Too soon, they reached the Provincara’s castle gates. The guards recognized him at once and ran shouting for the servants; the groom Demi held his horse, and was the first to ask, Why are you here, my lord? The first, but not the last.
“I bear messages to the Provincara and the Lady Ista,” Cazaril replied shortly, bent over his pommel. Foix popped up at his horse’s shoulder, staring up expectantly; Cazaril heaved his off leg up over the horse’s haunches, kicked free of the other stirrup, and dropped to his feet. His knees buckled, and he would have fallen then, but for the strong hand that caught his elbow. They’d made good time. He wondered dizzily how dearly he would pay for it. He stood a moment, trembling, till his balance returned to him. “Is Ser dy Ferrej here?”
“He has escorted the Provincara to a wedding feast in town,” Demi told him. “I don’t know when they mean to return.”
“Oh,” said Cazaril. He was almost too tired to think. He’d been so exhausted last night, he’d fallen asleep in the posting-house bunk within minutes of being steered to it by his helpers, and slept even through Dondo. Wait for the Provincara? He’d meant to report to her first, and let her determine how to tell her daughter. No. This is unbearable. Get it over with. “In that case, I will see the Lady Ista first.”
He added, “The horses need to be rubbed down and watered and fed. These are Ferda and Foix dy Gura, men of good family in Palliar. Please see that they are given . . . everything. We’ve not eaten.” Nor washed, but that was obvious; everyone’s sweat-soaked woolens were splashed with winter road mud, hands grimed, faces streaked with dirt. They were all three blinking and weary in the torchlight of the courtyard. Cazaril’s fingers, stiff from clutching his reins in the cold since dawn, plucked at the ties of his saddlebags. Foix took that task from him, too, and pulled the bags off the horse. Cazaril rather determinedly took them back from him, folded them over his arm, and turned. “Take me to Ista now, please,” he said faintly. “I have letters for her from the Royesse Iselle.”
A house servant led him within, and up the stairs in the new building. The man had to wait for Cazaril to climb slowly after him. His legs felt like lead. Murmurs rose and fell between the man and the royina’s attendants, as he negotiated Cazaril’s entry to her chambers. The air within was perfumed with bowls of dried flower petals and aglow with candlelight and warmth from the corner fireplace. Cazaril felt huge and awkward and filthy in this dainty sitting room.
Ista sat on a cushioned bench, dressed in warm wraps, her dun hair bound in a thick rope down her back. Like Sara, the inky shadow of the curse hung about her. So. I was right in that guess.
Ista turned toward him; her eyes widened, and her face stiffened. She surely knew something was terribly wrong just by his sudden presence here. The hundred ways to break the news to her gently that he’d rehearsed during the long hours of riding seemed to fall through his fingers, under the pressure of those dark, dilated eyes. Any delay now would be cruel beyond measure. He fell to one knee before her, and cleared his throat.
“First. Iselle is well. Hold to that.” He inhaled. “Second. Teidez died two nights ago, from an infected wound.”
The two women attending upon Ista cried out, and clutched each other. Ista barely moved, but for a little flinch, as if an invisible arrow had struck her. She vented a long, wordless exhalation.
“You understand my words, Royina?” Cazaril said hesitantly.
“Oh, yes,” she breathed. One corner of her mouth turned up; Cazaril could not call it a smile. It was nothing like a smile, that black irony. “When it is too-long-anticipated, a blow falls as a relief, you see. The waiting is over. I can stop fearing, now. Can you understand that?”
Cazaril nodded.
After a moment of silence, broken only by the sobbing of one of her women, she added quietly, “How came he by this wound? Hunting? Or something . . . else?”
“Not . . . hunting exactly. In a way it was . . .” Cazaril licked his lips, chapped with the cold. “Lady, do you see anything odd about me?”
“I see only with my eyes, now. I’ve been blind for years, you see. You see?”
Her emphasis made her meaning very plain, Cazaril thought. “Yes.”
She nodded and sat back. “I thought so. There is a look about one who sees with those eyes.”
A trembling attendant crept up to Ista, and said in an overly light voice, “Lady, perhaps you should come away to bed, now. Your lady mother will surely be back soon . . .” She shot Cazaril a meaningful look over her shoulder; clearly, the woman thought Ista was going into one of her mad fugues. Into what everyone thought was one of her fugues. Had Ista ever been mad?
Cazaril sat back on his heels. “Please leave us now. I must have some private speech with the royina on matters of some urgency.”
“Sir, my lord . . .” The woman managed a false smile, and whispered in his ear, “We dare not leave her in this stricken hour—she might do herself some harm.”
Cazaril climbed to his full height, and took both ladies by the arms, and steered them gently but inexorably out the door. “I will undertake to guard her. Here, you may wait in this chamber across the hall, and if I need you, I will call out, all right?” He shut both doors upon their protests.
Ista waited unmoving, but for her hands. She held a fine lace handkerchief, which she commenced to folding, over and over, into smaller and smaller squares. Cazaril grunted down to sit cross-legged on the floor at her feet and stare up into that wide-eyed, chalky face.
“I have seen the Zangre’s ghosts,” he said.
“Yes.”
“More. I have seen the dark cloud that hangs over your House. The Golden General’s curse, the bane of Fonsa’s heirs.”
“Yes.”
“You know of it, then?”
“Oh, yes.”
“It hangs about you now.”
“Yes.”
“It hung about Orico, and Sara. Iselle—and Teidez.”
“Yes.” She tilted her head and stared away.
Cazaril thought about a state of shock he had seen sometimes come upon men in battle, between the moment a blow fell, and the time their bodies fell; men who should have been unconscious, should have been dead, staggering about yet for a time, accomplishing, sometimes, extraordinary acts. Was this quiet coherence such a shock, soon to melt—should he seize it? Or had Ista ever really been incoherent? Or did we just not understand her?
“Orico has become very ill. How I came by my second sight is all of a piece with this black tangle. But please, please, lady, tell me how you came to know. What did you see, and when, and how? I must understand. Because I think—I fear—it has been given to me, it has fallen to me, to act. Yet nothing has told me what that action must be. Even second sight cannot pierce this dark.”
Her brows went up. “I can tell you truths. I cannot give you understanding. For how can one give what one does not possess? I have always told the truth.”
“Yes. I see that now.” He took a daring breath. “But have you ever told all of it?”