Seeds of Betrayal (17 page)

“I suppose we might,” she said, though she found herself wondering if it was too late for that. Even if there were a way to prove beyond any doubt that the Curgh boy hadn’t killed Lady Brienne of Kentigern, her death and all that followed it had left scars on both houses. Their hatred for each other ran deep; bridging that rift would take time.

“Isn’t there any way to find him?” Kearney asked, looking back at her, his face ruddy from the heat of the fire. “Is there no one to whom you can send a message?”

“I don’t even know where they’ve gone. Before he left, Grinsa said something about going to Aneira, but he didn’t tell me more. And while I may be archminister to Eibithar’s king,” she added with a small smile, “that doesn’t carry much weight with the Aneirans.”

Kearney tried to smile, but he just looked pained, like a man too aware of his own powerlessness to find humor in the limitations of those who served him.

“If you hear anything, you’ll let me know?”

“Of course.”

They remained that way for several moments, their eyes locked. Finally Keziah stood, looking away as she did.

“I’ll see to that message,” she said. “The one to Lathrop.”

“Thank you.”

She crossed to the door quickly and pulled it open. Glancing back one last time, she saw that Kearney was stirring the fire again, his lips tightly pressed together. She couldn’t begin to guess what he was feeling, which scared her more than anything else.

There were times, more often than he cared to admit, when Paegar felt like a coward in his first battle. Standing by the door of his quarters waiting for the archminister to return from her conversation with Kearney, the minister smiled ruefully at the image. It wasn’t just that he wanted to survive what he knew was coming. Above all else, he wished to make it through each day without being noticed by anyone, neither his allies nor his enemies. If he could have made himself invisible, like some mischievous demon from the Underrealm, he would have done it in an instant. Failing that, he did all he could to appear as ordinary as a chair or a table. He never allowed himself to arrive late for the king’s daily discussions, but neither did he reach Kearney’s chambers too early. He said little, but he always said something, so as not to make himself conspicuous with his silence. Most important, he did everything in his power to avoid the Qirsi healer with whom he had conspired to kill King Aylyn during Adriel’s Turn.

Murdering the old king certainly had been a coward’s act. Aylyn had been so weak, so lost to life already, that it barely counted as a murder at all. Paegar might have placed the pillow over the king’s face to smother him, but the old man offered no resistance. For all the high minister knew, Aylyn may have been dead already.

Still, that night had haunted his sleep ever since. He dreamed of the murder quite often, and every time it was the same. He laid the kerchief over the king’s mouth and nose, lifted the pillow, and placed it down on Aylyn’s face, pressing harder and harder until he was leaning on the old king with all his weight. At first, just like the actual murder, Aylyn offered no resistance. But then suddenly, a mind-twisting pain ripped through Paegar’s gut and he staggered backward to find the king’s dagger buried hilt-deep in his belly. Looking up, he saw the pillow and kerchief fall away, revealing the king’s face, his eyes wide open and a fierce grin on his pale lips.

Invariably the minister awoke soaked with sweat, his heart pounding against his chest and tears dampening his cheeks. Sleep was lost to him for the rest of the night. All he could do was sit in the darkness, choking back his sobs and hoping that no one passing by his chamber door would hear. He dreaded the dream as the wife of a drunken brute might dread a beating; the longer he waited, the more certain he grew that it would happen again soon.

Yet, when he lay down to sleep each night and prayed to Shyssir for gentle visions, it wasn’t this dream he had in mind, but rather another that he feared even more. The vision of the Weaver. The leader of the Qirsi movement had only appeared to him twice, once to ask the minister to join his cause and a second time to tell him that the king had to die. To this day, he wondered how the Weaver had known to find him. Certainly one of the others had mentioned his name, but that didn’t really change the question. How had they known that he would take their gold and betray his king? How could they have known that his loyalties to both Aylyn and Eibithar were so tenuous when he hadn’t realized it himself? He still recalled the night he returned from one of the city’s sanctuaries-he no longer remembered which one, though he often tried, thinking it important somehow- to find a small leather pouch on his bed. It was filled with five-qinde pieces, sixteen of them, more gold than he earned in an entire year as the king’s minister.

