Rebel's Cage (Book 4) (20 page)

Robert thanked the monk and waited for him to leave before pulling on his shirt and flashing Aiden one of those famous smiles. ‘I was about to come looking for you. We have to talk.’

Robert Douglas had always been a force not easily refused. At forty-three, it seemed his energy, his passion and determination were never to age; his looks were those of a man ten years younger. He still had the power to dominate any gathering by virtue of his personality, his confidence, his smile and dry humour, but in a room as small as this, the walls strained to contain him.

But Deverin was right – Robert
had
changed over the last eight years.

‘How are Murdoch and the others?’

‘They’re all well, off to their winter homes as usual.’

‘How did you get injured?’

‘It’s nothing,’ Robert waved a hand, pushing his arms through his jacket sleeves. ‘Just a brief argument with some of Kenrick’s men.’

‘Oh? In the same place where Selar wounded you?’

Robert finished getting dressed and failed to reply.

‘By my count, that’s the fourth time you’ve been wounded in the same place.’

‘It happens.’

‘Does it? I wouldn’t know.’ Aiden swallowed down the fear that rose in him again and tried not to sound like a petulant
fishwife. ‘Are you … dropping your guard on that side? Or favouring it? There must be some reason for …’

When Robert didn’t reply, Aiden said nothing until Robert had no choice but to meet his gaze. ‘You don’t make it very easy for me, do you?’

Robert spread his hands. ‘What do you want me to say? I got injured. It doesn’t matter.’

‘It matters to
me.’

With half a smile, Robert turned to the fire and took a copper pot away from the heat. ‘But it doesn’t matter to me. Not in the long run. I’m still here, aren’t I? Still alive? I can still fight. Does it really matter if I get injured now and then?’

‘I’m not going to win this one, am I?’

‘Stop worrying, Bishop.’ Robert turned back to him, taking his hand and putting a warm mug into it. ‘I made some brew. Drink. The morning will seem the better for it.’

Aiden gave up. When Robert turned back to the desk, he deliberately changed the subject. ‘Did you find everything?’ Aiden had laid out the letters and other documents last night after Robert had fallen asleep. ‘Are there any problems I should know about?’

‘No, you’ve done your usual excellent job, Bishop.’ Robert pulled a single sheet of paper from the piles, unfolding it slowly between distracted fingers. ‘You manage my investments as well as any Guildesman could.’

Aiden made a rude noise and Robert smirked in response.

‘Take that as a compliment, Bishop. It appears my finances will keep us for another year.’

Another year? Aiden successfully suppressed his reaction to that. Robert had lost his lands at Dunlorn and elsewhere, but he had managed to rescue his family’s possessions outside of Lusara, which, for reasons Aiden had never been able to fathom, he left in the hands of a renegade Bishop who knew too little about finance to do more than hold on to what he’d started with. However, for their purposes, it appeared to be enough.

But another year? Could Lusara last that long? Could Robert?

He turned towards the window where the drapes were open to allow in the meagre light. As casually as he could, he said, ‘And the letters? Anything I should know about?’

‘Nothing too exciting, I’m afraid – though I haven’t got to the bottom of them yet. I haven’t seen one from Patric.’

‘No. But that might just mean that he’s already on his way back.’

‘Aye, it might. We can only hope. What’s this?’

Aiden turned to find him turning a sealed letter over and over in his hands.

‘Oh, that arrived two, no, three days ago. I don’t know who it’s from.’

Robert went to open it, but then stopped himself, as though he didn’t want to get distracted. Instead, he took the sheet he’d picked up earlier and handed it to Aiden without fanfare. ‘Read that.’

Frowning, Aiden took it, read it, stared at the words with eyes that couldn’t absorb such wild news.

The Guilde … reversing laws … sorcery? This had to be some sort of joke!

‘I take it,’ Robert said quietly, ‘that you’d not heard?’

‘No! But are you sure it’s true?’

‘That’s an official notice I took from a Guildehall.’

Aiden read the paper a second time. Impossible – and yet, there they were. ‘On the surface, it looks like a piece of insanity.’

‘How do you think Brome will handle it?’ Robert wandered to the fireplace.

