Count Scar - SA (25 page)

He had lapsed back into Nabarrese, but his meaning was clear. I adopted a lofty expression, as though I had not even noticed him nearly getting a grass stain on the rear of his expensive outfit.

"No more than you are, Prince" I said calmly. "So there is no need to discuss her further." The thought came unbidden that the prince's choice of vocabulary in asking me for a favor, coupled with
his request that I not take a woman to wife, could have an entirely different explanation than the political borders in these mountains. The idea was so funny—especially the picture of how much
redder and more sneering the prince would become if he knew what I was thinking— that I had to struggle hard to keep from laughing.

"Let us go instead to the village of Three Cuckoos," I said airily, turning my back on him so he wouldn't see my grin, and picking up my sword belt, "and talk with the mayor and the
inhabitants. Once we've resolved that issue, we can return if you wish to the topic of the heretics— and the question you still haven't answered, why you tried to kill me."

I mounted without giving him a chance to answer, doing my best to convey assurance that he would immediately agree. My knights had been working with me for months now, and they seized
their own horses' bridles and were in the saddle as smoothly as any cavalry I'd ever commanded for the emperor, before Prince Alfonso was fully on his feet again.

I hadn't left him much choice. Our horses stamped impatiently while Alfonso's men hastily brought forward his steed. It was a magnificent golden stallion, with legs so slender they gave an
appearance of delicacy, and wide-spaced intelligent eyes. Not at all the horse, I said to myself, suppressing another chuckle, for a piebald gelding like the prince.

But with his face turned away from me as he mounted, I lost the effect of his pale blue eyes and was able to concentrate again on his dark hair and complexion, and on the shape of his shoulders
under his cloak as he settled himself in the saddle. Though he was much younger and slighter than the duke, something about the way he sat his stallion reminded me of Duke Argave. Both of
them were southerners, I reminded myself, men whose ancestors had lived here—and doubtless intermarried—for centuries. Only a quarter of my own blood was southern. The rest of me was
foreign, foreign to these mountains, to this land of heretics and intrigues, even to Peyrefixade—except that Peyrefixade now was mine.

Melchior was again concentrating on whatever Alfonso and his chancellor were saying to each other, and as I wheeled my horse around to start toward the disputed village, the priest urged his
steed into position beside mine. "Alfonso is complaining," he said in a low voice, again slightly amused, "that his chancellor had not warned him you were such a fierce and headstrong man."

"Do you mean he hadn't realized I was a northerner?" I replied, gratified. But something else in the priests words caught my attention. "I also gather," I added casually, "that Prince Alfonso has
always been an enemy to the Order of the Three Kings, refusing to allow your Order to operate in his principality, saying publicly that an order of Magian priests is no better than a covey of
heretics."

"How did you know?" asked Melchior in surprise. I didn't answer but gave a knowing smile. Even a scarred count could sometimes see through the attitudes and prejudices of a magic-working
priest.

The village of Three Cuckoos toward which we were heading was, as far as I could tell, quite clearly part of the prince's territory—or at least not part of mine. When I came home from the duke's
court with the message conveyed by the duke's old mistress, to meet with Alfonso to settle this purported border dispute, Seneschal Guilhem had told me that the villagers there had always had an
independent streak. There had been times under the old count, my great-uncle, he informed me, that they had temporarily claimed to lie under his jurisdiction, but only when they had had some
disagreement with Alfonso's predecessors. The late countess—or rather, I expected, Lord Thierri—had tried to make them pay her rent, but without any success. I hadn't even bothered to visit
there while making the rounds of my lands earlier in the spring. The village was however located in a potentially crucial position, where a narrow valley coming down from this high, stony
plateau widened out enough for fields—and a view toward Peyrefixade. An ideal invasion route from either direction.

The village was a several miles' ride from Alfonso's encampment. He kicked his golden stallion forward to ride even with me, and Melchior dropped back. Alfonso looked toward me with a sneer
as if to suggest that he too could be headstrong and ferocious if he wanted. I smiled placidly as though not aware of the effect.

"You did not bring Raymbaud," he said as though disappointed.

"I do not travel with my bouteillier," I said, using the word from the Royal Tongue because I had no idea of the Auccitan. I was surprised, however, that he even knew my bouteillier's name. Then
I realized something. Raymbaud's accent, ever so slightly different from those of the rest of my staff, must be Nabarrese. He must once have worked for Prince Alfonso before deciding the duke—

and the counts of Peyrefixade, once he became the duke's spy—would pay better. "I do not need refined service in the field," I added, hoping Alfonso felt the jab.

But at least for the moment his attention was elsewhere. "You let heretics escape," he said abruptly. This, I realized, was something he had been working around to asking me when I cut our
discussion short. "Why?"

I waited a minute to answer, looking forward between my horse's bobbing ears: wanting both to make sure I had the words right in Auccitan and to make him impatient. "The Inquisition had not
asked my permission to put them to death," I said at last. I was certainly not going to tell this young prince I would have faced a hundred enemies single-handed rather than watch someone be
burned to death. "Surely you, Prince, must realize that sometimes one must make a firm gesture to show one's authority." I was quite proud that I had found the right Auccitan word for

"gesture."

Alfonso might not have recognized it himself, but he followed my meaning. "But you are not in sympathy with them?"

I was getting used to his accent, and although I was quite sure his word for "sympathy" was not Auccitan, it was close enough to the Royal Tongue for a guess. "I hate them very much," I said,
deciding that neither his nor my vocabulary was ready for "despise." "And if they want to capture my castle, then I shall hate them even more."

"But is not your priest of the Order of the Three Kings ?" Melchior's presence was bothering him, then—and he didn't even know his private conversation was being overheard with magic.

