The Traitor's Daughter (47 page)

“Your concern for my welfare is heartwarming. But what demands have I made, cousin? What terms have I sought? What have you to give that I could want, beyond your sorrow and undoing?”

“Your sons’ lives, perhaps?”

“Your threats are empty. Touch any one of us and you’ll never see that girl you treasure again. The hills are wide and the forests deep. You might search for a lifetime and never find her. If she is still alive to be found.”

Despite her wretched position, she still plainly believed that she held the winning card. She would play it to the limit and beyond, play it for days, weeks, years to come—if he permitted it.

He would not.

“Madam, you are in error,” Aureste returned gently. He regarded the two young men, her sons. The big one, uninjured, returned the scrutiny impassively. His eyes, pale and cold as slush, were also inexpressive as slush, his countenance as a whole perfectly unrevealing. The other one, wounded and stretched out on the floor, appeared at best but semiconscious. His eyes were closed, and from time to time an incoherent muttering bubbled out of him. Clearly an unpromising source of information. Engaging the eye of the nearest Taerleezi soldier, Aureste flicked an indicative finger and directed, “Dispatch him.”

At once the soldier drew his sword.

“Wait.” Yvenza’s tone was so commanding that her listener obeyed. “Have done with these charades. You will not harm us. You cannot, you dare not. We both know this.”

“One of us is sadly misguided.” Aureste repeated his signal.

The soldier shrugged and plunged the heavy blade into the throat of the recumbent prisoner. Blood gushed extravagantly. The victim thrashed and floundered a bit, then died in a red pool. Something like a grunt escaped the watching Onartino; the first sound he had hitherto uttered. His fists clenched briefly.

Aureste’s avid gaze fastened upon Yvenza’s face. She was a mother whose son had just been killed before her eyes; her pain and grief must be unimaginable. And he wanted to see them. Every tear, every shudder, every aspect of her agony—he meant to drink them in. He wanted her to suffer at length; he wanted reparation.

But the Widow Yvenza offered little satisfaction. Her set face was every bit as expressionless as Onartino’s as she met Aureste’s eyes and announced evenly, “Your daughter is a dead woman. Her death will be slow—over the course of years—and very ugly.”

“Not nearly so ugly as that of your older son, should you continue to resist me,” he replied with a smile designed to freeze her to the marrow. Her composure and fortitude were extraordinary, but he would surely break her. “Give me back my daughter, alive and well, and I will give you your son, your only remaining son. Refuse, and you lose everything.”

“You have lost everything, Aureste,” she told him. “You simply do not know it yet. Your daughter is no longer yours.”

That odd look of secret knowledge was back in her face, and it disturbed him, but he thrust his misgivings aside. The woman was acting, or mad, or both. He had no time to waste on her theatrics.

“Perhaps grief has unhinged you,” he suggested drily, and in one corner of his mind he realized that he half believed it. The marble immobility of her face suggested lunacy. “I will endeavor to recall you to reality.” Turning to the nearest of his Taerleezis, he commanded, “Take this woman’s son, strip him naked, and beat him with truncheons, brazen knuckles if you have them, belt buckles, fire irons—whatever comes most readily to hand. Strike to cause maximum pain and injury, but do not kill him as yet, and see to it that he does not lose consciousness. You two”—he addressed a pair of soldiers—“place the woman in a chair affording her a good view, and see that she stays there.”

The soldiers made haste to obey. Before they could lay hands on him, Onartino spoke up for the first time since he had been brought in.

“Enough,” he snapped. “Back off. I’ll tell you all there is to tell about your daughter.”

“Hold your tongue, boy,” Yvenza warned.

“Your stubbornness and your venom have just gotten Trecchio killed,” Onartino returned. “So happy with your accomplishment that you’re trying to do as much for me, Mother? There’s no great secret here to betray. In fact, I say the stew’s tastier if he knows. I’ve said so all along.”

“And when he knows, what then?” Yvenza inquired. “When he’s learned all and has no further need of us, exactly what do you think happens next, my wise and judicious son?”

“Tell me the truth and I will spare your lives,” Aureste reminded her, pleased to witness familial discord. “I have given my word.”

“Your word?” She curved her lips in imitation of a smile. “The worth of your word is famed far and wide.”

