The Fatal Child (17 page)

He had missed the trail more than once. He had lost count of the days. The Angels might know what
the King was doing but Padry did not care. He could guess at the words Lex and Lady Develin were using about him, and what they would say to him when they saw him again. But he did not care about that either. He thought that perhaps he would never go back. At nights he dreamed of Atti and held her hand. By day he rehearsed the talk he would have with her: what he would say and what she would, how he might persuade her, how he might make her see.

Indeed they were beautiful, these mountains. He had never been among such peaks in his life before. They rose, sharp-edged, clear against the hard blue of the sky. Their lower slopes were coated with brush, their heads and shoulders were yellow and grey rock. Carrion birds drifted in lazy circles above the hillsides. Insects buzzed thickly among the thorns. As the day drew on, clouds grew above the peaks and settled on their shoulders in long, foaming masses that poured silently down the slopes at evening. He would sit and watch them, with his legs weak, and hungry and aching from the day. Above him the ridges would darken, going purple against the sky, and then fading into night. One by one the stars would come out.

They were beautiful but they were deadly. From the tops of the ridges, when he climbed them, he could see far away the higher peaks where the snow would never melt. And as the year wore on those snows would come down, falling in blankets over all this country and stifling it of life. Already the air seemed to be cooler in the evenings. Winter was coming. And then where would Atti be?

Come back, Atti. Come back to life. Come back to me.

Or shall we both die in the mountains?

He was following a path; a narrow, winding track no wider than rabbits make. To his right the hillside climbed steeply to a high crest. To his left it fell a giddy depth to the valley floor. A stream ran there, narrow and muddy brown. The path sloped upwards. It might take the rest of the day to reach the ridge top. His limbs were weak. His muscles strained with the slope. He was panting. His ears were full with his own breath.

He stopped and listened.

For a moment – he could have been imagining it, but it had seemed very real – for a moment he had heard footsteps that had not been his. Yet there was no one on the path with him. There was nothing but the great, empty hillsides, sweeping barrenly up to his right and down to his left.

He shook his head. His ears were not ringing. They seemed to be hearing perfectly clearly.

After a moment he walked on, listening intently. He could hear nothing but the gasp of his breath and the rattle of the stones under his thinning soles. He was leaning heavily on his staff with his head bowed as he went. He was nearly exhausted. Very nearly. At the ridgeline he might rest. Or perhaps before that. But he would keep going a little further. Just a little.

Then—

‘Who’s there?’ he gasped.

‘I am,’ said a voice behind him. A woman’s voice.

He levered himself round to face her.

She was alone, standing on the hillside where a moment before there had been no one but him. She was just as he had seen her at the table in Aclete: dark-haired, slim and too young for her age. She wore the same dull robe that hung all the way to her feet. She was looking at him solemnly. He looked back into the face of Tarceny.

‘You were following me,’ he said. His voice sounded like a croak in his ears.

‘Not long, and not so that you would see me. But yes, I have been watching you.’

He leaned on his staff, and looked at her. ‘By witchcraft, I suppose?’ he said.

‘You may call it that. I have to tell you that you are near the end of your journey. But you will not get what you want by it.’

There was nothing harsh or forbidding about her tone. She sounded a little sorry for him.

‘Is she close?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Guarded?’

‘Yes.’

He pulled himself upright and gripped his staff.

‘By many?’ he insisted.

‘She is guarded by Lomba, brother to the princes Talifer and Rolfe. Lomba has only recently come out from the pit, although we spent a year calling him. He is much more a monster than either of his brothers, with a monster’s pitilessness and strength. You would not prevail against him.’

‘That has yet to be tested,’ Padry said.

She took a step closer. Her eyes looked up into his. ‘What poison is it, sir, that drives the brain to madness? This pretty thing with her delusions of a throne! Would you of all people risk a bloody death for her?’

‘Poison! She is not poison to me!’

‘No, my Lord Chancellor? How is it then that you stand here? She had barely set foot in my house before she had warned me that you might follow. And you have.’

