The Rose of the World (73 page)

The lad shrugged. ‘In this?’ he waved his hand in a gesture which took in the whole castle and all the chaos it contained. ‘She could be anywhere. But you might try the kitchens, sir. That’s where she works . . .’

Aran was not familiar with the layout of castles; but he followed his nose. The kitchens were deserted, which was not entirely surprising, but in the pantry beyond he heard voices. Half a dozen women were in there, all unveiled. One of them was a big woman with short red hair, bright blue eyes and freckled arms: no Istrian, she. ‘Are you Brina, Egg Forstson’s wife?’ he hazarded in Eyran, and watched the woman’s jaw drop.

‘Egg? Did you say Egg . . . Forstson?’

Aran nodded.

She gaped. Then, ‘Who are you? Are you with King Ravn?’

Aran grinned. It seemed there were still miracles in the world. He answered all her questions, including the one which made her hands fly to her mouth and tears of joy prick her eyes; then he asked: ‘Have you seen a woman called Bera Rolfsen? A beautiful woman, about forty years of age, with a proud face and long auburn hair, very fine skin, small hands, a fierce temper?’ He realised by her gentle expression he was letting his tongue run away with him and reined himself in. ‘She was taken recently, only a few months ago, from the island of Rockfall. Or Katla Aransen, a girl with flame-red hair?’

Slowly, Brina shook her head.

‘Did you say Katla Aran-sen?’ This other voice was foreign, her Old Tongue sharply accented. Aran craned his neck to see beyond Brina a young woman with sallow skin and long dark hair coiled in braids around her ears. ‘I have met a Katla. In Forent, it was, at the seraglio there.’

Aran felt his heart thump.

‘And her mother, too,’ the woman went on, a crease appearing between her brows. ‘But she was not called Aransen, I think.’

‘In my country, we are named for our fathers,’ Aran said quickly. ‘Tell me, were they used as whores?’

The woman regarded him oddly. ‘Not houris, no: Katla she fight like a cat and the lord there like his women softer.’

‘And Bera? Where are they now?’

The woman spread her hands apologetically. ‘I do not know, I am sorry.’

As abruptly as it had shone, hope died again. He bade Brina wait where she was, to bolt the door and open it only to him or Egg. It had been a long while since Ravn’s army had been near women.

On a hill to the south of Cera, the Lord of Cantara cast off his sabatka. ‘May the Goddess forgive me for impersonating a woman,’ he muttered. ‘It was for the best cause.’

The Rosa Eldi inclined her head. ‘I forgive you,’ she said tonelessly.

He gave her an odd look. Then he glared at Virelai. ‘Well now, can you prove yourself truly useful and magic us up some horses?’

Virelai looked panicked. ‘No, my lord.’

‘Well, you can leave us, then, if this is the extent of your abilities.’

‘I think not.’ The Rose of the World placed a restraining hand on Virelai’s arm. ‘He will stay with me.’

‘I do not want him here.’

‘Now that I have found my son, I will go nowhere without him.’

Virelai felt a warm glow suffuse him. He did not know what it meant, only that he felt happier than he could ever remember feeling, other than those times in the back of Alisha Skylark’s wagon.

Alisha: the deathstone
. Panic reared up again, displacing the momentary sense of wellbeing. He must somehow tell the Goddess about her stone, about Saro Vingo and his quest to find it and save the world . . . But how could he do so in the presence of the very man he was most terrified of?

The Lord of Cantara was stomping about now, his face thunderous. ‘I have saved you from the barbarians,’ he stormed. ‘And for what? To play nursemaid to your whelp? I want my own son out of you; not one from whatever bizarre union spawned
him
.’

‘He is my brother’s son,’ she said softly. ‘My most beloved brother–husband.’ It was all coming back to her now, her memory. Over the past few days it had come flowing like a river in spate: it filled her head till she thought she would burst with sorrow.

Tycho Issian screwed his face up in disgust. ‘Your brother? What revolting perversion is this?’ He stared from one to the other.‘No wonder he emerged as this pale streak of life. He looks more like a fish than a man. Where I come from, they would have put such a freak of nature out on the hills and let the wolves take him.’

