The Charnel Prince (37 page)

Berrye looked down, shyly, and for the first time since the conversation had begun looked no older than her nineteen years. “My order has no such restrictions,” she murmured.

“I see. And why come to me now with this knowledge?”

Berrye looked back up. Her eyes were round and threatening tears. “Because, Your Majesty, they are all dead—all my sisters. I am orphaned. And I believe their murderers were the same as those who killed William, Fastia, Elseny, and Lesbeth.”

Muriele felt a sudden rush of sympathy, and her own grief threatened to surface, but she crushed it away. She would have time for that later, and she had already allowed herself to appear too weak in front of Berrye. Instead, she concentrated on the facts.

“Lesbeth? So Austrobaurg killed her?”

“I believe Austrobaurg never even saw her,” Berrye said. “I think she died here, in Eslen.”

“Then where did Robert get her finger?”

“From the author of all of this, of course. From the one who designed this entire tragedy.”

“Gramme?”

“Or Robert. Or the both of them. I cannot say for sure.”

“Robert loved Lesbeth better than anyone.”

“Yes,” Berrye said. “With a terrible love. I think an unnatural love that she did not share.”

Muriele felt a sick twisting in her belly, and her mouth went dry.

“And where is Robert now?”

“I don’t know. But I think Ambria Gramme does.”

“And where is she?”

“At her estates, preparing a fete of some sort.”

“I’ve heard nothing of this,” Muriele said. “It was not widely advertised in Eslen.”

“Then who attends it?”

“That I did not discover either,” Berrye confessed. Muriele sat back, her head whirling. She closed her eyes, hoping things would settle, but it was too much.

“If you have lied to me,” she said at last, “you will not die quickly.”

“I have not lied to you, Majesty,” Berrye said. Her eyes were clear again, and her voice strong.

“Let us hope not,” Muriele said. “Is there anything else you can tell me?”

“There is a good deal,” Berrye said. “I can tell you which members of the Comven favor you and which do not. I can tell you who Gramme has on her side. And I can tell you she is planning to move against you soon.”

“Have I cause to doubt Sir Fail and his men?”

“None that I know of.”

Muriele sat up. “Lady Berrye, will you declare an oath to take me as your personal liege, swearing by whatever saints you swear by?”

“If you will protect me in turn, Majesty.”

Muriele smiled. “You must know that I can barely protect myself.”

“You have more power than you know,” Berrye told her. “You just haven’t learned how to use it. I can help you. I was trained for it.”

“You would be my new Erren?” Muriele asked bitterly. “My new coven-trained bodyguard?”

“I would do that, Majesty. I swear it by the saints I swear by.” She touched her forehead and breast with her thumb.

Muriele sighed. “I would be a great fool to trust you,” she said.

“If I were already in your employ, I would tell you exactly that,” Berrye said. “You have no reason to trust me. But I’m asking you to. You need me, and I need you. My entire order was slaughtered, women I loved. And believe me or not, but I cared for His Majesty. He was not a good king, but he was, for all his faults, a good man, and there are few such in the world. I would see those who brought him down go screaming to Mefitis, begging her mercy. And there is one more thing.”

“What is that?” Muriele asked.

“Do not ask me to explain this. It is the one thing I cannot explain.”

“Go on.”

“Your daughter, Anne. She must live, and she must be queen.”

A long shock ran through Muriele, starting at her feet and working up to the crown of her head.

“What do you know of Anne?” she demanded.

“That she is alive. That she was at Saint Cer. That the sisters of the coven Saint Cer, like those of my own order, were all murdered.”

“But Anne escaped?”

“I have no proof, but I feel it in my heart. I see it in my dreams. But she has many enemies.”

Muriele stared at the girl, wondering how she could have ever believed her to be the empty-headed pretty thing she had pretended to be. Even Erren had been fooled, which was remarkable. Alis Berrye was a very dangerous woman. She could also be a very useful ally.

Muriele rose and summoned the footman. “Give the lady Berrye an escort and instruct them to take her to her apartment, where she will retrieve her personal effects. Settle her in the small apartment down the hall. And please tell Sir Fail that I request his presence.”

“You won’t regret this, Majesty,” Berrye said.

“See that I don’t. Go along now, Lady Berrye.”

She watched the girl go and then returned to her chair, ticking her finger against the wooden arm, waiting for Sir Fail.

It was time to pay a visit to her husband’s other mistress. But she had another call to make first. One she had been avoiding.

She went to her dresser, and though she had made her decision, she hesitated before the small coffer, thinking of the Him, deep beneath the castle, where no light ever shone. His voice of silk and nightmare. She had not spoken to the Kept since that day she discovered the key in William’s study, after his death.

But she had questions for him now. With no more faltering, she opened the wooden box.

The key was not there.

I HAD TO LEARN TO HEAR AGAIN once before. It was after I walked the faneway of Decmanis. Each stop along the way took something from me—the sensation in my hand first, then my hearing, then my sight—until there was nothing left of me but a body, not even a mind. Somehow I finished the path, and it all came back to me, but different, better.

That’s how it is to be dead. I heard a lot at first, but it made no sense. It was just noise, like the wailing of ghosts in the halls of the damned. Then the noises began to make sense, and eventually to become familiar.

I can hear Aspar, Winna, and Ehawk, but my body is lost to me. I cannot speak to them or move a finger or an eyelid.

I remember I used to care for them.

I do still, in many ways. When Winna is near I can smell her, feel her, almost taste her. When she touches me, it sends shivers through me that somehow are not revealed on my dead flesh.

