“W-what?” Jilseponie stuttered, hardly believing her ears, and only then did she begin to understand the depth of Constance’s hatred for her. She wasn’t surprised to learn that Constance would not be pleased to see Jilseponie anywhere near her two beloved sons, but the level of outrage here, the look in Constance’s eyes, went beyond the realm of reason.
“I shared his bed, you know, and there, before you, stood the living proof,” Constance said, assuming a defiant and haughty posture.
Jilseponie stared at her incredulously.
“Oh, how my Danube purred over my charms,” the woman went on crudely. As she continued detailing her lovemaking with Danube explicitly, Jilseponie’s expression shifted from incredulity to pity.
For Constance’s ploy was lost on Jilseponie, who also knew true love, and understood and accepted the realities of relationships. She thought to tell Constance then that she was no threat to her, that she was certain that she would bear Danube no heirs to weaken the claims of Merwick and Torrence, but she held silent, for she recognized that her words would do little to calm or comfort Constance. No, there was more behind Constance’s anger than any fears for her children. Her love for Danube was so very evident on her face as she stood there.
Jilseponie felt bad about the revelation, about how strong Constance’s feelings obviously remained for the king, but there was nothing she could do about it, for she could not dictate her husband’s heart.
So she let Constance’s anger play itself out, and then she quietly excused herself and left.
She didn’t see Constance again, nor Merwick nor Torrence, for many months.
“You should go hunting with Duke Kalas,” Jilseponie remarked to King Danube, soon after he had refused the Duke’s latest invitation. Spring was in full bloom outside Castle Ursal, the air warm and bright, the difficult winter long forgotten. “You cannot ignore him, nor should you, for he is your closest friend.”
King Danube looked at her, his expression soft and gentle. “How does he treat you, my love?” he asked.
“As a gentleman should,” Jilseponie replied with a warm smile.
She was lying.
King Danube looked at her doubtfully.
Jilseponie merely smiled wider and more convincingly, coaxing a reciprocal grin from her husband. In truth, none of Danube’s court treated her well at all anymore, Duke Kalas included. Never had any been friendly toward their new queen, this outsider who had so invaded their exclusive domain, but in the weeks since the sparring incident with Merwick and Torrence, things had gotten worse for her. Duke Kalas was always polite to her publicly, of course, and on those few occasions when he had come upon Jilseponie alone, he went out of his way to compliment her. But she had overheard him on more than one occasion, laughing with other nobles, and at her expense. It didn’t really bother Jilseponie, though. She had come to understand, to truly recognize, that these sheltered people who fancied themselves better than everyone else were not worth any emotional pain.
“You must go,” Jilseponie went on. “He is going out to the west with Duke Tetrafel and it would bolster Tetrafel greatly if you went along.”
King Danube sat back and considered the words. Duke Tetrafel was a fragile man, and had been for more than a dozen years, since he had gone off to the west in search of a direct route through the Belt-and-Buckle to the subjugated kingdom of To-gai. What Tetrafel had found, by his account, was a strange tribe of creatures that sacrificed most of his party to the peat bogs, animating the corpses as grotesque zombies.
The Duke of the Wilderlands had never really been the same.
“I would prefer to stay with you,” King Danube remarked, leaning back toward Jilseponie’s throne and putting his hand gently on her leg.
She covered his hand with her own, and her smile altered to show a bit of regret.
“You are not feeling well?” the perceptive Danube asked.
Jilseponie looked him in the eye and sighed. She had been experiencing a great deal of pain of late, mostly in her abdomen. Severe cramps. She attributed them to the scarring she had incurred during her first battle with Markwart on the field outside of Palmaris, when he had killed her baby, and indeed, when she had searched inside herself with the soul stone, she did note some damage. She didn’t quite know why these pains had gotten worse of late.
It wounded her to refuse her husband’s advances, but she could not ignore the discomfort. She still didn’t feel the same way about Danube as she had about Elbryan. Her relationship with the ranger had been full of lust and love, full of the wildness of youth and the danger of the times. With Danube, the relationship was more complacent, more tame, but she did not want to hurt him.
