The Crystal Chalice (Book 1) (6 page)

  With keen perception he saw that he had hurt her.
To avoid looking at him, she reached for the decanter without asking his
permission and refilled her glass. He made no comment, intrigued to see what
happened next. With courage fortified by the wine she had consumed, she lifted
her glass in a mocking salute. “Permit me to compliment
you
. You have
made cruelty a fine art.”

 She thought he looked a little stung but it might
just have been the effect of the wine. Everything was getting a little hazy, a
little remote. “For your information,” she continued. “I did not aim that high.
I was always aware of the differences between us. I will never forget that he
is a prince and I am a nobody, without even a past to call my own.”

 “You have had too much wine,” he remarked.

 “I have never been drunk in my life,” she declared
virtuously, then ruined the effect by adding, “That is, what I can remember of
it. If only I could remember more. It has been months now and nothing has come.
I have discovered things about myself, like my ability to read the old
language, but I cannot remember being taught it. Did my father teach me? Do I
have a brother or sister? Do I really come from the Land of Marshes as Relisar
suspects? I would give anything to remember.”

 But with one of those quick mood changes which she
found disconcerting, his cynical gaze had gone and he was staring thoughtfully
into his wine, watching the firelight glimmer blood- red in its depths.

 “It’s strange,” he remarked, without taking his eyes
off his glass. “you would give anything to remember your past and I would give
anything to forget mine.”

 It was the first human thing he had said. The first
thing inconsistent with his image of ruthless cruelty. Yet there were other
things which did not quite fit the pattern. His voice was well educated, even
cultured. He knew the Book of Light and was clearly acquainted with the old
language. Moreover, he was more perceptive that she would have predicted. She
supposed intelligence must not be inconsistent with cruelty.

  He proceeded to demonstrate the point. “So, the
Prince and his army have gone. They have decided in all probability that
teaching me a lesson is too expensive an exercise for the present, but that
leaves me with you. With the Princess in my control I could have named my
price, but with you, well, I doubt anyone would pay so much as a groat to get
you back. Relisar’s mistake! What an embarrassment! They are probably glad to
be rid of you. But what shall I do with you? As you rightly pointed out, I do
not relish having been made a fool of.  You seem intent on making a
sacrifice of yourself, and I have no intention of depriving you of the
satisfaction. The problem is that the choice is endless.” He appeared to
consider the matter. “I could give you to my men. There are few women up here
and they no doubt would make the most of the opportunity. Then again, there are
several inventive and unpleasant ways to die, most of them long drawn out
affairs..... ”

 “.......that is unworthy of you” she interrupted.
“You’re trying to frighten me and that is the  mark of a bully - but you
are not a bully.”

 “What makes you say that?”

 “Because bullies are cowards and whatever your
reputation, you are no coward.”

 “You know nothing about me.”

 “I know I have angered you. I know also that you
will do to me whatever you deem expedient, and there is nothing I can do to
stop you. But if it gives you any satisfaction, let me tell you that I am
already so afraid, that nothing you can say will make my fear any worse. If you
want to kill me, just do it. Just lift that carving knife and slit my throat.”

 “Do you think I won’t?”

 “I think you are capable of anything.”

 Suddenly, to her amazement, a hint of amusement
crossed his face. “You keep telling me you are afraid, but you don’t look
afraid. Moreover, you have said things to me that few people would have dared
to say.”

 She smiled wryly in response. “That’s just the wine
talking.”

 “Perhaps, but I think that is not entirely the
answer. Perhaps you think that if you build up some kind of rapport with me, I
will not be able to kill you.”

 She looked a little disconcerted, because that was
exactly what had been in her mind.

 “You are not what I expected,” she conceded. “But
that is both good and bad. You are not the unthinking brute I was led to
expect, but on the other hand your intelligence makes you difficult to deal
with.”

 Although his expression did not alter, once again
she had the impression that he was secretly amused.

 “Are you always so frank?”

 “Unfortunately, yes. It has got me into a great deal
of trouble at times.”

 “Does your Prince not admire the quality?”

 “He’s not my Prince, and yes, he admires honesty,
it’s just that my honesty can stray into the regions of tactlessness on
occasion.”

 “I can well believe it,” he murmured.

 She leaned across the table towards him,
unconsciously stretching out her hand in a gesture of supplication.

 “Why don’t you just let me go? I’m of no value to
you. You can’t use me to bargain with. Why not just let me go?”

