The Soul Weaver (13 page)

A little way into the park, just beyond iron gates that hung bent and broken from rusted hinges, sat a brick gatehouse where the housekeeper and head grounds-keeper had once lived. Though its windows and doors gaped, its wood trim had splintered and peeled bare of paint, and vines had overgrown the front stoop and garden wall, the shell of the gatehouse remained intact. We halted at the weedy semicircle of the carriage park just in front of it.

“If everything looks safe enough when Radele returns from his reconnoiter, he and Gerick will remain hidden here,” I told the three of them. “I want Paulo patrolling outside the walls. The king will have attendants and bodyguards, but I would expect them to be a small number and remain in the courtyard in front of the main house when he enters the garden. Anything beyond that, and I want to know about it.”

“There's fresh tracks all over,” said Paulo. “A number of people have been here today.”

“I'd expect nothing less,” I said. “And very likely ten spies along the road watched us ride in. But if he brings in a large party, or if they move to surround the house and gardens, or do
anything
that looks remotely suspicious, before, during, or after the king's arrival, Paulo, you're to warn Radele. And, Radele, you
will
get Gerick away, using whatever means necessary.”

“But, madam—”

“You have no other duty.”

Radele jerked his head irritably and rode away.

“One of us should be with you,” said Gerick, the first speech beyond single-word responses he'd offered us all day. “You've said again and again that the king is a treacherous villain. Tennice has told me—”

“Yes, Evard is a despicable bastard, but he'll not touch me. I know this seems illogical. He's had a thousand opportunities to do so over all these years, but he promised Tomas he wouldn't, and, whatever else he may be, Evard keeps to his word. He loved Tomas like a brother; I witnessed his grief when he heard Tomas was dead. Truly I'd not have been afraid to confront him in his own palace today. But on no other matter do I trust him. It's
you
must stay out of sight.”

Gerick looked very young in that moment, too much worry creasing his slender face. What kind of mother was I to bring him into such risk? I brushed his smooth cheek. “Be alert, dear one. Stay safe, and we'll see our road more clearly.”

Half an hour later, Radele returned from his survey of the gardens. Having reassured me that no one lurked anywhere on the grounds, Radele tethered our horses behind the gatehouse and took up a position in a tree where he could watch both the gates and the gatehouse.

The sun dropped behind the forested hills. Gerick watched from the hollow doorway of the gatehouse as Paulo waved and rode back through the gate the way we'd come, and I walked up the carriage road through the tunnel of trees. Shorter footpaths led from the gatehouse to the main house and gardens, but I was still a bit early, and I wanted to approach the house from the front.

At the point where the road emerged from the trees and skirted a wide, open lawn gone to weeds, I got my first look at the ruin of the main house. Every window was broken. The south wing, all the guest bedrooms and the great ballroom, lay in charred rubble. The north wing, including the drawing room where Karon and I had wed in the light of five hundred candles, looked as if a ram had been used to cave in one wall.

Astonishing that Evard would pick his murdered rival's house for us to meet. Did he think I would feel safe in a place so familiar? More likely it was a pointed reminder of his power. Whatever his motive, the ruined house only served to remind me of everything I despised about Evard, a shallow, arrogant, ambitious man who had destroyed Martin and his friends because he was not fit to be one of them.

As the last glow of red dulled to gray in the west, I circled the skeletal house and strolled into the back gardens. The plantings had gone wild, of course, only the hardiest left to compete with thistles, brambles, and encroaching forest. I could find no remnant of the rose garden, and all the ponds and streams were dry. Surprisingly, the arched bridge remained intact, overlooking a choked oval of knee-high weeds where a reflecting pond should have been. Only a few birds and a lonely frog mourning the loss of his lily pads disturbed the quiet dusk.

A warm breeze riffled my hair as I waited. Not a long wait. My every sense was on the alert, so I heard the muffled hoofbeats long before the solitary rider reached the edge of the gardens. A horse nickered softly. Light steps crunched on the gravel, only to hesitate next to a wild mass of honeysuckle that had overgrown the path. Through the tangled shrubbery glimmered the faint beams of a lantern.

