Bonds of Vengeance (43 page)

As he approached the horse he realized that there was something on his saddle, glittering in the moonlight that shone through the bare limbs of the trees. Slowing, he glanced around, but saw no one. He walked cautiously to the beast and looked more closely at what lay on the saddle. It was a dagger, the blade of which had been broken in two. Instinctively he reached for his own blade, but it was still there. This one must have belonged to the Qirsi.

There was a message here, he felt certain. This, it seemed, was a day of messages. But he couldn’t say what this one meant. He knew only that he wanted to be back in his castle, where, at least for this night, he would be safe.

Only when the duke was gone, his lumbering footsteps no longer echoing through her ship, did Jastanne allow herself to slump back in her chair, squeezing her eyes shut.

“Demons and fire!” she muttered, rubbing her brow with her thumb and forefinger.

There could be no doubt but that Kearney’s message was genuine. She had been telling Aindreas the truth when she said that even chancellors in the Weaver’s movement didn’t know all that was done in his name, but she had no doubt that the Weaver’s will had been behind Brienne’s death. Not that he had told her so, or that she had asked. She merely understood him, as she did the sea. She could read his thoughts as she could currents, his moods like she could the sky. And she knew that in his own way the Weaver was as powerful as Amon’s Ocean. She would no more defy him than she would steer her vessel into a storm. In the depths of his magic she glimpsed her own future, and a brilliant future it was. His wisdom and strength would sustain her and carry her to glory, and if he asked it of her, she would give all to him.

Right now, serving him meant learning all she could of this traitor disgracing herself in Kearney’s prison tower. What kind of a woman would betray her people this way? What means had they used to compel her confession? Certainly mere torture shouldn’t have been enough. True, it had been sufficient for Qerle, the cloth merchant Aindreas had used to find Jastanne. Qerle, however, was but a courier in the movement. He was no one.

But this woman, if the missive from the king was to be believed, had a hand in Lady Brienne’s death. She had to be someone of importance, perhaps another of the Weaver’s chancellors. In which case, she should have been willing to die for the movement. She should have been capable of withstanding all forms of torture and coercion.

Had Jastanne been there with her, she would have shattered her skull like a clay bowl. Traitors to the cause deserved no better.

She stood and began to undress. It was growing late and there was a chance the Weaver would come to her tonight, walking like a god in her dreams. Jastanne slept unclothed for him. She thought of it as an offering of sorts, a way of showing him that she was devoted to him and to his movement, a way of telling him that her mind and body were his.

And he had responded by making her a chancellor, and so much more.

For the Weaver had plans for her, important plans. Only half a turn before he had ordered Jastanne to the western waters. Again, there had been some truth in what she told the duke. She had dreamed that he would come. But her return to the Scabbard had been no coincidence.

“It is all coming together,” the Weaver had told her that night, caressing her body with his mind. “Soon, very soon, we will begin the final battle with the Eandi. And you will be there when I reveal myself. You will be there to share my victory.”

His caresses had grown more urgent then, more powerful, until she cried out in her sleep with pleasure and desire.

She was to be his queen. He hadn’t said so, not yet. But she knew from the way he touched her. She knew him as she did the sea. He would return to her soon, to tell her how she could serve him next, and to touch her again.

It was yet another measure of the Weaver’s power and of the strength of the movement he commanded that Jastanne could exact her revenge against the traitor without even leaving port. She climbed into bed, already anticipating the Weaver’s caresses. Tonight, perhaps. Or tomorrow. No later than that. He would appear before her, framed against the brilliant sun, and he would speak to her again of his plans, of the future he was shaping for them all. And she would tell him then of the message from Kearney, trusting him to strike at the woman for her, for all Qirsi. He would know who this traitor was. He would know how to reach her. And he would make her pay dearly for her treachery.

Chapter
Seventeen

Galdasten, Eibithar

It was always the same dream. He was in Audun’s Castle in the City of Kings, standing at the front of the fortress’s magnificent great hall, with the Oaken Throne just behind him. All the dukes, thanes, earls, and barons of Eibithar sat before him, along with the queen of Sanbira, the king of Caerisse, the archduke of Wethyrn, and many nobles he didn’t recognize. All had come, he knew, for his investiture. Renald of Galdasten, the first king of Eibithar to come from the house of eagles in nearly a century. Above them all flew the pennons of all the houses of the realm, led by the bronze, black, and yellow of Galdasten, and beside him, seated in a smaller version of his own great throne, sat Elspeth, looking resplendent in a red velvet gown. His three boys stood beside her, all of them dressed as young soldiers, in the colors of their house with golden hilted swords on their belts.

A prelate he didn’t recognize stood with him, holding the jeweled golden circlet that was to go on Renald’s brow. But before the man could give him the crown, the ceremony was interrupted by a disturbance at the rear of the hall. Everyone stood, so that Renald, standing farthest from the noise, could not see. A woman screamed, then several more, and in a moment the hall was in turmoil. The would-be king strained to get a glimpse of what was causing such panic, but though the tumult seemed to be drawing nearer, he still could see nothing.

Beside him, Elspeth stood, calmly bowed to him, and walked away, leading their sons out of the hall through a small door that had escaped Renald’s notice until then. He called to her, even took a step as if to follow. But before he could, the horde before him finally parted revealing a horror beyond his imagining. A man was striding toward him, a Qirsi. The stranger’s face was flushed and bathed in sweat, and his
limbs were covered with swollen red welts—bites from vermin. The front of his shirt was stained with vomit and blood and in each hand he held a mouse. Renald wanted desperately to flee, to follow his wife through the doorway, but his feet would not move. And as the man stopped before him, laughing so that his foul, hot breath blasted the duke’s face, he held out the rodents he carried, crushing their fur against Renald’s face.

