The Wizard King (38 page)

Tonia and Gilda bustled out to greet them, while a handful of others—wizards too unseasoned to have joined the main force a week ago—squinted curiously from the compound’s windows and doorways. “Thank God you’re both safe,” Tonia said, embracing Jaren snugly. She drew back and wrinkled her nose in distaste; Jaren and Durek were wrapped in ragged peasant cloaks, the lingering smell of hay and dung only slightly obscured by that of sodden wool. “Lord, you’re a sight. Fragrant, too.”

“We couldn’t very well slip inconspicuously through the countryside dressed for court,” Jaren said as he sloughed off the cloak and tossed it over a fallen log.

Satisfied that they were safe and well, Tonia’s troubled gaze wordlessly asked the fate of those left behind.

“We don’t know where Athaya is,” Jaren told her, sagging down onto the log. “No one’s seen her since the night of the attack. For what his word is worth, the Sage told us he didn’t plan to harm her. He must be keeping her captive until he’s got a solid hold on Caithe. Athaya is the only legitimate danger to him now, and he knows it.”

“He never even bothered to send anyone out after us,” Durek said, relieved yet oddly affronted. “Nobody we saw, that is. Jaren kept us—warded, is it?—most of the time, but I suspect the Sage’s men know we’d have little choice but to come here. He probably figures he can come after us whenever he gets around to it.” Durek peeled off his boots and propped his stockinged feet near the fire to dry. “Has there been any news from the others? The wizards you sent to oppose him?”

Tonia nodded grimly. “Ranulf tried to contact me just before… oh, Lord, they never stood a chance,” she said, a rare show of tears welling up in her eyes. “Almost half of them were killed the first night they arrived, and the rest were taken prisoner. Maybe a few got away,” she added, struggling to salvage a few scraps of hope from the debacle, “but if they did, they wouldn’t have made it back to camp yet. We can only hope.”

Jaren stared vacantly into the campfire, pained by the remembrance that hope was already lost for one of their number. “Tonia—”

She patted him gently on the shoulder. “I know about Hedric.” Jaren cast her a puzzled look of inquiry, but she merely sniffled and turned away, electing not to elaborate on how she had obtained such knowledge.

Durek picked up a scrap of wood and tossed it listlessly into the fire; the wood was damp and the flames hissed angrily at him. “What do I do next?” he asked himself quietly. He hung his head in abject dejection, unable to believe that he was as much an outlaw in his own land as Athaya had ever been. “I can’t fight the Sage with soldiers and you can’t fight him with wizards. Our only choice is to kill him, but no one can do that except perhaps Athaya, and we have no idea what he’s done with her!”

He picked up a birch twig and absently began stripping off the feathery white bark. “It seems I have no choice but to beg Reyka for help.”

“You could try,” Jaren said cautiously, “but don’t be too hopeful of getting it. Caithe and Reyka haven’t exactly been friends with one another over the years. And even were Athaya to ask it of him as a personal favor, Osfonin is certain to point out that, ultimately, this conflict is a civil war; Sare is a Caithan protectorate. As a matter of policy, Osfonin is averse to getting involved in somebody else’s domestic quarrels.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Durek said sullenly, “but from a purely objective stance, it occurs to me that I might not be having that problem if Athaya had simply married Prince Felgin the way my father wanted her to.”

Jaren shrugged, conceding the point. “Maybe not. But personally, I’m rather glad it never worked out.”

To add to his Majesty’s misery, the rain began to fall again, coming down in fat, soaking drops. Tonia scowled up at the sky and hurried back indoors, leaving a trail of footprints in the thickening mud, while Jaren motioned Durek toward the chapel. “Come, we can talk there.”

“The kitchen might be better,” Gilda suggested, gathering up Durek’s boots and the pair of shabby cloaks. “You both look in need of a hot meal. Besides, there’s someone using the chapel at the moment, and I doubt he’d welcome the company. A cousin of Cameron’s came looking for him earlier today,” she quietly explained to Jaren. “Didn’t have any idea the boy was killed by the Tribunal last year. He took the news awfully hard.”

Jaren glanced to the decrepit little church. Maybe I’d better go say something to him,” he said, though the slouch in his shoulders indicated that he would far rather avoid such a gloomy errand.

