The Cup of the World (42 page)

And now they were gathering the dead. Someone was crossing the court towards her. She rose, and lifted up her lamp. Martin emerged out of the darkness and looked down at the man at her feet.

‘He was planning to marry,’ she said.

‘It takes blood to stop a war, my lady. And if it is not stopped, then it will have blood anyway. With good luck, this one may now be caged.’

Phaedra turned her head. She wanted to shut away the terrible images that danced in her mind. She wanted to cry, and being unable to, she felt sick; and tired.

‘When did you arrive?’

‘A half-hour ago. The postern gate was open, and no one was guarding it.’

She looked around. ‘Have you seen Hera?’

‘She is in the chapel, and the door is locked. I should go back and tell her it is safe to come out. But I wanted to find you. Are you hurt?’

She shook her head. ‘It is not my blood,’ she said dully. ‘It is Ulfin's.’

‘They say he is asking for you.’

‘I do not want to see him.’ She knew she would go. ‘… Ambrose?’

‘Well, when I left him. When he understood I was coming here, he gave me something for you.’ He fished something from his pouch and handed it to her, seeming to smile for a moment. ‘“Give Mama,” he said.’

It was one of the white stones, lying warm in her palm. Her fingers closed on it.

Martin stooped over Vermian's body. ‘I will bring this one in.’

‘Will you need the lamp?’

‘No.’

‘Don't forget Hera.’

He grunted, and she could tell by the sound that he
had indeed forgotten, despite reminding himself of her only a moment before. And she remembered that she had been looking for water to wash the blood from Ulfin's face. That had been hours ago. Thought had shattered under the impact of the things they had both witnessed. The mind saw image after image, forgot them and moved on. And she must move on too.

The courtyard was dark and quiet. The stone bowl of the fountain glowed in the lamplight as she passed it: that place where Ulfin and she had kissed in the sunlight on her first day in Tarceny The bowl was empty. Its waters were silent now.

Chawlin rose to his feet as she entered the antechamber. The door to the bedroom was open. She could see the light beyond it, and the shape of the man upon the bed.

‘How is he?’

‘Conscious. He's in pain, of course. I think the bleeding has stopped.’

‘Sit down, please.’

Someone – Chawlin, presumably – had righted the tables that had been upset in the fight. The mess had been cleared. The blood had been mopped away – no, surely not. But he had dragged that rug across to cover whatever marks remained. The room had a subdued and peaceful look. Apart from Chawlin himself, a mild-looking boy with a naked sword across his knees, there was no sign that anything had happened here.

Phaedra hesitated. Through the window she could see, dimly the shapes of the wooded ridges rolling away to the north of the castle. The night was lighter than it had been.
Somewhere beyond the towers and clouds the moon had risen again, paling the overcast sky to a dull, colourless glow. She felt a sudden wish to be out there, moving across the vast floor of the night, and away from this torchlit stone where swords cut flesh and all her deeds were remembered.

Out there, in the soft darkness. But the night had never been her friend. There was stone under her feet and a lamp in her hand, and beyond the door lay the man she had betrayed.

She stepped through and set her lamp on a low table. Chawlin – or someone – had been busy in here too. The blood-soaked rugs and sheets were piled into a corner. The silks were pushed beneath the bed. The rope was gone. Ulfin lay with his head heavily wrapped so that only one eye was visible.

He was looking at her.

‘I'm here,’ she said.

‘What – happened?’ Speaking seemed to hurt him.

‘The castle is taken. Septimus is here. You are his prisoner.’

‘Why?’

‘Why did I …? Do you not know?’

‘No.’

His one eye was watching her. It did not look angry, or accusing, but bewildered. That was worse. For a moment she could not look at him. Don't kill him! She might as well have let his throat be cut then and there. For they must kill him. They could not allow him to live. Not after all he had done. In some market square, before a thousand people …

‘Why – why do I have to justify myself to you, Ulfin? You would have left me to die in the rocks. You—’

‘But you were not – danger.’ Still he was looking at her.

‘Was I not? Was I not? Do you misremember, now? Or are you hiding it even from yourself?’ She rose.

