The Curse of Chalion

Chapter 19

Cazaril found the Zangre eerily quiet the following day. After Dondo’s death the court had been alarmed, yes, but excited and given over to gossip and whispering. Now even the whispering was stilled. All who had no direct duties stayed away, and those who had inescapable tasks went about them in a hurried, apprehensive silence.

Iselle and Betriz spent the day in Ias’s tower, waiting upon Sara and Orico. At dawn, Cazaril and the grim castle warder oversaw the cremation and burial of the remains of the animals. For the rest of the day, Cazaril alternated feeble attempts to attend to the mess on his desk with trudges down to the temple hospital. Umegat lay unchanged, gray and rasping. After his second visit, Cazaril stopped in at the temple itself and prayed, prostrate and whispering, before all five altars in turn. If he was in truth infected with this saint-disease, dammit, shouldn’t it be good for something?

The gods do not grant miracles for our purposes, but for theirs, Umegat had said. Yes? It seemed to Cazaril that this bargain ought to run two ways. If people stopped lending the gods their wills by which to do miracles, eh, what would the gods do about it then? Well, the first thing to happen would be that I’d drop dead. There was that. Cazaril lay a long time before the altar of the Lady of Spring, but here found himself mute, not even his lips moving. Abashed, ashamed, despairing? But wordy or wordless, the gods returned him only the same blank silence, five times over.

He was reminded of Palli’s insistence that he not go about alone when, slogging back up the hill, he passed dy Joal and another of dy Jironal’s retainers entering Jironal Palace. Dy Joal’s hand curled on his sword hilt, but he did not draw; with polite, wary nods, they walked wide about each other.

Back in his office, Cazaril rubbed his aching brow and turned his thoughts to Iselle’s marriage. Royse Bergon of Ibra, eh. The boy would do as well as any and better than most, Cazaril supposed. But this turmoil in the court of Chalion made open negotiations impossible to carry out; it would have to be a secret envoy, and soon. Running down the list in his mind of courtiers capable of such a diplomatic mission turned up none Cazaril would trust. Running down the much shorter list of men he could trust turned up no experienced diplomats. Umegat was laid low. The archdivine could not leave in secret. Palli? March dy Palliar had the rank, at least, to demand Ibra’s respect. He tried to imagine honest Palli negotiating the subtleties of Iselle’s marriage contract with the Fox of Ibra, and groaned. Maybe . . . maybe if Palli were sent with an extremely detailed and explicit list of instructions . . . ?

Needs must drive. He would broach it to Palli tomorrow.

Cazaril prayed on his knees before bed to be spared from the nightmare that had recurred three nights running, where Dondo grew back to life size within his swelling stomach and then, somehow dressed in his funeral robes and armed with his sword, carved his way out. Perhaps the Lady heard his plea; at any rate, he woke at dawn, his head and heart pounding, from a new nightmare. In this one, Dondo somehow sucked Cazaril’s soul into his own belly in his place, and escaped to take over Cazaril’s body. And then embarked on a career of rapine in the women’s quarters while Cazaril, helpless to stop him, watched. To his dismay, as he panted in the gray light and regained his grip on reality, Cazaril realized his body was painfully aroused.

So, was Dondo plunged into a lightless prison, sealed from sound, deprived of sensation? Or did he ride along as the ultimate spy and voyeur? Cazaril had not imagined making love to Be—to any lady since this damned affliction had been visited upon him; he imagined it now, a crowded quartet between the sheets, and shuddered.

Briefly, Cazaril envisioned escaping by the window. He might squeeze his shoulders through, and dive; the drop would be stupendous, the crunch at the end . . . quick. Or with his knife, taken to wrists or throat or belly or all three . . . He sat up, blinking, to find a half a dozen phantasms gathered avidly around him, crowding each other like vultures around a dead horse. He hissed, lurched, and swiped his arm through the air to scatter them. Could a body with its head smashed in be animated by one of them? The archdivine’s words implied so. Escape through suicide was blocked by this ghastly patrol, it seemed. Dreading sleep, he stumbled from bed and went to wash and dress.

Coming back from a perfunctory breakfast in the banqueting hall, Cazaril encountered a breathless Nan dy Vrit upon the stairs.

“My lady begs you ’tend upon her at once,” Nan told him, and Cazaril nodded and pushed up the steps. “Not in her chambers,” Nan added, as he started past the third floor. “In Royse Teidez’s.”

