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Authors: Katya Reimann

Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles (15 page)

BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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“Heiratikus had been Bissanty’s highest man in Tielmark. But Bissanty always has more plots going against Tielmark than a single man can manage. It stood to reason that Heiratikus must have had knowledge of those plots. It came to me that he might have left clues behind that would expose other spiders. I wanted to bring those traitors to light—in my own time, and in a manner that would bring me back to Benet’s favor.”
As he spoke, the sun finally made its appearance. They were within the shadow of the barrow-ground’s hedge. By mutual unspoken agreement,
they moved outside of the shadow and started walking toward the field with the rabbit-trails. The touch of light caught in the Duke’s beard and hair, revealing grey strands which Gaultry had not noticed earlier.
“But I could not move quickly,” the Duke continued. “I had withheld my knowledge of Heiratikus’s private cache. An unfriendly mind could read fresh treason in that. But then came the attack against the Common Brood at Emiera’s feast. I was sure Heiratikus must have known something at least of the early arrangements that were made for that, and decided it was time to find out, and see what I could do to stop it.
“Dervla High Priestess has appropriated Heiratikus’s old rooms to couch four of her tiresome acolytes. I sought an interview of Dervla’s highest acolyte in those quarters. Once I was inside, my men created a distraction. Heiratikus’s hiding-hole is built into a panel—I thought I knew the trick to opening it.” The Duke shook his head. “I had too good an opinion of my own plotting. It took longer to open than I expected. There were papers inside, along with this trinket. I had time only to seize the ring and a single packet of letters. Then, barely, I got the panel closed and stepped away, just as the rabbit-faced girl I had come to treat with returned.
“Two days later, Dervla announced her discovery of Heiratikus’s cache. My clumsiness, and a report from her acolyte, had led her to it. By virtue of the information she found there, two men were hung and seven young knights were sent from court in shame. The letters I found were of little use. Somehow Heiratikus had got hold of correspondence written between Argat Climens and an old Bissanty lover, but there was nothing in what was written beyond what any court lovers might have set to paper. Unless the High Priestess has become newly subtle, that must have been the only evidence against the good Duchess of Vaux-Torres, because she was not one of those charged in Dervla’s first round of accusations.
“But it seems that what Dervla wanted most of all from that cache is the object you now hold in your hands. Whatever it is, the other papers in the hiding-hole must have revealed that it had been stored there. I mentioned last night that she trumped up a warrant against me, accusing me of treason? Truly I think she was driving for the excuse to search my quarters, hoping to find that very piece of silver you hold in your hands. She knew that I had been to Heiratikus’s hiding-hole first, and she seemed to want, desperately, something that I had taken. The search revealed nothing—I had already burnt Vaux-Torres’s letters.
“But Dervla was not satisfied. She called me out before half the court, where she so lost her sense of fitness that she insisted my own person be searched—an outrage no duke has suffered in three hundred years of Tielmaran history.”
“What did you do?” Gaultry asked, fascinated. “Did you have the ring with you?”
“I was very proud,” the Duke said. “Righteously so.” His eyes gleamed mischievously. “I am sure Dervla imagined I would beg my rights to a private search, and in private she might have had her merry way with me—I know the power of her spells. But I called her bluff. I declared the entire accusation an affront to my honor. Charging every able body of my house to step forward, I called for all among us, men and women together, to strip naked for the court’s pleasure, that our High Priestess and anyone else might satisfy themselves that none of Haute-Tielmark’s house had anything to hide. Dervla was shocked to see herself mocked; my Prince, I am pleased to say, comported himself nobly throughout the farce. When Dervla, filled with fury, had finished her ransack of our belongings, he invited us to dress, and asked our pardon.”
“Where was the key?” Gaultry asked.
“I had swallowed it.” Haute-Tielmark grinned, unrepentant. Seeing Gaultry’s disbelieving expression, he patted his immense girth. “It took an inordinate amount of sour whiskey to bring it forth again.”
“But why hold it back? After all, she is High Priestess.”
“She called me a traitor, and sought to rob me of my land.” The coldness in the man’s voice left no doubt of his feelings. “I had committed myself, body and soul, to the Goddess-Twins, yet still she wished to see me brought low. I will render nothing to her. Traitor? She doesn’t know the meaning of the word. She imagines it is anything that goes against her own plots. As if Benet need bow to her. She would set herself up as a new Heiratikus, to rule him.”
They had reached the fallow field. Ahead, the roofline of Sieur Jumery’s manor hove into view. “But you don’t even know what you’re denying her.” Gaultry fingered the silver ring. “It could even be something to make Benet strong.”
