Destined for a King (12 page)

Part of her, at least, wished he had chosen her for Calista Thorne.

She thrust those notions aside. It was time to think about her marriage with her head, not her heart. What she really needed was more information, but she wasn't going to get that from her mother, her father, or even Torch. They all had their own aims in this. She needed to talk to someone neutral who was familiar with events that occurred before her birth.

“Calista,” her mother went on. “Remember why I named you.”

“I won't forget, Mother.” She turned for the door. As loath as she was to leave the peace of the stillroom, she wasn't going to find her answers here, either. “Now if you'll excuse me, I have some thinking to do.”

“But—”

She had to give some kind of reply her mother would accept. “Perhaps it's a matter of the man I know compared to the man I don't know.”

The man she knew, indeed. The handsome charmer who weakened her knees with a single seductive grin. Who had known how to wring every last drop of pleasure from her body.
Magnus will never be that to you
.

“What did he do to you?” Her mother shook her head. “It's almost as if he bewitched you.”

“What he did to me was nothing more than what men and women have been doing for centuries. For what it's worth, he wasn't cruel.” Cruel. Now, there was a descriptor that ought to apply to Torch based on rumor, but in the bedchamber, his touch had been singularly gentle. He would have stopped had she asked it of him. Magnus, on the other hand, wasn't one to go easy on any who dared oppose him. All the more reason for her parents to fear his reaction.

All the more reason for her to fear, but her every choice led down a frightening path. She could repudiate Torch and watch him die slowly. Or she could go through with the wedding and condemn herself and her entire family, unless by some miracle Torch prevailed.

But Torch didn't seem to fear Magnus. Nor had Jerrah or Griffin. They had the belief in their own rightness in taking on the king. A belief strong enough to overcome any fear, but again, it was not proof. It wasn't something solid she might hold in her hand or show someone else. It wasn't something she could point to and say, “This is the truth. Josse Vandal still lives, and he is our true king. He's merely been in hiding for the last score of years and five.”

“Any man's hand and body can give you the same pleasure,” her mother said.

“By the Three, Mother.” For a moment she could not go on. It was as if her own mother had picked up a club and slammed it into her stomach. “And here I'd always believed you were true to Father.”

“I have been, my dear. All these years. He and I are proof that two strangers may wed and yet grow to love each other, given time.”

Strangers? Calista had never before heard her parents' marriage was anything but a love match. “You chose him, Mother. That is the story you always told me.”

Mother pressed her lips together. “I did, but that does not mean I knew him, not the way I do after so many years together.”

By all the hells, that reply solved nothing, for her mother had still been given a choice. Yes, and Calista still had one, even if Mother wanted to push her in one direction. “If you'll excuse me, I've much to think on.”

She didn't let her mother protest. She ducked beneath the low-hanging lintel into the yard. Torch's men were training hard, bashing at each other with blunted swords. A few of Blackbriar's men had joined them, while others walked the wall, side by side with brigands. And from about the walls came the ever-present pounding of work on the gates. Along the parapet, platforms had been raised, and above them soared the skeletons of trebuchets.

Shored up defenses, indeed. And they would need them before long. A sennight. No, less. For with Griffin's defeat, nothing stood in the way of Magnus's army.

A cry from behind drew her attention. Torch. His long legs ate up the ground that separated them as if he'd never been injured. The last thing she wanted was to face him now after the talk she'd just had with her mother, but he wasn't alone. Hawk was with him, and in between, as if the two older men were personal guards, Owl trudged, head down.

Nothing for it. She'd have to see what they wanted.

“My lady.” Torch touched a hand to his chest and inclined his head. So formal. So courtly. And where had he learned such manners? Certainly not in the wild and certainly not while burning and plundering the villages of the Freeholds. But she knew where he'd grown up. He'd talked about the Pinnacle. She'd seen it through Jerrah's memories. “Since you healed me, I wondered if you might not see to my squire's hands.”

Hawk nudged the boy. “Show her.”

Not raising his gaze, Owl thrust his hands at her. Weeping blisters covered red, angry skin. Long welts housing scratches cut across the expanse. “Gracious, that must pain you,” she commented, “especially when you try to hold a sword.”

For some reason, what she could see of Owl's face turned bright red. “Yes, m'lady.”

