Return of the Guardian-King (20 page)
Maddie still marveled at the return of her sons. Some days she sat in wonder, thanking Eidon with all of her heart for this gift. Others she felt Abramm’s loss more keenly than ever, perhaps because so many seemed to think that having regained her sons, she should stop mourning the loss of her husband. In any case, her sons’ return had sparked a series of receptions and, more importantly, had moved Ronesca into a much more pleasant and solicitous mood. Maddie suspected Garival had spoken to her, because the very morning after the boys’ return, she had arrived at Maddie’s chambers, professing relief at catching her before she’d left. “It would not be good to put your sons at risk on yet another journey, especially when they have so recently arrived,” she’d said, adding that Maddie could do her lying-in at the palace and she would begin interviewing midwives and wet nurses that very day.
She’d been friendly and helpful ever since, showering the boys with gifts that included a special spiritual tutor with puppets and bright sparklers of Terstan light. Maddie had sent him away, kindly but firmly, and was astonished when Ronesca had accepted the decision without one word of criticism. But perhaps that was because shortly afterward Ronesca’s own sons returned home from the front—the war temporarily shut down by wind and weather and the withdrawal of the Esurhites. The last two weeks had been downright peaceful.
At least on the surface. Maddie continued to fret about her father’s condition, which Garival said seemed more an ailment of mind and mood than body. He was erratic, emotional, prone to uncharacteristic fits of temper and sometimes stubbornly and even aggressively irrational. His aides were at their wits’ end for how to deal with him. Garival thought it might be the strain of the war, and hoped that a few months at home in Fannath Rill with his daughter and grandsons would help to ease him.
But as the days passed and still no word came of the king’s return, Maddie had grown more and more uneasy.
As for Leyton’s ill-fated attempt at drawing the Esurhites into a trap on Torneki, Garival claimed there was no talisman so far as he knew, though there had been an attempt to draw the Esurhites into the bay at Torneki. It had gone horribly wrong, but more than that he would not tell her.
“So,” Carissa said. “I understand you’ve received yet another gift from Draek Tiris. A book of nursery rhymes and some figs?”
“Sorite nursery rhymes,” Maddie corrected. “And the figs were gold.” She lifted her skirts as they started up one of the wooden footbridges. With her monstrous belly hiding all sight of her feet these days, she had to step carefully and hope she didn’t trip.
“I thought the golden figs were out of season now,” Carissa said.
“For eating, yes. These are solid gold.”
“Off the same magic tree that made the edible ones a few months ago?” Skepticism colored her voice.
“Aye. Whether it’s true or not, I still have no idea what I should do with them. Would you like one?”
Carissa looked at her in surprise, then shook her head. “Oh no, my lady. I’m sure he meant those just for you. Perhaps you can use them as paperweights.” And they laughed together at the notion.
When Ronesca had informed Maddie that a proper princess needed a coterie of noble ladies-in-waiting, she undoubtedly had in mind some Chesedhan ladies to recommend for the position. Instead Maddie had chosen Carissa. Besides being her boys’ aunt, Carissa needed a position in the court beyond “exiled Kiriathan princess.” Though Maddie had not wished to draw her from husband and baby when they’d first arrived, now, with Trap living across the palace from her, and Conal needing her less and less, she’d seemed lonely and at loose ends. Serving Maddie as lady-in-waiting was the perfect solution, and she had called upon her services frequently of late. As a result they’d grown closer than they’d ever been—Carissa’s recent pregnancy and Maddie’s current one, plus the antics of their boys, providing a wealth of subject matter for discussion. Now, apparently, Tiris ul Sadek was to be added to the mix.
“You two are developing quite the relationship,” Carissa remarked as they came down the other side of the bridge.
“I don’t know that I’d call it a ‘relationship.”’
Her sister-in-law shrugged. “Not a day goes by you don’t hear from him. He visits you in person several times a week and showers you with expensive gifts. Exotic fruits and flowers, that amazing cloak, the gold-trimmed lirret with those fancy strings you were so excited about, jeweled books of Sorite music, all those dragon things. . . .” Here she grimaced and uttered a little groan of distaste. “Those, though, are just plain odd. Whoever heard of sending someone a dragon sculpture as a courtship gift?”
