The Godspeaker Trilogy (49 page)

“A simple toymaker who’s trotted in and out of this castle since he was big enough to hold his father’s tool bag,” he pointed out. “I’d have to be a sight deafer, dumber and more blind than I am not to see the way things work around here, Your Highness.”

Her brief smile was sad. “Yes, I expect you would.”

She was poised to turn away from him, but he couldn’t let it go at that. The poor girl was heartsick and clearly near the end of her endurance. All alone in the world, almost, and sore in need of help.

“Truly, Highness, at least let me speak to Ursa,” he said, cajoling. “She has prodigious experience with fevers and fluxes and the like. She could make up a little posset of something then give it to me, and I could—”

“You don’t change, do you?” said the princess. “Ever since I can remember you’ve been fixing the broken things in my life. Do you recall that dappled grey rocking horse I rode to pieces? The one I inherited from Simon, who inherited it from Ranald? Three times you mended it, till we had to concede that the poor old thing had pranced into its last battle.” The affectionate amusement died out of her face, leaving it pale and older than its nineteen years. “Do you recall what you told me, a child of seven, as you held me on your lap and let me cry? You said, ‘Little princess, don’t grieve. The old horse has had a good life, and a long one, and all things in their time must turn to dust.’” Abruptly the brilliant blue eyes were full of tears, and her lips trembled.

Floating through the nearby open door, a strident, querulous cry. “Mr Jones? Mr Jones! Come back here this instant, Mr Jones!”

The princess took a deep, shuddering breath and dashed her hand across her face. “You’re wanted, Mr Jones, and so am I. I’ll pass your good thoughts along to the king. He’ll be touched to know how his people care.” Impulsively, she clasped his wrist. “Thank you, Dexterity. You’re a dear, true friend.”

And she was gone, long swift strides hampered only slightly by her dress. Dexterity watched her out of sight, his own grief for the dead princes rewoken.

Poor girl. Such a burden she carries. People watching her wherever she goes. Whispering behind her. Whispering before she arrives. Dissecting her life even as she lives it.

Of course, things would probably turn out all right. More than likely the ailing king would rally. Physicks could do amazing things these days. The king had to rally, Ethrea wasn’t ready to lose him yet. With the untimely losses of Ranald and Simon there was no prince waiting to take the throne. There was only Princess Rhian. Not yet at her majority and a girl to boot. Ethrea had never been ruled by a woman … and there were those who thought it never should.

Prolate Marlan for one. His views on women are stringent, to say the least.

Dread chilled him. Were King Eberg to die without a male heir only misery could follow. Ethrea’s past was a tapestry of betrayal and bloodshed, the desperate doings of six duchies wrestling for the right to rule the whole. In the end duchy Fyndle had emerged triumphant, was renamed Kingseat and became the traditional duchy of the king. Peace reigned sublime and for more than three hundred years the cobbled-together edges of the five lesser principalities had rubbed along tolerably well.

But if Eberg should die what an unravelling there’ll be. All the nations with their interests invested here will swoop down on us like a murder of crows …

Dexterity felt his heart thud. If the king recovered he could find himself another wife and sire a son to replace the two who’d died so untimely. Eberg wasn’t old, just three years senior to himself. It was barely middle-aged. The king had a score of sons left in him, surely. If the worst came to the worst and he died before this hypothetical son turned eighteen, well, there’d be a regency rulership but that could be survived. A king in nappies could be survived. But what kingdom could survive without any king at all?

Stop scaring yourself, Jones. His Majesty will be fine.

Lady Dester appeared in the open doorway. “ Mr Jones! What are you doing ? Must I remind you who I am ?”

“No, Your Ladyship!” said Dexterity. “My sincere apologies. I’m coming right now!” And he fled his dire thoughts as though they pursued him with raised hackles and bared teeth.

While the storm of Lady Dester’s displeasure raged about him he nodded and apologised and bowed and packed up her purchases, then the other court ladies’ choices. When he’d finished and was blessedly alone, he allowed himself a moment to sit and sigh and heft with pleasure his coin-filled purse.

“Even with that outrageous discount not a bad day’s work, my love,” he remarked to the air. “I’ll stop in to see Javeson on the way home and order the new parlour curtains, shall I? Midnight blue, with perhaps a touch of silver. What do you think, Hettie? Do you think blue would suit best?”

I think we’ve more to worry about than curtains, Dex.

