“So do I,” Matt sighed. “Well, maybe I can get back to sleep. How long has it been, Sergeant?”
“Since you lay down? It may be an hour, by the position of the moon.”
“Got to sleep longer, if I can,” Matt muttered. “Thanks, Sergeant. Good night.”
“Good night, Lord Wizard.” The sergeant tugged his forelock and turned away.
Matt lay back and closed his eyes, willing himself to relax. He tried to think happy thoughts, Celtic thoughts—Osian seeking the Land of Youth—and began to grow drowsy as the wonderful old story drew him in. He drifted toward slumber…
“What are you doing to find my murderer, I said!” the voice ranted.
Matt managed to keep from jumping up, but every muscle went stiff.
“Aside!” Prince Gaheris’ voice snarled. “He has my murderer to find first! I died before you!”
“I am your father, boy!” the first voice shouted. “I am the king! Yield precedence to me!”
“There is no precedence in the world of the dead,” Gaheris said, full of venom, “and you are king no longer. If it comes to sheer force of will, I fancy my rage and bitterness are greater than yours, especially toward you, for it is you who have bred them!”
“I?” Drustan bleated. “What did I do to earn your hatred?”
“Ignored me,” Gaheris snapped. “If you did notice me, it was only to berate me for my failings, or to bellow at me for not following your orders instantly. You showed your jealousy and spite in a thousand ways.”
“Jealousy! What cause had I to be jealous?”
“Because I would have your crown when you were dead,” Gaheris snapped, “and you begrudged it even then!”
“Uh, guys,” Matt put in, “do you suppose you could go argue someplace else besides the inside of my head? I’m trying to get some sleep here.”
“Aye!” Gaheris snapped. “Let him sleep, so that he can seek the man who murdered me!”
“Let him devise my revenge instead,” Drustan commanded, “for I know who my murderer was!”
“Oh, really?” Matt sprang to full mental alertness, then settled his mind to listen. “Go on. This could be very interesting.”
CHAPTER 20
Two minutes later he wished he hadn’t said that. In fact he wished Drustan hadn’t come calling at all. He was only glad that Drustan’s memories hadn’t included smell as he saw Prince John’s gloating face from Drustan’s point of view, bending over the dying king to ask, “Do you remember your philandering, Father? Of course you do, it was your pride and your boast! The number of times I had to listen to the sickening accounts of your conquests nearly made me die of nausea! But do you remember those horrible howling fights with Mother whenever she found out about your little paramours? Do you remember how she refused to live in the same castle with you? Did you even care that you drove her away and thereby robbed me of my mother, and my chance to win her love? No, of course not! All you cared about was your own pleasure, and indulging your own temper!”
A gargle of denial sounded in Mart’s ears, filling his whole head, and he realized it was Drustan’s response, seen and heard from the viewpoint of a dying, aphasic king.
“Do you remember how you sat back and watched when Gaheris beat me?” John snarled. “Oh, you could have told him to stop, but no—you had to yell at me to put my fists up, to block his blows, and scold me for failing! You could have protected me from Brion’s contempt, from his rebukes and his lectures—but you were too busy with things of greater importance. After all, one lonely child couldn’t have been all that important, could he, Father?”
Again, Drustan gargled a protest.
“Where were you?” John asked. “When I was a little boy, tormented and beaten by my brothers, where were you? Off fighting the Irish and gaining a few miserable square miles of bog, that’s where! Or off wenching with one or another of your paramours! Even after you took me away from my mother, where were you? Gone on missions of state as often as not, until I was old enough to be useful as a weapon against Mother and Gaheris and Brion, by your threat to make me king!”
The king croaked something in protest; Matt, inside his memories, understood it: “But I loved you!”
“Loved me?” John’s lip curled. “If you had loved me, you would have kept me with you! Oh, now and again you felt fatherly, and took me out to give me a drubbing with a stick and call it teaching me swordplay! If you loved me, you had a very odd way of showing it! But that’s all right, Father—I loved you, too, and my way of showing it is to set you on the road to your reward more quickly than you would have gone otherwise.”
Drustan’s brows pulled down in puzzlement.
“Can’t understand?” John jeered. “Where is the vaunted genius of statesmanship now? It is I who have killed you, Father— I who fed you your bowl of gruel this morning, and a dram of poison with it.”
Drustan’s eyes widened in horror.
“Oh yes, you understand now,” John said, grinning with glee. “I’ve set you off on the road to Heaven, all right, but it will be a long, long road, Father, because you’ve committed enough sins for an army in your life, not the least of which was my upbringing! You’ll burn in Purgatory for thousands of years to pay for those sins, and I will delight in imagining every wince, every torture, every scream!”
A roar rang through Mart’s head, and the room seemed to tilt downward as Drustan forced himself up. John retreated in fear—but the room swung again as Drustan fell back, eyes filming over, breath rattling in his throat. The room was silent for a second; then John’s face swam into view again, grinning once more. “At the end, of course, I goaded you into enough anger to make your poisoned heart burst—and to make sure you died in sin, in the sin of anger. Sleep well, Royal Father. I’ll think of you every morning—think of you, and delight in your torments.” He stepped up to close the king’s eyes, saying softly, “Goodbye.”
Darkness closed in, and Matt could feel the king’s desperation and clamoring fear of the supernatural as consciousness dimmed and was gone.
In the darkness of dream and memory Matt drew a deep, shaky breath. He realized that what he had seen might have been augmented by the king’s own guilty memories, but that didn’t matter—it was memory, however distorted, and he didn’t doubt for a second that John had really boasted of killing his father as the king was about to cross the threshold of death. He could almost sympathize with the prince, but not enough—he could have found another form of revenge, after all, such as succeeding where his father had told him he would fail.
“So I know who murdered me.” Drustan’s voice seemed to echo all about Matt. “I know it by his own confession—nay, his boast! Go you now and see justice done!”
“Give me justice first,” Gaheris demanded, “or I’ll never give you a night’s peace!”
Drustan started a roar of outrage, but Matt cut him off— after all, it was his mind. “Shut up, both of you! I can’t help either of you if I’m so groggy from lack of sleep that I can’t think straight. Besides, why should I?”
“Because if you don’t—” Gaheris began in his most threatening manner.
But Matt cut him off again. “Remember, I’m a wizard, and if I want to clear you out of my skull, believe me, I can. But it so happens that getting rid of John is now probably the only way to save Merovence from war, because if we let him have Bretanglia, sooner or later he’ll attack Merovence.”
“Why, that is so,” Gaheris said in surprise. “The fat little toad is that envious!”
“He will lose,” Drustan said with certainty.
“Sure, he’ll lose, but tens of thousands of soldiers will get killed in fighting him off. No, if I can come up with a good reason for kicking him off the throne he has stolen, I will!”