by T. O. Munro
She was right, she was sure she was right. She had no gift for motherhood. Her own recent history was filled with the disasters that a bastard born child could unleash. Quintala, an ungovernable traitor. She herself an accident that triggered a national disaster. The half-elf had been right about that. How many lives would have been saved if that toppling domino of her own birth had not triggered such a sequence of other ill-met events? What hope was there for this thing growing within her? How ill starred could a conception be?
She reached for a spoon and dipped it in the viscous green mixture. She had to pinch her nostrils against the smell as she brought it to her mouth. She took a breath and thought of mothers she had known, mothers she could not be, and of a mother she had not known. Alone, always alone, since the moment her mother died.
She couldn’t see for sudden tears. Shame, regret and grief flooded from her eyes. Her mother, she who had made the first and greatest sacrifice for her daughter. The one who’d thought the prize well worth the risk. She blinked at the spoon, seeing suddenly in the green glutinous liquid, not a solution to her present predicament, but a betrayal of her mother’s memory.
She flung it onto the fire. A moment later the mess tin and its contents were also upended in the flames. There was a brief sharp flare of the smell of mother’s bane before it was driven up the chimney by a rush of air.
Niarmit sat on the hearth, hugging her knees. She could be strong. She would be strong. As strong as her mother, but she still had no idea how this could be made right.
***
The door to Kimbolt’s chamber was flung open and Lady Maia staggered unsteadily through it, followed with more measured steps by the black clad Sir Vahnce. Neither had eyes for the seneschal. Maia tripped and stumbled, looking over her shoulder at the advancing knight. “You’re a brute.” There was venom in her voice, laced with an undercurrent of admiration.
“And you’re a bitch,” the knight replied.
“What is this?” Kimbolt demanded.
Maia struggled to her feet and was helped upright by a none too gentle hand gripping her arm tightly enough to make her squeak. “Tell him,” Sir Vahnce commanded.
“I will not be treated like this,” Maia protested.
Vahnce’s grip tightened. “Tell him or I’ll break your Goddess-sworn arm.” He released her with a forward shove so she tottered a few more steps towards Kimbolt.
“Please, Seneschal,” Maia’s eyes widened with distress. “I know you for a real gentleman, unlike some that shroud a rogue’s heart beneath a gentleman’s title.” She glanced back at Sir Vahnce as she rubbed her bruised bicep.
The knight raised his arm, showing her the back of his hand. Maia scurried across to Kimbolt with a whimper, reaching for support.
“Enough!” Kimbolt slammed his palm down on the table beside him. “Sir Vahnce, perhaps you could explain what is going on.”
Vahnce’s arm fell and he shook his head. “She’s a snake this one, Seneschal. I always suspected it, but never really knew it until now.”
“Speak plainly.” The woman was shivering against him, if her terror was an act it was as well played as any of Quintala’s treachery.
Vahnce sighed. “There’s an officer in the guard, goes by the name of Greebo. He was suddenly flush with cash the other day, flashing gold in a city inn, bought a drink for all as knew his name. I don’t like it when poor men in an honest trade get suddenly rich. I usually find there is some compromise of their honour at the heart of it.”
Kimbolt nodded. Corruption was an insidious weed at the heart of Oostsalve governance. He had dismissed from government service any who could be shown to have taken a bribe. Vahnce had been instrumental in an endeavour which had drastically thinned the ranks of Oostport civil servants.
“So,” Vahnce went on. “I took the chance to ask Mr Greebo how he came by his good fortune.”
“And.”
“He was open enough, insisted it had been honest work. A generous payment for delivering a letter, a letter to you.”
Kimbolt frowned. “I got no letter. I do not know the man Greebo. He lied.”
Vahnce grimaced. “Not entirely, Seneschal. He did set out to deliver the letter, but he was intercepted on the way by another. Someone to whom he told the story and who promised to pass on the letter to you in person. Someone who paid him extra to believe their good intentions.”
