Casting In Stone Book One of the Averraine Cycle Read online

  Arlais stared at me, constantly and with a kind of shock, all through the rest of the evening meal. I supposed that, despite my reputation and my explanation, she had not quite understood what it was to be Dungarrow’s champion after all, and why should she have? No one goes a-dueling much on the holy isle.

  Guerin had greeted me with a grin, a clap on the shoulder and a full wine-cup, and asked me where I’d learned that particular little maneuver. A few of the folk around us, troopers out of Keraine, mostly, congratulated me and continued to make sure my cup stayed full. Lannach wasn’t well-loved, which was no surprise, and they had enjoyed the scene all the more because I’d let him live.

  By the time they’d all settled down again and the boiled meats were being served, I had relaxed into that kind of unguarded tipsiness I rarely allowed myself. All’s right with the world, drink and be merry, and hail-fellow-well-met: you know the sort of mood, I’m sure.

  Then, for some reason, I glanced up at the king’s table. Birais was looking at me with something like speculation, an expression that vanished as he caught my gaze. It was replaced immediately by that impenetrable mask again, but he raised his wine cup and lifted it towards me and then drank, and looked away.

  That sobered me somewhat. When people in power look at you that way, they are almost always calculating what they might use you for, and so, later, I wasn’t really all that surprised somehow, when he came out of the shadows as Guerin and I were making our way back to the hall after a visit to the latrines.

  I bowed - it’s a reflex, really, and good manners, Lady Ilona had always said, never hurt. Guerin attempted to do the same, but then burped loudly, grinned foolishly, and subsided to lean against the wall.

  “You surprise me, Lady Caoimhe,” Birais said, after a moment. “I had not heard that you were strong on mercy, yet, tonight, you chose not to kill.”

  I shrugged.

  “Can I ask why?”

  “Well, for one thing, no one asked me to.”

  “Ah. Do you only kill on command?”

  “It depends on who is commanding,” I said, carefully. “And… other things. Why? Did you want him dead?”

  “Would you have killed him if I had asked?”

  I considered this. “No, probably not.”

  “Then why…?”

  “It’s always interesting,” I said, “to know another’s thoughts on this. But would you have asked?”

  “No,” he echoed my own words. “Probably not.”

  He nodded then, as if he’d satisfied something in himself, and turned away, back to the hall. And then he stopped, and turned back.

  “I knew your mother, a little,” he said, and his voice was curiously flat. “A long time ago.“ He paused. “You are not much like her,” he said, finally.

  And this time, he did go, without a backward glance.

  “That,” said Guerin, “was…odd.”

  He sounded remarkably sober, and he wasn’t using the wall as a desperately required support anymore.

  “Yes,” I said. It was odd, and unsettling, and I thought that I wouldn’t rest easy until Birais took his royal self and his royal troops back south again. Being of interest to the king of Keraine was pretty much the last thing I needed.

  All I wanted, just then, was to be away from here. I wanted it to be quiet, I wanted it to be ordinary, I wanted it to be as it had been for so long, before the wolves, before this unending stream of visitors to Rhwyn, and before the certain knowledge that my friendship with Einon was ended. I had known it was over, of course, known it the moment Feargal lay dead at my feet, but there had always been an illusion, a pretense that somehow, I still had something to return to.

  Be a rock, I thought. Be a rock, be a wall of stone. Be no living thing.

  “I’m for home,” I said. Delwen had wanted me for the banquet, but she hadn’t said anything about a bed for the night, and the heat and the noise of the crowded hall had lost any appeal.

  “I’d offer you space in my chamber for the night,” Guerin said. “But there isn’t any. I’ve got one of the troop captains and his second in there with me. The second snores. Badly.”

  “No matter. I left Balefire in the pasture. He’ll need to be seen to.”

  I retrieved my sword from under the table, and buckled it on, before it occurred to me that I ought, in all courtesy, relieve Delwen of any concern over me. I looked around the hall. People had been moving about, with Owain now sitting farther down the hall, talking to Joss, and Guerin was at the high table now, joking about with one of the king’s men.