 But as she looked at him, she knew the wine had
betrayed her. She knew that she had made a mistake.

 “Your Prince may not return your regard, but he is a
man with a conscience and that is a weakness which can be exploited. I imagine
his conscience is giving him a great deal of trouble at the moment and he may
be prepared to bargain something to put it to rest. Then there is the not
insignificant matter of the fact that you have made a fool of me before my men.
I do not rule a kingdom where position and respect are inherited, a mere
accident of birth. I hold this place with two things - strength and fear. If my
men do not fear me they will not obey me. One of them may even challenge me for
the leadership. Now, we can’t have them thinking I’m getting weak, allowing
someone who has betrayed me to go unpunished. Your fate will depend on whether
I think you are of more value to me dead or alive.”

 His speech, however, did not have quite the intended
effect.  She had been sitting with her head hanging, and when he finished
speaking, she quietly, rather gracefully, slumped forward onto the table.

He observed her for a moment before remarking: “You are
about to add to your meagre store of experiences, for you are going to have one
monumental headache in the morning.”

 
As Celedorn had predicted, Elorin awoke the
following morning with a thundering headache. Cautiously she sat up, holding
both sides of her head with her hands, as if sudden movement might cause it to
fall off. Her recollections of the night before were a little hazy. Parts of
her conversation were clear, others might have been something she had dreamed.
She had a vague notion that she had said some things that in the cold light of
day would have been better left unsaid. But here she was, back in her prison,
still in one piece - except for her headache.

  When she tried to get up she made another discovery
- she was lying on a rather lumpy mattress instead of the bare boards and
someone had put a blanket over her. She stared at the blanket. She had no
recollection of going up to her room and assumed that one of the guards must
have carried her. She wondered if the blanket was part of his orders but
guessed that it probably was not. She rose a little unsteadily and went into
the bathroom. The mirror informed her that her looks had not improved. The
swelling had gone down in her cheek but it was now several interesting shades
of purple.

 “You certainly wouldn’t pass for a princess today,”
she informed her reflection. “Indeed, your behaviour last night was not exactly
dignified.” She sighed. “Too much fear, not enough food or sleep and too much
wine. An appalling combination, but not exactly an excuse.”

 She leaned on the basin, wondering if it was worth
trying to wrestle with the tap again. Her head hung forward and through the
pain of her headache she was conscious of a dense fog of depression beginning
to settle on her. At that moment she heard the sound of a key turning in the
outer door. She stepped swiftly back into the room and stood with her back
against the wall, facing the gradually opening door with trepidation.

  But a rather unexpected sight met her eyes. In the
doorway stood a burly figure so rotund as to be almost completely circular. He
was dressed, unlike the others she had seen, in a homely brown tunic that might
have belonged to a farmer. It was held at the waist by a belt that struggled to
meet around his ample middle. He was older, too, than the others. His bald pate
was fringed by grey hair and his brown eyes twinkled merrily out of the folds
of flesh. Even more interesting, he carried a tray set with several covered
dishes.

  “You are Elorin?” he beamed, making it more of a
statement than a question. “Permit me to introduce myself. I am Dorgan - a
civilised being, I might add, without sacrificing modesty - or at least, what
passes for civilised in these environs.”

 Elorin gaped at him, completely nonplussed by the
appearance of someone within the grim fortress who did not exude evil and
death. His cheerful homeliness was incongruous in the extreme. He looked as if
he should be in a marketplace selling apples or sitting in the sun on a bench
outside some country tavern drinking cider.

  Undaunted by her lack of response, Dorgan said:
“I’ve brought you some breakfast. I heard those barbarians brought you nothing
to eat yesterday.  I also heard that you.....er.....over-indulged with the
decanter last night. Sore head this morning?” he enquired sympathetically, but
before she could answer he continued: “Never mind, it will soon pass once you
get some proper food in you.” He began lifting the covers off the dishes. “And
just look what those black-hearted scoundrels have done to your poor face.
Hydar, I would guess? He has red hair, you know, and a temper to match.”

 She finally found her voice. “No, it wasn’t Hydar,
it was Celedorn.”

 “Ah, well,” he excused, “he was mightily provoked.
Indeed, the men can’t understand why he hasn’t ........well, never mind all
that, my foolish old tongue sometimes runs away with me. Here, come and eat.
Nothing ever looks bright on an empty stomach.”

  He held out a plate of fresh bread and slices of
ham. “Just go ahead, don’t mind me.” He settled himself on the end of the bed,
as if he proposed to become a permanent fixture, and watched her as she ate.

