[Galazon 00] When the King Comes Home

by Stevermer, Caroline

  “Immediately? Out of the palace. Ultimately, Ardres,”

  “Not Dalager? The prince-bishop thought there would be trouble at the royal tombs.”

  “I must find that … woman. Dalet. I must find her, and I’d best start in Ardres.”

  “Why? What will confronting her accomplish? You’ve already broken free of her.”

  “She wanted Julian. Not me. I’ve prayed for guidance. This is a sign that it’s time to go. Unless I stop her, she’ll try to call Julian back. I can’t permit that.”

  “How will you stop her?”

  “I’ll kill her. The sooner, the better. This way.” Istvan fumbled with the paneling in the thickness of the window arch. A scrabble of fingernails against wooden molding, and a narrow panel slid inward. We sidled through, he shut the panel, and we were cramped in utter darkness.

  One breath and the dust made me want to clear my throat. Instead I muttered indistinctly, “How did you know this was here?”

  “Julian showed me. There were other passages then. Things have changed. This was the only one I could still locate. We go this way.”

  I caught his belt, squeezed my eyes tight shut to keep from straining myself blind in the perfect darkness, and followed him.

  I was impressed at how few times Istvan had to backtrack in the cramped, dark passages. Guessing by sound and smell alone, our route took us near or through the palace laundry, the palace scullery, and possibly the royal mews, on our way to the dank little close where we emerged into the city streets.

  “Now we leave the city,” said Istvan. “They won’t realize we’ve escaped yet, so the gates will still be open.”

  “You think they’d close the city gates just to stop us?”

  “The prince-bishop would do more than that to keep us under his hand. Now, listen. No matter what, don’t say anything. Just keep your eyes down and follow me.”

  I caught his sleeve. “We’re going to walk out the first gate we come to?”

  “Unless you plan to hide in the city. I don’t recommend it. Anyone who helps you will risk the prince-bishop’s displeasure.”

  “There are better ways to leave than walking. My poor blisters still hurt.”

  “We don’t have time to nurse your feet.”

  “I don’t propose to. We must take the time to get some food and transportation. That chain of yours must be worth quite a bit.”

  “This?” Istvan touched the heavy links and then pulled the chain off and handed it to me. “Sell it, by all means.”

  “Not the whole thing. That would attract attention, a transaction that large. It will bring more a few links at a time anyway.”

  I tutored Istvan in the essentials of bartering with a goldsmith. The guild of goldsmiths was closely affiliated with the artists guild, and I couldn’t run the risk of being recognized. I stayed safely in a side street while he negotiated the sale.

  “That’s fetched five times as much as we’ll need,” Istvan said, when he rejoined me.

  “Show me.” I counted out the coins. “You have even less idea what things ought to cost than my brother does.”

  “A horse and a bag of oats, what more do we need?”

  “You eat oats? I like a more varied diet. And we’ll need two horses.”

  “You can ride pillion behind me. It will attract less attention.”

  “If you’re going to Ardres and I’m going on to Neven, we need two horses.”

  Istvan conceded that point. While I had the upper hand in the argument, I insisted that we eat something at once, before we tried to bargain for the horses. “It takes time to buy a horse. If we’re hungry, we’ll be impatient. The horse trader plays on weaknesses like that. We need to behave as if we’ve all the time in the world.”

  “We don’t. Speed is essential.”

  “Hurry, and we’ll only draw attention to ourselves.”

  I found a bakeshop and persuaded them to sell me the next batch of rolls out of their oven. Istvan sat beside me under the chestnut trees. We watched the sun on the river while we ate.

  “We won’t have much time for dickering,” Istvan reminded me.

  “If you don’t dicker, you’ll be remembered for another two hundred years. I’ll do the talking. Hold your peace unless you see something wrong with the horses. The more faults you find there, the better.”

