Rules of Ascension: Book One of Winds of the Forelands

by DAVID B. COE

  “You told him,” the duke repeated, offering it now as a statement, an accusation. “How could you do such a thing? You have condemned my son! Aindreas will never listen to us now! Tavis will be lucky to survive the day!”

  Fotir started to respond, but Javan cut him off with a savage gesture. “Say nothing! This was not a matter for discussion, particularly not with the first minister of a rival house! What could you possibly have been thinking?” He waved a hand in Xaver’s direction. “Even the boy knows enough to keep the scar hidden, and to say nothing of the incident! And you, you of all people, tell it to Aindreas’s Qirsi?” He shook his head and muttered a curse under his breath. “Is that why you told him?” he asked a moment later. “Because he’s Qirsi? Is that more important to you than the oath you took to serve me and my house?”

  “No, my lord.”

  “Then why? Explain this to me!”

  “Shurik and I were speaking as friends, sharing our experiences as ministers in court.” Fotir swallowed. “In the course of our conversation, I expressed my concerns about Lord Tavis’s recent behavior.” He exhaled and shook his head, much as the duke had done a moment before. “As I said, my lord, I believed at the time that we were speaking in confidence. I had no idea how much damage I was doing.” Once more, he hesitated. “If you wish to release me from my oath, I will understand, though I wish to continue in your service.”

  The duke dismissed the Qirsi’s offer with another gesture and a quick frown. “And how would I replace you? With a Kentigern Qirsi? No, Fotir,” he said, shaking his head. He took a long breath, which seemed to steady him. “No,” he said again, his voice lower this time, calmer. “I do not release you from your oath. I shouldn’t have said what I did. This isn’t your fault. Even if Aindreas knew nothing of Tavis’s attack on Xaver, he’d be eager for a quick execution. In truth, I would be too, if it was my daughter lying dead in that room.”

  “Forgive me for asking, First Minister,” Xaver said, “but could a Qirsi have done this? Could that explain the locked door?”

  The minister shook his head. “I don’t see how. Only a few of our powers are physical in nature—mists and winds, fire, shaping—and of those, shaping comes closest. As it happens, I’m a shaper, which means that I can shatter a blade, as I did just now in Lord Tavis’s chamber, and I can mend it as well. I can also alter its form, curve a blade that is straight, or straighten one that has been bent. I can do the same with wood or glass. But I can’t throw the bolt of a lock without a key, and I certainly can’t pass through wood.”

  “But you shattered Tavis’s blade, and you say you can do the same with wood. Could another shaper have broken the door, entered the room, killed Brienne, then mended the door?”

  “Not without waking everyone on this corridor. You heard the sound when I broke the blade?”

  Xaver nodded.

  “Breaking a door of such thickness and strength would have made a far greater noise. And mending it would take hours. We may be looking for a Qirsi, but we’re looking for one with a key to the room.”

  “Or one who can climb,” the duke said.

  Xaver and Fotir looked at him.

  “The window was open, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, my lord,” Fotir said. “But it was a warm night.”

  “I realize that. Nevertheless, if we’re to assume that Tavis didn’t kill her, then we have to consider every possible entry the real murderer might have used.”

  “But, my lord, the castle walls are at least ten fourspans high to these windows, and they’re watched day and night.”

  “I’ve led soldiers who could climb walls that were far higher and more carefully guarded than these. For a single climber, it would be difficult, but far from impossible.”

  Despite the duke’s surety, Xaver found it hard to imagine anyone climbing the walls of this castle. On the other hand, the duke was right about one thing: this was no time to be ruling out any possibilities.

  “Even if we can figure out how,” Fotir said, “that leaves us with who and why, both of which are likely to be far more difficult to answer.”

  Javan shook his head. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. We don’t need to address those questions now. We merely need to find some evidence to suggest that Tavis didn’t kill her. And we need to keep Aindreas from executing him before we do.”

  “What would you have us do, my lord?”

