The Iron Wars

THREE

“I don’t like it, my lady,” Brienne was saying as she fussed with the pins in Isolla’s hair. “No one will tell me anything, not even the pageboys.”

“If they won’t spill their confidences to you, there is truly something wrong with the world,” Isolla said wryly. “That’s enough, Brienne. I can’t bear it when you fuss.”

“You’ve an impression to make,” Brienne said stubbornly. “Would you have these Hebrians think you were come from some backwater court where the ladies still wore their hair down on their shoulders?”

Isolla smiled. There was no arguing with her maidservant sometimes. Brienne was a minx of a woman, tiny and slim with raven hair and flashing hazel eyes. Her skin possessed the flawless paleness which Isolla had once yearned for, and with a crook of her little finger she could set men staring and stammering. But she was no light-headed giggler. She had sense, and was the closest thing to a friend Isolla had ever had, if she did not count her brother Mark. Mark the King, who loved his sister and who had sent her here to wed a man of whom she knew virtually nothing. A man who was mysteriously absent.

“You don’t think he’s dead, do you?” she asked Brienne.

“No, my lady. Not dead. I ventured to suggest that to one of the cooks and was almost brained by a ladle for my pains. They’re very touchy, the palace staff. No, it’s my belief something happened to him in the battle to retake the city. He was wounded, that’s plain, but no one knows or will say how badly. It’s unsettling. I was in Abrusio as a girl-you know my family hailed from Imerdon-and it was a godless place then, teeming with foreigners and heathens, everything to be had for a price. It’s different now. All that is gone.”

“War is apt to put a dampener on things,” Isolla said, studying herself in the dressing mirror. “That will do, Brienne.”

“No powder, my lady?”

“For the fiftieth time, no. I’ll not have myself painted like a mannikin, even for a king.”

Brienne pursed her lips in disapproval, but said nothing. She was utterly devoted to her mistress, the woman who had befriended the kitchen-wench and raised her to the level of body-servant. And she knew how conscious Isolla was of her plainness, and suffered for her when the other ladies at court whispered behind the backs of their hands. The Princess of Astarac could sit a horse as well as a man, and she had both a man’s bold way of striding on her long coltish legs and a man’s bluntness in speaking. And she read books, books by the hundred it was rumoured. A strange way for a noblewoman to carry on. But Mark the King would have nothing said against his sister and her eccentric ways, and it was even rumoured that he discussed high policy with her in the quiet of her apartments. Discussing politics with a woman! It was unnatural.

Brienne felt the feminine barbs more keenly than her mistress, for they had long ago lost their sting for Isolla. She wanted to see her lady happy, married, with child. All the things that a woman ought to be. But she knew that for Isolla life held more, not merely because she had been born a princess, but simply because of the woman she was.

There was a knock on the door. Isolla rose smoothly from the dressing table and said: “Enter.”

A footman stood there in Hebrian scarlet. He bowed. “My lady, the wizard Golophin asks if he might be admitted.”

“Golophin?” Isolla’s brow creased, then smoothed. “Yes, of course. Show him in.” And when the door had closed again: “Quickly, Brienne. He likes wine. And bring some olives.”

Her maidservant rushed out to the anteroom whilst Isolla composed herself. Golophin, Abeleyn’s mentor and teacher, and, she had heard, his closest friend. Perhaps now she would learn what was ailing the invisible King of Hebrion.

Golophin entered with little ceremony beyond a courtly bow. She was shocked at his appearance, the desiccated look of his flesh. The man was no more than an animated skeleton. The eyes, however, missed nothing.

“My thanks for receiving me so informally, lady,” the old wizard said. He had the deep voice of a singer or orator, music all through it.

They sat and looked at one another for a moment whilst Brienne bustled in with the wine and olives. Golophin’s gaze was frank and open. He’s sizing me up, Isolla thought. He’s wondering how much he can tell me.

The old wizard poured for them both, saluted her with a tilt of his glass and then drank his entire goblet-full at a draught and poured himself another. Isolla sipped at hers, suppressing her surprise.

Golophin smiled. “I am trying to regain my lost strength, lady, and perhaps I am trying to forget how I lost it. Pay me no mind.”

She liked his frankness, and sat without saying a word. She somehow realized that it would be better if she were not to make small talk.

“Are your apartments to your liking?” Golophin asked absently.

She had been given a vast lonely suite that belonged to some long-dead Hebrian queen-Abeleyn’s mother, perhaps. The rooms were hideous with sombre tapestries and hangings and devotional pictures of Saints. The furniture was huge and heavy and dark-wooded. The place felt like a mausoleum. But she nodded and said: “They are very fine.”

“Never liked this place myself,” the wizard admitted. “Abeleyn’s mother Bellona was a fine woman, but a bit austere. I see you’ve pulled the hangings away from the balconies. That’s good. Lets in what sun there is in this black month of the year.” He threw back another glass of the wine. Isolla thought privately that it was not the third or even the fourth glass he’d had that morning.