Angrily he struck his staff on the stones of the mountain. ‘May I not simply care for her? How is it
poison
to want to save a child from the wilderness?’

‘If you wish, I will show you.’

In her hands there was a large stone cup, with a stem like a goblet. The stone was roughly carved, and winding around its rim was the vague form of something like a snake, or a long-bodied dragon. The bowl was half full of dark water. Where had it come from? She could not have been carrying it beneath her cloak like that, water and all, surely?

But undeniably it was there.

‘Look,’ she said.

He looked at the water and … Well, it was water, with the sky reflected at one level and the brown, pitted bowl showing through at another. He glanced up at her, perplexed, and down at the water once more.

‘I don’t—’ he began.

‘Look,’ she said again.

There was something in the water – floating? A
scrap of waste or cloth? Or was it another reflection? All these thoughts chased through his mind in a moment. Then the thing wavered and turned, and it was a ship.

It was a ship: a big, two-masted cog such as the merchants of Velis used. The image of it floated there on the surface of the water, seeming to grow as he looked. It was moving gently out of a bay. Its sails were set, curving to catch the light and the wind. There were banners flying from the masts, long, floating banners, and even at this distance he could guess at the device, the great sun of Tuscolo.

Gueronius.

‘He has gone, you see,’ she murmured. ‘Without you, they could not hold him. He has left his throne and judgement hall empty. And where now is all the work you have done, since the day that Develin fell?

‘The mind deceives itself, Padry. Even as it blunders into darkness, gratifying its desires, it will tell itself that it is on the true Path. Yes, you did a good thing when you saved her from the sack. Perhaps it was wise, too, to have placed her under the convent mothers, so that should you be tempted you could at least not act on your temptation. Still she was there, under your window every day, for your eyes and thoughts to dwell upon. Why did you remain in Tuscolo when Gueronius returned to Velis? What good-seeming reasons did you find, to mask the one in your heart? You hid it well – well enough at least that you never needed to admit it to yourself.

‘But your eyes betrayed you. When you let them rest
on her, that beautiful little thing, she guessed. She knew your heart better than you did. You never saw how she shuddered. And then you spoke to her, and said that you might take her from the convent and into your care. You have thought that saving her might be the one good thing you had done in your life. If she has done one good thing in hers, Padry, it may be that she saved you by fleeing from you. But she could not save your duty. And many people will pay the price.’

Padry’s eyes were fixed on the ship. He could see it so clearly that he felt he could almost call to it. But no, even if he had stood on the shores of the bay itself, surely it would have been too far. He watched it heel as the wind took it, drawing it gently beyond all reach, out into the ocean. As it began to diminish, he looked up.

‘He will – he will have made provision for the Kingdom,’ he said. ‘There will be regents. When I return to Tuscolo, I can—’ He stopped.

‘Will you return?’

‘I … Of course.’ He gripped his staff. ‘But I must see Atti.’

‘You cannot take her with you.’

‘I will take her if she will come.’

‘She will not. Understand me. It is you that has driven her here. She will not go with you. And if you would save yourself you will make her dead to you in your thoughts, return to Tuscolo, and see what can be remade from what has been broken.’

Padry looked at his hand, at the uneven colours of
his ageing skin. He seemed to see it very clearly, as her words sank slowly into his heart. Anger, a horrible weak anger, rose in him. It was unfair! Lies! It was a trick to keep him from her.
It should not be like this!

And wrapped in his anger was the fear that it might be true.

Atti, looking away from him. Atti, not seeing him, determinedly. Each time he had stood there on the hilltop she had not seen him. Even in the convent garden, even when he had taken her hand and stroked it soothingly, her face would have been turned away, looking among the bell towers or the shadowed cloisters. Only the curve of her cheek, like the crescent of the new moon. Atti …

He almost stamped in his frustration. Day after day on the roads, and his duty in ruins – for nothing? ‘I must see her! I can’t help it – I must
see
her!’

