She reached up to touch his cheek, her eyes shining. "No one could possibly be kinder. You've not only granted my wish, you're telling me I'll get to see them again. That I'll meet Alan again, and fall in love again, and hold my little Mouse in my arms, exactly as before. That is what you are saying, isn't it?"
He held both his hands wide, elegant fingers cupped to catch the sun. "You are that child in Central Park, off to see the lions. And I am an old man, half-asleep on a bench . . . from this point on the world proceeds just as it ever was, and only one thing, quite a bit ahead of today and really not worth talking about, will be any different. Please look in your pocket, child."
She reached into the front of her denim coverall, then, and smiled when she felt her four-year-old hand close around the silver horse. She took it out, and held it up to him as if she were offering a piece of candy.
"I don't know who you are, but I know what you are. You're something good."
"Nonsense, " he said, but she could see he looked pleased. "And now . . . " The magician placed his vast, lined hands around hers, squeezed once, gently, and said "Forget." When he took his hands away the silver horse was gone.
The little girl stood on the green grass, looking up at the old man with the closed eyes. He spoke to her. "Where are you off to, if I may ask?"
"I'm going to see the lions," she told him. "And the draffs. Draffs are excellent animals."
"So they are," the old man agreed, tilting his head down to look at her. His eyes, when he opened them, were the bluest she had ever seen.
The Pretenders' Tourney
Daniel Abraham
The serfs and peasants of Castrwick said a star had fallen from Heaven. Or an angel. The night had gone bright as an instant of noon. The thunder of it left the church bells chiming as if they'd been struck. A plague-blinded baby regained her sight by being bathed in that divine light, so they said.
Now, only a light rain fell, dotting the heather with silver. A dozen local men, their caps in their hands, stood around the three nobles who had come from Westford Keep: Dafyd's mother, the newly widowed Dowager Duchess; his childhood friend Rosmund Colp, fourth son of Lord Andigent and now family priest of Westford; and Dafyd himself, once the youngest son of Westford, and now by grace of God its Duke.
"It might be miraculous," Rosmund said.
The wound in the land gaped wider than a man's height and three times as long. The stone itself rested on a rough pallet of cut saplings.
"Of course it is," Dafyd's mother said. "It fell from Heaven as a sign from God."
Rosmund looked at his knees, his wide brow taking on the furrows they always did when the Duchess started declaiming upon the Divine.
Dafyd dropped to the ground and walked closer. The village men, once his father's property and now his own, stepped aside to let him pass. Their gazes never rose above his knee and none of them spoke, but something in the way they held themselves crackled with excitement. Dafyd had seen boys no more than ten stand the same way just before a children's melee, but these were men. Gray-haired, some of them. It struck him again that he was the youngest person present.
Black as soot, the stone was shapeless as a blighted apple. The word of God made stone: twisted, diseased, ambiguous.
"It's good iron, that," one of the men behind him said.
Dafyd turned to him. A broad-shouldered man, missing his lower teeth, his hands were knobbed with muscle and his arms were both wider than the young man's thigh. He could have broken Dafyd over his knee like a twig, but instead he blushed under his gaze and looked ashamed for having spoken. Dafyd tried to recall the man's name. Herdlick, he thought. Or that might have been the smith at the next village on. His father would have known.
"If you please, sir," he said toward Dafyd's feet.
"We shall have a new blade forged," the Duchess said. Her eyes were bright as candles. "A new blade for a new age."
The subtle sound came, barely audible over the tapping of raindrops, of a dozen men taking in a breath at once. Nothing, Dafyd thought, suited his mother as well as theater, and the weight of her drama settled across his shoulders like a yoke. Anger crawled up his throat, and he spoke more sharply than he intended to.
"There isn't time. We leave for court in a fortnight."
"It will be done, my lord," the smith who might have been Herdlick said. His face was round as the moon and as bright. "I ain't a swordsmith by trade. That was Ableson, and him plague-took. But I know as much as anyone in the Duchy and, by my honor, my lord, if I have to kill myself and both my 'prentices doing it, it'll be in your hand when that day comes."
That day. The words nipped Dafyd's belly like bad meat.
"It is the will of God," his mother said. Dafyd stepped back to his horse, heaved himself up into the saddle, and pulled her head back toward the path more roughly than she deserved. He felt an instant stab of regret.
Rosmund and his slow nag caught up with Dafyd before the first turning. They rode for half a mile in silence. The rain grew harder, the low gray sky more nearly the color of steel.
"I'm not sure running off helps," Rosmund said.
"I'm not running," Dafyd said. "And a fat lot of good you were."
"What did you want me to say? That stones fall from the sky all the time?"
"You could have said that being odd doesn't make something holy. Or that it was an omen that I shouldn't be king," Dafyd said. "The best you could offer was it might be miraculous?"
"Well, it might."
