The Merchant Emperor (12 page)

HIGHMEADOW, ROLAND

No matter how many glasses of Canderian brandy he poured down his gullet, the pain in Tristan Steward’s ribs would not recede. His lungs were clear enough to breathe in the smoky air of the library to which he had fled a few hours earlier, but each breath was labored, causing his sides to hurt with the effort of taking in air. With a bitter hiss of liquid through clenched teeth, he bolted back another snifter’s contents and closed his blue eyes, then ran his fingers meaninglessly through his sweat-soaked auburn hair, hot and brittle from sitting endlessly before the library’s roaring hearth.

Steward, the Lord Roland and prince of Bethany, was trying and failing to blot from his mind the vision of the Lord Cymrian returning to the main keep of Highmeadow in the early light of foredawn, carrying in his arms the body of a woman Tristan knew well.

Perhaps not well
, he thought, reconsidering the moment.
But certainly intimately
.

From the moment she had come to his notice in his own keep in the province of Bethany, the dead chambermaid, whose name was Portia, had become impossible for him to resist. Dark of hair and fair of face, with a wicked sparkle in her large, doe-like eyes, she had displayed none of the respectful deference that was universally present in those of the serving class, except when she was in public. In the privacy of his bedchamber, to which she had almost immediately gravitated, she was insolent and playful, commanding and dominating him sexually in a manner that he was both loath to allow and gleeful to embrace. Her ruthless passion had captivated him in ways that no other bed partner had ever inspired, and her willingness to participate without hesitation or compunction in whatever nefarious scheme he felt like concocting had made him trust her more than any person he had ever confided in save one.

It appalled him to know that other trusted person had met a similar fate to the one that had apparently befallen Portia.

But to recognize his own hand in the demise of his favorite paramours, both of whom he had sent forth on similarly shameful missions where they had met their hideous ends, would have required a modicum of introspection from Tristan Steward, as well as the ability to feel guilt and responsibility for his actions. Both of these traits had only been his while his first paramour, a serving woman named Prudence, was alive, and only because she had taken on the role of his conscience, loving him and insisting that he be a better man than he was by natural inclination. Any desire for self-improvement, for ethics and higher purpose had fled along with her spirit as it left the world. Now Tristan was alone again, aching with grief but feeling little remorse and no guilt whatsoever.

Rather, what he felt was poisonous rage directed at the man who had borne Portia’s dead body back to Highmeadow.

Tristan seized the crystal decanter again and splashed more of the honey-colored liquid into his snifter. He tossed it back; the potable was so smooth it did not burn, but the corners of his eyes stung nonetheless. He could feel the warmth race down his throat to his stomach, where it sparked the fury that was boiling there into wildfire rage. He heaved the glass into the fire, where it shattered against the back of the hearth and flashed as the alcohol hit the flames.

Then, his anger still burning, he strode to the library’s heavy back door, threw it open, and hurried down the auxiliary staircase to the servants’ quarters.

The enclosed sconces that lined the stairway cast long, flickering shadows on the stone walls that curved along the staircase. Even in his fury Tristan made note of the solidity of the fortress he was visiting for the first time. Highmeadow was a new stronghold, a citadel four years in construction that had been designed for defense by the best artisans and military commanders of the Cymrian Alliance, making use of the premier military knowledge of four different races. Situated in the dense forests of western Roland, in the province of Navarne but very close to the border of Bethany, his own province, at the historical site where the ancient House of Remembrance had once stood, Highmeadow was a bastion of strength in an impenetrable woodland, a conglomeration of buildings that were situated on, within, and above the earth in the very trees of the forest, with hidden defenses and barricades surrounding it for miles. This building was the only one he had been privy to thus far in his visit, a general keep meant for housing guests of state and other visitors of the Lord and Lady Cymrian, with libraries, meeting rooms, and dining halls all secured for the protection of the guests and privacy of the discourse undertaken there. Even Portia, an eavesdropper of highly refined talents, had complained that the new keep had prevented her from overhearing anything of value since the household had moved there from the old and drafty keep of Haguefort in the capital of Navarne. Since one of the main functions that Tristan had commanded of her when he sent her as a gift to the Lord and Lady was just such surveillance, he had been left with little information of value for his pains.

