Return of the Guardian-King (32 page)

And again the silence hung heavily between them. Then Elayne sighed. “Oh, my poor girl, if you believe there is no interest on his part, you are sorely mistaken.”

Carissa looked up at her in astonishment.

“I have seen the way he looks at you. We all have. And I do not think he spends his days away from you by his own choice.”

“I know what I saw that night, when he kissed me.”

“A man struggling to control himself? Yes, my lady, he does know about Rennalf. Did you ever think he might have been fearful of coming on too strongly? That you might not welcome such attention from him? Or any man?”

“Wouldn’t welcome it?! I burn for him every time I’m in his presence. I stand there trembling, unable to breathe, the awareness of him so great I can hardly speak or think. I yearn for a look, a touch . . . some word of affection. But there is nothing. He is cool, polite, and scrupulously proper.”

“And what reason have you to think he might know you feel this way?” Elayne asked, eyes upon her knitting.

“I should think it obvious.”

“Obvious?” Elayne looked out over the nursery. “Let’s see. From what I’ve observed, every time he comes near you, you move away. You do not meet his gaze, and speak to him only if you must. You decline all his invitations to dinner, refuse to share cocoa with him in the morning—though he’s the only one who can make it to your liking—and four out of five times at the ball you turned down his requests to dance. What is he to take from that but that it is you who finds
him
distasteful?”

Carissa sat there, stunned. She had focused so hard on hiding the truth from him, it had never occurred to her that the consequences of success would be a man careful to respect what she showed him and never trouble her with what he felt himself.

Elayne said it was obvious to everyone that he loved her. Was it? She ran back through her memories, searching for signs it might be true. But even as she did, something in her resisted it, mocking it as wishful thinking on her part, and presumption on the part of others. She’d seen what she’d seen, hadn’t she? Surely she could not have been that blind. And what did anyone else know, anyway?

“Carissa.” Elayne’s age-spotted hand covered her own. “Don’t let that part of you that hates yourself blind you to this truth. Eidon has given you this man as a precious gift. He’s one of the finest I’ve ever known, but even he has his limits. Don’t let the darkness in you drive him away.”

“But it already has. . . . He sent me the papers.”

“At your request. You don’t have to sign them.” She returned to her knitting. “Why not set yourself to show him how you really feel and win him back?”

“Show him how I feel?”

Elayne chuckled. “Surely you’ve not forgotten how to flirt, my lady?”

“Flirt?” Carissa gulped. “I’m not sure I ever knew,” she said. “More than that, I’m not sure I even could. . . .” She thought of Byron Blackwell’s sister, Leona, and Maddie’s own Briellen, and distaste welled up within her. Distaste wedded to a deep and powerful dread. “He’d probably think me batty. Or worse, he might laugh. . . .”

“You might shock his shoes off, my lady, but I know he’d never laugh at you. You ought—”

They were interrupted then by the breathless arrival of Maddie’s auburnhaired maid, Jeyanne, who skidded to a stop before them as the words poured out of her mouth.

“You’re saying,” Carissa repeated back when Jeyanne was done, “that the king himself is searching his sister’s bedroom?”

“No! He’s sent that hideous Captain LaSalle. He rounded up all the servants and locked them in one of the sleeping cells. I was out of the suites when they arrived, or I’d be in there, too.”

“They?”

“There were five of them, milady. Ripping everything to pieces. Pulling out drawers, cutting up pillows, tearing down draperies. They were even punching holes in the paneling. . . .”

“What in the world. . . ?” Elayne cried. “Did they say what they were looking for?”

“No, ma’am. The girls were begging them to, so they could help, but they refused.”

“The regalia,” Carissa murmured. She looked at Elayne. “Maddie went to confront him about having Abramm’s scepter. Somehow the conversation must have come round to the rest of the pieces and he guessed she has them.”

“How in the world could he have gotten hold of the king’s scepter? We didn’t have it when we fled the palace. Abramm took it when he went to face Rennalf.”

“Did he?” Carissa asked coldly. “Or did he take a copy of it?”

Elayne’s eyes widened.

“Trap thinks Leyton stole it when he was in Kiriath for Abramm and Maddie’s wedding,” Carissa added.

