The Crystal Chalice (Book 1) (5 page)

 “I spilt red dye on the table she had just
polished,” wailed Relisar from beneath the table. He clapped his hands over his
ears as a jar hit the wall with a deafening crash. “It’s only lucky for me she
is such a terrible shot.”

 “Keesha!” Elorin cried. “Keesha, don’t be angry with
him. He doesn’t mean to provoke you, you know. Indeed he holds you in the
highest regard, as do we all. I will clean up the dye he spilt.”

 Silence fell. Relisar cautiously eased his head up above
the table.

 “Do you think that’s done it?” he asked.

 A small book flew across the room and hit him on the
nose. 

 After such enlivening sessions, Elorin enjoyed
escaping for her daily ride in the country. Sometimes, to her delight, the
Prince accompanied her, but as the date for his departure drew nearer, she more
often went alone. She grew to know and love the rich countryside around the
capital. The quiet lanes edged by golden trees, their leaves falling like an
unclaimed fortune to the ground. The hedgerows still laden with glowing red
berries and the well-tended fields, sometimes dusted with ground-mist as
ephemeral as spiders’ webs, from which the farmhouses arose as if enchanted.
The only thing that marred her pleasure in these lovely afternoons was the
hostile looks and muttering that followed her passage through the city. Each
day it seemed to get worse, although she tried her best to be discreet. It
finally came to a head the day before the Prince’s departure.

  She was returning from her ride a little later than
usual. Darkness was falling by the time she crossed the bridge to the city gate
and began to ascend the streets. She reached a square where a market was held
during the daytime, expecting it to be empty, but many of the stalls were just
beginning to pack up and there was still quite a crowd milling around them. The
inns and shops around the square all had their doors and windows open, allowing
light to spill out over the cobbles to mingle with the torches that some of the
stall owners had lit. Elorin began to guide her horse through the edge of the
crowd. She had become almost accustomed to receiving hard looks, so that she
saw nothing amiss when those she passed glared at her. She guessed it was
mainly disappointment about Relisar’s failure to produce the Champion and
persuaded herself that it was nothing personal. But tonight was different.
Something in the atmosphere was not right. Something in the attitude of the
crowd was making her uneasy. Her feelings were transmitted to her horse, which
began to sidle and become difficult to manage. The crowd ahead was so dense
that she feared trying to force her way through. So she turned in the saddle,
thinking of retreat, only to find that the throng had closed behind her.

 “There she is,” said someone, louder than the rest.
“The one with no name. The one with no past.”

 “Relisar’s mistake!” scoffed another.

 “She brings us ill-fortune at a time when our Prince
goes to face that beast in the mountains.”

 “Perhaps she is a demon, summoned by mistake by the
old fool.”

 “Everyone knows demons have no past, they spring
ready-formed from the mouth of the Destroyer.”

 Elorin’s unease was rapidly turning to fear. “I’m
just a person like yourselves,” she said to the man nearest her. “I don’t know
what Relisar got wrong but I’m just a human being.”

 She would have been better to have held her peace.

 “The Terrible One has sent her to spy on us, to
betray our Prince and send him to his death.”

 “No!” she cried. “It’s not true! I would never do
anything to hurt Prince Andarion!”

 But they did not hear and would not listen. They
were milling around her by now, pressing against her horse, snatching at the
bridle. Her horse, already nervous, suddenly reared up. Her foot slipped from
the stirrup. She tried desperately to hang on, but inexorably she slid from the
saddle and fell to the ground at the feet of the crowd. Rough hands grabbed
her, some pulling her one way, some the other. She struggled and writhed but to
no avail, there were too many of them. A blow fell on her shoulder.

 “She will not be allowed to betray our Prince,”
yelled one. “For even demons can die!”

 “How do you kill a demon?” someone asked.

 “Hang them,” a deep voice replied.

 “No!
No!”
she screamed and fought all the
harder. A howl of pain issued from one man who had hold of her .

 “She bit me! The demon bit me!”

 She was propelled across the square, her hair wild,
her tunic ripped, until they reached the inn. With chilling certainty she knew
why they had brought her there. A beam projected from the inn with pulleys and
ropes attached to it. It was used to haul beer barrels off the wagons and into
the cellar of the inn.

 A man grabbed the pulley and dragged a loop of rope
downwards.

 “Bring her here!” he ordered. “We’ll send her back
where she came from - and without Relisar’s help this time.”

 The crowd roared with approval.

 A wagon was rolled beneath the pulley and Elorin was
thrown up onto it.

 “Tie her hands,” someone shouted and from somewhere
cord was produced and her arms wrenched behind her back.