“Oh.” Cazaril’s brows rose, and he turned instead to pass his own chamber and go down the hall to Teidez’s, Nan at his heels.

As he entered the office antechamber, twin to Iselle’s above, he heard voices from the rooms opening beyond; Iselle’s murmur, and Teidez’s, raised: “I don’t want anything to eat. I don’t want to see anyone! Go away!”

The sitting room was cluttered with weapons, clothes, and gifts, strewn about haphazardly. Cazaril picked his way across to the bedchamber.

Teidez lay back on his pillows, still in his nightgown. The close, moist air of the room smelled of boy sweat, and another tang. Teidez’s secretary-tutor hovered anxiously on one side of the bed; Iselle stood with her hands on her hips on the other. Teidez said, “I want to go back to sleep. Get out.” He glanced up at Cazaril, cringed, and pointed. “I especially don’t want him in here!”

Nan dy Vrit said, in a very domestic voice, “Now, none of that, young lord. You know better than to talk to old Nan that way.”

Teidez, cowed by some ancient habit, went from surly to whiney. “I have a headache.”

Iselle said firmly, “Nan, bring a light. Cazaril, I want you to look at Teidez’s leg. It looks very odd to me.”

Nan held a brace of candles high, supplementing the wan gray daylight from the window. Teidez at first clutched his blankets to his chest, but didn’t quite dare fight his older sister’s glare; she twitched them out of his hands and folded them aside.

Three scabbed, parallel grooves ran in a spiral partway around the boy’s right leg. In themselves, they did not appear deep or dangerous, but the flesh around them was so swollen that the skin was shiny and silvery. Translucent pink drainage and yellow pus oozed from their edges. Cazaril forced himself to keep his expression even as he studied the hot red streaks climbing past the boy’s knee and winding up the inside of his thigh. Teidez’s eyes were glazed. He jerked back his head as Cazaril reached for him. “Don’t touch me!”

“Be still!” Cazaril commanded in a low voice. Teidez’s forehead, beneath Cazaril’s wrist, was scorching.

He glanced up at the sallow-faced secretary, watching with a frown. “How long has he been feverish?”

“Just this morning, I believe.”

“When did his physician last see this?”

“He would not have a physician, Lord Cazaril. He threw a chair at me when I tried to help him, and bandaged it himself.”

“And you let him?” Cazaril’s voice made the secretary jump.

The man shrugged uneasily. “He would have it so.”

Teidez grumbled, “Some people obey me. I’ll remember who, too, later.” He glowered up at Cazaril through half-lowered lashes, and stuck out his lower lip at his sister.

“He’s taken an infection. I’ll see that a Temple physician is sent in to him at once.”

Teidez, disgruntled, wriggled back down under his covers. “Can I go back to sleep now? If you don’t mind. And draw the curtain, the light hurts my eyes.”

“Yes, stay abed,” Cazaril told him, and withdrew.

Iselle followed him into the antechamber, lowering her voice. “It’s not right, is it?”

“No. It’s not. Good observation, Royesse. Your judgment was correct.”

She gave him a satisfied nod, and he bowed himself out and made for the end stairs. By Nan dy Vrit’s shadowed face, she at least understood just how not-right it was. All Cazaril could think of, as he hastened down the stairs and back across the stones of the courtyard toward Ias’s Tower, was how very seldom he’d seen any man, no matter how young or strong, survive an amputation that high upon the thigh. His stride lengthened.

By good luck, Cazaril found dy Jironal at once, in the Chancellery. He was just sealing a saddlebag and dispatching a courier with it.

“How are the roads?” dy Jironal asked the fellow, who was typically lean and wiry and wore the Chancellery’s tabard over an odd assortment of winter woolens.

“Muddy, m’lord. It will be dangerous to ride after dark.”

“Well, do your best,” dy Jironal sighed, and clapped him on the shoulder. The man saluted and made his way out past Cazaril.

Dy Jironal scowled at his new visitor. “Cazaril.”

“My lord.” Cazaril offered a fractional bow and entered.

Dy Jironal seated himself on the edge of his desk, and folded his arms. “Your attempt to hide behind the Daughter’s Order in its plot to unseat me is doomed to fail, you know,” he said conversationally. “I intend to see that its failure will be miserable.”

Impatiently, Cazaril waved this aside. He’d have been more surprised had dy Jironal not had an ear in the order’s councils. “You have much worse troubles this morning than anything I can offer you, my lord.”