She glanced up at Torch to catch him smirking. Even serious Hawk's lips looked as if they wanted to turn upwards. “Is this some sort of jest?”

“Not at all.” Torch reined in his expression. “The boy can hardly keep up his training with his hands in such a state. I had to cut the gauntlets off him.”

“What have you been into?” she asked the boy. “This looks like the reaction some people have to our roses.”

Instead of replying, Owl turned his head down and away.

“Have you been in the Blackbriar gardens?” She ducked so as to look him in the eye and see if she could detect a lie, but he still refused to raise his eyes to her.

“Answer the lady's question,” Torch said. The lady. Still so formal. Not as if he'd had her in his bed a mere quarter day earlier. A spot on her hip tingled—the very spot where those long fingers of his had bitten into her flesh while he thrust into her. Again and again and again.

“I only thought t' pick a few flowers,” Owl said at last. “Thought Tamsin would like 'em.”

A muffled snort came from one of the men. Calista looked up sharply to catch Hawk schooling his features.

She narrowed her eyes on him. “Did you put him up to this?”

“No, my lady. Never me. Someone else might've.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“The idea was mine,” Torch said. “I merely thought if the boy might convince your maid to…well, to spend a little pleasant time with him in some dark corner of the hayloft, his disposition might improve.”

“What?” Owl glared at his master. “That weren't how it happened a' tall. Kestrel only said t' try t' win Tamsin's favor. He didn't say nothing 'bout no hayloft. Or whatcha call it? Pleasant time?”

Hawk cuffed him on the back of his head. “What do you think
winning a maid's favor
means?”

“I thought I was t' give her flowers and such. Maids like that.”

During this entire exchange, Calista refused to look Torch in the eye. “Maids do indeed like such things,” she said. “But gifts ought not be given with the idea you might get something in return. Especially not gifts like Blackbriar roses. As you've seen, the thorns are vicious, and some people have a reaction to touching the leaves. You, my boy, are one of them. But never fear, I have some salve you can put on them. The blisters ought to heal in a day or two.”

Cheeks flaming ever redder, Owl looked away and mumbled something at the ground.

“What did you say?”

Torch cleared his throat. “I cannot be certain. If you're not used to deciphering his speech, the boy can be difficult to understand under the best of circumstances. But I believe he asked how much of a supply you have.”

“I've plenty, and I can make more if necessary. Why?”

Again it was Torch who supplied an answer. “From what I gather the blisters have afflicted more than his hands.”

No one lurked about the stables when Calista slipped in through a back door. Thank all the gods. She breathed in a lungful of clean-smelling hay and leather and horse, hoping the familiar scents would calm her. Not wanting to consider the habits of a sixteen-year-old boy, she'd left Owl in her mother's care. She'd managed to leave Torch and Hawk behind along with the rest.

Now if only she could slip out of the keep undetected, for she was certain if anyone noticed her leaving, she'd find herself with an escort in no time at all. Not just any escort. No, Torch would insist, and she preferred not having to explain herself to him.

For she'd remembered a time in her childhood, before her body had developed a woman's shape. A tutor had lived with them, a thin grizzle-haired man in brown cottar-spun linsey robes, wearing a curious triangular pendant on a leather thong. He had taught her to read and to write her name, and to add columns of numbers and subtract still other columns of numbers until she could do it in her head.

She'd far preferred the reality of plants beneath her fingers, and the softness of fresh-turned sun-warmed earth. The scents of the stillroom and the satisfaction of a well-weeded bed of herbs. So Brother Tancrid had played a game with her. For every column of numbers she figured properly, he'd tell her a story.

She'd liked the stories enough to untangle the confusing rows of numbers until she could reckon her way through the steward's ledgers. At the time, she hadn't realized he was teaching her history as well, but he had through his tales of the Avestari and the Freeholds and all the varied families of the Eastern Strongholds. He'd told her of the royal family who lived in the gilded palace at Highspring Moor, surrounded by courtiers dressed in rich clothing. She'd recognized his stories as true when, from time to time, a rider dressed in rich velvets and samite and silk would pay a call on her father. Said courtiers bore messages from King Magnus.

Magnus Vandal.

Never once had Master Tancrid mentioned any figure named Josse Vandal or his father Jaffe, only Magnus, who had ascended the throne before Calista's birth, as a young man, strong of arm and stronger of will.

