The Fatal Child (31 page)

So it could be worse, thought Padry, dragging the last corners of his mind out of sleep. It was not plague sweeping in from mysterious Outland. It was just politics – deadly, but familiar. Politics could be dealt with. Action was already in hand. (Although even if things went well from here there would be consequences for the King’s authority, and his own as chancellor, to be considered. The only winner would be …)

A scream burst from nearby. The voice was unrecognizable, distorted. It might even have been an animal, except that at the end it trailed away into the sound of a woman sobbing,
‘No, no no!
’ Padry thought a servant must be having a fit. Then he realized that there was only one person who could make a noise like that in the King’s corridor.

It was Atti.

‘This is the end,’ groaned Ambrose.

The end? thought Padry.

‘Did you hear her,’ said Ambrose, ‘when she came to me on the knoll? What she asked for?’

‘Why – to be Queen,’ said Padry, writhing inwardly at the memory and at all the other memories it brought.

‘That’s what I heard her say. I should have listened better. She asked for justice against Gueronius …’

The screams rose to a pitch that sounded like a beast being tortured. Then they collapsed again into weeping.

‘Gueronius did it, you see,’ said Ambrose softly. ‘It was Gueronius who destroyed her house in Velis. And it was his uncle Septimus who destroyed her father’s house in Tarceny when she was an infant…’

‘My lord – it was not Gueronius she was fleeing when she came to you!’

‘No. It was you. But behind you stood Gueronius. He stands behind anyone with power in her life. You, my mother, me … I brought her here and made her my Queen. I made her submit to me. I tried to heal her by taking power over her. And so he stands behind
me, too. He
is
me, beyond the curtain in her dream. She’s been fighting that. With her waking mind she’s been fighting, telling herself it’s a dream, telling herself she loves me. But she’s been losing. Ever since we came here she’s been losing. And now I’ve let him … Aun was right – I should have had him murdered!’

‘For pity’s sake!’
shrieked the Queen from beyond two oak doors.
‘Where is the locksmith?

‘I’ve got us into such a mess,’ Ambrose groaned.

‘Your Majesty sent him a fair offer,’ said Padry. ‘All the Kingdom will know how he received it.’

‘I didn’t mean that. I meant coming here in the first place. Trying to do things my way when they can’t be done like that. Aun says I’ve been weak.’

‘It is not always weakness to offer peace—’

‘Hi-hi-hiiieh!
’ broke the sounds from next door.

And another woman cried, ‘
You there! Spice-water for Her Majesty! Now, you useless slut!
’

Ambrose started up as if stung. Then he flopped back again. His eyes were screwed up in pain, squeezing little bright tears down his cheeks.

‘I love her, Padry,’ he whispered. ‘I can’t help it. I don’t want to help it! But I can’t help her, either. Whatever I do seems to make it worse!’

‘I am sure she recognizes your devotion, Your Majesty,’ said Padry.

‘Oh come, my Lord Chancellor! Don’t tell me you’ve not wondered about those ladies-in-waiting?’

‘Er … not to any great extent, Your Majesty.’

‘You must be the only man in Tuscolo who hasn’t! Everyone looks at them. They’re pretty. Not much use
though …’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Spice-water! What good’s
that
going to do? No, she likes pretty things – except when they come from me! But there’s one of them who isn’t. The Lady Caterine. She’s fat and heavy, and not very clever either, the poor girl. Why did Atti choose her? I’ve heard men ask each other that. They also ask why the Queen’s not pregnant yet.
I
know why. The Lady Caterine knows why, too. Because it’s
her job
to sleep against the door between the Queen’s bedroom and mine, in case I have it in mind to join my wife during the night. She is Atti’s doorstop!’

(More shrieks, and more twittering of anxious female voices around the Queen.)

‘It’ll take more than a pair of fat buttocks to keep out Gueronius’s knights,’ said Ambrose with a sickly grin. ‘She knows that much.’

‘Your Majesty! At this moment Gueronius is a pauper and a fugitive. He can hardly—’

‘Can’t he?’ said Ambrose. His face was flushed, his eyes drunken, yet his glare made Padry think again. Gueronius …

Gueronius was a war leader, hard, cunning and dangerous. He was the head of a faction whose members had lost power and favour under Ambrose. What would he do now?

If Lackmere’s riders could catch him in the open, well and good. But there was more than one strong place in his former estates that might open the gate for him. If he shut himself in one of those, Lackmere would not be able to touch him – not with the sort of
force that he could throw together in half a night. So that would mean a siege. Gueronius would call for aid. The Tuscolo faction … What would Seguin do? Wouldn’t he jump at the chance to make trouble? There were others, too. Where was Joyce at this moment?

The devil of it was that the King’s best support was in the far south, in Develin and Lackmere – much further from Tuscolo than Gueronius and his possible allies. The sands had shifted fast enough in Ambrose’s favour eighteen months ago. Why should they not shift as quickly back again? If Ambrose were forced to retreat from the capital …

An image rose in Padry’s mind of the palace corridors – these very corridors – filled with men and women on their knees, pleading one after another that they had been forced to act against their will, that they had been secretly loyal to Gueronius all along. He saw them. He saw the faces of the armed men at their backs, and the drawn swords. He could almost smell the blood and the fear.

He sucked in his cheeks. It was ugly. It could get very ugly indeed.

‘I think … it would be advisable to raise a loan,’ he said. ‘A large one, since we may need to muster a force. I will approach the best sources in Tuscolo in the morning. If I can do that before the situation becomes widely known, we may save ourselves a few pennies in interest…’

‘No, no! Don’t let him in!
’ screamed Atti’s voice from another room.

‘I can’t stand this,’ muttered Ambrose. He pulled himself from his seat and crouched before the fire.

