Royina Sara, her white shawl bundled about her and a woman at her heels, was hurrying up the hall. Cazaril bowed anxiously as she came to the staircase.
“My lady, what has happened? Can I help?”
She touched her hand to her frightened face. “I scarcely know yet, Castillar. Orico—he was reading aloud to me in my chambers while I stitched, as he sometimes does, for my solace, when suddenly he stopped, and blinked and rubbed his eyes, and said he could not see the words anymore, and that the room was all dark. But it wasn’t! Then he fell from his chair. I cried for my ladies, and we put him in his bed, and have sent for a Temple physician.”
“We saw the roya’s page,” Cazaril assured her. “He was running as fast as he could.”
“Oh, good . . .”
“Was it an apoplexy, do you think?”
“I don’t think . . . I don’t know. He speaks a little, and his breath is not very labored . . . What was all that shouting, down by the stables, earlier?” Distractedly, not waiting for an answer, she passed him and mounted the stairs.
Teidez, his face gone leaden, licked his lips but said no more as Cazaril turned him around and led him down to the courtyard.
The royse did not find his voice again till they were mounting the stairs in the main block, where he repeated breathlessly, “It cannot be. Dondo told me the menagerie was black sorcery, a Roknari curse to keep Orico sick and weak. And I could see that it was so.”
“A Roknari curse, there truly is, but the menagerie is a white miracle that keeps Orico alive despite it. Was. Till now,” Cazaril added bitterly.
“No . . . no . . . it’s all wrong. Dondo told me—”
“Dondo was mistaken.” Cazaril hesitated briefly. “Or else Dondo wished to hurry the replacement of a roya who favored his elder brother with one who favored himself.”
Teidez’s lips parted in protest, but no sound came from them. Cazaril didn’t think the royse could be feigning the shocked look in his eyes. The only mercy in this day, if mercy it was—Dondo might have misled Teidez, but he seemed not to have corrupted him, not to that extent. Teidez was tool, not co-conspirator, not a willing fratricide. Unfortunately, he was a tool that had kept on functioning after the workman’s hand had fallen away. And whose fault was it that the boy swallowed down lies, when no one would feed him the truth?
The sallow fellow who was the royse’s secretary-tutor looked up in surprise from his writing desk as Cazaril swung the boy into his chambers.
“Look to your master,” Cazaril told him shortly. “He’s injured. He is not to quit this building until Chancellor dy Jironal is informed what has occurred, and gives him leave.” He added, with a little sour satisfaction, “If you knew of this outrage, and did nothing to prevent it, the chancellor will be furious with you.”
The man paled in confusion; Cazaril turned his back on him. Now to go see what was happening with Umegat . . .
“But Lord Cazaril,” Teidez’s voice quavered. “What should I do?”
Cazaril spat over his shoulder, as he strode out again, “Pray.”
Chapter 18
As he turned onto the end stairs, Cazaril heard a woman’s slippers scuffing rapidly on the steps. He looked up to find Lady Betriz, her lavender skirts trailing, hurrying down toward him.
“Lord Cazaril! What’s going on? We heard shouting—one of the maids cried Royse Teidez has run mad, and tried to slay the roya’s animals!”
“Not mad—misled. I think. And not tried—succeeded.” In a few brief, bitter words, Cazaril described the horror in the stable block.
“But why?” Her voice was husky with shock.
Cazaril shook his head. “A lie of Lord Dondo’s, nearly as I can tell. He convinced the royse that Umegat was a Roknari wizard using the animals to somehow poison the roya. Which turned the truth exactly backwards; the animals sustained Orico, and now he has collapsed. Five gods, I cannot explain it all here upon the stairs. Tell Royesse Iselle I will attend upon her soon, but first I must see to the injured grooms. Stay away—keep Iselle away from the menagerie.” And if he didn’t give Iselle action, she’d surely take it for herself . . . “Wait upon Sara, both of you; she’s half-distracted.”
Cazaril continued on down the stairs, past the place where he had been—deliberately?—decoyed away by his own pain, earlier. Dondo’s demonic ghost made no move to grip him now.
Back at the menagerie, Cazaril found that the excellent Palli and his men had already carried off Umegat and the more seriously injured of the undergrooms to the Mother’s hospital. The remaining groom was stumbling around trying to catch a hysterical little blue-and-yellow bird that had somehow escaped the Baocian guard captain and taken refuge in the upper cornices. Some servants from the stable had come over and were making awkward attempts to help; one had taken off his tabard and was sweeping it up, trying to knock the bird out of the air.
“Stop!” Cazaril choked back panic. For all he knew, the little feathered creature was the last thread by which Orico clung to life. He directed the would-be helpers instead to the task of collecting the bodies of the slain animals, laying them out in the stable courtyard, and cleaning up the bloody mess on the tiles inside. He scooped up a handful of grains from the vellas’ stall, remains of their last interrupted dinner, and coaxed the little bird down to his own hand, chirping as he’d seen Umegat do. Rather to his surprise, the bird came to him and suffered itself to be put back into its cage.
“Guard it with your life,” he told the groom. Then added, scowling for effect, “If it dies, you die.” An empty threat, though it must do for now; the grooms, at least, looked impressed. If it dies, Orico dies? That suddenly seemed frighteningly plausible. He turned to lend a hand in dragging out the heavy bodies of the bears.
“Should we skin them, lord?” one of the stable hands inquired, staring at the results of Teidez’s hellish hunt piled up outside on the paving stones.
“No!” said Cazaril. Even the few of Fonsa’s crows still lingering about the stable yard, though they regarded the bloody carcasses with wary interest, made no move toward them. “Treat them . . . as you would the roya’s soldiers who had died in battle. Burned or buried. Not skinned. Nor eaten, for the gods’ sakes.” Swallowing, Cazaril bent and added the bodies of the two dead crows to the row. “There has been sacrilege enough this day.” And the gods forfend Teidez had not slain a holy saint as well as the sacred animals.
A clatter of hooves heralded the arrival of Martou dy Jironal, fetched, presumably, from Jironal Palace; he was followed up the hill by four retainers on foot, gasping for breath. The chancellor swung down from his snorting, sidling horse, handed it off to a bowing groom, and advanced to stare at the row of dead animals. The bears’ dark fur riffled in the cold wind, the only movement. Dy Jironal’s lips spasmed on unvoiced curses. “What is this madness?” He looked up at Cazaril, and his eyes narrowed in bewildered suspicion. “Did you set Teidez onto this?” Dy Jironal was not, Cazaril judged, dissimulating; he was as off-balance as Cazaril himself.
“I? No! I do not control Teidez.” Cazaril added sourly, “And neither, it appears, do you. He was in your constant company for the past two weeks; had you no hint of this?”
Dy Jironal shook his head.
“In his defense, Teidez seems to have had some garbled notion that this act would somehow help the roya. That he’d no better sense is a fault of his age; that he had no better knowledge . . . well, you and Orico between you have served him ill. If he’d been more filled with truth, he’d have had less room for lies. I’ve had his Baocian guard locked up, and taken him to his chambers, to await . . .” the roya’s orders would not be forthcoming now. Cazaril finished, “your orders.”