“I will go with Kalas and the others,” Danube said, and his expression showed that he trusted his wife and understood that she wasn’t simply making excuses so that she would not have to share his bed.
Jilseponie truly appreciated that trust, for it was not misplaced. She hoped that whatever this affliction might be, that it would pass soon and she could resume her marital relations with her husband; but she feared that it was something deeper, something perhaps permanent, and something—and this she feared most of all—that was growing worse.
“I will be back before our anniversary,” Danube promised, and he leaned over and kissed her gently on the cheek.
“And I will be waiting for you, my love,” Jilseponie replied.
Danube rose and started away, then. He didn’t see his wife wince as yet another cramp stabbed at her.
“Too much!” Abbot Ohwan said angrily. “You administer too much of the herbs to her.”
“There is no such amount,” Constance Pemblebury retorted just as angrily. “She cannot bear him a child! It is that simple.”
“You are well versed in the administration of the herbs,” Abbot Ohwan scolded; and it was true enough, of course, for Constance had lived most of her life as a courtesan, and all the ladies of Danube’s court well knew how to use certain herbs to prevent unwanted pregnancy. “And you know, as well, that giving her too much may cause great harm, even death. You know this, Lady Constance. You see her wince as she walks, as she sits.”
Constance’s lips grew very thin and she turned away, muttering under her breath.
“I will be no player in this!” Abbot Ohwan shouted.
“You already are!” Constance retorted, turning back on him sharply.
The abbot maintained his composure—mostly because he was much more afraid of Queen Jilseponie, a sovereign sister in his abbey and a powerful voice within the Church as well as the State, than he was of Constance Pemblebury, whether she was to become the Queen Mother of Honce-the-Bear or not. “No more,” he said quietly and calmly, shaking his head.
His obvious determination brought an immediate angry reaction from Constance. “You will!” she growled, seeming on the very edge of hysteria. “You will continue to supply me with the herbs that I need! She cannot become with child! She cannot!” She moved forward as she spoke, out of her seat, her hands reaching for Abbot Ohwan’s collar.
He caught her by the wrists and held her back, but she began to sob suddenly and seemed to go limp. As soon as Ohwan then released his grip somewhat, Constance tore one hand free and slapped him, and hard. “You will!” she said.
Abbot Ohwan reacted quickly and hugged the woman tightly, pinning her arms between them and calling out her name repeatedly to calm her. Finally, Constance did settle down, and Ohwan tentatively released her.
“You will,” she said to him calmly, in complete control, “or I will announce your complicity publicly. And not just about providing me with the herbs to use against the Queen, an act of treason by itself, but the role that you, and St. Honce, play now, and have always played in keeping the courtesans infertile. How might the people of Ursal view such a dark revelation about their beloved Church, and about their beloved noblemen?”
“You speak foolishness, woman,” Abbot Ohwan scolded.
Constance p
ut her head down and seemed to go limp again. “I am a desperate woman, Abbot Ohwan,” she said. “I will do what I must to protect the rightful inheritance of my children.”
If she had looked at Ohwan’s face as she spoke, she might have concluded that he didn’t share her assessment of the “rightful inheritance.”
“You will cause her great harm,” the abbot warned after he took a moment to collect his thoughts.
Now Constance did look up at him, her expression pleading. “Would you have the royal lineage go to that woman?”
It was a biting question, for in truth, Abbot Ohwan wasn’t overfond of Jilseponie, though she had backed Master Fio Bou-raiy at the College, as had Ohwan. Still, he preferred the older Church, the Church of Markwart before the coming of the demon, before his world, like that of so many others, turned completely over. This new order that had come to the Abellicans, the young reformers like Braumin Herde and Abbot Haney of St. Belfour—and of course, like Queen Jilseponie herself—did not sit well with him at all, gave him the uneasiness that comes with the destruction of tradition, a sense of shifting sands.
“I will give you enough to keep her infertile,” he agreed, and Constance beamed at him. “But no more than that!” he quickly added in the face of that smile. “I agree that it would be better for all if Queen Jilseponie does not become with child, but I’ll play no role in her murder, Constance! The King will be gone for two weeks at least with your friend Kalas. No herbs will you slip into Jilseponie’s food during that time, do you hear?”