‘Also I will send to money-houses in Pemini, Watermane and Velis—’

‘Wait,’ said Ambrose. He was staring into the embers. ‘We need to remove Gueronius, don’t we?’ he said.

‘My former pupil,’ sighed Padry, ‘could oblige us greatly at this moment by breaking his neck in a fall, yes. Failing that, however—’

‘There’s a way of doing it.’

The King bent down in the hearth and, putting his face painfully close to the embers, blew them into a soft rush of flame.

‘Your Majesty?’

‘I don’t mean breaking his neck. But capturing him. The princes could do it. They could come on him anywhere – inside his keep, among his men … There’s six of them now. Hergest and Galen came out of the pool this winter – did you know that? It should be enough.’ With his bare hands he was taking logs from the hearth, beginning to build the fire again. ‘It’s the sort of thing they’ve done before,’ he said.

Padry stared at him.

The princes. It was the sort of thing they had done before.

Slowly thought returned to his brain. But now it followed a different path. Not politics, but something deeper: the things he should never, ever forget, and too often did. Beyond the Abyss was the Lantern. Beyond the Lantern, Madness. Beyond Madness, Penitence. And then …

‘Your Majesty,’ he said carefully. ‘The Demon is a lure for the rising soul. It is the power that turns things upside down.’

Ambrose barked a laugh. ‘I might have known you would say that. Croscan and his Path again! Padry I don’t know whether my soul is rising or sinking. But I want to keep the peace and keep Atti safe. This way I can do that
and
win.’ He stood, and brushed ash off his doublet with his hands.

‘Your Majesty! What use is it to win if by winning you lose the only thing worth having?’

‘Lose what?
She’s
the only thing worth having! If she’s got to be the price then it’s too damned high! And if I must fall, then I will fall in my own way – or jump first.’

‘But your followers …’

‘Would prefer a bloody victory won with iron and gold? I wonder! It’s surprising what people will shut their eyes to, so long as the reward is success. My father took Tuscolo by witchcraft, seized the crown by witchcraft, and failed not because of what people thought of his witchcraft but because my mother betrayed him to his enemies. All right, Thomas’ – he took a sip of wine from his goblet and held it before him, turning the dark liquid around and around in the bowl – ‘all right. You don’t have to stay. Just see that I’m not disturbed.’

Padry stared at him, shaken at the change in his King, and shaken all the more because the King had for the first time called him
Thomas
. Thomas, as if he were a brother, a friend, a fellow traveller; as if this
decision had been made together, as if this corruption were a thing they shared. And as he watched his King pacing and chanting and sipping at the goblet in his hand, Padry knew they shared it indeed.

I must stay, he thought, even as he backed towards the door. He must not be left alone to do this. He must be stopped if at all possible.

But – but if he
couldn’t
be stopped …

Of course the corridor would have to be watched …

New flames were leaping in the hearth. Ambrose took another sip of wine and looked into his cup again.

‘Come, Talifer,’ he said.

‘Come, Talifer, come, Rolfe, come, Lomba, come, Marc. Come, Hergest and Galen, if you can hear and understand. Come to me in Tuscolo.’

He paused. There was no sound but the soft roar of the fire.

‘This may take a while,’ he said.

Firelight danced on the walls and glittered on the polished metal of candlestick and cup. The air seemed darker and thicker. Padry looked at the chairs and chests. He could almost see them forming themselves into brown rocks lying in an endless, weary brown land. A faint throbbing, so low that he could barely hear it, was growing in his mind. The smell of dank water came faintly to him. He remembered it at once.

‘Sire, this is insane!’ he pleaded desperately. ‘You will destroy yourself!’

‘Shut up or get out!’ snarled Ambrose. ‘Or shall I
have the guards come and drag you out by the heels?’

‘Your Majesty, I
beg you
—’

‘You want to talk about demons again?’ cried the King. The fire was in his eyes and drink was in his blood. ‘Gold is a demon, Thomas! Iron is a demon! Go you to your demons and
leave me with mine
!’ And, turning away, he continued, ‘Come, Talifer, come, Rolfe, come, Lomba. Come, Marc, come, Hergest, come, Galen. I have need. Come to me in Tuscolo …’

Padry fled from the chamber.

Even as he closed the thick oak door behind him he felt that the room had changed – that if he opened it again he would see not the hearth and the tapestries and the throne but a barren, rocky landscape under a dull sky. And somewhere far across it something had begun to move.

veryone was busy these days, thought Melissa. They were all busy and snappish, and tired with broken nights. It was hard for a poor honest maid to get everything done the way they thought they had told her they wanted it. And if she did it wrong she would have to do it again, either right then or later, during those bits and scraps of time when she was not doing anything and not waiting to be called either. And that made it even harder to have any time for herself, to slip away and see someone she wanted to see. Especially if that other person had a dayful of stuff that he also had to be doing.

She still called him ‘Puck’, from the greeting
Puka halalah
that he used to give her in the hills. She could not pronounce his real name, which was full of impossible hill sounds. (She had wondered whether the hill people were born with their tongues a different shape, but he had showed her his, and no, it seemed the same.) Puck had lessons to attend morning and afternoon, and there were also times when he was
supposed to be in the library and times when he went to help in the stables. And even though his day seemed far less full than hers – as she kept telling him – he often seemed to be busy when she could get away.

But there was always the Grand Audience, held twice a week when the King was in Tuscolo, and the Queen would be dressed up and go down with her ladies to the great hall and sit on her throne beside the King, and together they would listen to person after person coming before them on important matters, and the King would tell his herald what he had decided about them, and the herald would bellow it down the hall and everyone would say how good it was. Grand Audience never took less than two hours, and in those two hours it was possible for a maid who had done everything right so far that day to slip off and find her way to the upper stables. And shortly before noon, there he would be, too.