“You will allow me to accompany you, won’t you, sir? I won’t be any trouble, I swear.”
Hugh gazed at him intently.
“You understand that you can never go back to the palace, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir. I’ve set fire to my bridge, as they say.”
“You haven’t just set it on fire. You’ve cut it from the bank and dumped it down the gorge.”
Alfred ran a trembling hand over his bald pate and stared at the floor.
“I’m taking you with me to look after the kid. You understand, he’s not to go back to the palace either. I’m very good at tracking. It would be my duty to stop you before you did anything foolish, like trying to sneak him away.”
“Yes, sir. That’s understood.” Alfred raised his eyes and looked directly into Hugh’s. “You see, sir, I know the reason the king hired you.” Hugh flicked a glance outside. Bane was gleefully throwing rocks at a tree. His arms were thin, his throw clumsy. He continually fell short of the mark, but patiently and cheerfully kept at it.
“You know about the plot against the prince’s life?” Hugh questioned easily, his hand, beneath his cloak, moving to the hilt of his sword.
“I know the reason,” repeated Alfred. “It’s why I’m here. I won’t get in the way, sir, I promise you.”
Hugh was confounded. Just when he thought the web was unraveling, it got more tangled. The man knew the reason, he said. It sounded as if he meant the real reason! He knows the truth about the kid, whatever that is. Has he come to help or hinder? Help, that was almost laughable. This chamberlain couldn’t dress himself without help. Yet, Hugh had to admit, he’d done an extremely efficient job of tailing them; not an easy matter on a dark night made darker by enchanted fog. And, at the Kir monastery, he had managed to conceal not only himself but also his dragon from a wizard’s six senses. But someone that skilled in tracking, hiding, and tailing had fainted dead away when he felt a knife at his throat.
There was no doubt this Alfred was a servant—the prince obviously knew him and treated him as such. But whom was he serving? The Hand didn’t know, and he meant to find out. Meanwhile, whether Alfred was truly the fool he appeared or a cunning liar, the man had his uses, not the least of which would be to take charge of His Highness.
“All right. Let’s get started. We’ll circle around the village, pick up the road about five miles outside it. Not likely anyone around here would know the prince by sight, but it’ll save questions. Has the kid got a hood? Get it on him. And keep it on him.” He cast a disgusted glance at Alfred’s satin-coated, knee-breeched, beribboned, and silk-stockinged finery. “You stink of the court a mile off. But it can’t be helped. Most likely they’ll take you for a charlatan. First chance we get, I’ll bargain with some peasant for a change of clothes.”
“Yes, Sir Hugh,” Alfred murmured.
Hugh stepped out the door. “We’re leaving, Your Highness.” Bane danced up eagerly and caught hold of Hugh’s hand. “I’m ready. Are we going to stop at an inn for breakfast? My mother said we might. I’ve never been allowed to eat at an inn before—”
He was interrupted by a crash and a stifled groan behind him. Alfred had encountered the door. Hugh shook the boy’s hand free. The child’s soft touch was almost physically painful.
“I’m afraid not, Your Highness. I want to get clear of the village while it’s still early, before people are up and stirring.”
Bane’s mouth drooped in disappointment.
“It wouldn’t be safe, Your Highness.” Alfred emerged, a large knot forming on his glistening forehead. “Especially if there is someone plotting to ... uh ... do you harm.” He glanced at Hugh as he said this, and the assassin wondered again about Alfred.
“I suppose you’re right,” the prince said with a sigh, accustomed to the problems of being famous.
“But we will make a picnic under a tree,” added the chamberlain.
“And eat sitting on the ground?” Bane’s spirits lifted, then fell. “Oh, but I forgot. Mother never allows me to sit on the grass. I might catch a chill or get my clothes dirty.”
“I don’t think that this time she will mind,” Alfred replied gravely.
“If you’re sure . . .” The prince put his head on one side and looked intently at Alfred.
“I’m sure.”
“Hurrah!” Bane darted forward, skipping lightheartedly down the road. Alfred, clutching the prince’s pack, hurried after him. He’d make better time, thought Hugh, if his feet could be persuaded to travel in the same general direction as the rest of his body.
The assassin took his place behind them, keeping both under careful surveillance, hand on his sword. If Alfred so much as leaned over to whisper into the kid’s ear, that whisper would be made with his last breath. A mile passed. Alfred seemed completely occupied with the task of staying on his own two feet, and Hugh, falling into the easy, relaxed rhythm of the road, let his inner eye take over guard duty. Freed, his mind wandered, and he found himself seeing, superimposed over the body of the prince, another boy walking along a road, though not with cheerful gaiety. This boy walked with an air of defiance; his body bore the marks of the punishment he had received for just such an attitude. Black monks walked along at his side. . . .
. . .“Come, boy. The lord abbot wants to see you.” It was cold in the Kir monastery. Outside the walls, the world sweat and sweltered in summer heat. Inside, death’s chill stalked the bleak hallways and kept court in the shadows.
The boy, who was not a boy any longer, but standing on the threshold of manhood, left his task and followed the monk through the silent corridors. The elves had raided a small village nearby. There were many dead, and most of the brothers had gone to burn the bodies and do reverence for those who had escaped the prisonhouse of their flesh.
Hugh should have gone with them. His task and that of the other boys was to search for charcrystal and build the pyres. The brothers pulled the bodies from the wreckage, composed the twisted limbs and staring eyes, and placed them upon the heaped oil-soaked faggots. The monks said no word to the living. Their voices were for the dead, and the sound of their chanting echoed through the streets. That chant had come to be a music everyone on Uylandia and Volkaran dreaded to hear.
Some of the monks sang the words:
. . . each new child’s birth, we die in our hearts, truth black, we are shown, death always returns . . .
The other monks chanted over and over the single word “with.” Inserting the “with” after the word “returns,” they carried the dark song full-cycle. Hugh had accompanied the monks since he was six cycles old, but this time he’d been ordered to stay and complete his morning’s work. He did as he was told, without question; to do otherwise would be to invite a beating, delivered impersonally and without malice, for the good of his soul. Often he had silently prayed to be left behind when the others went on one of these grim missions, but now he had prayed to be allowed to go.
The gates boomed shut with an ominous dull thunder; the emptiness lay like a pall on his heart. Hugh had been planning his escape for a week. He had spoken of it to no one; the one friend he had made during his stay here was dead, and Hugh had been careful never to make another. He had the uneasy impression, however, that his secret plot must be engraved on his forehead, for it seemed that everyone who glanced at him kept looking at him with far more interest than they had ever before evinced.
Now he had been left behind when the others were gone. Now he was being summoned into the presence of the lord abbot—a man he had seen only during services, a man to whom he had never spoken and who had never before spoken to him.
Standing in the chamber of stone that shunned sunlight as something frivolous and fleeting, Hugh waited, with the patience that had been thrashed into him since childhood, for the man seated at the desk to acknowledge not only his presence but also his very existence. While Hugh waited, the fear and nervousness in which he’d lived for a week froze, dried up, and blew away. It was as if the cold atmosphere had numbed him to any human emotion or feeling. He knew suddenly, standing in that room, that he would never love, never pity, never feel compassion. From now on, he would never even know fear. The abbot raised his head. Dark eyes looked into Hugh’s soul.