‘Brome hasn’t been well over the last year.’ With abrupt disgust, Aiden tossed the notice onto his desk. ‘He’ll probably bluster – but the chances of him putting up any kind of opposition are very slim indeed. He’ll either do it, or he’ll die and some other fool will do it in his place. Either way—’

He came to a halt when he realised Robert was laughing softly.

‘What?’

‘Oh, Bishop. So many years and I thought I’d successfully convinced you. If I have failed here, what hope have I left?’

‘What are you talking about?’ Robert’s laughter dried up, leaving behind a flash of pain and disappointment. ‘Am I missing something?’

‘So much, and yet, nothing at all,’ Robert replied obliquely. ‘Are you really so horrified that, after almost six hundred years, my kind are no longer anathema, at least according to the Guilde? That it will no longer be legal to hunt us down like vermin? To burn us alive at the stake? Is that really so terrible? If it is, I wonder why you’ve been writing books about just such things for the last eight years.’

Aiden grunted, seeing all too well. ‘And I suppose you see nothing wrong in the peremptory and illegal manner in which centuries-old laws are being overturned without regard to the proper process and the will of the people.’

Robert raised his eyebrows in disbelief this time. ‘The will of which people?
My
people, the Salti Pazar –
sorcerers
– get murdered and you talk about proper process? By the gods, Bishop! Where has your sense of justice gone?’

‘Apparently the same place as yours.’ Aiden turned to the sideboard and pulled the stopper out of the flask of ale he kept there for Robert’s visits. He poured out two cups and handed one to the Duke. ‘There is a reason things are done the way they are. Those laws – and hundreds of others – are there to protect the people. Surely you can appreciate that.’

‘Certainly,’ Robert’s voice came back with that same hard edge. ‘But Osbert has just given us something we’ve all been working towards for years, you more than anyone else. This is a free gift. According to you, Brome will do the same. So what if the change isn’t entirely legal? Does it matter? Surely the death of oppression is good in any form.’

‘By the gods, man, are you blind all of a sudden?’ Aiden snapped, determined to pound sense into him. ‘You know full well the reason the people trust the Guilde and Church is because of those same laws, because there is that process to be followed, because that process protects them against upstarts and usurpers. If those laws can be changed like that,’ he clicked his fingers, ‘what other laws will soon follow? The people of Lusara have already lost faith in the Crown. They will also now
lose faith in both Guilde and Church – and where will that leave them? Without an anchor and without hope. How then will they view sorcery? The gift from the gods you claim it to be?’

Robert stared at him for a moment, then, abruptly, he looked away. ‘I never said that. And those laws didn’t protect them against Selar.’ He paced away a little, reaching the desk and pausing there, one finger tracing the edge of the notice, his stance rigid and uncompromising. ‘You don’t understand what it’s like to be born with something that you’re told is inherently wrong, to find the pillar establishments legislate against something you have no choice in being.’ He paused, lifting his head enough for Aiden to see a glitter of hatred in those green eyes. ‘Even if I’d never once used my
gifts,
I would still be called evil, still executed. You have written your books because to you, there are intellectual questions to be answered, an imbalance of understanding about sorcery, and you seek to redress that. For me, on the inside, losing these laws is something to rejoice in – regardless of how much a trap they are. I have spent so much time trying to release Lusara from a much lesser tyranny, all at the expense of the Salti, who have nobody to champion their cause. Perhaps if I had paid more attention to it then …’

Robert didn’t finish that thought. Instead he turned, his expression unreadable. ‘So you see, proper process means little to me and to others born like me. No matter Osbert’s reasons for doing this, no matter if the laws are overturned in six months – for
this
time, I am not an abomination, and my people, however trapped in history they may be, are, for a moment, honestly free. Can you understand that much, Bishop?’

He could understand – and was touched. He had rarely heard Robert speak so eloquently and so freely. He offered up a smile of understanding. When Robert gave him one of his own in reply, Aiden sipped his ale and said, ‘What do you mean by it being a trap?’

Robert’s eyes hardened. ‘Kenrick or Nash have obviously issued an instruction to Osbert, and probably Brome. I have no
doubt that the whole thing is designed to draw Salti out into the open.’

