The Widow and the King (22 page)

It will be a beating
, said the whisper in his head.
Your first
.

The Heron Man!

‘Which, of Punishment and Pardon, is the greater?’ repeated the master, as if he thought Ambrose had not heard him.

Pardon, thought Ambrose. It must be Pardon. He remembered his mother saying something …

Did she? Did you ever listen to her?

The voice in his head teased and confused him, like a bystander jeering as he stood under the eyes of the master.

You never listened. And then you left her.

Go away! Ambrose's mind screamed at it.

‘Come now,’ said the master sharply.

You did not listen. And then you left her. Now you cannot answer, and now you will be beaten. They will lay a thornstick across your back and peel your skin. Your flesh will swell, black and aching with pus.

Go away!

You deserve it because you left her.

Ambrose struggled to shut the voice out of his head. The master's face loomed over him. The muscles around the big eyes were hardening with impatience. Ambrose's skin tingled as if it could already feel the cane swishing through the air.

If you want to answer, ask me. I am all you have now.

He opened his mouth again. The little corner of the courtyard was still and grey.

I helped you to answer the Widow. I would do it again – if you asked.

No!

Ask me.

Ask me. You must.

Seconds passed. His mind was blank. He could not think. And he would not. If he thought he would see her turning in the air. If he thought he would feel the thornstick on his back. The unseen eyes were on him, waiting for him to save himself. And he would not.

Is
that
your answer?

The air thickened with contempt. But he would not think any more.

At last the master sighed. He began to pace, with a slow, rolling step, before the boys.

‘Pardon and Punishment each have their place,’ he said.

‘Men may pardon if they choose, and punish where they have the right, as a master punishes a bad pupil.

‘Yet men also punish without thought and without law, for wrongs that may be real or imagined. Such punishment is itself a wrong to the one who is punished.

‘And what man will pardon one who has wronged him, so long as his enemy is living? For first he is angry, and when he wearies of anger he fears that he would be seen as weak, and preyed upon. This we know as feud.’ He stopped in front of the first scholar. ‘Is it not true?’

‘Yes, master,’ said the scholar dutifully.

‘And yet,’ Denke went on. ‘If one who has the right – let us say the King – interposes in a feud between two men, and holds the wrong against himself, and yet pardons it – the feud must end, must it not?

‘That first pardon – the forgiveness when men are wearied of their quarrel, when all face ruin and yet none
have the will to forgive –
that
is the seed of peace. With peace there may be law, and with law, justice; with justice, pardon and punishment as they are deserved.

‘Therefore Pardon is the greater.’ Now he stood in front of Ambrose. ‘Do you agree?’

The big, steady voice had cleared the mists in Ambrose's mind like wind. Pardon was the greater. He had known it.

‘Yes, master.’

Once more the flesh-ringed eyes looked down on him.

‘What is your name?’

He almost said ‘Ambrose’. But that name had been taken from him. He hung his head and said nothing.

‘Three days?’ said the master, with the lift of an eyebrow. ‘In another three days, if I question you, see that you show me you have understood. This is what we teach here.

‘But for this reason, this time, I give pardon for your lack of wit. Do not forget again.’

With a grunt, the master strode off across the courtyard. As he left it seemed to Ambrose that the air lightened, as if something oppressive had passed on with him.

‘That,’ said one of the boys softly, ‘was nearly the stick for you.’

‘Lucky it was him,’ the other murmured. ‘He can scare the juices out of you, but he doesn't flog half as much as some.’

‘And he's got something on his mind this morning, hasn't he?’ said the first.

Twenty paces away Denke was again speaking as he went, as if someone walked beside him whom the boys could not see.

Ambrose realized that he was cold. He was clutching himself as if some gust from the mountains had blown over him, heavy with ancient tears. And he knew that he had known the answer the master wanted, and could have given it – if he could have forced his way past the dry, scornful voice in his head, which had been so quick, so right; and so familiar.

‘Your name's Luke, isn't it?’ said the shock-haired boy.

‘Yes,’ Ambrose mumbled.

‘I'm Rufin. This is Cullen. Look – it can be hard starting in this place. We know that. We've all done it. You stay close to us. If you get stuck again, we'll try to give you a hint.’

‘Thanks,’ Ambrose said.

He knew the boys wanted to be kind. Maybe they would be able to help if someone asked him questions again. But they could not help him where it mattered.

He stooped for his stones. They were still there. His fingers trembled as he touched them. They could stop the Heron Man from reaching him. But the Heron Man had not tried to reach him. All he had done was to speak to him. And at the sound of his voice Ambrose had felt helpless – helpless like a bird under the eyes of a snake. The only thing he could have done would have been to beg his enemy for aid. And now the Heron Man despised him. There had been no mistaking that. Maybe he had always despised him. Ambrose wondered what he would do next.

He wanted to get away.

‘Suppose the King is the source of forgiveness,’ said Cullen, still watching the master. ‘Then who forgives the King?’

‘We all can,’ said Rufin.

‘When he's dead.’ They did not seem to be paying Ambrose any more attention. After a little Ambrose left, slipping into the shadow of the School Stair. He did not know where he was going. He did not really care.

What mattered was getting away from the courtyard.

At length, on a shelf of the third press in the library, Sophia found what she was looking for. Like the other books and quires it was chained for safety to the iron bar that ran beneath its shelf, so she had to spread it out on the reading shelf immediately below the place where she had found it, some way from the dimming light of the window. Dapea settled patiently on the bench on the far side of the library aisle. No doubt she thought that Sophia had become especially dutiful after her last beating, to be reading at this hour.

Well, let her. The quire had nothing to do with Sophia's legitimate studies. She had been thinking about it for most of the day. Now she had time, an empty library, and for escort a maid who could not read. She composed herself.