  Delwen wasn’t anywhere to be seen, but as I searched I saw Eardith, standing off to the side of the hall, watching Lady Ilona with an almost feverish intensity.

  I began to watch, too. The Lady sat beside Birais and seemed to be asking serious, probing questions. She looked as if she was deeply interested and absorbed in the answers, yet there was something just ever so slightly off in the way she held herself, though I couldn’t find any words that quite described it.

  I couldn’t hear the questions or the answers, of course. But something in me sensed that neither what she asked nor what the king answered was of even the tiniest interest to her. He could have been reciting nursery tales, for all she cared. It was as if she was trying to distract him in some way, for some obscure purpose.

  I looked back at Eardith. She was very still.

  I remembered how she had been, yesterday, in the mountains. Her hands and lips hadn’t been at rest then, but there was something about her now that seemed the same.

  I felt suddenly queasy, and I didn’t think it was from the wine.

  The holy ones, the ones with great talents, well, you hear stories. There had always been the suspicion that Braide’s grip on Dungarrow had not only been because they were canny and wise and had taken advantage of temporary weaknesses. There were hints that they didn’t always stay strictly in bounds in their quest for power.

  I had, for most of my life, considered Lady Ilona my savior. Almost everything that had been good in my life seemed to have come to me through her, and the later losses had been my own choice; I couldn’t fault her treatment of me. She had been like a mother to Meryn and I both, and even now, after everything, she had remained my friend. Even now, she behaved towards me as she always had, as if the last years had never been.

  I owed her. And I owed Eardith, too.

  I’m imagining this, I thought. I must be.

  What I might have done, I don’t know. At the very moment that the idea of somehow interrupting this, somehow disturbing Lady Ilona, or Eardith or even the king, began to take shape in my mind, Eardith suddenly turned and looked at me, and then produced a thin, rueful smile. A moment later, she grasped her walking stick and began to head down the hall towards me.

  “You look exhausted,” she said, by way of greeting. “Look you, I must get back home. There are things I need to see to. You should take to my room here, and get some rest.”

  I felt, as I had for so much of my life, as if I inhabited two places, two bodies at once. I listened to her far-off voice as she told me what chamber they’d given her. I heard myself tell her that Balefire had been in the field below the garden all day, and asking nicely if she could make sure he was well-watered before stabling him.

  And all the while, I was still back in that other moment, still reliving what I had seen, trying to make sense of it, to see if there was some other, more sensible explanation that would fit.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Either out of sheer boredom, or because he had the sense to see the strain his little army was putting on Rhwyn’s limited resources, Birais announced to the hall at breakfast that he intended to hunt.

  This produced a flurry of activity. Arlais and the Lady were still abed, I gathered, and Eardith had not reappeared, nor Lannach, either, which was a relief. There’s nothing so risky as a man who’s had time to work up a new grievance to stitch onto an old one. Since it seemed an outing for the king’s part
y, mostly, and I had nothing much else to do, I merely sat and watched as Owain gave orders to find enough spears for everyone, and the kitchen servants tried to assemble enough left-over food from last night to pack up as noon-day rations for the ones who were going.

  But when I ventured out into the courtyard, I discovered I had been invited along on this, after all. Balefire was there, saddled and ready, and whoever had brought him up from the cottage had brought my hunting spears as well.

  I wasn’t sorry. While I didn’t particularly want to spend a day anywhere near the king, I needed something to keep my mind from endlessly turning over last night’s events, and I thought, in a party of this size, I could probably stay out of Birais’ notice for a few hours.

  Maybe.

  It was the usual sort of excursion. People made the usual sorts of jokes, and there were, as always, a few false trails that came to nothing save some wild riding and a few caustic remarks.