“Well, lots of folks say I’m odd, so I guess it fits.” She shrugged. “He knows I have an interest in dragons. He knows why, as well.”
“Nevertheless he’s obviously courting you.”
“I have no interest in Tiris ul Sadek, Riss. At least not like that. And I’ve been entirely forthright about that with him.”
Carissa chuckled at her. “Abramm said you were stubborn, and now I see why. Why in the world do you fight it so? Tiris is rich, charming, erudite. And he is a
very
attractive man.”
“So was your brother,” Maddie said tartly. “In ways Tiris will never be.”
For a moment Carissa was silent. Then she sighed wearily. “Maddie, Abramm is gone. Don’t let that rumor mess this up for you.”
“I’m not. Even if it’s false, Abramm has not left my soul. I doubt he ever will.”
“Maybe not, but you’ll still need someone to support you. And your sons.”
Maddie looked at her in surprise. “Didn’t Trap tell you? As First Daughter, all Briellen’s holdings are mine now. He’s been traveling the realm this last month visiting each of them, getting to know those who oversee them, gathering tribute where it’s due.” Which was almost everywhere.
Carissa stopped in surprise, and when Maddie stopped a step afterward and turned to face her, she said, “You mean he’s not even been in Fannath Rill all this time?”
“Doesn’t your husband tell you anything?”
Pain flashed across Carissa’s aristocratic features, swallowed up by that mask of impassivity the Kalladornes were so good at. She lifted her chin to gaze across the hills and fountains and moving waterwheels. “I haven’t seen him in weeks,” she said. “And no, he tells me very little.” She started walking again.
Maddie fell in beside her, dismayed by this revelation but having no idea what to say. How in the world could things have gone so wrong between those two? After their unexpected marriage, she had hoped to see the promise of love that had always sparkled between them finally grow to fruition. Instead it seemed to have shriveled and died away altogether. Ever since that day she’d pressed Trap into asking Carissa to come with him to the inn and she’d refused. It hadn’t been long after that she’d learned he’d moved out of their shared apartments to live in his office across the palace from them. He’d claimed it was Carissa’s desire and more convenient for him, and Maddie hadn’t pressed him.
Now, feeling she might be partly to blame for it all, she was hesitant to intrude again.
“He’s given me his name,” Carissa said tightly. “He’s taken my son for his own and all the evil talk that goes with it. Is that not enough?”
They walked on in silence, the crunch of their feet on the gravel path overlaying the ever-present trickle of water. When Carissa said nothing more, Maddie decided she couldn’t leave the matter without probing further.
“You told me once that you loved him,” she said cautiously. “Do you still?”
“That was years ago!” Carissa protested. But she didn’t answer the question, lapsing into silence again. Just when Maddie was about to try another tack, she sighed. “I know he doesn’t love me, Mad. He is kind and attentive and unfailingly polite, but never anything more. Finally I suggested he shouldn’t pretend what he didn’t feel, that I would never expect any more from him than he’d already given. That’s when he left.”
Maddie’s stomach dropped to her toes. “Oh, Carissa . . . you actually said that to him?”
“I gave him his freedom and he took it.” Carissa wiped a tear from her eye. “I’ve even heard he’s found a mistress, a tavern maid down by the river.”
“Well, since he’s not been in town for the last month, I find that very hard to believe.” She shook her head. “Abramm said Trap’s loved you since he was seventeen. I really don’t think the problem is that he doesn’t care.”
“You’re saying this is my fault? That I drove him away?” Carissa’s ire rose quickly, fueled by her pain. “You didn’t see the expression that came over his face when he thought I wasn’t looking. Miserable and sad and hopeless.”
“Maybe he looked that way because you asked him to leave.”
“No. He looked like that before I asked. I know—”
She was interrupted as hurried footfalls on the gravel path behind them brought both women around. One of the royal guardsmen ran up to them.
“Your Highness?” he gasped, bowing sketchily to the First Daughter. “The king has been wounded, my lady. They’re bringing him through the city gates as I speak. He should be here shortly.”
“Wounded? How can he be wounded when the war is paused?”
“I don’t know, my lady. It may be the old wound. I’ve heard it was inflicted by the Shadow. They feared he’d not reach Fannath Rill alive. As it is, they don’t expect him to last much longer.”