Dexterity froze. Looked from side to side. Over his shoulder. Behind the couch. Nothing. No-one. The room was empty.

He cleared his throat. Feeling ridiculous, he said, “Ah … is anyone there?”

No reply. He sat down again, pulled his kerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow.

“You’re overworking, Jones. Time you put your feet up and relaxed with a pint of cold ale.”

You can’t be drinking ale at a time like this, Dex.

With a strangled shout he leapt to his feet, the kerchief fluttering abandoned to the floor. Beneath his best brown waistcoat and second-best yellow shirt his heart was beating a wild tattoo. It was impossible, but he asked the question anyway.

“Hettie? Hettie? Is that you, Hettie?”

The kingdom’s in trouble, Dex, and you have to save it.

“God preserve me!” he muttered, even though he’d stopped believing in God twenty years ago. “I’m going mad!” He scrambled together his trunk and his knapsack, tied his purse to his belt, cast a last horrified look around the empty castle chamber and fled.

Ursa was pruning a boil-free bush when he burst into her physicking workshop. Her narrow face was grave with concentration, her thin fingers sure and steady as she snipped, snipped, snipped at the boil-free’s spiky red leaves. Her shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair was hidden beneath an unflattering old scarf; her short, spare body clothed, inevitably, in a stained baggy smock. Workbenches lined the low-ceilinged room, thicketed ropes of dried and drying herbs dangled from its rafters. Trapped sunshine warmed the air which was redolent of mint and rosemary and sweet julietta.

For once the workshop’s rustic welcome failed to soothe him.

“Ursa, I’m sick!” he panted, clutching at the corners of the nearest scarred bench. “Or losing my reason!”

Still snipping, she swept him head to toe with her measured grey gaze. “You look fine to me, Jones.”

“No,” he insisted. “I’m sick. Quick, you have to do something!”

Sighing, Ursa set down her shears, folded her arms across her flat chest and regarded him in silence for a moment. Then she pulled out a rickety stool and pointed. “Sit.”

He sat, carefully, and watched as she rummaged in a handy drawer, withdrew a wooden hammer and laid it on the bench.

“Do you have nausea?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No.”

“Dizzy?”

“No.”

“Headache?”

“Not really.”

“Shooting pains? Pins and needles? Faintness?”

“No, no, and no.”

She glared at him. “You’ll be more than sick if I find out this is some kind of a joke, Jones. I’m a busy woman, I have no time for jokes.”

He clasped his hands between his knees to stop them shaking. “Ursa, trust me. This is no joke, I promise.”

Her expression was sour. “It better not be.” She crossed to the windowsill, where a neat line of potted plants drank the last of the sinking sun. With an impatient hmmph she plucked a leaf from a delicate purple vine, came back to him, spat on it and slapped it on his forehead.

“Do you have to spit?” he complained. “It’s disgusting, Ursa.”

She looked at him, unimpressed.

“It is !”

“Do I tell you how to string puppets, Jones?”

“Yes. All the time.”

“And if you paid more attention they’d last twice as long.”

With Hettie gone, she was his closest friend. Which wasn’t to say she didn’t drive him to distraction. “Huh,” he muttered, under his breath. “Well, what’s happening?”

“Hush up,” she said, frowning. “Fevertell takes a minute or two to react.”

A minute passed in toe-tapping impatience.

“No fever,” she declared, twitched the leaf from his forehead and tossed it in a compost bin. Then she struck him on the knee with the hammer.

“Ow!” he said as his leg kicked out without him asking. “That hurt!” Anxiously, he looked at her. “Was it supposed to?”

“I just hit you with a hammer, Jones, what do you think?”

He swallowed. “I think … Ursa, I think I’m losing my wits!”

That made her grin. “If you had any to lose, Jones, I’d be worried for you.”

He pounded his fist on his knee. The memory of that loved, longed-for voice in the empty castle room still had the power to raise the hair on his head. “For God’s sake, Ursa, this is no laughing matter!”

“And nor is blasphemy, Dexterity Jones. You bite your tongue before God bites it for you!”

Irate, they glared at one another. He was the first to look away. Rubbing wet palms against his best velvet breeches he whispered, “Truly, Ursa, I’m afraid.”

Her astringent voice gentled, and so did her face. “Yes, I can see that, Jones. Why? What’s happened, my friend, to scuttle you into my workshop like a frightened rabbit?”