Fortunately, there was no need. “I’d wait until morning,” Gilda advised him. “He asked to be left alone for the night. He didn’t come right out and say it,” she added, “but he’s furious with us for what happened to Cameron and doesn’t trust himself to be civil for a while.” She stole a glance at Durek; the man would be even less civil to the king who had instigated the Tribunal.

“I can’t very well blame him.” He turned back to Durek. “Let’s get something to eat, then, and afterwards I’ll see about finding you a room. There should be plenty to choose from now,” he added, sadly aware that many of the camp’s wizards would never be returning to use them.

“Jaren, wait…” Even though the rain was falling harder now, Durek paused to let Gilda get a few yards ahead of them. He shifted his weight from one stockinged foot to another, fidgeting like a child forced into making an apology to his elders. “I… just wanted to thank you. Not just for bringing me here—though God knows I couldn’t have found the place without you—but for putting up with me these past few days. I… wasn’t always the most congenial of traveling companions.”

Jaren didn’t leap to dispute the fact; the most engaging conversation he’d had since fleeing the capital had been with the peasant who sold them the cloaks. Still, Durek’s acerbity was easily forgiven in light of the devastation they had left behind them in Delfarham. “You don’t have to apologize—”

“Yes. Yes, I do. It’s important.” Durek frowned deeply, struggling to sort out his tangled skein of thoughts. “I’m finding that a lot of things are important now that never were before…” He winced as if he had a dagger lodged in his back, twisting at every uttered word. “Athaya… she did well in choosing you, I think. Hedric told me so once, but I didn’t want to believe him at the time. Of course, if you ever tell Athaya I said that, I’ll deny it,” he added, mildly sardonic. He let out a breathy wisp of resigned—almost sad—laughter. “She’d never believe I said it anyway.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Jaren replied, cracking the very faintest of smiles as he brushed a trickle of rainwater from his face. “Athaya believes a lot of crazy things.”

The slightly martyred tilt of his head proved that Durek did not disagree. Then his expression turned solemn. “I’m sorry about Hedric. I barely knew him, but… I think I know what you and Athaya have lost. I know that probably doesn’t mean much coming from me, but…” He let the words trail off, standing in uneasy silence in the rain; barefoot, drenched, smelling like a wet dog, and feeling as less a king as he ever had in his life.

“On the contrary,” Jaren replied. Then the steady rain began to fall in sheets and he hurried the king toward the inviting warmth of the kitchens. Like any other fugitive from justice, Durek would be welcome there.

* * * *

Just as dawn drew a pink smudge across the eastern horizon, Hugh Middlebrook was admitted into Archbishop Lukin’s solar to deliver the treasure for which he had been sent. His cloak was still drenched from the night’s rain, his borrowed clothes still soiled with mud, but these discomforts could not stop a triumphant smile from breaking across his face.

As Hugh set the strongbox on the table, Lukin’s eyes lit up the world. He reached out slowly, only to pause and draw back, as if this were a thing too holy to set his human hands upon.

“You have done well,” he murmured, breathing the words more than voicing them, as if whispering seductions into a woman’s ear. “I take it everything went smoothly?”

“They never even questioned my story,” Hugh replied, somewhat taken aback at the ease of the theft. “I called out to them at the forest’s edge as you suggested, and when one of the wizards finally approached me, I said exactly what you told me—that I was Cameron’s cousin. The woman led me to the camp—she didn’t even notice I was leaving a trail so I could find my way back—and told me he’d been killed by the Tribunal. I blinked up a few tears for her—as simple as thinking of the puppy I had as a boy, run down by a carriage. Then I asked to be left alone in the chapel for a while. It worked like a wizard’s charm! The strongbox was right where you said it would be, and there are so few wizards left at the camp that nobody was loitering about to spy on me as I took it. But later…“Hugh’s feelings of triumph receded for an instant. “I almost choked when I heard the king’s own voice in the clearing! He and McLaud arrived at the camp only a few hours after I did. It was a great relief to know that his Majesty escaped the attack on Delfarham, of course, but… God only knows what I would have said to him if he had seen me!”

“I’m certain you would have thought of something clever,” Lukin responded absently, only half listening as his fingers stroked the strongbox’s brass locks as if a woman’s cheek, spellbound by his prize. “Thanks to you, we know his Majesty is alive. And you have obtained the instrument of his enemy’s destruction.”

