Author: Lois McMaster Bujold
Category: Science
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“As a betrothal gift, my dear Royesse, I have guessed what your heart most desired to complete your trousseau,” Dondo told her, and motioned his page forward.
Iselle, regarding him with that same frozen stare, said, “You guessed I wanted a coastal city with an excellent harbor?”
Dondo, momentarily taken aback, choked out a hearty laugh, and turned from her. The page flipped open the tooled leather box, revealing a delicate pearl-and-silver tiara, and Dondo reached in to hold it up before the eyes of the court. A smattering of applause ran through the crowd from his friends. Cazaril’s hand clenched on his sword hilt. If he drew and lunged…he’d be struck down before he made it across the throne room.
As Dondo raised the tiara high to bring down upon Iselle’s head, she recoiled like a shying horse. “Orico…”
“This betrothal is my will and desire, dear sister,” said Orico, in edged tones.
Dondo, apparently unwilling to chase her about the room with the tiara, paused, and shot a meaningful glance at the roya.
Iselle swallowed. It was clear her mind was frantically churning over responses. She’d stifled her first scream of outrage, and had not the trick of falling down in a convincing dead faint. She stood trapped and conscious. “Sire. As the provincar of Labran said when the forces of the Golden General poured over his walls…this is entirely a surprise.”
A very hesitant titter ran through the courtiers at this witticism.
Her voice lowered, and she murmured through her teeth, “You didn’t tell me. You didn’t ask me.”
Orico returned, equally sotto voce, “We’ll talk of it after this.”
After another frozen moment, she accepted this with a small nod. Dondo managed to complete his divestiture of the pearl tiara. He bent and kissed her hand. Wisely, he did not demand the usual return kiss; from the look of astonished loathing on Iselle’s face, there seemed a good chance she might have bitten him.
Orico’s court divine, in the seasonal robes of the Brother, stepped forward and called down a blessing upon the pair from all the gods.
Orico announced, “In three days’ time, we will all meet again here and witness this union sworn and celebrated. Thank you all.”
“Three days! Three days!” said Iselle, her voice breaking for the first time. “Don’t you mean three years, sire?”
“Three days,” said Orico. “Prepare yourself.” He prepared himself to duck out of the throne room, motioning his servants about him. Most of the courtiers departed with the dy Jironals, offering congratulations. A few of the more boldly curious lingered, ears pricking for the conversation between brother and sister.
“What, in three days! There is not even time to send a courier to Baocia, let alone to have any reply from my mother or grandmother—”
“Your mother, as all know, is too ill to stand the strain of a trip to court, and your grandmother must stay in Valenda to attend upon her.”
“But I don’t—” She found herself addressing the broad royal back, as Orico scurried from the throne room.
She plunged after him into the next chamber, Betriz, Nan, and Cazaril following anxiously. “But Orico, I don’t wish to marry Dondo dy Jironal!”
“A lady of your rank does not marry to please herself, but to bring advantage to her house,” he told her sternly, when she brought him to bay only by dint of rushing around in front of him and planting herself in his path.
“Is that indeed so? Then perhaps you can explain to me what advantage it brings to the House of Chalion to throw me—to waste me—upon the younger son of a minor lord? My husband should have brought us a royacy for his dowry!”
“This binds the dy Jironals to me—and to Teidez.”
“Say rather, it binds us to them! The advantage is a trifle one-sided, I think!”
“You said you did not wish to marry a Roknari prince, and I have not given you to one. And it wasn’t for lack of offers—I’ve refused two this season. Think on that, and be grateful, dear sister!”
Cazaril wasn’t sure if Orico was threatening or pleading.
He went on, “You didn’t wish to leave Chalion. Very well, you shall not leave Chalion. You wanted to marry a Quintarian lord—I have given you one, a holy general at that! Besides,” he went on with a petulant shrug, “if I gave you to a power too close to my borders, they might use you as an excuse to claim some of my lands. I do well, with this, for the future peace of Chalion.”
“Lord Dondo is forty years old! He’s a corrupt, impious thief! An embezzler! A libertine! Worse! Orico, you cannot do this to me!” Her voice was rising.