 “I’ll stay and talk to you for a while, if you like.
I miss a bit of conversation that doesn’t involve words such as ‘pillage’
and  ‘slaughter’.” He winked at her, his little eyes dancing
mischievously. “It gets a bit monotonous, if you know what I mean.”

 She couldn’t resist smiling back. “Was it you who
put the blanket over me last night?”

 “Yes, indeed,” he admitted. “You didn’t think that
it was one of those uncouth fellows?”

 She laughed and shook her head. “How do you come to
be here, Dorgan, amongst all these......er......uncouth fellows?”

 “Ah, my dear, that is a long story full of the
vagaries of fate. Perhaps some day I will tell you when you have several hours
to spare. A rushed story is never a good one and I don’t believe in précis when
it comes to matters of importance.”

 The rebuff was so pleasantly done, that she accepted
with equanimity that he was telling her to mind her own business.

 When he saw she had finished, he said: “Now, what
shall we do for the rest of the day? How about a tour of this impressive pile?
But before you get too excited at the prospect, I should tell you that I
haven’t asked Celedorn’s permission yet. I have only lived to a ripe old age
because I am always most circumspect when it comes to asking his permission.
I’ll go and find him and attempt to use my limited powers of persuasion.”

 He lifted the tray and whisked himself out of the
room most nimbly for a man of his bulk. However, she noticed, with some
chagrin, that he turned the key in the lock behind him. He was so long in
returning, that she gave up pacing the dusty floorboards and took to staring
out of the window at the deserted courtyard below, convinced that he had
forgotten about her. However, he proved true to his word and arrived back,
picking up where they had left off as if he had only been away for a moment.

 “All is well. Permission has been granted. Actually,
Celedorn’s response was that I could do what I liked with you - provided I
didn’t lose you.”

 He held the door open for her and seeing her
hesitate, added: “Come, don’t look so anxious. I’m really perfectly harmless.
Indeed, I’m the only person you could say that of within these walls.”

 “I could believe that. I did, after all, spend an
evening with Celedorn.”

 He studied her reflectively. “The personification of
evil, in fact?”

 “Well.......” she hesitated, unsure of him.

 “A little more complex than you thought.”

 “Yes,” she agreed, relieved to find common ground.

 “Nevertheless, it is dangerous to relax with him.
Your uninhibited conversation might have entertained him last night but it is a
dangerous game to play. The only thing one can predict about Celedorn with any
certainty, is that he is always unpredictable.”

 She stared at him, alarmed.

 “Oh dear, I have brought back that anxious
expression that I was so set on banishing. Now, come with me downstairs and we
will begin in the main hall.”

 As Dorgan guided her around, she soon discovered
that he had an almost inexhaustible flow of pleasant but inane conversation.
However, there appeared to be certain subjects upon which he was reluctant to be
drawn. He was strangely loyal to Celedorn, often attempting to excuse the
inexcusable but would give little information about him. In reply to some
probing question, he would invariably reply that if Celedorn wanted her to
know, no doubt he would tell her himself.

  After trailing round many long, gloomy corridors
and inspecting empty rooms where the dust lay as thick as grey flour, the
highlight of the tour for Elorin was the kitchen. It was reached by a narrow
flight of steps leading down from the great hall. Another door accessed the
kitchen from the courtyard. It was by far the most cheerful, and somehow human,
room she had yet seen. The empty halls she had seen earlier were beginning to
make her feel the castle had only brigands and ghosts to offer. But here was a
room as cheerful as her companion.

  He held open the door for her. “This is my domain.
Do you like it?”

 A huge fire glowed in the hearth, reflecting its
flickering light off rows of gleaming copper saucepans, glass jars full of
bottled fruits and herbs and a huge scrubbed table, neatly stacked with dinner
plates. Herbs hung in aromatic bunches from the ceiling and strings of onions
cascaded lumpily from hooks on the wall.

 Elorin’s face lit with enthusiasm. “Dorgan this is
wonderful - it’s just so unexpected. How I should love to have a kitchen like
this?”

 “You like cooking?”

 But the smile faded as swiftly as it had appeared.
“I....I don’t know. I can’t remember doing any cooking but....but I have a sort
of feeling that I once liked it. During the last few months this has happened
sometimes. When I’m not really trying to remember, a shadow of something comes
to me. For instance, one day in Addania, I just sat down without thinking and
played chess with Relisar. How did I know how to play? Who taught me? I
couldn’t remember and the more I tried the less certain I became, but the fact
remains that somehow I knew how to play.”

