The Quartered Sea (49 page)

He shook his head.

"The kigh left it," Kovar said quietly. He looked up at the younger bard. "I heard you, under the water, but I couldn't make out the actual notes. What did you Sing?"

The cry that burst from Bannon's throat drew all eyes to him. He lifted both hands from the pier, palms stained red. "Dead men don't bleed," he said.

"But the kigh said that the
Starfarer
was lost. That it sank in a storm and everyone died." Jelena gripped Otavas' hand, her fingers white around his. "If everyone died, how could Benedikt still be alive?"

A murmur, echoing the queen's confusion, ran around the room. Every ranking Palace official, most of the nobility in residence, almost half the Council, and one or two officials from the city had crowded into the large assembly room for an explanation. Rather than have a thousand rumors started, the queen had commanded the bards, the healer, and the ex-assassin—the four who'd experienced the disaster from the inside—into the large assembly room the moment they returned to the Palace. So far, the explanation hadn't clarified much.

Karlene glanced over her shoulder toward the Bardic Captain. When it became clear he wasn't about to answer, she stepped forward. "Benedikt Sings the strongest water the Bardic Hall has ever seen, and he seems to have a more… personal relationship with the kigh than any of the rest of us. It's not impossible that the kigh would save Benedikt even while they destroyed the
Starfarer
and her crew."

"Then why didn't Benedikt Sing the
Starfarer
safe?"

"I'm sure he tried, Majesty. I suspect that the kigh saved him after the ship had gone down. This…" She waved a hand, unable to think of what exactly to call the brutal pounding the coast of Shkoder had undergone. "… visit today wasn't Benedikt's idea. He didn't tell the kigh to bring his pain home, they just did it."

"They just did it." Jelena repeated.

"Are you sure that's what was going on out there?" Otavas asked quietly. He raised his free hand before anyone could protest the question. "I'm sorry, Karlene, but first you told us Benedikt was dead with all the others and now you tell us Benedikt is alive. You had to have been wrong at least once—is it possible you're wrong today?"

"No, Highness." Heads turned as Magda answered for the bard. "The first message had diffused into hundreds, maybe thousands, of kigh. This one didn't. I felt the pain." She had to swallow before she could go on. "The pain of the wounds Benedikt had taken and the pain of being so far from home—of being so completely and utterly alone."

Some of that pain made itself heard in Magda's voice, the rest of it, resonating in her kigh, made itself felt throughout the room, touching each kigh in turn.

After a moment, Iancu i'Nadina, the Queen's Chancellor, coughed into his fist, drawing all eyes. "If Benedikt is alive, Majesty, what do the kigh expect us to do?"

Bannon made a sound low in his throat.

Magda, who'd stayed close by the ex-assassin's side ever since he'd bathed his hands in Benedikt's blood, reached over and lightly laid two fingers on his wrist. He started at the touch of her kigh and jerked away, but the sound stopped. "We're expected to do the right thing, Chancellor. No more but certainly no less."

"Which is?" the chancellor insisted.

"We will send a ship to bring him home." Jelena's words rang in the room like a trumpet call. Releasing Otavas' hand, she stood and swept an uncompromising gaze over the faces staring up at her. "I will not abandon one of my own."

"Majesty." The Chancellor's voice was apologetic but firm. "The Council will never agree. We have already lost a ship and twenty lives. Will we risk twenty more to save one?"

Jelena's brows drew in at the sounds of agreement coming from the crowd.

"We lost more lives today, Majesty." The Chancellor spread his hands. "There isn't a fishing village up coast or down not mourning their losses. Isn't that enough?"

Otavas saw Jelena's shoulders stiffen, and he moved up to stand behind her. No matter what decision she came to, he knew she'd added the day's deaths to the deaths she already carried, and he wanted her to realize that she didn't have to carry them alone.

She drew in a deep breath and her chin rose. "Abandoning Benedikt will not bring those people back."

"And those you send out to rescue him," the Chancellor prodded gently. "What of them?"

The sounds of agreement and disagreement grew momentarily louder, then shut off as Jelena raised her hands. Before she could speak, Kovar stepped forward.

The Bardic Captain had said very little on the way back from the harbor and nothing at all during the explanation of why the sea had thrown itself with such fury against the Shkoden coast. His shoulders were bowed under his quartered robe and his face was not only pale but almost gray. Those of the court, who'd barely seen him since the
Starfarer
had sailed, thought he was growing old.

The bards and Magda realized he'd aged that afternoon.

As he approached the dais, the nearer edge of the crowd drew back so that he stood alone. He drew in a deep breath, gathering strength much as Jelena had, and slowly lifted his head.

"Majesty, when you send a ship for Benedikt, bards strong in both air and water will sail on it. I will send strength enough to fill the sails and calm the sea. No more than you do we abandon one of our own."

"That isn't how you felt when the
Starfarer
sailed," the queen reminded him coldly.

Kovar closed his eyes for an instant, then met her gaze. "I was wrong, and I most humbly beg Your Majesty's pardon." Gathering his robe up out of the way, he dropped to one knee. "The bards are Your Majesty's to command.
I
am Your Majesty's to command."

