The King's Name (29 page)

I walked up through the usual bustle of the camp. Rowanna and Atha were sitting together by Rowanna's tent. I bowed to them as I passed. When I came to Urdo's tent I scratched at the flap, drew back the curtain, and went straight in.

Garah and ap Erbin were sitting just inside. I recognized her at once, though she was dressed as the lowest

sort of servant, and absolutely filthy. Under the dirt on her face were marks of bruises.

Her eyes were red-rimmed as if she had been weeping. She looked up when she saw me, but she could barely manage a smile. "I tried to get her to come, but she just wouldn't," she said.

"What?" I blinked. "Who? Have you come alone all the way from Bregheda?"

Now it was her turn to look at me stupidly. "Bregheda? I came from there almost a month ago, as soon as

Urdo sent for me, just in time to be captured with Caer Tanaga. I escaped from the city last night."

"From the city?" I echoed. "Are you all right? Is that your disguise?" I sat down and let the curtain fall closed, leaving just one bar of sunlight across the floor of the tent.

"Disguise?" She looked down at herself. "Oh, no, this is Morthu's idea of how to treat people as they deserve.

He's been having me scrub floors for the temerity of pretending to be queen of Bregheda, as he put it. I admit I

did spend a little while thinking of what Glyn would do to him for that, and how the muster of Bregheda, such as it is, would avenge the insult, and how you would, Sulien. But he's quite right that my parents are farmers and I used to be a groom, and I have scrubbed plenty of floors before and it just isn't as awful as Morthu imagines. It doesn't do any good to stay angry about that sort of thing. And it did give me a chance to move about, rather than being stuck in the one room like the others. Elenn tried to stop him, but by then I'd realized it made more sense to do it and I told her so. That's the least of what he's been doing anyway. It doesn't matter."

"It does matter," I said, ablaze with indignation. I wished I'd killed Morthu when I'd had the chance.

"I'm sure Alswith has some clothes she can lend you," ap Erbin said, a little tentatively.

"I don't care about clothes!" Garah said, so loudly that it was startling, almost a shout. "How long will Urdo be?"

"It depends whether he can leave the talks now," I said. "If he can't then he might be an hour or so yet.

Please tell me, what's been happening? Who wouldn't come?"

"Elenn. She refused to come with me. Morthu and Amala have been telling her lies and she believes them and she wouldn't come out."

"Amala?" I said, amazed.

"She was brought in a while ago, with some idiot Narla-henan prince. She was treated well, and Elenn has had to entertain them. You know what she's like, ever gracious, doing her duty. She's doing that still, even though the city has been captured. She and Amala have been
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condescending to each other. Amala told her in my hearing that Urdo was treating you as his wife, letting your mother embrace him as family and leading you in to dinner."

My heart sank and I tried to speak, but my voice caught in my throat, so Garah went on talking.

"I told Elenn afterward that it was a nonsensical lie, as if you'd ever do anything like that. I told her everything I could think of about how honorable you are and how you don't mean her any harm and how you would never do it, but she believed Amala, because it fitted with what Morthu had been saying, and you know how Morthu convinces people. Elenn said Amala had never been known to lie. I don't know why she was, either. I know she's Marchel's mother, but I would never have thought of her as being on Morthu's side."

"It isn't like her," ap Erbin said.

I took a deep breath and spoke as evenly as I could. "Actually, those things did happen, but without any such intent. Can you imagine trying to stop my mother embracing Urdo?" Hot blood rose beneath my skin at the memory.

"Oh, Sulien, you idiot," Garah said. "You know Elenn's pride; even you must have seen how stupid that was.

As for Urdo, I don't know what he can have been thinking."

"I think my mother was trying to say that he was Darien's father," I said feebly.

"As if that needed saying," ap Erbin said disapprovingly. "Weren't you thinking about the queen at all?"

"I knew Elenn wouldn't be pleased," I said. Garah snorted. "But I thought we could explain. I didn't realize it would be this bad."

