I scribbled a message for Kellea and grabbed my cloak.
“I knew they’d take him there,” said Paulo, frost wreathing his face as we raced through the snow-blanketed streets. “Knew it from the first. So I found the place. Been watching it every day.”
We cut through a long-neglected bathhouse, our footsteps echoing on the broken paving as we circled empty pools littered with years of dead leaves and matted with snow. Moonlight poured through the fallen ceiling to reveal glimpses of richly colored mosaics peeking from behind masses of winter-dead vines. The path through the bathhouse gardens led us into a broad street of fine houses. Only a stitch in my side caused our steps to slow.
Avoiding the soft pools of lamplight that spilled from the paned windows alongside laughter, music, and the savory scents of roasting meat and baking sweets, we hurried toward a formal circle of trees at the end of the street. A high, thick wall, quite overgrown, and a severely plain iron gate with no hinges, no latches, no guards, and no obvious way to open it closed off the roadway. Through the gates and a large expanse of trees and shrubs, I glimpsed a huge house with many lighted windows on its lower floors. Signaling for quiet, Paulo led me into a narrow lane that skirted the wall.
At the back of the house, the stone wall yielded to a wooden building. The unmistakable scent of stables hung in the cold air trapped behind it. Paulo carefully removed three boards from the wall, leaving a hole just large enough for a person to crawl through. He went first, pulling the loose boards back into the hole once I had slithered into an empty stall filled with fragrant hay. Skirting the wide stableyard, we sped across a gravel lane and through a hedge, across a snow-covered lawn, and around a corner of the great house.
The addition of a massive chimney sometime after the original house was built had left a jutting corner in each side of the house. Near the bottom of the wall to the left of the chimney was a wide grate of the kind used to draw fresh air into an enclosed room. Yellow light and the sound of voices spilled out of the grate.
“However did you find this?” I whispered.
“Back when that Duke Baglos told us how wicked and stubborn the Prince was when he was a boy, he said how Exeget used to make the Prince spend time outside in the winter for punishment. Well, I’ve been throwed out in the winter a deal of times, so’s I thought where would a fellow go to get warm if he was out like that? Stables, maybe, or in a corner like this where he could get a look at what was going on in the house.”
We settled ourselves beside the grate and peered inside. I could easily imagine the boy D’Natheil, sent into the winter weather unclothed to crush his pride, huddling here to draw warmth from the brick chimney and watch resentfully as his warm and comfortable mentor went about his business in the Preceptors’ council chamber. For that was surely the room that lay beyond the grate.
The chamber was immense, its floor well below the level of the ground on which we sat, and its ceiling out of view. Suspended from the unseen ceilings were wide lamps created, not from candles or oil lamps or torches, but from a thousand faceted globes of light hung on hoops of bronze. Tapestries woven of jewellike colors adorned the walls, hung between elegant pilasters shaped like elongated wheat sheaves. Tall bronze doors, each with a graceful tree worked in relief, faced us across the expanse. Our vantage allowed us to look down on a raised dais that stood just in front of the great hearth. On the dais stood a long table and seven elaborately carved, high-backed chairs, five of them occupied: one by a huge man wearing a wide neck-chain of gold set with rubies, another by a buxom, broad-faced woman in a robe of shifting colors, one by a skeletal, balding man, and two more by an elderly man and woman who sat in the center-the Preceptors of Gondai. Gar‘Dena, Madyalar, Y’Dan, Ustele, and Ce’Aret. A sixth man, his light, thinning hair immaculately combed, face round and boneless, looking something like a foppish clerk, must be the Preceptor Exeget. He stood just beyond the table, beside a chair that had been set to face the dais. Karon sat in the chair.
He wore a white robe, just as on the day I walked with him in my mother’s garden, but on this night his face expressed neither hope, nor joy, nor even the tired and rueful humor of that meeting. His haunted eyes were hollow, his face gaunt. His hands, resting on the wide arms of his chair, were shaking. Eyes fixed on the fire beyond the dais, he showed no signs of hearing anything that was being said. What had they done to him?
Exeget seemed to be concluding an argument. “… and so we have uncovered at last what the traitor Dassine has wrought: imprisoning a dead soul before it could cross the Verges, murdering our rightful Heir, and reviving him by implanting this impostor in his body, leaving us with a sovereign so crippled of mind that he could easily be molded to his master’s will. Even our ‘Prince’ will tell you he does not belong in his office. His life should properly have ended ten years ago in the brutal fires of his adopted world. He belongs beyond the Verges.”
Earth and sky, they’d told him everything!
“But no matter the method of his transformation, you cannot deny that he is the Prince as well as the Exile,” said Madyalar, the woman in the color-shifting robe. “I see no difficulty here. He has answered all our questions. He possesses the Heir’s power; we cannot deny him. D’Arnath’s line ends with D’Natheil.”
“Not so,” said Exeget. “Vasrin Shaper has again shown her faithfulness, taking the matter of our dilemma and shaping a solution. The line of D’Arnath cannot end if this Prince provides us a successor.”
“But D’Natheil has no children. Dassine did not let him breed,” said the hard old woman, Ce’Aret.
“All true, and yet… If we could produce one who could pass the test of parentage alongside our crippled Prince, would you not say we had found ourselves a ready Heir?”
“Well, of course, but that’s impossible,” said Y’Dan, the bald man.
No. Not impossible at all.
Exeget smiled, waved his hand, and the bronze doors swung open. Darzid and Gerick entered the room and stood behind Karon, who stared at the floor, unmoving save for the unceasing tremor of his hands.
Gerick was dressed in brown breeches and a sleeveless shirt of beige silk. A gold chain hung around his neck, and a wide gold armring encircled each of his tanned, bare arms. A knife hung from his belt, the sheath strapped to his leg with a leather band. His red-brown hair was trimmed and shining, and affixed to his left ear was a gold earring, embedded with jewels. In the two months since Covenant Day he had grown a handspan, but neither that nor his deep red-gold coloring nor his exotic adornment was the most profound change.
He was no longer afraid. All the false bravado, all the sullen temper was gone; how clear it was now that they had been products of his terror. Gone also was the child who had watched with curiosity and pleasure when I made things that he could recreate for the old nurse he loved. Gerick’s eyes were cold, and hatred, not love, gave life to his face.
I pressed one hand to my mouth and the other to my belly, trying to quell the dull, swelling ache just below my ribs. So profound a change in so short a time. What had I been playing at to allow this to happen? Who were these vile beings who could so easily and so determinedly corrupt a child?