White Pagan, page 40
part #6 of Kestrel Harper Saga Series
Perhaps that had come as a product of the loss of her own mother that had given Asta so little motherly experience to draw from.
“It will be an adjustment for Jerit…he does not yet know…but he will…and I fear he will not understand. He will need you…” The way you needed me, the way I failed to give.
The hand around Asta’s tightened. “He will be safe with me…and if today was any indicator, it will do Prince Lorant good to have him here.” There was a nine years difference in their ages, but the little prince had already taken to following Jerit through the castle halls, and Jerit, without a younger sibling of his own, seemed eager for the company of someone he could teach and interact with.
“I’m glad to hear it. He will need friends.” Uprooted from Glevum, losing Oska, Jerit would need the support of others, whatever the future held.
As would Asta.
Though Yóáná did not say it, the bond shared in their clasped hands proved to Asta that she could count on her daughter despite her failures. For as long as she was here, Asta would do her best to make up for those disappointments.
***
“If you do not believe me, test me!”
Raebhá’s plea and demand again went unanswered, just as it had every day since being thrust into this small, locked room. Her captors continued to ask the same questions: who was she? Why had she come from the mountains with the ghostly stranger? Who was he and why was he here? Could she prove her identity? They listened but seemed not to believe her. They never spoke other than to ask those questions, and then left her alone again. Though they refused to answer her, she was able to glean, through conversations heard through the walls, that she and Kavan had made it to the ghísaer of Ghené, to the ghís of Phaurd. She deduced that none of those interrogating her were márbhyndhánis. It was likely none of them knew about the Gate in the mountains or could tell her what it meant.
A lack of training explained why none sought to read her. None would know how. Without a leader’s direction, none would feel permitted to take action against her or Kavan. Instead, they settled for repetitive questions while they waited for instruction and guidance.
She wondered how long that would be. By her calculations and the tick marks made on the wall, she had been questioned twenty-two times, always early in the morning. There was a small shuttered window through which she could watch the positions of the stars as the hours passed which helped confirm her calculations. She was well-fed, given adequate furs for the cot she was allowed, a fire in the central pit offered warmth, and a single whale tallow candle came with each meal to provide light, but her belongings had been confiscated and she remained alone, seeing only those who questioned her.
She worried about Kavan but lacked the skill to seek his presence or determine his welfare. Many times, as she tried to sleep, she believed she felt him with her, a soothing comfort in the darkness. It calmed her to find, each time the sensation came, that he seemed unharmed, but she had no idea where he was. Was he being questioned as well? Did he understand their captors and did his answers coincide with hers? Did their captors understand him or were they frightened by his differences, his language, dialect, and appearance?
If he could blast them free of stone and snow, why had he not freed himself and her?
She sank heavily onto the cot and lay back, weary of pacing and tempted to sleep again. With a hand on her abdomen, she spread the other on the frozen mud-brick wall, closed her eyes, and tried to seek Kavan’s presence. It was easy to imagine that he did not act out of respect for a culture he was unfamiliar with, his curiosity about their captors equal to their curiosity about him. Maybe he feared retribution if he acted. Maybe he was afraid they would hurt her. Maybe he was being better treated than she was, not a captive but a pampered guest.
He would have won her release if that was so. Or perhaps it was his influence that allowed her the basic luxuries she enjoyed. If he was free to move about, she was certain he would have come for her, come to her. If she knew, she would feel better about her predicament.
Instead, she fretted, for with each passing day she became more certain of an unexpected turn she had not thought possible, or likely, before. Actions, no matter how big or small, always had consequences. Now she was presented with one she did not know how to handle.
The matter might be moot, however, if she and Kavan were not released soon. They would not be killed, but what other fate they might face concerned her.
Particularly now.
Elsewhere, denied a bed or the warmth of a fire but given additional furs for protection against the cold and two meals each day at regular intervals, Kavan did not believe he was in danger of execution. Those who brought his meals never spoke. After an initial period of sleep that first day, he sought Raebhá’s presence within, traced the threads across the seaside town, and reassured himself then, and each day since, that she was well and unharmed. He could read her loneliness, her confusion, her consternation with their quandary, but he did not intrude on her thoughts. So long as she was unharmed and alive, he was satisfied.
More often than not, his troubled musings stretched back to the Sovereignties, to his cousin, his sons, his friends whom he had abandoned in the face of hunger and plague. And for what? To freeze or live as a captive in this perpetually dark world? He needed to be free, to get Raebhá home, to find a Gate that would take him back to his. He had promised Rhyrdan a swift return and he had, by his best calculations, been away for nearly a month and a half. Kóráhm’s feast day, his birthday, had passed. Yet here in this place, he had been unable to summon Kóráhm, and his efforts to touch the thoughts of anyone in Rhidam, Bhryell, or Alberni was of little comfort. He could brush fingers of power over their minds but communication with any so far away was going to take more effort.
He was conserving his energy in case the day came that he needed it to escape this place and get Raebhá out alive.