Dy Jironal’s eyes widened in surprise; his head tilted in an attitude of sudden attention. “Oh?”

“What did Teidez’s wound look like when you saw it?”

“What wound? He showed me no wound.”

“On his right leg—he was scratched by Orico’s leopard, apparently, while he was killing the poor beast. In truth, the marks didn’t look deep, but they’ve taken an infection. His skin burns. And you know how a poisoned wound sometimes throws out feverish marks upon the skin?”

“Aye,” said dy Jironal uneasily.

“Teidez’s run from ankle to groin. They look like a bloody conflagration.”

Dy Jironal swore.

“I advise you pull that troop of useless physicians off of Orico for a moment and send them across to Teidez’s chambers. Or you could lose two royal puppets in one week.”

Dy Jironal’s glare met Cazaril’s like flint on steel, but after one fierce inhalation he nodded and shifted to his feet. Cazaril followed him out. Corrupted with greed and familial pride dy Jironal might be, but he wasn’t incompetent. Cazaril could see why Orico might have chosen to endure much, in exchange for that.

After assuring himself that dy Jironal was climbing the stairs to Orico’s chambers with due haste, Cazaril turned back down them. He’d had no word from the temple hospital since last night; he wanted to check again on Umegat. He made his way out the Zangre gates past the ill-fated stable block. A little to his surprise, he spotted Umegat’s tongueless undergroom climbing the hill toward him. The man waved his thumbless hand when he saw Cazaril, and hurried his step.

He arrived breathless and smiling. His face was marked with livid bruises, red-purple around one eye, from the futile fight in the menagerie, and his broken nose was still swollen, its lacerated edge dark and scabbed. But his eyes were shining in their wrecked matrix; he almost danced up to Cazaril.

Cazaril’s brows rose. “You look happy—what, man, is Umegat awake?”

He nodded vigorously.

Cazaril grinned back at him, faint with relief.

He spoke a mumbled sort of gargle, of which Cazaril made out perhaps one word in four, but enough to gather he was on some urgent errand. He motioned Cazaril to wait outside the silent, dark menagerie, and returned in a few minutes with a sack tied to his belt and clutching a book, which he brandished happily. By which Cazaril understood Umegat was not only awake, but well enough to want his favorite book—Ordol, Cazaril noted with bemusement. Glad of the stout little man’s company, Cazaril walked beside him down into town.

Cazaril reflected on the fellow’s stigmata of martyrdom, displayed with such seeming indifference. It was silent testimony of horrendous torment, endured in the name of his god. Had his terror lasted an hour, a day, months? It was not quite possible to be sure whether the softened roundness of his appearance was the result of castration or just old age. Cazaril couldn’t very well ask him his story. Just attempting to listen to his badly mouthed ordinary exchanges was a painful strain upon the ears and attention. He didn’t even know if the fellow was Chalionese or Ibran, Brajaran or Roknari, or how he had come to Cardegoss, or how long he had served with Umegat. Doing his daily duties as they came to him. He stumped along now with the book under his arm, eyes bright. So, this was what a faithful servant of the gods, heroic and beloved, ended up looking like.

They arrived at Umegat’s chamber to find him sitting up in bed against some pillows. He was pale and washed-out, his prickly scalp puckered along its stitches, remaining hair a tumbled rat’s nest, lips crusted, his face unshaved. The tongueless groom rummaged in his sack, pulled out some shaving gear, and waved it triumphantly in the air; Umegat smiled wanly. He stared at Cazaril, not lifting his head from the pillow. He rubbed his eyes, and squinted uncertainly.

Cazaril swallowed. “How do you feel?”

“Headache,” Umegat managed. He snorted softly. Finally, he said, “Are all my beautiful creatures dead?” His tongue was thick, his voice low and a little slurred, but he seemed coherent enough.

“Nearly all. There was one little blue-and-yellow bird got away. It’s back safely in its cage now. I let no one make trophies of them. I saw them cremated like fallen soldiers yesterday. Archdivine Mendenal has undertaken to find their ashes a place of honor.”

Umegat nodded, then winced. His crusted lips tightened.

Cazaril glanced at the undergroom—yes, this man had to be one of those who knew the truth—and back to Umegat, and said hesitantly, “Do you know you’ve stopped glowing?”

Umegat blinked rapidly at him. “I . . . suspected it. At least you are much less disturbing to look upon, this way.”

“Your second sight is taken from you?”