Aiden swallowed loudly, choosing his words carefully. ‘Should we be sending a warning to the Enclave?’

‘If I can see it, they will.’

‘Even so, we need to consider how the people are going to react to this. Up until what, about sixteen years ago, sorcery was little more than a myth. I would think the people are very confused about the entire issue.’

Robert nodded absently as he turned his attention to the sealed letter in his hands, forgotten until now. He broke the wax and unfolded the paper, reading quickly. For a moment, he froze.

Fathomless green eyes gave nothing away, though something of an old vulnerability filtered through the unguarded gaze.

‘What is it?’ Aiden frowned, worried.

Robert blinked and his gaze cleared a little. He took a breath and continued, as though nothing had happened, ‘Confused? Yes, I suppose they would be.’ He slipped the folded letter inside his jacket, then turned back to Aiden with a face that held no expression at all. ‘I heard Deverin and Payne have arrived. Owen is expected this morning some time. Could you send word for them to come here, discreetly? This afternoon? I … need to go out for a while.’

‘Of course. They’ve been waiting for such a—’

‘So have we all.’ Robert’s gaze fractured then, drifting once more out of the window to rest on some place far in the distance. Perhaps he was looking at and imagining that same border, that same boundary between one state of being and another.

And then he was gone.

*

It was the strangest feeling, riding through the snow, riding back into the past. As the white-sheathed landscape was draped by fresh veils of falling flakes, Robert could almost imagine that same powerful sorcery was pushing him back through the years, to the last time he’d seen David Maclean, one of his most influential, and yet powerless enemies.

Micah’s father.

There had once been a time when he’d spent hours framing words he could use on the man, to change his mind, to convince him that in taking a seat on Selar’s Council, Robert had not been committing an act of treason against his people. He’d seen the sorrow in Micah’s eyes, understood how hard it was for him to reconcile the father he loved and the friend he believed in. He’d stood by and watched that huge family almost split apart from taking sides in an argument that should never have happened in the first place.

Long after he left St Julian’s, he rode down into a still valley where a dozen winter houses sat close by each other for company. A tiny church stood to the east of the hamlet and he stopped only when he reached the shadows of its tower.

He didn’t pause. Instead, he ignored the pulling of his wound and swung down from the horse, tying it to a post. With his feet crunching into iced snow, he entered the churchyard.

Rough grey stones stood up from the white ground in eager rows, small fences between this world and the next. He walked without direction and yet, unerringly, his feet took him to the right place, where fresh-turned earth scorched the placid ground, where the dead warmth was almost visible.

‘Good morning, Your Grace.’

Robert didn’t turn, but there was a thread of the familiar in that voice. He let out a sigh and wished he hadn’t. ‘When did it happen?’

Footsteps came towards him, carefully, stopping at his side. ‘Four days ago. The end itself was swift.’

‘He’d been ill for a long time, hadn’t he?’

‘Aye, for the last year. He … hated it.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘We know.’

‘Do you?’ Robert turned then, facing the man who stood there. Light blue eyes, some fine lines around them, wavy red hair and the shadow of freckles. Tall, fit, tanned. A gaze open with truth and without fear.

So like Micah.

‘I’m Durrill Maclean, Your Grace. Next youngest after Micah.’

‘Yes,’ Robert murmured, ‘I remember.’ And he did, perhaps too well. ‘How is your mother?’

‘Sad, but well enough, considering.’

‘And your brothers? Sisters? Is there anything I can do?’

A frail but genuine smile lit the familiar and yet different face. ‘Thank you, Your Grace, but no. All that could be done is done. My father died as he had lived. He … he spoke of you, on his last night.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Apologies seemed all he could offer now. After all, the Maclean family had been settled and prosperous once, until he had revealed himself as a sorcerer, until he had waged war against his own King. Then, by deed of proximity, by virtue of the fact that his closest friend was this man’s brother, the entire family had been forced to flee for fear of reprisal. They’d settled here, buying a modest farm with the small resources they’d brought with them. They’d done well, but nothing would replace what they had lost.

Just like so many others.

‘He could never forgive you.’