The Cup of the World (37 page)

Martin looked at her for a long moment. She saw him understand that, even under Penitence, she had not said all that she should have done. Then he nodded.

‘And what will you do?’ he asked.

‘I will go … I will go to Jent.’

Another lie. She would go towards Jent. But not even Martin should know what it was she was planning to do.

er new maid was called Hera. She had been sent, generously, by Elanor Massey in response to a letter Phaedra had written the day she had ceased her fast. Hera was the same girl who had fallen asleep in the chair while waiting on Phaedra two years before. She smiled openly, and had come with a warm recommendation. All the same, Phaedra thought her both very young and not altogether sensible. So she was less surprised than perhaps she should have been when, an hour after their arrival in Baer, Hera came flying into the upper room where Phaedra was resting, threw herself down and, seizing Phaedra's hand, kissed it. Somewhere nearby a church bell had begun to ring.

‘Your Majesty!’ Hera said. ‘What?’

‘I'm sorry, mam. I just wanted to be the first to call you that. They're saying in the streets that he's been crowned! I'm going to serve you really well, Your Majesty. I'd never have believed—’

‘Dear Angels, girl’ – although Hera was almost exactly
her own age – ‘I am not crowned yet. I may never be. Whatever they are saying in the streets, it may not be true. He has refused the crown twice—’

‘He's taken it, mam. He truly has! So perhaps the war will be over,’ Hera said. For she had quickly decided that her mistress must be unhappy at her lord's absence.

‘He has won battles before, and not brought it to an end,’ said Phaedra dryly. ‘Now get to your feet and be useful, will you? Look,’ she said, lifting the green cloth she had been fingering in her lap. ‘You have made me spill my drinking water on this sleeve. Hang it out of the window to dry, please. And you can tell me whether the people are planning to storm the lodge at the same time.’

A few scattered cheers broke out when Hera appeared at the window.

‘They think I'm you, Your Majesty’ she said, and waved at the crowd below. ‘I think they'd like to see you, if you are willing.’

‘If that is what they want. But I shall not be called “Your Majesty”, Hera – by you or them.’

‘No, mam.’

‘That's to be quite clear. Let the word be sent from the door. I shall want to go out in the town soon, for I have Sarcen silks to order for my lord's robes. I do not want to find myself part of a procession.’

‘No, mam.’ Hera was still smiling, waving from the window. ‘What colours, please, mam?’

‘What?’

‘What colour silks, mam?’

‘Oh. Black, I suppose. And gold,’ she added sourly.

Gold for a king. And green – the green cloth of Trant,
hanging from the window of the lodge: a signal for the man from the reeds of Derewater.

Lying awake in the night, remembering.
And will he refuse it a third time? I wonder
. She could picture the scorn in Lackmere's eyes as he had spoken to her of her own naivety.
In politics it is often necessary to refuse more than once what you would most have others give you
. So now Ulfin had what he had sought from the beginning.

Again and again she remembered his face as they had talked in the fountain court about Ambrose's name. Without saying a word that was untrue, he had led her to believe the opposite of what was true. He had duped her so many times, and most of all about his will to be King – the Fount of the Law, which in him would be founded on lies.

She could not sleep for anger.

Once she cried his name aloud. ‘Ulfin!’

She remembered how, in that very room, she had heard a woman's voice crying the name of Ulfin's brother in the night. Even Evalia's loss, she thought, was less terrible than her own. At least for Evalia the memory of Calyn was whole.

The small hours of the night seeped past. She turned in her sheets, dozing, dreaming among images of Ulfin smiling, Ulfin speaking, Ulfin frowning in thought as he offered her the white stones for Ambrose. The white stones now lay scattered in a room where Ambrose slept. Such little things they were, hidden in the darkness. The shadows moved. Something cracked beneath a clawed foot close by. She saw Ambrose wake and begin to cry. She saw
Eridi lift her head from the pillow to listen. Across the chessboard Phaedra met the eyes of the priest.

When the time comes you must sacrifice without mercy
, he said.
Except the King, which you must guard with your life
.

She looked down and did not answer. There were very few pieces on the board, and most were black. She prodded another white stone into place around her son, and prayed that the ring might hold.

A day and a half of dull riding south of Baer, as they were plodding slowly through low-limbed woods, a horseman surged onto the path ahead of them. He was helmed and armoured. Another followed at his tail, and others with him – five, eight, more.

‘Put up your arms,’ one shouted.

A crashing among the bushes behind her told that others were emerging from the woods to cut off their retreat back down the road. The sergeant who led her escort reined around, looking for a line of escape as his half-dozen men fumbled for their weapons. The ground among the trees was rocky and treacherous.

The horsemen were beginning to close from the front. In a few seconds they would charge.

‘You had better do as he says,’ said Phaedra.

The sergeant was neither young nor noble-born, and had the sense the moment needed. He grunted an order to his men, who dropped their weapons to the ground. The ambush party approached from front and rear. Orders were being given – to her own men – Move over there, put your arms up, hands together,
do
it, damn you. She looked around, but could not see any face that she recognized.
The leader towered over her on his charger. He took the reins of her horse. He did not say anything. His helm hid most of his face, although a mane of black hair peeped from under it, and there was something distantly familiar about his eyes. A rider nearby spat at her. She watched dumbly the little fleck rolling down the pommel of her side-saddle.

‘
Vixen!’
one screamed at her.

Then they put a sack over her head.

Patience, patience. She had gone in the dark before. The hood rasped at her cheek and chin, and her breath huffed in the cloth before her lips. There were chinks of daylight rising from where it opened around her neck. And she did not have to see. All she had to do was ride, and wait, for however many hours it would be until they lifted the hood from her head again.