“Who?” The question was answered before Kimbolt had even finished it, the knight’s glance sliding across to the woman clutching at the seneschal’s arm. Kimbolt shook her off. “You gave me no letter.”
“No,” Vahnce agreed. “She didn’t.”
“Who was the message from?”
Maia was silent, biting her lip and looking from knight to seneschal and back again.
“Creebo said it was a woman, a ragged dressed woman with a sharp tongue. He thought her too haughty for a servant, and her master too trusting with his gold to let her loose with so fat a purse on so simple an errand.”
“A woman?” Thoughts spun slowly in Kimbolt’s head connections clicking into place like tumblers in a lock. “A woman!”
Maia shrugged. “There’s many women would want to bother you with immaterial worries,” she sniffed. “I was merely filtering out the chaff that should not concern you.”
Kimbolt took a heavy step towards the defiant courtesan. “Who was it from?”
She looked away. “I don’t know, it can’t have been anyone or anything important.”
Kimbolt spluttered the obvious protest. “They paid gold to have it delivered from one side of the palace to the other. That speaks of something very important.”
Vahnce came up on the woman’s other side. “Indeed, it does, and you know who it came from don’t you, Maia?”
She hugged herself, shrinking in size before the simmering ire of the two men. She shook her head. “I don’t.”
“Do you really think I came straight to you from Greebo?” Vahnce said. “Would I really be such a fool as to simply give you the chance to deny everything, to pit your word against a palace servant’s”
“I’ve always thought you a fool, Sir Vahnce.”
“After Greebo, I spoke next with Lady Jade.”
Maia caught her breath at that.
“She was most enlightening,” the knight went on.
“Unwrap this riddle, Vahnce,” Kimbolt insisted seeing the self-assurance drain from the wretched Maia.
“Jade is a fool too,” the woman flung out her words with desperation. “She couldn’t be trusted to remember her own name if it was but a syllable longer.”
“She remembers well enough the little journey you made to the Focus Inn, the seat you insisted you and she should take, the conversation she told you to begin. A subject and a conversation you fully intended to be overheard.”
“What conversation? Overheard by who?”
Vahnce’s expression slipped from grim accusation to sorrowful apology. He turned his eye on Kimbolt. “It was about you, Seneschal. The ladies had a conversation, a loud conversation about how Maia had been… intimate with you.”
It was a stomach churning shock, Kimbolt stepped away putting physical distance between himself and the Lady Maia’s vile allusion. “You said that? You said such a despicable lie in public.” He shook his head as a worse thought surfaced. “Who was it you meant to overhear? Where is this note that a woman sent for me?”
“I destroyed it.” Maia said quickly, too quickly. “It was of no consequence.”
Vahnce loomed by her ear. “Oh no, Lady Maia, I know you too well. A trophy such as that, it will lie in your collection with the rest.”
“I don’t what you mean.”
“Fetch it,” Kimbolt commanded. “Fetch it now or, may the Goddess forgive me, I will break your fingers one by one.”
“You wouldn’t Kimbolt, you are too much of a gentleman for that.”
“But I am not,” Sir Vahnce whispered in her ear. “So I will take you to your q
uarters and we will return with the letter you appropriated within ten minutes, or else Lady Jade will be feeding you your meals for a month and Lord Tybert will have to take himself in hand.”
Colour and resistance drained from Maia’s face at the sincerity of the knight’s threat. She meekly submitted to his direction as he pulled her away by her arm.
***
The eternal summer of the Domain of the Helm looked down on the flowers blooming in the steward’s garden. There was a bench in the shade of a hibiscus bush. Niarmit settled on it. Thren took a seat beside her. The king was silent for a moment, patiently waiting for his distant descendant to speak. She opened her mouth a few times, but closed it again, the words unuttered.
“Something troubles you?” Thren said after the moment had stretched into minutes. “Have things gone ill for the salved people? Or for you?”
“Has there been word of my father?”
Thren shook his head. “He must still be probing the dark recesses of this realm. There are a handful of monarchs still left to join us.”
