The Death of Dulgath (15 page)

He stared hard at Wells. They all did. The chamberlain’s eyes darted around once more.

Christopher rested his hand on the hilt of his sword as a gentle reminder that Wells might already be in too deep. He wasn’t, of course. The matter would still be word against word, but his little demonstration with Knox was bound to pay dividends.

“All right.” Wells nodded. “What
do
you want me to do?”

“Nothing at the moment. We’ll wait to see what the
consultants
have to say.”

“And Sherwood?”

Christopher just smiled.

Sherwood put a breakfast biscuit in his mouth. Holding it with his teeth, he shifted the painting to his left hand and opened the study door with his right. Another lovely Maranon morning cast spears of sunlight across the floor, over the desk, and up the wall. There was something magical about early light—late evening, too. Sherwood had a fondness for both dawn and dusk. Fairy tales said that these
between-times,
the not-quite-day and not-quite-night periods, were when the doors between the world of men and the worlds of the fantastical opened. These were the enchanted minutes when wonderful and dreadful things occurred. Sherwood wasn’t one for superstition, myths, or legends, but he admitted to the truth of the
between-times
being enchanting. The light was always more golden, its angle casting dramatic shadows, and everything came alive with color. That morning should have been wonderful, but instead, Sherwood was greeted by the dreadful.

At first, he didn’t know what he saw. Something strange was in the center of the room, lying on the floor in a twisted, unnatural way.

As usual, Sherwood had arrived early. Lady Dulgath, always punctual, wouldn’t be there for half an hour. He had intended to finish the last of his breakfast as he oiled his paints. He hadn’t left much time to set up. He’d lingered in bed, suffering a mild attack of depression. The morose feelings came over him often. Most times they were fleeting and easy to weather. Yet occasionally a random hurricane hit, the world turned dark, and rain fell in unimaginable torrents.

During those times, death by drowning was all but certain—and quite often welcomed. What had been fine the day before became too much to bear when the depression hurricane descended, and any memory of happiness was dismissed as a delusion. He was worthless; his work was atrocious, his life a miserable failure, and obviously Elan would be a better place without him breathing the air. While the attacks came without warning or trigger, that didn’t mean they couldn’t be provoked. Given that he had begun that morning experiencing a sprinkle, what lay on the floor of the private study threatened to bring the thunder.

For a brief instant Sherwood thought he saw a person, a horribly broken and mutilated corpse. Then he realized he wasn’t seeing flesh and bone, but splintered wood. He was looking at his easel, shattered in a dismembered sculpture of wanton destruction. Worse still were his paints. Bottles had been thrown, leaving brilliant bursts of colors on the walls and glass shards on the floor. A yellow ocher starburst had exploded near the window, looking like a second sun; a splatter of vermilion made the wall appear to bleed; a fan of umber had sprayed the wooden floorboards.

Sherwood always left his tools in the study. The room was never used and always closed. It made no sense to carry everything up to his room and then back down every morning. Early on, he left the canvas, too, but grew paranoid as the image of Lady Dulgath took form. He couldn’t afford to let anyone see it until finished. Maybe not even then.

He had taken the painting with him the night before and slept with it beside his bed, breathing oil fumes all night—one of the things his despair latched onto and labeled as stupid. He no longer felt that way; his depression couldn’t care less about such crumbs when a banquet lay before it.

The easel had belonged to Yardley, who inherited it from his master, who very likely got it from his. No telling how old the thing was—easily a hundred or more years. And every inch was covered in paint, with some places showing a buildup of layers, the sediment of decades. The screw that held the crossbar had long been cracked; so had the crossbar and the back leg. This had always caused the canvas frame to wobble, and the tray never was tight enough to suit Sherwood, especially not when it held a vial of Ultramarine. He’d cursed the thing countless times and considered having a new one made.

But seeing it on the floor, broken into a dozen pieces with bright jagged splinters, he felt he might vomit. This was the easel he’d learned on. This was the platform from which he discovered how to properly see the world. He’d taken it everywhere, sleeping with it on ships and in winter camps on high mountains. It had leaned against walls while he bedded ladies of varying ranks, and he’d whispered his fears to it more than once after coming home drunk.

Almost as tragic as the easel were the pigments. Seventy-five or maybe as much as a hundred gold tenents decorated the walls of the study. No blue burst, though—he’d thrown away the vial of Beyond the Sea all on his own. He still hoped to catch the man—Royce Melborn—and ask for it back. If Melborn had half a brain, he’d deny knowing anything about it, but laymen rarely understood the value of paint. That one vial was worth a dozen easels and everything presently on the walls.

Sherwood felt the hurricane build as he saw his brushes, also vandalized. Each one had been snapped in half, and some of them had the hairs pulled out or mashed with so much force that the ferrule had split. The painting was safe, but what good was it now that he had no hope of finishing it?

“What happened?”

Sherwood turned to see Lady Dulgath standing in the doorway.

How long have I been standing here?

He couldn’t talk and only pointed at the disaster, shaking his head.

“Who did this?” Her voice rose in volume and anxiety. “Did you see, were you here?”

He continued to shake his head. He felt like crying, afraid he might. Already his face was hot, his eyesight misting. He blinked fast to hold everything back.

“You there! Stephen,” she called out the door, “run and fetch the sheriff. Then tell everyone in this castle to assemble in the Great Hall. Do you understand? Everyone!” Her voice was angry, violent.