“I’ll not hear you,” said Orico, and actually put his hands over his ears. “Three days. Compose your mind and see to your wardrobe.” He fled her as if she were a burning tower. “I’ll not hear this!”
He meant it. Four times that afternoon she attempted to seek him in his quarters to further her plea, and four times he had his guards repulse her. After that, he rode out of the Zangre altogether, to take up residence in a hunting lodge deep in the oak woods, a move of remarkable cowardice. Cazaril could only hope its roof leaked icy rain on the royal head.
Cazaril slept badly that night. Venturing upstairs in the morning, he found three frayed women who appeared to have not slept at all.
Iselle, heavy-eyed, drew him by the sleeve into her sitting chamber, sat him down on the window seat, and lowered her voice to a fierce whisper.
“Cazaril. Can you get four horses? Or three? Or two, or even one? I’ve thought it through. I spent all night thinking it through. The only answer is to fly.”
He sighed. “I thought it through, too. First, I am watched. When I went to leave the Zangre last night, two of the roya’s guards followed me. To protect me, they said. I might be able to kill or bribe one—I doubt two.”
“We could ride out as if we were hunting,” argued Iselle.
“In the rain?” Cazaril gestured to the steady mizzle still coming down outside the high window, fogging the valley so that one could not even see the river below, turning the bare tree branches to black ink marks in the gray. “And even if they let us ride out, they’d be sure to send an armed escort.”
“If we could get any kind of a head start—”
“And if we could, what then? If—when!—they overtook us on the road, the first thing they would do is pull me from my horse and cut off my head, and leave my body for the foxes and crows. And then they would take you back. And if by some miracle they didn’t catch us, where would we go?”
“A border. Any border.”
“Brajar and South Ibra would send you right back, to please Orico. The five princedoms or the Fox of Ibra would take you hostage. Darthaca…presupposes we could make it across half of Chalion and all of South Ibra. I fear not, Royesse.”
“What else can I do?” Her young voice was edged with desperation.
“No one can force a marriage. Both parties must freely assent before the gods. If you have the courage to simply stand there and say No, it cannot go forth. Can you not find it in yourself to do so?”
Her lips tightened. “Of course I could. Then what? Now I think you are the one who has not thought it through. Do you think Lord Dondo would just give up, at that point?”
He shook his head. “It’s not valid if they force it, and everyone knows it. Just hold on to that thought.”
She shook her head in something between grief and exasperation. “You don’t understand.”
He’d have taken that for the wail of youth everywhere, till Dondo himself came that afternoon to the royesse’s chamber to persuade his betrothed to a more seemly compliance. The doors were left open to the royesse’s sitting room, but an armed guard stood at each, keeping back both Cazaril on one side and Nan dy Vrit and Betriz on the other. He did not catch one word in three of the furious undervoiced argument that raged between the thickset courtier and the red-haired maiden. But at the end of it Dondo stalked out with a look of savage satisfaction on his face, and Iselle collapsed
on the window seat nearly unable to breathe, so torn was she between terror and fury.
She clutched Betriz and choked out, “He said…if I did not make the responses, he would take me anyway. I said, Orico would never let you rape his sister. He said, why not? He let us rape his wife. When Royina Sara would not conceive, and could not conceive, and Orico was too impotent to get a bastard no matter how many ladies and maidens and whores they brought to him, and, and even more disgusting things, the Jironals finally persuaded him to let them in upon her, and try…Dondo said, he and his brother tried every night for a year, one at a time or both together, till she threatened to kill herself. He said he would roger me till he’d planted his fruit in my womb, and when I was ripe to bursting, I’d hang on him as husband hard enough.” She blinked blurry eyes at Cazaril, her lips drawn back on clenched teeth. “He said, my belly would grow very big indeed, because I am short. How much courage do I need for that simple No, Cazaril, do you think? And what happens when courage makes no difference at all, at all?”
I thought the only place that courage didn’t matter was on a Roknari slave galley. I was wrong. He whispered abjectly, “I do not know, Royesse.”