“Straight through. Angle right. The gardeners have been sorely lax. You'll have to mention it to the lord.” My voice sounded harsh against the subtleties of the evening. Despite my resolution to be open-minded, I couldn't hide my bitterness at the desolation this man had wrought.

The newcomer pushed through the branches until I could make out a shadowy figure at the far end of the arched bridge. Odd . . . Evard was never as tall as my brother, only average in height, much to his youthful disgust, but this person was not even as tall as me.

“Who's there?” I said, retreating a few steps. “Speak or I'll be away from here before you can blink.”

I listened until I thought my ears must crack and whipped my eyes from side to side, searching the gloomy plantings for any sign of stalkers, but I sensed no one else about. The figure moved closer, and I backed away.

“Wait. Don't go!”

A woman! Her voice was low and mellow, yet bore such authority that my feet stopped moving of their own accord. My eyes stopped their suspicious search and riveted themselves to the slight form that followed the lantern beams up the arching span.

“The conditions of this meeting are not changed,” she said. “You've agreed to it, and I've endangered myself and others to come here. You cannot leave.”

She wore a lightweight cloak of the deepest sapphire, its full hood draped gracefully about her face, keeping it in deep shadow.

I walked to the foot of the bridge. “But the person I agreed to meet—”

“Is unavailable tonight. I speak for him.”

“I cannot believe he would permit anyone to speak for him, especially . . .”

“Especially a woman?” She set her lantern on the stone parapet. “Perhaps you don't know him as well as you think you do, even after such long acquaintance. And, of course, you don't know me at all.” With slender, pale hands, adorned with a single, slim band of sapphires that gleamed in the lamplight, she lowered her hood. On her brow she wore a gold circlet, graven with a dragon and a lily—the crest of the Queen of Leire.

Mariel Annalis Karestan Lavial, Princess of Valleor, had been a child of eight when her father's kingdom fell. She had witnessed the beheading of her father and brothers, and the rape and execution of her mother, who had vowed to lie with the first Vallorean man she could find and so produce a new heir to rival the Leiran conqueror. Princess Mariel alone was allowed to survive untouched, secured in the virginal captivity of a remote temple school in case the Leirans ever found a use for her. She was the living symbol of Valleor's subjugation. I, as so many other Leirans, had never thought of her as having any other identity, even when she was brought from her childhood seclusion to wed the Leiran king.

“I've wanted to meet you for a long while”—the queen raked cool green eyes over me as I sank into a genuflection I would not have offered her husband—“the Lady Seriana who threw away a kingdom for a sorcerer. The woman to whom I was forever being compared and beside whom I was always found wanting . . . by my husband, as well as everyone else at court.”

“Your Majesty, I—”

“I decided early on not to hate you. After all, you'd given me a life. If you'd married him, I would have been dead by seventeen. And even if you'd never existed, he would not have cared for me in the beginning. A Vallorean princess was no more to him than a looted castle or captured horse. But he doesn't speak of you in that way any more.”

The queen's light hair was piled on her head in smooth coils, and her features were ivory in the lamplight, an impassive courtier's mask that revealed little of the person beneath. Though her face was too long and angular to be called beautiful, and her stature unimposing, she carried herself with assurance. Her age would be somewhere near five and thirty.

“Why am I here, Your Majesty? How did the king know I was alive?”

She moved a few steps closer. “As you surely know, our people have suffered some . . . disturbances . . . of late that have left them in great fear. No science or philosophy offers any explanation. And so my husband's thoughts turn to other unbelievable tales he has heard. To sorcery. To you. Who else in this land knows anything of magical beings or would be bold enough to speak of such to her king?” Her manner was businesslike, her voice clear and intelligent. “And, despite his many faults, Evard is not a fool. He said he would not believe
you
were dead unless he saw your corpse.”

