The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) (26 page)

Rugg nodded. “In fact, I forbid you to mention them. No, just listen, Basil. I’m your senior and your friend, and I know what I’m saying. Start talking about wizards, and your job becomes that much harder.”

“Astronomically,” Elton agreed.

“By a magnitude of ten,” put in Cassius, not to be outdone.

Rugg ignored them. “No one will know how brilliant your argument is if they’re laughing themselves sick over your premise. Promise me, Basil. Promise you’ll keep away from the wizards and all their works.”

Basil looked around at his friends’ faces, crimsoned by wine and firelight and earnestness. “I can’t promise about the wizards,” he said at last. “But I’ll stay away from magic, if I can. I don’t want to shame you. And I do want to win.”

Rugg sighed. “That’ll have to do, I suppose. Now. Debates are traditionally in the spring, at Festival time. That means you’ll have to challenge Crabbe as soon as MidWinter’s over.”

“Spring!” Cassius complained. “Where’s the drama if you challenge him three months before you debate him? Everyone’s going to be bored to numbness with the whole affair by then.”

“It gives the other man time to prepare,” Elton pointed out.

“Or leave town,” said Cassius.

The meeting broke up very late, with all of the participants quite drunk and very fond of each other in a conspiratorial kind of way.

“Never liked Crabbe,” Rugg confided loudly as the fire burned low. “Humorless bastard—stick up his arse, eh? Glad to do him one in the eye.”

“Inn—innov— New thinkers got to stick together,” Elton declared. “Scratch each other’s backs. Would you scratch my back, Basil?”

“To the bone, Tom,” Basil said earnestly. “Day or night. Just ask. You, too, Leonard, Lucas. You’ve saved my life. Do anything you like.”

“Get rid of Campion,” said Elton. When Basil stiffened angrily, he waved a languid hand. “Sorry. No harm in trying. It’s out of love, you know.”

ALONE, FOR ONCE, BASIL WATCHED THE MOON TRACK ITS way across the panes of the high, slanting window over his bed, doubling itself when it passed over an imperfection in the glass.

Keep away from wizards. If they only knew.

“Secrets fester,” he murmured to the moon. “Knowledge must be brought to light.” He rolled over, fumbled under his bed for the box that held the Book and, pulling it out, held it in his hands. If only he could bring its secrets to the light, he thought, he’d break his promise to Rugg in a heartbeat. But the meaning of its spells was locked as tight as the dead mouths of the wizards who had uttered them.

Basil lit a candle, held a page near it, then up to his slanted window. But neither flame nor cold moonlight could illuminate the sense of those words, as thick and impenetrable as a night without stars. He ran his fingers lightly over the thorny, undecipherable lines. Their very incomprehensibility spoke to him of powerful rites crafted by masters of wind and soil and human desire, who encoded their wisdom in a secret language to keep it safe. The magic was real. It had to be real. He could feel it in his fingers when he turned the soft skin pages, still miraculously supple after so many centuries. He could see it in the recalcitrance of the words, which never seemed so foreign as when he tried to transcribe them.

Basil shook his head. He’d had too much to drink, that’s what it was. Magic wasn’t real. Not now. But to these vanished wizards, trained in its spells, steeped in traditions and rites and knowledge passed down from master to master, oh, to them it had been real as sunlight. Of this he was sure. The book told him that, at least.

The book told him that, but what would it tell others? The intangibility of his proofs was one reason to pay attention to Rugg’s caution against revealing the wizards as the new focus of his studies, let alone its source. Another was the tangible and utterly embarrassing fact that reading the book inevitably sent Basil into erotic daydreams that were as violent as they were explicit. Thinking of the book was tantamount to thinking of Theron and what Basil would like to do to him. Basil did not dare show Theron the book. And tonight had made it clear that there was no point in telling Elton or Cassius or even Rugg about his discovery.

