Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles (14 page)

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Authors: Katya Reimann

BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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But he still had the strength to hate. “Of course you can outrun me,” he said. “The very corpses of the ground rise to renew you.”
“Insult me as you like,” she sneered in answer, feline cruel. He still had not intuited her connection to Aneitha, did not suspect why the great cat lay sleeping on the grass, while she feinted and dodged before him with graceful animal power. “It is not Tamsanne’s heirs whom the earth here has rejected.”
“It was one question only,” the old man said hoarsely. “Fergaunt and Jerry did not deserve to lose their grounding for that. The answer revealed her sin—no transgression of mine.”
Gaultry stared, puzzled. Her grandmother was not a vengeful woman. Snapping a man’s ancient link with his ancestral past, destroying that link for even his sons after him … What secret could Tamsanne have possessed that could have been so important? Her puzzlement swung her into the old man’s trap. “What did you learn?”
A look of ugly triumph lit the old man’s face. “Your grandfather was a dead man when Tamsanne used him to get with child.” Which fact, if true, would mean that Gaultry and Mervion’s mother was necromantic spawn, and unclean.
In the shock of her surprise, Gaultry lost control of the panther. The next instant was a blur. With Aneitha in full control, she felt her body lunging over the altar, one heel slipping and spattering ancient blood. Then the old man was beneath her, and her fingers and teeth were on his throat.
Without intervention, she would certainly have killed him. The old man gasped beneath her, half-strangled and already in pain at his loss of breath. Thankfully, intervention came, in the form of a pair of massive hands which grabbed her by the shoulders and peeled her away. Still kicking and struggling, she was hoisted up in the air.
Victor Haute-Tielmark, expressionless, held her until she regained
control. “Are you all right?” he asked, concerned, as she slowly stopped fighting him.
She lashed Aneitha’s spirit in place with angry bolts of power.
Enough!
she told it.
Try that again and you will regret it
. “No,” she panted aloud. “I’m not all right.”
The old man was flat on his back before her, his face patchy white and pink with his fear, yet full of his ugly triumph. Gaultry stared at him, defeated. He had vented his poison, there was nothing that could roll the foul knowledge back. Her own grandfather could not have been a dead man. Such a thing was not possible. If it was—Tamsanne would not have, could not have—“Kill him, Eliante!” Tears ran freely down her cheeks. “Send him down to Achavell!” She wished it were in her to stab out and kill the man. But the Duke had cut short Aneitha’s attempt to vent that murderous rage, and now it was too late.
Haute-Tielmark, looking down at the old man’s trembling and pathetic body, shook his head. “Whatever he said to you, death cannot be the punishment. You’ll have to settle for the knowledge that you held his life in your hands—and let it go.”
“You stopped me!” she spat.
The big duke released her shoulders. “Go ahead,” he said.
Gaultry stared down at the old man, hating him. What he had said about her grandmother could not be true! Yet even as her mind cried denial, doubts assailed her.
Gaultry had never known her mother, Tamsanne’s daughter. Severine had died in childbirth, birthing prophecy as she had borne her magical twins, Gaultry and Mervion.
Your grandfather was a dead man.
No, it was not possible that Severine’s father had been a corpse. Of course, Glamour-power such as she and her sister possessed was not possible either—not in this age. It was the magic of the heroes and war-leaders of the distant past—not of the living.
Your
grandfather was a dead man
. Her grandmother’s magic was powerfully of the earth. Oh, she could not believe that Tamsanne would commit an act so unclean—yet could this be the source of Severine’s powers? And through Severine, of Gaultry’s?
Breaking free of this inward spiral, she gave the Duke an angry glare. “You know I cannot do it now.”
He shrugged. “That is what makes it a choice.”
The Duke had arrived at the barrow-ground accompanied by a pair of embarrassed-looking soldiers, one the sentry who had guarded her door.
They stood over Aneitha’s prone body, prodding curiously at the creature to spare themselves from watching the scene before them.