“And he has not come back between times.”
“He set out to get them all, to rally every scion of Eadran’s to your cause and your protection.”
“I wanted to speak to him.”
“You could tell me, if that would help.”
She shook her head. “I wanted to talk to someone who knew my mother. I never met her, but I wish I had.”
Thren reached out to give her hand a comforting squeeze. “I am sure she would be proud of you.”
Niarmit flinched at the touch and the king withdrew his hand with a soft sigh. “How goes the war?” he asked. “It has been some days since you came to share news with us.”
She gave a distracted shrug. “I had thought the next strike would come from Listcairn, but I think now it will be in the seven counties. We are training warriors and priests to fight his zombie horde. If we can strip him of his armies, then we may come at the Dark Lord in person.”
“And what then?”
She looked at him blankly. “I had hoped you would have an answer for that. Chirard fought with Maelgrum through my body when I first wore the Helm. For a moment the Kinslayer had the upper hand. Maelgrum was shaken. But then the Dark Lord found a way to hurt me even with the Helm, and Chirard fled from him.”
Thren frowned. “I never wore the Helm much in my lifetime; I knew what monster lurked waiting for me here. I have no real experience of wielding its power, only what I have witnessed through your eyes.”
“Four monarchs and I slew a dragon,” Niarmit mused. “More crowned heads might yet do greater deeds. Who is still left to emerge from hiding and join us?”
Thren counted off on his fingers. “Danlak, though if historians speak true we lose little by his absence. Chirard the second is also missing. The first of my name, the Vanquisher’s son has yet to declare himself. Bulveld the Second is probably in no hurry to see his father or his son, neither parted with him on good terms. Danlak’s brother Chirard the First came in the other day, bursting for the fight. He was disappointed to find you were not here and too impatient to wait long but he will return.”
“Chirad Dragonsoul?” Niarmit dredged her memory of the salved history. “The one who nearly captured the Holy City?”
“The very same.” Thren gave a wry smile. “I did let him lecture me on his victories for a while, and there were so many of them. It seemed the best way to keep him entertained while he waited to meet you. However, I was not sad when he decided there was a hunt he would rather pursue and that the tales of his remaining battles would have to wait.”
Niarmit nodded. “He knew how to wield the Helm against his enemies. Maybe I should have been the one listening to his lectures.”
Thren grinned. “Oh don’t worry, my dear, you will be, you will be.”
A companionable silence fell. Niarmit reviewed the battle Chirard had picked with Maelgrum. The Kinslayer had made the Dark Lord kneel, before Maelgrum’s magic had struck back. “What else did that book tell you besides how to kill a dragon, your Majesty?”
Thren sighed. “It told me a list of the crimes Chirard would commit, the people he would kill – my parents amongst them. It was a book of evil.”
Niarmit frowned. “What did the book look like?”
“Slim and small with a decoration on its cover.”
“What decoration?”
“A strange blue pattern.”
“And a word, one word?”
“Yes.” Thren was surprised at her prescience.
“Fate?”
“Exactly.” Thren gripped her arm. “You have seen this book? You have found it?”
“Not exactly,” Niarmit admitted. “My cousin found it, or rather she found the cover. That is all that is left of it. The pages were all burned away to blackened ash.”
“That is good, the ravings of a madman are best destroyed.”
“The picture on the cover,” Niarmit asked. “Have you ever seen anything like it before?”
“Not before or since. It is the scrawl of a lunatic, possibly he tried to paint his own murderous mind.”
“It was familiar to me.” Niarmit screwed up her face trying to picture the shape on the book and the occasion when she had seen something similar.
Thren sniffed. “Perhaps when you last snatched him from the Helm the trauma gave you some insight into his mind.”
Niarmit shuddered at the thought that her mind and Chirard’s might ever having been in close enough proximity for some contamination to pass between them. “No it wasn’t then.” Another dark thought stepped from the shadows of her memory. “It was in the cavern when I was trapped with the dragon and Udecht had healed me.”
