‘Lord Eldric’s looking for you, lady,’ he said, a rather helpless response.
Sylvriss nodded. ‘Only to tell me what I already know,’ she said. ‘He’ll not disturb my locked room.’
Her tone was unexpectedly harsh and Isloman frowned. Then he reproached himself. Had he too not lashed out blindly in the past in response to such pain?
‘What can I do?’ he said gently, moving past her and putting Hawklan on the bed.
‘Let me stay by Hawklan tonight,’ she replied imme-diately.
He looked at her in surprise. ‘Of course,’ he said. Then, hesitating, ‘But why?’
Sylvriss pulled her hood forward again. ‘I don’t know,’ she said softly. ‘I’m just… drawn here. Some need.’
Isloman felt himself frowning again. Despite the shade of her hood, he saw fear come into her eyes at this response, and even as he spoke he tried to call the words back. But they had a momentum of their own. ‘I understand your pain, lady,’ he said. ‘But who knows what his pain is? What pain keeps him from returning to us. He shouldn’t be burdened further.’
Sylvriss bowed her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think. I’ll leave you.’
His words spoken, Isloman could act again. He placed a hand on her arm to stop her then picked up a chair and placed it at the head of Hawklan’s bed. ‘Sit down,’ he said gently. ‘It’s me who didn’t think. I’m sorry. Whatever his pain I know Hawklan wouldn’t refuse you such a simple comfort after your terrible loss.’
The memory of the woman who had risked her own life to save his, a stranger’s, and who had ridden so determinedly, so hopefully, by his side only days before, washed over him, and he had difficulty speaking. ‘It’s just that I feel so helpless myself,’ he managed. ‘Unable to reach him. Just carrying him around and talking to him. It feels so futile when I remember what he’s given to me and to so many others.’
He took another chair and sat down on the opposite side of his silent friend. Sylvriss reached out and took one of Hawklan’s hands. For a moment, Isloman thought he saw the hand tighten gently about the Queen’s, but she made no response.
Silence hung between them. Then, unexpectedly, she said, ‘Tell me how Rgoric died, Isloman.’ Isloman started slightly, and for a moment he searched around for an excuse. Sylvriss anticipated him. ‘I know the Goraidin will have told you,’ she said. ‘Now you tell me. There’ll be less pain in the truth than any fiction I might fabricate.’ Her gaze and her reasoning were inescapable.
Isloman shifted uncomfortably. ‘I only know what Tel-Odrel and Lorac heard from Dilrap,’ he said awkwardly. At the name Dilrap, the Queen grimaced in self-reproach. She had almost forgotten about her faithful co-conspirator. ‘Then it’ll be the truth,’ she said. ‘Tell me… Please.’
Isloman reluctantly related the tale of the King’s murder in its entirety, unconsciously adopting the detailed thoroughness that had typified the Goraidin’s telling.
Seemingly unaffected, Sylvriss listened intently, but asked no questions. When he had finished, she showed no reaction other than to nod to herself as if under-standing something for the first time.
After a long silence she said, ‘We Riddinvolk are taught from childhood to know our emotions and to let them flow freely. Especially powerful emotions, such as grief. They’re like certain horses. If you bind them, beat them into submission, they seem to go quiet, but sooner or later they break free and destroy you.’
Isloman did not speak.
Sylvriss looked straight at him and then at her right hand. ‘When Tel-Odrel told me about… what had happened, I felt as though the ground had opened under my feet; that I too could not stay in this world in the face of such a truth. But part of me understood… I’ve grieved before. I ran to my room. I knew what would happen, what must happen. But it didn’t. I couldn’t weep. I knew I should, but I couldn’t. I still can’t, Isloman. Something’s stopping me here, amongst my friends. Out in the night, under the trees, I wept for nothing, but now… ’ Her voice faded.
‘The Fyordyn are a little stiffer in such matters,’ Isloman offered.
Sylvriss shook her head. ‘No, it’s not that. They have their own ways, and they’re very understanding of the ways of others.’