Gaultry felt the prods like cudgels against her own back. “Leave her alone!” she snapped. She would have to consider the fears the old man had raised in her later. “Goddess-Twins, what do you think you’re doing?”
It was past time for Aneitha to make herself scarce. Twisting in the big duke’s grip, Gaultry spread her hands and opened a channel, flinging the big cat’s spirit outward. It twisted back toward her with surprising determination, unready to return to its own body. She slapped it roughly with a flash of magic.
What, are you having too much fun?
she berated it.
Get out of here! Take back your body and make yourself scarce.
Across the green, the soldiers drew back as the panther rose, a quiver running along its tawny body as its spirit resettled within. “Get out of here,” Gaultry shrieked aloud. The cat’s eyes met Gaultry’s with a brief, inscrutable flicker. With a disdainful twitch of its tail, it turned, made for the hedge-gap beyond the pit, and vanished.
Sieur Jumery stared after it, transfixed. “The panther—it was in her. She was using its power … .”
Haute-Tielmark cleared his throat. “Well, Sieur, you have learned this morning what you ought to have known before time: Gaultry Blas is not a woman to be dealt with lightly.” He gestured to his soldiers. “Rolf, Piers. Escort the good justice to the house. I do not think he can walk alone.”
Sieur Jumery opened his lips in protest, but no words issued forth. After a moment, one of the young soldiers reached out a solicitous hand and helped the old man to his feet. He supported Sieur Jumery as the old man shook out his robes, then dusted the grass off his back. The other soldier fetched the pitted sword from where Sieur Jumery had dropped it on the turf. Thrusting it naked into his own belt, he offered the old man his elbow.
“Your Grace.” The old man turned back to where Haute-Tielmark stood, holding Gaultry’s elbow. “I will expect an accounting in this matter.” His voice was very weak.
Haute-Tielmark nodded solemnly. “You will have it, Sieur.” He and Gaultry watched the soldiers walk Sieur Jumery around the fallen pit and out through the hedge. “Whether you’ll have satisfaction of it is another matter altogether,” he muttered, out of the old man’s earshot.
“He has nursed a great evil for many years,” Gaultry said, still feeling revolted. “Now maybe he feels he’s purged it.” The Duke was holding her
painfully tightly, as though she might yet reconsider her decision not to attack. “You can let go,” she told him.
Haute-Tielmark released her. “He is a very old man, and he was raised in different times. He doesn’t know where to direct his hate.”
She looked at the altar. The bleached stone looked clean as ever, the dark basin of blood undisturbed. Yet when she looked down at her boot, the leather was blood-soaked where her foot had gone into the basin. She shuddered. That blood, periodically intermingled with new sacrifice and renewed, had stood beneath the sky for more than a thousand years, whispering the land’s secrets to the family that had been tied to it.
She would have to get new boots and burn the old.
She shivered, and stared up at the Duke. “I feel ill.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Should I try to mend the Ingoleurs’ broken land-tie?”
The Duke shook his head, his expression grave above the golden beard. He sketched the Goddess-Twins’ sign. “That’s the old man’s burden, not yours. This is not your land.”
She saw then that he understood something of what had transpired. “But it was my grandmother who broke the blood-link—”
He shook his head again, more vehemently. “I’ve no doubt Tamsanne had the power to do so. But she could not have accomplished it here on his own land if the ground itself had not conspired to break with him.”
“You don’t know Tamsanne,” Gaultry said. “Even if the land had screamed in protest, she could have done it.”
“Perhaps.” She read in the Duke’s eyes that he did not agree.
“What makes you think the land turned against him?”
“Perhaps he asked for knowledge that threatened the land. This must have been just before the close of the last cycle of rule,” the Duke reminded her. “Lousielle was Princess, but Bissanty-backed courtiers ruled Tielmark. Even the loyalty of a man with an ancient bond to Tielmaran soil could have been set to doubt.”
“Someone set him to discover my grandmother’s secrets,” Gaultry admitted. “He as much as told me so—or at least did not deny it.”
“And now he’s shared Tamsanne’s secrets with you. Was there something in them that might threaten Tielmark’s freedom?”