The Duke kicked at a tussock of grass, sending clumps of dirt flying. “Dervla’s obsession is not to make Benet strong. Whatever that key opens, it will not help with that.”
“Then why put it in my hands?”
The Duke shrugged. “The gods guided me to you. Until the Lanai go
and crawl back into their mountains, I’ll be stuck riding the western border. It is better with you. You can return it to the High Priestess if you so choose—or discover for yourself what it unlocks.”
As they crossed the field, she held the key up to the light. The silver caught the sun, and dazzled Gaultry’s eye. She flinched. How could she set herself against Tielmark’s High Priestess?
The Duke caught her wrist. “The Goddess-Twins’ power may be strong in Dervla, but it’s also strong in you. There is space between any priest, however pious, and any of the Great Twelve. To defy Dervla’s whims does not set you against
them
.”
She pushed his hand away. “I have taken your key,” she said sharply. “I have listened to your words. Do not mistake that for cooperation. I am Benet’s servant, not yours.”
The Duke grinned again. “I’m counting on that. Without true servants, the court games will overwhelm him.”
Unknowingly, he touched her deepest fear. How would it be possible for her to serve Benet rightly, through all the intricacies of the court intrigues? Fifty years of bitterness—more—governed the alliances in Benet’s court. Who could expect her to navigate that maze successfully?
“Leave me alone,” Gaultry said. She hastened her steps toward the manor, not caring how he responded.
She did not look back to see that the Duke had stopped to watch her progress, a satisfied expression on his bearded face.
Victor Haute-Tielmark had secured them places on the Soiscroix fish
wagon. They spent the day traveling with tubs of live lake fish and barrels of gutted trout and perch packed in rotten, straw-smeared ice. The fish were destined for the Prince’s table in the capital. Evidently the fighting on the western border had not meant the cessation of midsummer banquets at the Prince’s court.
The swift-moving wagon jolted its passengers constantly, limiting talk. By noontime, a light rain began to fall. As the day wore on, the drizzle saturated the wagon’s canvas cover and began to drip inside. Much of the ice had melted by sundown. Damp penetrated everywhere, and the smell of fish permeated everything traveling in the wagon’s bed. For a time, Gaultry managed to nap uneasily. She spent the remainder of the hours brooding over all she had learned at Sieur Jumery’s manor. Tamsanne’s secrets, Dervla’s pride—the Common Brood seemed poised more to bring about Benet’s downfall than to consolidate his power.
Tullier, wavering between consciousness and fainting, had the best place in the wagon. He slept fitfully on a narrow cot wedged between fish tubs, the dog curled at his feet. Gaultry and the Sharif had settled one on either side of a tall barrel, a little away from Tullier, cold and rather uncomfortable. Martin was riding on the front seat with the driver. But it was Aneitha who traveled the most malcontent. They had taken her into the wagon in a field outside of Soiscroix and penned her in a makeshift cage—a calf-box purchased from a Soiscroix marketgoer. The animal, none the worse for her adventure at the barrow-ground, found her
time in the calf-box not the less miserable for being stowed under one of the more persistent drips in the wagon’s canvas ceiling.
She was not born to caging
, the Sharif told Gaultry. The Ardana’s arms were folded into loose slings. From her posture, it was clear that she was still in pain. The tamarin, on the Sharif’s lap, groomed its damp fur with restless fingers, a picture of dissatisfaction.
Aneitha endured a cage when traders brought her to Bissanty
, Gaultry answered gruffly.
If she wants to see her home desert, she’ll have to put up with it for now. The driver wouldn’t have taken her on without the box.
It was a little after the late midsummer twilight hour when the wagon’s wheels finally clattered into Princeport’s streets. Gaultry climbed over a barrel to the wagon’s side for an unobstructed view. Princeport, a large town of tall houses with blue slate roofs, was situated on two low hills which flanked the town’s ample harbor. Beyond, the distinctive silhouette of the Prince’s palace rose up on the craggy headland north of the lower of the two town-hills. By daylight Princeport was a pleasant town, too small to support sprawling slums or crumbling tenements. But this night, under thin drizzle and gloomy clouds, it seemed dreary and empty, dampened by more than rain.
When Gaultry had first come to Princeport, she had found the cobbled streets and stone-slated houses grand and fine. Until Princeport, she had never been to a village of more than two score houses, and the sheer number of buildings had been a revelation. The thatched cottages and rutted village lanes that characterized the hamlets of Arleon Forest were nothing, compared to Tielmark’s capital. Before Princeport, Gaultry had never understood that it was possible to travel out of sight of field or forest.