  Javan rubbed his beard, his eyes fixed on the window again. He looked tired and pale, though even at that moment, he had the aspect of a king, dignified and strong.

  “I’ll go to Aindreas,” he said after some time. “He probably won’t speak with me, but I should at least try. I want you to go to your friend Shurik. See if he’ll let you look around Tavis’s chamber. Lie if you have to. Tell him that Tavis carried certain items of value to the house, and you want to make certain that they’re safe.” Xaver heard no rebuke in the duke’s tone, but still the minister’s face colored at the mention of Aindreas’s Qirsi.

  “What about me, my lord?” the boy asked.

  Javan faced him, a sad smile on his lips. “Go to Tavis,” he said quietly. “If the guards try to stop you, tell them the truth: you’re his liege man. They should let you pass.”

  “But shouldn’t you be the one to see him, my lord?”

  “I will, later. After I’ve seen Aindreas. But chances are he’d rather see you than either of us.”

  Xaver nodded, though he had to wonder if Tavis really wanted to see any of them right now. Or, more to the point, if he wanted to be seen by them.

  “We’ll meet back here later,” the duke went on a moment later. He was facing them again, his expression grim, his dark blue eyes catching the light in the room like the steel of a sword. “Watch yourselves, both of you. The two of you have convinced me that Tavis is innocent. But that means there’s a murderer in the castle, one who’s cruel enough to kill Brienne in this way, and clever enough to make it seem that Tavis did it. Neither house has been spared, which tells me that all of us are in danger.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Usually Cadel would have left the castle immediately. Once his work was done, he had little to gain from lingering, and a great deal to lose.

  But this time was different. The night before, just as Cadel was leaving the hall to make his way to Lord Tavis’s chamber, the cellarmaster asked him to stay on as his assistant for the remainder of Javan’s visit to Kentigern. It was a fine offer, a plum position for any castle servant. A refusal would have aroused Vanyk’s suspicions. His acceptance, on the other hand, carried no cost at all. There would be no more banquets, though Vanyk didn’t know this yet, and after Brienne’s death and Tavis’s imprisonment, no one in Kentigern Castle would care to have anything to do with those they thought were visitors from Curgh. All he had to do was show up this morning and let Vanyk tell him to leave. After that, he was free.

  He passed the night hidden in the stable, and made his way to the cellars just after the ringing of the midmorning bells, carrying the flask, now empty, that the cellarmaster had given him the night before as part of his payment. Sanbiri dark. It had been a guess, really, though an educated one. The best wine in the Forelands came from the vineyards of Sanbira; every major house in Eibithar held it in their cellars. With the land’s future king visiting it was only natural that Vanyk should serve it at the banquet. And with all that Cadel had heard from his Qirsi contacts about Tavis’s thirst for wine, he could assume that the young lord would be drinking it.

  Probably no one would notice the sweetwort in the flask that Tavis and Brienne took back to the boy’s chamber. Aindreas and his guards had their murderer; the existence of the container itself, its proximity to the bed, would answer most of the questions that remained. Moreover, Cadel’s climb from the empty chamber on the east side of the castle to Tavis’s window on the south wall would have been difficult enough without an empty flask tied to his belt. Most men in his position wouldn’t have bothered.

&
nbsp; But Cadel hadn’t survived in his profession for so many years, building the reputation he had, by being careless or lazy. He did carry the flask to Tavis’s room, and after killing Brienne, he switched the containers, taking the one with sweetwort when he left. He had emptied his; theirs still had a bit of wine in it. But Tavis wasn’t likely to remember that, and given the depth of the sleep brought on by sweetwort, no one was likely to question an empty flask.

  He found Vanyk in the cellar, arranging flasks on the shelves. His eyes were red, like those of many of the servants Cadel had seen this morning. Apparently Brienne was much loved by the people of the castle.

  “Good morning,” he said cheerily, approaching the man and holding out the empty flask.

  Vanyk stared at him briefly before turning back to the wine containers again.

  “Just put the flask on the shelf there,” he said with a vague wave of his hand. “Then you can go.”