“Mm. Second sight is redundant to reason anyway. You live, therefore I know perfectly well the Lady’s hand still grips you.” He added after a moment, “I always knew it was only lent to me for a time. Well, it was quite a ride while it lasted.” His voice fell to a whisper. “Quite a ride.” He turned his face away. “I could have borne it being taken back. To have it knocked from my hands . . . I should have seen it coming.”

The gods should have warned you . . .

The little elderly undergroom, whose face had drooped at the pain in Umegat’s voice, picked up the book and held it out consolingly.

Umegat smiled weakly and took it tenderly from him. “At least I have my old profession to fall back on, eh?” His hands smoothed the pages open to some familiar spot, and he glanced down. His smile faded. His voice sharpened. “Is this a joke?”

“Is what a joke, Umegat? It is your book, I saw him bring it from the menagerie.”

Umegat struggled awkwardly to sit upright. “What language is this?”

Cazaril advanced and glanced over his shoulder. “Ibran, of course.”

Umegat paged through the book, fingers shaking, his eyes twitching over the pages, his breath coming faster through lips open in something like terror. “It is . . . it is gibberish. It’s just, just . . . little blotches of ink. Cazaril!”

“It is Ibran, Umegat. It’s just Ibran.”

“It is my eyes. It is something in me . . .” He clutched his face, rubbed his eyes, and cried suddenly, “Oh, gods!” and burst into tears. The tears became wracking sobs on the third breath. “I am punished!”

“Get the physician, fetch the physician,” Cazaril cried to the frightened-looking undergroom, and the man nodded and sped away. Umegat’s clutching fingers were tearing the pages in his blind grip. Awkwardly, Cazaril tried to help him, patting his shoulder, straightening the book and then taking it away altogether. The coolly resisted breakdown, having breached Umegat’s walls in this unguarded spot, poured through, and the man wept—not like a child. No child’s sobs were ever this terrifying.

After agonizing minutes, the white-haired physician arrived and soothed the distraught divine; he seized upon her in hope, and would scarcely let her hands go free to carry out her business. Her explanation that many men and women taken with a palsy-stroke improved in a few days, people carried in by anxious relatives even walking out on their own a few days later, did the most to help him regain his shattered self-control. It took all his strength of mind, for her further tests, conducted after sending a passing dedicat running to the order’s library, revealed he could not read Roknari nor Darthacan either, and furthermore, his hands had lost the ability to wield a pen to make any kind of letters.

The quill fell from his awkward grip, trailing ink across the linens, and he buried his face in his hands, groaning again, “I am punished. My joy and my refuge, taken from me . . .”

“Sometimes, people can relearn things they have forgotten,” the physician said tentatively. “And your understanding of the words in your ears has not been taken, nor your recognition of the people you know. I have seen that happen, with some afflicted people. Someone could still read books aloud to you . . .”

Umegat’s eyes met those of the tongueless groom, who was standing to one side still holding the Ordol. The old man scrubbed his fist across his mouth and made an odd noise down in his throat, a whimper of pure despair. Tears were running from the corners of his eyes down his seamed face.

Umegat’s breath puffed from his lips, and he shook his head; drawn from his trouble by its reflection in that aged face, he reached across to grip the undergroom’s hand. “Sh. Sh. Aren’t we a pair, now.” He sighed, and sank back on his pillows. “Never say the Bastard has no sense of humor.” After a moment his eyes closed. Exhausted, or shutting it all out, Cazaril was not sure which.

He choked down his own terrified demand of, Umegat, what should we do now? Umegat was in no condition to do anything, even give direction. Even pray? Cazaril hardly dared ask him to pray for Teidez, under the circumstances.

Umegat’s breath thickened, and he dropped into an uneasy doze. Softly, careful to make no sound, the undergroom laid out his shaving gear on a side table and sat patiently to await his wakening again. The physician made notes and left quietly. Cazaril followed her out to the gallery overlooking the courtyard. Its central fountain was not playing in this chill, and the water in it was dark and scummy in the gray winter light.

“Is he punished?” he asked her.

She rubbed the back of her neck in a weary gesture. “How do I know? Head injuries are the strangest of all. I once saw a woman whose eyes appeared wholly undamaged go blind from a blow to the back of her head. I’ve seen people lose speech, lose control of half their body but not the other half. Are they punished? If so, the gods are evil, and that I do not believe. I think it is chance.”