With little else to do, however, it was an effort he began to practice, reaching from one beloved heart to another, drawing power, draining himself nearly to exhaustion, pushing, stretching, always seeking to reach further, longer, looking for the moment when the effort to communicate with Ártur or any one of the others came as easily to him as a handlight did.
His well of power and command of it were increasing.
The focus helped untangle his thoughts from the man he felt guilty of leaving behind, a dead man who should have been here with him.
Kavan had no notion of how far away he was from the lands he knew. He only knew that it had to be further in miles than he had been during his sojourn south of Hatu, further than the south most cities he had visited of Gorbesh and Pa’aliaka. He longed for a map, a means of constructing an image of the world that would fulfill his curiosity. The hindrance of the great mountains had forced Raebhá’s people to become a sea-faring lot. Surely they had mapping abilities that they could offer. How far had they traveled? How much of the world might they have mapped?
If he ever got out of this room, Kavan intended to find out.
***
None of the corridors looked familiar though he had lived here his entire life. Everything existed in shadows, each figure a shuffling corpse bathed in blood. There was a constant chatter in his head, voices both strange and familiar, shouting and screeching, gasping and whispering, never normal conversation but always muffled through a heavy veil or blaring so that the pain of them shot through his temples and between his eyes, causing him to squint and wince. Efforts made to cover his ears, bits of cloth stuck into them to block out external sound which compounded the internal chaos, were futile, most often resulting in aborted attempts by others to communicate with him. If he heard them, was aware of people around him, it did not show. He trudged or fled from one room to the next, driven by ghosts no one else could see, looking for his brother. Many shook their heads, scratched their chins, clucked their tongues, and more than one eyed Inness with suspicion.
What was she doing to their king to drive him mad?
Those closest, however, knew how she sat with him during the nights of screaming terror, how she held him and talked to him into the stillness of restless sleep, only to endure waking some short time later to more thrashing and wailing, always the same names on his tongue, names that told the House de Corrmick that the uprising, the loss of his brother, and the death of his father had deeply traumatized the new king.
Inness saw it too and bitterly tried to find a way to help her husband. She had believed his fortitude strong enough to do what needed to be done, had pushed that notion onto his shoulders for as long as they had known one another, scolding and reassuring him every time he claimed weakness that he was a man of strength, the man Neth needed if she was to regain glory. When the time for action had come, sensing his wavering faith, she offered to be the one to act. It had been an insincere offer, one whose tone and phrasing revealed his struggling weakness and bolstered his resolve to follow through, if for no other reason than to prove to his wife that he was the man she believed him to be.
She would have done the deed herself if she had known this would be the result.
As she watched him balancing on the parapet, hands tight against his chest so that she could not see them, staring into the clouds that had brought night over Glevum hours earlier, unable to tell if his eyes were open or closed from where she stood, Inness realized her folly in pushing Oska too far. Still, she believed there was strength in him, that all he needed to do was move past the death of his father and then they could rule Neth together as they had always intended to do. She was strong enough for both of them. All she needed to do was regain his faith, his trust, and help him regain his presence of mind.
“Oska, husband; please. Come down. Come before the fire. Sit with me. The weather turns foul and you must sleep.”
He seemed not to hear. Perhaps he was sleepwalking as he sometimes did. He did not react to her words or her company. She watched his arms move and his head tip back slightly and then, slowly, one arm fell to his side. His fingers uncurled from around the metal chalice he held and it clattered to the balcony behind the parapet. Perplexed, Inness took a step forward, wondering where he had gotten the alcohol she had so carefully hidden, intending to pick it up, but when Oska unsteadily teetered upon the ledge as if in response to her movement, she froze.
“It should have been me.”
“No,” she scolded, having heard those words too many times. “You are where you are meant to be; you are king, as I promised.”
Oska’s eyes closed. He shook his head, the hand that had held the chalice flexing to the memory of the blade it had wielded, the blade that had ended his father’s reign. And for what?
“He was a grand king.”
Kjell had ended centuries of barbaric infighting and iron-fisted rule, had provided the people of Neth with education and the chance to serve the military with honor instead of forced conscription that pointlessly claimed the lives of so many and left too few to tend the land and provide the commodities the kingdom needed to thrive. Kjell had provided a stability that no Nethite could remember.
Oska had brought that dream to an ugly, brutal end for what? So that he could sit on that throne? The throne that was destined to have been his anyhow? How could he further the man’s legacy when his were the actions of the de Corrmicks of olde?
“He was a good king.”
Inness snorted. “He was a coward, hiding behind a Lachlan wife, stripping Neth of power and…”
Slowly Oska’s head turned, and though he did not open his eyes, he seemed to stare at her with an expression of perplexed bitterness. “How am I any different?”
It was the most rational thing he had said, the most rational he had sounded, since the uprising. Hoping for a clearheaded conversation, Inness picked up the chalice. “You are smarter than…”
“Smarter, but not wiser.” He seemed to look at the ground far beneath his feet. Inness took the opportunity to step closer. He did not flinch, not even when she set the chalice on the wide lip of the parapet and took his hand.