The room had gone so quiet, Jelena's surprise could almost be heard.

Karlene stepped forward and knelt behind Kovar's right shoulder. Hardly had her knee touched the marble when Tadeus dropped gracefully down by her side.

Feeling a hysterical giggle rising in the back of her throat and viciously suppressing it, Magda knelt where she stood. Under normal circumstances, Shkoden monarchs would be knelt to en masse only once in their reign—during the final moments of their coronation, in a final acknowledgment of their sovereignty. As she heard Bannon kneel beside her and the rustle of clothing as more and more of those in the room were caught up in the moment, Magda felt kinder toward Kovar than she had since First Quarter.
Trust a bard to find the symbolic gesture
…

Brows drawn in, the Queen's Chancellor stared out over the kneeling crowd in disbelief. Then he shook his head and smiled. Lowering himself carefully to one knee, he turned the movement into a truncated bow. "Majesty, it appears we are
all
yours to command."

* * *

"So, Benedikt, how is my Song coming? Will you be finished on time?"

"Yes, peerless one." She asked him that question, or a variation on it, every night. Benedikt didn't know why as he no longer had the courage to answer any other way. It was always Song, never song, she never missed the emphasis, and somehow, that bothered him more than the rest. He braced his fingertips against the floor as she walked around him, her palm brushing the soft stubble on his head. He'd lost much of his sense of balance when he lost his eye and it didn't help that the xaan's touch sent deep shudders through his body that he could neither prevent nor show.

Her robe trailed a silken caress across the bare skin of his back. He swallowed hard as his body reacted. Barely breathing, he watched her as she came around his blind side and settled before him on her bed. Brushing a rippling fall of dark hair behind one shoulder, she tucked her feet up under her robe and nestled Shecquai against her hip.

The dog licked a front paw, ignoring Benedikt completely as if no longer considering him a threat.

"Sing '
The Mountain Maiden'
, Benedikt. It has a gentle melody that always relaxes me."

"Yes, peerless one." He spent his day in his room—the same room as before the loss of his eye, only guarded now—but every evening he was brought to the xaan to sing. Perhaps she liked to see how well she'd molded him to obedience, perhaps she'd just grown used to her nightly lullaby. He didn't know, he couldn't care. He did as he was told and he sang.

* * *

When the guard returned him to his room, Benedikt sank down on the floor and leaned against the stone backrest. Singing for the xaan, the constant struggle to show nothing of what he felt, left him too numb to work on the Song of Sorquizic during what remained of the evening. Perhaps—if even once—he'd succeeded in hiding his emotions from her, it might have been different. Perhaps, but he didn't think so.

It wasn't the fear that gave him the most difficulty.

He stroked his palm over his head, much as she had, and trembled at the memory of her touch. Her gentle caresses were far more dangerous than Hueru's brutality. He was so afraid of her; he needed to know she was no longer angry with him, and every time she fulfilled that need, he felt himself tottering on the edge of a dark precipice.

He found himself wanting to please her.

He had broken that afternoon on the wharf. He remembered every word he'd screamed, every promise he'd sobbed, every plea for mercy. He'd agreed to break his oaths and use the kigh as a weapon.

Had the xaan been able to use him immediately, the pieces he'd broken into would have been forever scattered. But she couldn't. And every day, while he worked on finding an answer to the Song of Sorquizic, he remembered he was a bard of Shkoder. And every night, he managed to step back from the precipice and work on putting the broken pieces of himself back together, one at a time.

Trouble was, there probably wouldn't be enough time for him to finish, and his courage seemed to be broken into the smallest pieces of all. If he truly wanted to keep his oaths, all he had to do was fling himself, head first, off his balcony. Twenty-three priests had already died to keep Balankanche safe. What was one foreign bard?

His hand rose to the edge of the linen bandage over his eye but didn't actually touch it. He knew he couldn't get to the island before the xaan caught him.

Who was strong enough to protect him from the xaan?

Not the tul. Benedikt had a feeling that the tul was only alive because his sister hadn't bothered to kill him.

"After all," he sighed, stretching out his legs and staring out through the open balcony doors at the falling rain, "why risk upsetting the Tulparax so close to the change?"

He began to frown and stopped as the movement pushed painfully at his healing eye. If he was right, and the tul was only alive because the xaan didn't want to upset the Tulparax, then all he had to do was find a way to put himself under that same protection.

Benedikt sat up and peered out to the space where the tul's half of the building was unseen, black on black in the rain. Serasti had told him, with a significant degree of satisfaction, that if he was seen even glancing across the courtyard, he'd lose the other eye. He hadn't been out on the balcony since and now, heart in his throat, he dropped his gaze to the flickering flame dancing in the small lamp beside him on the floor.

The clipped wings of his courage couldn't carry him across the courtyard, so how?

The guards on his door wore cotton plugs in their ears and even if he could get by them, he didn't think he could just walk out the front door, not anymore. They'd all be watching for him, and they'd taken his priest's robe away.

Benedikt dried damp palms on his sawrap and fought to breath through the fear in his throat. If. Too may ifs.
If
broke him back into pieces again.