The Widow and the King

by John Dickinson

  There was a scratch at the door to the council chamber, and it opened.

  ‘My lady, the counsellors …’

  ‘Let them wait a moment yet!’ snapped the Widow. She turned back to her daughter.

  ‘Sophia. I have been pleased with you, these past months. You have worked. You have attended court and council. You have shown thought for others …’

  ‘Yes – yes, but you don't know why!' cried Sophia, and stamped her foot. And before her mother could speak she ran from the room.

  The council chamber was full of men, men in robes, men in gowns, men in armour, buzzing with the news that Velis would be in Develin in three days. The stores to be gathered, the ordering of accommodation, who was going to move out of their rooms … She pushed past them, their faces blurring in her tears. They saw she was weeping. She felt their embarrassment, and hated them for it. She was in the corridor now, running. She could hear the shock in their voices fading behind her.

  To begin with, she did not know where she was going. Her feet carried her down stairs, through the great hall and out into the early morning. No one followed her. The rule about escorts had lapsed since the return from the winter tour. And no one remembered rules at a time like this. When she came to herself in the angle of the upper courtyard, she was alone.

  She realized that she was looking for Chawlin. She would have to tell him. They would have to decide what to do together. Because the Widow was right. Sophia knew she was right. But she could not go to be Velis's bride. And she could not give up Chawlin. And she did not know what to do.

  A door opened in the foot of the corner-tower, and out came a man. It was Denke, the disgraced Law Master, with scrolls under his arm. He saw her, and bowed his head as if to avoid her look. Of course, he no longer attended council or sat at high table. It would have been kinder to him and everyone if the Widow had dismissed him from the house altogether. Somehow she had never summoned the will. So he was still among them, barely speaking and barely spoken to, a living image of the listlessness that had fallen on the house. Heaven knew what meaninglessness he was finding to keep himself busy – teaching the scholars, perhaps.

  Denke walked past her, saying nothing, with the same hollow look in his eyes that had been there ever since he had damned his own discipline at Ferroux. She watched his back as he passed under an arch and out of sight.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you,’ said a voice beside her.

  It was Luke.

  ‘Not now,’ she said, crossly, turning away. She walked slowly, trying to think where Chawlin might be at this hour.

  Luke was still at her side. ‘It's important,’ he insisted.

  ‘Please leave me alone.’

  ‘We're in danger.’

  ‘I know that,’ she said.

  Did he know already? Would it be like this all day, with people running to her with their fears, wanting to know what she was going to do? Would Hestie talk at her about the Whore of Tarceny all over again?

  ‘I want you to go to your mother. Tell her …’

  ‘I've spoken with her already. Go away and leave me.’

  ‘Not about this. They're after something that's in this house. That's what they want. You mustn't let them …’

  ‘Who? What are you talking about?’

  She kept walking as they spoke, hoping that he would see that she wanted him to go away; but he persisted.

  ‘There's a man I see at night. He's one of Velis's counsellors. They want something from this house. You know what it is.’

  Now she stopped.

  ‘Velis – you're seeing one of Velis's men? How?’ Spies?

  Then her mind absorbed the other things he had said. She remembered that he had heard what Chawlin had been saying by the fountain at Ferroux. He hadn't just been interrupting, then. He had been eavesdropping. She turned on him.

  ‘If you tell anyone …’

  ‘I haven't. I promise you. But he wanted me to tell him. He's threatening me. There are things – you don't see them, or if you do you think they are just normal. But they are not. They can come into the house. They want to kill me. Or he'll do it.’

  The thought came to her, as clear as a voice in her head, that this was just a poor, demented boy who made fantasies and thought they were real.

  She accepted it, because she had heard that voice before. There was no point being angry. But she must get away. She had important things to do.

  ‘Luke …’

  He had stepped back, and was watching her as though she had suddenly become unfriendly. His hand was on his pouch, which held those maddening stones.

  ‘Luke. I'm upset, and I'm busy. Take your story to Padry and let him do what needs to be done.’

  ‘He won't believe me.’ He was still eyeing her carefully. He was calculating, she thought. ‘But you've met him – the man I'm talking about. He was one of the riders that came here on the day you were out of the castle.’

  She stared at him.

  ‘How did you know about that?’

  ‘I talk with demons.’

  He is mad, said the voice in her mind. She might have said it aloud.

  ‘Then who is that standing beside you?’ the boy asked. Sophia looked around. There was no one there.

  ‘You filth!' she cried, furiously. ‘Get away from me! Leave me alone!’ And she ran from the courtyard and left him there.

  Ambrose stood his ground in the angle of the upper courtyard, and looked where Sophia had been. Just out of the centre of his vision was a figure in a grey robe and hood. Somewhere in Ambrose's head a voice was screaming.

  It was the Heron Man, standing there. Ambrose had an impression of a pinched nose, and deep lines on the face under the hood. That skin must be dry, like paper if he touched it. He could not see the eyes …

  But he could feel them.