I heard her and Aspar last night. She smells different when they do that, sharper. So does Aspar.

Observations of the quaint and curious holter-beast—in the act of procreation, this ordinarily closemouthed creature vocalizes extraordinarily, though only in low tones. He makes rhymes of his lover’s name—mina-Winna, fenna-Winna, and the inevitable winna-Winna. He calls her by other silly appellations of his own invention, notwithstanding that Winna is already a rather silly name.

There’s someone new, a Sefry. Winna doesn’t like her because Aspar does, though he denies it every way he can. I wonder if she looks like his wife, the dead one?

They’re taking me to the next faneway, which for them is clever. I wonder what will happen there? The first was very strange, and I am hard put to explain why it affected me the way it did. It was consecrated to one of the damned saints, she who was known as the queen of demons. Perhaps Decmanis is punishing me for stepping on her faneway, and yet somehow that doesn’t feel right. The only other possibility that occurs is that she is somehow also an aspect of Saint Decmanis, which would be very interesting indeed, not to mention heretical.

Can saints be heretics?

We’re approaching the fane. I can feel it like a fire.

———«»——————«»——————«»———

Aspar surveyed the clearing and the mound. The bodies were still there, and none of them were moving. Of the Briar King and his hunt there was no sign, save the dead bodies of slinders and the monks they had killed.

“Oh, saints,” Winna said when she saw the carnage.

“Weak stomach?” Leshya asked.

“I’ve seen bodies like this before,” Winna said. “But I don’t have to pretend I like it.”

“No, you don’t,” the Sefry agreed.

“So what do we do now?” Winna asked.

Aspar shrugged and dismounted. “Take Stephen up on the mound, I reckon. See what happens.”

“Are you quite certain this is the wise thing to do?” Leshya asked.

“No,” Aspar answered shortly.

Stepping carefully, they picked their way around where the bodies were thickest and up to the top of the sedos. Aspar laid Stephen out in the very middle.

As he’d more or less expected, nothing happened.

“Well, it was worth a try,” he muttered. “You three watch him. I’m going to have a better look around.”

Aspar walked back down through the carnage, feeling tired, angry at himself for having nursed such a forlorn hope. People died. He knew that by now, didn’t he? He used to be easy about it.

The slinders looked like people now, their faces relaxed in death. They could have come from any village around the King’s Forest. He was thankful that he didn’t see anyone he knew.

After a time he wandered to the edge of the forest, and before he realized it found himself standing beneath the gnarled branches of the naubagm and the strands of rotted rope that hung from them. The earth had drunk a lot of blood in this place. It had drunk his mother’s blood.

He’d never been told what brought her here. His father and foster mother rarely spoke of her, and when they did it was in hushed tones, and they made the sign against evil. Then they had died, and he’d ended up with Jesp.

A raven landed on the uppermost branch of the tree. Farther above, he saw the black silhouette of an eagle against the clouds. He took a deep breath and felt the land roll away from him, getting bigger, stretching out its bones of stone and sinews of root. He smelled the age and the life of it, and for the first time in a long while felt a kind of peaceful determination.

I’ll fix this
, he silently promised the trees.

“
I’l
l fix this
.
” It was the first thing Jesp had said when she found him. He’d been running and bleeding for a day, the forest turned to shadow around him. When he finally fell, he’d dreamed he was still running, but now and then he woke and knew he was lying in the reeds of some marsh, half covered in water. He’d been awake when he heard her coming, and tried to reach for his knife, but he didn’t have the strength to move. Seven winters old, he’d been. He still remembered the way his breath whistled, because he’d kept forgetting that’s what it was, kept thinking it was some sort of bird he’d never heard of.

Then he’d seen Jesp’s face, that ancient, pale Sefry face. She stood there for what seemed a long time, while he tried to talk, and then she knelt down and touched his face with her bony fingers.

“I’ll fix this,” she said. “I’ll fix you up, child-of-the-Naubagm.”

How she knew that about him, she never said. But she raised him, and filled him with Sefry nonsense, and she died.

He missed her. And now that he knew that Sefry stories weren’t all nonsense, he desperately wished he could talk to her again. He wished he’d paid more attention when she was alive. And maybe he wished that he’d thanked her, at least once.

But that was done.

He sighed and cracked his neck.

A few kingsyards north, something ran out of the forest, moving faster than a deer.

It was a man, dressed in the habit of one of the monks. He had a bow, and he was making straight for the sedos, where Aspar could still see the others.

With a silent curse, Aspar pulled a shaft from his quiver, set it to the string, and let it go.

The monk must have seen the motion from the corner of his eye—even as the arrow arced toward him, he dropped into a sudden crouch and whirled, firing at Aspar.

Aspar’s shot missed by a thumb’s breadth; the monk’s missed Aspar by just twice that.

Aspar stepped behind the Naubagm as the monk fitted and fired another arrow. It struck quivering into the ancient tree.

The monk turned again and sprinted toward the mound and out of range. Cursing—and at a much slower pace than his adversary—Aspar ran after him.

The monk did a strange, twisting dance, and Aspar realized that Ehawk and Leshya were firing at him now. Both missed, and before either could draw new arrows, the churchman shot back. Aspar watched in throat-choking helplessness as Ehawk jerked weirdly and fell. Winna was crouching, but still far too large a target.

Leshya fired again and again without success.

The monk’s dodging gave Aspar a chance to get back in range, and he drew back to shoot, still running.

His bowstring snapped with a hollow thud.

He drew his ax, snarling.

Leshya drew and shot. This time the monk had to dodge so violently that he stumbled, but he rolled and came back up, facing Aspar.