Trapped and desperate, she fell to fasting and prayer; Nan and Betriz helped to set up a portable altar to the gods in her chambers and collected all the symbols of the Lady of Spring they could find to decorate it. Cazaril, trailed by his two guards, walked down into Cardegoss and found a flower-seller with forced violets, out of season, and brought them back to put in a glass jar of water on the altar. He felt stupid and helpless, though the royesse dropped a tear on his hand when she thanked him. Taking neither food nor drink, she lay back down on the floor in the attitude of deepest supplication, so like Royina Ista when Cazaril had first caught sight of her in the Provincara’s ancestors’ hall that he was unnerved, and fled the room. He spent hours, walking about the Zangre, trying to think, thinking only of horrors.
Late that evening, the Lady Betriz called him up to the office antechamber that was rapidly becoming a place of hectic nightmare.
“I have the answer!” she told him. “Cazaril, teach me how to kill a man with a knife.”
“What?”
“Dondo’s guards know enough not to let you close to him. But I will be standing beside Iselle on her wedding morning, to be her witness, and make the responses. No one will expect it of me. I’ll hide the knife in my bodice. When Dondo comes close, and bends to kiss her hand, I can strike at him, two, three times before anyone can stop me. But I don’t know just how and where to cut, to be sure. The neck, yes, but what part?” Earnestly, she drew a heavy dirk out from behind her skirts and held it out to him. “Show me. We can practice, till I have it very smooth and fast.”
“Gods, no, Lady Betriz! Give up this mad plan! They would strike you down—they’d hang you, afterward!”
“Provided only I was able to kill Dondo first, I’d go gladly to the gallows. I swore to guard Iselle with my life. Well, so.” Her brown eyes burned in her white face.
“No,” he said firmly, taking the knife and not giving it back. Where had she obtained it, anyway? “This is no work for a woman.”
“I’d say it’s work for whoever has a chance at it. My chance is best. Show me!”
“Look, no. Just…wait. I’ll, I’ll try something, find what I can do.”
“Can you kill Dondo? Iselle is in there praying to the Lady to slay either her or Dondo before the wedding, she doesn’t care anymore which. Well, I care which. I think it should be Dondo.”
“I entirely agree. Look, Lady Betriz. Wait, just wait. I’ll see what I can do.”
If the gods will not answer your prayers, Lady Iselle, by the gods I will try to.
He spent hours the following day, the last before the marriage, trying to stalk Lord Dondo through the Zangre like a boar in a forest of stone. He never got within striking distance. In midafternoon, Dondo returned to the Jironals’ great palace in town, and Cazaril could not get past its walls or gates. The second time Dondo’s bravos threw him out, one held him while another struck him enough times in the chest, belly, and groin to make his return to the Zangre a slow weave, supporting himself like a drunk with a hand out to nearby walls. The roya’s guards, whom he had scraped off in a dodge through Cardegoss’s alleys, arrived in time to watch both the beating and the crawl home. They did not interfere with either.
In a burst of inspiration, he bethought himself of the secret passage that had run between the Zangre and the Jironals’ great palace when it had been the property of Lord dy Lutez. Ias and dy Lutez had been reputed to use it daily, for conference, or nightly, for assignations of love, depending on the teller. The tunnel, he discovered, was now about as secret as Cardegoss’s main street, and had guards on both ends, and locked doors. His attempt at bribery won him shoves and curses, and the threat of another beating.
Some assassin I am, he thought bitterly, as he reeled into his bedchamber as dusk descended, and fell groaning into his bed. Head pounding, body aching, he lay still for a time, then at last roused himself enough to light a candle. He ought to go upstairs, and check on his ladies, but he didn’t think he could bear the weeping. Or the reporting of his failure to Betriz, or what she would demand of him after that. If he could not kill Dondo, what right had he to try to thwart her effort?
I would gladly die, if only I could stop this abomination tomorrow…
Do you mean that?
He sat stiffly, wondering if that last voice was quite his own. His tongue had moved a little behind his lips, as usual for when he was babbling to himself. Yes.
