The Misbegotten King (5 page)

“All right, Lord Prince,” said the senior midwife, “lay her back against the pillows. Here, do you want to cut the cord?”

She handed him a pair of silver scissors. Roderic looked down at the baby, now eagerly sucking at a nipple which looked much
too large to fit into the tiny mouth. Annandale nodded. “Go ahead, love.”

Roderic bent and carefully snipped. The infant did not notice. He was as greedily attached to his mother as ever.

Annandale smiled up at him, her face radiant, and it did not seem possible that she had spent the last ten or twelve hours
racked by such pain. His hand hovered over
the child, hesitant. “Touch him, Roderic. You won’t hurt him.”

Tentatively, he placed three fingers over the baby’s back. The child seemed impossibly small, his head no larger than Roderic’s
fist, his back smaller than the span of Roderic’s five fingers. His legs looked like a frog’s.

“What shall we call him?” Annandale asked.

Roderic brushed the soft down on the baby’s head with the back of his hand. “I was thinking we should name him for the first
of the Ridenau Kings. Rhodri. Rhodri Ridenau—my father’s grandfather, who first restored the Estates of Meriga and made it
whole.”

Annandale smiled. “Rhodri Ridenau—I like it. What do you think, Tavvy?” She looked up at the woman hovering at Roderic’s arm.

“It’s a fine name. But you—” Tavia tapped Roderic firmly on the shoulder. “You
must
go. Send us all something to eat.”

With a sheepish glance at his sister, Roderic picked up Annandale’s hand and pressed a kiss into the palm. “Thank you.”

“Thank you.” She met his eyes with a look full of meaning. “Go, let them finish here. When he’s been cleaned and dressed,
you can hold him.”

Roderic traced a finger over a tiny ear, loathe to leave the presence of such a new and beguiling being. The baby squirmed,
turning his head against Annandale’s breast, his skin reddening even as Roderic watched. Roderic bent to look at him more
closely, and incredibly, the child opened his eyes and focused. Abelard’s eyes looked out of the tiny face, and in that moment,
Roderic
understood why he would fight with his last breath to preserve his father’s kingdom. Not for himself, not for his missing
father, but for this fragile being, who had existed only moments before as anonymous lumps beneath his mother’s belly, and
now who lived and breathed and moved as independently as he. And with a pang of wonder, Roderic realized that when this infant
was grown to manhood, and fathered children of his own, those children would live to see a time and a place he could never
know. He had a sense of past and present and future, of the link from grandfather to father to son to generations yet unborn.
He felt at once both humbled and exalted.

Roderic bent and kissed Annandale’s mouth again. He had no words to express what he was feeling, but his eyes met hers, and
he had the uncanny sense she understood. She nodded and closed her eyes, lying back against her pillows, her face suddenly
white with exhaustion. “Rest, love,” he murmured. At the door, he paused once more and looked at the bustling women. “Thank
you all.” He kissed Tavia’s cheek. “I’m sorry I was rude.”

She smiled, her wrinkled face crinkled around her faded blue eyes. “It is not every day an heir to Meriga is born.”

He gripped her under the elbow and guided her to the antechamber. “How is Amanander? Has there been any other change?”

Tavia glanced into the bedroom and pulled the door shut. “No—not really.”

“Not really? What do you mean by that?”

“This morning, before I was summoned here, Gartred
was allowed to see him—you know, her weekly visit—and I could have sworn I saw him open his eyes and look at her.”

“He opens his eyes all the time.” Roderic frowned.

“But this time—” Tavia broke off. “Perhaps it was a trick of the light. It was so dark—we had candles lit well into the morning.”

“What do you think you saw?” Roderic asked gently, aware that this sister hated Amanander with a passion and lived for the
day when he would answer for his crimes before the Congress.

“I thought he looked at her as though he knew her. I thought I saw recognition in his eyes.”

Roderic tapped a finger on his chin, considering. “Who’s with him now?”

“Jaboa. She’s been with him since—”

Roderic nodded. Jaboa, Brand’s wife, was as trusted a nurse as Tavia. She could well confirm or deny anything that Tavia thought
she might have seen. “Well. I’ll have the servants bring you all dinner. And I’ll speak to Jaboa. Perhaps she noticed some
change, too. I’m going to see Phineas, now. But I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He leaned down and pecked another kiss on
her plump cheek.

If Amanander were to wake out of his unnatural sleep, and stood trial before the Congress, it would without a doubt contribute
to a speedy end to the rebellion in Missiluse. He went down the staircase to Phineas’s chambers with a light heart and an
easier step.

D
own dark and winding corridors Amanander roamed, heels tapping, tapping, tapping on the faded wooden floor. He rounded corners,
strode up and down dusty staircases, lost in a haphazard maze. He knew he searched, but why and for what he had forgotten,
and that awareness gnawed as annoying as an itch.

Sometimes he thought he heard voices, a blurred buzz that rose and fell just at the periphery of his hearing. Sometimes he
thought he heard his name, but each time he paused and tried to listen, the voices maddeningly faded.

Debris was piled in the corners, along the corridors, broken spears and swords which crumbled into dust when he touched them.
Room after room was full of mismatched crockery, ragged clothes, and phantom chairs and beds and tables that vanished at his
approach. He felt with frustrating certainty that someone searched for him, but where, or how to reach that person beyond
the walls of this grim prison, he did not know.

And there was another, another he knew he ought to know, another so similar to himself that their thoughts sometimes intertwined.
The random words meant nothing,
for he could discern no sense in them. And there was a woman, too, or was there more than one—a woman with black hair and
pale skin, who taunted him in language he did not understand as he restlessly roamed the corridors, who sometimes wore another
face, a face of such unearthly ugliness he was tempted to shut his eyes until the apparition passed.

