Myrren's Gift (6 page)

Myrren, and when spurned had decided to take revenge. He had a long history of indiscretions outside his marriage and this had been just another attempt to get a young woman into his bed. It was a tragedy.

Magnus felt, that Rokan had stumbled across this particular girl’s village.

The problem for Magnus was that the noble’s accusation carried weight in the eyes of the Stalkers and those who still harbored deep-rooted suspicion of any man. woman, or child who might show some physical difference. The Zerques had preached for a century or more that a person born with a caul, more or less than ten fingers or toes, or—Shar forbid—ill-matched eyes must be a member of the devil’s clan.

Magnus might have officially dismantled the power of the Zerque Order, but he could not control the minds and hearts of his people. He knew that some in his realm still used the odd warding against sorcery, or wore specific colors on certain days, and whilst these seemed little more than harmless superstitions he also knew how easily they could develop into full-blown fear, a baying for blood. He hoped that any genuine sentient—if there was such a person—would have the wisdom to keep his or her practices secret.

No such chance for young Myrren—witch or not, her case was now very much public. Magnus did not personally believe the girl was guilty of the charges, but only privately scorned those who did. No matter his own opinion, the law—his law—provided for Myrren’s trial. And Morgravian justice was not renowned for its mercy where a guilty verdict of devil craft was handed down. Worse, he knew what lewd enjoyment some would derive from seeing her tortured and debased—not least of all Lord Rokan—and there was nothing he could do to stop it now.

Rokan’s evidence was persuasive and the law was. sadly, on his side. When Lord Rokan had called for a private audience with the King and had seemed utterly determined to have this woman brought to trial.

Magnus had felt his hands were tied. Odd-colored eyes were the single most damning characteristic a person living in Morgravia could possess. The girl was doomed by the peculiarity of her features. He felt sorry for her but the time to save her had passed. At the point when Magnus could have intervened, he

?

had instead been distracted by anger toward his son. Celimus’s irresponsible behavior was drawing far too much attention and the boy was still only sixteen. Shar help them when he was of an age where his father’s height and wrath could no longer cow him. But mostly Magnus had been feeling an uncontrollable rage at the dark news from his physic that his days were numbered. Magnus was fearful it would not be sufficient time to mold Celimus into a responsible heir to the throne, to create a true King from the ruin of his marriage.

His anger was fully stoked by the time Lord Rokan kept his appointment and strode in to formally demand the young woman’s death. Celimus had not excused himself either, which would have been the polite choice under the circumstances. Instead he had hung on Rokan’s every word, his sly smile creeping wider across his face. He even had the audacity to join the conversation and this was the taper that lit the dry straw on his father’s smoldering mood.

“Go ahead, Father,” he had jeered. “A witch trial would deflect attention from the Crown’s wayward heir and give them something to really talk about.” The mocking smile challenged the King.

Magnus knew his son was a young man without love and all his parents had given him, it seemed, was the capacity to be cruel and self-centered. With his impending death, the King of Morgravia realized if he had been a better father, a more affectionate and loving one—even just a father who had been more accessible and keen to exert his influence during the child’s early years—it might have made a difference.

Instead what stood before him was a clever, avaricious individual who was. to all intents, heartless. A frightening combination for the person who would sit on Morgravia’s throne. Today’s indiscretion had been the latest in a long line of acts that made his father despair of him, hate him even.

Rokan had continued to bluster through his troubled thoughts and Celimus had egged him on. In a fit of pique. Magnus agreed, if only to get both detestable men out of his chamber. Had he any inkling that he would reign, without succumbing to his illness, for another six years, he might never have let Myrren of Baelup suffer.

Chapter 3

Celimus was frustrated. He paced the courtyard angrily awaiting a page he had sent off to find Wyl Thirsk. The Prince enjoyed belittling Wyl but the orange-haired troll was not giving him the sort of smug satisfaction he wanted. He would be King one day and he wanted to see this one in particular cringing early to him. Wyl was Fergys Thirsk’s son after all and Celimus had despised Fergys since he was old enough to measure the bond between his father and his General. Perhaps without the famous soldier in the King’s life, his father might have paid more attention to his sole heir.