“I don’t think so.” Doubt curdled through her.
Tainted
, Sieur Jumery had called her. “But who could have the power to make a man like Sieur Jumery seek such things?”
“His liege lord could have commanded him.” The Duke frowned.
“Fifty years back that would have been Roger Climens of Vaux-Torres. Or perhaps his father. It was before my time. Not that the Climenses have ever been particularly zealous in their loyalties, their current duchess included.” He looked at Gaultry. “Did you not wonder why I came to you so fast last night when I discovered where you were lodged, and the strange circumstances that had brought you there?”
“I noticed you had hurried.” The Duke still wore the tunic with the torn embroidery he had arrived in the night before. He had not, it seemed, even paused to have his servants pack an extra shirt.
“Sieur Jumery owes allegiance to Argat Climens—old Roger’s granddaughter. The Dukes of Vaux-Torres have always been slippery in their promises to Tielmark’s Prince. Argat Climens has taken at least one Bissanty lover. I couldn’t leave you in the house of one of Vaux-Torres’s knights unprotected—with good cause, it would seem, though Sieur Jumery’s personal animus here was not quite what I expected.”
Gaultry looked again at the basin. “Do you really think that what he learned of Tamsanne threatened Tielmark?” A thousand-year link, a thousand years of ancestry cast adrift. She shivered.
Your grandfather was a dead man
. Could those words be a lie?
Would Tamsanne have severed an ancient ancestral link merely to punish a lie?
“I don’t know,” the Duke said. “But anything concerning a member of the Common Brood could also concern Tielmark.”
“I want to go back to the house,” she said, shivering. “I can’t bear to be in this place another moment.”
“I would speak with you of another matter first.”
“What more could you want of me?” she spat.
The Duke did not immediately answer. She thought it was because she had spoken rudely. Flushing, she forced out prettier words. “Your Grace, as you are at my Prince’s service, so am I.”
He smiled. A surprisingly gentle smile, showing his crooked teeth. “You are only two years older than my son Hoy.” He seemed a little amused. “Sometimes I forget.”
“I am no child,” she protested.
“Neither is my Hoy.” The Duke vented a fond snort. “But he is still young enough to be unsure of his powers. Of course, there are many, even among those granted the highest powers, who refuse to learn their duties. It is of that which what we must speak.”
As he spoke, he opened his hand. An ornamental piece of silver lay
on his palm. It looked like a ring, but the large hammered flower at its front would make it impractical to wear on one’s finger for any duration. “What is it?” she asked.
“It’s a gift.” Taking her hand, he closed her fingers around it. “A gift to keep private to yourself.”
Gaultry pulled away and opened her hand, examining the object more closely. There was a pin-sized insertion hole in one side of the hammered flower, as though the ring was intended to be display-mounted. More curiously still, a sliding prong had been constructed within the ring-band, designed to press outward and prick its wearer when the display-pin was pushed into the insertion hole.
“I believe that it is a sort of key,” the Duke told her. “I found it in Chancellor Heiratikus’s private chambers.”
“How is that possible?” she asked. “The Chancellor’s chambers were cleared immediately following the Prince’s marriage, and you did not arrive in Princeport for another week. There would have been nothing left.”
The Duke sighed. “This goes back to the lunacy of my old politics. I was close enough to Heiratikus to know where he kept his private hiding-hole. But believe me, by the time I reached Princeport I had come to peace with the fact that I’d allowed myself to be blinded, almost to the end of treason. It pleased me very little to know that Benet bore me no trust—and that I’d earned his suspicion. It was the Goddess-Twins’ own mercy that I even got the chance to abase myself before him.”
Though Gaultry had been at the Prince’s palace at the time, she had not been privy to the particulars of Haute-Tielmark’s interview with Benet, except for knowing that the outcome, against the expectations of court, had been in his favor. Despite colluding with Heiratikus, Victor Clement had not only been reinstated to power, he had held on to everything in Haute-Tielmark. “So what did you do then?” she asked, unwillingly curious.

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