Then the archbishop snatched up a crumpled piece of parchment and waved it in the guardsman’s face. “The audacity of the man, sending me letters commanding that I officiate at his coronation! He thinks to humiliate me. He wishes me, as prelate of Caithe, to humble myself and thus all of Mother Church at his feet. But God’s ways are indeed amusing at times,” he added, setting the offending letter aside. Chuckling softly, he smoothed out another of its wrinkles; he would keep this letter as a trophy—something to laugh at when his enemy was nothing more than a memory. “The Sage’s own command will be the manner of his undoing. The rest is in my hands now.

“But I forget myself,” he said abruptly, recalling himself to the present. He pushed a leather pouch of gold across the table to Hugh; it was twice what he had promised, but Caithe’s future was well worth it. “Here. Use this in any way that God guides you, for your loyalty to church and crown. You could resign your post and buy a country house somewhere. The Tribunal has confiscated several charming ones… perhaps a manor in the south would suit you?”

Hugh gulped audibly as he felt the weight of the purse. “T-thank you, Excellency! I never expected—”

“I only ask one more task of you. Go to the cathedral and hire a courier for me; I am long overdue on my reply to his Grace and must tell him how delighted I will be to attend him upon his coronation.”

Hugh bowed crisply and departed, leaving the gold behind to collect after his final task was done. Once he was gone, Archbishop Lukin drew a slender key from his cassock—a key he doubted Durek knew he had—and unlocked the strongbox. Holding his breath in dizzy anticipation, he lifted up the priceless crown—Faltil’s crown, encrusted with brilliant purple corbals. How fitting, he mused, that God would provide such an object of beauty with which to rid the earth of His enemies.

He turned the crown from side to side, holding every facet up to the newborn sunlight streaming through the windows, and spat out a curse when he saw that close to a dozen of the costly gems had been pried out from the crown’s base. “Grubby little thief,” he murmured. “Probably sold them off one by one to fill his belly with beer and sausages.” But Lukin’s ire did not last for long. Cameron had received his punishment at the end of a hangman’s noose; the Tribunal had seen to that.

“Ah, but even so, it still has the power I require,” he said, reverently returning the crown to its box. “What the Sage of Sare fancies to be my humiliation will instead be his death—his and any other wizard who attends him. I’m sure Caithe’s cunning princess will be there to see her puppet crowned…”

Lukin set his hand upon the strongbox and laughed aloud more heartily than he had in weeks. “I shall be happy to crown you king, my Lord,” he said, bowing obeisance to an invisible Sage. When he arose, his eyes glittered with malice. “And it will be the first and last ceremony of your very brief reign.”

Athaya knew she should be quite accustomed to prisons by now—within the past two years, she had endured countless hours in both Delfar’s dungeon and the convent of Saint Gillian’s—but her confinement in the Sage’s fortress was proving to be the most punishing of all. The fate of her homeland was being determined at this very hour, and not knowing what was happening, not being able to help when she was needed most, tore away at the delicate cloak of faith she still struggled to grip about her. By the seventh day of being bound within Drianna’s sumptuous chamber, with little else to do but pick at the food Tullis brought to her, ignore his halfhearted attempts at conversation, and wish dreadful plagues upon the wizard who had brought her here, she thought she would go quite mad.

The day was humid, the air unsettled, and the gray-green clouds cloaking the island, lingering over a decision on whether to storm or not, made Athaya even more restless than usual. Time and time again she paced to the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of Caithe’s northernmost shoreline across the hazy channel. Even when she knew it unlikely, she imagined that she spied the outline of Saint Gillian’s among the distant crags. A year ago, she would have scoffed at the notion that she might one day wish herself back within those bleak and clammy walls. From there, at least, she would have a slight chance of escape; from here, there was none.

Athaya had lost count of the number of times she had gone to that same bay window this past week, toying with absurd plans for scaling down the fortress’s rocky face to freedom. But while she could stand before the open window, she could not lean out of it; binding spells had been drawn across the aperture as well as the door—an invisible curtain trapping her securely inside. “Probably afraid I’d jump and kill myself at the thought of marrying him,” she had grumbled after first discovering the enchantment.