I think the gods load the dice. He wanted to urge her to take good care of Umegat, but clearly she already was doing so, and he didn’t want to sound frantic, or as though he doubted her skill or dedication. He bade her a polite good morning instead, and took himself off to track down the archdivine and apprise him of the ugly turn of Teidez’s wound.

He found Archdivine Mendenal in the temple at the Mother’s altar, celebrating a ceremony of blessing upon a rich leather merchant’s wife and newborn daughter. Cazaril perforce waited until the family had laid their thanksgiving offerings and filed out again before approaching him and murmuring his news. Mendenal turned pale, and hurried off to the Zangre at once.

Cazaril had developed unsettling new views of the efficacy and safety of prayer, but laid himself down on the cold pavement before the Mother’s altar anyway, thinking of Ista. If there was little hope of mercy for Teidez’s own sake, lured into violent sacrilege and left there by Dondo, surely the Mother might spare some pity for his mother Ista? The goddess’s message to him via Her acolyte’s dream the other day had sounded merciful. In a way. Though it might prove to be merely brutally practical. Prone on the polished patterned slates, he could feel the lethal lump in his belly, an uncomfortable mass seeming the size of his doubled fists.

He rose at length and sought out Palli at Provincar dy Yarrin’s narrow old stone palace. Cazaril was conducted by a servant to a guest chamber at the back of the house. Palli was seated at a small table, writing in a ledger, but laid his quill aside when Cazaril entered and motioned his visitor to a chair across from him.

As soon as the servant had shut the door behind him Cazaril leaned forward and said, “Palli, could you, at need, ride courier to Ibra in secret for the Royesse Iselle?”

Palli’s brows climbed. “When?”

“Soon.”

He shook his head. “If by soon you mean now, I think not. I am much taken up with my duties as a lord dedicat—I have promised dy Yarrin my voice and my vote in the Council.”

“You could leave a proxy with dy Yarrin, or some other trusted comrade.”

Palli rubbed his shaven chin, and vented a dubious, “Hm.”

Cazaril considered claiming to be a saint of the Daughter, and pulling rank on Palli, dy Yarrin, and their entire military order. It would require complicated explanations. It would require divulging the secret of Fonsa’s curse. It would entail not merely admitting, but asserting, his . . . peculiar disorder. God-touched. God-ravished. And sounding as mad or madder than Ista ever had. He compromised. “I think this may be the Daughter’s business.”

Palli’s lips screwed up. “How can you tell?”

“I just can.”

“Well, I can’t.”

“Wait, I know. Before you go to sleep tonight, pray for guidance.”

“Me? Why don’t you?”

“My nights are . . . full.”

“And since when did you believe in prophetic dreams? I thought you always claimed it was nonsense, people fooling themselves, or pretending to an importance they could otherwise never claim.”

“It’s a . . . recent conversion. Look, Palli. Just do it for, for the experiment. To please me, if you will.”

Palli made a surrendering gesture. “For you, yes. For the rest of it . . .” His black brows lowered. “Ibra . . . ? Just who would I be riding in secret from?”

“Dy Jironal. Mostly.”

“Oh? Dy Yarrin might be interested in that. Something in it for him?”

“Not in any direct way, I don’t think.” Cazaril added reluctantly, “And likewise secret from Orico.”

Palli sat back, his head tilting. His voice lowered. “Coy, Caz. Just what kind of noose are you offering to put round my neck, here? Is this treason?”

“Worse,” Cazaril sighed. “Theology.”

“Eh?”

“Oh, that reminds me.” Cazaril pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to decide if his headache was getting worse. “Tell dy Yarrin his councils are being reported by some spy to dy Jironal. Though he may be canny enough to realize it already, I don’t know.”

“Worse and worse. Are you getting enough sleep, Caz?”

A bark of bitter laughter broke from Cazaril’s lips. “No.”

“You always did go strangely fey when you were overtired, y’know. Well, I’m not riding anywhere on the basis of a bunch of dark hints.”

“In the event, you’d be given full knowledge.”

“When I am given full knowledge, then I’ll decide.”

“Fair enough,” Cazaril sighed. “I will discuss it with the royesse. But I didn’t want to propose to her a man who would fail her.”

“Hey!” said Palli indignantly. “When have I failed?”

“Never, Palli. That’s why I thought of you.” Cazaril grinned and, with a little grunt of pain, pushed to his feet. “I must return to the Zangre.” Briefly, he described the unpleasant progression of Teidez’s claw mark.