Sherwood picked up a brass candle tray and bent to sweep up as much of the pigment as he could. “I don’t understand why anyone would do this.” His voice was shaking, his words slurring. He didn’t care. “Stealing is understandable, but—I mean—this is worth a lot of money. Why destroy it? What have I done?”

“I’ll have it replaced,” Lady Dulgath said.

“You can’t. The time, the cost—it’s…” He actually didn’t know how much. Thinking about the totality of the loss was like asking how high was up.

“Doesn’t matter. You are my guest. I consider it my failure. I’m responsible, and I’ll make it right again.” She took a step, and glass crunched under her shoe. She froze and looked around, frightened. “The painting, is it—” She saw the covered square of canvas resting beside the leg of the desk, and her shoulders relaxed. “They didn’t touch it?”

“Wasn’t here. I took it to my room last night.”

She offered him an encouraging smile. “Well, that’s something, isn’t it?”

“Yes—that’s something.”

She continued to stare at the painting. He couldn’t stop her from looking at it. All she had to do was take two steps and lift the cover. He was certain she would, but a moment later Sheriff Knox and Chamberlain Wells entered.

“I want to know who did this,” Lady Dulgath demanded.

Knox took a moment to look around thoughtfully, finally focusing on the door. “That might be difficult.”

“Why is that?”

“No lock. Anyone can get in here.”

“Could be anyone in the castle then,” Wells said.

“Not just the castle,” Knox corrected. “Virtually anyone could have come in last night. I pulled Throm and Frewin from the gate to guard your bedroom door. We were shorthanded on the wall. You really need to let me recruit more guards. Burying your head in the sand must stop. Your life is in danger.”

“Whoever did this wasn’t trying to kill me.”

“But someone is.”

“Dulgath doesn’t need a standing army. This is a close community, and I won’t allow you—or anyone else—to destroy that.”

“I’m just asking for a few more guards—to protect you!”

“I don’t need protection. I need to know who did this. Find out. Go!” She turned and faced the chamberlain. “I’ve ordered the staff to be gathered. See to it that they are…everyone. I’ll speak to them shortly. I want this solved, and I want it solved today.”

“As you wish, milady.”

She closed the door after they left and crossed the room to Sherwood, who was still struggling to gather as much pigment as he could. She found an empty cup, a decorative stein from a high shelf, and helped him. “I’m so very sorry this happened, Sherwood.”

He paused and looked up. “You know my name.”

“Of course I do.”

“You’ve never said it before.”

She shrugged. “Is that significant?”

“To me it is.”

She looked at him, curious, forehead furrowed, those elegant brows creeping closer together. He could see it again, that vision through her eyes; an image beyond the window, a hazy shadow like someone peering out through frosted glass.

Sherwood had struggled his whole life to see beyond the veil that people hung over themselves. They wore clothes to hide their truths: the bravado of cowards, the humility of the courageous, the indifference of caretakers, and the sins of the pious. He scraped back veneers to find bone. These were the buried secrets that unlocked the sincerity of his work. Understanding—seeing—what others couldn’t, or refused to, allowed Sherwood to put into paint the same underlying honesty that made his portraits so lifelike. Everyone kept secrets; most simple and easy to spot.

Wells was practically naked. The man was a glutton. Knox was a barely restrained animal at heart. Fawkes was a different matter. Something cold dwelled within his chest and throbbed rather than beat. Sherwood wouldn’t trust Fawkes to piss every day.

Nysa Dulgath was nothing like them, or any woman he had ever seen. She had a secret, to be sure, but she’d buried it deeper than he thought possible, beneath the dirt, below gravel, under shale and heavy rock. All he ever saw were these fleeting glimpses of shadows peeking out the windows of her eyes, little cupped hands pressed against the glass, a lonely soul trapped in an empty house.

Seeing how she looked at him then, that concern in her face, made the clouds part. He stood in the eye of the hurricane. The world blew around him dark and terrible, but he was safe. He was with her under a single shaft of sunlight, and everything was perfect.

The religious spoke of divine moments of grace when whatever gods they worshiped paused from their daily routine to stretch out a finger and touch them. Lives were changed, prophets made, and nations shifted when that happened. Sherwood felt touched at that moment, rocked to his core and then some. For a time, he thought he might be falling in love with Nysa Dulgath, but
love
was no longer a word large enough to encompass everything he felt. Mothers loved their children. Husbands loved wives. What Sherwood felt was more akin to worship. A prophet was born among the broken glass and scattered pigment, and while nations didn’t tremble, they should have.

Chapter Nine
Theft of Swords

Hadrian awoke to the song of birds and a cool breeze. A window was open, the only movement the thin curtains rippling with the wind. He lay on something soft, a pillow beneath his head. Somewhere distant, he heard muffled clinks of glasses, voices, laughter, and the drag of chairs on a wooden floor.

Sounds like a tavern.

The thought drifted in with the gentle breeze and whistling whoops and chortles of a thrush—then he remembered.

He sat up, expecting a nasty headache, something similar to the morning after a drunken pass out. He had figured his head would be throbbing, his eyes dry and reluctant to shift. Surprisingly, he felt okay, good even. His mouth might have been the last resting place for a deceased chipmunk, but other than that he was fine.