 In her terror Elorin could only groan. Through her
head, unbidden, the old prayer ran, the litany against death.

  For an instant she must have closed her eyes, for
she felt the rough rope pushed over her head and pulled tight around her neck.
 

 Suddenly there was a commotion
at the edge of
the crowd. Trumpets sounded in the night, startlingly loud over the hubbub of
the crowd. All the shouting just drained away. She opened her eyes. Andarion,
mounted on a black horse, was at the edge of the crowd with about a dozen
mounted guards behind him. The Prince surveyed the crowd coldly. Even though
they vastly outnumbered the guards, he advanced into them without fear. It said
much for the respect in which he was held, that a laneway opened up before him,
leading to the wagon on which Elorin stood. The man who had put the noose
around her neck, froze with his hand still on the rope. The crowd was now
utterly silent. In the face of the Prince’s anger, guilt - rather belatedly -
began to take hold.

 “Release her!” he snapped to the man who held the
rope. When Elorin was free, he asked her if she was hurt.

 She shook her head unable to command her voice to
speak. He turned to address the crowd.

 “Is this the way Addanians treat their guests? Is
this the behaviour of rational men? Only a few days ago I was telling this girl
that Addania stood for justice and civilisation. Little did I think you would
give me cause to regret my words. You have made me deeply ashamed of you. I
never thought to be ashamed of my own people.” He turned to the man with the
rope.  “What you have tried to do is attempted murder. You will find the
courts unsympathetic to your superstitious nonsense. Consider yourself lucky
that I do not sit in judgement upon you.” He nodded to one of the guards. “Take
him into custody.”

 As Elorin’s horse was nowhere in sight, the Prince
took her up before him. She could feel his whole frame rigid with anger and
shame.

 The crowd was totally silent and subdued as it
watched them go. On the way up to the palace, Andarion said to Elorin:
“Tomorrow you will have to come with me to the mountains. A battle with
Celedorn is hardly the safest place to be, but it would appear to be safer than
leaving you here.” But before he parted from her at Relisar’s tower, he added
wearily: “Forgive them, Elorin, if you can, for they are terribly afraid.”

 The captive in the fortress of Ravenshold awoke the
following morning aware of cold and pain. She had curled up on the bare slats
of the bed the night before, wrapping herself in her cloak as best she could,
as protection against the gusts of freezing air coming in through the broken
windowpanes. Now she was stiff and sore and chilled to the bone. A dismal grey
light was seeping into the room. She sat up with a groan and looked around.
Daylight did not improve her surroundings. The grey stone walls were, if
anything, even more cheerless than the night before. The great fireplace was
empty, save for some charred sticks and fine silvery ashes. Clearly a fire had
not burned in that grate for a very long time. However, she noticed something
that had escaped her attention in the darkness of the night before - another
door, facing the one through which she had entered. She swung her legs over the
side of the bed and stood up feeling slightly dizzy. Her cheek felt swollen and
bruised, as did her wrist. Every fibre of her being appeared to have been
penetrated by the cold, and to add to her discomfort, she realised for the
first time that she was hungry. The guards had brought her nothing to eat.
Perhaps they deemed it not worth the effort of feeding someone who was unlikely
to survive another day. Indeed,  no one had been near her since she had
been locked in the room the previous day. The only thing that had disturbed her
was the commotion of  horsemen returning to the square below in the small
hours of the morning, but she was too exhausted to care.

  She crossed the room to the other door and gave it
a tentative push. It creaked on its hinges and moved a little. Feeling bolder,
she pushed it open and discovered to her astonishment that it contained a
bathroom. Evidently the castle in its prime, had been possessed of every
luxury, but its days of glory had long gone. The marble bath sunk in the floor
was stained and filled with rustling brown leaves, trespassers into the room
courtesy of the broken window. The once-pretty mosaic tiles which had decorated
the walls, had flaked, one by one, like coloured scales, to accumulate in sad
heaps on the dusty floor. The huge wash-basin, too, was stained and cracked,
its once pristine white marble now rusty brown. She tried pushing the lever of
one of the taps but it wouldn’t budge. The other one squeaked and turned a
little. A startling groaning sound issued from under the floor and her efforts
were rewarded with a dollop of brown sludge. Abandoning the tap she looked up
and caught an unexpected glimpse of herself in the fragment of mirror still
adhering to the wall. Her cheek was swollen and discoloured, her brown hair was
tumbled and there were dark shadows beneath her eyes. Another wave of dizziness
engulfed her and she gripped the edge of the basin. The full implications of
her situation rushed in on her and the blue eyes that stared back from the
mirror were suddenly filled with fear.