Maddie sent the boys back to their nursery with Channon and went to prepare herself to meet the king. A little over half an hour later, she was striding into the newly opened royal apartments, closed and locked since the monarch had left for Peregris over a year ago.
Hadrich’s physician, Dr. Lavek, greeted her in the outer chamber, and so far only he and the servants were there. Ronesca and First Minister Garival were still at the Kirikhal, though Lavek expected them soon.
“I thought my father was healing,” Maddie said.
“He’d been up and walking for over a month, the wound fading,” Lavek explained. “Then a week ago he collapsed. Spent the next night raving as the fever overtook him, and the wound—”
He broke off as a voice shouted from the chamber behind him, “No! No! I will not see them! Take them away!” Silence followed the words, and then, in a much stronger voice, “I want to see my daughter. Bring Madeleine at once! I must see her NOW.”
Lavek frowned. Maddie prodded him. “And the wound?”
“The wound is something you will have to see to understand. But . . . I don’t know that you should go in just now.”
“I want to.”
“My lady, he may not even know you. When Leyton came to see him right before we left to return to Fannath Rill, the old man threw a candlestick at him. And that after he’d been howling for his son to attend to him all night.”
“I’ll make sure I’m ready to dodge.”
Lavek’s stern face grew sterner. “It’s dark in there, Your Highness. He can’t bear the light. We’ve had to put the kelistars behind screens to have any illumination at all. If you conjure one while you’re beside him, the chance is great you’ll set him off into a rage.”
Madeleine frowned at him, chilled. “The man who fetched me said you suspect shadowspawn.”
“Aye, spawn spore has been the issue from the start, though he’d done a purge and we thought him in the clear.”
She frowned.
Just as we thought Abramm was after the morwhol
.
Lavek led her through the bedchamber’s arched doorway into the darkness and the shocking, stomach-turning stench of vomit, feces, urine, sweat, and something close to rotting flesh, all cloaked in a thin veil of incense. Her gorge rose, and it took all her willpower not to turn and run. Pulling her kerchief from her waistband and holding it over her face, she breathed through her mouth as her eyes adjusted to the darkness.
Kelistars lay behind two dressing screens, out of her father’s sight. Others rested in sconces on the wall above his bed, high enough that he apparently didn’t notice. The sideboard held a bowl of onions, one of which lay quartered on a plate. Candles, fat and thin, burned before a small altar of stone and evergreen—a nod to the old ways some in Chesedh still practiced and silent testimony to Lavek’s desperation to find a cure. Small tables on either side of the canopied bed held pans from which ascended streams of pale, fragrant smoke. On the table nearest her sat a plate of roast game hen, rice and almonds, and a sweet dumpling, picked at but little eaten.
The king lay in the great canopied bed, propped up against a mountain of pillows and covered with a thin linen sheet. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, what she saw shocked her more than the stench. Her father was but a shadow of himself, his tall frame nothing but bones. Beneath his gold circlet, long, sweat-darkened gray hair frizzed to his shoulders, framing an overgrown beard. Fissures carved his face, and his eyes had sunk so far into his head she saw nothing but shadow beneath his brows.
Able to breathe as long as she did so through her mouth, Maddie withdrew her kerchief and approached the bed. Her father lay unmoving, his bony chest rising and falling erratically beneath his silk bedgown. She caught the vague glint of his Terstan shield through its loose weave. One of his skeletal hands picked absently at a fold in the sheet. The fingernails were long and dirty, the fingers themselves shiny with grease from picking at the food before he’d pushed it aside. Outrage stirred in her that his servants had left him in such a disheveled state. Even traveling, there was no excuse. He was the king. He deserved their respect.
She stopped at the bedside. An empty starstick stood just behind the arrangement of flickering candles, obscured by the ribbon of scented smoke. The incense was stronger here, but so was the stench of death and rot. His eyes, the lashes caked with yellow crust, were slitted, though he had given no sign he was aware of her.
She conjured a small kelistar and held it out to see him better, mindful he might rise up and slap it away. When he did not move, she decided he was indeed asleep. In the increased light his face looked thinner than ever, the bones pressing out against the skin. His large nose and sagging cheeks were netted with tiny red and purple lines where the smallest blood vessels had broken. Dried blood rimmed his nostrils. This close she felt his fever heat and saw that white bandages bound his abdomen beneath his sleeping gown.