Constance stared at him hard, but she did nod.
“None,” he said definitively. “And when he returns, you must return to the normal, and safe, dosage. No more than that. Do you hear?”
Constance’s lips grew very thin again, but she grudgingly nodded her agreement.
She left St. Honce then, her mind whirling with plans and plots and—mostly—with anger. For it was no longer simply a matter of keeping Jilseponie barren, as she claimed to Abbot Ohwan. No, Constance had come to enjoy seeing the woman wince in pain, had enjoyed hearing the reports that King Danube wasn’t sharing her bed of late—wasn’t even sleeping in the same room. She had allowed herself to entertain fantasies that her plan would drive Danube and Jilseponie apart, that the lustful King, after too long without the softness of a woman, would come back to her.
And if Jilseponie died in this process, then all the better.
“But no,” she whispered to herself as she crossed the small courtyard that led to the castle. “I mustn’t be impatient. No, I must follow Abbot Ohwan’s rules. Yes, I will.”
Nodding and grinning, Constance passed between the two lurking, expressionless guardsmen.
As she entered the castle behind them, they glanced at each other and grinned knowingly—for Constance Pemblebury’s behavior of late had elicited more than a few smiles—each shaking his head as they resumed their stoic expressions.
Chapter 21
The Haunting
“YOU ARE CERTAIN OF THIS?” MARCALO DE’UNNERO ASKED, TRYING HARD AND futilely to keep the excitement from showing on his weathered face.
Sadye’s brown eyes twinkled mischievously.
“How do you confirm …” De’Unnero started to ask, but he stopped short and waved his hand, knowing better than to doubt his clever companion. If Sadye said that the sword and bow of Nightbird, the great Tempest and Hawkwing, were buried side by side in cairns just outside Dundalis, then Marcalo De’Unnero would accept her claim as fact.
“It may be guarded,” the former monk reasoned.
“The grove is outside the village, and few travel there—particularly now, since Jilseponie sits on her throne, and Roger Lockless haunts Palmaris,” Sadye replied. “Beyond those two, few care enough to bother, I would guess. We are far removed from the days of heroics.”
De’Unnero smiled, but there was a sadness in that smile, a regret that all the momentous events of just a dozen or so years before, including those heroics of Elbryan the Nightbird, could be so readily and easily forgotten. Sadye spoke the truth, though, he had to admit. Those years of turmoil before the plague had all but been erased, aside from ceremonial tributes—De’Unnero had heard of the impending canonization of Avelyn Desbris—and the resulting gains for the victors, as evidenced by the mantles of bishop on Braumin Herde and queen upon the shoulders of Jilseponie.
So much had happened in the years he had been running wild along the frontier of Wester-Honce! In truth, De’Unnero didn’t really care about Jilseponie’s ascension, other than the implications it might hold for his young companion; nor was he much bothered by Braumin Herde’s ascent. Herde was a good, if misguided, man, De’Unnero knew; and while, in De’Unnero’s eyes, he was nowhere near possessed of the willpower and charisma of a proper bishop—his demeanor more suited to leading a small chapel somewhere—his rise to bishop of Palmaris was of little concern to the former monk.
Of most concern was the general direction of the Church, the news that Jilseponie was serving as a sovereign sister as well as queen, and the news that Fio Bou-raiy, a man Marcalo De’Unnero hated profoundly, was now the father abbot of the Abellican Church. These were truths that now gnawed at Marcalo De’Unnero. But in reality, even being able to care about such things again had come as a breath of fresh air to the beleaguered man. For so many years, he had been compelled to think about the basic needs of existence, of how he would eat and where he would sleep. But now he had Sadye, dear Sadye, and Aydrian, who could not only divert the weretiger, as Sadye could do, who could not only bring forth the weretiger, as Sadye could do, but who could also find the spark of humanity beneath the feline exterior, reaching Marcalo De’Unnero and helping him to dismiss the beast. Because of Aydrian, Marcalo De’Unnero could live in Palmaris again, could walk right by the oblivious Roger Lockless on the street, as had happened several times, without fear that the beast would come forth. Because of Aydrian, Marcalo De’Unnero could stop worrying about the basic needs of life and could start concentrating on the more important aspects of truly living. The world was again full of possibilities for him.