That night he fell into a vision of a windy plain, and on that plain, at the top of a steep rise, he found the man who would thereafter control his life. At first he thought it a simple dream, a fantasy brought on by the mysterious gift, and even after the Weaver spoke to him of the gold, he failed to grasp that it was anything more. Only when the Weaver hurt him, wrapping an unseen hand around his throat and squeezing until Paegar thought he would die, did he understand that all of it was real. When he dared to ask why he had been chosen, the Weaver said only that he was one of the fortunate ones, that he had a choice. His service to the cause would be rewarded with riches; his refusal to serve would result in a slow, painful death.

For a time he served merely by giving information to others who contacted him on the Weaver’s behalf. In return, he received small payments of gold. The night after he killed Aylyn, he found more than one hundred qinde in his chamber. He still didn’t know who paid him or how the courier delivered the gold. But the Weaver remained true to his word- Paegar served, and he was paid. He could only assume that if he ever defied the Weaver he would die.

Thus, he lived in constant fear of having to take another life on behalf of the cause. For though he managed to murder an ailing old man who was already on his deathbed, and who had no wife or young children to mourn him, Paegar couldn’t bear the thought of having to kill this new king. The minister owed nothing to Kearney, nor did he care if it fell to one of the others to assassinate him. But he hadn’t the stomach for it himself.

It no longer bothered him that he was a coward. In his youth it had been the source of much shame, but as he grew older he began to accept it as a part of who he was, like his intelligence and his various magics. If nothing else, Paegar knew, it would allow him to live a long life, at least by Qirsi standards.

Unless the Weaver had other plans for him. He felt certain that the Weaver would see no virtue in his cowardice, but rather would view it as an impediment to Paegar’s ability to serve the movement, perhaps even as cause to rid himself of the minister. So Paegar had decided that he needed to make himself indispensable to the Weaver. Not as a killer, since his talents didn’t lie there, but in some other way. And he had to do so quickly. It was only a matter of time before the Weaver came to him again. Too much time had passed since their last conversation, and as with his disturbing dream of Aylyn’s murder, Paegar knew he would have to wait only so long for the next one.

For more than a turn he had struggled to find some task that would keep him in good stead with the Weaver. The gold left for him after Aylyn’s murder had been payment for the killing, but he knew the Weaver well enough to understand that it had also been intended as incentive to do more.

“I want those who serve the cause to go beyond my instructions,” the Weaver told him the very first night they spoke. “I expect them to work on behalf of this movement at all times.”

He knew better than to hope the Weaver would never ask him to kill again. If he found another way to serve the movement, however, one that even the Weaver himself could not have imagined, he might forestall the next murder for at least a short while. But what?

The answer finally came to him by chance, after he overheard a conversation between Gershon Trasker, Kearney’s ill-tempered swordmaster, and Leilia, the queen. Gershon and the king’s wife were in the corridor near Kearney’s quarters, and Paegar had just descended the stairs of the prelate’s tower. Hearing them speak, he kept himself in the shadows by the doorway and strained his ears to listen. Much of what they said held little interest for him. There was to be a feast the following night, and Gershon, always concerned for the king’s safety, had asked to arrange some of the seating. Near the end of their discussion, however, Leilia said something that caught the minister’s attention.

“I assume that the Qirsi whore will be there.”

“Yes, my lady,” the swordmaster answered.

“I want her as far from me and as far from Kearney as possible.”

“The king is welcoming the duke of Aratamme, my lady. The duke will have his first minister by his side, and it’s customary for the king’s archminister to sit with the ranking Qirsi of a visiting noble.” He seemed to hesitate briefly. “I assure you, my lady, their… trysts are over.”

“I don’t care if they’re over, and I don’t care if the queen of Sanbira herself is coming!” the queen said, her voice growing shrill. “I don’t want that woman at our table!”

“To have her sit anywhere else would raise questions, my lady, questions that might be… awkward for both you and the king.”

A long pause followed. At last Leilia muttered a most unqueenly curse. “Fine,” she said. “Just put her at the end of the table. I don’t want to have to see her, much less speak with her.”