"The Magians hate the heretics as much as we do," I said airily, hoping it was true.

At this point the track turned steeply downward toward the village, requiring us to give full attention to our horses and putting an end to further conversation. We went single file down the
narrow and muddy way. From the hillsides around us we could hear the steady calling of the cuckoos that had given the village its name. Once sheltered from the cold wind off the peaks, I found
the air growing warm and itched inside my velvet. Smoke drifted up from the huddle of houses before us.

It was clear the villagers had not expected our arrival. So if I had not decided to ride over here, I thought, Three Cuckoos might have remained nothing more than a pretext for our meeting. Several
men came running into the village from the fields as we approached; others, bent over as though hoping to avoid detection, darted away. For a moment I saw in an open doorway a face I found
strangely familiar, but it was gone before I could identify it. Inbreeding, I thought again. When everyone had similar bone structure, it was easy for an outsider like me to think they all looked
alike.

Prince Alfonso, seeing a chance to seize the initiative again, pulled up his stallion in the middle of the cluster of houses and shouted something in Nabarrese. "He's calling for the mayor and the
old men," translated Melchior, at my elbow again, "to give testimony about the village's jurisdiction and responsibilities."

This I could have guessed. Having been forced to come here, Alfonso intended to make a good showing of his own authority by having all the elders swear that the counts at Peyrefkade had never
exercised justice over this village.

The mayor, an old man with wispy white hair who appeared far more terrified than the simple arrival of his sworn lord should account for, stumbled forward and dropped to his knees. Alfonso did
not dismount. With a sneer and a look off over the man's head, he asked him several rapid questions.

The Nabarrese was too fast for me, and I couldn't catch the mayor's words either, but it sounded as though he was earnestly expressing an intent to agree to whatever Alfonso wanted.

What had the prince done here in the past that would make these people so terrified at his mere arrival?

Or, I thought with a sudden chill, was it not Alfonso himself they feared so much as the Inquisition he befriended? Glancing around, I saw many eyes on me, eyes that dropped or disappeared back
into a house's shadows as I turned my head. I was used to people staring, but if they thought Alfonso was here at the request of the Inquisition, were they wondering if the scarred count of whom
they must have heard, the scarred count who needed to reestablish himself in the Inquisition's eyes as a true son of the Church, was here to force them painfully into confessions, justified or not?

I neither wanted to let Alfonso make a display of his authority nor to terrify innocuous villagers. "Thank you for your testimony," I called out in Auccitan, interrupting the mayors stammered
agreement to something or other. "I can see, Prince," turning to Alfonso, "that this is a complicated case, one that would take days of questioning to resolve. Let us cut those days short. Out of
gratitude for the friendship you have offered me, I hereby yield to you my predecessors' claims and my own to jurisdiction over this village."

Swinging down from the saddle, I scooped up a stone and held it out toward Alfonso at arm's length. There was a silent pause for about fifteen seconds. Everyone turned to look at the prince.

Having no choice, he slowly and grudgingly dismounted and stepped toward me to accept the stone. I deliberately kept myself from smiling as his fingers closed around it.

By holding it toward him from a standing position, rather than kneeling, I had made it clear that this was a resolution of a disagreement between equals, not a situation where one man was forced
to subject himself to the other. I might have yielded any claim to lordship over Three Cuckoos—a claim I knew well I could never have sustained anyway—but both Alfonso and I knew I had won.

"Let us return to your encampment, Prince," I said, ignoring his irritation. "There we can discuss the other issues that still await us." The mayor, I was interested to see, was so surprised at this
sudden end of questioning and so relieved at our imminent departure that he had to support himself against a wall.

Again I took the lead, forcing my horse into a trot until the track became too steep. My knights rode right behind me, leaving Alfonso and his own men rather ignominiously to bring up the rear.

As we came back out onto the plateau, I paused to give my horse a rest from the long climb and turned to look back. Melchior, sitting his horse at my side, spoke without looking at me. "I know
you don't want to exercise your authority in someone else's territory," he said in a low, cautious voice. "But if this keeps on, Count, the archbishop really will doubt your dedication to the True
Faith. As, I fear…"

He let it trail away without finishing the sentence, but his meaning was clear. "You're worried about my religious devotion?" I asked sharply. "What are you talking about?"

"Isn't that why you didn't even try to maintain your claim to the village, but got us all away from there so quickly?" he asked, turning toward me now with surprise. "I thought you were afraid
that someone in Alfonso's retinue would recognize that man, too, or realize that the mayor's terror was unusually pronounced even for someone with such a prince over him."

Our horses tore at the sharp mountain grass but did not seem to like the flavor. "I saw someone I thought I recognized," I said slowly. "If—" But then the memory snapped into place. "It was one
of the heretics I set free."

Melchior nodded. "The whole village must be full of the Perfected. Here, almost out of the prince's territory, very far from any other settlements, they would have thought they were safe from the
inquisitors. When a whole troop of armed men suddenly rode up, they must have imagined all too clearly what it meant."

"Especially armed men accompanied by a priest," I agreed. "Heretics are unlikely to make a clear distinction between the vestments of an inquisitor and those of a member of the Order of the
Three Kings." I too should have recognized the heretic, I thought, if I had not been so pleased with myself for how I was manipulating the prince.

Melchior looked startled at the implication that he could possibly be mistaken for a member of the Inquisition, but he did not answer at once. At this rate, I thought in irritation, the heretics were
going to consider me their friend. I just hoped they didn't pass the news of this friendship on to Prince Alfonso's pet inquisitors the next time they were questioned. "As soon as we're safely home
again," I said, "I'm going to send a message to Archbishop Amalric and tell him I've found a nest of heretics. That should make him pleased."