“At the cost of much hardship and privation and danger” – his eyes hinted at pride – “my demure and retiring daughter saved her mother. She enabled me to find the Queen and set her free.
“Her abductors defended themselves as well as they could – well enough to prevent the Fayle’s men and me from capturing or questioning them – but at last they fell.” The state of his gear testified that the battle hadn’t been easy. “When I had taken Queen Madin and Torrent to safety in Romish, Havelock’s friend brought me here as quickly as possible.”
Geraden absorbed this account without obvious surprise or appreciation. When King Joyse had finished, Geraden asked noncommittally, “And you didn’t stop in Orison? You don’t have any news from there?”
The King was losing patience. “Do I look like a man who has spent time on social amenities and conversation? I knew that if I did not find you here I could return to Orison at my leisure. But if I had stopped there first and failed to find you, the delay might have made me too late to join you. I have learned nothing, heard nothing, since the moment I left the hall of audiences.
“Geraden,” he concluded warningly, “I must know what has happened in my absence. I must hear the tale you brought to Orison with Prince Kragen. I cannot go into battle without that knowledge.”
“My lord King,” Geraden responded as if he were immune to Joyse’s impatience, “Eremis is holding my brother Nyle hostage somewhere near here – a stronghold of some kind, probably. Eremis is going to use him against us. Against me. And it’s my doing. If I hadn’t been so determined to stop him from betraying you for Elega and Prince Kragen, he never would have been vulnerable to Eremis. He wouldn’t have been locked up where Eremis could get at him.
“But it’s your doing, too. You’ve always been such a friend of the Domne. You welcomed Artagel. You went out of your way to draw me to you. And yet you always ignored Nyle.
“His yearning was as great as mine. He has plenty of ability. And he was raised from the beginning on Artagel’s stories about you, the Domne’s stories. He would have been willing to kill for you by the time he was six.”
“Geraden,” King Joyse growled.
Nevertheless Geraden went on, “Why didn’t you value him at all? Why didn’t you give him something to save him while he was still young enough to save?”
“You exceed yourself,” snapped the King. “I have not come all this way to answer such questions.”
“But you’re going to answer this one,” Geraden replied as if he were sure – as if he had the capacity to make King Joyse do what he wanted. The hint of authority in his voice was so subtle that Terisa scarcely heard it. He meant to wrest some kind of truth from his King.
And the King did answer. To her astonishment, he retreated visibly, with a crestfallen air, a look of embarrassment; Geraden had touched an odd shame. “Yes,” he muttered, “all right. You are right: I always did ignore him. There was always a quality in his dumb need which I disliked. He pitied himself before I could pity him – and so I had no desire to pity him.
“But that is not the reason.
“Artagel was another matter altogether. His talent with the sword was obvious. Anyone would have welcomed him. But you, Geraden—” The King’s gaze was angry and hurt at once, as if his own sense of culpability baffled him. “I did not choose you out of a desire to give you precedence over Nyle. I would not have done that to the son of a friend. No, I drew you to me because I had already seen your importance in Havelock’s augury.”
Geraden hissed a breath; but King Joyse didn’t stop.
“The glass which he broke when I was an infant showed you exactly as you appear in the Congery’s augury” – for a moment, the King’s voice sounded as raw as splintered wood – “surrounded entirely by mirrors in which Images of violence reflected against you. How could I let you be? I had to save you, if that were possible. And if it were not, I had to give you the chance to save me.
“Geraden,” King Joyse admitted in frank pain, “on your father’s love, I swear to you that I slighted Nyle’s yearning only because I was not wise enough to see where it would lead him. The Domne has given me nothing but love and loyalty. In the matter of his son Nyle I failed him.”
For a long moment, Geraden didn’t speak. When he did, his throat was tight with emotion. “We all failed, my lord King. For my part – I swear to you on my father’s love that I’ll save you if I can. No matter how many people you’ve hurt. You haven’t been honest with us for a long time, and I hate that. But you’re still my King. Nobody can fill that place but you.”
Terisa couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “Castellan Lebbick is dead,” she put in cruelly to get the King’s attention. She needed answers of her own. “Gart killed him. All he managed to do before he died was save the Tor.”
That made Geraden turn toward her, made King Joyse face her again.
The two men looked unexpectedly like a match for each other, suited to meet each other’s demands.
“I defended you,” she said with Lebbick’s body vivid in her mind, and the Perdon’s; with the Tor’s hurt displayed under the light of the lanterns. “I stood up in front of everybody and told them what Master Quillon told me. You made yourself the only reasonable target. So the enemies you hadn’t been able to identify would attack you instead of someone else, somewhere else. I told them. That’s why we’re all here. We decided to trust you even after you abandoned us.
“But Master Quillon is dead. Castellan Lebbick is dead. The Perdon is dead. The Tor is dying.” Her distress accumulated as she spoke. She thought that she would never be reconciled to all the different kinds of pain King Joyse had exacted from his friends. “Nyle is a hostage, and Houseldon has been burned to the ground, and Sternwall is sinking in lava, and the Fayle doesn’t even have enough men left to rescue his own daughter, and now we’re probably going to be slaughtered because we don’t know where Eremis’ stronghold is,” oh, curse you, curse you, you crazy old man, “and I want to know how you stand it. How do you live with yourself.? How do you expect us to trust you?
“You can’t help us now!” Overwhelmed by unpremeditated bitterness, Terisa cried, “You can’t even beat Havelock at hop-board!”
Despite her outburst, however, King Joyse faced her gently. Her accusation hurt him less than Geraden’s had: maybe he was readier for it. His face softened while she protested against him; his gaze was blurred by compassion. He waited until she was finished. Then, incongruously, he pulled an old handkerchief out of the seam of his breastplate and handed it to her so that she could wipe her eyes.
Geraden stood now at the King’s shoulder as if he had been won over. “Terisa—” he began; but King Joyse touched his arm, stopped him.
“No, Geraden. I must answer her.
“My lady, I have already proved myself to you, after a fashion. You have seen atrocities in Mordant. Yet it was not I who perpetrated them. If I had not, as you say, made myself a target, if I had not risked those I love most in the name of my weakness, those atrocities would be everywhere. Without the lure of my weakness, Eremis might have had great difficulty forging an alliance with High King Festten – and so he would have had no choice except to afflict Cadwal and Mordant and Alend with vile Imagery until all things were destroyed. At the cost of Quillon’s life, and Lebbick’s, and the Perdon’s – at the cost, yes, of my own wife’s indignation, my own daughter’s betray – I have procured my enemy’s name as well as his attention, so that for Cadwal and Mordant and Alend there is still hope. I have given us the opportunity to fight for our world.