“But that was—”

“Almost six years ago. I know. It also lays much of the blame for Abramm’s fall at Leyton’s feet. Which is hardly going to endear him to the Kiriathan exiles here. Nor is taking the rest of the regalia for his own.”

A man in the uniform of the palace guard stepped into the room and, seeing the women, strode briskly toward them. He dropped a quick bow. “Your Highness,” he said to Carissa. “I’m afraid you must return to your quarters at once.” He held his hand toward the doorway he’d just come through. “If you will, ma’am?”

At her apartments a quartet of soldiers were already searching through her things. When their leader, whom she recognized as Captain LaSalle, asked where her husband was, she told him he lived in his office near the queen’s apartments. Frowning, he bade her sit down and returned to supervising the others. To her surprise, not long after that Trap himself arrived, stepping into the sitting room for the first time in months. He looked grim and angry, and he scrupulously avoided her gaze as he addressed the intruders.

“What are you men doing here?” he demanded.

LaSalle turned to him with obvious satisfaction. “Ah, Lord Meridon. We’ve been looking for you.” He nodded at one of his men, who had come up behind Trap. “Bind this man and escort him to Larochell.”

“What?!” Carissa cried indignantly. “You can’t arrest him!”

“We’re palace guard, my lady. We can do whatever we want.” As he spoke, another of his men stepped up to Trap’s side, pulling a pair of manacles from his belt and binding the former Kiriathan First Minister’s wrists behind his back.

“This is outrageous!” Carissa erupted. “You can’t arrest a man for no reason!”

“Oh, we have a reason, my lady. The king would like to borrow your regalia. He will of course return it when he is finished, but he needs all the pieces.”

“So,” Trap said, his voice quietly furious, “the stories about his stealing Abramm’s scepter are true, then.”

LaSalle smiled at him. “The First Daughter has given us three of the pieces. Two remain—a robe of unusual fabric and a sword. If you refuse to hand them over, we will have to take unpleasant action.”

“We do not have them,” Carissa insisted, drawing LaSalle’s attention back to herself. “The sword is still in Kiriath, and I have no idea what’s become of the robe.”

“You refuse to obey a direct order of the king?”

“We’re not refusing. We simply don’t have what you want.”

“No? Well, I notice that your husband is not protesting nearly so much as you are, my lady. Perhaps because he knows exactly where to find them.” He smiled again at Trap. “But he will tell us soon enough.” He nodded at his men to take him away, and they escorted him from the room.

LaSalle addressed her again. “If you’d like to spare him the pain of an interrogation, simply tell us where they are.”

“I told you. They’re not here. I have no idea where they are.”

“Well, we will make sure of that. Now, if you’ll sit here out of the way—”

She pulled away from him. “I’ll go with my husband.”

“I’m sorry, Highness, but you will not. Please sit down and we’ll get this over with as quickly as possible.”

CHAPTER

18

Abramm stepped from the shadow of the evergreens into the sundrenched meadow, following the muddy trail as it curved through the grass toward a stand of new-leafed oak trees. A small white butterfly zigzagged before him, and crescents of still-melting snow arced in the shadows at the meadow’s edge, fringed by clumps of flowering daffodils. Water trickled all about him as birds chirped in the trees, and somewhere beyond the springgreen foliage ahead of him, a bell clanged.

Eagerness roiled him as, boots squelching on the muddy path, he crossed the meadow with long strides. Any moment now he would come out on the bluff overlooking the river town of Ru’geruk and the Jardrath Valley beyond it. Finally he was free! He’d said his good-byes to the group this afternoon, when it was clear they should easily be able to reach Ru’geruk by day’s end. Trinley had not been happy with his decision, but Abramm no longer cared. They planned to part ways in Ru’geruk anyway, and he had his own concerns. Besides, sooner or later the others would have to fend for themselves. In Ru’geruk he hoped to get work on one of the riverboats, perhaps as a deckhand or oarsman, and make his way downriver. Given his size and strength, and his rock-solid belief that Eidon had already prepared the way for him, he even had the audacity to think he might be on the river as early as tomorrow morning. After that, from all everyone had told him, he’d be in Fannath Rill within a month. Every time he thought of it he wanted to whoop for joy.

There’d be no more of Trinley’s faultfinding and sly insults, no more of his arbitrary assignments, his stubborn insistence on what any sane person could plainly see was the hardest way to do a thing, his constant one-upmanship. Though Abramm had borne it all in silence, leaving the injustice to Eidon to handle, he felt now like a caged bird set free.

