Count Scar - SA (3 page)

"Halt, in the name of Caloran, Count of Peyrefixade!" shouted my guards to my surprised delight, as they leaped out in front of the gate and stood with crossed halberds. The duke stopped twenty
yards below them, before the final loop of the road. "Tell your master that Duke Argave requests permission to enter the castle which he has vouchsafed him." He must know who I was but was
not looking at me now.

I stepped forward. "Enter my castle, esteemed lord, for I would gladly greet you and bow the knee to you." They might pride themselves on their dancing-master manners here in the south, but I
was sure that none of them had experienced anything like the ceremony of the imperial court on a high holy day.

Argave gave a sudden smile and kicked his lathered horse for the final assent.

It was quite clear that I would never have inherited this castle were it not for the duke, so there was no use in holding back. When he reached the gates I was already down on one knee, reaching for
his stirrup to hold it as he descended.

He nodded in satisfaction but said, "Rise, Caloran. You will come to my court at Ferignan for formal investment next week, and until then you need not bend the knee to me." He gave only the
slightest flick of his eyelids at the sight of my scarred face. I came to my feet slowly but maintained my grip on his stirrup until he had dismounted. He took a heavy, linen-wrapped box from the
back of his saddle, then the grooms appeared to lead the horse away.

His messengers immediately burst into a flow of words that I could not understand. The duke looked at me over their heads and smiled as though enjoying my discomfort. But he said in a friendly
enough tone, "You do not understand our region's language? Come, lads, let us not appear to be discussing secrets before Count Caloran. You can tell me all these things later if they have any
import."

"I speak the Royal Tongue," I said stiffly, "and Allemann of course, from my years in the imperial court." Let him learn about that from me and not from his messengers.

"Auccitan, our region's language, is in your blood," he replied good-naturedly. "You should quickly pick it up, as it is not so different from the Royal Tongue."

And if they persisted in speaking a language I did not understand, I thought, then Bruno and I would converse before them in Allemann.

"I knew, of course, of your service to the emperor," the duke continued, just when I thought he would not deign to mention it at all. "And how you left that service two years ago." Duke Argave,
I thought, had good information—perhaps from my brother, perhaps from other sources—but did not always care to share that information with those under him.

"Here in your own court," he added thoughtfully, "you may hear nothing but your own Royal Tongue. After Countess Aenor came back from offering her obeiance to the king, she ordered that
none but his language be spoken here, and she was obeyed. Of course," he put in almost as an aside, "she did not live a year after that, so the lesson may not have taken thoroughly."

The countess had died within a year of taking office herself? Clearly there was a great deal that the messengers had deliberately kept from me. I led Duke Argave into the great hall, though he
doubtless knew the way better than I did.

Here, with a flourish, he whipped the linen away from the box and handed it to me. It was even heavier than I had expected from the way he carried it, and I came close to dropping it. It was made
of age-darkened chestnut, bound with bands of iron, and locked with a massive lock. But the duke produced a key, and under his gaze I slowly opened it.

It was, as I suspected, the treasury of the county of Peyrefixade. The cook would be able to buy more peppercorns after all, I thought, hefting the leather bags within. I didn't want to count my
money with Duke Argave looking on, but then I suspected he had long since counted it himself. The bags seemed somehow less full than I had hoped, though I tried to reassure myself that most of
the money would be in gold. There was no use whatsoever in suspecting the duke of having improved the condition of his own spice chests while guarding my treasury for me.

The bouteillier hurried in with flagons of wine. He said something in rapid Auccitan to Duke Argave as he served us, but the duke did not answer. This southern wine was better than anything
my brother had in his castle, I thought as we sipped.

"The spring rents come due next month," said the duke. Everything he said had a slightly amused, ironic undertone, but that seemed only his way of speaking, not a comment on my rents—I
hoped. "Your seneschal can inform you about your rent collectors. He's a good man, devoted to your family."

I nodded, noticing a sheaf of parchment in the bottom of the treasury box. A quick glance showed that a few were property deeds or judicial records, but most were chirographic records of transfers
of property away from the county patrimony. The ones I leafed through all represented gifts to a religious house dedicated to the Three Kings.

"How did the countess come to die so suddenly," I asked without looking up, "having held the office such a short time? Was it the perils of childbirth?"

Duke Argave chuckled, and then I did meet his eyes. They were dark and piercing, with very little real humor in them. "You should know better than that, Caloran. If she had had a child, there
would have been no need to summon you all the way from the north!" He wore a large emerald ring, doubtless worth many times the contents of my treasury box, and he turned it thoughtfully as
he spoke. "Her grandfather, old Count Bernhard, had outlived his son by many years and died beloved and venerable last winter. His granddaughter, the heiress, would doubtless have been loved
just as much—eventually—if it had not been for her accident."

So there had been some sort of trouble during her short reign. "Accident?" I repeated.

"Late fall, the time of fogs and mists. She must have decided to walk on the ramparts by herself in the evening. No one knew she had even left her chamber until they heard the scream… It was not
until the next morning that they found her body."

"So she fell to her death." I stirred uneasily in the great carved chair in which I sat. She had presumably known the castle all her life; I would have to watch my own step very carefully.

"Or was pushed."

The duke's words seemed to echo through the empty hall. "But who would have pushed her?" I asked, horrified.

"Not her husband," he answered with assurance, "as he was never out of the sight of at least a dozen witnesses that evening, at least one of whom I trust completely. And there was scant reason
for him to want her dead just yet, even had he despised her, which he did not. For without a child of his body to inherit, he had no further legal claim to be Count of Peyrefixade. He tried to argue
it with me, of course, even hired some men of law to make his case, but I could tell his heart was never in it. Without his wife Lord Thierri is just one more dependent at my court again. That's
the real reason I haven't brought him to the ordeal."

