascolet men who had supported him through his travails, tallied up his ready money and then cheerfully reckoned that a baron had credit enough to travel on a light purse (for the collection of tax revenues had been—perhaps willfully—confused by the late alterations in Ascolet’s status from imperial possession to independent kingdom to barony), and set out back toward Landuc, on a well-travelled king’s highway. Prudently, he appointed a burly man a handspan bigger than himself as his Chancellor of the Exchequer for the duration of the journey, and although this soldier was inept at figures, he was proficient at diplomatically explaining to innkeepers and hostlers that His Excellency the Baron of Ascolet would pay later. And therefore they made good time and were well-housed and well-entertained each night.
The Price of Blood and Honor Page 6