He lurched around to the end of his bed, fell to his knees, and flipped open the lid of his trunk. He dived down amongst the folded garments, scented with cloves as proof against moths, until he came to a black velvet vest-cloak folded around a brown wool robe. Folded around a ciphered notebook that he had never finished deciphering when the crooked judge had fled Valenda, that it had seemed too late to return to the Temple without embarrassing explanations. Feverishly, he drew it out, and lit more candles. There’s not much time left. About a third of it was left untranslated. Forget all the failed experiments. Go to the last page, eh?
Even in the bad cipher, the wool merchant’s despair came through, in a kind of strange shining simplicity. Eschewing all his previous bizarre elaborations, he had turned at the last not to magic, but to plain prayer. Rat and crow only to carry the plea, candles only to light his way, herbs only to lift his heart with their scents, and compose his mind to purity of will; a will then put aside, laid wholehearted on the god’s altar. Help me. Help me. Help me.
Those were the last words entered in the notebook.
I can do that, thought Cazaril in wonder.
And if he failed…there would still be Betriz and her knife.
I will not fail. I’ve failed practically everything else in my life. I will not fail death.
He slipped the book under his pillow, locked his door behind him, and went to find a page.
The sleepy boy he selected was waiting in the corridor upon the pleasure of the lords and ladies at their dinner in Orico’s banqueting hall, where Iselle’s nonappearance was doubtless the subject of much gossip, not even kept to a whisper since none of the principals were present. Dondo roistered privately in his palace with his hangers-on; Orico still cowered out in the woods.
He fished a gold royal from his purse and held it up, smiling through the O of his thumb and finger. “Hey, boy. Would you like to earn a royal?”
The Zangre pages had learned to be wary; a royal was enough to buy some truly intimate services from those who sold such. And enough to be a caution, to those who didn’t care to play those games. “Doing what, my lord?”
“Catch me a rat.”
“A rat, my lord? Why?”
Ah. Why. Why, so that I can work the crime of death magic upon the second most powerful lord in Chalion, of course! No.
Cazaril leaned his shoulders against the wall, and smiled
down confidingly. “When I was in the fortress of Gotorget, during the siege three years ago—did you know I was its commander? until my brave general sold it out from under us, that is—we learned to eat rats. Tasty little things, if you could catch enough of them. I really miss the flavor of a good, candle-roasted rat haunch. Catch me a really big, fat one, and there will be another to match this.” Cazaril dropped the coin in the page’s hand, and licked his lips, wondering how crazed he looked right now. The page was edging farther from him. “You know where my chamber is?”
“Yes, m’lord?”
“Bring it there. In a bag. Quick as you can. I’m hungry.” Cazaril lurched off, laughing. Really laughing, not feigning it. A weird, wild exhilaration filled his heart.
It lasted until he reached his bedchamber again and sat to plan the rest of his ploy, his dark prayer, his suicide. It was night; the crow would not fly to his window at night, even for the piece of bread he’d snatched from the banqueting hall before returning to the main block. He turned the bread roll over in his hands. The crows roosted in Fonsa’s Tower. If they wouldn’t fly to him, he could crawl to them, over the roof slates. Sliding in the dark? And then back to his chamber, with a squawking bundle under his arm?
No. Let the bundle be the bagged rat. If he did the deed there, in the shadow of the broken roof upon whatever scorched and shaking platform still stood inside, he’d only have to make the trip one way. And…death magic had worked there once before, eh? Spectacularly, for Iselle’s grandfather. Would Fonsa’s spirit lend his aid to his granddaughter’s unholy soldier? His tower was a fraught place, sacred to the Bastard and his pets, especially at night, midnight in the cold rain. Cazaril’s body need never be found, nor buried. The crows could feast upon his remains, fair trade for the depredation he planned upon their poor comrade. Animals were innocent, even the grisly crows; that innocence surely made them all a little sacred.
The dubious page arrived much quicker than Cazaril had thought he might, with a wriggling bag. Cazaril checked its contents—the snapping, hissing rat must have weighed a pound and a half—and paid up. The page pocketed his coin and walked off, staring over his shoulder. Cazaril fastened the mouth of the bag tight and locked it in his chest to prevent the condemned prisoner’s escape.