  Make no mistake. If you are ever given a choice between setting forth on a long journey afoot with little preparation and less baggage or setting forth on a long journey on horseback with a minimal amount of preparation and a small though sufficient amount of baggage, choose the latter. There was no similarity between my first attempt to leave the city and my second. By the time Istvan agreed to stop and rest the horses, my knees ached a little, but nothing worth complaining about, once we were settled for the night.

  Istvan was silent, even by his standards. I waited until the work of seeing to the horses and cleaning up after our plain little meal was finished before I tried to get him to talk about our journey. He wouldn’t. Nor would he talk about anything else. He had built a small fire. Keeping it poked properly seemed to require his entire attention.

  “Are you ill?” I asked finally.

  He shook his head.

  “Are you sure? You looked quite pale for a while there. I thought you might faint while we were waiting to get through the north gate. Did the rolls disagree with you?” Mother always told us hot rolls were bad for the digestion. I have never found this to be so, but she was very seldom wrong.

  “No, I’m not ill.”

  “What’s wrong, then?”

  He shook his head again.

  After a long pause, I asked, “How many men do you think the prince-bishop will send after us?”

  He looked surprised. “Are you worried about that? We’ll outrun them. Go to sleep.”

  “If they don’t worry you, what does?”

  I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Eventually he said, “I thought someone might recognize him today. There were so many people in the streets, at the gate. I might have walked right past his wife. Or a child of his. If he had a wife or children.”

  I blinked. “Recognize who?”

  “Him. The man who lived in this body before that woman put me into it.”

  “Your body?”

  He shrugged. “Mine now. But this one isn’t two hundred years old, is it?”

  “Oh. Oh. That’s why you thought you were possessed?”

  “Not me. Him.”

  The thought made me sit up straight and sputter. “You mean, she put you inside someone else? Someone alive?”

  “She found some poor fellow, put his soul out as if it were no more difficult than putting out the cat, and invited me in. She changed the looks of him too. Dressed him like a doll. Kneaded him like clay until he looked like Julian. I can’t tell what he was like. But perhaps someone will recognize him just the same. Someone who loved him. You can’t just pluck a man out of a crowd and expect no one to miss him. He must have had friends. Enemies. Someone who owed him money. God’s bones, even I had that much.”

  “Who owed you money?”

  “Maspero. And if you ask me one more silly question about that mountebank, you can ride the rest of the way by yourself.”

  “I had no idea you felt that way about him.”

  “You don’t listen, then.”

  “Maspero said—”

  “Quiet. I don’t want to talk about Maspero any more. You’ll grumble tomorrow if you don’t rest tonight. I’ll keep watch. Go to sleep while you have the chance.”

  “But he said—”

  “Not—another—word.”

  “Gold has no memory.”

  Istvan stared at me.

  “When it’s melted down—to be reshaped. ‘Gold has no memory. What ancient coins have been new minted, what antique crowns lost to make earrings for a lady who cares for nothing but the vain fashions of today.’ That’s what Maspero said in his treatise on metalwork.”

&nbs
p; Istvan said nothing.

  After a while, I added lamely, “Yet Maspero made treasures. No one remembers the coins and crowns they might have been once. No one regrets them.” I didn’t share Saskia’s comments on Maspero’s theory. She held it was nonsense. Gold couldn’t be worked and reworked indefinitely. It could be melted again and again, certainly, but every time the metal was reworked, it changed subtly. As it grew less pure, it grew brittle, until finally it was unfit for anything but money. Even though I kept Saskia’s opinion to myself, an awkward silence fell.

  There was a long pause, in which the only sounds were the soft hiss and crackle the fire made, before Istvan spoke. “Maspero was wrong.”

  It didn’t even rain, that’s how different my second trip north was from my first. Neither horse went lame, though mine made odd coughing noises first thing in the morning and Istvan’s bit him on the wrist once. We were even able to find a decent meal in Joretta, where a tavern offered us a chance to bait the horses while we made free with an excellent mutton stew, my first hot meal in days.

  The route Istvan chose took us away from the river, and several times we crossed back and forth over the spine of hills west of the Lida, a more direct route than the river road, which made loops and arcs that paralleled the course of the river, much less traveled than the old royal road. Despite the poor farming weather, the hills were rich and green at high summer. All along our passage we met flocks of sheep and herds of goats.

