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BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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The prayer peaked. Martin rose from his knees and walked swiftly forward, bearing the reliquary pot.
Behind him, Gaultry hesitated at the brink. What fueled the magic here? A power in Martin, long dormant, now loosened? The death-strength of his grandmother? Something Dervla had ceremonially invested in the vessel’s ash? Martin had appealed to the land’s old god—Allegrios, who ruled the coast before the Goddess-Twins, before Mother Llara, before the Bissanty had swept south to rule. She accepted the ancient trinity of Llara, Andion, and Allegrios—the oldest gods, the sky, earth, and sea come together to form the world at time’s dawning. But she had not thought to see some aspect of this triad’s power vested through Martin.
Martin had reached the stone. He scraped the seaweed aside, searching for a place to leave the pot. As she watched, he found a cranny and wedged it in with a handful of seaweed.
Then he turned to her, still singing, and opened wide his arms.
She stared at the sandy path, at the turquoise waves beaten back to
either side, unnerved. Holding her gaze in his own, he began to walk back toward her.
She saw the predator’s strength in him then, the strong ripple of his arms, his body. She saw the wolf’s eyes, measuring her, assessing her fear. Ash from the crematorium foundations still streaked his face, emphasizing the high hard bones of his cheeks. She saw the danger in him, the death that stalked him, the turbulence of war that threatened his life.
And she saw also the desire that ran all through him, the strength he yearned to share. Within the body of the warrior, she saw the vulnerable fire of his love.
“Gaultry,” he said, incorporating her name into his song, calling her.
“Martin!” His name escaped her in broken return as she ran to meet him. His prayer ended against her mouth as his arms enfolded her.
The sea path held for only a heartbeat longer. Gaultry had a crazy final glimpse over Martin’s shoulder of the rock where he had buried his grandmother’s ashes, and then the sea reclaimed it. The waves crashed in from either side, closing in up to Martin’s shoulders. Martin snatched her off her feet, safeguarding her from a ducking.
The surge of the water was not rough, as Gaultry had imagmed. They were out in the water beyond the turbulence of the surf. As Martin had promised, the water was warm, luxuriously so. She felt weightless, buoyant, the wash of warm water caressing her clothes against her skin. He cradled her body against his own, holding her head clear above the water. Her legs clasped naturally around his hips, helping him to hold her up, and, clutching him to her, she pressed her mouth against his hair.
“I love you,” she whispered. Despite the brine, the rain was falling hard enough to keep the water sweet in her mouth. “Even without all the power of the sea in you.”
“And I you,” he answered solemnly. “From here forward, our separations will only be temporary.”
T
hey remained in the water a long time together, lost in the motion of the waves. When they finally left the water and went back up into the cemetery to collect their rain-soaked outer garments and their boots, it was Martin, not Gaultry, who was overcome with shyness at the audacity of their act. However chaste, it had not been innocent.
“I want to make you a more substantial pledge,” he said. “Before I ride today, I will petition Benet to allow me to send word to Helena.”
Gaultry, lacing the front of her tunic, stilled. When it came to his wife, Helena, there was only one matter on which Martin would be petitioning the Prince. A request for the dissolution of marriage.
“Now?” she asked.
“There will be obstacles,” he admitted reluctantly. “Even if Benet agrees, he will have to petition Dervla as High Priestess for approval. Benet I think I can sway to my side. Dervla—that’s another matter entirely.”
Separation between peers of the realm—and Martin’s wife held his father’s old title—was a serious business. For Martin to legally separate from Helena—the woman with whom he had not shared a household for more than a decade—he would have to enter a complaint against her conduct. Gaultry could think of only one complaint he could offer: the illegitimacy of his putative son. Young Martin Montgarret, the boy Martin had left in place as his heir when he had separated from Helena and renounced his rights to the family name, title, and property. “Are you sure?” she asked. “In Arleon Forest, common law would legitimize any commitment you and I agreed to follow.”
Martin shook his head. “I owe you more.”