"Or?"
Rosmund shrugged. The rain had plastered his hair to his skull. He looked like a drowned cat.
"Or it might not," he said. "But that's not the question. Is it?"
The plague had come in late summer, seven weeks before the harvest. It began as a cough, and then a fever. Those who fell before it took to their beds. Two days after the first cough, the fever began to rise and fall, and the ill lost their minds. Many were tormented by dreams of demons lurking in the shadows. Some were possessed by lust.
At five days, their joints swelled and ached. At six, some respite came; lucidity returned, joints moved more freely, fever cooled. On the seventh day, just as the power of the illness seemed broken, they died. A glimmer of hope before the grave, a small added cruelty that made mere tragedy into something worse. Dafyd's infant sister had even taken milk once—the first in days—before her tiny lips stilled.
Some villages lost only one or two people. Others were killed to the last man. Plague-death struck where it struck and passed over the houses it passed with a will of its own.
It took the Duke of Westford, silencing his cool wit and ending forever his warm embraces and drunken midwinter songs. It took Dafyd's sister, Ydel, before she could walk or speak; her toothless grin gone still. It took his eldest brother, fair-eyed Racian, who Dafyd had grown up believing to be invincible. It took his older brother, Caersin, from his library at seminary. It took the family tutor, the dancing master, and twenty servants.
It spared the Duchess, though the grief released a religious fervor that had survived through twenty-five years of marriage to the Duke. Dafyd suffered no cough, no fever, no delirium or swollen hands.
How much of him had survived was an open question.
Riding back now, Rosmund at his side, the lethal season they had left behind showed in small ways. Here a field lay fallow, all the hands that worked it the year before now lying beneath it. There, a dyer's yard with windows stopped up with wooden planks and jute to keep out snow long since melted. The smiles and bows offered by the men and women they passed showed ghosts behind the eyes. No one was untouched.
Both of the princes had also died, and the king's brother, Lord Saratyn. They said the king died at midnight on the longest night of the year, but that seemed too poetic to be true. Even as the plague went on its deadly way, the Council Regent studied the genealogies and precedents, argued points of law and cited examples of succession. At the first thaw, they agreed that the impasse could not be
settled by mortal means.
The debate hinged on whether the ascendance of King Abdemar of Essen three hundred years before had been legitimate or not, and reasonable men could have different opinions on the subject. If it had been, then, by its precedent, Sir Ursin Palliot, Duke of Lakefell and Warden of the South, was the royal cousin set to inherit the throne.
If it had not, then Westford ascended, and by the grace of the God who had slaughtered his family, Dafyd Laician would become king.
And God, so the Council Regent said, was to answer the question in His traditional manner: trial by combat. Whose arm He lent strength would be king.
"It isn't as simplistic as you make it sound," Rosmund said.
"No?" Dafyd asked.
"Of course not."
In the privacy of the Ducal stead, a dry cassock and his hair only damp and both Duchess and laity safely distant, Rosmund looked more like a priest. The fire burning in the grate pushed back the spring chill and filled the room with the smell of pine sap and smoke, driving out the scent of rain. Rosmund poured himself another cup of wine as he spoke.
"There are also political considerations. Lord Palliot is willing to set aside the cane field grants that Earl Haver wants, and so Haver is against you. Our former King, God keep him, had fallen three years behind in paying tithes. The bishop knows you and I are on good terms, and suddenly he's moved to write an opinion that the Essen ascension was based on scriptural misreading."
"Money and ambition, then. I don't find that comforting."
Rosmund drank the wine, his throat working with each swallow. The cup clicked against the table.
"I think you're underestimating the comfort money and ambition can bring," he said contemplatively, and the door behind him burst open.
"You are never," the Duchess said, storming into the room, "never to disgrace this family that way again."
The words struck her son like a slap.
"Disgrace?" Dafyd said, rising to his feet. "You spout the will of God like a zealot! Fine. But don't pretend that I have to carry it."
Her cheeks were red and thick, her lips almost blue, and her hands balled in fists. Rosmund poured himself a fresh cup of wine as they shouted.
"You run off like a little boy whenever you're . . . "
"Like it or not, Mother, I am Duke of Westford now, and if you . . . "
" . . . faced with the reality of God's presence. Well it . . . "
" . . . feel that you've become a prophet of God . . . "
" . . . might have been charming when you were a child, but . . . "
" . . . you can tell Him that I have no use for . . . "
Rosmund made a slurping sound. They both wheeled on him, chests working like bellows. He looked up at them, wide-eyed.
"Sorry," he said.
"Dafyd," the Duchess said, her voice quieter now, but sharp. "Every man in that field was looking to you, and you disappointed them. And me. And your father. Never do it again."
She wheeled before he could answer and swept from the room, slamming the door behind her. Dafyd said something obscene. Rosmund shrugged, refusing even in her absence, to cross the woman.
