The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) (55 page)

He reached over her head to pull a spray of pink blossoms and handed it to her, saying that flowers or gold equally were inadequate to the task of adorning her lovely neck as it deserved. She nested the spray in her bosom and preceded him back to the house.

When Theron went home, he stuck his head into Sophia’s study. His mother looked tired. He’d seen little of her these past days—some ruckus to do with her University women, and an outbreak of sickness across town. Indeed, when she noticed his velvet coat, Sophia gasped and grabbed at her papers: “Oh, no! We have a dinner tonight and I forgot?”

He came forward into the lamplight. “No, Mother. I was just paying a call at the Randalls’.”

“Ah.” She put the papers down. “She is well, your little girl?”

“Quite well.”

“And you?” Sophia busied herself straightening papers as if he were already gone. Impulsively, Theron knelt at her feet and laid his head in her lap. He closed his eyes and breathed in the sharp smell of the herbs her clothes were stored in. “And you, Theron?” she asked softly.

“I don’t know,” he answered her. “From day to day, I really do not know.”

His mother stroked his hair. “It’s all right, my love. It’s always been hard for you, these sudden changes in your life that you make. And you will make them. One minute you wish to be a swordsman, the next a scholar. One moment you are the world’s greatest astronomist, the next a rhetorician.” He laughed uncomfortably. “So maybe all this is for the best: you marry, you have a wife to love and keep— something that’s always real, always solid, that does not change; something to build over the years whatever else happens, no?”

“Perhaps.”

She heard the uncertainty. “If you change your mind, Theron, about this marriage—”

“No,” he sighed.

“That is good. I know your moods. You can be difficult,” she teased, twisting a lock of his hair. “Did you know? So charming, until you’ve had too much of it—like a little boy sick on sweets. And then you are moody, you do not talk at all. Everyone thinks, ‘What is wrong? What’s the matter with him, is he all right?’ But then you come around all by yourself. I think about telling her that, your sweet bride, but she’ll find out on her own. And she will love you anyway, just as the rest of us do.”

It was a long time since she had sounded so loving and easy. Theron took her hand from his hair and kissed it. “Thank you, Mama. I’m sure I will be happy.”

“Oh, no.” She took his chin in her hand, and looked at him tenderly. “You are not sure at all. But perhaps that is good.”

He leaned into her hand and murmured, “Mama. I have bad dreams.”

“So do we all, my son,” she said sadly. “Shall I make you a posset to help you to sleep?”

“Yes, please.”

The hot liquid put him to sleep, but he was only shutting the door to one world of incomprehensible demands to open it on another. The world of his dreams was full of trees and torches. A man he knew was Basil, who looked like a bear, held him in his dark-furred arms and said, “You will be king. I have chosen you, and you will run for me, and stand the trial.”

“What is the trial?” he whispered, his cheek against the man’s warm fur.

The bear pressed a finger to his lips. “Oh, Little King, that is secret wisdom. No man knows that but the wizards, and the king who does not fail his trial. And when you have succeeded, you will not wish any man to know what you had to do.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“I? Of course I do.”

“How do you know that I can do it?”

“It is my business to choose wisely. I chose you for your trial, out of all the Little Kings that the land has grown for herself. My chosen always triumph.”

“But how shall I triumph if I don’t know what to do?” he asked plaintively. His heart was pounding. He had only moments left to ask the right questions. Already he could feel the tingling in his legs, the way his muscles were bunching and regrouping into powerful leaping haunches. He reached out his hands to beg for more time, and heard the wizard laugh.

“Pay attention to your lesson, Little King, and it will go well for you. Know yourself, always. There’s many a Little King has failed by failing to know himself.”

Theron woke and struck a light and stared down at his face in his washbasin. He saw there the stag’s head of Ysaud’s pictures: liquid eyes, proud muzzle, branching horns.

He cried out, and woke for real, and stumbled out of bed. He pulled on the white shirt that he had worn, musky with his desire for Genevieve, and a black scholar’s robe, and soft leather boots that covered his legs like a second skin. Then he went out into the night.

IT WAS EARLY YET IN RIVERSIDE. THE EVENING’S ENTERTAINMENTS were just beginning. Theron could have found a man or a woman on the street and had them for a handful of coins. A few more steps would have taken him to the most famous brothel in the city, where on his family’s credit he could have enacted any and all of the bizarre scenes that plagued his sleep. But Lord Theron Campion passed Glinley’s and pressed on across the bridge, toward the Apricot.

The men came alert when he entered. “That’s him,” he heard them say, as they drew aside in fear or amusement, disgust or caution. He didn’t know which and he didn’t care. This was his turf now, and he welcomed the green flame of his fighting spirit as it licked through his veins. He stood on the table, and felt the belling cry burst from his lungs.

The tavern was silent. “Well, well,” a man said. “Come to put us all in our place again, are you?”

The man was not beautiful, but he was graceful, with a dancer’s body and a head of black curls, a red mouth, and swarthy skin. Theron wanted him. He nodded his heavy-branched head,
Yes, I am come
.

“Fine,” said the dark man, “that’s fine. But none of your pussy wrestling this time. That’s for nanny boys.” A few men laughed, and others blushed. “Can you fight,” the dark one said, “like a man?” He raised his arm up over his head. From his hand, like a claw, sprang sharp cold steel.

The tavern erupted. Big Lou pushed forward through the crowd, shouting, “None of that!” The dark man was rushed outside, and Theron followed, at the heart of a knot of men urging on the fight. Someone had seized a torch from the doorway, so that their shadows crossed and wrestled with each other on the street.

