The Cup of the World (26 page)

The Lady of Tarceny she had never felt so alone.

Her troubles were beginning to grow. That night, as Orani was brushing the tangles from her hair, Phaedra started and exclaimed aloud. After a few seconds she rose and hurried down the corridor to the room which was now the nursery. Ambrose was awake, but quiet, mouthing at one of Ulfin's stones while Eridi sang him one of the droning lullabies of the hills. Stones and other toys were scattered on the floor of the room. Lamps flickered quietly in their places. The two were alone. So she returned to her chambers, ignoring Orani's stare, and settled herself before the mirror again. She watched the glass intently, looking past the brush and hands of her maid to a certain corner of the wall beyond where, a few moments before, she had locked eyes with something inhuman.

A face. Not a man's face, or at least she thought not. What she had glimpsed had seemed more like … like a demented cockerel under a cloth hood, staring and gibbering in her glass from the shadows of the far side of the room.

There was nothing there now. The robe, still unfinished, stood like a headless shadow and did not move. The hanging behind it had pictures of fight scenes from the ancient stories of the Kingdom, but surely not the patterns that could conjure such a thing for a sleepy eye. And Orani, standing beside her, did not appear to have seen or felt anything.

Phaedra sniffed. Was there a smell?

‘We must have more lights,’ she said.

She wrote guardedly to Ulfin. When his answer came it brought little comfort. She must watch and trust no one.
Especially she must watch over Ambrose. Ulfin could not say when he would be able to return.

He also said, curiously that he hoped she would retain Orani and Eridi in service, for he thought they were good at what they did. It was the first time that she could remember him noticing anything to do with her domestic arrangements since those few weeks after their marriage, eighteen months ago. She wrote back that the weather was bad, and that Ambrose was crawling.

Her letter crossed with the news that, a year after they had first offered it to him, he had again refused the crown.

The weather was indeed bad. The light was dim. She had rushes burning in the corridors in the middle of the day, despite the constant risk of fire. They gave off a heavy, sour smell and some fumed so badly that if she had indeed been suffering from eye-ache it would have made things worse rather than better. The air was damp, and chilly in the wind. A round of colds began among the household. Phaedra worried about keeping the tower room warm for Ambrose, keeping the fire going, keeping a flow of dry wood coming up hourly from the woodstore in the arms of kitchen boys.

She was crossing the upper bailey after a short meeting with Caw and the guard captain about duties. Her head was full of the numbers – a guard and three servants sick, a sergeant and four gone to recruit men for the war. Another guard asking leave to marry. There were too few horses. She knew that Caw would soon ask her to release her horse Thunder to the garrison, which would spark their first argument in months (she did not have much use for the animal, who was a lump – but there were limits!). And with these preoccupations she looked up in the dank day at the north-east tower for the reassuring plume of smoke that wavered thinly up the inner side. It was not there.

She stopped and waited, but it did not appear. Had the fire gone out? Or was the wood in the hearth so dry that the smoke was simply invisible in this light? Caw's voice sounded behind her, ending a conversation with the guard captain in the doorway to the inner gatehouse.

She hurried across the courtyard. If the fire had gone out, it would either be because Eridi had allowed it to – in which case she was in for a tongue-lashing if the room was a jot less than
very
warm – or because the next lot of wood hadn't appeared, in which case some kitchen boy was going to spend a day or two doing something
very
unpleasant. She entered the hall and climbed the gallery stairs, passed into the living-quarter passage and turned to her right. A flight of wooden steps took her up to the next level, where the house-servants were quartered, and to the door to the tower room. It was shut. She lifted the latch, which clacked in her hand, and entered.

It was nowhere near warm enough. The floor was
littered, as it always was, with Ambrose's stones and other toys. The room was empty. The fire was out. There was no one there.

The smell. Not the woody scent of dead embers, but something thick and damp, like old stone at the edge of pools. She knew it at once.

Then she saw Ambrose.

He was a half-dozen steps up the stair that curled up the side of the chamber to disappear into the tower wall. He was struggling, on hands and knees, to make the next step.

There was someone on the stair above him …

Dear Angels!

A figure – it was smaller than a man – crouched in a heavy, hooded cloak, with its head bowed. The boy was climbing towards it.

It leaned forward.