But if anyone could tell her anything about the rest of the Vandals, she trusted her old tutor to know.

When she grew old enough to discern, she realized his rough garb was a sign he'd taken vows as a member of the Acolytes. Their cloister lay within an easy ride of Blackbriar Keep. So once she'd quietly readied her palfrey, eased along the curtain wall, and slipped through a postern gate, she heaved herself into the saddle and set a course for the southwest.

The air outside the confines of the keep was warm and somehow lighter. How freeing to breathe in its freshness, to hear the birdcalls, to feel the warmth of the sunlight through the trees after all the days she'd been cooped up with Torch. Already her heart beat less heavily in her chest. It seemed to patter more easily without the constant worry, without the eyes on her.

And her thoughts felt clearer as well. In no time at all, the cloister's buff walls rose before her eyes, nestled on the far side of a pond behind which rolling hills tumbled green and cheerful on the horizon. In the fervent hope her old tutor would supply her with answers, she cantered the final furlong to the gate.

A wrought-iron barrier, a filigree of grillwork surrounding an inverted triangle in the gate's center, separated the cloister from the outside world. Beyond, in the courtyard, chickens scratched in the dirt, much as they did in Blackbriar's bailey. A goat or two cropped at a patch of grass.

Calista dismounted and pulled on a rope that hung next to the gate. A bell's chime echoed through the space. Presently, a barefoot brother meandered from one of the ocher-colored stone buildings within. “What might I do for you, my child?”

“I've come to seek the counsel of someone more learned than I. Is Brother Tancrid here?”

The breeze swept his rough brown robes about spindly legs. “What is your name?”

“Calista Thorne of Blackbriar Keep. Brother Tancrid was my tutor when I was a girl.”

Taking a step back, he nodded and swung the gate open. “Enter and be at peace.”

Peace was an apt description. As soon as she crossed into the cloister, she felt as if she'd entered a different world. The brother led her into the low building across the compound, the brown hens clucking peevishly as he glided through their midst.

The brother showed her to a tiny chamber, little more than a cell. A single window pierced a wall half as thick as the length of her forearm. No fire blazed on the hearth to burn off the musty scents of humidity and mildew. “Be seated, and I will inform Tancrid he has a visitor. I would offer refreshment, but few come seeking the wisdom of the earth these days.”

She took a seat on a rough-hewn wooden bench. The only other furnishing in the room was a low table. Old scrolls of parchment lay scattered across the surface. She unrolled one to reveal a map denoting the boundaries of each of the Strongholds. At its center, a large star marked the location of Highspring Moor. The silence about her deepened until she could hear the rush of blood in her head.

Before long, the soft padding of bare feet on cold stones ruptured the quiet. Calista turned to find her old master standing in the doorway. His rough brown robes brushed the floor, almost hiding his bare feet. His grizzled hair had lightened to gray and the furrows on his brow were etched deeper than she recalled, but his blue eyes still twinkled with their old curiosity.

As she rose, she resisted the impulse to launch herself at him the way she had as a child.

He stopped a foot away and looked her up and down. “Calista—or rather, I should call you
my lady,
as you are a woman grown.”

At his tone, she nearly curtseyed. “How wonderful to see you again after so long.”

He inclined his head. “I've always been here, never far. You could have called at any time. But tell me, what brings you now. I'd have thought you long since wed and moved away.”

An odd statement, when he'd known so much about the families of the Strongholds and their allegiances. Could he not have known of her betrothal? “My father would see me wed to King Magnus.”

He raised a pair of bushy brows, gone as gray as his hair. “Is that so?” Decorum would have dictated congratulations, yet he offered none, nor did he sound delighted at the news. “And what are your wishes in this matter? For as often as fathers try to decide their daughters' fates for them, the daughters form their own opinions.”

“That is why I have come to see you. I have a decision to make, you see.”

“Indeed.”

He turned to the door and closed it before indicating the bench. She resumed her seat, while he remained on his feet, almost as if their former roles were reversed. As her tutor, he'd always bid her stand before him to recite her lessons or read from one scroll or another, while he remained seated, hands clasped in his lap, and listened with interest, no matter that he must have heard such lessons repeated hundreds of times before. If the repetition vexed him, he never allowed the reaction to show.

