The Traitor's Heir (47 page)

“Are you listening to a word I'm saying?” Ladomer asked, waving a playful hand in front of his face.

“Sorry?” Eamon asked, recalled from his distant dreams of power.

“I suppose I wasn't talking about Alessia, was I? So there was nothing worth listening to!”

Eamon smiled a little. Apart from Alessia herself, he confided most things to Ladomer or to Waite, depending on their nature.

Ladomer pushed a mug to him over the table. “My point exactly. Drink – it will do you good.”

Eamon took a deep draught.

“There's something on your mind,” Ladomer told him. “Don't try to deny it! I can read you like a book.”

“You don't read books,” Eamon replied idly.

“Neither do you these days,” Ladomer countered.

“No,” Eamon mused, trying to maintain his focus against the obsessive bent of his thought. “I'm a little distracted, Ladomer,” he confessed.

“By Alessia?” Ladomer scoffed. “Come, come, Ratbag! You've been bedding her for months. Surely the distraction stage has worn off by now?”

“Not by Alessia,” Eamon answered, offended.

“Oh?” Ladomer eyed him curiously. “I thought she was your whole world! Well, if it isn't Alessia, then you must tell me what it is!”

Eamon met his gaze and held it for a long time. Ladomer was his closest friend. Surely it wouldn't hurt…

“Come on, Ratbag!” Ladomer insisted. “It's no good keeping secrets from me; you know I always find them out, one way or another, in the end.”

“You must promise not to speak of it,” Eamon told him sternly.

“Not to speak of it? My, we are being dramatic this morning.” He solemnly raised one hand. “I give you my word.”

So it was that Eamon at last confessed to Ladomer the way in which the promised power of the Right Hand held him in thrall every moment he lived.

For a long moment, Ladomer stared at him. “Well I never!” He whistled quietly. “I have heard some impressive things about you, especially from Lord Ashway – he loves wandering around the palace corridors playing the prophet – and Lord Tramist speaks highly of your breaching skills. But you, become Right Hand!” He lifted his mug high. “Now that would be worth seeing.”

The words encouraged him and his friend's confidence spurred him to his duties with renewed vigour. For with every day that he served, with every cadet he trained or snake he breached, he was coming closer to earning his place as a Hand. And the closer he came to becoming a Hand the nearer he came to the greatest prize.

“Just a little more,” Cathair advised him one frosty morning in late January. “The Master is most impressed with you, Mr Goodman!”

One day late in January he went to see Alessia. She was expecting him, and all the servants – by now well accustomed to his presence – greeted him. To those who were kind he gave a few coins, and they praised him for it. He walked proudly, fully expectant that promotion to the Hands would come any day. In his pride he demanded Alessia's touch. Gone was his surprise and delight each time she favoured him with her love; now it was a right, his right. Now he favoured her.

As he kissed her that night she pulled back from him and took his face in her hands. Then she studied him hard, strange care on her beautiful face.

“What is it?” Eamon asked, leaning forward to kiss her bare throat.

“You've changed, Eamon,” she said, a touch of sorrow to her voice. “He's changed you.”

“Who has?”

But she did not answer him.

The following day, Eamon was strolling down the Coll towards the college. He had some papers to see to, and needed to go over the list of suggested lieutenantcies with Draybant Farleigh and Captain Waite. He had plenty to occupy him – yet his mind was filled with Alessia and weighted with her strange sorrow. What had she meant? How had he changed?

He saw someone climbing the Coll. Recognizing Mathaiah, he stiffened. His ward was dressed smartly and bore his jacket lightly over his shoulders despite the cold. Mathaiah had excelled himself in service over the last few months and was one of those shortlisted to progress directly to lieutenant on his swearing. In this sense, Eamon's tutelage had served him well. Yet Eamon felt that Mathaiah Grahaven was doing all he could to undo that distinction by letting other cadets outdo and defeat him, or by making easy mistakes in his lessons. It seemed nonsensical to him.

Snow drifted in the air that day. Eamon made to pass by his ward without a word, as had become their custom. But this time Mathaiah called him.

“Sir?”