 He was watching her understandingly, all his usual
mischief missing from his eyes and at that moment she knew they would be
friends for whatever duration Celedorn decreed her existence would continue.

 “Come,” he said, lifting a cloth cover off a bowl,
“the dough has rested and now we must shape the loaves.”

 The dark and dreary day outside passed unnoticed.
The snow, which had shown an inclination to turn to slush, froze again, setting
footprints as hard as stone. Icicles that had been weeping miserably from the
eaves, suddenly froze solid, forming a brittle, uneven fringe. Secretively, it
began to snow again, tiny flakes here and there, almost invisible, that soon
increased to a silent, feathery blanket. Elorin looked up from her task and
glanced out of the tiny window.

 “When I was a child, I used to pretend that the
clouds were huge feather quilts which had burst apart and were shedding their
contents on the world below.”

 Dorgan smiled significantly at her. She smiled back
but also shook her head. “It’s no use, Dorgan, if I try to grasp it, it will
disappear.”

 Instead, she told him much of her life in Addania
and found him a surprisingly good listener - for someone who talked so much.
The bread baked in the oven, filling the kitchen with its warm scent. The glow
of the fire grew richer and deeper as the day diminished.

 However, the peace was not to last. As darkness fell,
a clatter of hooves on the cobbles outside signalled the return of one of the
mounted patrols that seemed to come and go constantly. After a moment, the door
to the kitchen was flung back with such force that it slammed back against the
wall. Hydar strode in, scattering snowflakes from his cloak.

“Where are you, old man?” he roared. “I want bread and
mulled wine, it’s damned cold work out there.”

 He stopped abruptly when he saw Elorin.

 “What’s she doing here?” he demanded of Dorgan.

 “She is here with Celedorn’s permission, that’s all
you need to know.”

 Hydar did not reply. He walked round Elorin one way,
then back the other way, eyeing her up and down in a manner that made her flesh
crawl.

 “Not languishing in some dank dungeon, my
sweetheart?” he asked. “Why waste your time with old Dorgan here, when you
could enjoy the delights of the guardroom, or perhaps you prefer something more
private.”

 She shot a frightened glance at Dorgan, unsure what
to reply.

 “Don’t interfere, Hydar. What happens to her is
Celedorn’s decision.”

 Hydar’s eyes narrowed. “Is it? Is it now? After what
she did to us, I expected her to be food for the ravens by now, but here she
is, perfectly at home in your kitchen. You know what I think, old man?
Celedorn’s getting soft. He’s losing his grip. I expected to have the hide
flogged off me, but nothing has happened. There is no room at Ravenshold for
weakness. If he is not strong enough, then perhaps it is time for someone else
to lead us.”

 “Don’t be a fool,” Dorgan snapped. “Celedorn has
some plan you are not privy to. He does not let fools, who can be so easily
deceived, into his confidence.”

 Hydar snarled with anger. “Be careful what you say.
Remember that if Celedorn falls, you fall with him. You will soon learn that I
do as I please.” He spun towards Elorin. “And as for you....” Without finishing
his sentence, he grabbed her by the arm and started to drag her towards the
door.

 Before Dorgan could react, a voice cut across the
room like a steel blade.

 “You will do nothing without my orders, Hydar. You
will not even presume to breathe without my express permission.”

 Hydar released his grip on Elorin as if he had been
burned and all three spun round. Celedorn had entered silently from the door to
the stairs.

“What were you proposing to do?” he continued silkily.
“You may be impressive when it comes to intimidating old men and girls, but why
do you not tell
me
what you were proposing to do?”

 Everyone in the room instantly wondered just how
long he had been standing there, how much of Hydar’s remarks he had overheard.
As the two men faced each other, the contrast between them was marked - the one
so heated, the other so cool.

 Elorin and Dorgan stepped back against the wall,
aware that they were superfluous to what was happening.

 Hydar was in the grip of rage as fiery as his hair.
His face was red with anger, his powerful shoulders hunched aggressively, but
Celedorn was as cold as the snow still falling outside, his face disdainful,
his eyes as icy and remote as a mountain glacier. Elorin suddenly noticed that
he was armed. A sword hung in a black scabbard by his side. He had not touched
the sword or given any indication that he knew that it was there, but all at
once everyone in the room was aware of it.