Isloman looked down.
‘It’s the walls, I suppose,’ Sylvriss said after a while, looking round. ‘Too long in rooms and corridors under the eyes of Dan-Tor. Always hiding, cheating, lying. Endlessly watching for those tiny signs that might tell him of my deceit, and doom us all; and then shackling them, holding them tight.’ She grimaced and clenched her fist as she spoke.
Isloman let the remarks fall into the silence. Behind Sylvriss a rather bedraggled Gavor landed unsteadily on the sill of the open window. He opened his beak to speak, but Isloman made a tiny gesture to encompass the scene. Gavor put his head on one side, then glided silently to Isloman’s feet. The carver bent down and Gavor stepped silently on to his hand to be lifted up on to his shoulder.
‘And for what?’ Sylvriss continued after a while, her tone more shrill, a faint harbinger. ‘To feed my own pride and arrogance? To show the man I could defy him, overcome him?’ She lowered her gaze. ‘If I’d left him alone, Rgoric would be alive today.’
‘Maybe,’ said Isloman. ‘But nothing you could have done would have stopped us seeking out Dan-Tor and releasing his true self. Who knows what would have happened to you then? And can you say Rgoric was alive when Dan-Tor was poisoning and controlling him?’
Sylvriss looked at him. ‘Alive is alive, Isloman. Dead is dead. Gone. Finished. Beyond hope.’
Isloman turned away from her. ‘Didn’t Dilrap say your husband died his true self?’ he said. ‘Died quite free of his old foe, and fighting him to the end? There are worse ways to end one’s life.’
Sylvriss squeezed Hawklan’s hand. ‘What good’s that to me? A hero’s death,’ she exclaimed bitterly, but immediately her head went back, eyes and mouth closed tight in self-reproach. ‘No. I didn’t mean that. I meant… Poor Dilrap. I… Damn you, Isloman.’
Then she started rocking back and forth as if to some inner rhythm. ‘How can you know?’ Her voice rising and raucous in its pain. ‘I held him and loved him. He was my man… my beautif… ’ She faltered. ‘And they hacked him… and cut… and… ’
She thrust her fist into her mouth and bit her curled forefinger as she spoke, but nothing could stop the release now, and, suddenly, she bent forward and cried out her husband’s name in a long keening wail. Isloman clenched his teeth at the sound.
Then she wept. Wept for a long time, her tears in-termingling with incoherent bursts of reproach and rage. Isloman sat motionless, harrowed and helpless, his own eyes streaming for this dead stranger. At one point he reached out tentatively to take the hand clutching at the patterned counterpane that covered Hawklan’s bed, but the sight of his own hand seemed to give him a measure of his intrusiveness at this most private moment and he withdrew it.
As the daylight gradually faded, so also did Sylvriss’s sobbing. Surreptitiously, Isloman wiped his own eyes and waited for her to emerge from her inner darkness into this less harsh one. A torch by him slowly started to glow. He reached out and quietly extinguished it.
Eventually Sylvriss sat up and after a small scuffling search produced a kerchief to wipe her eyes. It was Hawklan’s, given to her by Gavor when she had wept before as they lay in the copse, taking a brief respite from their pounding journey away from the city. She did not notice.
With incongruous delicacy she blew her nose and then shivered.
Isloman stood up slowly, his whole body stiff with tension. Walking past her awkwardly, he closed the window.
Sylvriss inclined her head in acknowledgement.
‘Would you like me to take you back to your room?’ Isloman’s voice was soft, but it seemed to be uncom-fortably loud in the heightened atmosphere of the room.
Sylvriss turned to him and laid her hand on his arm. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Let me stay here. Watching your friend with you. I’ll be no burden to him. I’m used to night vigils. You can tell me everything else, about yourself and… ’ She motioned towards Hawklan. ‘And why you’re here.’ She paused and looked down at her hands. ‘I don’t want to wake up… alone again.’