‘Very well,’ said the woman at last. ‘Follow the path to the ridge. You will find a house. She is there. You may speak to her if she will listen. Do not attempt to touch her, even if she seems to be alone.’

She turned, still holding the cup, and seemed to walk into the hillside. In an instant she had vanished. Padry was by himself, high in the mountain valley.

He reached the ridge at sunset, when the valleys were lakes of deep shadow and the ridges, yellow in the last light, were like islands in a rising sea. Before him, across a great gulf of air, was a high, snow-covered peak, wreathed in cloud. The air was chilly. He shivered.

At his feet the path ran on, downhill now, along the very crest of the ridge. There at the end of it, where the ground fell steeply on three sides, was the house. It was a strange sight to see here in the mountains, with a little squat-towered gatehouse, roofs and terraces clustered on the sharp spine of the rock. It was not big, and yet he had seen nothing more than the mean, circular huts of the hill folk since passing the ruined keep at Hayley. On that huge arm of rock the scale of it seemed all wrong.

Voices came distantly to his ears – the voices of girls from within those solemn walls. He heard one of them laugh. There was something chilling about that laughter – about the thought that a girl could be happy without him, not even knowing that he was close. With a growing feeling of dread in his heart he limped down the path to the gate.

The doors were ajar. The gate-tunnel was deep in shadow. He did not call. He did not dare risk raising his voice. He slipped through the open leaf of the door and crept inwards.

On the far side was a small courtyard, bounded on three sides by buildings and on the fourth, to his left, by a low wall that looked out over the valley. There was no one there. The voices came from beyond an archway opposite. He recognized Atti’s, speaking in a low, serious tone.

He stole across the open space and stood in the shadow of the second arch.

He was looking through a colonnade, like the cloisters of a convent, or— No, it was more like
the columns around the garden at Velis where he had first set eyes on her in the middle of the smoke and battle. There were no plants or pots or pathways here – just a simple paved space – but there in the middle of it was the bowl of a fountain, exactly like the one he remembered. Beyond it was something like a throne on a raised platform. Between the fountain and the throne stood the two girls.

They were playing a game. One of them was the gawky peasant girl he had seen on the hilltop at Aclete. She had a cup and ball in her hand. She was trying to catch the ball in the cup. She was not very good at it. Atti, standing with her, was saying, ‘You must keep your eye on it. No, not like that. Let me …’ and she took it, and showed the other girl how to catch it one-two-three, with easy flicks of her wrist that saw the ball landing neatly in the cup again and again. She gave it back to the other girl and watched while her companion tried and tried and failed. The peasant girl laughed again. Atti did not laugh. She never did.

Padry stood in the shadows and watched. It was so long since he had seen her! He wanted to rush forward, to have her eyes on him, to see her smile in joy as he would smile in joy. And yet…

And yet he did not want to move. He did not dare to break the moment that he saw, two girls together. He was afraid of what would follow if he did. He was trying to imagine Atti smiling at him, and could not. He could not remember ever having seen her smile. Even now, as the other girl giggled at her own
clumsiness, her face (as much as he could see of it) was solemn, watching. She was calm, but…

Why could he not see more of her face?

Atti, dear Atti – turn and look at me! Do not make me come bumbling out of the shadow to you. Turn and show me that – that at least you are pleased that I am here?

She did not turn. But as he watched he saw the other girl’s eyes fall on him and the laughter drop from her lips. She said something in a low tone to Atti. Atti answered. Two words – he did not catch them, but they might have been
I know
.

She did not look round.

She knew he was there. She would not look at him. She stood just as she had stood in the garden at Velis, looking away, very, very still – still as a statue, while he pleaded to her back. Oh, Atti!

There was no gate, no bars here. He could step into the courtyard. He could walk across and take her by the arm, look her in the eyes:
Atti, do you see how you wrong me?

But the shadows were deep in the colonnades. The girls seemed to be alone, yet in the darkness close by something was watching him.

It was forbidden. And now even his own soul forbade it.