“Will you save yourself?” Aureste inquired of the son.

“As you value our lives, boy, hold your peace,” Yvenza warned.

“Trecchio held his. I don’t mean to follow his path. You can go on with your games and plots; I’ve had enough of them.” Turning to Aureste, Onartino declared, “You already know that your girl has been in this house. Well, she’s not here now. Seems the cunning little harlot managed to seduce one of the servants, and he ran off with her last night. We might have tracked them down by now if it hadn’t been for you and your cannon and your Taers, so you’ve got yourself to thank for their escape. One more detail that you might like to know, though—before our little Jianna scoured off, she married me. The ceremony was performed by the East Reach Traveler before a roomful of witnesses, so it’s legal and binding as you please. The girl’s my wife now, wherever she might hide and however she may whore herself, she’s still mine, subject first to my authority. When she’s found, she’s mine. So there you have it. Finished and done.”

“You unutterable fool,” Yvenza remarked, very quietly. “You have ruined us.”

Just as quietly, Aureste inquired, “Where is she?”

“I just told you.” Incredibly, Onartino appeared impatient. “She’s run off. We don’t know where.”

“You expect me to believe that ludicrous concoction?” Aureste kept his voice low, but the rage and hatred, briefly lulled by the prospect of success, were reawakening. These backwoods brigand enemies of his had not only abducted Jianna, held her prisoner, and no doubt tormented her so far as they dared, but now they slandered her name, hindered his search, and insulted his intelligence. “You weave an absurd fantasy. Give me the truth, or I will rip it out of you.”

“You have the truth. If you don’t like it, that’s your affair.”

His captive’s affectation of surly indifference was a creative touch. Had the tale possessed even minimal plausibility, Aureste would have found himself in danger of believing. As it was—

“You expect me to accept the idea that the Maidenlady Jianna Belandor consented to grant you her hand?”

“A woman will consent to anything when it’s put to her in the right way.”

“And you also claim that my daughter—a sheltered virgin—was capable of seducing some species of household menial?”

“She knew how on instinct. With some of them, it’s just there in the blood.”

“You are a liar.” Aureste struck the other’s face and his ring opened a bloody gash.

Onartino snarled and returned the blow. Before his fist hit flesh, a quartet of Taerleezis flung themselves on him.

For a moment Aureste contemplated the immobilized prisoner, then commanded his soldiers, “Follow your instructions. Strip him and beat the truth out of him.”

They obeyed. At first Onartino fought back, struggling mightily to break free, cursing and even kicking. Despite his size and strength, he was no match for the Taerleezis, who swiftly cut the clothes from his body, then commenced beating him with their truncheons, belts, and fists. His cursing increased in volume and his struggles waxed in violence, for a little while. As the blows rained down on his unprotected flesh, however, his vociferation dwindled to grunts and gasps. The thud of a brass-knuckled fist on his nose coincided with a crackle of breaking bone and a spray of blood. A second such blow dislodged both his front teeth. Welts and cuts striped his torso and his resistance was visibly weakening when Aureste raised a negligent forefinger, suspending the assault.

Meeting the prisoner’s pale eyes, gleaming balefully behind swollen and purpling lids, he asked, “Where is my daughter?”

“You stupid kneeser shit, what does it take to get it through your head that we don’t know?” Onartino inquired in turn.

“Perhaps the mother is more reasonable than the son.” Aureste turned to Yvenza, who sat flint-eyed and upright in her chair. “Are you ready to relinquish my daughter?”

She stared at him. Her lips resumed their contemptuous curve.

“Do you understand that you’ll see him beaten to death before your eyes? Be assured that the spectacle will last throughout the night.”

“And your daughter’s fate will exceed it by a hundredfold.”

“You have her, then? You know where she is.”

“I will tell you nothing, cousin. I leave you to the joys of speculation.”

“That is scarcely my sole joy.” Addressing the Taerleezis, Aureste commanded, “The bastinado.”

At once Onartino was lifted, laid out flat on the table, and held down while a pair of soldiers took turns beating the soles of his feet with cudgels. This particular torment, while leaving few visible marks, was notoriously painful, but the sufferer never uttered a cry, much less a revealing word. Whatever his shortcomings, he was clearly no coward, and for the first time it occurred to Aureste to wonder whether he could possibly have been telling the truth, or even part of the truth.