She told herself that it was important that they should treat her as a prisoner. It must not seem to her soldiers that she was being handled any differently by their enemies. She wondered why Lackmere had chosen so open a way of contacting her. (If he had chosen it, for she had not seen him yet.) She had been expecting him to fall in with her company disguised as a priest or a merchant, so that they could speak privately on the road. She had taken a small escort because it increased the chances of finding a moment to talk unheard – not because it would make falling into an ambush easier. There would be a lot of explaining to do at Tarceny if she returned there after this.

If
she returned. She had no idea what would happen now. She could hear, not far away, the sound of Hera
whimpering as they rode. Presumably she too was blindfolded. Phaedra could feel the sound sawing at her own nerves. She wanted to utter some rebuke, sharply at this silly girl whom she barely knew. She did not. Hera had much less idea than she why they had suddenly been pounced upon. Earlier that afternoon she had been still blissful in her sudden proximity to the new queen, full of dreams and thoughts about the future. Now she was being herded along by rough, armed men. Angels knew what fears were in her mind.

And no doubt Hera had a sweetheart somewhere who still loved her – who had not abandoned her and to whom she had expected to return. Perhaps she had not betrayed her own father to death. Perhaps she still thought the world was a place in which good things would happen and go on happening, in which a soul might be free of its own guilt and seek for something more than just the undoing of what could not be undone.

‘Hera,’ she called, trying to keep her voice soft so that no one would be tempted to shut her up. ‘Hera.’

There was no answer, but the whimpering stopped.

‘It won't last, this. It won't last for ever.’

Still there was no answer. Whatever Hera was thinking, she was silent in her hood. Phaedra rode on, and did not know whether she pitied her maid or envied her.

It did not last. An hour later, after a steep climb and then a long descent by running water, her horse was pulled sharply to her left. She could hear others of the party ahead of her. They had slowed. Her mount plodded forward under somebody's guidance, and began to climb
a slope. Instead of the
scrape-clip-scrape
of hooves on rocky paths there were dry leaves and twigs under its feet. The sounds had changed. They were not in the open. The noise of wind in branches was overhead as well as around them. They had turned off the path and plunged into trees. Instinctively she crouched in the saddle, hunching her shoulders against the imagined sweep of low branches. She wondered if her captors would care if she caught a knock or a twig in the eye.

‘Take our masks off,’ she said.

No one answered.

‘Take them off,’ she said. ‘We can't remember the way now. And it won't help you if we crack our skulls or fall in the bushes.’

There was a halt, and low words spoken among their captors. A horse rode up close to her left. A hand hauled the hood roughly from her head. Light exploded in her eyes.

They were, as she had thought, in a wood. It might have been any wood anywhere in Tarceny for it had the same steep slope and green leaves and the sound of rushing water somewhere below. Down there a rearguard of their captors had assembled, sweeping leaves across their tracks. Others were taking the hoods off her followers. Her men, she saw, were bound. Hera's face looked drawn and miserable. Phaedra tried to give her a smile.

Lackmere was still nowhere to be seen.

‘Forward,’ said the leader.

He had removed his helm, and his thick curling hair fell in a mane to his neck. Watching his back, as he rode a slanting path ahead of her up the slope, she saw the
faded design on his surplice. There, faint on the brown and weather-stained cloth, an eagle spread its wings above a battlemented tower: Baldwin. He was one of Elward's brothers – probably Tancrem, the middle one, as the youngest could barely be carrying arms yet. That was why she had thought she recognized him. And Phaedra felt a slight chill in her stomach. For while it was something to know her captor's name, she could not think that any in the House of Baldwin would be well-disposed towards her.

They breasted the slope, and suddenly there was a camp before them. It occupied most of the flat top of the hill, under three huge oaks with awnings spread from their branches. There were a score of men and a few women there, watching them as they rode up. There were horses in lines, and a cooking fire with the thinnest wisp of smoke above it. It was a strong place, defensible, in that the hill was steep sided; well concealed, for until you climbed to this level you did not know it was there; and yet it lay within ten minutes of at least one path, and offered its inhabitants the whole cloak of the forest to hide in if some force were to come against them.

Faces were turned towards her. She was scanning them for signs of Lackmere when Tancrem, dismounted, appeared at her knee.

‘Down,’ he said, and held out his hand.

‘Thank you,’ she said as she alighted. ‘It is good to see, and to walk, after so long.’

‘Stand there.’ He was pointing to a spot in the middle of the camp. She turned and walked silently to where she was told. Her other followers were being hustled off somewhere. People were gathering around her, in a half-ring.
She looked round at them, and found that it was impossible to look a crowd in the eye.

Men came forward with drawn swords. They laid them down in a row on the leafy forest floor.

There were six. Three pointed towards her, and three away. A young man, bareheaded, stepped forward and began reading from a scroll.

It was a charge of witchcraft.

All the voices that had spoken to her, murmuring in her ears now. In the rustle of the leaves she could hear Father talking, but she could not catch the words. Evalia – how hard it was to think at a moment like this! Little Ambrose cried ‘Mama’, and looked around for her. And still she stared across at the young man reading, on and on, and could not speak.

It was the accusations themselves that steadied her. The reedy voice bore in upon her confusion. It stated this, described that, all things that she was supposed to have done; things that even her bewildered mind could reject at once. This was not, as she had for some terrible moments supposed, her confession to Martin returned to bring her to her ruin. This was a credulous, ludicrous concoction; a miscellany of all the frightened whispers that man could pass to man in a defeated army. Martin had not betrayed her. He must still be striding north to Hayley as she had bidden him, to meet her son and take him to safety. And knowing that, she could think again.