“Campion!” He heard the word over and over, until he realized it was directed at him, and he turned and saw several men with hair as long as his own, done in dozens of tiny braids. They’d been among the men who had hunted him into the grove at the year’s turning. One of them was smaller than the others, his hair reflecting flame from the torchlight. Theron knew him—a follower of Basil’s.

“Lindley . . . ?”

The student pushed to Theron’s side through the shouting, jostling crowd. “Have you got a knife?” he asked breathlessly.

“No.”

“Take mine.”

The handle was antler, the knife was sharp. Lindley was hastening him with the crowd around the corner to the dark courtyard of a deserted tannery. Theron could smell the residue of death and piss. It made him wild. In the circle of men, he sprang at his opponent. The knife felt good in his hand; when he was young, to prove he wasn’t just a sickly boy who read books, he’d made one of the Riverside toughs take him into his gang. Sophia had put a stop to it, but not before he’d learned a lot.

The dark man pulled back sharply, surprised by his ferocity. Theron bared his teeth. With the knife in his hand he was hunter as well as hunted; he was man as well as beast. The power of the Land flowed up through his feet. He knew where his opponent’s knife would be before he even moved. He heard the dark man’s breathing as clear as words, telling him his body’s thoughts. He smelt the man’s fear. He wanted blood, he wanted dominion. He feinted and ducked and slashed, driving onward to his mark.

“Blood!” the men shouted. “Blood! Blood!”

If it had been a swordfight, it would have ended right there, or else gone on to the death. But this fight occupied a middle ground between formal ritual and mortal honor.

The dark man’s breathing was loud and ragged. He was gripping his knife wrist where it had been slashed, and staring white-eyed at the Deer King, poised to move edgily away from his glittering horn.

Theron did not close the space between them. Instead he slashed his knife upward in the air once, twice, and a third time, his blade blue in the moonlight, black where the vanquished man’s blood stained it. The man fell to his knees as if in prayer. Theron stood over him, breathing hard, the night air filling his lungs. He lowered the knife, and held it out to his side.

Lindley took the knife from him. “My lord,” he said, “that was well fought. The Companions are witness.”

Theron didn’t hear him. His eyes were fixed on the kneeling man, his erstwhile challenger. The man’s dark head was down, low to the ground. Theron parted his gown and lifted his shirt to his waist. He said, “Yes, I can fight like a man. Now show how you appreciate it.”

His pleasure was fierce and exalted. All of creation spun around his dominion and his joy.

When he returned to himself, there was no color at all in the world, just moonlight and shadow. The man with the knife was gone, and so were most of the ones who had been there watching, though some stood by or coupled in the shadows. Lindley was supporting him, and another person he did not know.

Lindley said, “I’ll get you water.”

Theron rasped, “No.” He shook himself free of the sustaining arms, and stood alone. He shivered at the cold wind on his sweaty skin.

Lindley, again: “Shall I see you home? To Tremontaine House?”

“No.”

“Hush, fool.” It was the other one who had held him, a person as tall as himself in a heavy cloak and a large felt hat. “No names, I think, and no direction. I can see our young friend to safety.”

Lindley moved in closer to Theron, demanding, “Who are you? You’re not of the Companions.”

“No, indeed,” the other said. “I am of the Blood.”

“The Blood,” Lindley breathed, not quite comprehending.

“Yes,” said the other in silky tones, “the Blood of Kings. It runs as true in my veins as in his.” Theron felt his arm being taken in a grip so sure that he did not think to flee. “Come, my young lord. Sophia will be worried about you—and if she isn’t, she should be.”

The walk back to Riverside seemed to take forever. He was tired to the bone; at times, he even thought he slept as he walked. His companion’s voice wove strands of meaning through his exhaustion: “What a wonderful evening! . . . I won’t tell them where I found you, if you won’t tell them I was wandering around down there. . . . Come on, boy, it’s only a cat!”—this when he jumped at a sound too close to them—“. . . I think Katherine will be just as happy if I stay in Riverside after all. . . . This is the Bridge, Theron, we’re nearly home. . . . Pull yourself together, boy; you’re going in the front door with me.”

Then there was the familiar smell of his own hall, and light in his eyes, and his companion saying, “Do forgive me. I asked him to sneak out and meet me down by the docks before I put in my official appearance—childish, I know.”

And Sophia’s hands and voice were turned, not to him, but to the other; her voice was hushed with tears and she said, “Oh, my dear—you have your father’s eyes, his very eyes as I remember them so well—the little lines right there—and there. Jessica, welcome home.”

chapter
III

WHEN LORD NICHOLAS GALING WENT TO CALL ON Lord Theron Campion, he dressed as though for courting, in amethyst-colored wool cut very close to his figure, a waistcoat embroidered with water lilies, and a carnelian nestled in the discreet ruffles at his throat. Aping the severe academic style, he’d slicked his dark curls away from his face with gold clips and worn a gownlike cloak in place of his usual coat. He slipped two of Ysaud’s drawings into a flat leather case, found a chair, and paid the chairmen the exorbitant sum they required to carry him across the Bridge to Riverside House.

He felt pleasantly excited, like a hound with the quarry in sight. He’d play Lord Theron, show him Ysaud’s pictures if necessary, bring into clear focus the hazy pattern that surrounded him. No great scandal: just two men in a room, getting things straight. The boy was clever, but not subtle. To a man used to dealing with Arlen, it would be as simple as a game of checkers.