Along those lines of thinking, he had planned to leave Palmaris with his two friends to begin the boldest move yet, a journey that would take him all across the southern reaches of the kingdom to distant Entel and, if everything went well there, far, far beyond.
But now this information concerning the sword and bow of Nightbird …
“It is two weeks to Caer Tinella, and two to Dundalis beyond that,” he said, as much thinking out loud as informing Sadye of anything. “And if we dare to travel to the north and get stuck there when the first snows fall, we’ll not be able to head for the southern reaches until late next spring. We could lose a year on this chase.”
“Worth it?” Sadye asked, her tone showing that she considered these prizes well worth the journey.
De’Unnero smiled. “Let the boy find his father’s toys. We may find a way to put them to good use.”
He could only hope that no grave robbers had garnered the information. How angry he would be to travel all the way to that frontier town to find the graves already emptied!
De’Unnero, Sadye, and Aydrian came to a hillock outside Caer Tinella on a cold and windy autumn day, a day much like the one that had seen the dedication of the chapel that now dominated Marcalo De’Unnero’s line of sight and line of thinking.
That whitewashed building—small by the standards of the Abellican abbeys but huge compared to the other buildings of the small town—sat on a hill, making it appear all the larger. Rising above it, atop the small steeple, was a statue of an arm, an upraised fist—one that Marcalo De’Unnero recognized. He had seen the original arm, the arm of Avelyn, petrified on a plateau hundreds of miles to the north. How he remembered that man! The fallen brother; the murderer of Siherton the monk; in effect, the man who had brought about the disaster that was now the Abellican Church. When people thought of Marcalo De’Unnero, they usually spoke of him as a rival of Nightb
ird and of Jilseponie, but, in truth, De’Unnero held some respect for both of those two. They were worthy. Not Avelyn, though. Avelyn was the man Marcalo De’Unnero had truly hated. In De’Unnero’s eyes, the drunken wretch was undeserving of the legend surrounding him, and to see a chapel dedicated to the man standing so prominently on a hill in the growing community of Caer Tinella was nearly more than De’Unnero could tolerate.
“You knew that they would acclaim him as a hero,” Sadye said to him, easily seeing the disdain and despair on his face. “They name him as the one who saved the world from the rosy plague, as well as the man who destroyed the physical manifestation of Bestesbulzibar. You know they are beatifying him; we have even heard that he will be named saint by the end of the year. Is this chapel such a surprise to you, truly?”
“Whether or not it is a surprise has little bearing on my hatred of the place,” De’Unnero retorted.
“Why would you care?” Aydrian dared to put in. “You have divorced yourself from the Church, so you say. Take this as just another example of why you felt compelled to leave. Let it prove the point you constantly make of their endless string of errors.”
De’Unnero’s hand snapped out to grab the young man by the front of his tunic. “So I say?” he asked angrily. “Are you questioning me?”
Sadye was there in an instant, easing De’Unnero’s hand away, staring at De’Unnero and forcing him to look back at her rather than continue to foolishly challenge Aydrian. “I know why you care, but he does not,” she reminded. “You have told him little of your—of our—plans.”
De’Unnero relaxed and nodded. “The sight of that place offends me,” he said calmly to Aydrian. “It is a symbol of all that is wrong with the formerly great Abellican Church. It is a testament to the man who destroyed all that once was.”
“Obviously, the current leaders of the Church do not agree,” Aydrian said, showing no signs of backing down.
“Leaders,” De’Unnero echoed with obvious scorn. “They are Falidean rats, all,” he scoffed, referring to a rodent indigenous to the southern reaches of the Mantis Arm, notable because thousands often followed a single misguided individual onto the mud of Falidean Bay, where the sudden and devastating tide, the greatest tide in all the world, inevitably washed them out to sea and drowned them.
DemonWars Saga Volume 2: Mortalis - Ascendance - Transcendence - Immortalis (The DemonWars Saga) Page 94