Palli’s face grew very sober indeed. “Just how bad is it?”

“I don’t . . .” Caution tempered Cazaril’s frankness. “Teidez is young, strong, well fed. I see no reason why he cannot throw off this infection.”

“Five gods, Caz, he’s the hope of his House. What will Chalion do if he doesn’t? And Orico laid low as well!”

Cazaril hesitated. “Orico . . . hasn’t been well for some time, but I’m sure dy Jironal never imagined them both becoming so sick at once. You might note to dy Yarrin that our dear chancellor is going to be fairly distracted for the next few days. If the lord dedicats want to get past him to Orico’s bed and get anything signed, now might be their best chance.”

He extracted himself from Palli’s cascade of second thoughts, although not from Palli’s insistence that he take the dy Gura brothers for escort. Climbing the hill once more, his circling calculations of how to effect Iselle’s escape from the wreck of her cursed House spiraled inward on a much simpler grim determination not to fall down in front of these earnest young men, to be hauled home stumbling with his arms across their shoulders.

Cazaril found the third-floor corridor of the main block promisingly crowded upon his return. Green-robed physicians and their acolyte assistants scurried in and out. Servants hurried with water, linens, blankets, strange drinks in silver ewers. As Cazaril lingered, wondering what assistance he might offer, the archdivine emerged from the antechamber and started down the corridor, his face set and introspective.

“Your Reverence?” Cazaril touched his five-colored sleeve in passing. “How goes the boy?”

“Ah, Lord Cazaril.” Mendenal turned aside briefly. “The chancellor and the royesse have given me purses for prayers on his behalf. I go to set them in motion.”

“Do you think . . . prayers will do any good?” Do you think any prayers will do good?

“Prayer is always good.”

No, it’s not, Cazaril wanted to reply, but held his tongue.

Mendenal added suggestively, lowering his voice, “Yours might be especially efficacious. At this time.”

Not so far as Cazaril had noticed. “Your Reverence, I do not hate any man in this world enough to inflict the results of my prayers upon him.”

“Ah,” said Mendenal uneasily. He managed a smile, and took polite leave.

Royesse Iselle stepped into the corridor and glanced up and down it. She spied Cazaril and motioned him to her.

He bowed. “Royesse?”

She, too, lowered her voice; everyone here seemed to speak in hushed tones. “There is talk of an amputation. Can you—would you be willing—to help hold him down, if it chances so? I think you are familiar with the procedure?”

“Indeed, Royesse.” Cazaril swallowed. Nightmare memories of bad moments in field hospitals flitted through his mind. He had never been able to decide if the men who tried to take it bravely or the men whose minds broke in terror were the hardest for their helpers to endure. Better by far the men who were unconscious to start with. “Tell the physicians I am at their service, and Lord Teidez’s.”

Cazaril could hear from the antechamber where he leaned against the wall to wait just when the proposal was floated to Teidez. The boy was going to be of the second category, it seemed. He cried, and bellowed that he would not be made a cripple by traitors and idiots, and threw things. His rising hysteria was only calmed when a second physician opined that the infection was not gangrene after all—Cazaril’s nose agreed—but rather, blood poisoning, and that amputation would do more harm than good now. Treatment was reduced to a mere lancing, although from Teidez’s yells and struggles it might as well have been an amputation. Despite the draining of the wound, Teidez’s fever soared; servants brought buckets of cold water to make him a bath in a copper tub in the sitting room, then the physicians had to wrestle him into it.

Between physicians, acolytes, and servants, they seemed to have enough hands for these practical tasks, and Cazaril withdrew for a time to his own office on the floor above. There he diverted his mind by writing tart letters to those town councils late with their royally mandated payments to the royesse’s household, which was all of them. They had sent letters of excuse claiming poor crops, banditry, plague, evil weather, and cheating tax gatherers. Six towns’ worth of troubles; Cazaril wondered if Orico had pulled a fast one with his betrothal gift and dumped the six worst towns on his rent rolls onto his sister and Dondo, or whether all of Chalion was in such disarray.

Iselle and Betriz came in, looking weary and strained.

“My brother is more ill than I have ever seen him,” Iselle confided to Cazaril. “We are going to set up my private altar and pray before dinner. I’m wondering if we should perhaps fast as well.”

“I think what may be needed here are not others’ prayers, but Teidez’s himself; and not for health, but for forgiveness.”