  Another wrestling session with the tap produced a
liquid a little closer to water and she bathed her cheek and wrist, wishing the
water was warm instead of icy cold.

  All that interminable day she sat shivering,
waiting for someone to come. But nothing happened. The hours ticked by in
discomfort and fear but no one disturbed her isolation. She spent much of the
time looking out of the window down to the square below. There was much
activity, constant coming and going of mounted men, but she saw no sign of
Celedorn or Hydar. As the day wore on, hunger and thirst became her most
predominating concern. She pushed her hand through one of the tiny, broken
panes and managed to scoop some snow off the window-ledge. It did very little
to alleviate her discomfort but she judged it better not to risk the rather
revolting-looking water from the tap.

  Just as the day was beginning to fade, finally she
heard footsteps in the corridor. She stood up abruptly, her heart beginning to
pound and wondered if she had the strength and courage not to play the coward.

 A key rasped in the lock and the door swung open. A
man she had not seen before was standing in the corridor holding a lighted
torch. Without coming into the room, he gestured to her to follow him.

 “Come,” he said gruffly, “you’re wanted below.”

 She followed him down flight after flight of dimly
lit stairs. Her legs were weak and she felt light-headed but tried to persuade
herself that it was hunger rather than fear.

 Finally he stopped in front of a door she
recognised. It was the room where she had encountered Celedorn. It proved to be
the setting for a second encounter.

  He was sitting in the great carver at the head of
the long table, his back turned to her. He neither looked around nor
acknowledged her presence in any way. The guard gestured to her to stand by the
table and silently withdrew.

 The room was more pleasant than the last time she
had been there. The red curtains had been drawn against the darkness, a roaring
fire blazed in the hearth and the table was lit by tall candles in pewter
stands. Unfortunately, what their light revealed was a table set for dining. A
small basket, quite near her, was filled with bread, and a beautiful silver
bowl was piled with glossy red apples. Beside Celedorn, on a wooden platter,
sat a side of beef. The carving knife, with which he had just helped himself to
a generous portion, still sat on the table. In the centre of the table was a
tall, glass flagon of wine flanked by several crystal wineglasses which
refracted the firelight in a way she would have found beautiful had she not
been so hungry. She eyed the food desperately and it took every ounce of her
self-control not to snatch up something to eat.

 Celedorn continued in a leisurely fashion to enjoy
his meal. He still had not acknowledged her existence in any way but she was
perceptive enough to realise that he was deliberately tormenting her. Not for
the price of her soul, would she have asked him for anything. She stood
silently watching him, discreetly gripping the back of one of the wooden chairs
for support.

 Finally, without raising his head, he indicated that
she could sit down. With relief, she sank into the chair furthest away from
him. She took the opportunity to study him. Although he had discarded his cloak
and armour and was seated, rather than standing, she found him no less
daunting. The candlelight flickered over the horrific scars on his cheek. Even
the flattering light could do nothing to disguise their cruel ridges. As she
had observed before, the middle scar came so close to his lip that it lifted
the outer edge in an attitude of permanent disdain. The ragged, black beard
covering his chin gave him a wild, unkempt air. As she watched, he pushed aside
his plate and leaned back in his chair, a glass of ruby wine crooked in his
fingers. She found herself being scrutinised by those cold, pale eyes. She had
forgotten how piercing, how powerful was his gaze. To her annoyance, she found
she had some difficulty meeting it. It became a matter of willpower not to drop
her eyes.

  He tilted his head a little to one side, as if he
had found something that interested him.

  When he spoke, he immediately caught her off guard
by the unexpectedness of his question.   “Are you afraid?” he asked
quietly.

  Her instinct was to deny it, but she knew it would
be foolish. It would seem like mere childish bravado.

 She met his look squarely: “Yes,” she confirmed. “I
am afraid. Anyone who is in your power having angered you, and is not afraid,
is a fool.”

 He raised his eyebrows, increasing his habitually
mocking expression. “And you, of course, are not a fool?”

 “Only in certain respects.”

 Once again the silent appraisal was resumed. Indeed,
it went on so long that she began to get uncomfortable. She knew that this was
his intention, but was unable to stop herself from breaking the silence. “How
did you know so quickly that you were being deceived? My disguise did not fool
you for a single instant. How could you have known I was not the Princess?”

  He shrugged. “The wig was enough to fool Hydar and
the others, because all they knew about the Princess was her most famous
feature - her red-gold hair. However, I had the advantage of them, in that I
had actually seen the Princess.”

 She gasped. “We thought that there was no likelihood
of .......” she stopped abruptly, suddenly aware of what she had been going to
say, but he finished her sentence for her.