At the bottom of the stairs, the hallway was dark save for light coming out from under a door halfway down on the right. The Lord Roland made his way to the door and paused outside it. A moment later he could hear soft conversation, and identified one of the voices as belonging to Gerald Owen, the longtime chamberlain of Haguefort who had served Stephen Navarne, the late duke, and his father and grandfather before him.

The other voice was unmistakably that of Gwydion of Manosse, known to his intimates as Ashe. Tristan’s boyhood friend and long-hated rival for both power and, at least within the secrecy of Tristan’s heart, the love of a woman.

The Lord Cymrian.

Without so much as a respectful tap on the door, Tristan barged into the room.

Gerald Owen and Ashe looked up in surprise. Both men were gray in the face, the chamberlain from age and exhaustion, the Lord Cymrian from something else. Tristan could see despair in his cerulean-blue eyes, though his face betrayed nothing as his gaze returned to the bed.

Lying before them on the room’s bed was the body of the serving maid. Tristan’s throat tightened upon beholding it again; he slammed the door shut behind him and came to the bed, staring down at the woman who lay there.

His mouth dropped open in shock.

The corpse of the beautiful young chambermaid was desiccated like a mummy that had been buried in sand for a thousand years. The supple flesh of her limbs, so vibrant and smooth that morning, had withered and dried to a tanned hide, hanging limply off the visible bones. The enormous eyes that had stared deeply into his own, watching him intently as she rode him up against the wall of his bedchamber in the guesthouse that morning, had sunken into hollow sockets and disappeared. Her sensuous mouth that had been open as if in the throes of sexual congress was open still, but the lips had vanished, leaving little more than gristle around the gaping teeth. Only the waves of long black hair remained, draping languorously over the pillow. Were it not for that hair, he would never have recognized her.

Tristan’s stomach rushed into his mouth. He turned and retched into the washbasin on the nightstand. Then, when the nausea passed, he wheeled in wrath and addressed the two men, only one of whom was watching him.

“You
bastard
, Gwydion,” he snarled at the one whose gaze was still on the body. “You unspeakable bastard. What have you done to her?”

“Nothing,” the Lord Cymrian murmured over the chamberlain’s snort of indignation.

“
Nothing? Look
at her—she’s—she’s—” Tristan stuttered to a halt as the chamberlain stared at him. “What have you done?” he repeated.

“Have you never seen a body in such a state?” Ashe asked quietly, his voice hollow.

“Never.”

“No? Well, think back harder, to your childhood days. Do you recall the death of Talthea, the Gracious One?”

Tristan stopped. A memory, long buried, rose in the back of his mind, hanging in the mists behind which early days were hidden. He vaguely recalled standing beside his brother, Ian Steward, now the Blesser of Canderre-Yarim, but then merely an acolyte being trained in the Patrician faith, both of them barely old enough to feed themselves, watching the death of a woman most people in the crowd around them had simply referred to as the Widow.

“She was a First Generation Cymrian,” Ashe went on, his hand coming to rest on the withered skin of the dead woman’s arm.

“I
know
who she was,” Tristan spat. “She was a historic figure. My father brought us all the way to the Circle to witness her death. I was barely old enough to walk. What does that have to do with
anything
?”

Finally Ashe turned to look at the Lord Roland. “If you recall, I lived at the Circle at that time. She was left on the Altar of Ultimate Sacrifice, where she had died, under the stars, after all the mourners had left. Like you, I was just a child. Watching her struggle to die, when all the healers were trying to save her against her will, had horrified me. I remember feeling deep sadness, and not really even understanding why. So that night, I looked out the window of my room in my father’s keep, at her body bathed in moonlight on the altar. I thought she might be cold, so I took a blanket off my bed, slipped from my father’s house, and went to the altar.

