She did her best to bank the flame of rage: it would do her no good to let it overwhelm her. “And what slanders does Jenkin Crowel spread?” She had grown heartily sick of looking at Feival’s back. “By Zosim’s masks, man, turn around and talk to me!”
He faced her, surprised and perhaps even a little angry. “He says many things, or at least so I hear—he is not such a fool as to speak lies about you to me!” Feival scowled like a sulking child. “Many of them are just small insults—that you are mannish, that you like to go about in men’s clothing, and not simply for disguise, that you are sour-tempered and a shrew…”
“More true than not, so far,” Briony said with a grim smile.
“But the ugliest thing he will not say directly, but simply hint. He lets slip that at first everyone thought the southerner Shasto had kidnapped you…”
“Shaso. His name was Shaso.”
“… but that now folk in Southmarch believe you were not taken against your will. That it was part of a plan you made to seize your father’s throne, and that only Hendon Tolly being there prevented the two of you from carrying it off.” He flushed a little. “That is the worst of it, I suppose.”
“The two of us? My brother Barrick and I?”
“No. In the hints he lets drop, your twin brother was a victim too, sent away by you to die fighting the fairies. Your accomplice, claims Crowel, was that very southern general Shast… Shaso—the man who killed your other brother. And that he was… more than an accomplice…”
Briony’s rage was so sudden and so powerful that for a moment blackness rushed into her head and she thought she was dying. “He dares to say that? That I…” Her mouth seemed full of poison—she wanted to spit. “His master Hendon did kill his own brother—surely that is what he is thinking of! He is telling people that Shaso and I were lovers? ” She lurched to her feet. It was all she could do not to snatch up her sewing and run out to stick a needle in Jenkin Crowel’s eye. “The infamous… pig! It is bad enough that he should insult that good old man who died trying to get me to safety, but to suggest that I would… that I would harm my own beloved brothers! ” She was weeping now and could barely catch her breath. “How can he tell such lies about me? And how can anyone believe them?”
“Briony—Princess, please, calm yourself!” The player looked almost terrified by what he had unleashed.
“What does Finn say? What are people saying on the street, in the taverns?”
“It is scarcely discussed outside of court,” he told her. “The Tollys are not particularly popular here, but it likely makes people wonder. Still, the king is popular and you are his guest. Most Syannese leave it to him to know what’s best.”
“But not here in the court, I take it.”
Feival was trying to calm her now. “Most people in the court do not know you any better than do the drunken fools in the taverns. It is because you lock yourself away here like an anchorite.”
“So you are saying…” She paused to get her breath, to feel her heart slowing a little. “So you are saying that I should get out and mingle with the others in Broadhall Palace more often? That I should spend more time with folk like Jenkin Crowel, swapping insults and telling lies?”
Feival took a breath and straightened, the very picture of a man who had suffered unfairly. “For your own good, yes, Princess. You should make yourself seen. You should show people simply by your presence that you have nothing to hide. Thus you will refute Crowel’s lies.”
“Perhaps you are right.” The heated fury was receding, but what replaced it was something no less angry, only colder. “Yes, you are right. One way or the other, I must move to prevent the spreading of such terrible, terrible stories.
“And I will.”
The temple of Onir Plessos did not have enough beds for all the newcomers but the pilgrims were a sensible lot, happy enough just to find refuge from this year’s cold spring rains. The Master Templar told them they could spread their blankets in the common room after the evening meal.
“Will we not disturb your other guests, or the brothers?” asked the leader of the pilgrims, a heavyset fellow of obvious good nature for whom the conducting of religious seekers and penitents had become, after so many years, more a business than a religious calling. “You have always been generous to me, Master, and I would not wish to gain a bad name here.”
The Master Templar smiled. “You bring a respectable class of pilgrim, my good Theron. Without such travelers, our temple would be hard pressed to shelter and feed the truly needy.” He lowered his voice. “An example of the kind I like less well, do you see that fellow there? The cripple? He has stayed with us for several tennights.” He gestured toward a robed figure sitting in the sparse garden attended by a smaller figure, a boy of perhaps nine or ten summers. “I confess I had hoped that when the weather warmed he would move on—not only does he have a rank smell, he is strange and does not speak to us himself, but has the child speak for him… or at least pass along his words, which are usually full of doom and mystery.”
Theron looked interested. The lessened nature of his own faith, or at least of his zeal, had not made him any the less drawn to the strong faith of others—the reverse, if anything, since just such strong faith had now become his livelihood. “Perhaps he is an oracle, your cripple. Was not the blessed Zakkas unrecognized in his own lifetime?”
The Master Templar was not amused. “Do not seek to teach piety to a priest, Master Caravaner. This fellow does not talk of holy things, but of… well, it is hard to say without you hear him yourself—or hear what the child says for him.”
“I doubt we will have time,” said Theron shortly, smarting a little from the priest’s rebuke. “We must leave early tomorrow. There is at least one more snow coming to the Whitewood this year, and I would not be caught in it. The north has become strange enough these days without fighting the storms. I miss the warm springs we enjoyed here in Summerfield when the king was on his throne in Southmarch.”
“I miss many things about those days,” said the Master Templar, and on this safer ground the conversation continued for a while as the two men regained their old friendship.
The fire in the common room had burned low and most of the pilgrims had fallen asleep after a long, cold day’s walking. Theron was having a quiet conversation with his wagoneer when the holy man—or so Theron was already disposed to think of him—limped slowly into the room, leaning on a dirty, sullen, dark-skinned child. The boy helped him to sit down by the hearth, close to the embers, and then took a cup from the beggar’s hand and carried it off to fill it from the bucket.
Theron waved the wagoneer off to finish what he had to do before sleeping, then watched the frail holy man for a moment. It was hard to make out much of anything about him: his face was hidden by the long hood of his stained and tattered robe, his hands wrapped in dirty old bandages. The strange shape sat still as stone but for a faint trembling. As Theron stared at the beggar he felt not an apprehension of holiness but of sudden dread. It was not that the man himself seemed particularly threatening, but there was something about him that suddenly made Theron think of old stories—not those of holy pilgrims, but of unquiet spirits and dead men who cannot rest in their graves.
Theron ran his fingers through the swaying, clicking collection of religious ornaments around his neck, some he had gained himself on his travels as a younger man to various holy sites, others given to him as gifts (or sometimes as partial payment) by the pilgrims he conducted. His hand lingered for a moment on a wooden dove, one of his favorites and long-since polished to a deep sheen by handling. It had come from one of his earliest pilgrimages, to a famous Zorian shrine in Akaris, and he found it particularly soothing to think of the White Daughter when he was troubled.