He rose from his seat on the bed and walked to the window. Tenderly he picked up the lifeless body of the bird, and cupped it in his hands.
“The poor thing must have flown in here and battered itself to death against the window. It’s odd, Galen,” he said, turning to face me. “Odd that the servants hadn’t disposed of it before they moved you in here. It’s been dead several days now. How sad.” Unceremoniously, he dropped the bird out the window.
“Nevertheless, it’s not the kind of thing a sick boy should have in his room.”
Dead several days. Like the prisoner in the moat house.
Whether from the wine or the fever or from being tired of lying, I felt tears rush into my eyes. I had trouble keeping them down as I spoke.
“Brithelm, I have done some terribly wrong things.”
He looked at me evenly and nodded. And I told my story, or, at least as much as I dared tell.
“So that bird was Benedict di Caela?” Brithelm asked between mouthfuls of boiled egg, balancing the empty tray on his head.
“No, damn it! That bird was a stopping-off place for Benedict di Caela, for Gabriel Androctus, for the Scorpion, for what have you. Whoever or whatever he is, he’s still about the premises, and plotting villainy.”
Brithelm was to his feet at once, headed for the door.
“You and I will simply have to go to Sir Robert di Caela and tell him that this . . . Gabriel Androctus he fancies his future son-in-law is in fact the family curse come to roost.”
“I think not, Brithelm. No telling the tricks that old Benedict has up his scaly sleeve.”
“Then it’s also time to tell Sir Bayard the whole story, Galen. So you won’t be unprotected.”
“Oh, I think not, Brithelm! The world may be as trusting a place as you seem to imagine, but one thing I can rely on is that Bayard Brightblade will dismantle me if this story is told to him.”
“Then,” Brithelm concluded, “it is time for dismantlement. Do you want your soup?”
“No . . . I’m far from hungry. Far from sober, too, with the mulled wine you’ve plied me with. I’m not drunk enough to confess everything in my dark past, though. I’m afraid that would take dwarf spirits or something stronger.”
Brithelm nodded, his wide face buried in the soup bowl.
When he rose up for air, he had little to say.
“We’ll go to Bayard as soon as you’ve weathered this fever. But we have to go there. After all, think of Sir Robert. Think of Enid—if half of what that raven boded is true, she’s in dreadful danger.
“Think of Agion.”
Something beyond wine and fever impelled me. This time I was sure.
“Brithelm, I have to go tonight. Bayard will be gone by noon tomorrow—you can count on it. He’s too depressed to stay for the wedding.
“The wedding!”
“I had forgotten it, too,” Brithelm declared calmly. “Are these potatoes in the bottom of the bowl? I had been avoiding them, thinking they were turnips.”
“We must get to Bayard, and get to him tonight!”
“Very well,” Brithelm agreed, bent curiously over the soup bowl.
He glanced up at me, once more staring me through.
“And no lies this time, Galen. Not like Alfric.”
He must have seen the look of surprise on my face, for he laughed, looked down, and stirred in the soup bowl with his finger.
“Surely you didn’t think I believed our brother’s tales of heroism.”
“Then why . . .”
He looked up again, smiled at me.
“Simply because it made him feel better. He was dreadfully embarrassed—passed over for squirehood again and again, and then, when he tried to do something about it, he gets mired by his baby brother waist deep in the Warden Swamp, squealing until rescued by his middle brother. He needed a little . . . ornamental passage in his story, a part where he was the hero.”
“But then, what about me and having to tell Sir Bayard all about—”
“Same reason.”
Again he looked down into the bowl and stirred some more.
“Potatoes get so confoundedly transparent when you boil them too long. Are these turnips, Galen?”
He held up the bowl to me, smiling that vacant grin once more.
As you might imagine, Bayard was not overjoyed to see me. Shivering in the night air, which was burrowing into my cloak and tunic more ferociously than it ever did in the mountains, I approached the pavilion where his standard had been raised that afternoon and saw him sitting alone, away from the other Knights. Wrapped in the blanket from which he had drawn the ceremonial Brightblade shield, he also shivered in the brisk autumn night. He had left the shield face-down in the dirt beside him.
The night was still overcast and chill. Not far from Bayard, the other Knights drank roka and played music and told stories, enjoying the company before most of them struck camp and returned to Palanthas, to Caergoth, to Solanthus, to those few places in which the Order was still permitted and still welcome. Brithelm walked among them, slack-jawed with amazement at the tales the Knights were telling.
“Do you suppose these are true, Galen—all these tales about sea monsters and abductions by eagles? Do you suppose Sir Ramiro over there really has a talking sword?”
“I suppose that it makes him feel good to tell the others about it, Brithelm,” I responded vacantly, looking across the dappling of firelight and darkness into the campsite of my former protector. Who sulked at the twilit edge of things, his attention evidently on the stars. It was almost a pitiful sight, and I suspect I felt almost sorry for Bayard.
I tried to slip by the revelry, and could have done so with ease, what with the citterns and the clatter of cups and the boasts.
But the smoke of the campfires or the dust in the rising wind—or just plain fatigue, if that is possible—brought on a fit of sneezing as though I had rolled the length of a country in goldenrod. The fit over, I sniffed, walked on as if I belonged at the encampment, or as if I had a message for my protector that would not bear obstructing.
Sir Ramiro of the Maw, all four hundred pounds of him, stopped me before I could get to Bayard.
“I would not approach him if I were you, boy. He doesn’t seem all that pleased with any of the business that plagued this tournament, and I understand you had a little hand in delaying him.”
“So he’s talking about that, is he?” I began. But Ramiro waved his fat hands quickly, so quickly that his forearms quivered.
“No, no, boy, you’d never hear such talk from Bayard Brightblade. Your brother was quite vocal at the banquet earlier, and seemed altogether pleased that you’d played merry hell with Sir Bayard’s intentions. Seeing as that’s the case, if you’ve come for forgiveness, I’d advise you to wait on it until morning.”
The big Knight stepped in front of me and folded his arms across his expanse of chest. It was like having a gate closed in your face, and I stepped back, almost into the cheery campfire of two Knights from Caergoth, and adopted my best official voice, lowered at least one strenuous octave.
“So Bayard isn’t pleased with me, Sir Ramiro? Perhaps he’ll be pleased when the family di Caela, the beautiful Enid included, is finally consumed by the curse it’s been carrying for four hundred years.”
“The curse again? I thought the di Caelas had put that yarn to rest.”
“Please let me through, sir. The ill tidings are for Sir Bayard’s ears first.”
I coughed again, and began the long, circular route around Sir Ramiro. He started to stand in front of me once more, but Brithelm distracted him with some questions about the talking sword, and I was allowed to pass freely through the encampment to where Bayard sat, stargazing, huddled under blankets and gloom. I paused and took stock as Bayard pondered the moon.
“Things at Castle di Caela, sir. They’re in bad shape, I fear.”