D
exterity opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again. Here, now, brought to the telling, he felt suddenly foolish. What would she think of him, sensible Ursa in her sensible workshop, if he babbled of his dead wife’s voice speaking to him in an empty room? No. He was just overtired … and it was spring. A difficult time of year. The ache in his heart, that constant companion, was magnified by memories and regrets.

Ursa was waiting for him to speak, staring with the forthright gaze that turned braver men than him to water. “Dexterity?”

He slid off the stool. “I’m sorry, Ursa. I shouldn’t have disturbed you. I—”

“Sit down, Jones!”

He sat again. “Oh dear.”

“It’ll be more than ‘Oh dear’ if you don’t stop shillyshallying.” She drummed her short, grimy nails on the bench top. “Just tell me what happened. All of it. No prevaricating.”

Oh dear, oh dear . He gave her a half-hearted smile. “You’ll think I’m a noddycock.”

“I’ve thought that for twenty years, Jones. Spit it out.”

“Well …” He rubbed his damp palms on his breeches again. “You see, it’s like this. I was up at the castle, it’s my day for selling to the ladies of the court. I saw the princess, too—” The sharp pity stirred. “I’m worried for Her Highness, she’s not looking well. She—”

“Isn’t the point of this story, is she?” said Ursa impatiently. “Jones, you are the most distractable man!”

No-one scolded like Ursa. He gave her a look. “Yes. Well, after the ladies departed I chatted to Hettie about the new curtains I’m planning for the parlour.”

Ursa’s fingernails resumed tapping on the bench top. “You’re always chatting to Hettie. Do get to the point .”

“The point?” he repeated, his voice caught in his throat. “The point, Ursa, is that this time Hettie chatted back.”

Being Ursa, she didn’t shriek or throw her hands in the air or gasp, even a little. Being Ursa she blinked like a cat stretched out in the sunshine.

“Hmm,” she said, after a considering pause. “That’s interesting. What did she say?”

What did she say? The kingdom’s in trouble, Dex, and you have to save it .

He couldn’t tell Ursa that. “I—I don’t know! I don’t remember! It didn’t occur to me to write it down, Ursa, please, you have to take this seriously. Hettie spoke to me! I must have a fever. Or else—or else—” He stared at her in horror. “Perhaps I’m losing my mind!”

She laughed. “That’s ridiculous!”

“Easy enough for you to say! You’re not the one hearing disembodied voices!”

In one of her mercurial mood changes Ursa patted his shoulder, all solicitous sympathy. “Now, now. Just you take a nice deep breath and come down out of the branches, Jones. You’re no more losing your mind than I am.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because I’m a physick. It’s my job to be sure.”

“But—but Ursa —”

She rapped her knuckles on the top of his head. “Be quiet. You’re going to calm down, Jones, and drink some ginger root tea.”

Comforted by her lack of alarm he watched as she set her battered kettle on the hob and poked up the embers with a fire iron. He’d never known anyone so comfortable inside her own skin as Ursa. She moved briskly, with as much concentration and purpose while spooning dried ginger root into the teapot as she showed stitching a wound or splinting a broken bone. Her faded old scarf was fixed in place by the tortoiseshell clasps he’d given her last Kingdom Day. It warmed him to see them.

On the point of boiling, the kettle burped a wisp of steam. Ursa glanced at him, lips still quirked in her mocking smile. “It’s been a while since you and I sat down to gossip.”

Yes. A while. And not only because he’d been busy working and she regularly disappeared into the countryside hunting for herbs.

It’s this time of year. After so long we still find it awkward. Silly, really. We both know there’s no blame on either side. She did her best for Hettie and so did I. Some things just aren’t meant to be …

He shrugged. “Ah, well. The days get away from you, don’t they, if you’re not careful.”

Her mocking smile faded. “Yes,” she said softly. “Yes, they certainly do.”

The kettle boiled properly. Ursa poured hot water into the teapot and a rich ginger aroma billowed forth.

His stomach growled. “Don’t suppose you’ve any plum duff about, have you?” he asked hopefully. “I rushed off without my breakfast this morning and I’m always too busy to eat when I’m up at the castle.”

Ursa gazed heavenwards in silent beseechment. “When are you going to get yourself organised, Jones?” she said, reaching into a cupboard and bringing out a dented cake tin and a knife.