  “Go? Don’t we have work to do?”

  The cellarmaster faced him again, his eyes narrowing. “Do you think you’re being funny? Can you really be so cruel?”

  Cadel stared back at him blankly. “I don’t understand. I thought—”

  “Haven’t you spoken with any of your Curgh friends today?”

  He smiled. “No. I slept in the stable. You didn’t think that I was going to share that Sanbiri dark with them, did you? Now if I had been able to find a woman, then I might—”

  “So you don’t know what’s happened.”

  Cadel shook his head, still smiling. But as Vanyk just stood there, saying nothing, looking like he was about to cry, he allowed his smile to fade. “What is it, Vanyk? What’s this about?”

  The cellarmaster swallowed, and a moment later he was crying. “Lady Brienne is dead.”

  “Bian have mercy!” Cadel whispered. “How—?”

  “Lord Tavis killed her. He’s in the dungeon now.”

  He took a step back and shook his head again. “That’s impossible!” he said, sounding angry, as any man of Curgh would. “It’s a lie! Lord Tavis wouldn’t do something like that!”

  “The door was locked,” Vanyk said, his voice hardening as well. “Her blood was on his hands and on his blade. It was him that did it. No doubt.”

  “I don’t believe it for a minute! And I won’t stay here listening to these lies! I don’t care about your gold or your wine! Tavis is no murderer!”

  Cadel turned on his heel and started up the stairs out of the cellar.

  “Good!” the cellarmaster shouted after him. “Be gone then! I don’t want to see you here again, you Curgh bastard! Bian take you all and let you rot in the Underrealm!”

  When Cadel reached the top of the stairs, the kitchen servants eyed him darkly. No doubt they had heard his exchange with Vanyk. He stared back at them for a moment, as if daring any of them to speak. Then he stalked out of the kitchen tower and into the ward.

  Two of the guards stopped him at the north gatehouse, brandishing swords and glaring at him much the way the servants in the kitchen had.

  “Where you going, Curgh?” one of them asked.

  “To the city. My duke needs herbs to calm his blood, and he doesn’t trust the apothecary in your castle.”

  “Nor should he,” the other man said. “If it was me, I’d give him a bit of hemlock. That’d calm him, all right.”

  Cadel felt himself growing tense. Even carrying just a pair of Sanbiri daggers, he knew that he could handle both of them. But that would only have made matters worse; servants weren’t known for their skill with blades. No, if they chose to vent their hatred for the Curgh lord at him, he’d have no choice but to take it. Fortunately, their fear of angering Kentigern’s duke overmastered their lust for vengeance.

  “Go,” the first one said at last, his voice cold. “May the apothecary have a heavy hand.”

  Cadel hurried through the outer ward to the east gate, retracing his steps from the day before. And just as the inner gate guards had let him through without a question on his way into the castle, now the outer gate guards let him pass with no more than a sneer.

  Once he reached the road winding down the tor to the city, he knew he was safe. He would spend the balance of the day in Kentigern’s marketplace before leaving the city with a group of merchants that evening, just to be certain. The guards were less likely to notice him that way. Even then, he wouldn’t be finished. He still had to cross the Tarbin into Aneira and find his way south to the city of Noltierre. But compared with what he had done already, that was nothing. In all important respects, he had completed his job successfully. Again.

  He should have been pleased. This had been a relatively difficult assignment, more complicated than most, and more dangerous as well. Certainly he was about to receive more gold than he had for any previous job.

  Yet something bothered him. He couldn’t say what it was. He had gone over everything in his mind several times, and he was certain that he hadn’t forgotten anything, or made any mistakes. It all had gone just the way he planned. Even his luck had been good. How else could he explain his first encounter with Vanyk and the ease with which he had gotten the wine into the hands of Tavis and Brienne? Strange as it seemed, the gods had been with him.