She would have laughed—debt was not the description she would have used for her feelings—but it was clear from his expression that he would not welcome levity. “You and I own no titles or land,” she reminded him gently. “Helena’s son—you have allowed him to grow to the threshold of manhood with expectations. After all this time, it would be cruel to destroy his hopes—unless reclaiming the lands of Seafrieg is your real intention here.”
“This is not about property,” Martin said stubbornly. “When I married Helena, I made a pledge before the gods. Until I am released from that, she will continue to have a claim on me.”
“Certain ties must be acknowledged,” Gaultry said. “On your honor, I would not have it otherwise. But a public dissolution of a peer’s marriage? That is a matter of property, not of love.”
“Women like Helena are supported through great accumulation of property.” Martin could not meet her gaze. “Allegrios mine, the matter is more complex even than I have told you. I would have mentioned this long before, but there was neither time nor place. My sister has threatened to challenge Helena for the title and all of Seafrieg’s holdings. Mariette told Grandmère she could no longer sit idly by, leaving Seafrieg unrighteously
in Helena’s hands. If I did not want Seafrieg—she feels it should be hers.”
“She has a point.”
Martin sighed. “Mariette was not even ten years old when Helena and I separated, and Morse was yet living. In my own pain, I did not foresee the time when she might have a serious claim to the title.”
“And if Mariette successfully challenges young Martin’s legitimacy before you divorce Helena, she and her son will be left with nothing. You don’t want that.” Disappointed, Gaultry, her outer clothes in place, picked up her cloak and wrapped it tightly around her body. “Weren’t you just saying dissolution of the marriage was something you owed me?”
“What would you have me do, Gaultry?” Martin’s tone echoed her own frustrations. “Allegrios mine! This was the past. My heart was caged and wounded. I did not know then that it could ever heal, ever come bursting free.”
Gaultry shook her head. “I love you, Martin, and I will not live to see that fire dampened. But better I had loved a simple forest man, and not be confused by property matters that lie beyond my interest.”
Martin reached for her and took her in a hard, enveloping hug. “It feels almost insane to be thinking of such things,” he admitted. “In scant hours, I will ride with my Prince for the battlefield. This time, I can feel the doom that hangs over me: The Brood-prophecy will dog me at every step. With every engagement, I will be thinking ‘Here is the moment I will spill my blood, like so many members of my family before me.’ Yet the stakes here are higher than my single life, so I must go.”
Though he spoke calmly, there was hidden tension in him. “Gaultry,” he said. “The tide of battle has swept me up. But you will be here, and there is much you can do. Uncover the secret that will paint Benet’s path with the red that is not Brood-blood. That is all that can save you—can save us—from the prophecy. Uncover the Kingship secret. Gaultry—I’m depending on you.”
“You mustn’t go,” Gaultry said sharply, the sudden clear horror of Martin’s danger washing through her. “Remind Benet of the risks. Does he want more of the Brood-kin killed? Tell him you can’t go.”
“And leave Mariette to face the red path’s dangers without me? As Grandmère’s military commander, she had no choice but to remain at the front. Should I leave her there to support Benet alone?”
Gaultry clenched him in a tight embrace, burying her face in the
front of his tunic. But the cloth was swiftly dampening from the wet shirt beneath, and there was little comfort to be found there.
“I will get the Brood to parley,” she said, her resolve hardening as she spoke the words. “Elianté and Emiera in me, I will get them to parley. Dervla and Tamsanne and Julie. Marie Laconte’s heir too. Everyone. We will know what it will take to make Benet King before the ripening of the new moon—this I pledge. Then I’ll ride out to you—to Benet—to meet you with the answer.”
“That’s a dangerous oath.” Martin pressed his cheek against the top of her head. “But it may well be all that makes the sacrifice of our own lives a worthwhile cause.”
“I will not lose my life in this,” Gaultry vowed. “Neither my life, nor yours. And Benet will be King, and the Brood-prophecy will be complete.”
“The power is in you to make your oaths come true.” Martin brushed a strand of her wet hair from her face. “But the gods are cruel. They may even give you what you think you want.”
Clasped in the circle of his arms, Gaultry shivered. Martin was right. Despite her brave words, she doubted there would be an easy release for any of the Brood. The gods, having granted great power, would see a price exacted in return.