But no. The story was wildly improbable to the verge of impossibility. Jianna, kidnapped and held captive in this guarded stronghouse, escaping in the company of some peasant lover scant hours prior to her father’s arrival? And even more implausible—Jianna married to this hulking, loutish son of her father’s enemy?
The ceremony was performed by the East Reach Traveler before a roomful of witnesses, so it’s legal and binding as you please …
So the oaf had claimed, and one of his own personal bodyguard, the promising Drocco, had reported the discovery of an East Reach Traveler among the dead, a finding that seemed to corroborate the story. But did not prove it, and the thing was just too fantastic for belief … 
a roomful of witnesses …
He could question the surviving Ironheart servants—who would undoubtedly reply according to their masters’ will. No dependable testimony there.

Frustration heated his anger. He relieved both by setting his men to work on Onartino’s fingernails with pliers; but the extraction of all ten produced no satisfactory information. Likewise futile was the application of radiant red coals to strategic points of naked anatomy, although one such application, resulting in the sizzling destruction of the victim’s right eye, did at last succeed in breaching Onartino’s provoking stoicism. Roars of pain resounded beneath Ironheart’s grim old roof. Aureste drank the outcry, which seemed in part to quench his own inner fires. A measure of relief stole over him, and he signaled his men to desist. His eyes turned to Yvenza, who sat motionless, unblinking eyes fixed on the spectacle before her.

“Give me back my daughter and all this ends,” he offered once again.

Her gaze flicked him and turned away, as if from an object unworthy of notice. In that instant he saw that her eyes were astonishingly devoid of tears; devoid of fear, hate, grief, or any other readily identifiable emotion and therefore alien as the eyes of some visitor from beyond the stars.

Thrusting his misgivings aside, he nodded and the torture resumed, the Taerleezis now hauling their prey upright to endure a merciless rain of cudgel blows to the torso. But Onartino’s response was disappointingly sluggish; his sensations seemed to have dulled. At last a poorly aimed blow glanced off the back of his skull to leave him sagging unconscious in the grip of his captors.

Annoyed, Aureste was obliged to order another suspension of activity. During the lull he repaired to a chamber more tranquil of atmosphere, there to dine on the best fare the indifferent kitchen of Ironheart could provide. Following his meal, he demanded to be shown to the chamber in which his daughter’s cloak had been discovered. It took but moments to investigate the place, a very plain, chilly little room whose door could be barred from the outside. No furnishings beyond a small bed with a threadbare blanket, pot under the bed, a rickety table, washbasin and pitcher. No ornaments, no clothing or personal items, nothing to recall his daughter’s presence. And then he noticed the crude wooden comb lying in the shadow of the basin and all but invisible on the wooden table. He picked it up and found tangled in its teeth a single long, dark hair. The right length, the right color.
Hers
. His eyes scalded for a moment. He slipped the comb into his pocket then returned to the interrogation chamber, renewed in energy.

Onartino had recovered consciousness. He lay supine and motionless on the floor, his large body crisscrossed with welts and bleeding cuts, splotched with purple-black bruises and red burns, knobbed with discolored lumps suggestive of broken bones. His face presented a shocking spectacle, with its burned-out eye socket surrounded by hugely swollen, livid flesh. He turned to look with his one remaining eye as Aureste reentered, his gaze unblinking and expressionless as a wounded lizard’s. Similarly impassive waited Yvenza, still in the chair where the soldiers had placed her. The soldiers themselves sat at the table, indifferent to the bloodstains marking its surface as they consumed the meal that some servant had evidently been ordered to bring them. They snapped to attention as Aureste came in.

Advancing to Onartino’s side, Aureste halted, looked down, and observed, “There’s still time to save yourself. Where is my daughter?”

“Probably servicing sailors, by this time,” Onartino opined, voice hoarse, words slurred but still understandable.

Aureste came within a nervespan of driving his booted heel straight down on the profane mouth, but controlled the impulse. The loss of all his remaining teeth might render the prisoner incapable of intelligible speech. Therefore turning to Yvenza, he inquired simply, “Well?”