  They were deep, like pits. They bore on him with the weight of years run dry of all weeping. They were tired, dull, listless, as if all the malice of the Heron Man was only a crust upon the immense weariness within his brain. They looked at him, and they despised him. He felt like a tiny cockroach under pouring sand, drowning beneath vast sediments of time.

  No! He could feel his hand on his pouch, clicking the stones again and again. The sound seemed light and very feeble.

  No! Go away!

  For long moments more the eyes watched him: slow, with that appalling heaviness. The mouth twitched – into a smile that mocked him.

  The Heron Man turned away. In that instant Ambrose saw that his enemy was standing not in the courtyard, but in the landscape of brown stones where nothing grew. Then he vanished as he had come.

  He was standing in the upper courtyard, and the monster was gone. He could feel how his heart beat and his breath staggered. He waited for his head to clear. The sky above him was still that of early morning. The sight of the Heron Man could have lasted only moments.

  I saw him, he thought. I heard him and looked, and I saw him there.

  They don't know him. They can't see him. I can.

  What now?

  He had to talk to someone. The Lynx was gone. She hadn't seen the Heron Man as he stood at her elbow. She was angry with him.

  He could look for Chawlin. Chawlin still met him for practice bouts, as he had promised. But he was less friendly, after Ferroux. Ambrose knew that he had interrupted something important, then. But he did not think it was just that. Chawlin had not wanted to listen, in the garden. Why should he listen now?

  And only the Lynx could speak to the Widow. She was still the best person.

  He must simply try again.

  It would not be easy to approach her now, with all the duties and business of the house around her. He would have to get a message to her. How could he do that? As a middle-study scholar, who was supposed to know his letters, he did not even have a writing slate.

  His feet took him through the student kitchens to the School Stair, and up them to the library. The building was quiet. Everyone was out. Somet
hing must have happened to cancel lessons for the morning. He could not imagine what that might be. It had not happened before. But in this strange time it did not seem strange.

  The presses of the library were full of scrolls and books and quires, each bearing the knowledge of years. And yet each was mere paper: paper on which his words might be written.

  Tearing a work in the library would earn him the worst beating the masters could give him, if they found out. But even that seemed less important to Ambrose than his message. He was casting around the shelves for a suitable scroll when someone at the reading press on the other side of the passage sighed and sat up.

  Ambrose jumped. He had thought the room was empty.

  It was the master Padry, looking at him with bleary eyes. There were scrolls open on the reading shelf in front of him. He must have been sitting quite still, with his head in his hands, for Ambrose to have missed him. There was a dead lantern at his elbow – here, in the room where no flame was allowed. From the crumpled look of his heavy green robe, he must have been sitting there all night.

  ‘Boy.’

  ‘Yes, master?’

  ‘What is the second arc of the path of Croscan?’ Croscan?

  He knew this. This had been in the lessons.

  Touch the heart. Breathe.

  ‘It is the path of the soul,’ he answered. ‘From defeat and ruin on earth to the ascent of the spirit through the spheres.’

  ‘And what, on the second arc, is the import of the Moon?’

  ‘It is the crisis of the soul, when Truth and Untruth meet. It is the Trial of Faithfulness.’

  ‘Give me, then, three signs of Faithfulness – in any system. All are good, to me.’

  Three signs of Faithfulness. Ambrose drew breath. Then he hesitated.

  What was Faithfulness?

  And he saw how his question was mirrored in the slightest widening of Padry's eyes. He saw the anguish within them.

  Padry no longer knew the answer.

  What was Faithfulness? If even a master had lost it …

  But there was a sign – a very obvious one.

  ‘The Lantern of Tuchred Martyr.’

  Padry nodded. Ambrose could not tell if the master had forgotten even this, or if he had remembered it but thought it not enough.

  ‘The oak leaf …’

  ‘Oak leaf ?’ Padry frowned. ‘Oak stands for strength, perhaps for Fortitude, but it has no purpose to cleave to.’

  Ambrose wanted the oak leaf. It was his.

  ‘The oak grows to the light, master …’

  ‘And you have already given me a light. But – well … No, I will not quibble. A third, then. A good one.’

  Ambrose wanted to say a knight in the mist. But that would mean nothing to Padry. And there was another, better one, as obvious to Ambrose as the Light of the Martyr.

  ‘The hill people say it is the dragon Capuu, who binds the world together.’

  ‘The dragon!’ Padry blinked.

  ‘So it is, so it is …’

  Padry looked at the air in front of him, as if he was gathering his thoughts at last.

  ‘Well,’ he said.

  ‘Well, if you know all that, then maybe what we do here is not in vain. If only One has learned, it may yet be enough … The Lantern, the Leaf and the Dragon. I will meditate upon those.’

  He rose unsteadily from his place, and looked around him. ‘What was it you wanted in the library?’

  It had been from that very bench that Padry had dragged him to his beating. And yet it seemed to Ambrose that two humans on the edge of despair should trust one another.

  ‘Paper,’ he said.

  ‘Paper?’ Padry paused. ‘Let me show you what I do when I am in need.’

  He took the scroll in front of him and folded over the last finger's width of the bottom margin.