‘Stop!’ Nothing changed at the sound of her voice.

There were soldiers on the roof above. Somewhere in the room was a gong to call them, but she could not think where. She could not take her eyes off her son. His tongue was clenched between his lips as he reached for the next flight of stone. His head rocked. He uttered a little grunt as she watched.

The crouching thing lifted its head. Beneath the hood it seemed eyeless, toad-headed. Something crunched. Flecks of stone trickled down the stair.

Long fingers that were not a man's stretched towards the child.

‘Amba!’ she said, louder this time. The boy looked round and saw her.

I'm busy, his look said.

If she stepped forward he would turn to climb again. Two steps above him the fingers hovered like the roots of black trees. Water glistened on them. She must not look. She must look at Ambrose. At Ambrose.

‘Come down, darling. Please – come down.’

Slowly the boy turned.

He frowned in concentration. He hesitated. Then he tried a step downwards.

He fell.

Phaedra cried out, and lunged up the stair to catch him as he rolled over and over down the stone steps. Above her the stair was crowded – the hooded crouching thing, stinking, a few feet away, and beyond it, another figure – a man in a robe and hood, looking down, coming down the stairs towards her …

It was him! It was
him
!

‘Help! Help!’ Down the stairs, and she nearly fell. Somewhere beyond a door feet pounded on wooden steps. People were coming. She turned, snarling, with her child in her arms, to face the enemy.

The stair was empty.

Ambrose bawled and bawled. The tower door rattled and Caw flung into the room, with Orani behind him.

‘There's someone up there!’

Caw leaped to the stair foot. Phaedra saw him check as he registered that there was no one on the lower steps. He drew his sword, listened, and crept to the point where the stair disappeared into the thickness of the wall. There he paused.

‘Where's Eridi?’ asked Orani.

‘Quiet, damn it!’ Caw trying to listen, as the tower rang with Ambrose's cries. After a few seconds he called loudly upwards.

‘Ho there! Tower guard!’

There was a pause.

‘Sir?’ came a voice, echoing down.

‘Is the stair clear?’

‘Clear, sir, as far as I can see.’

‘Come on down then, and take care.’

After a moment there came the sound of armoured heels upon the steps. Watching Caw, Phaedra could see the moment when the guard lurched into his view. The stair was clear.

‘Have you seen anything? Inside or out?’

‘No, sir.’

‘There was!’ cried Phaedra. ‘On the stair, two of them!’

‘All right!’ Caw swore under his breath. ‘All right, let's do this properly. Up the stairs, you, and sound the alarm.’

‘Sir?’

‘Sound the alarm! Something's been here. Either that or you and your fellow have been pissing down the steps, to make it stink like this. Get the inner gatehouse to drop the portcullis and keep it down until I say otherwise. Then the two of you clear the roof of the living quarters. It's the only place for them to have gone. Hurry’

‘Sir!’ Feet clattered on the stairs, fading.

‘Now, dear, don't cry’ Orani was saying, as she prised Ambrose from his mother's grip. ‘There, there.
Next
time you turn round an' come down
backwards
, that's the way. Nasty fall, was it? There, there …’

Ambrose wailed on, but less loudly. Phaedra looked at her hands, and found she was shaking. She wanted to cry too.

And no one else had seen anything.

‘Take that child down to the gatehouse, quick,’ said Caw. ‘It'll be safe enough there until we have sorted this out.’

‘And you
get out too!’ he barked.

Eridi had appeared in the door with an armful of wood, and was gawping at them. Orani hustled her out, babe in one arm. Ambrose's keening receded. The door closed. Above, a trumpet began to sound the harsh notes of the alarm.

Phaedra was left in the room with Caw, still perched on the stairs.

‘I suppose you think I'm mad,’ she whispered.

He looked at her, as though he was about to agree. Then he said: ‘You'd better see this.’

Phaedra climbed up the steps towards him – nine, ten, eleven: he was standing precisely where the crouching thing had been. He moved his foot as she approached. Sunk into the lip of the step was the mark.

It was if the stone had been worn, or crushed by some impossible weight. She touched the stone. It was damp. The place stank.

It was smaller than a man's print. Smaller even than her own. And rounder. On one side of it was another mark that might have been a little claw. Other pits and blemishes in the surface of the step showed where the creature had rested. The stairs above and below were clean.