"Who could?" Garah agreed. "To be fair, if Urdo had explained it properly she might well have accepted it.

She likes Darien, after all, and it's not as if it's more than an acknowledgment of that, really, I suppose. It's how Amala put it, and what Morthu had been saying about Urdo putting her away. I knew you wouldn't do

anything like that, but I didn't think about your mother. She would want acknowledgment, of course."

"Yes," I said, feeling wretched. "It was just impossible. You know what Veniva is like."

"It was just Morthu making it sound as bad as it could possibly be, and maybe making her believe that,"

Garah said, and sighed. "In any case, I told her that even if it were true fifty times over she would still be better off out of Caer Tanaga, and she could go back to her father's house if she wanted to."

"She's taking it as badly as that?" I asked, horrified.

"Worse," Garah said. "She hates Morthu, you know she does, but she still wouldn't leave, even when there was the chance, because she wouldn't risk the insult to her pride. She said something about an argument with her sister? She said Emer and Atha were allied with you and they were her personal enemies. She said she couldn't trust any of you. She said terrible things about Emer."

"What?" ap Erbin asked, sounding merely interested.

"Is this relevant?" I asked.

"Not really," Garah said. "The important thing is that Elenn is still in Caer Tanaga and she wouldn't escape with me."

"How did you get out?" ap Erbin asked.

"Through the old heating tunnels under the citadel," Garah said. "Glyn found an entrance in a storeroom years ago, and it was near the room where they were keeping those of us who weren't noble but were hostages. I would have come days ago, but I was trying to persuade Elenn. Then yesterday, no, the day before, Morthu came and—"

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"Morthu was in Caer Tanaga the day before yesterday?" I interrupted.

"Yes, why?" Garah asked, her voice in the gloom sounding puzzled. "Did you think he was here?"

"So much for curses," I said, disappointed.

"Oh, as for curses, that's much worse than you think," Garah said, leaning forward into the bar of light so I

could see her bruised face clearly. "Morthu is killing people, sacrificing them for his sorcery to put curses on us all. People in Caer Tanaga. He burned a hundred people in one night on the dark of the moon." The dark of the moon. I counted backward. That would have been the day we left Caer Gloran. "He took all the armigers who didn't die in the fighting and made up the numbers with wounded and guards and just people of the town, and he tied them up in the courtyard and burned them alive. He made us watch. Elenn stood stock-still with her hand on her old dog's head, more like a statue than a woman. I tried to protest when I saw what he was doing. He dragged poor Edlim out by his feet, with his head bumping, and it was too much for me. But he only beat me and said that if I said another word I would be out there with them."

She shuddered.

"What did he do with them?" I asked.

"I don't know what he was doing. He sang in strange languages, and it was dark sorcery.

Everything went very dark, even the fire, though it was still burning and still burning them. Then there was a strange light, and it looked as if something was coming out of all of the bodies and Morthu was gathering it up." She lowered her voice. "I think he was taking their souls. I prayed to the Mother to help them, with as many of their names as I could, but I didn't dare do it aloud, and I don't think it helped. I was sick, afterward; but then I couldn't move even to retch, I could only watch." Her voice shook. "Everybody was too afraid to talk about it afterward, but Garwen said she didn't see anything except the people burning. Since then, almost every night he's been there he has killed one or two people. He didn't make us watch again, but we knew what was happening.

Then, the night before last he came to our room, and I thought he'd kill me then and I was terrified. He looked at me as if he liked me being afraid and smiled in that horrible way of his.

But he didn't take me, he took

Garwen and her youngest daughter."

"Garwen?" I asked stupidly. For a moment the name meant nothing to me.

And then Masarn opened the curtain and came in with Urdo, and Garah burst into tears.

"Garwen?" Masarn asked, glancing around the tent. And then I remembered his quiet, uncomplaining wife, who had lived in Caer Tanaga, and made candles and borne children and looked at me as if I were an exotic beast.