  ‘Will that be enough?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Padry took from his pocket a sharp knife and, without hesitating for a second over the damage he did, carefully slit the scroll so that the folded paper came free. He handed it to Ambrose – a thin, straight scrap of blank sheet, with space for a dozen words.

  ‘You will want pen and ink, I suppose. You may use mine. Take them to my cell when you have finished, and leave them there. I shall not need them this morning.’

  He straightened, placed the scroll back into its rack, and walked slowly from the room. Ambrose sat in his place, and found the wood of the bench was still warm. Alone, and surrounded by the knowledge of centuries, he dipped the quill pen in the ink-bottle and began to scratch out his appeal.

  He had only ever written on slate before – never on paper like this. It was harder than he had thought it could possibly be.

  XVI

  The Secrets of Develin

  ophia was in the turret of the wall-tower, waiting for Chawlin. The sun was low under a mass of grey-purple clouds, bathing Develin in a gold light. It did nothing for her mood. This glory would slip from the stones in moments. Within, she was all anger and impatience.

  Where was he?

  She remembered his face when she had caught him that morning and told him about Velis. His smile had dropped, deadened all at once, as though the muscles in his cheeks had lost their power.

  ‘We need to think,’ he had said.

  ‘We need to think.’ He had thought, and she had seen that his thoughts had led him nowhere. All he had said was: ‘Meet me this evening in the wall-tower above the angle of the upper courtyard. It's a good place. We can talk there.’

  It seemed to Sophia that there was not much to think about. Develin could not fight. Velis was too powerful, and the Widow would not do it. If she wed, they must be torn apart. She had thought wildly of poisoning Velis, somehow. But she did not know how. And she could not see herself doing such a thing. There was only one answer.

  At her feet lay a coarse sack that she had brought across the courtyard and hauled up the steep stair. She touched it, as if to make sure that it was still there.

  Where was he?

  Footsteps sounded, coming up the tower. The trapdoor creaked open. Chawlin's head appeared through the gap.

  ‘I'm sorry to be late,’ he said, climbing onto the platform. ‘Luke was following me, trying to find out where you were. He truly is crazy, I think, and now it is worse. I had to go and hide in the stables for a bit.’

  She scowled.

  ‘I don't want to talk to him.’

  ‘I guessed not.’ He cocked his head on one side to look at her, and the lines around his mouth were grim. ‘So, then …’

  She waited.

  ‘So we now must face things as they are, and not as we would like them to be,’ he said. ‘There's no choice.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I should have said this before,’ he said. ‘I am ashamed of myself. But it is useless that either of us should pretend about things that are not going to happen. You owe your mother duty, and I owe her a great debt. Even thinking that you may – step down to where I am … It's a betrayal. I've been stupid. I've liked your company too much. You would be right to hate me now. The only mercy is that we have done nothing but dream …’

  He was saying they should give up, and part.

  ‘… We both know it. You will have to – you will have to do as your mother asks.’ He said the last words in a rush.

  Sophia was silent for a moment. He was so obviously wrong that she could not feel more than mildly disappointed in him. I've liked your company too much. He was letting his head rule his heart, that was all. She only had to show him the truth.

  ‘There is a choice,’ she said. ‘We can choose what we want. Or we can choose what we don't, because we're afraid. I know what I want. I need to know what it is you want.’

  He sighed. ‘It's no use thinking like that …’

  ‘You have to tell me.’

  ‘Sophia! You are – very dear to me. Indeed you are. But you are just at the beginning. For each two years that you have lived, I ha
ve three or four …’

  ‘And I love you,’ she said, for the first time in her life.

  It stopped him. When he spoke again it was slowly, as though his words hurt him.

  ‘Marriage is a big change – all the more so for someone who is young. There must be scores of girls every year who dream of escape when their betrothal is announced. Yet I only know of one who did …’

  ‘So now it will be two!’

  ‘Only one who did, Sophia. She ran to be the bride of Tarceny. And there was war.’

  She stared at him. The Whore – the Whore of Tarceny. He was throwing that woman at her, now.

  ‘Do not use that name to me! Do not use it!' she yelled in his face.

  ‘I don't think you know yourself,’ he said, as she gathered breath again. ‘Running would change your life. It would change mine, too,’ he went on. ‘It's not been much. But it's not been bad either.’

  ‘Do you like living near something, knowing you can't reach it?’

  The sack lay at her feet, but she did not touch it yet.

  ‘It's better that I do not …’

  ‘Don't you want me, then?’ (You do, she thought. You do. Why can't you say it?)

  His forearms jerked in frustration.

  ‘I don't think you know what you want!’ he cried.

  How silly. Of course she knew.

  ‘I want you,’ she said deliberately. ‘I love you. I can prove it to you.’

  ‘That's …’

  ‘No, look.’

  From the sack at her feet she lifted it. She heard him choke.

  The large, roughly-cut stone cup lay in her hands. It was heavy and awkward, with its thick stem and a base like a two-handed goblet. Around the rim curled a vague form that might have been a serpent or snake.