It was too soon to show his hand, he told himself. He didn’t know enough about it. He must study Arioso’s notebooks, collate the commentaries, see what he could find out about the wizards who had put their names to the spellbook’s notes and conjectures, research the crest on the document box, turn it all into history: documented, analyzed, safely in the past. When he’d done all that, he’d write a book about it, and that book would be the most important historical analysis of the age. With it, he could win the Horn Chair, even without Rugg’s precious debate. He’d dedicate it to Theron.

In the meantime, however, there was a great deal to do.

chapter
II

THE YEAR DREW ON TO MIDWINTER, THE WHITE Days between the old year and the new. It was a time of holiday for every soul in the city except the tavern-keepers and the Watch. The Hill swarmed with tailors and seamstresses, with purveyors of fancy goods and wine, with carts from the country bearing sheep and geese and deer and pheasants to be served up at MidWinter feasts. At the University, the MidWinter Brand went from door to door, collecting from each student his (and occasionally, her) statutory stick of wood for the Last Night bonfire in the Great Court. The honorable magistrates of the City Council sat in conference with civic-minded nobles of the Council of Lords, planning public entertainments.

Traditionally, the Last Night of the old year, which began the festivities, was a night of bonfires and mayhem, presided over by a University student chosen by his fellows. He was called the Little King; his court were his Companions. Magistrates still sweated in their cozy beds over tales of the bad old days, when Last Night left behind it ravished maidens, abducted children, corpses in the street, shops stripped bare of their wares and their furniture, and a handful of formal challenges to the death. The City Council had finally abolished the Little King and tried to abolish the selling of liquor or the lighting of open fires for the ten days of the festival. That was the year the City had learned the true meaning of the word mayhem.

Now there were civic bonfires in the major squares, tended by the long-suffering Watch, and fireworks at midnight over the river. The whole city spent the night drinking and dancing in the streets, and if a dog was blown up by a firecracker tied to its tail or a few windows were smashed, well, a few nights in the lockup were enough to clear the taint of it in time for the new year.

Justis Blake’s first year at University, he’d gone home for MidWinter to his country village, where they saw the old year out with fire and song and the little children fell asleep by the bonfire on the village green. He’d been homesick enough to endure his friends’ teasing and the trouble and expense of going home. This year, however, he had decided to stay.

On the morning of Last Day, Doctor St Cloud lectured to no more than half of his usual audience. Which was a pity, Justis thought, sucking warmth back into his stiffened fingers, but only to be expected right before the holiday.

“In the archives of the University,” St Cloud was saying, “there is a curious manuscript, written by one of the minor wizards attending on King Laurent. This wizard, who did not feel it necessary to sign his name to his private musings, conveniently spent many pages mourning certain ancient rituals, which he describes as you or I, when we grow old, might someday describe our University exploits.”

Everyone chuckled. Justis glanced to where Finn was sitting rapt, his bony face sharpened to a fine point of concentration. Beside him, Lindley scribbled furiously. They both wore roughly-carved wooden leaves pinned to their hat brims, and there was a lovelock plaited into Lindley’s copper hair. They’d begun floating about in a cloud of roses and musk shortly after the day Lindley had discovered his adored master with Lord Theron Campion. Vandeleur’s opinion was that he’d settled on the Northerner out of pique, but Justis remembered how Lindley had looked when Finn was holding forth on little kings, wizards, and deer. It had been the look of a thirsty man offered drink.

Blake returned his attention to the lecture. “Now, the wizard’s account of MidWinter presents a neat problem of scholarship,” said Doctor St Cloud. “The name ‘MidWinter Festival’ was bestowed on the White Days by law shortly after the Fall. It took a great deal of rereading and cross-referencing to determine that the wizard’s Royal Hunt took place during the same time. Luckily, ‘White Days’ is a term of great antiquity, so I looked for a passage where the two terms fall together. And I found it.” St Cloud took a small tablet of notes from his pocket and ran his finger down it. “Ah, here it is. ‘This year, the White Days were gray, nor could the King’s Wizard break the clouds, so that the Royal Hunt perforce took place in utter darkness.’