“Before I say any more, I'd like your assurance that whatever we discuss does not leave this room.” Torch had not wanted her to repeat his claim even to him in the privacy of her bedchamber, after all. Whatever else he had done or would do, she'd respect his secrecy for now. Unless Brother Tancrid could give her good reason not to trust Torch.

The Acolyte's expression hardened, something she'd never seen before on his face. “I give you my word by my vows before the Three and to the earth beneath our feet that supports and sustains us all. Now, what have you come to ask me?”

“I've come for a story.”

Once again his expression changed, softening into the lines she remembered. A quiet laugh emerged from his lips. “You're a woman grown and still asking after stories. I ought to make you work for it, but I suspect you'll need to get back home before you're missed. As much as I suspect you'll be asking me about a story you haven't yet heard.”

“If it's one you've told me in the past, I'd have remembered it myself.”

He sniffed, the reddened rims of his nostrils flaring for an instant. “You always were asking to hear the same ones over again. I admit a failing there.”

“How so?”

“If I'd done my job properly and aroused your curiosity, you might already possess the knowledge you seek. So come.” He ran his index finger over his upper lip. The yellowed nail stretched past the tip of the digit, long as a hawk's talon. “What story would you like to hear?”

In spite of herself, she glanced around the chamber, as if she might find the walls riddled with holes and an ear pressed to every one. “I need you to tell me the story of Josse Vandal.”

“And where have you heard that name?” He said the words low, as if he, too, feared eavesdroppers. “King Magnus struck that name from existence a score and five years ago when he rose to power. Even to pronounce it in his presence would be deemed treason. Pray you do not make that mistake should you wed him, or I fear he will seek a new bride in less than a year.”

She ought to have expected such an ominous reply, but even so a shiver prickled up and down her spine. “Treason? For a mere name?”

“There are those”—Tancrid's voice fell to a whisper so she had to strain to catch his words—“who would claim Josse Vandal to be our rightful king.”

She nodded. “That much I knew.”

“And who have you been talking to that you even know this name?” The question carried caution and concern for her.

“I prefer not to say. But can you tell me, if one exists who might possibly take the kingship away from Magnus, what sort of proof he might bear to back his claim?”

“Is it not already proof that Magnus fears the name so much he's had it all but erased? There is no written record of it, and it lives only in older men's memories.” Her father, for one, but he was hardly likely to pronounce a name that would brand him a traitor. Not when he was such a staunch king's man. “In another generation, that, too, will be gone, once the last who recall those times have died off.”

“Yes, but should one appear who claims to be Josse Vandal himself, how would I know he's telling the truth? Surely there must have been other pretenders over the years.”

“Not until recently, for Josse would be a younger man. He was a boy of five when Magnus came to the throne. As for proof, there is none, for Magnus has been certain to get rid of all evidence, the same as he's caused the name to be stricken.”

A boy of five. Convenient that no one who'd known the child was like to recognize the man after all these years. But that put Torch at just about the right age for his claim to be true.

“But if, as you say, Magnus has succeeded in erasing the past, how is it you know these things?”

Brother Tancrid clutched at the carved wooden triangle he bore about his neck. But for his index finger, all the other nails were cut short. Calista sifted through her childhood memories, but if he'd ever worn his nails in such a fashion, she'd never noticed. “It is part of the vows we take to become the Sons of Earth.”

“Sons of Earth?” She'd never heard him refer to himself as such.

“Acolyte is a descriptor thrust upon us by the outside world. Within these walls, we take our true name and declare our true purpose. Here we not only seek knowledge of all things, we preserve it, both the permitted and the forbidden.”

She brushed a finger across the map, lingering on the raised ink of the star at its center. “Does your true purpose enable you to share the story?”

“Enables me, yes.” He sniffed. “But be warned. This knowledge is deadly should you repeat it to the wrong person. In this chamber, it is safe, as am I. But you would carry it back into the world, where it might breed war.”

“I think we've established I already know more than I ought.” And war was coming, no matter what. “Please.”

“Perhaps your appearance here and now is the sign that it is time to restore the balance.” He rubbed the space below his nose. “But the story does not begin with Josse Vandal. We must reach further back through the generations and annals of the kings, back to Josse's grandfather. By the official records, he only married once, but depending on whom you ask, he either married at the age of sixteen to a dairy maid who bore the family name of Rathbone or at the age of twenty when he made a far better alliance. Either way, King Magnus and Jaffe Vandal were half brothers. The only open question is which one of them was legitimate.”

