The Cup of the World

by John Dickinson

  Now Adam slumbered by the fire. The chess pieces, with which she had forced an honourable draw against him earlier in the evening, stood frozen in their places at his right hand. Most of the servants were abed. It was time to speak.

  ‘What made you warn me to be careful?’ she murmured.

  ‘I was worried about you,’ said Evalia. ‘I still am. I saw you go up alone into that evil place—’

  ‘Tarceny?’

  Evalia hesitated.

  ‘The old lord is dead, remember,’ said Phaedra.

  ‘Phaedra, there is not one of the seven great houses – not one – without its own long tale of ruin and misdoing. You might think that some devil has played his game with each of them; and indeed I think one has. Yet Tarceny's story is the longest and perhaps the foulest of them all, over many generations. And there you were. You seemed to be so happy then. And beautiful, and young—’

  ‘I am losing my looks.’ Somehow it did not seem difficult to voice such a private grief here.

  Evalia shook her head. ‘You are tired. You have been for a long time. And you have lost faith in yourself. Looks fade quickly when that happens – I should know. But you will win them back again, perhaps more quickly than you would think possible.’

  Phaedra watched the flames. She remembered how everything was more difficult than it had been before. She seemed to have been afraid for so long, first with the birth and then these other things. Ever since Father had died. Or even before that, with the raid coming, the Kingdom arming, the priest on the hillside who had disappeared.

  ‘I do not know what to do,’ she said.

  For answer Evalia touched diManey's hand. The knight snorted and opened his eyes. Phaedra watched him realize that he had been asleep, attempt to look as though he had been awake all the time, and then understand that both the women knew he had been napping and thought it funny that he should pretend otherwise. Evalia inclined her head towards the bedroom.

  ‘Hum?’ said diManey ‘You ladies want to talk secrets? Very well.’ He heaved himself from his chair and allowed Evalia to help him across the rush-strewn earth floor to the doorway. Then he rumbled again and felt his way unsteadily into the darkness beyond. Evalia returned to the fireplace with a slight smile on her lips.

  ‘What did he mean?’ asked Phaedra.

  ‘Not what you are thinking. We might be talking about the secret of good looks for all he knows. He has guessed that you are in some sort of trouble. He supposes it is because the wars are putting you in danger, either from your husband or from his enemies.’

  ‘The latter is likely enough.’

  ‘Indeed. Now we are alone and may talk of what brings you here. However, we must be careful. I trust all who live in this house; but it is better for them as well as for us that they should not hear what we say’

  Phaedra nodded. After a moment she drew the chess set on its small table over to where they sat and began to arrange the pieces. ‘Let us look as though we are playing. Or if you don't know how, let us look as though I am teaching you.’

  Evalia smiled and waited until Phaedra had finished. Then she reached out and moved a white pawn forward in a classic opening.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said softly.

  Phaedra put her chin on her hands and studied the board. There seemed to be so little to tell.

  Dreams. The whisper of robes. Shadows shifting in the corner of her eye. The thing she had seen in her mirror. The thing on the stair and the mark it had left. The face of the priest. The words were difficult, and her voice hesitated. She wanted to lift her head and look suddenly into the shadows; to listen for movements beyond the door. Her fingers were digging into her palm as she talked, so she used them to move another piece.

  No, she did not know how many there were – several, she thought. No, she had not spoken to any of them. Or at least none had answered her. (Evalia seemed to think that important.) No, she could not name the priest. Yes, she was sure it was the same as had wed her. Could she be sure he had sent the thing on the stair? Yes, he had been with it, like a man controlling his dog. And she had glimpsed them together before – a hooded man, and something smaller, at the library door. What else did she know about him? Only what Ulfin had said. That she was privileged to have been wed by him. That he was ‘holy’.

  ‘Does your lord practise witchcraft, Phaedra?’

  Phaedra blinked. Evalia had just executed a move that was both unexpected and devastating. She had no more idea how to respond to the white piece now sitting inside her defences than she had to the question she should have foreseen days ago. She looked up under lowered eyelids to read Evalia's face. It was a mask of concentration, frowning on the developing complexity of the board before them.

  Be careful, said Ulfin's voice in the fountain court, under the moon of Tarceny

  ‘I think he understands more than I do. But all his attention is on the war, as if it would tear him to pieces if he turned aside.’

  ‘But does he practise witchcraft?’

  Phaedra opened her mouth to answer. The words stuck. She could not say them. She could not betray Ulfin with her tongue, whatever Evalia might guess from her lengthening silence.

  ‘I can send no letters to him,’ was all she could manage. ‘Caw is against it. And I truly believe he would prevent them from going if he suspected they said too much.’

  ‘This Caw is not a fool,’ said Evalia dryly. ‘The powers of the land have no mercy for those who do these things, and little justice for those suspected of them – as even my case should tell you.’

  ‘Were you not innocent of those charges?’ Phaedra moved a piece in a wild counter-attack.

  Now it was Evalia's turn to pause.