Part of him wanted to ignore the voice and simply keep walking. But an older part of him, a part that he had thought lost forever in his world of Hands and bedclothes, stopped. He turned.

“Mr Grahaven?” He watched his ward against the grey sky. The cadet seemed somehow older; there was strength and nobility in his bearing that Eamon had not seen before. He noticed that the cadet held a small pouch. The young man fixed his hand more firmly about it.

“What is that, Mr Grahaven?”

Mathaiah smiled. “Something I've saved for.” Frozen figures passed them by on either side. “Sir,” he continued quietly, “there is something that I need to tell you.”

“Speak freely, Cadet.”

Mathaiah laughed sadly. “We were friends once. Then I spoke freely. Now I must just speak.”

A cold stab of anger drove through him. “Mind your tone, Grahaven.”

“For months,” Mathaiah told him, his voice a sharp whisper, “you have been steadily driven and drawn away from what you came to Dunthruik to do. Your sword and name are tarnished with blood, but you still have your name. It is not too late to turn, first lieutenant.” Mathaiah paused. “I can see, we all can, that the throned is netting you, baiting you, goading you. And he has a powerful piece, sir. But he does not own you. Not yet.”

How dare the boy judge him! “Do not harp upon this theme, Mr Grahaven,” Eamon hissed, “or you will find yourself in a pit of trouble.”

Undeterred, Mathaiah leaned in closer. “You have not turned me in, sir. I believe that's because a part of you knows what you should be doing. And part of you knows the truth. She's his, sir. She always has been, and from the day that you saw her first with Alben, she has been played to capture you.”

The biting wind drove into his eyes. “I love her,” he snarled.

“Maybe you did once. Maybe one day you will again. But now she is simply yours, just as you are becoming his.”

Eamon's blood raged. How dare Mathaiah say such things! And yet… the rage pointed to something that he had been long fighting to deny. For the first time in many months he reached for the heart of the King and the comfort that it had once offered him. Both were gone.

“I have important matters to attend to, sir. Once, I dreamed of your attending to them with me. Now, I cannot even think to ask it.” Mathaiah clutched the pouch, and steeled his eye. Did he detect a tear? “Good day, sir.”

He turned and disappeared into the snow. Eamon could only watch him go.

It was the seventh of February. Bitter winter winds from the north still blew, but the ice over the plains was thinning, the roads slowly becoming passable again. For nights, Eamon's dreams had been filled with the Pit, with the memories of breached minds, with Hands and banners and eagles, and with a blue light that had never quite left him. It did not call him first lieutenant.

He stood on Alessia's balcony watching grey clouds roll over the sea. He knew that she was dressing behind him but he did not watch her as he often did. Instead his eyes turned towards the palace. More than a week had passed since he had spoken with Mathaiah, but his ward's words still haunted him. He felt a weight at his heart and knew it to be the weight of guilt – guilt so softly spoken that a kind word could yet steer its keen bite away.

Alessia came to him and touched his arm. Instinctively, he took her hand. On some days, he felt as though that hand in his was all he had.

“You're very thoughtful today,” she said softly, turning him to look at her. She was wearing a dark green dress that he had not seen before.

“You're very beautiful today.” He gathered her to his side, trying to strengthen himself by her warmth and presence.

What if…? He could not believe it. What if Mathaiah had spoken the truth?

He looked urgently at her. “Alessia, why do you love me?”

“What kind of question is that, Mr Goodman?” she countered playfully.

“A serious one. Please,” he insisted, laying a finger to her lips to still them. “Please. I need to know.”

“Isn't it enough that I love you?”

Though he longed to answer yes, all he tasted was doubt as she quickly pressed her soft lips to his.

That afternoon he met some of his cadets in the West Quarter College hall. He saw Manners and Mathaiah speaking quietly together in one corner. As the two spoke Manners' eyes widened, as if he had heard something amazing. Eamon suddenly yearned to join them. What friendship he had been without these past few months! Surely Mathaiah would speak to him?

“Mr Goodman, sir!” Cadet Overbrook hurried over, papers in his hand and a wild, exhilarated look on his face. “Sir!”