This was what the duke had hinted at in his letter to me. I felt a cold suspicion that there was still much more to this than he had said. He could certainly have accepted the countess's consort as
the new count if he had wanted, without fearing anyone would dare oppose him. But for some reason, without even having met me, he had decided he wanted me instead.

"But who do you suspect, then?" I asked. "Surely by now you must have charged someone with this hideous crime."

"No witnesses to her fall," said the duke regretfully, "and those who might seem to have the most to gain are all beyond suspicion. Oh there was one witness, too terrified to come forward the
night she died, one of the staff here who spoke of apparitions and horrors. But it was clear nonsense, illusions of the mist to wine-blurred eyes."

He rose briskly, his cloak swirling around him, and I stood up too, "No, I will not stay for dinner. I shall leave you now to learn more of your own castle and will take my lads with me. But you
shall attend my high court next week and make your oaths before all my other men. You are also sworn to the king through your oaths to me, so there will be no need to go north to the royal court
before midsummer—I hear the roads can be poor this time of year."

"I noticed," I said dryly.

"And you shall make the acquaintance of my daughter Arsendis, a charming young woman who has expressed great interest in the new northern count." I suddenly found
myself smiling hugely.

Apparently, even with the scar, I would not be too horrifying to a maiden's sensibilities. The duke handed me a small square of parchment. "You might enjoy this miniature of her."

It was a woman's portrait, done very small, showing someone black-haired smiling over her shoulder at me. Her dark eyes tilted up at the corners and gave the impression she was enjoying a
private joke. The picture was startlingly realistic; I had never seen a portrait look so much like a living, breathing person. I rubbed at it with my thumb, vaguely suspecting magic.

"Keep it for now," said Duke Argave with a wave of his hand. "You can return it to Arsendis when you meet her at my high court next week. Oh, and before then, your capellanus will arrive."

"My Kapelanner?" I said, so surprised that I used the Allemannic word. "A spiritual advisor? I have one?"

He was already heading out toward the courtyard. "I requested him particularly. A bright young man who is wasting his considerable talents holed up in the religious house of the Three Kings."

There were too many pieces for me even to start putting them together yet. "Isn't that the house," I asked, hurrying to keep up with the duke, "to which old Count Bernhard, my predecessor, was
so generous?"

Argave turned toward me suddenly and smiled. "So you have learned that already, have you? I knew I need not fear someone of your family would be slow-witted." Out in the courtyard the
winter sun was shining, but the stone passage in which we stood was shadowed and chill. "But did you know they are the Order that practices magic?"

"Magic!" It seemed I was repeating about half of what the duke said, but he had surprised me again. "I knew all priests study a little magic," I sputtered, trying not to be scandalized, "as they
learn all branches of knowledge and science. I knew that the most pious men of God may persue some pagan learning, even read the love poems of antiquity while learning antiquity's language.

But a whole Order devoted to it! I would have thought that heretical."

The duke's whole manner changed abruptly. He had seemed detached and amused all during our conversation, but at the mention of heresy he became deadly serious. He turned to face me,
speaking with quiet intensity. "Well, some of the heretics back in the mountain valleys—the Perfected, as they like to call themselves, if you can imagine such hypocrisy!—certainly practice dark
magic. In the terrible wars of my boyhood, they wielded almost unimaginable magical powers, and hundreds, even thousands were slain on both sides. It is not however the magic that separates
the heretics from the True Faith. It is their perverted belief that this world is not God's creation but the devil's, and that by cleansing themselves, freeing themselves from the taint of earth, they
can become totally pure through their own efforts. They say that they are so Perfect that they do not need God's mercy and atonement, thus misleading many pious souls into damnation—

especially as I hear they often reward themselves for fasts and flagellations by afterwards indulging in gross orgies. That is why God-fearing sons of the True Faith need to oppose them with their
own weapons. And that is why," with a slight flaring of his nostrils, "not long after the war against the heretics, I helped the old count, your great-uncle, establish the Magian Order. I was then
a very young man, and it was one of my first acts on inheriting the duchy."

I immediately bit back all the issues I had been about to raise questioning the wisdom of learning more than the slightest bit of magic. "The path of wisdom," I said heartily, trying not to meet his
eyes. "So my new capellanus will be a Magian?"

"His name," said the duke, "is Melchior."

Chapter Two ~ Malchior

Chapter Two ~ Malchior

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"His name is Caloran."

I had been startled at first when a novice had interrupted my afternoon period of study to summon me to the office of the provost, then filled with deep apprehension that the day I had begun to
hope might never arrive was upon me at last. Had someone denounced me? Was I to be banished despite all my labors, despite a spotless record of devotion to the Order and the True Faith from my
first days as a novice? As I hurried past the chapter house, the terror that I might never again be allowed to enter that octagonal chamber and participate in the business of the Order as a full
brother had been truly terrible.

Arriving before Provost Balaam filled with such doubts and fears, I had been surprised and confused to have him launch into an apparently conversational account concerning the arrival of a new
count at the castle of Peyrefixade, a good day and a half away. Now I raised my eyes from his narrow face to the wall behind him, studying the ivory madonna and the fine wooden sculpture of our
Order's namesakes, the Three Magi, that hung there, while I tried to decipher the meaning of this conversation. After a moment I ventured, "A southerner's name: interesting for a northern
count."