Blackbriar Keep glowed in the level rays of the setting sun as Calista made her way back from the cloister. Smoke seemed to cloud her brain after all she'd learned. Tancrid had once more couched his history in terms of a story, but all the unfamiliar names and places and events of ages ago seemed to swirl in her mind until it formed a simmering stew.

And she wasn't much closer to making a decision than she had been. “There can be no solid proof,” Tancrid had said. “If the queen escaped with her young son, they'd have had little time to collect anything from the palace. And the boy would long since have grown to manhood. If he had a claim, he'd have made it and produced whatever proof he had.”

She hadn't told him Torch was the claimant. Not that Torch had any proof, other than a strangely noble sword for one of his apparent upbringing. But he could have taken that during a raid. He could have plundered a corpse. Given his reputation, he'd sooner have done either one of those than carry a carefully preserved blade out of the royal armory.

But the pommel bore a raptor, and the Vandal symbol was an eagle. Or at least according to Tancrid it had been once. Before Magnus came along and cast the entire palace in iron. He'd replaced the eagle on his banners with an arrow-struck crown.

Once again the saying the king was so fond of repeating echoed through her mind:
A swift arrow can fell even an eagle.
That was what he'd done. Their father barely cold in his grave, Magnus had felled his half brother within a sennight of the man's own coronation. He'd paid homage with steel and iron, sharp blades, and cruel bolts.

If the queen had escaped the carnage, the matter was kept a strict secret. Magnus buried three corpses, but whether the bodies possessed any royal blood was still an open question. Of King Jaffe, there had been no doubt. The other two might well have been lowly servants.

“I could ask Torch,” she muttered to herself, “but the most he can tell me are his vague childhood memories and stories passed along from his mother, retold so often they carry the ring of truth.” He might well believe he was the rightful king, but that didn't make it so.

And truth or not, did she wish to ally herself with him? Choose him over Magnus? How could she be certain Torch would rule justly? He had the assurance he was right in what he was doing, nothing more. That wouldn't make him a good ruler, any more than Magnus had been.

Magnus…A man who had attempted to erase the past. Perhaps he'd succeeded on even a grander scale. Tancrid had told her many stories in her youth, but were those stories true history or lies made up and spread by a monarch with something to hide?

“Whatever else Magnus has done,” Tancrid had pointed out, “he must still fear the Vandals. Why else would he claim it treason to mention the name of a boy who was last seen at the age of five?”

Though Calista had never met the king, for the span of a dream she'd inhabited the body of a woman who had experienced the effects of Magnus's rule. Someone on the outside. Not the pampered daughter of one of his supporters. Jerrah had known a life of cruelty due to that man. Could Calista fault the brother for wishing to right such wrongs?

“No one can tell what the future holds,” Tancrid had advised her at the gate. “None but the Three. You must listen with your heart.”

She hadn't even told him her dilemma, and yet he seemed to sense something of its nature.

At the postern gate, she slid from the saddle and led her palfrey beneath the shadow of the wall. The bailey was in an uproar of servants dashing here and there. In the middle of it all, Torch's men stood in ranks, armed, beside their mounts. Torch had hauled himself up on his charger and was shouting orders.

“What in the name of the Three?” she muttered. Had they received word of Magnus marching on them already? Her heart seized at the idea. The defenses weren't even halfway prepared. Torch had ridden in to claim Blackbriar so easily. Magnus would do the same, and he would not show the same mercy to the Brotherhood as Torch had shown the men of Blackbriar.

Overlooked, she led her mare into the dark of the stable.

“My lady!” Rand froze in his tracks, his hand clenched about the reins of still another mount. He was dressed in boiled leather over mail with a bow slung at his back. His saddle held a quiver full of fletched arrows.

“What is afoot?” she asked the guard. “Is the enemy coming?”

Beneath his helm, his brows lowered. “The enemy is within our walls and has been for the past fortnight.” He stepped directly into her path, halting her on the spot. Her mare jerked her head back and snorted. “Tell me it isn't true. Tell me you're not going to wed that upstart.”