“Shortly before Raldnor was stabbed at your gate, Lord Kren, I received certain information. Would it interest you to know that the Sarite had Lowland blood?”
He saw the change in Kren’s face, and how he mastered it, but it told him altogether too little.
“Lord Kren,” he said, “no doubt you recall Rehdon’s unlucky union with the Plains woman, Ashne’e. The child vanished and was never found. If it had lived, it would have been informative to see how far the Council of Koramvis would have adhered to the law and upheld its claim to the throne of Dorthar.”
Kren did not speak and his expression was schooled.
“I hope that you understand my meaning,” Kathaos said. “Waste is always distressing.”
“Indeed, my lord, but as no doubt you’ve heard, none of us can argue with death.”
As Kathaos rode back across the city, he pondered the conversation. He was unsatisfied, and yet uncertain whether the man was lying to him or not. It seemed, in any event, that Kathaos had lost the game entirely inasmuch as it related to Raldnor. Whatever Kren purposed to do, there would be little detection or hindrance in the Garrison, that inner room of Koramvis. And it was plain besides that he intended no help in other quarters. Yet neither would he spread secrets; he had not kept his position through gossip but because of that persistent strength and cynical integrity so apparent in his person. So, it was finished.
Kathaos, who had grown accustomed to waiting, settled in again to wait. He, too, had been put back into an earlier skin, yet in his case at least the fit was not unkindly. He had lost a game piece, that was all. There would be others.
In the narrow room at the tower’s head, Kren stood looking down at the unconscious man he had saved from death, simply out of a sense of justice. Nearby the physician clattered his instruments, and the girl servant was clearing up after him. He was a competent but messy old man, scrupulously clean with wounds—very few soldiers contracted festering or rot under his care—yet he was villainously untidy, with even a soup stain on his collar.
“How’s your patient today?”
“Rather better. The worst of the fever’s past and the back’s healing well.”
No other than the three in this room knew of Raldnor’s continued existence. The Garrison had seen something buried in a bloody sheet and assumed it to be a man. In a way, Kren was a king here; the soldiers, armorers, cooks, grooms and their women and children lived within these walls as if inside a minute city, and he ruled them in his own fashion, which was one of discipline tailored to human needs. They gave him their fierce loyalty, and so he put a bundle of old rags and goat’s flesh into the earth, not in fear of betrayal, but to protect his people.
As to what the lord Councilor had just told him, that could be shared with no one—except, that was, for the man lying on the bed, for it was obvious to Kren that he could never have known.
The maimed hand had made Kren uneasy, he could not at first think why. When he recalled at last the woman he had helped fly Koramvis and the baby she had taken with her, he had never thought to bring the two together—the man and the unseen child—as one. Until that moment in the room below, when Kathaos Am Alisaar had overreached himself in his machinations.
Now the weight rested on Kren. It troubled him that soon it would rest more heavily on Raldnor. With an unerring judgment he had already gauged Raldnor’s inner fragility, which bore no relation to his physical strength. And it was indeed a burden for any man to bear, this knowledge of the undisputed past, the impossible frustration of the future. For here was a King who could hope for nothing.
Raldnor woke in the dark to a girl’s anxious face.
“Lie still,” she whispered at once, although he had not moved at all. “You’re in the River Garrison,” she added, although he had not asked her.
Soon after the physician came. He muttered and seemed pleased with himself. Eventually Raldnor began to question him, for he could remember nothing beyond the moment he had pulled himself from the Okris and into the hovels and the dreadful night. His long sleep had seemed haunted with dim shouts and torches. Now the physician told him why.
“However, you’ve mended well. Though you’ll have a splendid scar to impress your next woman with.”
It was hard now to wait out the captivity of his weakness. As the girl and the old man seemed to know so much, he asked them for news of Astaris. The girl blurted out at once: “Why, she poisoned herself!”
At which the physician took her shoulder and shook her, calling her every foul thing a garrison full of soldiers could have taught him, and perhaps a few more. He had heard the young man mutter a name in his delirium—the name of a scarlet Karmian flower—and guessed at deeper emotions than pure lust. Nevertheless Raldnor only said: “Better than the fire.”
In his mind he felt a curious aching and turning, a search, but not for something dead. With an uncertain prescience he sensed her still alive, but far away as the stars. When they left him, he wept, but more from illness than despair. He experienced a strange mixture of hope and desolation, for he was once more in a limbo of the soul.
Soon there were days when he was sent to sit on the roof of the tower to take the air. It had been put about that the brother of the physician’s girl was visiting her.
He wondered when he would see his benefactor, Kren. And wondered also what the man’s reasons were for giving him life. There was nothing given for nothing, so the Vis had taught him. He was therefore not prepared for Kren.
The wide-shouldered man, long past youth yet obviously still strong of mind and physique, came onto the paved terrace at sun-fall and nodded to him courteously. Raldnor saw a scarred, lined face with unexpected eyes. There was nothing wavering or stupid in them, and nothing masked either.
Raldnor rose, but Kren signaled him back to his chair and sat also.
“Well, sir. It’s very pleasant to see my guest so much better.”
“I owe you my life, my lord. It’s my disgrace I’ve no means to repay you.”
“There you’re wrong. There are a few matters I must talk to you about. It may take a while, so bear with me, and I’ll be well repaid enough.”
Kren poured himself and the young man wine from the jug set between them. He tried to be easy with him, yet he found Raldnor troubled him—too many ghosts sat at his elbow. Kren remembered suddenly how she had drooped before him with her tired unpainted eyes, his poor Lomandra, with the millstone of Val Mala’s infamy on her back. His glance strayed to Raldnor’s severed finger, and he thought incongruously: “It mended well. I never thought it would.”
“Raldnor,” he said, “who was your mother?”
The young man stared at him.
“No, I’ve not gone mad. I asked you to bear with me. Please do so. This will be a difficult conversation at best, but necessary, I assure you.”
Raldnor looked away, his hollow invalid’s eyes burning oddly.
“Then she was a Xarabian—”
“You must hear some talk, Dragon Lord.”
“Please, sir, do me the kindness of dispensing with my rank. We’re cursed with the same title. Yes, I’ve heard about your beginnings—a mother dead in childbirth at Sar, the father dead soon after, then adoption by a widow, your aunt. Is any of this true, or merely a convenient alteration of the facts? No, please, I’m not intending insult. May I propose another version of your story? You were the foundling of Sar, perhaps, but you weren’t born there. Some traveler discovered you as a baby on the Plains outside the town . . . with a Xarabian woman. Was she alive or dead?”
Hoarsely Raldnor answered: “Dead. Your deductions are excellent. A hunter found me in my mother’s cloak.”