There was more, all uttered in a hushed, intense tone, so that none might hear it except the corpse. At last John ran down and stood panting as he glared at the body of the man who had humiliated him so often, and only given approval when John had learned how to fawn upon him.
Then John stepped away from the bed and threw his head back with silent laughter, forcing himself to keep his shout of victory to a whisper, fists clenched in triumph.
A tapestry stirred in the shadows. John heard the slightest rasp of wood sliding against wood and dropped his hands, squaring his shoulders, doing the best he could to look regal—but he could not quite wipe the grin from his face.
Niobhyte stepped out of the gloom into the light of the deathwatch candle. “Is it done, then?”
“It is,” John told him, glee still in his voice. “He is dead, and shall trouble me no more. I thank you for the poison, Niobhyte. It did all that you said it would.”
The chief synthodruid made a deprecating gesture. “It was my pleasure, as it shall always be my pleasure to serve you— if you will.”
“Oh, yes,” John told him. “Oh, I shall always be glad of your service, Niobhyte—and you may be sure of my patronage. I shall see your religion rise, and these stumbling-block priests torn down! The Church shall fall, the Old Gods rise again, and I shall be the first to worship them openly!”
“I shall ever be Your Majesty’s faithful servant.” Niobhyte knelt to kiss John’s hand. “The king is dead—long live the king!”
“I thank you, my first and most loyal subject,” John told him. “Now, though, you had better step back into that secret passageway, for I must bring in the doctor and the archbishop to make Drustan’s passing the law of the land. Then I can begin to unmake their Church!”
“I am ever obedient to Your Majesty,” Niobhyte said, and backed away with bowed head to disappear behind the tapestry again.
John listened for the sliding of wood on wood, then turned to open the door and call in both physician and prelate. The came, they stared in apprehension—then they both turned and knelt, declaring as Niobhyte had, “The king is dead— long live the king!”
“Read my weird?” Rosamund asked. “What is my weird, and how shall I read it?”
They stood on land, watching the little boat skip away over the waves, its sail filled with the morning breeze. Behind them the sun struggled to rise over Erin. Admittedly, the distance between Erin and Bretanglia wasn’t great, but Matt was still surprised Meg had sailed it so fast.
“Your weird is a sort of a trap,” Sergeant Brock told her.
Matt looked up in surprise.
“It is what you were born into this world to do,” the sergeant went on, “the outcome of the sum and total of all the virtues and talents within you, the work in life for which you, and only you, are most singularly fitted. But you do not have to do it. You can turn away from it, if you lack the courage—or you can be too blind to see it. But if you have eyes clear enough to read it, and the courage to enter into it, your weird shall close about you, shall catch you up, and bear you onward to fulfillment in this world and joy in the next. Therefore must you read your weird.”
“That has the sound of fate,” Sir Orizhan said, frowning.
“Is that your southern word for it?” the sergeant asked.
“Not quite,” Matt said. “Fate happens to you whether you choose it or not—and whether you like it or not.”
“A weird is not always pleasant,” Sergeant Brock admitted. “Your… the Church sings the praises of martyrs to the faith, who have endured the tortures of burning in this world in order to rise to the glory of sainthood in the next.”
“True,” Matt said thoughtfully, “but there are other saints like St. Francis of Assisi, who sang his way through life with joy”
“Well, he had his hard times, too,” Sir Orizhan pointed out, “but what life does not? The importance of it, Your Highness, is that if you can read your weird and be brave enough to step into it, it may bear you on to joy or bear you on to grief, but it will never leave you feeling that your life was not worth having lived.”
“Then I shall find it,” Rosamund said with iron determination, “clasp it to my breast, let it fold about me, and go wheresoever it carries me!”
“Then let’s begin by finding Brion’s body.” Matt turned his back on the sea and the fading dot that was Meg’s boat. “She said holy men had carried him away. Let’s find a bishop.”
That by itself turned out not to be easy. They’d had to leave the horses in Bretanglia, of course—Meg’s boat just barely managed the four of them—so they had to walk along the beach until they came to a fishing village. It took about an hour, and the old men were sitting on the dock watching the last of the fishing boats sail off for their day’s work. Matt hailed them, waving, and the four gaffers looked up in surprise before their faces turned into masks.
“Hi, there!” Matt climbed up onto the dock with his companions right behind him and approached the nearest grandfather, a man who looked to be in his eighties but, given the harshness of medieval life, was probably only in his thirties. “Can you tell me how to get to the castle?” He didn’t ask which one—any castle would do.
The oldster frowned, looking very suspicious, and demanded something incomprehensible—it sounded vaguely like “Bail out this Arab, go lair in her hair.”
Matt didn’t bother looking around for a Near Eastern woman. “Great,” he sighed. “I’ve been living and traveling in countries that were pieces of Hardishane’s empire for so long that I forgot what happened in lands that weren’t connected to the continent!”
Sir Orizhan came up, frowning. “What is the trouble, Lord Wizard?”
“Trouble? Oh, nothing—except that these people speak a foreign language, probably Gaelic, and I haven’t the faintest idea what this old duffer’s saying!”
CHAPTER 19
Sergeant Brock eyed the old man narrowly. “I suspect he speaks less and less of our language the more he distrusts us.”
The gaffer may not have known the words, but he understood Brock’s tone. He glared back at him and spat another unintelligible phrase.
“So is your mother,” Brock said. He watched the oldster carefully, but the expression of suspicious hostility didn’t change, and Brock turned to Matt with a sigh. “I fear he really doesn’t understand Bretanglian, Lord Wizard. He didn’t even seem to know I’d insulted his mother.”
“Maybe you didn’t. After all, he might have been paying you a compliment.”
Sergeant Brock showed his teeth in something resembling a grin. “There is that virtue in merely turning his own words back on him.”
“Okay, he’s only a day’s sail from Bretanglia, but how often do you think he meets people who speak our language?” Matt asked.
“Not often,” Sir Orizhan admitted, “since he is only a fisherman—but there is a fair amount of trade between the lands. Surely we can find a merchant who can speak with us!”
“Good idea.” Matt scanned the village. “Come to think of it, even the local priest should at least be able to speak church Latin… There! I suppose you could call that a steeple.” He pointed to a larger-than-average one-story building with a sort of pointed bump at one end.
“A church indeed,” Sir Orizhan agreed. “Do you truly speak the language of ancient Reme?”
Matt kept forgetting that it had been Remus who had won the fight for the first Latin wall in this universe, not Romulus.
‘Let’s say it’s not too different from something I learned in school.” He turned back to give the old men a cheery wave. “‘Thanks, guys. I think we can make it from here.”