  ‘Perhaps you would trust me if it were your own secret, and not his,’ she said solemnly. ‘If you do not want to tell me what you know, perhaps that is an answer in itself …’

  She was waiting for Phaedra to interrupt her. She had offered Phaedra help and comfort: a shelter for herself and her son, when no one else would. In doing so she must be putting herself at risk from the enemies of Tarceny She had a right to expect the truth. And Phaedra knew that she had already said enough to let Evalia spin any story of witchcraft she wished to against Ulfin and his house. Even if she made a firm denial now, Evalia must guess that it was false. Such a lie was more than Phaedra could utter. But she could not, could not, say the words that would expose Ulfin further.

  ‘I have told you what I have seen, Evalia.’

  A truth that concealed was a lie also. She frowned unhappily at the board, and pushed forward a pawn to strengthen her defence.

  ‘Well,’ said Evalia at last, ‘I cannot blame you. If you could have said more, I might have been able to help you more. As it is, I will tell you what I can. I know no more of these things that have troubled you than you do yourself. Although … I might guess that that which moves like thinnest smoke and that which weighs so much as to leave its mark in stone may both be creatures of deep places, where the rocks press fast together and the ways through are open to no body on the surface of the earth …

  ‘But this is guesswork. And I too am evading a question under the guise of an answer. I was not innocent of those charges, Phaedra.’

  Phaedra's heart sank. In that one short sentence, freely spoken, Evalia had willingly placed her life in Phaedra's hands.

  ‘I do not regret what I tried to do,’ Evalia went on. ‘Although I should have tried a knife, or poison, rather than this. I did not have that sort of courage. I was a young bride to Luguan's house. Like you, I suppose, I had grown up with stories of princely marriages and the happy-ever-after. I found how different it could be. The man was a beast. After eighteen months I was truly in despair. Then the rising came our way. The Seabord barons came fighting with a luck or skill that seemed far beyond their numbers. They killed Luguan – for their own reasons. One of their allies was the Knight of the Moon Rose—’

  ‘Calyn, my lord's brother?’

  For a
long moment Evalia was silent again. Then she rose and went to a low chest to one side of the hearth. The lid was unlocked. She took something from among many other things within it, with a sureness that showed she had known exactly where it lay before she opened the lid. She brought it to Phaedra in the palm of her hand.

  ‘I do not carry it any more. It is not fair to Adam. Nor do I keep it in the bedroom. But I could not send it back, with those other things. It was his. He was truly the best man I have ever known, Phaedra. What is more, he loved me, and I him. I shall never have those days again.’

  It was a ring, made to look like the body of a dragon twisting three times upon itself. The head bore a great boss on which was set the letter C upon the moon of Tarceny Phaedra turned it in the firelight to find the letters on either side of the boss.

  ‘U, C, P,’ she murmured. Her own ring nestled heavily against her skin.

  ‘“The Under-Craft Prevaileth” – it was his saying, and he would study those letters as you are doing, and whisper the words to himself. I remember how he would smile, then – as if it had cost him a great price. He once spoke of a ring that he and his brothers had broken in the mountains. It meant something terrible, I think. Because of that he was aware of powers that most did not dream of, and could work with things that most would call forbidden. He could see far, and speak far, and pass where no man should have been able to pass – many things. He used it very little: so far as I know only to help his friends among the Seabord barons in their fight against Tuscolo. He was a sick man when the tide turned against the rebels, and he died without even being aware that he and I had passed into Seguin's captivity. That was eleven months after he had first ridden through Luguan's door.

  ‘Seguin wanted Luguan's lands, which were now mine after Luguan's death. He could not make up his mind whether to wed me himself, or make me marry his thirteen-year-old bastard or one of his toadies. For my part I had lost my lover, I was childless and I saw myself returning to another heartless marriage. I had no thought for my safety, for I believed all the good in my life had ended with Calyn's.’ She smiled bitterly. ‘Although it was not long before I was trying to pray for my life, whether it would be good or no. But at that time I saw no reason not to use the knowledge Calyn had left me.

  ‘What I learned, and what you must look for, is this. There are powers. They do not seek much from the world or the people in it, if indeed they are aware of us at all. They were here before the Angels came. Some among them may tend to good, and some to ill. I suppose like all powers, some can be used for either or neither.

  ‘Then there is one – perhaps more than one, but only one that I have seen – who is an intermediary: who has learned the secrets of those powers and can use them. He seems to be an old man in a long, pale robe, like a priest's. I have heard him called the Prince Under the Sky. What his true name is I do not know.

  ‘Finally there are the suitors – people such as I, or as Calyn sometimes was, who meet and deal with this intermediary for a specific end. What I sought was Seguin's death. I obtained the means to achieve it. If I had been prepared to pay a fuller price, I should have achieved it indeed.’

  ‘Price?’

  ‘I think there is always a price. This intermediary – he is a man, I think, or was once. But he is not moved by the things that move men. He has access to power that makes all offers of wealth meaningless, and yet he demands acknowledgement. He demands some sacrifice on the suitor's part to recognize what he gives them. I do not know why. Perhaps there was a time when he made his own bargain, with some power or some other intermediary so that even he has a price to pay. And that price is measured in the misery of our world, and his hatred of those who come to him.