But that only lent strength to the apparition, and the only way he had discovered to make it go was to turn the full force
of his will upon it, staring at it with every ounce of strength which he possessed, pouring it through his eyes. And when
he did that, the vision vanished without a sound, leaving no trace.

He was getting better at it; if he caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye, he could prevent it from manifesting
entirely if he turned the full force of his glare upon it. It was good practice, he knew, for something that he used to know
how to do and had forgotten.

There was no night or day within the shadowed walls, no candles burned to tell the passing of the hours, but Amanander knew
that time, precious time, was passing, pouring out through his fingers like gold dust. Only his footsteps, echoing in the
empty halls, lingering on the dusty air, gave him a measure of the hours and the days.

He counted his time in footsteps, and as the numbers grew, he knew that within the numbers were the secrets he’d forgotten.
If only he could remember, he thought, just the very first, the very barest trace… but he wandered on and on, trapped within
the labyrinth.

At the bottom of a crumbling staircase, he heard a
name—his name—spoken with such clarity, he scarcely recognized it.

AMANANDER.

He stopped. Nothing had changed. He touched a black-gloved hand to the wall of flaking stone, and the stone left a whitish
smear across the leather. He curled his lip in automatic disgust and wiped it fastidiously on the inner hem of his black tunic.
Then he paused. When had he put on the gloves?

AMANANDER.

The voice echoed again, louder, more insistent. Amanander looked up the staircase, then down the corridor over his shoulder.
The voice seemed to be all around him, echoing off the dusty walls, again and again and again. He glanced down, realizing
with a start that his boots were black and polished to a high gloss, and that he could see his own face looking back at him.
He stared, jolted by the recognition of himself.

AMANANDER. This time there was the finest edge of pain in the intensity of the voice, as though he’d sliced his finger on
a razor’s edge. He looked up.

“Where are you?” It was the first time in weeks, months, years, since he’d heard his own voice, and it startled him, more
than his reflection. The sound echoed and spun with a power all its own, cracking the walls of the corridor.

HERE.

A shower of fine powder fell from the ceiling, and he looked up, shocked to see a crack a handspan wide, and growing wider.
He bolted up the steps, and the floor shuddered beneath his feet. At the top of the staircase, a figure robed in white stood
waiting.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” he said as he reached the top step.

The figure pointed to a room off the corridor.

“In there? You think we’ll be safe in there?”

The figure inclined its head and stepped aside, allowing Amanander to go first.

The room was nothing like the dusty empty halls he had left. Afire burned in a highly polished grate. Beside the fire, two
chairs, with high, cushioned backs, invited. Amanander sniffed. There was the scent of something cooking—roasting meat, the
tang of herbs, bread baking—and suddenly saliva exploded in his mouth. Before the fire, a cushioned stool held a thin circlet
of gold.

He turned to see the figure shut the door. “Who are you? Do I know you? Why have you brought me here?”

The figure swept the hood off his face, and in the firelight, three black eyes looked back at him with a feral gleam. “Lord
Prince,” said Ferad-lugz, “don’t you know me?”

“Ferad.” Pieces of memory came filtering back. This was his teacher, his tutor, his—his mind rejected the word
master.
Ferad was the one who’d taught him to use the Old Magic, who’d warned him against trying to use it before he was ready. “Where
are we? What is this place?”

“I am here only in semblance. And you should know this place. It’s your own mind.”

Taken off guard, Amanander stumbled back a few paces. “My mind?”

“The witch Nydia sent you flying here, after the day
at Minnis, when the battle was lost. You don’t remember? You will, in time.”

“How are you here?” Amanander whispered. The fire made a crackling noise in the grate, and he whipped his head around. “This—all
this—isn’t real?”

“Real? You ask me what’s real? Philosophers have argued for centuries over the meaning of what’s real. Some would say that
this is far more real than anything in the material world. But no, this place is not part of any physical reality as one normally
defines it.”

“The fire—it doesn’t burn?”

Ferad waved his hand impatiently, and from the folds of his loose white garment, his secondary arms, tiny, useless appendages
no larger than a human infant’s, twitched involuntarily. “It burns because you believe it burns. I haven’t time to explain
all this.”

“The hallway—the corridor—began to collapse when I heard your voice—why—?”

“Because once I got through to you, your madness began to collapse.” Ferad advanced, eyes burning with that unnatural light,
and Amanander took a step backward.

“I’m mad?”

“Unconscious. You’ve lain as though asleep for more than nine months. Much has changed in the world, little Prince, while
you’ve lain oblivious. And unless you want the world to forget all about you, and go on about its business by itself, then
I suggest you’d better come to your senses.”

Amanander sank into one of the chairs. The flames reflected in the highly polished surface of his boots; the
fabric was warm and rough beneath his palms. He touched the arms, and the wood was smooth and beautifully carved, and suddenly
he recognized it. “This is my desk chair. From the garrison at Dlas.”

“Was your desk chair. Another sits in your place.”

“Who?” He sat bolt upright as Ferad took the chair opposite.

“Your brother Brand’s son, Barran. Roderic sent him there.”

“Roderic.” He whispered the name, and the room seemed to resonate, the flames leap higher, the arms of the chair seemed to
expand beneath his grasp. His eyes fell on the gold circlet. He shot a glance at Ferad and reached out to take the crown,
seize it and put it on his head, and his hands passed through it as though it were hollow, a shell, a semblance, something
which wasn’t quite there. “What have you done with it?”

Ferad chuckled. “You haven’t won it yet, my Prince.”

Amanander leaned forward, suddenly conscious that he was much larger than the Muten. “It’s mine. Give it to me.”