And then someone else came slipping along the bench to sit beside her.

Maddening! This was exactly what she had wanted to avoid, and why she had waited until now to come up here. Scholars were always clumping together over the same book, especially when anything up to a dozen of them might have been instructed by their master to consult a single work. Indeed, the fastest way of finding what you wanted in the library when it was busy was not to look
along the shelves but to go and snoop at what your classmates were reading, because the chances were that they had found it before you.

And here they were – well, one of them, anyway. It was the clicking boy, peering around her arm at the quire before her. Without thinking, she drew her hand across the page to hide the words on it.

‘What are you looking at?’ he asked.

(‘Nothing’ would be a stupid answer. It would also be stupid to try to hide what she was reading. He would have to be told enough to make him lose interest.)

‘It's just a set of heraldic records,’ she said, and lifted her arm for him to see. ‘In order of precedence, and listing the badge of each house.’

‘Let me see.’

She made room for him, keeping her impatience locked in the secret places inside her mind. He looked down the long list of entries. At length he put his finger beside one. She glanced at it, and the word
Moon
leaped from the page at her.

He had found it – almost at once. He had found what she had been looking for.

She peered at the entry, spelling out the words in her mind.

Hairs prickled on the back of her neck. She had halfguessed that this would be the answer. Chawlin had looked
at those pale badges that the horsemen had worn, and had said they came from a distant house that had been broken. What house could that be? The scroll told her that it was Tarceny.

Those men had been Father's killers. They had passed by her so close she could have touched them.

‘Why are you looking at this?’ said the boy.

The Widow had spoken with them from the walls. She hadn't charged them, routed them, hanged them. She had
spoken
with Father's
killers
!

She cleared her throat. ‘I'm under private tuition,’ she managed to say. Her voice sounded weak in her ears.

‘That's not true. Not any more.’

She gripped the edge of the desk and willed herself not to shout at him. She knew that an argument in the library would do her no good. Everyone in the house knew she was still in disgrace, and being treated like any other scholar. Scholars were expected to share texts. She would only draw people's attention to the piece she had been looking at. In any case, it wasn't really the boy's fault if he knew no better than to speak to her like an equal.

‘A group of riders appeared at the gate a week ago,’ she said carefully. (Truth, she found, was often the best way of keeping the whole truth secret.) ‘They wore that badge. I wanted to know who they were, that was all. What is your name?’

He took a moment to answer. Then he said: ‘I'm called Luke.’

‘Are you here for a book? Can I help you find it?’

‘I want to look at this with you.’

She frowned, puzzled. Her mouth was open to frame
a question when another movement in the room caught her eye. Padry, the Master of Astrology, and also the scholars' Master of House, was peering round the corner of the press at their backs, like an old dog with nothing to do.

Sophia's heart sank. Now
he
would want to come over and see what they were looking at, and then he would want to talk about it, and maybe even ask questions. And she had already told this boy about the company of horsemen, so the boy would think it strange if she gave different answers to Padry. But the last thing she wanted was to remind the Widow's masters that she had been missing at the time those men had appeared at the gate.

Sure enough, here he came, sidling his bulk along between the bench and the press behind them in his idle curiosity. And she could not brush the quire aside or even shift it to show a less incriminating passage, because this idiot boy was leaning his elbows on it, caught in something he was reading. His finger had moved down to the last lines on that page. Padry stopped just behind him. She could only hope that the master did not see the entry about Tarceny, which lay open to the eye before them.

Padry peered over their shoulders. She saw him begin to read. She saw his face change. Her heart sank again.

Suddenly his hand gripped the boy by the shoulder.

‘Who set you to this? Who?’

To that moment Luke could not have been aware that Padry was in the room. He jerked, and turned pale. Something like a shriek escaped from him.

‘Who said you were to study this?’ said Padry again, shaking him by the shoulder.

Luke seemed to stop struggling when he realized who it was that had seized on him. But his breath was coming in gasps.

‘N-no one, master.’

‘No one indeed! Come with me. You will be taught to attend to your
studies
.’ Ignoring Sophia, he marched the boy out of the room, still gripping him by the elbow. Sophia watched them go, with her mouth open and her heart thankful that Padry had pounced so swiftly upon the wrong offender. The sounds faded down the stairway. Dapea, her maid, was sitting bolt upright on her bench, looking dumbfounded.

‘Angels!’ she said. ‘Is he going to beat the poor boy? And what for?’

He almost certainly would, thought Sophia. For some reason he had looked as though he had caught Luke tearing up a page to make paper. She wondered if Padry was actually going to start punishing the boy immediately, outside the school hall. But a door slammed, and all sounds were cut off. The silence swelled in behind it, troubled only by the sounds and calls of the household gathering in the courtyard.

Poor boy, yes.

‘That's my fault,’ she said grimly. ‘Although I don't know why it mattered.’

There was nothing she could do. She returned to the table where the quire lay with its long list of badges and names of infamy.

Tarceny.
The Under-Craft Prevaileth.
(What was undercraft?)
Sable, a Full Moon Argent defaced.

The Doubting Moon!

The Widow had spoken with them – spoken with them and let them go. Did she not even care about Father any more? She wore black every day, summer and winter; she spoke his name and cited his memory over and over. But she didn't care enough to
do
anything for him.

Sophia did not know. When it came to the Widow, she could not trust even her own feelings. That was something else the Widow had done to her.

Who could she trust? She wanted to talk to someone. But if she told anyone that she had seen these riders pass, she would risk another beating.

The scholar Chawlin. He knew, of course.

Well, why not? She had been looking forward to seeing him again. Here was a reason to seek him out. He would be at the Dispute tonight, with everyone else. She might catch his eye then. It would be very soon now. In fact she should be on her way already.