Count Scar - SA (7 page)

"Of course, my lord, I would be delighted to show you my map," he said with a dip of the head. "During the empty and sorrowful days this winter after the countess's tragic death, when we did
not even know yet that the duke had sent for you, I was able to keep my mind focused by mapping every room, every corridor, every stone."

I had expected some rough sketch and was stunned when he produced what appeared to be a completely realistic image of the castle, such as an eagle might see in flying over it. It was not even a
single sheet of parchment but an intricate series of flaps and folds, which one could open to see each of the storeys within each part of the castle. I unfolded them gingerly, almost expecting to see a
tiny image of myself in the middle of my great hall. "You did not do this with brush alone," I declared.

"No, my lord, I do have some small skill in magic," Raymbaud said with a rather self-satisfied smile. "And if you will follow me, I can show you that my map represents Peyrefixade quite
accurately."

Bruno and I spent much of the rest of the day with Raymbaud as he led us around, showing us each feature of my castle as proudly as though it were his own. I forced myself to put aside my
immediate and unreasoned thought that there must be something sinister about a man, not even a priest, who had studied the rudiments of magic; clearly my northern expectations had no place
here.

I already was familiar with the courtyard, entered by the great gates opposite the keep, with the stables on one side and the kitchens opening off the other. The keep, with the great hall on the main
floor and chambers above, I also knew, but I hadn't realized how extensive were the store rooms underneath. Raymbaud led me around behind the keep, circling the tower where I had stood on my
first morning in Peyrefixade, to a little terrace from which a steep stair led down to the postern gate, the private way in or out of the castle. Bruno and I took a torch to follow the long, long spiral
of stairs down and back. Then, with the magic map in hand, I was finally able to make sense of the tangle of passages and stairways at the back of the castle, an area now apparently little used
except for a small practice yard, shadowed by a squat square tower that stared away across the mountains.

Several knights were practicing their sword-fighting there, and I joined them, both to assure myself that my skills had not become rusty during the long trip down here and to assure them that a
scarred count could fight as well as anyone. Raymbaud also joined us and showed himself a polished if rather cautious swordsman.

"You were clearly brought up as a knight," I said to him when we stopped to mop our brows. "You know fighting as well as you do your wine barrels. A younger son?" An archduke's younger
son, I thought, at least had the opportunity to fight for the emperor. The landless younger son of a manorial lord would be lucky to find himself a service position at court that was not too
degrading.

"That's right, my lord," he said with an accommodating smile and another dip of the head. "And I count it my good fortune that I have been able to serve both in Duke Argave's court and more
recently here in Peyrefixade. My goal is always to provide service of the level that I would want were I lord here myself."

"He must be the duke's spy here," I said in private to Bruno later that evening. "Our duke seems to have a taste for Magians. Say nothing to Raymbaud to let him know we've guessed his secret.

Even aside from his abilities in castle management, which the next man the duke tried to plant on me might not have, a known spy can be dealt with as long as he does not realize he has been
recognized."

Once I had learned the names of the rest of the staff and had stood watching them at work long enough that I had a good idea of their functions and abilities—and they had come to the realization
that I would be no slipshod master—I turned my attention to the documents in the bottom of the treasure chest. The old count, my great-uncle, had kept very good records. Most people who give
property to the Church trust the monks or canons to keep the records of the transfers themselves, but he had had his own scribe draw up the charters and make chirographic duplicates of all of
them. The two identical accounts had been written on a single piece of parchment, side-by-side, with the word CHIROGRAPHUM written vertically between them, and then the two had been cut
apart through the letters of that word, so the two halves could be fitted back together if there were any question of their authenticity. "The religious house our capellanus comes from was built on
what was once Peyrefixade land," I told Bruno, leafing through the records while seated with my feet up in a window seat in the great hall. If I turned my head I could look out the narrow
window at clouds scudding across the ridges, first obscuring and then revealing distant peaks much taller than mine. "And the brothers pasture their sheep on more land that the countess's
grandfather gave them, and grind their grain in a mill theirs by his gift."

"So is that why his Order wants him here?" suggested Bruno. He sat on the floor beside me, sharpening his knife. "Keep an eye on you, make sure the new count doesn't try to claim it back?"

"That would make sense from the canons' point of view," I said with a frown, "but it doesn't explain the duke. Sending Brother Melchior here seems to have been our duke's idea—certainly not
Melchior's own. But the county of Peyrefixade must be, at least potentially, the most troublesome in his duchy. If, for example, I decided to defy him or to make an alliance with the princes south
of the border, he would have real trouble rousting me out. Perhaps he's hoping that a priest from the Order of the Three Kings will encourage me to make even more gifts to his Order, thus
ensuring that I never have a strong material base from which to threaten him."

Inwardly I wondered, as I had several times before, if the duke's hints about his daughter were also part of a plan to keep me even from thinking of challenging him.

The emperor had confidently assumed that his sworn liege men would never turn on him, and I would be sworn to Duke Argave at the end of the week, but perhaps here in the south they
anticipated that men would break their word.

"I don't understand about that priest," said Bruno with a quick look around and a lowered voice, though there was no one nearby. "He's supposed to be a Magian, but I haven't seen him do any
magic yet. Even the bouteillier can do better tricks than he can. And if the priest's whole Order is made up of conjurers, why can't they just conjure food and clothing out of the air rather than
having to make it like everybody else?"

"You'll have to ask Melchior that yourself," I said, returning to the charters. "It looks as though the late Countess Aenor tried to take back some of her grandfathers pious gifts after she
inherited."

"Did the canons use magic to stop her?" asked Bruno, interested.