“........no likelihood of some mountain brigand knowing
what King Tharin’s daughter looked like. That was bad luck. However, luck was
not wholly against you. If I had come to escort the Princess myself, as I had
intended, if.....ah....other matters had not called me away, your Prince would
not have escaped.”

 She sat up abruptly in her chair. “You were too late
to stop him! He got away.”

 The black brows drew a little together. “For the
moment,” he conceded, “however, the same cannot be said for you. What intrigues
me is how did they force you to do this? What threat, what reward, was great
enough for you to risk certain death? What would make you throw your life away?
You see, the last person who angered me, ended by begging me to kill him. You
knew very well my reputation. So why did you do this?”

 “I wasn’t forced. I volunteered.”

 “Don’t be a fool,” he snapped. “Do you really expect
me to believe that?”

 “It’s true nevertheless. I.....I owe Prince Andarion
a great debt of gratitude, more than I can ever repay. When you demanded his
sister as hostage, the Prince was thrown into the most impossible dilemma. He
loves his sister dearly, moreover she is his father’s favourite child. To give
her to a man such as you, hardly bore thinking about, yet to allow you to pin
down and slaughter a sizeable proportion of the Eskendrian army, with the Turog
just over the border, would have been folly. He was tormented for days trying
to find a solution but in the end I found it for him. Both his sister and his
army are safe. The only one who will pay is me.”

 “And who are you? Who is of so little account that
they can be so easily disposed of?”

 “Me? I’m no one. No past, no future, very little
present.”

 Once again a little flicker of anger glinted in his
eyes. “Don’t play games with me,” he counselled in a voice as smooth a steel.

  “My name is Elorin.”

 His anger flared and for a moment she thought he was
going to dive across the table at her.  “Elorin is not a name,” he
snapped. “It is the word for autumn in the old tongue.”

 “It’s the only name I have. Prince Andarion gave me
that name because Relisar made me appear on an autumn day.”

 Anger lifted as suddenly as a thundercloud from a
mountain peak, as it was replaced by comprehension. “I know something of this.
That old fool Relisar tried to summon the Champion of the Book of Light, and as
usual, managed to bungle it. I heard all he managed to produce was one
insignificant girl. A girl with no memory. I’m surprised the Prince tolerates that
doddering idiot. Everything he touches turns to disaster. The Prince must have
been desperate to try and resurrect that particular myth.”

 “You don’t believe in the prediction?”

 He gave a crack of cynical laughter. “Belief is for
children, or idiots such as Relisar.” 

  Suddenly, he noticed that she had turned deathly
pale and realised that if he didn’t give her some food she would faint. He
pushed the basket of bread towards her and filled a glass of wine. She took
both gratefully but didn’t thank him, for she knew his motivation was not
kindness. He wanted to continue with the sport of tormenting her.

 When she felt steadier, she asked: “Would you really
have destroyed the Prince’s army?”

 “Why would I not?”

 “Because you would have left Eskendria completely
vulnerable to attack from the Turog.”

 He shrugged, unimpressed. “Eskendria means nothing
to me.”

 “But what about your own people? If Eskendria falls,
all the other little kingdoms will fall. None of them have the strength to
stand against the evil horde. And when they are all gone, what of you? Do you
think you will survive here in your mountain fastness, immune from attack? The
Turog hate you more than anyone. They call you Zardes-kur, the Executioner, the
one who delivers death. If Eskendria had fallen as a result of your actions, do
you think you would have survived?”

 She noticed, for the first time, that the mocking
sneer had gone. He looked a little tired.   “Eskendria would not have
fallen. In truth your Prince was in no danger. You are not the only one who can
deceive. You are not the only one to attempt to present a lie as the truth. The
only difference is that I am more successful than you.”

 Suddenly her mind made an intuitive leap. “You were
bluffing. You hadn’t enough men to hold all the passes. If the Prince had
attacked you, he could have broken through.”

 He inclined his head in acknowledgement. “The Prince
showed his inexperience in military command. He should have sent scouts to
check the information he was given. He has yet to learn that all may not be as
it appears.”

 But her eyes were not focused on him, they were
looking at some inward place in which he had no part, and she remarked, almost
to herself: “He went through such agony. Such heartbreak. All because he is an
honest man unused to dealing with deceit. Would to God I could have spared him
that.”

 She looked up in time to see an unpleasant smile
cross Celedorn’s face. “So,” he observed softly, “we have the answer to the
riddle. Allow me to compliment you. You certainly aim high. You were willing to
sacrifice yourself because you actually had the temerity to fall in love with
the heir to the throne of Eskendria. It would be pathetic if it were not so
entertaining.”