“A border. Any border.”
“Brajar and South Ibra would send you right back, to please Orico. The five princedoms or the Fox of Ibra would take you hostage. Darthaca . . . presupposes we could make it across half of Chalion and all of South Ibra. I fear not, Royesse.”
“What else can I do?” Her young voice was edged with desperation.
“No one can force a marriage. Both parties must freely assent before the gods. If you have the courage to simply stand there and say No, it cannot go forth. Can you not find it in yourself to do so?”
Her lips tightened. “Of course I could. Then what? Now I think you are the one who has not thought it through. Do you think Lord Dondo would just give up, at that point?”
He shook his head. “It’s not valid if they force it, and everyone knows it. Just hold on to that thought.”
She shook her head in something between grief and exasperation. “You don’t understand.”
He’d have taken that for the wail of youth everywhere, till Dondo himself came that afternoon to the royesse’s chamber to persuade his betrothed to a more seemly compliance. The doors were left open to the royesse’s sitting room, but an armed guard stood at each, keeping back both Cazaril on one side and Nan dy Vrit and Betriz on the other. He did not catch one word in three of the furious undervoiced argument that raged between the thickset courtier and the red-haired maiden. But at the end of it Dondo stalked out with a look of savage satisfaction on his face, and Iselle collapsed on the window seat nearly unable to breathe, so torn was she between terror and fury.
She clutched Betriz and choked out, “He said . . . if I did not make the responses, he would take me anyway. I said, Orico would never let you rape his sister. He said, why not? He let us rape his wife. When Royina Sara would not conceive, and could not conceive, and Orico was too impotent to get a bastard no matter how many ladies and maidens and whores they brought to him, and, and even more disgusting things, the Jironals finally persuaded him to let them in upon her, and try . . . Dondo said, he and his brother tried every night for a year, one at a time or both together, till she threatened to kill herself. He said he would roger me till he’d planted his fruit in my womb, and when I was ripe to bursting, I’d hang on him as husband hard enough.” She blinked blurry eyes at Cazaril, her lips drawn back on clenched teeth. “He said, my belly would grow very big indeed, because I am short. How much courage do I need for that simple No, Cazaril, do you think? And what happens when courage makes no difference at all, at all?”
I thought the only place that courage didn’t matter was on a Roknari slave galley. I was wrong. He whispered abjectly, “I do not know, Royesse.”
Trapped and desperate, she fell to fasting and prayer; Nan and Betriz helped to set up a portable altar to the gods in her chambers and collected all the symbols of the Lady of Spring they could find to decorate it. Cazaril, trailed by his two guards, walked down into Cardegoss and found a flower-seller with forced violets, out of season, and brought them back to put in a glass jar of water on the altar. He felt stupid and helpless, though the royesse dropped a tear on his hand when she thanked him. Taking neither food nor drink, she lay back down on the floor in the attitude of deepest supplication, so like Royina Ista when Cazaril had first caught sight of her in the Provincara’s ancestors’ hall that he was unnerved, and fled the room. He spent hours, walking about the Zangre, trying to think, thinking only of horrors.
Late that evening, the Lady Betriz called him up to the office antechamber that was rapidly becoming a place of hectic nightmare.
“I have the answer!” she told him. “Cazaril, teach me how to kill a man with a knife.”
“What?”
“Dondo’s guards know enough not to let you close to him. But I will be standing beside Iselle on her wedding morning, to be her witness, and make the responses. No one will expect it of me. I’ll hide the knife in my bodice. When Dondo comes close, and bends to kiss her hand, I can strike at him, two, three times before anyone can stop me. But I don’t know just how and where to cut, to be sure. The neck, yes, but what part?” Earnestly, she drew a heavy dirk out from behind her skirts and held it out to him. “Show me. We can practice, till I have it very smooth and fast.”
“Gods, no, Lady Betriz! Give up this mad plan! They would strike you down—they’d hang you, afterward!”
“Provided only I was able to kill Dondo first, I’d go gladly to the gallows. I swore to guard Iselle with my life. Well, so.” Her brown eyes burned in her white face.
“No,” he said firmly, taking the knife and not giving it back. Where had she obtained it, anyway? “This is no work for a woman.”
“I’d say it’s work for whoever has a chance at it. My chance is best. Show me!”
“Look, no. Just . . . wait. I’ll, I’ll try something, find what I can do.”
“Can you kill Dondo? Iselle is in there praying to the Lady to slay either her or Dondo before the wedding, she doesn’t care anymore which. Well, I care which. I think it should be Dondo.”
“I entirely agree. Look, Lady Betriz. Wait, just wait. I’ll see what I can do.”
If the gods will not answer your prayers, Lady Iselle, by the gods I will try to.
He spent hours the following day, the last before the marriage, trying to stalk Lord Dondo through the Zangre like a boar in a forest of stone. He never got within striking distance. In midafternoon, Dondo returned to the Jironals’ great palace in town, and Cazaril could not get past its walls or gates. The second time Dondo’s bravos threw him out, one held him while another struck him enough times in the chest, belly, and groin to make his return to the Zangre a slow weave, supporting himself like a drunk with a hand out to nearby walls. The roya’s guards, whom he had scraped off in a dodge through Cardegoss’s alleys, arrived in time to watch both the beating and the crawl home. They did not interfere with either.
In a burst of inspiration, he bethought himself of the secret passage that had run between the Zangre and the Jironals’ great palace when it had been the property of Lord dy Lutez. Ias and dy Lutez had been reputed to use it daily, for conference, or nightly, for assignations of love, depending on the teller. The tunnel, he discovered, was now about as secret as Cardegoss’s main street, and had guards on both ends, and locked doors. His attempt at bribery won him shoves and curses, and the threat of another beating.
Some assassin I am, he thought bitterly, as he reeled into his bedchamber as dusk descended, and fell groaning into his bed. Head pounding, body aching, he lay still for a time, then at last roused himself enough to light a candle. He ought to go upstairs, and check on his ladies, but he didn’t think he could bear the weeping. Or the reporting of his failure to Betriz, or what she would demand of him after that. If he could not kill Dondo, what right had he to try to thwart her effort?
I would gladly die, if only I could stop this abomination tomorrow . . .
Do you mean that?
He sat stiffly, wondering if that last voice was quite his own. His tongue had moved a little behind his lips, as usual for when he was babbling to himself. Yes.
He lurched around to the end of his bed, fell to his knees, and flipped open the lid of his trunk. He dived down amongst the folded garments, scented with cloves as proof against moths, until he came to a black velvet vest-cloak folded around a brown wool robe. Folded around a ciphered notebook that he had never finished deciphering when the crooked judge had fled Valenda, that it had seemed too late to return to the Temple without embarrassing explanations. Feverishly, he drew it out, and lit more candles. There’s not much time left. About a third of it was left untranslated. Forget all the failed experiments. Go to the last page, eh?