“Wise enough to…”
A tremor ran through him. Inness felt it through their joined hands.
“It should have been me. Jerit is gone. We could not even bury him.”
“That is unreasonable…”
“I’m going to tell them…”
“Oska, come down; we will talk this through.”
“…everything.”
“They’ll kill us both!”
“No, they won’t. Tell Jerit…it’ll only be…”
His too-short leg shifted on the sloping stone ledge. He convulsed. She reached for his leg but came up empty-handed as he squawked and tumbled headlong from the height of the third-floor balcony.
“Oska!”
The reply that came back was the crack and thud of flesh and bone impacting the stone of the courtyard.
Chapter 21
Sentries and staff ran from all directions to come to the side of their fallen young king, but Inness did not linger on the balcony to witness the outcome. Nor did she go to the courtyard to be with him, choosing instead to retreat into the room. Not content there, knowing there would be questions about why she had not stopped him from climbing onto the parapet if she was in the chamber with him, she retreated to her private adjoining room and forced herself to lie in bed as though asleep, to await the inevitable pounding on her door.
Afterward was a whirlwind, expressing shock and grief over her husband’s death, staving off unavoidable questions by advisors who wanted to ascertain her exact location at the time of the fall, people asking how she wished to proceed with the care of his broken body. The physicians determined that the contents of the chalice, the deep red Glevum ale that Oska favored, had been laced with some foreign substance, possibly poison, possibly a sleeping aid, possibly some other residue left when the cup had been cleaned, but whether that had contributed to his fall could not be determined.
With all of the alcohol hidden from his reach, how had he come upon enough to fill his cup…and how had it come to be tainted?
Inness was too numb for grief; shock she did not have to feign. This was not supposed to happen. How had her calculations gone so awry? All of her planning, all of their scheming, their intent to rule together, was gone in one fatal instant. Suicide? Accident? Murder? No one knew and as the advisors and counselors gathered to discuss the future of Neth, who was to rule now that two kings had died in so short a span and the other prince remained unaccounted for, Inness knew she had to act quickly. She had to subvert anger and lingering shock and secure her place, her future before blame turned against her.
She refused to be cast aside, sent to Rhidam in disgrace, castoff as unnecessary in the land she had adopted as her own. In Rhidam, she would be no one. There would be no future for her. Here, she had one card yet to play but she did not know if it would be enough to overcome monarchical bias and the need for someone to blame.
Standing before them, chin lifted proudly though her rounded shoulders and hands clasped before her spoke of the grief and mourning they wanted to see, she cleared her throat. “Sirs, if I may.” She waited for them to settle before starting again. “What options do we have? Prince Jerit is still unfound and by your own investigation and admissions, it was his supporters who assassinated King…”
Voices rose in dissent. “Supporters! Not the Prince! He’s a child! There is no proof that he either knew of or plotted…”
“He fled!”
“With his mother! He’s a boy! To plan such a thing at his age is unheard of!”
“His mother then. She is a Lachlan!”
“She is a Dugan…”
“Of Lachlan blood…
“She was our queen! She was a good and faithful wife!”
Inness gave the men time to fight amongst themselves, content to allow their discord until the mention of Lachlan ancestry arose. Afraid that those arguments would be turned against her, she pounded the table once with the flat of her hand, an unexpected sound that drew the men’s attention from arguing.
“Must I remind you, I carry Lachlan blood?” The men squirmed in their chairs. “I agree with Lord Lumel. Prince Jerit lacks the maturity to plan such an uprising, but whether it was Queen Asta or someone else who formulated the plot, we cannot know until we find her or find someone who will expose the guilty. Regardless, Prince Jerit is not here. We can turn to Princess Rika, accept Cordashian rule and lose our sovereignty, or we can intensify the search for Prince Jerit and remain without leadership until he is found, vulnerable to Cordash, Enesfel, and Elyriá. We can bicker, create factions and fight each other. King Kjell left us weak. We cannot afford this chaos.”
Iden Stone, general of Neth’s forces and staunch supporter of Kjell’s, a friend since before Kjell’s crowning and a man who believed in the changes the late monarch had sought to bring, eyed the woman skeptically. “You are suggesting we make you queen?”
He had not been able to reach Kjell’s room during that night of violence. He had been forced, by the happenstance of his presence in the sentry bunkhouse settling a now trivial dispute between two of his men, to fight his way into the castle, through dozens of faceless men behind unmarked armor. Nearly all of the opposing force was killed in the incursion but by the time he reached the royal chambers, the king, his wife, and youngest son were gone.
The body he had later seen alongside other royal advisors and lords was no more King Kjell than Stone was. But others, less intimately familiar with Kjell, saw the royal signet on the bloody, mangled hand of a blonde man whose face had been caved in, and accepted the claim of his identity without argument.
Stone did not accept it. He clung to the hope that the king and his family were alive. Until he could prove it, until he could find them, he was a smart enough man, experienced in the ways of the de Corrmick royal court, to play the game and stay alive. Doing so, however, did not mean he could not cautiously question the motives of the ambitious woman before them.