Iselle shook her head. “He refuses to pray at all. He says it’s not his fault, but Dondo’s, which is certainly true up to a point. . . . He cries he never intended to hurt Orico, and they are slanderers who say so.”

“Is anyone saying so?”

Betriz put in, “No one says it to the royesse’s face. But there are strange rumors among the servants, Nan says.”

Iselle’s frown deepened. “Cazaril . . . could it be?”

Cazaril leaned his elbows on his table and rubbed the ache between his brows. “I think . . . not on Teidez’s part. I believe him when he says it was Dondo’s idea. Dondo, now, of him I would believe anything. Think it through from his point of view. He marries Teidez’s sister, then arranges for Teidez to ascend the throne while still a minor. He knew from watching his brother Martou just how much power a man may wield sitting in a roya’s pocket. Grant you, I don’t know how he intended to rid himself of Martou, but I am certain Dondo meant to be the next chancellor, perhaps regent, of Chalion. Maybe even roya of Chalion, depending on what evil chances he could arrange for Teidez.”

Iselle caught her lower lip in her teeth. “And here I thought you had only saved me.” She touched Cazaril briefly on the shoulder and passed on into her chambers.

Cazaril accompanied Iselle and Betriz on their predinner visit to Orico. Orico, though no better, was no worse. They found him arrayed in fresh linens, sitting up in bed, and being read to by Sara. The roya spoke hopefully of an improvement in his right eye, for he thought he could now see shapes moving. Cazaril thought the physician’s diagnosis of dropsy all too likely, for Orico’s gross flesh was swollen even more grossly; the roya’s thumbprint, placed upon the tight fat of his face, stayed pale and visible for a long time. Iselle downplayed the alarming reports of Teidez’s infection to Orico, but in the antechamber on the way out spoke frankly to Sara. Sara’s lips tightened; she made little comment to Teidez’s sister, but Cazaril thought that here at least was one who did not pray for the bewildered brutal boy.

After supper, Teidez’s fever rose even higher. He stopped fighting and complaining, and fell into lassitude. A couple of hours before midnight, he seemed to fall to sleep. Iselle and Betriz at last left the royse’s antechamber and climbed to their own rooms for some rest.

Close to midnight, unable to sleep for sake of his usual anticipations, Cazaril again went down the corridor to Teidez’s chambers. The chief physician, going to wake the boy to administer some fever-reducing syrup, fresh-concocted and delivered by a panting acolyte, found that Teidez could not be roused.

Cazaril trudged up the stairs to report this to a sleepy Nan dy Vrit.

“Well, there’s naught Iselle can do about it,” opined Nan. “She’s just dropped off, poor girl. Can we not let her sleep?”

Cazaril hesitated, then said, “No.”

So the two tired, worried young women dressed themselves again and trooped back down to Teidez’s crowded sitting room. Chancellor dy Jironal arrived, fetched from Jironal Palace.

Dy Jironal frowned at Cazaril, and bowed to Iselle. “Royesse. This sickroom is no place for you.” His sour glance back to Cazaril silently added, Or you.

Iselle’s eyes narrowed, but she replied in a quiet, dignified voice, “None here has a better right. Or a greater duty.” After a brief pause, she added, “And I must bear witness on my mother’s behalf.”

Dy Jironal inhaled, then apparently thought better of whatever he’d been about to say. He might profitably save the clash of wills for some other time and place, Cazaril thought. There would be opportunities enough.

Cold compresses failed to lower Teidez’s fever, and needle pricks failed to rouse him. His anxious attendants were thrown into a flurry when he had a brief seizure. His breathing became even more rasping and labored than the unconscious Umegat’s had been. Out in the corridor, a quintet of cantors, one voice from each of the five orders, sang prayers; their voices blended and echoed, a heartbreakingly beautiful background of sound to these dreadful doings.

The harmonies paused. In that moment, Cazaril realized the labored breathing from the bedchamber beyond had stopped. Everyone fell silent in the face of that silence. One of the several attendant physicians, his face drained and wet with tears, came to the antechamber and called in dy Jironal and Iselle for witnesses. Voices rose and fell, very soft and low, from Teidez’s bedchamber for a moment or two.

Both were pale when they came out again. Dy Jironal was pale and shocked; even to the last, Cazaril realized, the man had been expecting Teidez to pull through and recover. Iselle was pale and nearly expressionless. The black shadow boiled thickly about her.

Every face in the antechamber turned toward her, like compass needles swinging. The royacy of Chalion had a new Heiress.