“If life and honor were the same, the gods would have less power,” she said.
Martin, releasing her, stooped to retrieve his cousin’s funerary vessel from its temporary resting place by the stone. “And men greater. From what I’ve seen, that would improve nothing.”
They held each other in a mutual gaze, Gaultry drinking in the mental and physical longing for rest that already lined his face. It would be weeks, if not months, before they saw one another again. Unwilling tears pressed at her eyes. She choked them back. She did not want to cry, did not want to make this parting more difficult than it was already.
A gull, calling from the sea, broke the moment.
They began the long trek back up the slope to the palace.
After Gaultry’s intense experience of the cremation and her time
with Martin, the Duchess’s funeral felt anticlimactic. The actual ceremony, attended only by the Princess, Gaultry, one of Melaudiere’s aides, and representatives of the other six ducal houses, was conducted in the chapel below the palace’s main temple. It was a low, unpleasantly cryptlike room. Arranging the witnesses in a circle around the stone altar took longer than the actual interment ceremony.
Speechifying from the temple steps followed, in which Gaultry played no active role. The lawn was crowded with mourners from both palace and city. In consideration to the rain, Dervla, Melaudiere’s personal priest, and the other speakers kept their commentary brief. Even with brevity, the odd combination of eulogy, legal jargon, and land law made much of the content impenetrable.
To Gaultry, standing on the temple steps and looking out across the turreted landscape of the palace, it seemed that the Prince’s court had passed momentarily into another world, a darker, greyer world, where peoples’ faces were closed and sad regardless of whether or not they were in true mourning. On the battlements that faced the city, the normally gay flutter of the flags and banners of the noble houses, regiments, and services had been suppressed. Today Melaudiere’s flag flew alone beside the Prince’s, the former with a mourning pennant raised on the flagpole above it. For the first time, Gaultry saw plainly the impact the Prince’s edicts could have on those around him: Before mounting up and riding west, Benet had declared for three days of mourning, and his court, given
a direct command, had made a zealous response. The results were at once heartening for their display of unity and depressing for the atmosphere they created of a world plagued by loss.
The Duchess had made generous provision for memorial banquets. As the speeches ended, the crowd dispersed dutifully to the palace refectories. Gaultry, as befitted Melaudiere’s representative and a member of the Common Brood, had a place in the Princess’s inner dining chamber. Being allowed one guest, she had chosen the Sharif, who, on Benet’s personal order, would be sailing the next day with the morning tide.
The Sharif saluted her somberly in the quiet of the corridor outside the beautifully painted doors of the dining chamber. The tall Ardana owned no mourning clothes in the Tielmaran style, but the Prince had afforded her coin to clothe herself in the manner of her native land, and she appeared wearing flowing dun-colored robes that fastened at the shoulders and left her arms bare. A brazen amulet formed like a rising sun was pinned to the front of her robes, centered on her chest. In acknowledgment of the official mourning, she wore a meticulously pleated scarf of black cloth draped loosely across her throat and back over her shoulders.
How did it go?
she asked.
Fine
, Gaultry replied.
Though I spent more time staring at the altar-brazier than anything else. Dervla hardly pretended she was interested—she just wanted the ashes interred and the ceremony done with
. That was harsh, she thought, but fair. The High Priestess’s thoughts had seemed far away throughout.
This should be interesting
, Gaultry added, as the Princess’s pregnant lady-in-waiting, the rabbity Duchess of Ranault, pushed past them.
Ourselves aside, this crowd marks those who will form the Princess’s inner court in Benet’s absence—friends and those whom she must acknowledge together.
You are in that circle.
Gaultry shrugged, knowing the Sharif was right, but uncomfortable with the distinction. Her status could only do her harm if she did not soon find some way to satisfy the Brood,pledge. But she did not want to voice this to the Sharif.
It was good of you to agree to come, she said. You have much to accomplish before tomorrow’s sailing.
Almost the entire day, as Gaultry had stood witness to the Duchess’s cremation, the Sharif had worked with the Prince’s sewermen—Tullier at her side to translate for her—obtaining the knowledge of water pumps and valves that she intended to bring with her to her water-poor desert home.