But I refused to allow her easy manner to dilute my caution. “To speak of sorcery is forbidden, my lady. By His Majesty's decree, I have been pardoned of my earlier offenses, but I would not bring the hand of the law around my neck again.”

“I'm not here to entrap you, Seriana. I know everything you told my husband: about this other world and the magical passage between us, about the sorcerer prince and his enemies and their war that somehow affects our own lands. If I wished to arrest you for speaking of such things, I'd not need to come to this wilderness and set about playacting. When I tell you the whole of these matters, you'll understand why the king seeks your advice.”

“Well, then . . .” She hadn't left me much to say. “You, of course, may speak of whatever you please.”

She sat gracefully on the parapet next to her lantern, the light-beams dancing on the crystal beadwork of the riding gown visible beneath her blue cloak. “We heard the first reports more than two years ago,” she said, “whisperings among those bold enough to touch on forbidden subjects in the presence of the king: a commander with reports of a maimed soldier who disappeared in the middle of one night . . . a duke's vanished mistress whose legs were crippled by a disease in her bones . . . a military governor investigating accusations of witchcraft. My husband thought little of these incidents until a man named Maceron demanded an audience, claiming he had evidence of an invasion from the world of the sorcerers.”

“Maceron!” I almost left the garden right then. The murderer Maceron, the despicable hunter of sorcerers who had exposed Karon's secret to my brother and the king, who had served the purposes of the Zhid when they tried to use the Prince of Avonar to destroy the Bridge, the mundane henchman of the Lord Ziddari. “Madam, Maceron is a vicious, lying scoundrel.”

“Yes, you have every reason to despise the man. But you must hear me out.” She motioned me to sit beside her. “Maceron brought us a list of more than three hundred disappearances from all corners of the kingdom. Tales of disturbing dreams, fantastical visions of roads or doorways or impossible landscapes, almost every one of them including mention of three odd strangers with mysterious powers. Magical powers. These sorcerers were said to be most bizarre in their aspect: one of them huge with a beast-like hide, one black and emaciated like a creature of charred bones, one a dwarfish man with only one eye, crude in his speech and action. They were blamed for thievery, for tormenting of beasts, and for every manner of mischief and ruination. Strangely enough, almost every person who had disappeared was also deformed in some way, lame or blind or otherwise afflicted.”

The queen's hands rested quietly in her lap, pale against the dark blue folds of her cloak as she posed her query. “One would never have believed such a history. Yet identical descriptions of the three villains originated from every region, from people who had never left their villages and from people who had traveled widely and were little amazed at any oddity. And the ruffians had been seen in places hundreds of leagues apart on exactly the same day! Though we hold no admiration for this Maceron—indeed he is a repulsive villain—his evidence is compelling. So, tell me, Seriana, are these beings from the other world? If not, then who are they?”

I shook my head slowly, my thoughts in a jumble. “This cannot be an invasion from Gondai, Your Majesty. As I told the king, though the skills and talents of Dar'-Nethi differ from ours, their appearance does not. They are not monsters, but human creatures fair or plain as the case may be. Even the Zhid are but Dar'Nethi who have been wickedly enchanted. The works of the Lords of Zhev'Na in our world are far more subtle and terrible than these nursery frights.”

I believed what I said, but her description of the three odd thieves had shaken me with echoes of another story.
A bent man, no taller than your waist . . . a one-eyed jongler . . .
And the storyteller's son had been born with only one hand. So, had the storyteller heard the tales of monsters and adopted it to explain his son's disappearance or was there something of truth in the old man's account? In the past, some of Karon's ancestors, exiled in this world, had used illusions of monsters to impose their will upon the people of the Four Realms. Anxiety needled my spine like a kitten's claws.

The queen held her tongue, and her gaze did not waver.

No, no, no
. Except for the very few like Kellea and Gerick, the Exiles—those Dar'Nethi who, like Karon's family, had lived in this world for centuries—were all dead, hunted to extermination, burned and forgotten by men like Maceron and Evard. My blood surged hot.