"I don't know. All I have is the record of the agreement when the quarrel ended." I skimmed through the document, puzzling over some of the words in the antique language still used for formal
charters. "This suggests, without actually saying so, that they threatened to stop praying for her grandfather and for her own parents, who had died earlier. They all seem to be buried at their
religious house."

"Well, they couldn't be buried here on the mountain," said Bruno reasonably. "No soil to speak of—certainly not six feet of it."

"Earlier counts must have had a mausoleum," I said absently. "Maybe that's what those rumors I've heard about secret passages here were all about—though Raymbaud's map didn't show any
mausoleum."

"There weren't earlier counts," said Bruno unexpectedly. He held up his knife to the light, squinting to judge the sharpness of the blade. "Your great-grandfather was the first count at
Peyrefixade. The castle was built by the heretics, those people who call themselves the Perfected."

"How did you learn that?" I demanded, swinging my feet to the floor. "There are no charters in here more than forty years old." This was my castle and should not have such dark secrets in its
past, certainly not secrets I didn't even know.

Bruno grinned. "Talking to some of the servants. You can learn a lot that way. Men will tell things to another servant they'd never tell a master."

"And that's why I put up with having you around," I said good-naturedly, leaning back again. "But tell me about these heretics. I thought my own grandfather was from a count's family."

"Your great-grandfather led the war that drove the filthy heretics back," said Bruno in a storyteller's voice, enjoying this, "though his two sons were the actual field commanders. It was a great
and terrible war, with thousands killed on both sides, but the followers of the True Faith won at last and drove the devil's spawn to that little strip of land they still control in the high
mountains along the border. Your great-grandfather was named Caloran, too — did you know that? After the war he was rewarded with the tide of Count of Peyrefixade, the first count of your
line. A little later when he died, his younger son, your grandfather, went north, but his older son, Bernhard, held the county for a great many years, until he finally died a year ago and his
granddaughter started raising trouble with the Magians."

"I've heard mention of that war, of course," I said thoughtfully, looking out the window again. I could see, halfway up my mountain, a single rider. "They must indeed have had God on their side
to be able to capture this castle. My family surely hated the heretics as much as the duke does."

"Maybe the secret passages were hidden by heretic magic when they fled from here," Bruno suggested. But he was interrupted by the triple note of the horn.

The person I had seen approaching had not looked particularly important, so I waited for him to come to , me rather than going out to the gate. I returned the parchments to the treasury box along
with the remains of the countess's money. Less of it was gold than I had hoped, but there was still enough for supplies until the March rents—assuming the seneschal's figures were accurate, for
he, unlike the cook, seemed to keep everything in his mournful head.

In a minute a somewhat bedraggled knight entered, escorted by my guards. His cloak was torn and stained and the hauberk under it rusty. He went down on his knees before me, with only the
slightest encouraging push from the guards, and offered me his sword, hilt first. "I'm sorry I didn't get here right away, my lord," he mumbled, "but I was busy."

"No one should be so busy that he cannot greet his new lord," I said sternly, deliberately turning the scarred side of my face toward him. As I spoke I wondered who he could be. Another member of
my staff who had been on one too many little visits to his old mother? Not a dependent castellan, because the seneschal had told me Peyrefixade was the only castle in the county; I wouldn't be
like my brother the archduke, with scores of castellans to oversee. Perhaps a village mayor with delusions of grandeur?

It was the latter. I accepted his sword and held it by the hilt, making no motion for him to rise, while he explained why he had finally decided to come up the mountain. "And so it was a clear case
of adultery," he said, finishing the complicated details of an affair that must have entertained and scandalized his village for months. "I've ruled them guilty, but because it's a capital case you
have to seal my justice-roll. For the duke," he added as I frowned.

"If this is a case of high justice," I said slowly, "then only I, as count, can adjudicate."

"Well, yes," he said, hesitating now, "but Countess Aenor always told me to go ahead myself. She trusted me and sealed the roll."

"But I am not the countess." I thrust his sword back at him. "If you're my man, you have to do things my way." I had no desire at all to ride down the mountain and hear a bunch of villagers
scream at each other, but it appeared I had no choice. Delegating authority in capital cases was the easiest way to lose prestige among underlings and to encourage abuse of power. That was one
thing even my brother had known well. "You haven't put any of them to death yet, have you?" I asked in some trepidation.

"Well, no," he said, trying to justify himself. "Sealed ruling first, execution afterwards."

"I seal no decision of high justice" I said, reaching for my cloak, "until I hear it myself." Bruno resignedly stood up, and I motioned to two knights to accompany us as I strode through the
courtyard on the way to the stable. Further perusal of parchments—or search for secret passages—would have to wait.

2

2

I had never seen anything like Duke Argaves court.

It was located in the wealthy market town of Ferignan, in a broad river valley where several streams came together, including one that flowed from the base of Peyrefixade and one that, according
to Brother Melchior, flowed from the peak where his Order's principal religious house was located. The hills surrounding the town were planted with the olive trees Bruno and I had missed in
Peyrefixade, although this time of year their branches were sere and gray.

The duke's castle was located on a slight rise above the guild halls and merchants' houses that provided supplies for my castle and probably half the other villages and castles in the duchy. I
thought it showed Argave's ancestors' supreme confidence in their own power that they had not sought out an inaccessible peak like Peyrefixade. Even in the cold wind of a late winter afternoon
a few beggars clustered at the duke's gates, and I threw them a handful of coppers. The castles outer walls were pierced with arrow slits and had grim towers commanding every corner, but within
was a softness and luxury I had never seen, even at the imperial court.