Or at least that was how she had filled those hours in which she had not been closeted in private conference with the Prince. The desert
woman’s unanticipated effect upon Benet had seeded turmoil in the palace corridors, as the Prince had sent his calendar-man scurrying from the room with fresh orders and thrown his military outfitters into upheaval with the declaration of his imminent departure. Gaultry was glad her day of mourning had spared her from that.
I am glad for this final chance to observe your Prince’s chieftains and their clans, the Sharif told her. Ardain is a land that has not seen a month of peace the course of my entire life, nor neither the life of my mother before. To see how those who do not live constantly in war comport themselves—this is a matter of interest to my people as well as myself.
She paused, and there was a flicker of humor in her eyes.
Almost as important as your valves and pumps.
Peace was a relative term, Gaultry found herself thinking, as a footman approached and ushered them onward.
The inner dining chamber was a narrow, white-washed room with windows along one of its long walls to its own private court and terrace. The wall behind the head of the table was decorated with a tapestry depicting one of Tielmark’s lady Princes, possibly Corinne, eating a feast in a fruiting orchard, a man in a humble farmer’s smock, obviously intended for her consort, accompanying her. The room had a musician’s alcove as well, curtained today with brocade drapes. Gaultry and the Sharif were among the last arrivals.
Princess Lily had already taken her place at the head of the magnificent walnut table, the top of which was hewn from the trunk of a single tree, heartwood included. The fiery color of the table’s surface, the dazzling meal laid before her, and the bright tapestry at her back made the already diminutive woman seem smaller still, and without inner luster. Her pretty features looked tired. She fiddled disconsolately with her marriage ring as she waited for her guests to take their places.
Gaultry hoped she was doing a better job at concealing her loneliness for Martin than Lily was managing for Benet.
In Benet’s absence, the Princess wore a silver tiara, a formal reminder of her authority as Tielmark’s ruler in his place. The Duchess of Ranault, seated to Lily’s left where she could best be attentive, kept jumping up and touching at the Princess’s hair, as though nervous that the little bridge of silver would slip. Whether the Princess found Ranault’s attentions irritating or an assurance was not obvious from her expression.
The room hummed with respectfully quiet talk. All members of the ducal families in residence at the palace were making an appearance. Judging from their dry silks, the rain had deterred them from the lawn
outside of the temple. These peers were a mixed group of elderly relatives, ducal spouses and their young children. The dukes themselves, save for the disgraced Argat Climens, were all away at the front.
Adele Chevrier, the crippled daughter of Michael of Arleon, who held the ducal border lands where Gaultry had been born, was one of the few faces that Gaultry could identify—and Adele she recognized only by her cripple’s chair and attendants. Back in Arleon Forest, these were folk she had barely known existed, except by their heraldic signatures: crosses and garlands and brightly colored animals. She wondered what the Sharif made of them. Except for Adele, they were a handsome, hard-looking lot, very much a healthier breed than the effete nobles Gaultry had been exposed to in Bissanty.
Sitting amongst them, the young Princess’s slim figure appeared even tinier. Lily’s folk, fishermen from Princeport’s harbor, were not a people bred for the rigors of war fought astride large horses urged forward in bodycrushing charges.
Around the room servitors were chivying guests so the meal could begin. Gaultry and the Sharif had been accorded seats at the walnut table, two out of twenty-four places, each with its own plate and table setting as well as an individual chair rather than the more customary trestle bench. Many more than twenty-four crowded the room. Those guests who had not been assigned seats were expected to help themselves from the sideboards.
Inner circle of the inner circle,
the Sharif commented dryly, running her fingers along the polished wood of her chair-arm.
For today at least.
Gaultry shrugged.
By the accident of timing that makes me old Melaudiere’s chief mourner.
Converging forces of influence had determined both guest list and guest placement. The land’s highest peers and ministers were complemented by the Duchess’s close personal servants and friends, along with a scattering of the Brood-blood. At the table, the traditional landed hierarchy dominated. Ducal kin and a few highborn ministers with whom Gaultry was passingly familiar crowded the seats closest to the Princess. Dervla, in her place as High Priestess, had a seat at the Princess’s left hand. She was the only Brood-member seated above the nobles.