“When I reached the place where she lay, the body was still there, but had changed immensely. At the time of her death, she had appeared a young woman in the bloom of youth, even though she had lived more than a thousand years. Like all First Generation Cymrians, Time had stopped for her, so all her life she looked as she did the day she left the Island of Serendair. But now, in the darkness several hours after her death, she looked like this—desiccated, dry, as if she had been rotting for a millennium. I have seen a few Cymrians of the First Generation die since—and this is precisely what it looks like.”

Tristan’s body went cold in shock, and his skin began to prickle. “You believe Portia was a First Generation Cymrian as well?”

The expression on Ashe’s face grew hard. “If she was, it’s a mystery. For a short time, I wore the Patriarch’s Ring of Wisdom. When I had it on my hand, I was aware of all of the living First Generationers—no matter where they were in the world. It was as if our heartbeats were tied together; there are few enough of them left to have counted each one, and know them by name. This woman was not among them.”

“Then how could she be of the First Generation, m’lord?” Gerald Owen asked.

The Lord Cymrian’s eyes met Tristan’s.

“When I wore the ring, I believe this First Generation census of a sort was making me aware of living souls, of people who still were tied to their own names,” he said. “There was a man who did not come into my awareness, but who should have been counted by rights as a First Generation Cymrian, a bastard named Michael, the Wind of Death, who had been known to the Three when they were still in Serendair, several ages ago. I did not know of him; he was no longer the man, the Cymrian he had been—because he had already taken on a demon spirit as its host.”

The last words echoed off the walls of the room.

“A F’dor?” Tristan whispered.

Ashe nodded gravely. “And it is clear to me now, given all the trickery and games of the mind this woman was able to play on me, twisting reality until it was unrecognizable, that she, too, must have been host to something that evil, that unspeakably dark. If this body once belonged to a First Generation Cymrian woman, as it appears to have, that poor creature’s soul was eaten long ago by something demonic that took over her body before I had possession of the ring.”

“Dear All-God,” Tristan said, trying to quell his rising stomach.

The Lord Cymrian glared at him. “I can imagine how ill you must feel now, Tristan, realizing as you no doubt are that you have literally been in bed with the beast, have coupled with a monster that may very well have possessed you, may have taken a piece of your very soul, without you even realizing it.” His stare grew colder. “Not that you would even miss it.”

“I—I—never—”

“Spare me.” The air in the subterranean room grew instantly drier, as if it were on the verge of igniting. Tristan had seen the dragon in Ashe’s blood rise before, but never in such close quarters. “You do not think that I know what you have been up to? You forget, my friend, that my draconic nature grants me an awareness of much of what is going on around me, transcending normal understanding. In addition, this is
my
house. I know every sickening detail of your tryst with this woman this morning, distracted as I am by everything else that I am contending with. She was your bedwench—I know you brought her here, not to aid Rhapsody with our son upon his birth, as you claimed to my face, but to seduce me, to lead me away from all that I hold holy. I do not know how she was able to appear in my wife’s aspect, to approximate her scent, her likeness, but even you should know that those abilities are signs of powers of dark intent, probably demonic. And you knew she was capable of those things. Don’t lie to me—this is not the time for it. I will gut you with my teeth where you stand, I swear it, if you speak another falsehood to me.
Confess
.”

Tristan’s eyes darted nervously around the small room.

“Gwydion—I—”

The air around him seemed to swirl as Ashe grabbed him by the neck and slammed him up against the nearest wall, knocking the breath from him.

“Don’t
lie
to me,” the Lord Cymrian demanded through clenched teeth. His eyes were burning with azure fire, the veins in his neck extended in ropy strands. His anger was palpable in the air around them, burning Tristan’s lungs. “Your next breath will be your last if you do not tell me the truth,
now
.”

Even as he danced on the edge of consciousness in the raging Wyrmkin’s grasp, Tristan’s wiles were working.
He is not his wife, the Skysinger, the Namer, so he hasn’t the ability to discern the truth, as she does,
he thought, fighting off the blackness that winked in and out before his eyes.
His dragon sense cannot look into men’s hearts.