“End this curse!” he pleaded, his voice choked. “I beg you, Lady! End this curse you have put upon me! Free me! Let me go!”
He bowed his head. Harsh, dry sobs tore his body. He shook and shivered, his nerveless hands let slip their hold. Iridal bent over him, her tears falling on the graying hair that she smoothed with chill fingers.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered brokenly. “So sorry.” He raised his head. “I don’t want your damn pity! Free me!” he repeated again, harsh, urgent. His hands clutched at hers. “You don’t know what you’ve done! End it... now!”
She regarded him for long moments, unable to speak.
“I can’t, Hugh. It was not me.”
“Yes!” he cried fiercely. “I saw you! When I woke—” She shook her head. “Such a spell is far beyond my power, thank the ancestors. You know,” she said to him, looking into the pleading, hopeless eyes. “You must know. It was Alfred.”
“Alfred!” He gasped the word. “Where is he? Did he come... ?” He saw the answer in her eyes and threw his head back as if the agony was more than he could endure. Two great tears welled from beneath squinched-shut eyelids, rolled down his cheeks into the thick and matted beard. He drew a deep and shivering breath and suddenly went berserk, began to scream in terrible anger, claw at his face and hair with his hands. And, as suddenly, he pitched forward on his face and lay still and unmoving as the dead. Which he had once been.
23
Hugh woke with a buzzing in his head—a dull, throbbing ache that went up his neck and stabbed through to the back of his eyeballs—and a tongue thick and swollen. He knew what was wrong with him and he knew how to fix it. He sat up on the bed, his hand groping for the wine bottle that was never far from reach. It was then he saw her and memory hit him a blow that was cruel and hurt worse than the pain in his head. He stared at her wordlessly. She sat in a chair—the only chair—and had, by her attitude, been sitting there for some time. She was pale and cold, colorless—with her white hair and silver robes—as the ice of the Firmament. Except for her eyes, which were the myriad colors of sunlight on a crystal prism.
“The bottle’s here, if you want it,” she said.
Hugh managed to get his feet beneath him, heaved himself up and out of bed, paused a moment to wait until the light bursting in his vision had faded enough for him to see beyond it, and made his way to the table. He noted the arrival of another chair, noted at the same time that his cell had been cleaned.
And so had he.
His hair and beard were filled with a fine powder, his skin was raw and it itched. The pungent smell of grise[51] clung to him. The smell brought back vivid memories of his childhood, of the Kir monks scrubbing the squirming bodies of young boys—abandoned bastards, like himself.
Hugh grimaced, scratched his bearded chin, and poured himself a mug of the cheap, raw wine. He was starting to drink it when he remembered that he had a guest. There was only one mug. He held it out to her, grimly pleased to note that his hand did not tremble.
Iridal shook her head. “No, thank you,” she said, not aloud, her lips forming the words.
Hugh grunted, tossed down the wine in one swift gulp that kept him from tasting it. The buzzing in his head receded, the pain dulled. He lifted the bottle without thinking, hesitated. He could let the questions go unanswered. What did it matter anyway? Or he could find out what was going on, why she’d come.
“You gave me a bath?” he said, eyeing her.
A faint flush stained the pale cheeks. She did not look at him. “The monks did,” she said. “I made them. And they scrubbed the floor, brought fresh linen, a clean shirt.”
“I’m impressed,” said Hugh. “Amazing enough they let you in. Then do your bidding. What’d you threaten ’em with? Howling winds, quakes; maybe dry up their water... ?”
She did not respond. Hugh was talking for the sake of filling up the silence, and both knew it.
“How long was I out?”
“Many hours. I don’t know.”
“And you stayed and did all this.” He glanced around his cell. “Must be important, what you came for.”
“It is,” she said, and turned her eyes upon him.
He had forgotten their beauty, her beauty. He had forgotten that he loved her, pitied her, forgotten that he’d died for her, for her son. All lost in the dreams that tormented him at night, the dreams that not even the wine could drown. And he came to realize, as he sat and looked into her eyes, that last night, for the first time in a long time, he had not dreamed at all.
“I want to hire you,” she said, her voice cool and business-like. “I want you to do a job for me—”
“No!” he cried, springing to his feet, oblivious to the flash of pain in his head. “I will not go back out there!”
Fist clenched, he smashed it on the table, toppled the wine bottle, sent it crashing to the floor. The thick glass did not break, but the liquid spilled out, seeping into the cracks in the stone.
She stared at him, shocked. “Sit down, please. You are not well.” He winced at the pain, clutched his head, swayed on his feet. Leaning heavily on the table, he stumbled back to his chair, sank down.
“Not well.” He tried to laugh. “This is a hangover, Lady, in case you’ve never seen one.” He stared into the shadows. “I tried it, you know,” he said abruptly. “Tried going back to my old calling. When they brought me down from that place. Death is my trade. The only thing I know. But no one would hire me. No one can stand to be around me, except them.” He jerked his head in the direction of the door, indicating the monks.
“What do you mean, no one would hire you?”
“They sit down to talk to me. They start to tell me their grievances, start to name the mark they want assassinated, start to tell me where to find him... and, little by little, they dry up. Not just once. It happened five times, ten. I don’t know. I lost count.”
“What happens?” Iridal urged gently.
“They go on and on about the mark and how much they hate him and how they want him to die and how he should suffer like he made their daughter suffer or their father or whoever. But the more they tell me this, the more nervous they get. They look at me and then look away, then sneak a look back, and look away again. And their voices drop, they get mixed up in what they’ve said. They stammer and cough and then usually, without a word, they get up and run. You’d think,” he added grimly, “they’d stabbed their mark themselves and were caught with the bloody knife in their hands.”
“But they did, in their hearts,” said Iridal.
“So? Guilt never plagued any of my patrons before. Why now? What’s changed?”
“You’ve changed, Hugh. Before, you were like the coralite, soaking up their evil, absorbing it, taking it into yourself, freeing them of the responsibility. But now, you’ve become like the crystals of the Firmament. They look at you, and they see their own evil reflected back to them. You have become our conscience.”
“Hell of a note for an assassin,” he said, sneering. “Makes it damn hard to find work!” He stared unseeing at the wine bottle, nudged it with his foot, sent it rolling around in circles on the floor. His blurred gaze shifted to her. “I don’t do that to you.”
“Yes, you do. That’s how I know.” Iridal sighed. “I look at you, and I see my folly, my blindness, my stupidity, my weakness. I married a man I knew to be heartless and evil out of some romantic notion that I could change him. By the time I understood the truth, I was hopelessly entangled in Sinistrad’s snares. Worse, I’d given birth to an innocent child, allowed him to become tangled in the same web.
“I could have stopped my husband, but I was frightened. And it was easy to tell myself that he would change, that it would all get better. And then you came, and brought my son to me, and, at last, I saw the bitter fruit of my folly. I saw what I had done to Bane, what I’d made him through my weakness. I saw it then. I see it now, looking at you.”
51
Those who can’t afford water for bathing use grise to cleanse the body or any other surface. A pumicelike substance made from ground coralite, grise is often mixed with headroot, an herb with a strong, but not offensive odor, used to kill lice, fleas, ticks, and other vermin.