He began moving toward the door. “Your father, child, did not have an army of impish cutthroats coming up the tower after him at the time. Now, did you or did you not seek my counsel?”
Inos set her teeth, but obviously she was going to give in and let Sagorn go up the tower. There was a dead body upstairs, and she had suffered quite enough already without having to look at that. Rap moved quickly, to reach the doorway first, and Little Chicken scrambled up and followed.
The room one floor up was very gloomy, filled with gigantic shadows cast by a single small candle flame. Rap hurried across to where Yggingi lay, just inside the other stairwell. The goblin would always extend trash’s duties to include anything that let him show off his strength, and as soon as Rap took hold of Yggingi’s ankles. Little Chicken shoved him aside. “Out window?”
That gruesome thought had not even occurred to Rap. “Ugh! No. In that closet.”
The goblin dragged the corpse across the room and tucked it away among the king’s robes, while Rap dragged a rug over and covered the puddle of blood. He hoped Inos would not wonder why it was there, and that the blood would not soak through. By the time he had done, the other three had arrived.
Sagorn stood a moment, breathing hard. “But you must understand,” he was saying, “that we have no common purpose except to be released from the curse, and therefore to seek out more of the words. Otherwise we all go our own ways.
“Jalon soon got lost in the forest, and he called Andor. Andor did not have my scruples toward your father, and hence his daughter.” He made a small bow to Inos and then headed for the couch. “So Andor went to Kinvale to make your acquaintance. He even dreamed of becoming a king, I regret to say.”
“When he told us that he brought you back to Krasnegar afterward,” Inos asked, “then he was sort of telling the truth?”
The old man leaned back, chuckling breathlessly. “Yes, he was, for once. Here he had two words to chase: yours, when you got it; and Master Rap’s. By the sort of improbable chance that the words produce, he arrived at Krasnegar just as Rap was revealed as a seer.”
Rap closed the down door and bolted it. Little Chicken started playing with the bolt, flicking it back and forth, showing childish curiosity and delight. Rap listened to Sagorn’s story with half his head. The other half was sighting. The imps had already found axes and were breaking down the door into the robing room. He should be flattered that they were sending a hundred men after him, he supposed.
“Your father sank faster than I had expected,” Sagorn continued. “So Andor decided to go south and fetch you. He was annoyed that he could not charm Master Rap’s word out of him. Nor would he give it when threatened by the goblins. How did you escape, young man?”
Rap told them briefly. Fleabag thumped his tail on the floor at the sound of his name. Little Chicken scowled, so he must be picking up impish as fast as Rap had picked up goblin. It would be harder for him, though, for impish was a more complex dialect.
“Darad is a fool,” Sagorn said. “I despise his murdering ways, but he is not even efficient in them. He should have asked the goblins to extract the word from you. They would have been happy to demonstrate their skills.”
Except that Rap knew no word of power to tell; he shivered. “The imps are almost through into the robing room, your Majesty.”
Sagorn sighed and rose from the couch. “Next floor, then.”
“You chased me down these stairs once, Doctor,” Inos said. “I thought at the time that you were remarkably unwinded.”
“No. Thinal did the running for me. The curse does have its uses, I admit.”
Rap called to Little Chicken for help and began pushing one of the big cupboards over to the door. Then they fetched another. Those might gain a few minutes—for what, though? When he crossed to the stairs, Inos’s voice came echoing eerily down from above.
“… exactly does it do?”
“It is a last relic of Inisso’s works.” The old man’s voice came in bursts, now, as if he were very short of breath. “Magic casements—like talking statues and preflecting pools—are a supreme test of a sorcerer. They will show the future… and give advice. That is… the scene they show… is a hint… of the best course to take… a view down the best path… as it were.”
“Why would my father not let you try it, then?”
Sagorn had reached the bedroom door and stopped again, wheezing. “If he had, it might have warned him not to send you to Kinvale, and then this trouble might have been averted.”
“How could it have done that? A window do that?”
“It might have shown you here at Winterfest, perhaps? I admit that it is dangerous. It drove your great-grandfather mad.”
Rap did not like the sound of that, remembering the awesome glow he had provoked in the casement when he went near it—and remembering, also, the strange apparition who might have been Bright Water, witch of the north. She had gabbled something about foresight. She had accused Rap of blocking her foresight. Could there be a connection there?
Inos hurried across the bedroom, the death chamber. “Let us go straight up,” she said, and her voice almost cracked.
Rap felt a mad impulse to run after her and take her in his arms to comfort. He wanted that so badly that he trembled. He kept remembering how she had kissed him good-bye, almost a whole year ago now. But queens did not kiss factors' clerks—or horse thieves.
All the rest of Krasnegar had spurned him, and she had not. He had never doubted that she would remain his friend, once she was free of Andor’s witchery. It was very difficult to remember that she was his queen. If she were wearing a royal robe and a crown it might be possible, but despite her royal bearing in that shabby leather riding outfit, with her gold hair flying loose halfway down her back, she was still too much the companion of his childhood—on horses, clambering over cliffs…
Sagorn was still catching his breath.
“You know I have only been up there once in my life?” Princess Kadolan said. She was puffing, also, but perhaps that was only from politeness. “My grandfather died in a fire, I thought.”
The bedroom was brighter, with more candles still burning in the sconces. Sagorn went to study the two portraits over the mantel. “Yes, but he was mad before that.”
“Oh, dear! You think he saw his death through the casement and the sight drove him insane?”
The old man shrugged. “That is what your brother thought, and your father before him. It is an interesting paradox. The prophecy drove him mad, but had he not been mad, then he would not have been locked up, so he could have escaped the flames. Curious, isn’t it?”
Deciding again that he did not like this sinister, cold-blooded old man, Rap began heaving a dresser toward the door, and the goblin came to help.
The imps were into the robing room now, crossing to the stairs that led up to the antechamber. Once Rap reached the uppermost room, he would be unable to watch what they were doing. He hoped Inos was right to trust Sagorn, but it was not his place to advise her, and he had no advice to offer anyway. The situation looked hopeless, once the proconsul’s body was discovered, the culprits would be lucky if they were just thrown in the dungeon and not beheaded out of hand.
With the goblin at his heels, he followed the others, climbing the last flight unwillingly, sensing the blankness above him. When his head broke through that invisible barrier, he felt like a worm coming out of the ground. Again he was seized by a giddy excitement, an exhilaration stemming from the combination of great height and occult farsight, producing a divine—a detestable—ability to spy on everyone in Krasnegar outside the castle.
Sagorn was leaning one hand against the wall and breathing hard. Inos held a candle, standing with her aunt close to the doorway, staring across the empty chamber at the magic casement. It was dark and seemed no different from the other windows, except for its greater size. One of the others was rattling in the wind. Princess Kadolan shivered and hugged herself in the cold. Fleabag was wagging his tail, sniffing at the bedding and the rest of the two fugitives' camping equipment, lying in untidy disorder.