“The resistance went ill. There were many deaths in quick succession, among the exiled Horseriver kin of the old royal line. I found myself trapped in the body of a useless child, and in my impatience ate him; they treated us as mad. It was thirty years and another death before I won my way to leadership again. But no kin would fight for us anymore. I turned to politics, to the attempt to win back the Weald from within. I amassed wealth, and what power I could, and learned to bend men when I could not break them. I watched for fissures in the Darthacan royal house and applied myself to widening them.”
“Aye, and his son, and his son's son. I cascaded from body to body, amassing a great density of life. But my sons were not voluntary sacrifices to me, anymore. The gods, they say, accumulate souls without destroying them, which is proof, if any were needed, that I was no god on earth. If the invaded minds were not to explode in madness, only one could dominate. There was by then no choice of whose.
“For a hundred and fifty years I fought, and schemed, and bled, and died, and defiled my soul by fatal error and the cannibal consumption of my children's children's children. And for one glorious moment I thought myself done, the Weald renewed. But the new kingship had no weirding in it, no song of the land, none of the old forest powers. It was adulterated by the gods. I was not released from my cycle of torment. My war was over but not won.
“Thus began that line of strange and famously reclusive Earls Horseriver…”
“Can you not be released from your spell?” Ingrey whispered. “Somehow?”
Wencel's voice and face both cracked. “Do you think I have not tried?”
Ingrey flinched at the shout. “You need a miracle, I think.”
“Oh, the gods have long hunted me.” Wencel's grin grew unholy. “They harry me hard, now. They want me; but I do not want them, Ingrey.” Ingrey had to force his voice to an audible volume. “What do you want, then?”
The vision returned in breathtaking light, drenched in color. A man, a laughing woman, and a gaggle of youths reined in their horses on the reedy margins of the Lure, and watched in awe as a family of gray herons flew up into the bursting gold of dawn.
And for an instant, Horseriver's eyes cried, Damn you for making me remember that! The hour of drowning in blood and despair had borne with it a less piercing pain. His trembling grip tightened on Ingrey's face, fingers pressing hard enough to bruise. “I want my world back.”
Ah. That was not an image doled out by design. It escaped.
Ingrey moistened his lips. “But you can't have it. No one could.”
The brief flare faded back into dry dark, darkness absolute, and Ingrey knew the visions were over.
“I know. Not all the gods together, by any miracle they might devise, can give me my desire.”
“Do you fear the gods will destroy you?”
That disturbing smile again. “That is not a fear. That is a prayer.”
“Or…do you fear their punishment? That they would plunge your soul into some eternal torment?”
Wencel leaned forward, up on his toes. “That,” he breathed in Ingrey's ear, “would be redundant.” To Ingrey's intense relief he finally released his grip, stepping back once more. He cocked his head as if studying Ingrey's face. “But you'll learn all about that, if your luck holds ill.” Ingrey should have thought he'd faced a raving lunatic, but for the stream of searing sights Wencel had sent spinning through his head. Whatever truth he had sought to shake from Wencel, it had not been this. Staggered he was, and Wencel could doubtless tell it from the winded way he sagged against the table, for all that he clutched the edge to conceal any betraying shudder in his body. Disbelieving…he merely wished he could be.
A knock sounded on the chamber door, and both men jerked. “What?” the earl called, his sharp tone not inviting entry.
“My lord.” The dutiful voice of some senior servant. “My lady is ready to depart and begs your company.”
Wencel's lips thinned in annoyance, but he called back, “Tell her I come anon.” Footsteps faded outside, and Wencel sighed and turned back briefly to Ingrey. “We are to attend upon her father. It is going to be an unpleasant evening. You and I shall have to continue this later.”
“I, too, would wish to go on,” Ingrey conceded, considered his words, and decided to let the dual meaning-speaking or just breathing-stand unaided.
Wencel measured him, still wary. “You understand, our family curse is asymmetrical. While my death would be your disaster, the reverse does not hold.”
“Why do you not slay me as I stand, then?” For all of Ingrey's fighting edge, he did not doubt Wencel could do so. Somehow.
“It would stir up troubles I am still contemplating. At present, the spell would merely replace you with another, perhaps more inconvenient. Your Birchgrove cousin, likely. Unless you have some Darthacan by-blow I know nothing of.”
“The matter shifts, over time, in ways I do not control. You might have died in Darthaca. Fara might have conceived a son.” Wencel's mouth twisted. “Others might be born or die. I learned long ago not to exhaust myself grappling problems that time will carry away on its tide.” He walked back and forth once across the chamber, as if to shake the tension out of his body. Ingrey wished he might dare do the same.
At the end of his circuit, Wencel turned again. “It seems we are to be saddled with each other for a little, will or nil. How if you enter my service?”
Ingrey rocked back. He had a thousand questions, to which Wencel, and possibly Wencel alone, held the answers. Close attendance upon the earl must reveal something more. And if I say no, how long do I get to live? He temporized. “I owe Lord Hetwar much. I would not lightly leave his house, nor would he lightly release me, I think.”
Wencel shrugged. “How if I begged you of him? He would not lightly refuse Princess Fara's husband such a favor.”
No, but I might beseech Hetwar to evade or delay. “If Hetwar gives his leave, then.”
“A nice loyalty. I cannot fault it, who would have a like one from you.”
“I admit, your offer interests me strangely.”
Wencel's dry smile acknowledged all the possible meanings of those ambiguous words. “I have no doubt of it.” He sighed and walked to the chamber door, indicating this interview was drawing to its end. Obediently, Ingrey followed him.
“Tell me one thing more tonight, though,” Ingrey said as he reached the portal. Earl Horseriver raised his brows in curious permission.
Horseriver touched his forehead. “His memories still exist, lost in a sea of such.”
“But Wencel does not? He is destroyed?”
The earl shrugged. “Where is the fourteen-year-old Ingrey, then, if not there”-he gestured to Ingrey's head in turn-“in like disarray? They are both victims of a common enemy. If there is one thing that I have come to hate more than the gods, it is time.” He gestured Ingrey out. “Farewell. Find me tomorrow, if you will.”
There seemed something terribly wrong with Wencel's argument, but in his present dizzied state Ingrey could not finger what. In a few moments he found himself in the street again, blinking in the sunset light. It somehow surprised him that Easthome was still standing. It felt as though the city ought to have been churned to rubble during the small eternity he'd spent within, not one stone left upon another.
As I have been?
Gaps. Silences. Things not mentioned. For a man so sick with a surfeit of time, why was Wencel so anxious now? What drove him out of his reclusive routine, and into, apparently, such unaccustomed action? For Ingrey read him as a man pressed, and silently furious to be so.
He shook his aching head and turned for the sealmaster's palace.