Lower down the table, the hierarchical allocations became less obvious as Brood-blood mixed with members of Melaudiere’s household. Tamsanne and Dame Julie sat across from each other on opposite sides of the table, their venerable stature fitting them to mark the invisible
border between titled blood and the rest. Tamsanne, wearing an ancient black dress—like all the old woman’s clothes, well used and carefully greased at the seams to repel further wear—looked like a visitation from another realm. She circled the golden rim of her place setting with one wrinkled, work-thickened finger, face down-bent, focused. The dignity of her comportment just barely rendered this tic a mysterious, meditative gesture rather than bad manners. Gaultry had not crossed paths with Tamsanne since their brief meeting the night before Melaudiere’s death. She wondered what Mervion had told her about the attack on Tullier—and the Prince—in Martin’s townhouse, and their own argument after it.
To her great relief Mervion was seated below her grandmother on the far side of the table, in a seat between Palamar Laconte and a sweetfaced blond woman. The old duchess at least had ranked Mervion as an insider, Gaultry was warmed to see. Melaudiere’s priest, next to Palamar, had been assigned that side of the table’s last chair.
It took Gaultry a moment to realize that the blond woman talking animatedly to her sister could only be Dervla’s niece Jacqual, sister to the girl who had killed herself after being tortured by the Prince’s traitorous ex-Chancellor. The familial resemblance was obvious—indeed, Jacqual was enough like Dervla to be her daughter, but the young woman’s expression, free from the stress of the responsibilities that Dervla wore as High Priestess, bore innocent notice of the older woman’s unhappy mental frame.
Below Dame Julie, on Gaultry’s side of the table, were Melaudiere’s steward, the Sharif, Gaultry—and, filling the last chair on her side of the table, Argat Climens, the Duchess of Vaux-Torres.
Argat was the last seated, ushered to her chair by an apologetic servant.
“What an interesting summer it has been,” the Duchess said. She sank gracefully into her chair, the silk layers of her dress rustling expensively. “You have no idea, the arguments that went on behind closed doors, to secure me even this place. How embarrassing,” she sniffed, surveying the table with amused, sardonic eyes. “Any lower and I’d have had to scramble for Benet’s chair.” At the bottom of the table was an empty chair, unclaimed by custom in honor of the traveling Prince. “What would Dervla have made of that?”
Gaultry picked up her napkin and preoccupied herself with unfolding it. Her cheeks warmed as Vaux-Torres, still waiting an answer, turned to
study her from behind long, curled lashes, an ironic smile curving on the smooth ivory of her face. For a woman who was supposed to be in disgrace as a suspected traitor, the Duchess created an entirely successful impression that she was enjoying herself, however bittersweet her pleasures.
Who is it?
the Sharif asked, as she nodded politely to Melaudiere’s steward, seated on her other side, and somehow managed a gracious gesture to indicate her lack of language.
The Duchess of Vaux-Torres,
Gaultry told her. She covered her internal talk with less suavity than the Sharif. Catching the unspoken interplay, the Duchess’s eyes infinitesimally narrowed.
“This must be the infamous Ardana Sharif,” she said silkily. “Do introduce us, Lady Gaultry. I am most eager to meet the woman who has set the order of our realm tumbling on its heels.”
Sensing that she was out of her league, Gaultry made clumsy introductions. That sense was confirmed as Vaux-Torres acknowledged the introduction with a short salute in the Ardana’s own language, followed by rapid, fluent speech, first in a languid tongue, then in a tongue more guttural. Evidently Argat Climens, unlike Gaultry, had given the seating arrangements due consideration before making her appearance.
The Sharif, raising her brows in surprise, started to answer in the guttural tongue, then broke off, frowning, and shook her head. “I won’t use the talk of my enemies,” she said, speaking slowly to ensure she would be understood.
The Duchess, with a placating gesture, spoke once more in the guttural language. The Sharif laughed, won over, and then answered back.
Clever
! she told Gaultry, laughing still, although she did not go so far as to share the joke.
This one has a dangerous humor.
BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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