The Rosa Eldi raised an eyebrow. ‘Ah, yes,’ she said softly. ‘You have been incarnated this time as a hillman. How interesting. You have hidden your origins well from the people around you, but you cannot hide your essence from me. I know one of my own, though it pains me to lay claim to you.’

What had he said? Why had he told her something that might get him burned under the very laws he had himself instigated and enforced? And what did she mean by ‘this time’ and ‘one of her own’? The woman was mad, her wits turned by her experiences amongst the barbarians: that would explain it all. But mad or no, he wanted her so badly that it hurt. The touch of her on the castle stairs inflamed him still.

‘Claim me as your own, then,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Take me here, and now.’ He began to untie his breeches.

She turned her sea-green gaze upon him and his hand froze in its frenzied unbuttoning. ‘Falla’s Rock,’ she said. ‘I shall claim you on Falla’s Rock.’

He regarded her in horror. ‘We are nowhere near the Moonfell Plain.’

‘It is my sacred place.’

That stopped him. It was
a
sacred place, certainly, but women were forbidden it: only the Goddess might set foot on such a holy site. It was the law, the law of sacrilege. However, he considered, laws were made by men; men could revise them, particularly in such a special case. Perhaps her wits were not entirely fled if she wished to unburden herself of her sins by seeking absolution. As the current head of the Istrian state he could repeal the law, if he wished to; issue an exception for the Rosa Eldi alone. Besides, it would surely bless their union, wipe away all trace of taint from her congress with the northern king. He gritted his teeth. Could he wait that long? A sea passage was the fastest way to the Moonfell Plain from here: but the coast was held by Eyran raiders. By horse, then. Across the Skarn Mountains? He shivered.

‘We could, I am sure, find a temple near Ixta; and most villages keep their own shrine to the Lady,’ he offered hopefully.

‘Falla’s Rock,’ she repeated obstinately. She had her own reasons.

He bowed his head. ‘How we will get there, I do not know; but if we make it to Falla’s Rock you promise you will take me there and then?’

She smiled. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I swear on all that is holy that I shall take you then.’

Terror spread through Cera quicker than plague. With the lord holding a celebratory feast, the last thing anyone had expected was this sudden, violent incursion. Those who weren’t too drunk to pick up their weapons in the first place took one look at the rampaging northerners and surrendered. The city fell to the Eyrans with barely a fight.

Once it became clear that the Rosa Eldi, the Lord of Cantara and the sorcerer Virelai had somehow escaped, Ravn Asharson’s temper was terrible to behold. Even the tender sight of Egg Forstson being reunited with the wife he had never thought to see again did nothing to mollify him: if anything, it enraged him further. He stormed around the corridors like a tornado – an arbitrary force of nature which might pass you by with barely a ruffling of the hair on your head, or strike out your life if you got in its way. Even his own men avoided him, crowding in behind him at a distance, scattering if he turned, running like rabbits to his every shouted command.

Aran Aranson took himself off quietly in the opposite direction, left the castle and went out into the surrounding streets. No invaded town tended to offer pleasant sights, and Cera was no exception. For many, this was their first taste of war: it went to their heads faster than stallion’s blood. Everywhere he looked, there was misrule: looting, rapine, fear. He dragged a pair of Fair Islanders off a girl barely old enough to have her courses and berated them soundly: they sloped off like beaten dogs, but he knew they would wait until he was gone and find another woman to hound. Around every corner, another atrocity, another crying child, another pleading man or woman. By the time he came to the streets near the market, he was sick of war, of being Eyran, and a man.

Here, the shutters were up and the place was deserted. But he could feel eyes upon him as he walked across the very square where less than a year before Tycho Issian had stood beside the pale man and his harnessed cat and whipped the crowd to a ferment and cries of holy war. It was a dangerous thing to do: in any town less cowed than this one, he might well feel the sudden impact of an arrow in his back. He walked with his hand on the hilt of his sword and his gaze darting everywhere at once, but no one showed themselves. He was about to turn back and retrace his steps to the castle when he heard someone call his name.

His head shot up to meet the sound. The hairs rose down his spine.