Now all Celimus had to offer his King was contempt.

The major rift had come when his mother died twelve years previous. Whispers around the court had hinted that perhaps her death was not quite the accident it had seemed at first. Try though his caretakers might, they could not protect the sharp, highly intelligent four-year-old from absorbing the enormity of what was being gossiped about. If he valued his father’s praise, he worshiped his mother ten times as much. Although he had sensed her cool detachment from Morgravian society and its people—especially his father—Celimus also grasped that this aloofness did not extend to him. Celimus she loved with intensity. He was every bit her child. While his father was golden in looks, the son had her dark, exotic glamor. Olive skin and black lustrous hair meant Celimus was Adana all over again. She granted him his height was no doubt inherited from the King but that was all. Men should be tall, she had argued. For sovereigns she felt it was a prerequisite. She had no doubt that Celimus would be an imposing man in years to come—he was already an arresting child to look at. And with it came a bright and agile mind that she adored. Adana made good use of those early years, manipulating her son’s thoughts, trying to poison him against his father—
the peasant
, she called him—but not to much avail. It remained a failure of hers. The infant Celimus craved the attention of Magnus but she was relieved to note the King had neither time nor inclination to level much interest toward the boy. She hated the red-headed General even more and used his presence as a weapon to turn Celimus against the King.

“He loves that Thirsk fellow more than us, child. See how they bend their heads together. Plotting.

Always conniving.”

Celimus had not understood the grown-up words then but he had grasped her meaning. She accused Thirsk of constantly filling his own coffers at the King’s expense; she laughed hard at the shy and reticent creature Thirsk had finally married. “Peasant for peasant!” she had spat at Celimus one day. Although he had thought Helyna Thirsk quite pretty, he was only a few years old, and so believed his mother must surely be right. And when she had finally seen the Thirsks’ first child, Adana had attacked the infant’s red hair, claiming it was the sign of a warlock. Magnus had overheard her snide comment and his reaction was the closest Celimus believed his father had come to striking his mother. His parents had hardly spoken after that. They had never behaved as a family might—eating together or playing together.

Magnus was absent as a father, preferring his war rooms, his soldiers, the hunt, and other manly pursuits.

But despite his caretakers striving to assure the boy that his majesty had little time for anything but running his realm, Celimus knew his father avoided him. He watched other nobles making time for simple pleasures with their families and his mother’s words rang true: his own father disliked him, hated them both in fact, and deliberately chose to evade all contact with his wife and his son.

It hurt. And Adana made it her business to prey on her small son’s pain and turn it into her own weapon.

Her machinations worked. The young Celimus hardened his thoughts; the changes were initially subtle—he no longer asked whether he might see his father before going to bed or whether the King might care to take a ride with him sometime soon. Then they became more apparent. One one occasion.

Magnus had sent a message that he would be joining them for supper. Celimus was absent, claiming a stomach upset, but Adana knew better and she rejoiced in his shunning of the King.

It was after the aggressive incident between his parents that Celimus felt compelled—and that he had right on his side—to openly reject his father. Watching the tall man’s anger stoke so fast had frightened him. His mother had fallen to the floor as if struck, though he knew his father had pulled the blow just in time. She had shrieked and writhed on the flagstones of that courtyard before rising to cast a final cold slur at the man she despised.

Celimus remembered it well.

“I would rather die than have you touch me again, you pig!” And the chilling, prophetic reply. “Perhaps that can be arranged,” his father had said, just as coldly.

Celimus had not been the only one in earshot of the harsh exchange and so when the hunting accident occurred not long after, it was a small leap for many who had heard the gossip. Anyone who knew Magnus would refute the claim fiercely. Anyone who knew him well enough would know the man was more than capable of such a thing. Whether he had killed his wife or whether it was an accident remained a tantalizing mystery to Celimus. It was a matter never discussed and over the years it had become a buried issue, as cold as the tomb that enclosed its victim.