Phaedra stared at it. The mutilated step. The fresh
sweep of the step below, with one of the Ambrose's white play-stones resting on it. It had been that close. And the face of the man she had seen on the stair, intent upon the capture.

Footsteps above them roused her. Caw replaced his foot on the marks as the soldiers came into view and hurried out onto the parapet above the living quarters. Then he removed it and bent over the step.

‘I think I can get this slab up,’ he said in a low voice. ‘We'd better give out it was worn, so the child slipped.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Hide it. Bury it, when I can.’

‘Why?’

‘Why do you think?’ He looked up angrily. ‘It needs just one loose mouth about this, and we're all done. My lord too. And that's another thing. Don't go writing any of this to him.’

‘What!’ Ulfin was the only one who could possibly help.

‘Not in writing. I'll send him messages to get him back here. You can do the same. If you like, we'll craft it so that if he reads both together he'll get the idea. But they go separately. There's to be nothing anyone can read about this. Damn! I need a chisel.’ He stood up, breathing heavily

‘You stay here,’ he said. ‘Make sure no one sees it. Act mad, or whatever. In fact, that would be a good idea, for they'll find nothing on the roof and will wonder what it was all about. I'll be back as soon as I can.’

Without waiting for an answer, he turned and hurried down the steps and out of the room. Phaedra sat heavily
on the step below the marks – she could not bring herself to sit
on
them – and tried to think about what he had said.

Tell no one
. And what if they came again? Tell no one. Not the guards, not Orani, not Eridi. Try to get Ulfin back here without telling him why.

Dear Angels!

She played absently with the white pebble, thinking: Tell no one, not even Caw. Not about the face on the stair, beyond the crouching thing. Tell no one that it was the pale priest of the knoll.

They found nothing. Phaedra's anger ran like a wave through the household. A kitchen boy was put in the stocks for failing to deliver the wood. Eridi was beaten by Orani for leaving her post to get it. Men scurried when the lady expressed a wish, and watched her sideways, wondering.

The messages left for Ulfin within a day of each other, bearing as much as Caw would allow them to say. Letters from him arrived almost at once, so for a moment Phaedra believed that he already knew what had happened, and was giving them the answer. But when the seals were broken her hope faded. War was deepening in the Kingdom. He was leading a column to harry the Seabord, drawing soldiers from Trant and Tuscolo. Caw must send replacements to the weakened garrisons, in case Septimus raided from Develin. He must also send money. The letters bore no thought of troubles west of the lake.

Caw swore, and rode the next morning for Baer and the south of the March, where he reckoned there were manors that had yet to give as much as Ulfin's other lands
to their lord's cause. He took only three riders with him, and yet with sickness, and messengers abroad, his departure left the garrison with just nine fighting men until the recruiting party should return. Caw's last words to her were: ‘Remember – tell no one. We all depend on it.’

Phaedra nodded dumbly, and watched him ride out of the gate. She liked him so little. Yet to lose him now was almost more than she could bear.

For the first time she was truly mistress in her own house. And yet she had never been so ill-prepared for it. Indecision took her, even as she gave instructions for the simplest tasks. For at the same time as ordering the day-to-day functions of the garrison, she must also try to guard against the enemy they had never seen and could not be allowed to know existed, but might appear at any moment among them. How far would Patter be at that time? Would Arianda be within call? Was it safe to let Barnay gather wood on his own? Her mind grappled with the movements, and the recurring need to find reasons for tasks to be done in unusual ways. If her brain was too slow, as it often seemed to be, she would take refuge in irrationality and order them to do it anyway. And when they had bowed and left (shaking their heads, no doubt, as soon as they were out of sight) she would lose faith in her own decision, and call them back, or struggle to stop herself calling, and yet wish that she had done. She would watch them secretly, and yet suspect that they knew she was watching; but she could not rid her mind of the images of clawed shadows rising from the well or the woodpile around the servant who, in the last few seconds, would become her son. Then she would turn abruptly to walk
the walls or corridors, waiting for another half-hour to pass so that she might reasonably visit Ambrose again, wondering when she might hear from Ulfin, and what she would do that evening when the light faded. And at dusk she took her blankets and lay beside Eridi on the floor of Ambrose's room, rising every hour to tend the lights around him before they failed.