"Oh, Masarn, I'm so sorry," Garah said, through her tears. "Morthu killed her, and little Sulien, too. I sang the

Hymn of Return for them. But your other three are safe. I brought them out myself; they are hidden on a farm I

know outside the city."

Masarn stood completely still and all the expression drained out of his face. I stood up and put my arms around him, and he turned and held onto me as he wept, as if he were a child and I his mother. Urdo embraced him too. Ap Erbin stood up and pressed his mead flask into Masarn's hand. Masarn looked at it as if he didn't know what it was, then he gave a great sobbing howl and took it, and drank.

"Masarn?" I asked gently. Masarn didn't show any signs of having heard at all. It had hit him hard, and I didn't know what to say. I couldn't say what we always said in the alae; that she had been brave and died well, that the cause was good, and that she had learned well and would be
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swiftly re-bora. None of it was true, and the unspoken words were like ashes on my tongue.

Urdo went to Garah, who was wiping her face. He squatted beside her. "Are you hurt?" he asked. "How did you escape? Where is Elenn?"

"She just wouldn't come," Garah sniffed, and repeated her story, this time without the incredulity at my stupidity.

"Morthu must have clouded her mind. But even so, what makes her think she's safe there, where Morthu is slaughtering people for power?" Urdo asked angrily.

"Morthu and Arling have both offered her their protection if she were free," Garah said. "Arling has a wife, of course, but Jarnsmen do sometimes have more than one. And she still hates Morthu, she has told me so.

But I think Morthu has somehow persuaded her that we're going to lose. They took her to see the war machines, and she came back very shaken. I don't know everything they said to her. I wasn't there most of the time. I only know what I heard them say and what she told me.

But I tried really hard to get her to stop being an idiot and come with me." She glanced over at Masarn, who was still weeping in my arms. "I tried too long, Urdo, and that's why Garwen and little Sulien died, and that's why I came now, before he took the rest of us."

"You did the right thing," Urdo said, his voice very stem. "Sometimes there are no choices that harm nobody."

—17—

They arose early and saw the Tigran armies spread out on the plain before them. No more support had come to help them hold the pass. They knew at once that although they saw the sun rise they would not live to see it set. It was immediately clear to everyone that the most it would be possible for them to achieve would be to win a little more time for Satea and the other cities of Lossia to prepare for the onslaught. So, without discussion or lamentation, they took sweet oil and combed each other's hair and bound it up as was the fashion for feast days, so that their bodies would be seemly in Death's Hails when they came there after the battle.

—Fedra, The Lauian Ward, Book V

Garah and I went down to the stream. Ap Erbin took Masarn off with him. There wasn't anywhere to bathe that wasn't in full sight of anyone who happened to wander by, of course.

The news of Garah's condition raced through the camp. When she was clean the bruises showed much more clearly. We went back to my tent, where I trimmed the ends of her hair so that they were even.

"At least I used a knife, not a sword like you did at Caer Lind," she said, smiling at the memory.

"I'm not nagging at you for doing it, either," I said, stepping back a little to make sure it was straight. I had never seen her with short hair before. It made her whole head look different. It looked quite good now that it wasn't sticking up in all directions.

"I don't know if it's what Garwen would have wanted. She was a Tanagan, and she really loved the White

God." Garah took a deep breath and swallowed hard to stop herself crying. "But it seemed like the right thing to do."

I embraced her. "Oh, Garah, I'm so glad you got out!"

"I am, too," she said. "I wish I didn't have to go to this feast. I could just sit down and sleep, now that I'm clean and I've told you and Urdo what's happening."

"You do need to be there, and to look like the queen of Bregheda," I said. "It's important."

"Well, what can I wear? I said I didn't want to borrow anything of Alswith's, but nothing of yours will fit me."

"A drape fits anyone," I said, remembering Amala telling me so in Caer Gloran.

"But if I wear your drape, what will you wear?" Garah asked doubtfully. "Or do you have more
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than one?"

I had four, back at Derwen, but only one with me. "I shall wear my armor," I said. "I told Rowanna I'd wear what was suitable for my position, and what is more suitable than that?"