Always he woke then, gasping for air, his bedding damp with his own sweat, his stomach knotted like wet rope. He had never spoken of the dream with anyone. He hardly needed to. No one who knew the recent history of the house of Galdasten could have any doubt as to whence this vision had come. It had been but eight years since the madman brought the pestilence to Kell’s Feast, killing the old duke and his family, and so many other men and women of the dukedom that it almost defied comprehension.

Before that growing season, Renald had long lamented the cruelty of his fate. He was far more clever than his older cousin. Indeed, he thought himself the most intelligent and most capable among all the grandchildren of Wistel the Eleventh. But while Kell, as the eldest son of Wistel the Twelfth, could lay claim to the house and its lofty position in the Order of Ascension, Renald, the eldest son of the second brother, was relegated to the small castle in Lynde and a thaneship that led nowhere. In the wake of the tragedy, however, if it could be called that, he began to see that the gods had far greater plans for him and his line than he had ever imagined. It was almost enough to turn him from Ean’s Path, back to the Old Faith.

Yet the vision continued to haunt his dreams, as if warning him against taking too much pleasure in his good fortune. This was the fourth night in Osya’s waxing alone that he had been tormented by the dream, and he had begun to suffer for lack of sleep.

For several years he had just accepted the dream as a burden he had to bear as leader of his house, the cost of his dukedom, as it were. It had never occurred to him to question it beyond that. But as word of the Qirsi conspiracy spread through the Forelands, and, in particular, after the murder of Lady Brienne of Kentigern and the subsequent defection of Aindreas’s first minister, Renald had started to consider the dream anew. The commoner who brought the pestilence to Galdasten had been Eandi, not Qirsi. No one in Eibithar had ever suggested that the incident had been anything more than an act of insanity and
grief—the man in question, it seemed, had lost his child to the pestilence five years before, and his wife to some other illness a few years after that. This was no mask for an assassination plot; it was not an attempt to disrupt the Order of Ascension, as Brienne’s murder might have been. It was just what it seemed: the desperate, foolish act of a crazed man.

So why was the diseased man in his vision a white-hair? Was this some strange trick of his mind born of his fears of the conspiracy, fears he was certain he shared with every Eandi noble in the land? He would have liked to think so, but the vision hadn’t changed at all since he first dreamed it during the harvest of 872, and he had known nothing of the conspiracy in his first years as duke. For all he knew, it hadn’t even existed then.

Once more, he found himself wondering if the dream might be a warning. But of what? He had ambitions for the throne—were the gods telling him to abandon them? Or were they merely telling him that only the conspiracy could keep him from Audun’s Castle, that the real threat to his desires came not from Javan and Kearney, but from the Qirsi?

In recent turns, he had settled on this interpretation, only to see the frequency of the visions increase. Again he found himself lying awake nights, questioning the meaning of this. He briefly considered making his way to the Sanctuary of Amon at the eastern end of the city to ask the priestess there what it might mean. But a duke in Eibithar didn’t reveal to anyone the terrors preying on his mind, nor did he turn to the sanctuaries in times of trouble. If the prelate couldn’t help him—and dreams were hardly the province of the cloisters—no man or woman of the gods could.

Instead, Renald endured his visions alone. Elspeth would have thought him a weak fool for allowing mere dreams to unman him, and there was no other person in the castle in whom the duke placed enough trust to confide such a thing. On this night, as on so many that had come before, the duke rose from his bed and threw on his clothes, though the eastern sky had yet to brighten. He knew that there was no sleeping after the vision came, and he thought it better to occupy his mind with other things rather than lie in bed seeing the Qirsi’s face time and again.

Two soldiers stood just outside his bedchamber, two who were often there when the duke emerged from the room in the darkness of night.
They had the good sense not to comment on his inability to sleep, silently bowing to him instead, and falling in step behind him as he led them to his ducal chambers.

The room was cold when he stepped inside, and one of the guards hurried to the hearth to light a fire.

“Leave it,” the duke said.

“But, my lord—”

“Bring me some tea. That will be warmth enough.”

The man bowed again. “Yes, my lord.”

In a moment he was alone. The guards had left one of their torches, which cast great, shifting shadows on the chamber walls. Renald lit a lamp on his writing table and a second on the mantle above the hearth. Then he retrieved the missive from Kearney that had arrived two days before, and sat at the table.

The message was quite typical of the Glyndwr king—forthright but courteous, intelligently written and free of pretense. It seemed he had proof of Lord Tavis’s innocence in the murder of Aindreas’s daughter, and, perhaps more to the point, evidence as well of Qirsi involvement in the killing, which he now referred to as an assassination. Renald could only imagine how these tidings would be received in Kentigern.

The king went on to request that Renald make the journey to the City of Kings as soon as weather in the north permitted. With the snows giving way to the milder days and warmer winds of the planting, that time had already come. Still, the duke had made no plans to ride southward, nor did he expect to anytime soon.

He actually liked Kearney, and had been impressed with the king’s father the one time they had occasion to meet. Galdasten and Glyndwr had long been on good terms, and why shouldn’t they be? Renald’s house was ranked second among the five majors in the Order of Ascension; Glyndwr was fifth. They had never truly been rivals and with one on the north shore, buffeted by winds from Amon’s Ocean, and the other perched in the highlands, they had never had cause for any sort of land dispute. Renald even believed that Kearney might make a good king, given the chance to rule for several more years.