‘Phaedra!’

‘Do not be afraid. I am not leaving.’ She walked to the antechamber door. Chawlin looked up. No doubt he could hear every word.

‘Please pass the word for Brother Martin,’ she said. When he hesitated, she added: ‘He is the castle chaplain. You will find him in the chapel below, I think.’

She closed the door. Chawlin shouted down the corridor beyond.

‘Martin found me,’ she said. ‘You did not know that he had been in that place, did you? He will tell you how it was with me after you left. And then I think he should hear what you have to say’

‘You want a penitence? I do not. Not to a priest.’

‘To me, then.’

After a long moment he said, ‘If you like.’

The eye had turned to the ceiling. What she could see of his face was more relaxed now. Perhaps his pain was receding. Or perhaps – more probably – he was learning to bear it.

They waited.

After a while his head turned. ‘My men?’

She cleared her throat. ‘I know nine are dead. There may be more. Abernay was one of them. Caw and Hob are wounded. They are in the hospital with some others.
The rest are held.’ She left out the thought that some might be – probably still were – hiding from Aun's hunters in corners of the castle.

‘You tell Septimus – kill them.’

‘What?’

‘I wish them no ill. But if any live, they will hunt you. And Orcrim. You must catch him. And—’

‘I want no more bloodshed, Ulfin.’

He seemed to smile. After a little he said: ‘There will be. These men – follow Septimus. But they will fight. When I am finished, they will fight among themselves.’

So he knew there was no hope. Of course he did.

‘Septimus will hold them.’

‘Septimus will be fighting. Foremost. And Lackmere. Over you.’

No!

No. They would not. Enough was enough. When this was over …

Septimus had sought her hand. Would he not do so again? What would Aun do? And there was the March. Tarceny would be hers if Ulfin were gone. And the Trant manors. Tarceny and Trant: keys to the Kingdom. Someone would want to get them, through her. She saw the long, weary game opening up ahead of her. Something in her heart went cold.

‘I had thought to ask clemency for you,’ she said, and wondered why she had even bothered to hold out a hope he must know was useless.

‘They will not see me hanged.’

There was such a flat finality in his voice that for a moment she thought she had misheard.

‘I was King,’ he murmured. ‘And a fly in a web. Both at once. Now it is over. It is not Septimus—’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Does Ambrose still have the stones?’

Her fingers clenched around the pebble in her palm. She said: ‘Yes.’

‘I have doomed myself. But I am glad, Phaedra. It is better. And I may look my brothers with a straight eye when I see them.’

Another silence. Beyond the window the sudden swell of rain. It was deep dark out there now.

‘Calyn knew,’ he said. ‘We felled the stone together, but even then he saw further than I. He tried to warn me. And his last act was to send me the white stones that he had carved from the teeth of Capuu by the pool. Not even the love and the rage of the Mother of the World can pass them. Perhaps if Calyn had not … But I had already begun by then. We had spoken. I had been given the bowl. And I had seen you at the poolside. Yes, I had made my bargain.’

‘Bargain? What bargain?’

Behind her the door opened.

‘The chaplain, my lady’ said Chawlin.

Martin had changed into a dull robe, and wore his hood thrown forward about his face. He stepped up silently to settle beside Phaedra.

‘What bargain, Ulfin?’

He was looking up at the ceiling. ‘One I have failed to keep.’

‘And the terms?’

‘Go – with me.’ His mouth clamped shut.

‘Perhaps I can help you,’ she heard herself say, in a calm, dry voice that might almost have belonged to another.

‘You wanted power, of course. The Cup gave that to you – the power to see far off, to walk in dreams and to cross the world by moving in the dark places. Many tricks like that. I think you have written them in a book, which may not be far away. It gave you the power to love and be loved by one with whom you chose to drink from it. You bewitched me, Ulfin. Did you think I would never learn what you had stolen from me?’

Her voice was shaking. Ulfin lay, and Martin sat, like statues as she spoke. Neither made a sign. She drew breath. The price …

‘But first of all it was for the life of your father, to avenge the brother to whom you had bound yourself through the water.