Celimus never forgot it. however. It festered in his heart to become a dark ball of hate he vowed to one day hurl at the pig who sired him. He had heard his father openly threaten Adana and from the day of her death he had privately sworn to make his father pay. As a child there was little more he could do than remove all contact and pretense at affection, even in public, from the King as best he could. Drawing on memories of his mother, he became utterly cold and detached from Magnus, who. by the same token and at the urgings of Fergys, had begun an all-out effort to bring his son closer. But it was too late.

Too late for the father to give love. Too late for the child to want it let alone welcome it. In a youngster’s warped way Celimus had linked the always present Fergys Thirsk with wanting Adana dead and maturing had not eased the young Prince’s attitude toward his father’s closest friend. When the news of Thirsk’s passing had begun to filter through Stoneheart. Celimus had rejoiced at the old General’s death.

He had hoped it would drive a stake of pain so hard into his father’s heart that he might die of the agony and loneliness. But now he was having to deal with the hated seed of Thirsk’s loins.

And the son appeared to have the same qualities that the father had showed before him.

Now was a chance to stick another stake into his father’s side. Oh, he knew how his father loved Wyl.

Did Magnus think him a fool? Did he not think it was writ all over his peasant face everytime he encountered the flame-haired troll? It mattered not to Celimus that he did not chase his father’s affection but he would be damned if he’d allow the old man to love anyone.
You don ‘t deserve it,
he had often raged silently at his father whenever he saw the pair of them together.
I will not permit you that
pleasure, that sense of warmth in your last years. You denied it to me and then you destroyed the
only person who ever loved me. I shall do the same to you by destroying Wyl Thirsk whom you
fawn over,
he promised himself, smiling slyly toward the aging monarch.

Celimus had deliberately never given the Thirsk lad a chance. From the moment of Wyl’s arrival at Stoneheart, Celimus had set about a campaign of destruction, his intention to break Wyl’s spirit and send him running home to Argorn. But so far the lad’s keen desire to follow in his father’s footsteps was giving him sufficient grit to withstand Celimus’s cruel schemings. He did not care for the defiance that burned in Wyl’s gaze either, that remained even when he was seemingly paying homage.

“I’d like to poke your eyes out Wyl, and wipe that disloyal gaze from your ugly halfwit’s face,” he said to himself. “One day I might just do that. Destroy your eyes, destroy you, destroy the pretty, spoiled Ylena…” he trailed off as he heard the bells again.

He smiled savagely at what the sound prompted in his mind. The Prince had heard the change in the bells a day or so ago. Discreet inquiries had told him this afternoon was the right time to strike. He had only his mother’s reports to go on of how brutal the torture of a witch could be. He reveled in the thought that he would finally witness the brutality she had hinted toward when he was a boy. Persuaded by his bigoted mother, he held the view7 that those who appeared to wield magic—not that he believed in it—should be hunted down and executed. In truth Celimus cared nothing for witches or warlocks. Their kind had never impacted on his life and his generation had no belief in such folk, yet the idea of wringing confessions using methods of torture from supposedly empowered people did interest him. It interested him in the same way it fascinated him to hear the screams when he bullied and hurt defenseless creatures such as the palace dogs and cats. As a youngster he had enjoyed listening to their pitiful cries for release from his ministrations. He wondered if anyone knew how many corpses he had secretly buried, mostly in the midden heaps around Stoneheart.

He would have to sneak into the dungeon today, of course, but he was counting on no one having the courage to ask a royal Prince to leave—not now that he was a man and tall enough to look down on most. No, he would have a fine afternoon’s entertainment, not the least of which was dragging thirteen-year-old Thirsk through what he hoped would be a shattering experience that would show up the General for the cringing child he surely was.

“I’ll bring you down. Wyl Thirsk. I shall crush you like overripe fruit and then I will poison your family name. And when I’m King,” he muttered to himself, unaware that his words were becoming loud enough for others to hear, “I shall end the reign of the Thirsk ingrates as generals by—” His rantings were interrupted by the arrival of the breathless page.