“That is what I have been leading up to. Fournier has planted a spy there, God knows how. He may be a weaselly treasonous dastard, but he knows his business. Even I am not allowed to know our agent’s name. Twice in the past month a Merduk deserter has come to the gates with a despatch hidden on him.”
“He uses Merduks? A man for every message? He’ll be caught soon. You can’t keep that kind of thing secret for long. I take it there is no way to get a message to this agent?”
Odelia shrugged. “I fail to see how even Fournier can do that.”
“What about your… abilities? Your-”
“My witchery?” The Queen laughed again. “They run a different road, Corfe. Do you know anything of the Seven Disciplines?”
“I’ve heard of them, that’s all.”
“A true mage must master four of the Seven. I know only two-Cantrimy and True Theurgy. I may be one step better than a common hedge-witch, but I am no wizard.”
“I see. Then I would like to talk to these so-called Merduk deserters.”
“So would I. There is something odd going on at the Merduk court. But Fournier has hidden them away as though they were a miser’s hoard. He may even have disposed of them already.”
“You are the Queen. Order him to produce them, or the despatches they carried at least.”
“That would offend him, and then we might lose his co-operation entirely.”
Corfe’s eyes narrowed and a light kindled in them, red from the hearth glow. When he looked like that, Odelia thought, you could see the violence graven in him. She felt herself shiver, as though someone had walked over her grave.
“You mean to tell me,” Corfe said softly, “that this blue-blooded son of a bitch will deliberately withhold information which could be vital to the conduct of this war, simply out of a fit of pique?”
“He is not one of your soldiers, Corfe. He is a noble, and must be handled with care.”
“Nobles.” His voice was still soft, but the tone of it set the hair rising on the back of her neck. “I have never yet seen one who was worth so much as a bucket of warm spit. These deserters, or whatever they are, their knowledge of what goes on in the Merduk camps could be priceless to us.”
“You cannot touch Fournier,” Odelia snapped. “He is of the nobility. You cannot sweep aside the entire bedrock of a kingdom’s fabric just like that. Leave him to me.”
“All right then; if the kingdom’s fabric is so important I will leave him alone.”
What would he be like as a king? Odelia wondered. Am I mad to consider it? He has so much anger in him. He might save Torunna, and then tear it apart afterwards. If only he could be healed.
She set a hand on his brow. “What are you doing?” he demanded, still angry.
“Stealing your mind. What do you think? Now be quiet.”
Very well, do it. Take that plunge. She was no mind-rhymer, but she was a healer of sorts, and she loved him. That opened the door for her. She stepped through it with a fearful sort of determination.
It was like hearing distant thunder, a baying recklessness of baffled hurt and fury. She dove past scenes of slaughter, ecstasies of boundless murder. Corfe’s trade, his vocation, was the killing of his fellow man, and he was good at it-but he did not enjoy it. That gave her a vast sense of relief. His soul was not that of a bloodthirsty barbarian, but it was savage nonetheless. He was possessed of a deep self-loathing, a desire for redemption that surprised and touched her.
There-that was Aekir, burning like the end of the world. Go back further, to before that. And there was an ordinary young man with kinder eyes and less iron certainty in his heart. Wholly different, it seemed, and unexceptional.
She realised then that he must not be healed-not by her. His suffering had made him what he was, had forged a man out of the boy and rendered him steel-hard. She found herself both in awe of him and pitying his pain. There was nothing to be done here. Nothing.
She came out again, unwilling to look at the happiness there had been before Aekir, the fleeting images of the raven-haired girl who had been and would always be his only love. But the youth who had married the silk merchant’s daughter was no more. Only the general remained. Yes, he could be King. He could be a very great king, one that later centuries would spin legends around. But he would never be truly at ease with himself-and that was the mainspring, the thing that drove him to greatness.
She sat back in her chair and rubbed her eyes.
“Well?” he asked.
“Well, nothing. You are a muddle-headed peasant who needs to get drunk more often.”
His smile warmed her. There would never be passion there, not for her, but he esteemed her nonetheless. That would have to be enough.
“I think your magicks are overrated,” he said.
“Magic often is. I am off to bed. I am an old woman who needs her rest.”
He took her hand. “No. Sit with me awhile, and we will go together.”
She actually felt herself blushing, and was glad of the dimness of the room. “Very well then. Let us sit here by the fire and pretend.”
“Pretend what?”
“That there are no wars, no armies. Just the rain on the window, the wine in your glass.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
And they sat there hand in hand as the fire burnt low, as content with their common silence, it seemed, as some long-married couple at the end of a day’s labour.
It has become a bizarre habit for an old man, Betanza thought, this night-time pacing of wintry cloisters. I am getting strange in my twilight years.
Charibon’s cathedral bells had tolled the middle of the night away, and the cloisters were deserted except for his black-robed shape walking up and down, the very picture of a troubled soul. He did this most nights of late, marching his doubts into the flagstones until he was weary enough to finally tumble into dreamless sleep. And then dragging himself awake in time for matins, with the sun still lost over the dark horizon.
The old need less sleep than the young anyway, he told himself. They are that much more familiar with the concept of their own mortality.
There had been a thaw, and now instead of snow it was a chill black rain that was pouring down out of the Cimbrics, flattening the swell on the Sea of Tor and rattling on the stone shingles of the monastery-city. It was moving slowly east, washing down the Torian plains and beating on the western foothills of the Thurians. In the morning it would be frowning over northern Torunna, where Corfe’s army was still a long day’s march away from their beds.
Betanza paused in his endless pacing. There was a solitary figure standing in the cloister ahead of him, looking beyond the pillars to the sodden lawn they enclosed and the black starless wedge of sky above it. A tall figure in a monk’s habit. Another eccentric, it seemed.
As he drew close the man turned, and Betanza made out a beak of a nose and high forehead under the cowl. A hint of bristling eye-brows.
“God be with you,” the man said.
“And with you,” the Vicar-General replied politely. He would have walked on, not wanting to interrupt the solitary cleric’s devotions, but the other spoke again, stalling him.
“Would you be Betanza, by any chance, head of the Inceptine Order?”
“I would.” Impossible to make out the colour of the monk’s habit in the darkness, but the material of it was rich and unadorned.
“Ah, I have heard of you, Father. At one time you were a duke of Astarac, I believe.”
His curiosity stirred, Betanza looked more closely at the other man. “Indeed. And you are?”
“My name is Aruan. I am a visitor from the west, come seeking counsell in these turbulent times.”
The man had the accent of Astarac, but there was an archaic strangeness to his diallect. He spoke, Betanza thought, like a character from some old history or romance. There were so many clerics from so many different parts of the world in Charibon at present, however. Only yesterday a delegation had arrived from Fimbria, of all places, with an escort of forty sable-clad pikemen.