‘Do you know that in two years in this house I never wondered how you had brought an end to your father? Yet it was there for me to see. Caw dealt quickly with the marks we found on the stair. So quickly I think – perhaps – that such things have been found in this house before. By the hearth in the hall where you broke the floor patterns with black marble, because you could not get the white.’

Still he did not answer; and the rain beat heavily at the night outside.

‘How else, you may say, could a friendless young man come at so armed and cruel a lord? Yet you went further. When Trant had fallen – by your under-craft, although you allowed the world and me to think it was my own
faithlessness – you sought the life of the King. And the King died—’

‘You lied!’

She looked at him.

‘You said – you had not spoken with him.’

‘If I have lied to you, Ulfin, I was not the first to deceive. And I did not lie. I did not speak to him. He spoke to me, by the pool, as he handed me the water that broke at last the bond that you had laid on me. That is the truth. And it is the sort of truth you have been telling me for two years. And what of me? Why did you enspell me – enspell us both – for all those years? Was it for Trant: your foothold in the heart of the Kingdom? Or was it because – because only through me could you pay your price?

‘How
could
you live with me, Ulfin? How could you have wed me, and looked me in the eye, knowing that the price you would pay would be
the life of our son?’

‘No!’

‘For a father, the life of a son
, he said.
For a king, the life of a king –
Ambrose Umbriel, the King who would be. That was what you would rather have left me to die than say. And that is why I have done what I have done!’

‘I – did not know him! Phaedra!’ He jerked up onto one elbow. His face writhed with pain. She saw the open neck of his shirt, and a little black key on a chain against his pale skin. She saw him gather himself.

‘What you say is true—’

‘True!’ She laughed shrilly. ‘I never thought to hear you say that. “Speak the truth to one another.” What a curse that was! “Keep your promises” – including the
promise you had made to him. What was the other? “Let your lives be a mirror to one another.” We have both led our fathers to their deaths. You made a bargain to be King, and offered your child. I made a bargain with the King, to save your child. And my price was you. Dear Angels!’

‘Phaedra – think what you will. But do not think that I gave a child I knew for power, or wed you for any other cause than yourself. When I first made my bargain – I did not know what the price would be. He only said he would tell me when the time was right. I was young, grieving, hating everything. I would have given anything I had or thought I ever would have to be avenged on my father. After that – I used – what he had given me. There was never a word of price. If I thought at all it was only to assume he was showing me favour as the last of his own father's line. And he showed me you, by the poolside. Do you remember? You were close to willing yourself to death when I spoke with you.

‘Yet had I known then what the price would be I would never have asked to wed you. Believe this. It was only when I spoke with him after the taking of Trant that I understood what he intended. And by then I was committed to war with the King – a war I could not win without his help.

‘So I returned, when I could, to you. I was going to take Ambrose then. Yet when I saw him – when I heard the name you gave him – when I knew how I loved you – I could not give him up …’

It was Orcrim and Caw who had forestalled him, pointing to an imaginary likeness with the brother whom
he had loved. They had guessed, these men he would now have her kill. They had saved her son while she was blind to the danger. She drew breath to speak. But it was pointless now.

‘So I refused the Prince Under the Sky. I gave Ambrose the stones I had kept for my own protection. I surrounded myself with armed men – he and his can take hurt from iron, Phaedra. I would not use the power he offered, although my men paid dearly for it. And I went into the mountains, where you found me, to tell him he could not have what he wanted, and to make another bargain.’

‘You found you needed him more than he did you.’

‘If I was to prevent – this – yes.’

‘You trusted a maid and a wet nurse with secrets you would not trust to me.’

‘They understood what you would not.’

‘You mean they did not ask the questions I would have done! And you left us there. You went to use the power you knew could only be paid for in one way. You had him free you from the love you had cast on both of us, so that you could bring yourself to pay it. This was Ambrose's
life
!’

‘There is another interpretation.’

She stopped. He had crowned himself on his return from the mountains. Why then? For a king, the life of a king. He had made himself a king indeed, whereas Ambrose …