She had traveled a long way since those first innocent observations.
Now, as the fish wagon rattled along the town’s cobbled but deserted High Street, Gaultry found herself mentally comparing the narrow houses and streets to those she had seen in Bassorah, Bissanty’s foremost city. Bassorah, a true metropolis, boasted numerous thoroughfares and squares, many of them beautifully laid out and paved, built as monuments to emperors, army commanders, and highly placed noblemen. Tielmark’s capital, by contrast, was a working seaport, devoid of large-scale architectural splendors.
The dynamic thread of commerce that energized Bassorah’s streets, as citizens from every quarter of the empire converged upon the great city
to vie for favor from one or another of the ancient Bissanty houses or of its powerful ministers, was conspicuously absent.
The Midsummer celebrations had one more day to run before the new month opened. Traditionally, the biggest feasts were held on the final day of celebrations, after two feverish days of market fairs. Staring down from the wagon at the quiet streets, Gaultry could not quite suppress a niggling sense that Tielmark, with its shuttered houses, had failed to honor the festival’s spirit. A holy day in Bassorah would see the streets unruly until well after the midnight hour, the citizens overwrought with their extravagant displays of wealth, locked in fiscal competition to pay reverence.
This was not, she knew, a just comparison. Tielmark’s citizens, if anything, were more zealous than the Bissanties in their prayers. Indeed, without a class of slaves to worship for them, they had little choice but to be more active in their devotions. When it came to public displays of that devotion, they simply did not have the coin to make a costly show.
“Bassorah city sucked the land around it dry,” Gaultry reminded herself sternly. “The liveliness of its business was paid for by the thin lives of its people.” Her need to voice the thought aloud disturbed her. If she could feel this emptiness so strongly, could it be any wonder that Tielmaran courtiers, who lived in far greater expectation of luxury than she, felt similarly? Might not some of them then conspire to betray their Prince in order to achieve that distant, luxurious life?
She turned away from the wagon’s side, something in her deeply uneasy. Tielmark’s simple farming life had little in it to satisfy the worldly and ambitious.
“Martin,” she called, clambering forward to look into the wagon’s front seat. Martin, sitting in for the usual guard, was slumped next to Saucir, the driver. “How much longer?”
Even over the rattle of the wheels, he heard and responded at once, stretching his hand out to her. “Soon now.” Over the height of the bar that separated them he could just reach to brush her fingertips with his own. “Left turn here,” he said to Saucir. “And on to the corner.”
She remained pressed against the wagon’s front, spying on him through the cover of darkness with greedy intensity. The business at Sieur Jumery’s house had somewhat papered over the argument they had had over Tullier at the bridge, but she knew he had not quite let it go yet. As ever, he was so close to her—and so distant. Tantalizingly, it had been
like that since the night she and the others had rescued him, more than three weeks back. She could only hope that now they’d returned to Princeport, now they were safe from the hazards of Bissanty and the road, she and he would finally find a chance to speak of matters other than their own immediate safety. Unless—unless the Prince gave them a grim welcome, and sent Gaultry and her foreign companions to a cell and Martin, a valued war-leader, riding off to Haute-Tielmark’s war.
Yet despite the rain and her many worries, she found that her mood was lifting. The damp night air, plucking at her hair as it funneled in via the wagon’s hood, felt suddenly pleasant and fresh.
“Left again as you come into the square.” Martin pointed toward the dim façade of a house that stood near the center of the row across from them. “It’s the house with the stone fish over its door. Pull up next to the white steps.”
Princeport’s main square had been laid out by Bissanty engineers centuries past. It faced the sea on a gently sloping piece of land. Tall houses had long since been built up to screen much of the sea view, but the area’s proportions remained gracious and pleasant, reminiscent of similar piazzas in Bassorah. On the seaward side, an irregularly paved avenue led down to the harbor, the much-modified incarnation of an earlier Bissanty terrace. That avenue, with its slate steps, was too steep for horses, but each of those stone steps was wide enough to hold a small stall or market stand, making it an excellent place for an outdoor market. Here, finally, was some of the activity that Gaultry had missed elsewhere in the city. In honor of the Midsummer trading, the shallow terraces were crowded with stalls, many with their lessees still awake, finalizing transactions and securing their wares from the relentless drizzle. Their activity lent the square an attractive liveliness. A few steps down the avenue, the lighted door of a tavern beckoned, its open doors spilling laughter and music into the street. The publican had set up sputtering candles and a leaky awning to attract trade. In her fragile, changeable mood, Gaultry found it oddly cheering.