  But in the open country above the crossroads, the king found some sport, taking two white-tailed bucks, and it put him in a high good humor. When we stopped for a rest and some food while Joss organized the minimal butchering needed before transporting the carcasses back to the manor, I could hear Birais laughing at some jest from one of his captains.

  They would leave on the morrow, I had heard, and probably Ilona as well. And then, when things were quieter, mayhap I’d get some sense out of Arlais. Even Eardith might tell me somewhat, although that was less likely. But sooner or later, all this would get sorted, Arlais and Guerin would head back to Dungarrow and their own lives, and Rhwyn would go back to being the sleepy village it had always been.

  And then, I thought absently, I had best give some thought to my own future, such as it was. I still could lose myself somewhere. I could still take passage to Fendrais: Dungarrow wasn’t the only port where the eastern merchant ships put in. Orleigh, perhaps. Guerin would know what traders were likely to stop there, and when.

  The sun was making me sleepy. Through half-closed eyes, I saw that someone was coming towards me. For a moment, I assumed it was Guerin. He had been waylaid by the captain sharing his room and wound up on the grass over with the king’s party, leaving me to my own devices.

  It was Birais, himself, though, I realized. What on earth…? I straightened up and began to push away from the tree trunk that I’d used as a back rest.

  “Nay, stay put,” he said, waving me back. He sat as well, facing me.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Last night, you said it depended on who gave the orders, if you would kill.”

  “Aye.”

  “But…depending on what, is what I wonder.”

  “How much honour they have. How much trust I can place in them. And why they place their trust in me.”

  “Just their judgment, in the end? You just choose them and allow them to choose the rest? Do you never make those choices for yourself?”

  “Once,” I said. “Once, I did. As you well know, my lord, I’m sure.”

  And look how well that turned out, I thought.

  He was looking at me with an expression I could not read. Maybe it was pity, maybe it was something else, I couldn’t tell.

  “How old are you?” That one caught me off guard. There was no conceivable circumstance where that could matter to him.

  “Twenty-two, last Midwinter.”

  For a moment, he had an expression on his face that I couldn’t put a name to. For a moment, I thought he was about to say something more. But then his face closed down so suddenly, it was like someone had snuffed out a candle.

  “Ah,” he said. “Ah.”

  He stood. He manufactured a smile and muttered a platitude about youth and wisdom, and just as suddenly as he’d come, he was gone, back to his friends and his captains, back to being the King of Keraine.

  The sooner tomorrow comes, I thought, the sooner you are on your way south again, my lord, the better for all of us.

  Although, come to think about it, there was no clear reason why I should have cared.

  ***

  I visited Penliath only once in all those years after the marsh fever had come and gone.

  It was late winter, and we’d been called away south to Davgenny over some banditry that turned out to be a local landholder trying to weaken another one, with the aim of taking over some lands she wanted. It was the kind of thing that Ullien had always turned a blind eye to if it involved a friend of his as the aggressor, or if he got a decent bribe out of it afterwards, and I suppose she hadn’t quite taken in the fact that times had changed.

  She played all innocence and tried to throw the blame on her troop captain, but then, in the darkness, she’d also gone for an assassination attempt and slipped into Einon’s room with daggers drawn.

  And met me, instead, because we never, in those early months, ever took Einon’s safety for granted.

  Still, she was good with a knife, and desperation lent her strength. I got a cut across the upper thigh, and though it wasn’t deep, and I had been sure I was well enough to ride, a day or so out, I was shivering with an ague and only just barely able to stay in the saddle.

  We were less than a mile from Penliath, someone said, and Einon listened to them. Despite every argument I could muster, he gave orders to turn aside on the road, and we came, at length, to a place I really could have gone a lifetime without ever seeing again.

  Penliath Keep was, of course, much smaller than I remembered, and the hall I’d thought such an echoing, treasured space, I saw it now as simply ordinary, and in no way a place of any magnificence.

  The steward was pleasant and courteous, not seeming put out by our arrival one whit. There was no healer, but she sent down to the village for an old woman whose herb-lore she trusted, and who turned out to be more than competent enough for my needs.