“I remember you as a child,” he said. “A patient little creature. Abeleyn liked you, but had the cruelty of all small boys. I hope you do not hold it against him.”

“Of course not,” she said, rather coldly.

He smiled. “You have a head on your shoulders, lady, or so I am told. That is why I am here. Were you another tinsel-brained princess, you’d be kept in the dark and told whatever we thought you’d believe. But I have a feeling that will not suffice. That is why I am willing to do what I am about to do.”

Ah, she thought, and straightened. “Brienne, leave us.”

Her maidservant exited the room with a piteous look. Golophin rose from his chair and paced about the floor like some huge cadaverous bat, his mantle billowing out behind him. No-he was more of a raptor, a starved falcon, perhaps. Even his movements were as quick and economical as a bird’s, despite the wine he’d quaffed.

He went to the far wall, pulled back the hideous tapestry that hung there and pressed hard on the stone. There was a click, and a gap appeared, rapidly broadening into a low doorway.

Isolla sucked in her breath. “Magic.”

He laughed. “No. Engineering. The palace is riddled with hidden doors and secret passageways. Now you must come with me.”

She hesitated. She did not like the look of the hole he was gesturing at. It might lead anywhere. Was there some kind of plot afoot?

“Trust me,” Golophin said gently. And then she saw the suffering in his eyes. There was a grief there that he held bottled up as tightly as a genie of eastern myth. Despite herself, she rose and joined him at the secret door.

“I am going to take you to meet your betrothed,” the wizard said, and led her into the darkness.

Isolla had seen bale-fire before, as a child. A ball of it hovered above Golophin’s head in the dark and lit the way for them. But it was a guttering thing, like a candle almost burnt down to the wick. She suddenly realized that the old mage was damaged in some way-something had stolen away his strength and made him into a caricature of what he had once been. It was the war, she guessed. It had drained him somehow.

The passage they trod was smoothly made out of jointed stone, and it rose and wound like the coils of a snake. There were other doors off its sides, leading to other rooms in the palace, Isolla supposed. She knew she, a foreigner, was being trusted with some of the secrets of the palace. But then she’d be Hebrion’s queen soon enough anyway.

They halted. The bale-fire went out and there was a grating of stone. She followed the wizard’s lean back through another low door like the one in her own chambers, and found herself in a high-ceilinged room that was almost totally dark. A rack of tall candles fluttered by the side of a massively ornate four-poster bed, and she could make out weapons on the walls gleaming in the gloom. Maps and books and more of the dull hangings. A bedstand with jug and ewer of silver. And everywhere engraved or embossed, the Hebrian Royal arms. She was in the King’s chambers.

“Speak normally. No whispers,” Golophin told her. “He is far away, but not gone, not entirely. It may be that a new voice will reach him as a familiar one might not.”

“What-?” But Golophin took her arm and led her to the side of the huge bed.

The King. Her horrified eyes took in what was left of him at a glance, and her hand flew to her mouth. This thing was to be her husband.

Golophin was watching her. She sensed a protective anger in him that was not very far from the surface. She brought her hand down from her face and touched Abeleyn’s where it lay on the coverlet.

His features she recognized: the dark hair as thick as ever despite the threads of grey. The face she had known as sun-brown was as pallid as the sheets behind it. She was surprised to feel grief, not for herself who was to be joined to this wreck of a man, but for Abeleyn, the high-spirited boy she had known who had pulled her hair and said cruel things about her nose. He had not deserved to end up like this.

“What was it?” she asked, uncomfortably aware of Golophin’s hawk-like scrutiny.

“A shell. One of our own, God help us, in the moment when the battle was won. I was able to seal the stumps, but I had already exhausted myself in the fighting and could do nothing more. It would take a great work of theurgy to heal him completely, something I’m not sure I would be capable of even if I were at my full strength. And so he lies here, his mind in some fathomless limbo I cannot reach. We have made discreet enquiries for Mind-rhymers, but those who were not murdered under Sastro di Carrera’s regime fled to the ends of the earth. The Dweomer cannot help Abeleyn. His own will must pull him through, and whatever human warmth we can give.” Here he glared at Isolla as if he dared her to contradict him.

But she was not so easily cowed. She released the unconscious King’s hand and faced the old mage squarely. “I take it there will be no wedding until the King is brought to himself again.”

“Yes. But there will be a wedding. The country needs it. We may have slaughtered Carrera’s retainers and expelled the surviving Knights Militant, but there are still ambitious men in Hebrion who would stoop to seize a crown if they saw it fall.”

“You cannot fool the world for ever, Golophin. The truth will out, in the end.”

“I know. But we have to try. This man has greatness in him. I will not abandon him to rot!”