By contrast, the house to which Martin directed the driver had a distinctly forbidding aspect. Shuttered and barred, it had evidently been left closed and empty for weeks, if not months.
The driver reined the tired team of horses up outside the door. Martin leapt from his seat and disappeared into a narrow passage at the house’s side. After a long interval, the door under the carved fish creaked in
protest and opened. Martin, fumbling with a jingling ring of keys, stepped out.
“We’re here,” he called, coming around to the back of the cart. “Let’s unload our things, then I’ll ride on to help Saucir with these barrels.”
Gaultry clambered past Tullier’s cot and jumped stiffly onto the hard paving stones. “I’m cold,” she told him, as the first drops of rain struck her. “Leaning against those damn ice barrels all day would make anyone cold.”
“You can light a fire in the salon when you get settled,” he said, not unsympathetically.
The dark house was four stories high, fronted with tall, shuttered windows, three to each level. Though the fish over the door’s lintel was the only carving, the building could scarcely be called plain. Its tall plastered front was beautifully painted with trompe l’oeil framing in blue and grey. “You own this house?” she asked, unable to hide her surprise.
“Are you asking how I can afford to keep it?” he said frostily.
“I expected it to be plainer.” She matched his tone. “Last I’d heard, you’d surrendered all your wealth to become a soldier.”
“A profession in which I have achieved not a little success.” He scowled. “If it doesn’t kill him, a decade of fighting should bring a man some rewards.”
Imagining the painted house as the fruit of battle made her feel even colder.
Martin, watching her expression, relented. “It’s not all blood purchase,” he said. “Besides, I wanted to maintain something apart from my doting grandmere.”
That, Gaultry understood. The Duchess of Melaudiere did not shy from using people to her own purposes. It was easy to understand Martin wanting to live out from under her roof.
“Eliante’s eyes!” Gaultry changed the subject. “Isn’t it strange to be back in Princeport? After Bassorah, everything seems so grey and small.”
Martin nodded. “Unfortunately not so small that Bissanty will leave us alone.” He frowned. “It’s late. Let’s unload. I still need to get up to the palace tonight.”
“Are you sure I shouldn’t come with you?” Gaultry asked.
“And leave them alone?” Martin gestured into the back of the wagon.
“It’s not a matter of wanting to leave anyone.” Gaultry sighed, knowing that she could not abandon Tullier and the Sharif to the cold house
while she gallivanted up to the palace and the relief of homecoming. “I’m concerned as to how they’ll receive you.”
“Someone has to talk to Grandmère before we risk presenting the boy to Benet. It makes best sense for that someone to be me.” He wiped the rain off his face with an impatient gesture. “Grandmère will have a good guess as to how Benet will react to his erstwhile assassin, now we know about his heritage. She’ll also be able to tell me what’s gone on at court since Haute-Tielmark took off for the west border. What’s to argue? Confronting her and Benet simultaneously won’t give her a chance to marshal arguments to support you.”
“I know all that,” Gaultry said crossly.
“So help me get our friends settled so Saucir can get some sleep tonight. And me, too,” he added. “I’m not looking forward to shifting those barrels.”
“All right.”
Climb down,
she called to the Sharif.
It Looks like we’ll get to sleep in a warm bed tonight after all.
I don’t need a bed
, the Sharif answered, shivering.
Just to escape from this horrible cold.
Martin and Gaultry carried Tullier’s cot upstairs to the handsome salon at the front of the house. “I could have walked,” the boy said weakly, as they set him down near the ample tile-fronted fireplace.
“Not while I’m here,” Gaultry said. She brushed her fingers comfortingly in his hair, trying to believe that the swelling in his belly had subsided. “Give yourself another day to recover.”
When Martin asked him how his stomach felt, the boy turned his face to the wall and would not answer. Giving Gaultry a quick glance to gauge her reaction, the tall warrior shrugged, then turned to dump a bucket of coal into the grate. “Let’s go and bring that damn cat in,” he said.
They left the Sharif with Tullier and directions to start the fire, and returned outside for Aneitha’s box. It was an unpleasant chore. They had to unload four barrels and two loosely covered fish tubs before they could ease the cage out.
With Aneitha inside, the weight of the calf-box was perilously close to the limit of what Gaultry could carry without hurting herself, even with Martin shouldering more than his fair share of the burden. “Stop rushing,” she snapped, first terrified that the weight was too much for her to control, and then frightened that if they went too slowly she would sprain her back. Amazingly, they got the box into the hallway and set it
safely down without incident. Aneitha growled, soft and anxious, as they leveled the box.
BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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