“Of course, my lady.”

Their conversation ended a short time later and they walked off in opposite directions, the queen heading toward her chambers and the swordmaster entering Kearney’s. Paegar had been on his way to speak with Keziah, Wenda, and Dyre, but he remained where he was for a long time, hidden in the shadows, his back leaning against the rough stone of the tower’s inner wall.

One didn’t have to be a scholar to make sense of what he had just heard. The king and the archminister were lovers, or at least they had been. From what he knew of the king, Paegar found it hard to believe that Kearney would have risked a forbidden love, even as the duke of a remote house on the Caerissan Steppe. But much of what he had observed of the king and his minister over the past several turns made far more sense in the context of a failed love affair. There was a sadness to Keziah that went far beyond anything that could be explained by the treatment she had received from her fellow ministers. For his part, the king’s gaze often seemed to linger too long on the archminister during their discussions. On several occasions, Paegar found Kearney staring at Keziah’s face long after she had finished speaking. He hadn’t given it much thought before. Keziah was a beautiful woman, with a round, pretty face, pale yellow eyes, and long white hair that she always wore tied back in twin braids. Paegar had allowed that the king might be taken with her, as he himself was. But until this day, he had never guessed that they might share something more. Once confronted with the possibility, however, the minister could only rail at himself for failing to see it sooner.

Here was the prize he could offer to his Weaver. Wouldn’t the leader of the Qirsi movement be interested to know that the archminister of Eibithar’s new king had been the man’s lover? Wouldn’t the Weaver find some way to use such information, and wouldn’t he reward handsomely the man who first brought it to him?

But his thoughts didn’t stop there. What if Paegar could do more? What if by the time the Weaver entered his dreams again, the minister had already started turning the archminister to the Qirsi cause? Perhaps the king had ended their love cruelly, or maybe the hostility of the other ministers had left her resentful of both them and the king they served. He could see already that she and Gershon mistrusted one another, and no doubt she hated Leilia as much as the queen hated her. As far as Paegar could tell, Keziah lived as an exile, friendless, loveless, and joyless. To this point, he had done nothing but contribute to her pain. The other ministers resented the king’s decision to pass over Wenda and make Keziah archminister, so Paegar had treated her with disdain as well. To befriend her would have been to draw attention to himself.

Now, though, he saw how much might be gained by making himself the archminister’s confidant. There still were risks, but the possible rewards seemed too great to be ignored.

He started slowly, so as not to appear too obvious. Two days after overhearing the queen’s remarks, when Keziah arrived for their daily audience with Kearney, Paegar allowed his gaze to meet hers and nodded a greeting. Even this small kindness seemed to surprise her, and she hesitated for an instant before nodding in return. A few days later, the minister arranged what would appear to Keziah to be a chance encounter in the castle corridors. Again, he didn’t do much-he had to build her trust slowly, as one might win the affections of a feral cat. He merely nodded to her as they passed one another, adding, “Good day, Archminister,” almost as an afterthought. Keziah murmured a reply, and Paegar found himself wondering if he had already pushed her too far too quickly.

The following day, however, when they met again in Kearney’s chambers, the archminister nodded to him first, offering a small smile as well. Paegar struggled to keep himself from looking too pleased as he returned the nod. But his heart raced like that of a young man in love. It had begun. He no longer wondered if he could win her trust; the question now was how soon.

Fighting his excitement and his eagerness to build on these successes, the minister forced himself to avoid her. For much of Bian’s waning, he refused to speak with her again. He even went so far as to argue a point with her in front of the king and the other ministers, though it required that he take the lead role in that day’s discussion. Early in the new turn, however, he began once more to extend small kindnesses to her. He nodded to her at the start of each audience, and occasionally offered a smile if something in the discussion struck him as humorous. A second “chance” encounter, this one near the ministerial chambers, included not just a “good day,” but a “hope you’re well,” besides. The following day he managed to arrive at the king’s door just as she did and, bidding her good morning, held the door open for her, smiling as she stepped past him into the chamber.