  I even had time to think while I rode, something I never take for granted unless the horse I’ve been allotted is exceedingly meek and mild.

  One of the things I decided, as I kept my horse close to Istvan’s along the high tracks (though not too close, for his horse was fond of kicking as well as biting), was that it would be hard to part company with Istvan when we reached Ardres. He had no way of knowing, after all, that the necromancer Dalet would be where he had last seen her. He had no way of knowing where that previous meeting had occurred, not for certain. He had no way of knowing where she could be found, though Ardres seemed a likely starting point for the search.

  I had no way of knowing if the prince-bishop’s guard pursued us. It seemed fair to assume they were. If they were, would they hesitate to look for me in Neven? It seemed a likely spot to hunt for me. I had no wish to bring down disaster on my home.

  If any friend who helped me in Aravis was at risk of the prince-bishop’s displeasure, how much more did my family risk if I hid with them in Neven?

  I had no way of knowing if the road north of Ardres would truly be safe for me, riding alone as I would be. I had no way of knowing, even, if I would be able to force my mount to part ways with Istvan’s. Notoriously reluctant to travel alone, horses are. I have never been so poor in virtues that I needed to brag of any I did not have. I never said I was the finest horsewoman in the world, though of course I’ve always been perfectly competent, given a horse of tolerably good character.

  It began to seem to me that it would be a pity to part company with Istvan for no more reason than that we had reached some arbitrary crossroad.

  For one thing, he did not seem interested in the necessities of the journey. I had to force him to stop so that I could arrange to provide us with even the barest of provisions. For someone with a hearty appetite, he was wonderfully indifferent to food, something I envied after our eleventh consecutive meal of oatcakes and goat cheese.

  NINE

  (In which I hear things.)

  What is it that one sees in a line or a shadow or a shape? What is it that an object signifies to an artist when it expresses something that cannot be communicated in any other way?

  The siege medal tells us something about royalty, something about Good King Julian, and something about pride. It is a very simple design, yet it conveys the heroism and the joy that victory required and resulted in. Such simplicity used in such a cause argues pride verging on astonishment that the Lidians actually won. That degree of pride tells us something about Maspero, no stranger to vanity himself.

  It all comes back to spoons and cloak pins. It takes a great deal of skill, experience, and, yes, art, to make a spoon signify something. More art and skill in a well-wrought spoon than in a dozen frippery cloak pins. Yet one is not born with one’s full complement of skill, experience, and art. One must come to it through striving and practice. If one wishes to signify that a dragonfly might look rather well as a cloak pin, well, one must begin somewhere.

  I can’t say what it was about Istvan that made me sure I would paint him. It was no resemblance to the donor panel. I was done making copies. Now I would make only what I saw only in my own way. Who I saw was Istvan. What I saw in him, I could not articulate, even to myself. It was this mute certainty of mine that made me realize that here was my subject. If I could not signify something of what Istvan was in paint, there was no hope of expressing it in any other way.

  When I looked at Istvan, what did I see that ‘interested me so? It wasn’t his face, though it was while he was wearing a semblance of King Julian that he first attracted my attention. It was not the way he moved, for it was nearly a week after our first meeting that he regained an easy gait. Until then, he had walked like an old man, or like someone who’d been held immobile for days. He’d lurched. Once he recovered his ease of movement, it was possible to see in him the grace that had made him a great fighter. At times it was possible to glimpse the swiftness and strength that had evoked his old name, the Seraph.

  There was a balance to Istvan that pleased my eye. A good tool tells you in its shape what it is for. In Istvan lay something unseen yet evident. I longed to find a way to portray him so that what was unseen should be seen, not stated, but there for the eye with the skill to see it.

  Whatever it was I saw in Istvan, my desire to set it down compounded with my sympathy for him. It led me to persuade myself that he needed looking after—not a role the youngest in a family is usually allotted.