  We only stayed two nights. Two nights too many, for me.

  It was not just my dreams, which were harrowing enough. I could explain those away as the symptoms of my wound.

  It wasn’t that I feared my secret past would come out. Within a very few moments of our arrival, I realized that none of the servants and few of the villagers remembered my curse-laden childhood, and that the years had worn away those edges for them, anyway. My position as a friend of the new duke held promise for them, and they were doing well enough out of it so far that they were happy to forget those old tales.

  I could feel the evil, though, seeping from the walls. It was so clear and present to me that I found it unbelievable that the others did not feel it. I thought I might be, underneath it all, a coward, then, that everyone else felt this smearing of wickedness that clung to the very stones of the place, and were simply unafraid to walk its shadows.

  But oblique questions and sideways queries brought home to me that no one, not the people who lived here, nor any of my friends and guests, felt even the tiniest bit of it. It was clear my courtly companions thought Penliath a pleasant little place, and that, someday, when things were quieter, they would be happy to break journeys here, envisioning me as their complacent host, serving up wine and fresh-killed venison in my little hall.

  On the second night, the herb-woman came late. She’d been making up a sort of infusion for me, for the morrow, to stave off the last of my fevers. I woke out of a doze to see her, kneeling at the fire in the little grate, deeply engrossed in watching the flames.

  They’d put me in my mother’s old room. I had wanted to protest, but some of the old caution had come back and made me wary. I had gritted my teeth and did not scream out my childish terrors.

  “Child of darkness…” Did I imagine her words? “Child of darkness, you are called and called again.”

  I might have been dreaming, but I didn’t think so. The fire crackled, giving off a shower of sparks, but the old one, she didn’t even twitch.

  “The theft of a daughter, it cuts at the roots of the world.”

  I woke up in the morning, and there was nothing in the wide world over that could have made m
e stay there a moment longer. I hid the pain that weight on my injured leg gave me, I willed my nerves and sinews against the last shivers of my fever, and I convinced Einon that we shouldn’t, couldn’t, mustn’t linger any longer, and we rode out before midday, and I never, ever even thought about returning there.

  ***

  We weren’t back in the courtyard at Rhwyn a single grain of the glass, and I wasn’t even fully out of the saddle, when Arlais was at my elbow, asking where on earth I’d been and where was Eardith?

  “Hold up,” I said, grabbing onto the reins. “Hold up, Arlais. You’re making Balefire jumpy.”

  She backed off, a little, till one of the stable lads came and led the poor horse off to the stables.

  “Well, then,” I said. “What’s the trouble?”

  “Where is Eardith? I haven’t seen her since,” she paused, looking bewildered, “since last evening. I think. She’s not in her room. No one’s seen her at all.”

  “Calm down. She spent last night at the cottage. She had things she wanted to see to, she said.”

  “You talked to her this morning, then?”

  “No, she lent me her room. I was here all night.”

  “But Balefire - you went back down for him. You must have seen her then?”

  “Owain sent someone for Balefire,” I said. “Early this morning, I expect.”

  “What servant? Where are they?” She was, if anything, more frantic now.

  “I’ve no idea. Arlais, what’s all this about?”

  She drew a breath. It was like how you take a gulp of wine, when you need a moment to gather yourself, before you give someone some evil tidings.

  “She said we needed to talk. Alone, just the two of us. And that we should meet early, in the garden, before anyone else was about.”

  “And she didn’t show?” That was a little odd, but not something I would have worried over, and I said so. Eardith might have got distracted and lost track of time. She did, sometimes, when she got interested in something.

  “N-no…that is, I don’t know.” Arlais suddenly grew rather pink. “I don’t know what happened. I remember talking to her. And then - I don’t know. I don’t remember. I don’t remember even going to my bed. I mean, I was thinking of going, because it was so hot and loud, and - I think I remember being on the stairs, but… I only woke a glass ago. And no one has seen her. Anywhere.”