Thanks to the winter’s unusually deep snowfall, the Ankrill was running dangerously high, and the others had decided that once they reached Ru’geruk they would take the safer route inland to Caer’akila, a settlement of Kiriathan exiles in the foothills of the Aranaak. It had been hardest for Rolland, who had been so determined to go to the front with Abramm and do battle with the Esurhites. In the end, though, he was not willing to risk his children to the river’s raging wiles, and his wife had not wished to travel to Caer’akila without him. So he’d reluctantly given up his plans, promising to find Abramm at the battlefront as soon as he got his family settled.

The blue of sky and hazy distance now showed through the rapidly thinning screen of branches, and shortly Abramm emerged onto the edge of a granite cliff that overlooked the world. To his left the Ankrill roared over the same cliff in a cloud of mist, then tumbled along in a flurry of white-frothed rapids before finally settling into the wide, smooth current of a proper river, brown and murky with all the sediment. At the edge of a cove on its near bank stood the stone-and-wood-built settlement of Ru’geruk. The river had swamped the boat docks and lapped against the sandbags the locals had piled atop the existing stone walls to protect the waterfront buildings. From there it coursed southeastward through a tumble of low hills before heading off toward the vast reddish haze of the deserts on the horizon.

Abramm brought his gaze back to the town and the boats, and his excitement rose another notch.
Soon now, my love,
he thought. And he could not keep himself from grinning as he switchbacked down the muddy trail toward the city.

The footpath emptied into a wide square bounded by a stone trough and a low wall. The yard, a patchwork of grass and mud, stood mostly empty, just a few people standing or crouching in small groups with their horses and mules. The riverfront was another matter—it bustled with activity as men stacked bales of wool, kegs of ale, and bags of grain on the dock behind the low stone retaining wall augmented by stacked sandbags.

Abramm walked the busy boardwalk along the wall, eyeing the singlemasted, wide-beamed boats drifting aimlessly over the submerged stone quays. Workers sloshed along the top of those quays, back and forth from land to boats, loading supplies and cargo. In fact, it appeared that trade goods were the cargo of choice.

He had his eye on three vessels with wooden sheds built up against the masts to serve as cabins, the trio glossy with varnish and trimmed with yellow paint. From a distance they were smart-looking boats, but when he stopped on the dock directly before them, he was disappointed. The paint was cracked and peeling in places, and the boats were glazed with a general film of dirt and grime. That could have been from the flooding, he supposed. The other vessels were no better, and most were far worse.

An old deckhand leaned on the near gunwale of the closest vessel, watching him with age-clouded eyes. He was gaunt, hunch-shouldered, and clad in a rumpled grimy tunic over which he wore a bright blue tapestry vest with gold embroidering along the front edges—the castoff of some nobleman. His thin, frizzy white hair was caught in a long queue, and the skin of his face was pale and papery. Abramm looked up at him.

“You own this boat?” he asked.

The old man shook his head.

“I’m looking to work my way downriver,” Abramm said.

“River’s too high right now,” the voice rasped coldly. “No one’ll be sailin’ passengers for at least a week. Best ya go overland.” The white eyes stared at him sullenly.

“Are you the captain of that vessel, then?”

“Na. That’d be Arne Dugla’is. He’s the owner, too.”

“And where would I find him?”

The deckhand glared at him, then waved a hand downriver. “He be in the Silver Wolf with the rest of ’em, down in the south yard. He won’t take ya on, though. None of ’em will. ’Cept maybe old Janner, if he’s drunk enough. ’Course, ya wouldn’t get very far with him, either.” The old sailor wheezed a laugh, then turned away.

Abramm continued down the walkway toward the south yard, which turned out to be considerably more active than the one through which he’d crossed earlier. People, donkeys, and sheep milled with the local dogs and cats around more bales of wool, kegs, boxes, and bags stacked in wagons or in piles on the bare ground. Traders came from the surrounding lowlands to sell their wares to the rivermen, who would take them downriver and sell them again. Two lines of men going in and out of the open doorway in the one two-story building fronting the square drew Abramm’s attention, and asking about, he confirmed that this was where he would find Arne Dugla’is.