"Hypocrite," Dafyd said, accusing the closed door she'd passed through. "Says I'm acting like a child the same breath that I'm to do exactly what my mother tells me? She will never listen."
"Well. When you're king, maybe," Rosmund said.
Dafyd threw a cup at his head.
The journey to Cyninghalm could have been no more than a dozen days, but the weight of ceremony and allegiance slowed them to a crawl. The wide road, centuries old and still as solid as the day the stones were set, filled around their carts and carriages. Knights on huge warhorses waited at every crossroads, ready to join their banners to Westford's own. High lords and low fell in behind them wearing enameled armor so light and gaudy Dafyd couldn't help but think of beetles. As they passed, the trees themselves seemed to bow to them.
To him.
And with every league he traveled, his own robes and the black-and-silver of his court armor seemed more ridiculous. With every night's camp spent presiding over the grand pavilion, with every beery, weeping man laced into his best tournament silk, Dafyd felt more a pretender.
"He was a great man, your da," the Earl of Anmuth said. "A great man."
"Thank you," Dafyd said.
The old man bent back his head, gold beard shot with gray pointing toward the moon. Tears ran from his rheumy eyes, and his voice was thick with phlegm and sorrow.
"I was there the day he bested Easin's three top fighters. You wouldn't have been born then, but God, it was a day. Your da, he was brilliant. And after, when he took us all aside and swore that we . . . that we . . . "
He sobbed. The others—there must have been a dozen men in the pavilion, even that late—watched as if Dafyd were the entertainment. He set his jaw and prayed the old idiot would pass out. Anmuth wiped his eyes with the back of one wide, meaty hand, then leaned close. His breath smelled like the wind from a brewery.
"Lord Bessin came to me," he said softly. "Ass-licker offered to make me Warden of Rivers if I threw in with Palliot. Told him I'd rather muck stables. And I would, too. I would."
Dafyd nodded solemnly. The old man's bleary gaze locked on his, waiting for Dafyd to speak. He didn't know what he was expected to say. Thank you or I will be avenged.
"My father would appreciate that," he said. "He always counted you among his most trusted friends."
It might have been true, for all Dafyd could say. It sounded kind enough. New tears welled up in Anmuth's eyes and spilled down his cheeks. His beard squeezed together, completely obscuring his lips. He nodded once, clapped Dafyd on the shoulder, and walked unsteadily away.
Dafyd waited, troubled by something he couldn't quite express. The moon made its slow arc across the dark sky. Musicians played on flute and tambour. A minstrel declaimed the story of King Almad and the Dragon, which Dafyd had sat through unmoved a thousand times before. But when King Almad ascended to Heaven this time, he felt his throat thickening and his eyes tearing up. His brothers would have laughed.
And through it all, something Anmuth said bothered him like a stone in his boot. It wasn't until he lay down to sleep that he knew what it was.
Rosmund's tent wasn't quite as overbuilt as his own, but it still had its own framed door and walls too thick for sound to pass through easily. Dafyd shook the priest's door servant—a thin-framed boy in a cheap, greasy cassock—awake, and waited no more than a minute before Rosmund opened the door and waved him in. Rosmund wore a thick cotton night dress unlaced down the front, and his hair stood at a hundred different angles.
"Long time since we kept a midnight meeting," he said, and yawned. "We would have been twelve, I think."
"Are we alone?"
His bleary eyes sharpened.
"No," he said, "but she's well asleep, and I'd rather not wake her."
"Be sure," Dafyd said.
Rosmund went through the thick leather flap of the tent's interior wall and door. The Duke sat on a tapestried cushion until the priest came back.
"Snoring deeply," Rosmund said. "What's the matter?"
"Why is Lord Bessin trying to get men to side with Palliot?" Dafyd asked. "Trial by arms isn't about who's cheering or where they sit."
Rosmund shrugged and waited for Dafyd to tell him. They had known one another too long.
"Allies don't help in single combat," Dafyd said. "They're very useful in a war. I don't think my lord the Duke is going to accept a loss."
Rosmund's eyebrows rose toward his hairline. He whistled low, soft and appreciative.
"Insurrection. That would be a very, very stupid thing to do."
"You think I'm wrong then?"
"No," he said. "I think grief drives people mad, and anything, no matter how ill-advised, becomes possible."
"Grief?"
"Look around. The kingdom's caught a fever, and it's touched everyone. Not just you."
; A soft wind shook the thick leather walls. The candle flickered and the woman in the next room murmured something inchoate.
"I'm not at issue here. We're talking about civil war," Dafyd said, his voice cool.
"We're talking about mastering a world that's just shown everyone that it will take everything from them anytime it wishes," Rosmund said, his voice growing deep and passionate in a way it rarely did when speaking at the pulpit.
Eclipse Three Page 24