“So,” St Cloud said, “I reread the wizard’s memoir with an eye to the Royal Hunt, and this is what I learned. During the White Days, the king went a-hunting deer, leaving a young man, chosen by the wizards, behind him on the throne. This Little King ruled during ten days of license, when apprentices ruled masters and servants ordered nobles to do their bidding.”

“Ten days is impossible,” Peter Godwin shouted from the back bench. “Why, there would have been chaos.”

St Cloud looked up. “I may have misread the passage. Perhaps you’d like to see what you make of it, and report what you have discovered, let us say, First Day morning?”

Godwin was silent.

“Never mind, Peter,” Vandeleur soothed. “The manuscript will still be there when you’ve recovered from your hangover.”

Finn turned on his bench and glared. “
Some
of us,” he said pointedly, “are interested in what Doctor St Cloud has to say, and would thank you to shut up.”

There was a good deal of angry murmuring at this—the students were excited and ready for their holiday, and Finn was not well-liked. Someone bounced an apple core off his hat—one of Godwin’s cronies, probably—and the lecture might have come to a noisy end had not St Cloud burst out laughing.

“I’m flattered, Finn. And encouraged.” He surveyed the restless students. “The purpose of the Royal Hunt was not simply sport and venison for the royal table. The killing of the deer was a ceremony intended to bring back the sun and ensure an early spring. There’s an old Northern poem about it, very exciting, full of hunts and betrayals. But here’s the interesting bit.” He consulted his notes. “ ‘Without his due of blood,’ the wizard writes, ‘the Sun dozeth in his winter quarters, and the frozen soil holdeth the grain locked in its stony clods.’ ” St Cloud looked at them and smiled. “In these degenerate days, the Sun must eke out his due of blood from broken heads and bloody noses. Try and make sure they aren’t yours. Dismissed.”

There was laughter, applause, shouts of “Good Festival, Doctor St Cloud,” the clatter of boots on the steps from the gallery, the scraping of benches, and a blast of air tinged with the smell of roast chestnuts as the students tumbled out into the narrow street. Full of holiday cheer, Blake slapped Henry Fremont on the back and offered to stand him some roasted chestnuts.

“Don’t
do
that, you great ox,” snapped Fremont. “You’ll break someone’s rib one day, and, like as not, it’ll be mine.”

Justis laughed. “Undoubtedly. Do you want chestnuts or not?”

Fremont shifted the pouch hanging from his shoulder. It was new, Justis noticed, made of good leather, and worth the price of a good dinner with wine. “Nice,” he said appreciatively. “MidWinter gift?”

Fremont glanced down at the pouch as though he’d never seen it before. “That’s it,” he said brightly. “My father had a good year, sent me a purse. I fell prey to temptation in Tilney Market. Don’t worry, there’s plenty left to pay my tick at the Nest, and for roasted chestnuts, too, and even a MidWinter apple. Want one?”

Justis nodded amiably and followed Fremont to the vendor’s cart, where a tray of MidWinter apples shone a deep, sticky gold. As a liar, Fremont was about as convincing as a wolf got up in a fleece, as his mother would say. The thought made Justis suddenly, dizzyingly homesick. He bit into the apple. Sweet, warm caramel and tart, cold apple flooded his mouth with the taste of home. It was all he could do to thank Fremont for the treat and find his way to his cold, dark room, where he could sniffle in peace.

ON THE HILL, KATHERINE, DUCHESS TREMONTAINE, LOOKED to see that all was in order for her Last Night party. The bonfire was laid ready to light. There was, as always, plenty of food. She wore a splendid new dress and a cheap pearl necklace her mother had given her: one old, one new, as was the custom. Katherine did not love tradition for its own sake, but there were things that had always meant a great deal to her, and Last Night was one of them. She liked to have her chosen family around her; they were her link to her future and her past. Her mother was long gone, and so was the alarming uncle, her mother’s younger brother, who had left her the duchy. She liked to remember them both on Last Night.