  But still the feeling stayed with him, mirroring his every move like a shadow. Notwithstanding his good fortune, and the fortune in gold that awaited him, he suddenly felt the hairs on his neck standing on edge, as if there were lightning in the air. He glanced back over his shoulder, half expecting to see Aindreas’s entire guard bearing down on him. The road was empty. Cursing his own stupidity, he hurried on, fixing his eyes on the ground before him. He should have known better. He had often warned Jedrek not to look back like that under such circumstances. It only served to draw attention to oneself.

  “Fool!” he muttered under his breath. “Calm yourself!”

  The castle road leveled and merged into the avenues of Kentigern City, and Cadel quickened his pace, hoping that the bustle of the marketplace would divert his mind from this fear that had gripped him so abruptly. He knew better, however. Something was wrong.

  Considering the way the memory of his gleaning had occupied his mind over the past turn, Tavis shouldn’t have been so shocked by the familiarity of Kentigern Castle’s dungeon. But in the confused horror of the morning, his Fating had been far from his thoughts. That is, until the guards dragged him to the prison tower and opened the door to the dungeon stairs.

  The smells reached him first: excrement and urine, vomit and disease. He gagged, then retched, but he had already emptied his stomach onto the bed in his chamber. Then he heard the screams, not of pain, or even anguish. This was worse. These were screams of madness, of a man crazed by his imprisonment. Tavis recoiled at the sound and tried to flee. But Aindreas’s guards held him fast, laughing as they practically carried him down the uneven stone steps into the darkness. Even before his eyes adjusted to the shadows, he understood that this was the prison he had seen in the gleaning tent. He recognized the small barred window high on one of the walls and knew from its position on which wall he would be shackled. He was even expecting the blow from the guard that would bruise his right cheek, though he could do nothing to prevent it.

  “That’s for Lady Brienne, you bastard!” the man said. The words seemed oddly familiar as well, though there had been no guard in the image offered at his Fating.

  The man glared at him for another moment, as if considering whether to strike him again. Instead he walked away, leading the other guards up the stairs and out of the dungeon. The iron door slammed shut, the sound echoing through the prison like storm breakers hammering on a rocky shore.

  The screams had ceased when Tavis and the guards descended the stairs, but now they started again, as if the mad prisoner had been waiting for the crash of the door. He couldn’t see the prisoner; the sound seemed to come from another cell, farther from the stairs. Probably a forgetting chamber. Curgh’s prison tower had such cells as well, places where
prisoners were sent to waste away without food or water or even light. The young lord yelled for the man to be silent, but the prisoner wouldn’t listen, or didn’t care, or was beyond understanding. His screams filled the dungeon.

  Closing his eyes, Tavis felt the entire prison pitch and roll, as if he were on a ship being tossed about by Amon’s Ocean. His legs were weak, his stomach was sour and tight. He tried to sit, only to find that his chains were too short to allow him to do so comfortably. He could lower himself to the floor, his back against the wall, but he could not lower his hands past his shoulders, nor could he straighten his legs. Still, he was too exhausted to stand again, so he remained that way, crumpled on the filthy stone floor like a forgotten toy.

  In the days after his Fating, as he struggled to throw off his despair at what he had seen in the stone, Tavis tried to convince himself that the gleanings were a farce, that they were empty prophecies conjured by the Qirsi. He knew better, of course. The tradition of the gleanings went back centuries. If there had been nothing to them, the custom would have been abandoned long ago. But he had nothing else, no other weapon with which to fight off his fear. So he clung to this hope, like a dying soldier clutching his sword.

  But chained to that wall, folded awkwardly on the floor, Tavis knew that his hope had been in vain. Here was his future, stark, undeniable. If the Qiran was to be believed, his entire life had been leading to this place, to the hard rough stone pressing against his back and the cold iron cutting into his wrists and ankles, the foul stench burning his nostrils and the dim grey light teasing his eyes. This was all that was left for him. Imprisonment, disgrace, and soon, he knew, execution.

  Once more, as he had in his chamber staring at Brienne’s body, Tavis wished he could cry. But even in the dungeon, cramped and miserable, his mind buffeted by the other prisoner’s shrieks, he couldn’t summon a single tear.