It was a woman’s voice, and for a second his heart rose into his mouth, thinking it might by some miracle be Bera or Katla, but when he turned to find the window whence it had issued, the face he glimpsed was at that moment unrecognisable to him. Without conscious thought, he found himself running, till the face resolved itself into one he knew well.

It was Kitten Soronsen.

The last time Aran had seen her, she had been parading about in the hall at Rockfall in a pair of exquisitely expensive but ridiculously impractical beaded slippers bought for her by some infatuated young man, her skirts held immodestly high and her laughter ringing off the rafters. She had been then a very pretty girl – Aran was not blind to her attractions, even if he thought her a silly, attention-seeking little minx, with her sharp tongue and her flirtatious glances – but the world had changed shape since then. Her opulent golden hair was lank and stringy, and her face was peaky, her chiselled features made bony by privation and suffering.

‘Kitten!’

The warmth in his voice undid her. Tears sprang immediately from those red-rimmed eyes. When she came stumbling out of the door of the rude hovel she had been hiding in, the effects of her captivity became even more evident. She wore a robe of filthy homespun gone to rags at the hem, beneath which her feet were bare and callused. Arms like sticks clutched a swollen belly, and when she saw him looking at this new attribute in silent amazement, she wept even harder.

Then he was across the ground between them in three short strides and holding her close, the bones of her shoulderblades as spiky as chicken wings beneath his soothing hands.

‘Oh, Kitten, what has happened to you?’ Even as he asked this, he felt dread squeeze his ribs. If Kitten Soronsen, most beautiful of all Rockfall’s girls, had been so ill-used, what chance was there for his older wife, or his feisty, intransigent daughter?

The tale she told him between her sobs was a strange one indeed, and though it was a somewhat different version to the story he might have heard from others’ lips, still it was most painful and disturbing. Stolen by raiders and brought to the castle at Forent, where the lord was known to have an eye for the exotic, Kitten had for a brief while enjoyed special treatment at the hands of her new master on account of her beauty and spirit. But then he had gone away, and the rest of the stolen Eyran women had been taken out of the castle. She did not know what had become of Bera or Katla, except that they had been sent to the slave-market. She had been kept on in the Forent seraglio but the women there had been spiteful, jealous of her looks and the privileges that Rui Finco had conferred upon her. In addition, they had become uppity of late, and had started to question whether the Lord of Forent had a right to keep them locked away to use for his pleasure or that of his guests; for such was not the way with other women in the world. They had taken to removing their veils in private, and some bolder ones had even refused to wear the traditional sabatka at all, claiming the lovely silk robes were all of men’s design, another way to imprison them and keep them in their bondage. Eventually, it seemed, there had been some kind of rebellion in the women’s quarters at Forent, and one day they had simply walked out; for security had been lax since the lord had sailed away to war.

Kitten had stayed, not knowing where else to go or what else she might do other than please the noblemen she had been accustomed to serve. Except that they had all sailed away too, and the only men left in the castle had been the castle staff, all of whom were too shocked by the disappearance of the women and consumed by fear for what their lord might do on his return to care about the fate of one enemy captive, no matter how pretty or well versed in the arts of love.

For days she had sat in the women’s quarters and waited for food and wine to be brought to her at the usual times, but of course, no one had come, and eventually she had been forced to venture out to seek whatever sustenance she could find. She had not made it far. The local militia had taken over the castle and were making the most of its cellars while its lord was absent. Drunken, rowdy soldiers were everywhere. When they had accosted her, she had been haughty with them: and that had not sat well with their captain, who had been intensely irked to discover the famed seraglio missing. She would not tell Aran the details of that day, or the long night which had followed.

The next morning, bruised and light-headed with forced wine and sweetsmoke, she had run away, and passed out in the arms of a baker on his way to the market. She had woken in a filthy room, and there the baker’s sons had all had their way with her. The baker had kept her tied to the bed for three days: on the fourth, his wife broke the door down, carried Kitten out to the yard and put her on a nag.

And now . . .

And now, Kitten wept ever more plaintively and could not go on.

‘We will get you home safely to Rockfall,’ Aran promised her kindly.‘No one there will judge you for your condition.’ He did not add ‘for there is no one there left to judge you’ but the words hung on the air between them even so, and Kitten just sobbed the louder.