  Novelty, the desire to indulge in untrammeled bossiness, and a kind of girlish sentimentality that I blush to recall all combined to convince me that I ought to stay with him.

  I tried to plan how to convince Istvan to let me accompany him. There was so much I did not want to say, it was hard to think of anything else. In the end, my persuasion was not necessary. We reached the milepost where the Ardres road crossed the royal road.

  “There’s the way north,” Istvan said. He pointed and repeated the route to me painstakingly. One would have thought I had no sense of direction at all, the care he used.

  “I’m not going north. I’m staying with you.”

  “Fine,” said Istvan, and took the Ardres road, without wasting an instant to discuss my decision.

  I gathered my wits and reins to follow. One might almost have thought it was a matter of no moment to him.

  The terrain around Ardres is sharp and steep, rocky fields bounded by stone walls like untidy heaps of roof slates. Although it was high summer, the fields seemed barren. Wild mustard bloomed here and there, garish yellow against the sparse fields. There were no flocks of sheep there, and what goats I saw might have been wild, they clambered so swiftly and so warily along the ridges.

  The Arcel and the Lida make a Y where the Arcel’s flow joins the Lida; Ardres makes a bony spur that fills the bowl of the Y. Ardres Castle rode high and severe above the river valley, a prow of stone mastering the countryside for miles.

  Istvan chose his route into the high country above Ardres from the Folliard Bridge. Unlike me, he’d approached it from the north and west. So to the north and west we rode, as fast as our weary horses could go.

  I confess, I was growing somewhat weary myself. My blisters were unimportant, but a deep ache had taken up residence in the small of my back, and each of my knees had developed its own particular affliction: a shooting pain in the left, a steady twinge in the right.

  Istvan seemed tired too, which was not surprising, since the only watch we kept at night was his. He grew more silent with ever
y mile until we were a day and a half northwest of the Folliard Bridge. By then he was so weary he merely blinked at me when I spoke. At times he seemed to be looking at something just behind me, something I couldn’t see when I turned to look. Sometimes he seemed to be listening to something I couldn’t hear. It was a hard journey.

  By great good fortune it was still hours before dusk when he reached a place he recognized. The shadows of afternoon were lengthening, but the sun was still well up when he led the way up a crooked valley to a place where a ford offered passage across a river the color of dark beer.

  “I came this way.”

  I followed him through the ford. He led us upstream until the river dwindled to a brook. The terrain grew steeper and steeper, until the brown trickle of water dwindled to a spring and disappeared. We had to dismount and lead the horses. It was a slow climb. The long afternoon drew to a close. We gained height gradually, so that the daylight seemed unchanged, as if no time were passing.

  I decided that we were never going to reach the top of the hill. We were going to climb eternally. We had missed dying somewhere along our journey, we had slipped past Cerberus, and trudged directly into purgatory.

  We clambered upward until I could feel the little muscles around my kneecaps quivering like plucked lute strings. I stopped for a moment, puffing, but Istvan kept on. I knew without thinking about it that he would trouble himself no more about leaving me than he had about my decision to accompany him instead of carrying on to Neven. Whether I stopped or whether I kept on, it was all one to Istvan. He was in a hurry to find that red-haired woman, the necromancer who had called him back from whatever dreams death had allowed him.

  I straightened my spine and trudged on, hauling my horse along, up and up, until the whole world dwindled to my labored breathing, the sting of sweat in my eyes, and the aches in my back and knees.

  I hardly noticed it at first, I was so caught up in my assorted miseries, when the pitch of the hill eased. The world opened up all around me. I stood beside my horse—I would have leaned against him, but I thought that might tip us both over—and looked about. North, south, east, the barren hills fell away. We had reached the heights—and Istvan trudged on, oblivious to the stark beauty of the hills laid out before us. He was headed toward a square-built stone tower that commanded the summit to the west. Dark against the glory of the western sky, it was difficult to make out more than the silhouette. It looked battered, as if the weather on these heights were harsher than any ever encountered in the valleys below.