“Yes.” Thren gave her a nudge of encouragement as she stared across the garden trying to recall the scene. The bishop rising from having delivered the Goddess’s grace to heal her shattered hands, and over his shoulder a misplaced halo of shifting blues. “It was something like that picture,” she said. “But it hovered in the air just by the bishop, it was a small little shape.”
Thren pursed his lips. “How odd. In the air you say?”
Niarmit’s nod was interrupted by the sound of a distant gong, its percussion reverberating from the many mismatched walls of the sprawling palace above them. Niarmit looked quickly at her ancestor. She had heard the gong struck twice when she first wore the helm but never since. Thren saw her look of alarm and smiled. “It is just one of the monarchs announcing their return. They will be on their way to the Chamber of the Helm no doubt.”
“Could it be the Dragonsoul?”
Thren inclined his head. “Possibly.”
“Let’s go.” She was already rising from the seat.
She was half-running up the steps to the side entrance to the palace. Then a short walk carried her along the passageway to the semi-circular Chamber of the Helm. She was entering from one side just as the newcomer entered from the other side. His eyes were on the empty throne above which the Helm’s gleaming avatar hovered suspended by the thread of magic. He did not see her at first. She stopped dead. Thren crashed into the back of her.
The handful of monarchs in the room turned from their conversations with a less awestruck demeanour than Niarmit, but then the dark bearded saturnine new arrival wasn’t their father.
“Gregor,” she breathed his name.
He tore his eyes from the Helm to look at her for the first time. His mouth spread in a broad smile. “Niarmit, my girl.” He approached with arms spread to embrace her.
She took a few hesitant steps, unsure how to deal with the man who had beget her. He showed no such uncertainty, wrapping his arms around her in a tight hug. “My Niarmit.”
Her face was pressed into the fine cloth of his cloak, the intricate designs of the royal crest picked out in gold thread along its lining. There was comfort in his touch, the first time anyone had come this close since she had sent Kimbolt away.
He stepped back onto the dais to
look down at her, holding her hands so their arms stretched out between them. “My, my dear girl. You look fine.”
“Where have you been?”
He raised his hand to comb through his thick black hair. “I have been busy, travelling and imploring on your behalf.”
“Many monarchs have come because of your call,” Thren said.
“So I see,” Gregor said, smiling at the little gathering of antecedents.
Niarmit saw the thin material of Gregor’s collar lift in a wisp of a breeze. Her mouth hardened in concern. Another localised gust caught at the hem, lifting the fine material and making the elegant silver and gold embroidery glitter in the light. “The Kinslayer,” she called a warning to the others. “Chirard is coming!”
Immediately the kings in the chamber rushed to guard the entrances, staring out to see from which direction their zephyr heralded adversary might approach. Niarmit spun round, Thren at her side, glancing left and right for the first sign of the Kinslayer.
Behind them Gregor laughed. “Don’t worry, my girl, Chirard isn’t coming.” She turned back, puzzled to look at her father’s grinning face. “He’s already here, bitch!”
Before her eyes, her father’s face blurred, shimmered and dissolved, before reforming into the hard lines of Chirard the Kinslayer. The ornate cloak and doublet, far too detailed for Gregor’s clumsy imagination, became Chirard’s red robes. Niarmit’s mouth barely had time to form an O of surprise, before the revealed Kinslayer took two steps back up the dais, seized the Helm and slammed it down upon his own head.
The acrid smell of burning flesh filled Niarmit’s nostrils as the Helm scorched the hands of the usurper through to the bone, but still he wore it. As his connection to her physical body formed, her own link was ruptured. She felt a numbing chill as her spirit became stranded in the Domain of the Helm.
The gathered monarchs turned to face this new threat in their midst and Chirad’s scalded fingers bent in thaumatic shapes, unhindered by the pain they must have felt. “Come on, you bastards!” the kinslayer cried with undisguised glee.
