Cazaril stepped across the mess of food and wine and bile toward Urrac, who lurched backward until stopped by the far wall. Cazaril leaned into his face and repeated softly, “I don’t duel. But if you seek to die like a bludgeoned steer, cross me again.”
He turned on his heel; dy Maroc’s face, drained white, wavered past his vision, hissing, “Cazaril, have you gone mad?”
“Try me.” Cazaril grinned fiercely at him. Dy Maroc fell back. Cazaril strode down the corridor past a blur of men, blood drops still spattering off his fingers as he swung his arms, and out into the chill shock of the night. The closing door cut off a rising babble of voices.
He almost ran across the icy cobbles of the courtyard toward the main block and refuge, both his steps and his breath growing faster and less even as something—sanity, delayed terror?—seeped back into his mind. His belly cramped violently as he mounted the stone stairs. His fingers shook so badly as he fumbled out his key to let himself into his bedchamber that he dropped it twice and had to use both hands, braced against the door, to finally guide it into the lock. He locked the door again behind him, and fell, wheezing and groaning, across his bed. His attendant ghosts had fled into hiding during the confrontation, their desertion unnoticed by him at the time. He rolled onto his side, and curled around his aching stomach. Now, at last, his cut wrist began to throb. So did his head.
He’d seen men go berserk a few times, in the madness of battle. He’d just never imagined what it must feel like from the inside, before. No one had mentioned the floating exhilaration, intoxicating as wine or sex. An unusual, but natural, result of nerves, mortality, and fright, jammed together in too small a space, too short a time. Not unnatural. Not . . . the thing in his belly reaching out to twist and taunt and trick him into death, and its own release. . . .
Oh.
You know what you did to Dondo. Now you know what Dondo is doing to you.
Chapter 17
It was by chance, late the following morning, that Cazaril spied Orico ambling out the Zangre gates toward the menagerie with only a page at his heels. Cazaril tucked the letters he’d been carrying to the Chancellery office into the inner pocket of his vest-cloak, turned from the door of Ias’s Tower, and followed. The roya’s master of the chamber had earlier refused to disturb his lord’s after-breakfast nap; clearly, Orico had finally roused himself and now sought comfort and solace among his animals. Cazaril wondered if the roya had awoken with as bad a headache as he had.
As he strode across the cobbles, Cazaril marshaled his arguments. If the roya feared action, Cazaril would point out that inaction was equally likely to be bent to ill by the curse’s malign influence. If the roya insisted that the children were too young, he would note that they should not then have been ordered to Cardegoss in the first place. But now that they were here, if Orico could not protect them then he had an obligation to both Chalion and the children to tell them of their danger. Cazaril would call on Umegat to confirm that the roya could not, did not, in fact, hold the curse all to himself. Do not send them blindfolded into battle he would plead, and hope Palli’s cry would strike Orico as much to the heart as it had him. And if it didn’t . . .
If he took this into his own hands, should he first tell Teidez, as Heir of Chalion, and appeal for his aid in protecting his sister? Or Iselle, and enlist her help in managing the more difficult Teidez? The second choice would better allow him to hide his complicity behind the royesse’s skirts, but only if the secret of his guilt survived her shrewd cross-examination.
A scraping of hooves broke into his self-absorption. He looked up just in time to dodge from the path of the cavalcade starting out from the stables. Royse Teidez, mounted on his fine black horse, led a party of his Baocian guards, their captain and two men. The royse’s black-and-lavender mourning garb made his round face appear drawn and pale in the winter sunlight. Dondo’s green stone glinted on the guard captain’s hand, raised to return Cazaril’s polite salute.
“Where away, Royse?” Cazaril called. “Do you hunt?” The party was armed for it, with spears and crossbows, swords and cudgels.
Teidez drew up his fretting horse and stared briefly down at Cazaril. “No, just a gallop along the river. The Zangre is . . . stuffy, this morning.”
Indeed. And if they just happened to flush a deer or two, well, they were prepared to accept the gods’ largesse. But not really hunting while in mourning, no. “I understand,” said Cazaril, and suppressed a smile. “It will be good for the horses.” Teidez lifted his reins again. Cazaril stepped back, but then added suddenly, “I would speak to you later, Royse, on the matter that concerned you yesterday.”
Teidez gave him a vague wave, and a frown—not exactly assent, but it would do. Cazaril bowed farewell as they clattered out of the stable yard.
And remained bent over, as the worst cramp yet kicked him in the belly with the power of a horse’s hind hooves. His breathing stopped. Waves of pain seemed to surge through his whole body from this central source, even to burning spasms in the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet. A hideous vision shook him of Rojeras’s postulated demon-monster preparing to bloodily claw its way out of him into the light. One creature, or two? With no bodies to keep their spirits apart, bottled under the pressure of the Lady’s miracle, might Dondo and the demon have begun to blend together into one dreadful being? It was true that he’d distinguished only one voice, not a duet, baying at him from his belly in the night. His knees sank helplessly to the cold cobbles. He drew in a shuddering breath. The world seemed to churn around his head in short, dizzy jerks.
After a few minutes, a shadow trailing a powerful aroma of horses loomed at his shoulder. A gruff voice muttered in his ear, “M’lord? You all right?”
Cazaril blinked up to see one of the stable grooms, a middle-aged fellow with bad teeth, bending over him. “Not . . . really,” he managed to reply.
“Ought you go indoors, sir?”
“Yes . . . I suppose . . .”
The groom helped him to his feet with a hand under his elbow, and steadied him back through the gates to the main block. At the bottom of the stairs Cazaril gasped, “Wait. Not yet,” and sat heavily upon the steps.
After an awkward minute the groom asked, “Should I get someone for you, m’lord? I should return to my duties.”
“It’s . . . just a spasm. It will pass off in a few minutes. I’m all right now. Go on.” The pain was dwindling, leaving him feeling flushed and strange.
The groom frowned uncertainly, staring down at Cazaril, but then ducked his head and departed.
Slowly, as he sat quietly on the stair, he began to regain his breath and balance, and was able to straighten his back again. The world stopped pulsing. Even the couple of ghost-blotches that had crept out of the walls to cluster at his feet grew quiescent. Cazaril eyed them in the shadows of the stairwell, considering what a cold and lonely damnation was their slow erosion, loss of all that had made them individual men and women. What must it be like, to feel one’s very spirit slowly rot away around one, as flesh rotted from dead limbs? Did the ghosts sense their own diminishment, or did that self-perception, too, mercifully, wear away in time? The Bastard’s legendary hell, with all its supposed torments, seemed a sort of heaven by comparison.
“Ah! Cazaril!” A surprised voice made him look up. Palli stood with one booted foot on the first step, flanked by two young men also wearing the blue and white of the Daughter’s Order beneath gray wool riding cloaks. “I was just coming to find you.” Palli’s dark brows drew down. “What are you doing sitting on the stairs?”