  ‘So there is a price. It is never, I think, mere gold. But – to give that which should not be yours to give. That is his currency. If not – your blood, your strength, your warmth. Calyn had given enough of himself for a plain fever to carry him off as if he were a child …

  ‘Even to bargain, that is a price. Yes. Once you begin – it may not seem it – everything you say may seem fair, every exchange just common sense. But you cannot unsay what you have said. You cannot take back what you have given. You cannot give back what you have been given … Oh, Phaedra, what may seem a good enough bargain at the time, you may well regret later. When he moved Adam to spare me at my trial, I thought he had saved me because he wanted me as an ally. Later I supposed it was because he still needed me as a pawn, for his own ends. Now I am sure that the reason, the one reason he chose to help me, was that the price I paid him would be meaningless if I did not live to endure it. What it was I will not say. I will only say – take care. If you see him again, take care.’

  The firelight shone wetly in Evalia's eyes. Phaedra frowned upon the board in front of her, trying to puzzle a way forward through the interwoven threats and protections. At length she moved a piece on the board before her. Evalia looked at it, shrugged and moved a castle in a wholly irrelevant manner.

  A power, a suitor and the intermediary Which was the enemy?

  ‘It is three moves from checkmate,’ Phaedra said, raising her voice for the first time. ‘And I thank you.’

  Evalia shrugged again. Phaedra was leaning forward to demonstrate when she heard Ambrose call from the guest room.

  ‘A mother's duty is never done,’ said Evalia, almost wistfully.

  Later Phaedra woke in her bed. She had neither dreamed nor felt anything to alarm her. Her mind was turning on and on over the things it had spun in its sleep. It was almost completely dark. Only the faintest square patch showed where the window was open to the night, and the shape of one of Ambrose's white stones (which seemed to get everywhere) on the sill. Evalia's fingers must have packed those stones, when Calyn her lover was cold and dead; packed them and sent them to his brother.

  Evalia had demanded that Phaedra trust her. Phaedra had already trusted her, with herself and her son. But she had not been willing to talk of Ulfin. And although Evalia had talked willingly of Calyn, the comparison was not a fair one. Calyn was dead, and could not be harmed by the powers of this world. Ulfin went in peril of his enemies every day. Even Evalia's confession might have been less than it seemed to be. Surely she would already have said the same in penitence to the Bishop of Jent, and have his protection for it?

  Phaedra turned in her blankets, restless at her own thoughts. The bishop was many days away. He could not protect Evalia from terrible rumours spread at this end of the lake. His part in this had ended when from his high window he had pointed the two of them together. (Had he foreseen this discussion, even then?) Evalia had trusted her. She had given nothing in return. She had not been able to, any more than she had been able to accept any of the men who had come to Trant for her in the days when she had not known if Ulfin was anything more than a dream. She could only accept Evalia's trust, and take what she had been given.

  A power? She knew none. Except that Ulfin had once said that the Cup held the tears of someone who, to the hillmen, was Mother of the World. The hillmen lived in the mountains. The brothers had ‘broken a ring’ in the mountains. Deep places, where the rocks pressed fast together: perhaps there was some unholy power in the hills – a relic of the time before the Angels? Orani might know something, if Phaedra could find a way of asking. And yet the priest was no hillman. Evalia was saying he was the intermediary She had called him the Prince Under the Sky. There had been a letter that called him that, written from somewhere in the March.

  She must speak with Ulfin. Only Ulfin could give her the help she needed. She remembered his evident faith in the priest, and at the same time her own utter dread at the sight of the priest's face on the stair.

  Ulfin, help me!

  Ulfin. If one thing was clear, it was that Ulfin had himself been a ‘suitor’. Then, at the time he had come to see Ambrose, he had told her that he would use his under-craft no more. Why? Had he changed his mind about the priest? Had the price become too high?

 
Ulfin – what price have you paid? Are you now inwardly so weak that the smallest wound or fever will take you from me?

  The campaigns marched on, one after another, carrying him away. When would he return – weeks, months? She might never see him again. She lay in the darkness, trying to build a picture of his face in her mind. The clouds were thickening, hiding him, as they hid the moon. The light was fading. The ghostly underbellies massed across the sky like the plumes of armies: like a frozen fall of water a thousand miles high.

  She slept, and the waters roared in her dreams.

  XIV

  The Man in the Reeds

  t was a boy in the distance, plodding along the road by the lakeshore. He was alone in the sun. Beyond him the reed beds wavered and the blue lakewater wrinkled in the breeze. Across the strip of water a herd of goats was loose on the lower slopes. The clonking of their neck-bells carried clearly across the water.

  ‘… In a month or so it will be summer, and truly hot,’ Evalia was saying dreamily. ‘Then the surface of the lake falls and the stream sinks to a trickle. Last year it dried completely for three weeks, and the falls stopped altogether. I thought the grasshoppers would drive me mad.’ It was a warm day. Sitting in the shade of a little grove on a low rise, with Evalia lying beside her, the servants at a distance with the horses, Phaedra felt as if it might already be summer. The boy trudged on up the road towards them, as if on some errand. Beyond him a man was cutting reeds.

  ‘Watermane, of course, never dries. That's where the