Cazaril sometimes wondered if it had been weakness or cleverness on Ias’s part, to let dy Lutez do the dirty work and take the heat of the high lords’ grumbling, leaving his master with the name only of Ias the Good. Though not, Cazaril conceded, Ias the Strong, nor Ias the Wise, nor, the gods knew, ever Ias the Lucky. It was dy Lutez who had arranged Ias’s second marriage to the Lady Ista, surely giving lie to the persistent rumor among the highborn of Cardegoss of an unnatural love between the roya and his lifelong friend. And yet . . .
Five years after the marriage, dy Lutez had fallen from the roya’s grace, and all his honors, abruptly and lethally. Accused of treason, he’d died under torture in the dungeons of the Zangre, the great royal keep at Cardegoss. Outside of the court of Chalion, it was whispered that his real treason had been to love the young Royina Ista. In more intimate circles, a considerably more hushed whisper had it that Ista had at last persuaded her husband to destroy her hated rival for his love.
However the triangle was arranged, in the shrinking geometry of death it had collapsed from three points to two, and then, as Ias turned his face to the wall and died not a year after dy Lutez, one alone. And Ista had taken her children and fled the Zangre, or was exiled therefrom.
Dy Lutez. Don’t mention dy Lutez. Don’t mention, therefore, most of the history of Chalion for the past generation and a half. Right.
Cazaril returned to Ista and, somewhat warily, sat in the departed companion’s chair. Ista had taken to shredding her rose, not wildly, but very gently and systematically, plucking the petals and laying them upon the bench beside her in a pattern mimicking their original form, circle within circle in an inward spiral.
“The lost dead visited me in my dreams last night,” Ista continued conversationally. “Though they were only false dreams. Do yours ever visit you so, Cazaril?”
Cazaril blinked, and decided she was too aware for this to be dementia, even if she was a trifle elliptical. And besides, he had no trouble catching her meaning, which would surely not be the case if she were mad. “Sometimes I dream of my father and mother. For a little time, they walk and talk as in life . . . so I regret to wake again, and lose them anew.”
Ista nodded. “False dreams are sad that way. But true dreams are cruel. The gods spare you from ever dreaming their true dreams, Cazaril.”
Cazaril frowned, and cocked his head. “All my dreams are but confused throngs, and disperse like smoke and vapors upon my waking.”
Ista bent her head to her denuded rose; she now was spreading the golden powdery stamens, fine as snips of silk thread, in a tiny fan within the circle of petals. “True dreams sit like lead upon the heart and stomach. Weight enough to . . . drown our souls in sorrow. True dreams walk in the waking day. And yet betray us still, as certainly as any man of flesh might swallow back his vomited promises, like a dog its cast-up dinner. Don’t put your trust in dreams, Castillar. Or in the promises of men.” She raised her face from her array of petals, her eyes suddenly intent.
Cazaril cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Nay, lady, that would be foolish. But it’s pleasant to see my father, from time to time. For I shall not meet him any other way again.”
She gave him an odd, tilted smile. “You don’t fear your dead?”
“No, my lady. Not in dreams.”
“Perhaps your dead are not very fearsome folk.”
“For the most part, no, ma’am,” he agreed.
High in the wall of the keep, a casement window swung wide, and Ista’s companion leaned out and stared down into the garden. Apparently reassured by the sight of her lady in gentle conversation with her shabby courtier, she waved and disappeared again.
Cazaril wondered how Ista passed the time. She did not sew, apparently, nor did she seem much of a reader, nor did she keep musicians of her own. Cazaril had seen her sporadically at prayers, some weeks spending hours in the ancestors’ hall, or at the little portable altar kept in her chambers, or, far more rarely, escorted by her ladies and dy Ferrej down to the temple in town, though never at its crowded moments. Other times weeks would pass when she seemed to keep no observances to the gods at all. “Have you much consolation in prayers, lady?” he asked curiously.
She glanced up, and her smile flattened a trifle. “I? I have not much consolation anywhere. The gods have surely made a mock of me. I would return the favor, but they hold my heart and my breath hostage to their whims. My children are prisoners of fortune. And fortune is gone mad, in Chalion.”
He offered hesitantly, “I think there are worse prisons than this sunny keep, lady.”
Her brows rose, and she sat back. “Oh, aye. Were you ever to the Zangre, in Cardegoss?”
“Yes, when I was a younger man. Not lately. It was a vast warren. I spent half my time lost in it.”
“Strange. I was lost in it, too . . . it is haunted, you know.”
Cazaril considered this matter-of-fact comment. “I shouldn’t be surprised. It is the nature of a great fortress that as many die in it as build it, win it, lose it . . . men of Chalion, the renowned Roknari masons before us, the first kings, and men before them I’m sure who crept into its caves, on back into the mists of time. It is that sort of prominence.” High home of royas and nobles for generations—rank on rank of men and women had ended their lives in the Zangre, some quite spectacularly . . . some quite secretly. “The Zangre is older than Chalion itself. It surely . . . accumulates.”
Ista began gently pressing the thorns from her rose stem, and lining them up in a row like the teeth of a saw. “Yes. It accumulates. That’s the word, precisely. It collects calamity like a cistern, as its slates and gutters collect rainwater. You will do well to avoid the Zangre, Cazaril.”
“I’ve no desire to attend court, my lady.”
“I desired to, once. With all my heart. The gods’ most savage curses come upon us as answers to our own prayers, you know. Prayer is a dangerous business. I think it should be outlawed.” She began to peel her rose stem, thin green strips pulling away to reveal fine white lines of pith.
Cazaril had no idea what to say to this, so merely smiled hesitantly.
Ista began to pull the whip of pith apart lengthwise. “A prophecy was told of the Lord dy Lutez, that he should not drown except upon a mountaintop. And that he never feared to swim thereafter, no matter how violent the waves, for everyone knows there is no water upon a mountaintop; it all runs away to the valleys.”
Cazaril swallowed panic, and looked around surreptitiously for the returning attendant. She was not yet in sight. Lord dy Lutez, it was said, had died under the water torture in the dungeons of the Zangre. Beneath the castle stones, but still high enough above the town of Cardegoss. He licked slightly numb lips, and tried, “You know, I never heard that while the man was alive. It is my opinion that some tale-spinner made it up later, to sound shivery. Justifications . . . tend to accrue posthumously to so spectacular a fall as his was.”
Her lips parted in the strangest smile yet. She drew the last threads of the stem pith apart, aligned them upon her knee, and stroked them flat. “Poor Cazaril! How did you grow so wise?”
Cazaril was saved from trying to think of an answer for this by Ista’s attendant, who emerged again from the door of the keep with a hank of colored silk in her hands. Cazaril leapt to his feet and nodded to the royina. “Your good lady returns . . .”
He gave a little bow in passing to the attendant, who whispered urgently to him, “Was she sensible, my lord?”