He loves him, she thought. He truly does. And she warmed to the fierce old man. She had always responded to lost causes, had always sided with the underdog. Perhaps because it was how she had always seen herself.

“So you brought me here to join your little conspiracy. Who else knows the true condition of the King?”

“Admiral Rovero, General Mercado, and perhaps three or four of the palace servants whom I trust.”

“The whole city is in mourning.”

“I had to put out a bulletin on the King’s health. He is dangerously ill, but not dying. That is the official line.”

“How long do you think you can keep the hounds leashed?”

“A few weeks, maybe a couple of months. Rovero and Mercado have the army and the fleet firmly under control, and in any case Hebrion’s soldiers and sailors fairly worship Abeleyn. No, as always, it is the court we must worry about. And that, my dear, is where you come in.”

“I see. So I am to make reassuring noises about the palace.”

“Yes. Are you willing?”

She looked down at the wrecked King again, and felt an absurd urge to ruffle the dark hair on the pillow. “I am willing. My brother would wish it so anyway.”

“Good. I did not read your character wrong.”

“If you had, Golophin, what would have become of me?”

The old man grinned wolfishly. “This palace would have become your prison.”

For the lady Jemilla, the palace had indeed come to seem like a prison. Ever since the retaking of the city she had been shepherded and watched and guarded like some prisoner of war. And she had not seen Abeleyn once in all that time. That old devil Golophin was always there to put her off. The King was too ill to see anyone but his senior ministers, he said. But the rumours were running like wildfire about the palace: that Abeleyn was dead and already buried, that he was too horribly scarred to see the light of day, that his injuries had turned him into an imbecile. In any case, the triumvirate of Rovero, Mercado and Golophin-always Golophin-were running Abrusio as though they wore crowns themselves. It galled her beyond measure that she, who bore the King’s heir, should be put off and shuffled about as though she were some troublesome trull whose swelling belly could be ignored. And then, worst of all, the Princess of Astarac had arrived with due state to be married to the father of Jemilla’s child. Or to the man everyone thought was the father, it made no odds-not now.

Things were slipping through her grasp with every passing day. This wedding must not happen. Her child must be recognized as the rightful heir. And if Abeleyn were as near death as everyone supposed, then surely it made sense to secure the succession. Couldn’t they see that? Or must they be made to see it?

She lay naked on the wide bed in her suite. The short day was almost over and the room was dark but for the blaze of a fire in the huge hearth that dominated one wall. At least they had quartered her in the palace. That was something. She regarded her body in the firelight, running her hands up and down it as a man might with a horse he meant to buy. The swelling was visible now, a bulge that marred the otherwise perfect symmetry of her shape. She frowned at it. Childbirth. Such a messy, painful affair. Even messier if one sought to avoid it. She remembered the blood and her own shrieking the night she rid herself of Richard Hawkwood’s first child. Nothing could be worse than that.

Her breasts were filling out. She cupped them, ran her slender fingers down her abdomen to where the hair sprang in ebony curls at her crotch. She stroked herself there absently, thinking. She thought of her body as an instrument, a tool to be utilized with the utmost efficiency. It was her key to a better life, this flesh and all that it contained.

She sprang up, pulled round her shoulders a robe of Nalbenic silk and padded barefoot to the door. A moment to gather herself, to rehearse her words, and then she yanked open the heavy portal in a rush.

“Quickly, quickly-you there!”

There were two guards, not one. She must have caught them as they were changing shifts. It made her hesitate, but only for the fraction of a second.

“There’s something in my room-a rat. You must come and look!”

The two soldiers were members of the Abrusio garrison, veterans of the battle to retake the city. They were rough, untutored swordsmen who had not been told why they were to guard the lady Jemilla’s door, only that her every move was to be reported direct to General Mercado. They hung back, and one said: “I’ll get your lady’s maidservant.”

“No, no, you fools. She can’t abide rats any more than I can. Get in there and kill it for me, for God’s sake. Are you men at all?”

Jemilla was beautifully unkempt, one shoulder gleaming pale as ivory above the robe she clutched together at her breasts. The two soldiers looked at one another, and one shrugged. They marched into her chambers.

Jemilla followed them, shutting the door behind her. The soldiers poked under the bed, along the wall hangings.

“I believe it’s gone, lady,” one of them said, and then said no more but simply stared. Jemilla had dropped her robe and was standing incandescently nude before them, touching herself, her body undulating like a willow in a breeze.

“It’s been so long,” she said. “Won’t you please help me?”

“Lady-” one of the men said hoarsely. He held out a hand as if to ward her off.

“Oh, please. Do this thing for me, just this once.” She approached them as they stood, thunderstruck. “Please, soldiers. Just this once. It’s been so long, and no one will ever know.”

The men’s eyes met for the briefest moment, and then they moved in on her like wolves on a lamb.