Eamon smiled. He was fond of Overbrook, despite his being neither strong nor athletic. The young man would probably be far happier in a schoolhouse in some quiet town far away from Dunthruik than he would ever be as a Gauntlet ensign; he had the patience and wit to be an excellent teacher. Since his bout of fever, Overbrook had been industriously engaged in redrawing many of the maps that the Gauntlet used, a duty that had mostly liberated him from the aspects of Gauntlet life that he hated. Unfortunately, the cadet was down to his last maps; full duty beckoned him again in a couple of weeks.

“Mr Overbrook.”

The cadet came to a halt, dropped some papers, stooped to pick them up, saluted, dropped some more, picked them up, and beamed. “I've found it, sir!”

“Found what?” Eamon asked, wondering how the young man ever found anything.

“The last of those references that you asked me for,” the cadet beamed.

Eamon stared blankly before understanding: Cathair's poetry.

“I'm sorry that it took me so long, sir,” Overbrook continued. “It was so difficult to find that I was starting to think that you might have invented it, but I found it. I had no idea you were so well read, sir!” He pulled a ream of notes from his mapping papers. “It was a poem quoted in
The Edelred Cycle
.”

Eamon frowned. Although he had heard of it he had never read it. He did not think that his father had owned a copy. “What's that about?” he asked, genuinely intrigued.

“It's a poem, written after the Master liberated the River from the Serpent,” Overbrook answered. For the first time in many months, the terminology crept into Eamon's spine to make him shudder. “It tells how the Master came from the east and infiltrated the court to find a way in which the Serpent might be deposed. While there he becomes involved with a noblewoman who is close to the Serpent, and a large part of the work deals with their hidden love and his hidden task.” Overbrook was grinning with excitement as he told the story. “Edelred eventually turns one of the King's closest advisors and friends – who also happens to be the brother of the noblewoman. The roundel is about her, sir,” he added, “and some attribute its roots directly to the Master. In some versions of the text, though, the ‘flower' spoken of in the short verse isn't an ‘eagle's' flower, but a ‘traitor's'.”

Eamon stared at him. “A traitor's flower?”

“There's some discussion as to whether the flower was given to her by her lover, or her brother,” Overbrook explained. “It all matches with a growing tragic subtext, because when the noblewoman discovers Edelred's purposes she tries to change her brother's mind and dissuade him from following the Master. Finding that he cannot be moved, she tries to warn the Serpent, but the Master catches her first and, whilst assuring her that he loves her, kills her. It is a pity, for she is a fine character,” Overbrook pronounced sadly, “but she was going to betray him.”

Eamon listened with growing alarm. How much of the tale was true? “What happened?”

Overbrook grinned. “The Serpent was killed, his house vanquished, and the Master took the River Realm,” he said. “There's a phenomenal description of a battle at some watchtower somewhere,” he added, flicking through his notes. “Sometimes there are problems with the narrator's stance there – he seems to be more on the Serpent's side than on the Master's – but some manuscripts gloss the most suspect passages…”

Overbrook went on but Eamon didn't hear him. Suddenly he was on a cold floor in an inn far away, listening to Aeryn speak the words of a long forgotten song: “Dark, dark the foes of the throne, sly in the mere.”

He shut the voice from his mind. “Thank you, Mr Overbrook.”

Overbrook fell silent, seemingly disappointed. “That's all right, sir,” he said, reluctantly tucking the papers away. But his eyes soon fell on something else, a slightly incorrect detail in one of his map plans; he bumbled away, marking corrections.

Eamon was left in the hallway, his head reeling. If the story was true… why did it trouble him?

Pressing his forehead, he looked up to see Mathaiah's steady gaze fixed on him.

“Mr Goodman.”

Waite appeared in the hallway. Eamon saluted formally at once.

“Sir.”

“A quick word, first lieutenant.”

Trying not to think, Eamon followed the captain into his office.

“Mr Goodman, have a seat,” Waite said. He too had changed in the last few months; his hair and face were streaked with grey. In recent weeks he had left many important aspects of running the college to its draybant and first lieutenant, for he had been away increasingly, attending to business at the palace with the other quarters' captains.