The Poison Throne (16 page)

“Just a bite,” he conceded, dropping his boot and sitting down.

They cleared the plates between them, eating silently, steadily and with enthusiasm. Eventually there was nothing left but crumbs, and a half-bowl of creamy coffee.

Lorcan pushed back with a satisfied sigh. “Jesu Christi,” he murmured. “That was magnificent.”

Wynter laughed. She hadn’t seen him this rosy-cheeked and replete in an age. He laughed back at her, his old merry self. The sun made emeralds of his dancing eyes. “Ah, girl,” he said fondly, “you’re a bloody tonic.” And they grinned at each other across the devastation of breakfast.

After a few more moments of contentment, Lorcan straightened up and his face became serious.

“Wynter, Jonathon has offered me my licence.”

Her heart leapt. “Oh Dad! That’s
great
.” she squinted at him, waiting for his smile. Why wasn’t he walking on air? “What limitations?” she asked, thinking it must be
very
limited for this subdued response.

“No limitations at all, love. All grades open, all tenders legitimate, any province, any city, free to practise.”

“My God, Dad! I… that’s… Hah!” She laughed and spread her hands. “That’s
incredible
!” Jonathon had just handed her father carte blanche to set up business anywhere he liked, using whatever staff he liked, taking on whatever jobs he fancied. It was the most unlimited licence of work she’d ever heard of. Lorcan should have been elated. Instead he was looking at her with a kind of gentle sorrow.

“It’s hereditary, Wynter.” She dropped her hands at that, stunned. “It’s hereditary, in perpetuity. You get to carry it on. No one can ever take it away from you.”

“Oh, Dad.”

His eyes were huge and glittering in the streaming sunlight. Wynter put her hands on the table, palms down, suddenly cold all over.

She understood now. “He wants you to support Albi’s disinheritance. He wants you to declare for
mortuus in vita
?” Lorcan nodded. “You
can’t
. Dad, you can’t. Tell me that you…”

“He has the licence papers, Wyn. He held them
this close
…” Lorcan raised his hand in front of his face, clenched into a fist, looking at it as though it was something vile and disgusting. “This close,” he repeated.

“Dad,” she reached across the table to him and he looked at her as if she was about to break his heart. “It’s
Albi
, Dad. It’s
Alberon
.”

“I know,” he whispered. “But it’s also
you
, darling. It’s you and what happens to you when I’m gone.” He didn’t say the rest.
I’ll be gone soon. You’ll be all alone. This is all I can give you
.

The sunlight reflecting in his eyes flickered as a shadow crossed the room, drawing his attention to the window. Then another shadow briefly darkened his face. He got up to have a look.

“God help us!” he said, looking out the window, surprise and amazement. When the implications of what he saw sunk in, he said it again, low, heartfelt, hopeless. “God help us.”

Wynter knew already, had heard the rattle and slide of their claws on the red tiled roofs. She had hoped they’d escape her father’s notice. Ravens. Ravens were gathering. She turned and watched her father as he stepped onto the sill and leaned far out the window, balancing himself with one big hand on the top of the frame. For a moment all she could see were his long legs. Then she heard him curse and he slithered back into the room, his face drained.

“The keep?” she asked, not really a question.

“The keep,” he confirmed, not looking at her. He put a hand on her head as he passed her by. “Get ready for work,” he said, and went into his room, closing the door softly behind him. It was some time before Wynter heard him begin to get dressed.

Ravens over the keep. It could mean only one thing.

Jonathon had impaled the prisoner’s body on the trophy spikes. A broken, bloody, vengeful flag high over the complex; the first of its kind to have been displayed there since Jonathon had taken the throne.

Wynter put her face in her hands for a moment, pushing her fingers into her eyes, shoving unwanted images back into dark rooms and shutting doors in her mind. Then she got up and went to get dressed, leaving the breakfast things to gather flies in the sweltering heat.

She put on her rough work clothes and clubbed her hair. When she came out from her room, shouldering her roll of tools, Lorcan was standing in the receiving room. His tools were on his back, the sunlight in his plaited hair. They didn’t talk. Wynter still had no idea where it was they were going or what it was they were meant to do, and she chose not to ask her father for details. Sometimes words just made things worse.

He turned and looked her up and down, nodded approvingly and said, “Ready?”

“Ready.”

Then he straightened, set his shoulders and raised his head. Face cold, eyes hooded, Wynter’s father disappeared in the blink of an eye and became the Protector Lord Lorcan Moorehawke. He didn’t look at her again, just swept from the room with her in tow, master and apprentice striding forward on their business for the King.

It should have been very quiet at midday at the height of summer, but there was a steady undercurrent of activity in the halls. Grim-faced, eyes down, men were moving through the corridors like worker ants. They carried big paintings and small paintings, the images obscured with cloths. They carried statues, and stacks of manuscripts. All were heading in the same direction – out to the gardens.

She trotted obediently along behind her father, pretending not to notice. But she saw the strained look on the men’s faces. She saw the pages and serving girls snatching distraught conversations as they passed in the halls. She saw the tension growing in her father’s back. Then two men stumbled at the head of a short flight of stairs, the huge painting that they carried escaping their grasp. As they struggled to hoist it back onto their shoulders, the cover slipped and the image was revealed.

Wynter stopped in her tracks.

It was her favourite painting, the one from Jonathon’s chambers. The one that held pride of place above the main fireplace in his retiring room: Alberon, Razi and herself, grinning happily in the garden.

Memories of childhood came pouring over her.

She recalled how she used to lie under the round study table, listening to Oliver and Jonathon and her father talking. She remembered kicking her feet and looking up at that painting through the tassels of the tablecloth. She was always amazed at how like the three of them it was. How unusually accurate a depiction of their true selves.

Razi was shown sprawled against a tree root, a book in his hand, looking down to where Albi and Wynter were sitting on the grass. Albi was cradling Shubbit, his beloved spaniel, and Wynter was looking out from the painting, her eyes full of curiosity. They looked so happy, like a proper family. Proper brothers and sister. She and Albi were about six at the time; Razi must have been ten.

The men righted the painting and started down the stairs with it.

Wynter was brought back to the present by her father’s hand on her shoulder. She looked up into his guarded face. He was watching the men carry the painting down the stairs, the happy faces of the three children disappearing into the gloom of the stairwell.

Turning suddenly on his heel, Lorcan led the way down the side stairs and out through the small rose garden, from where they crossed quickly to the other side of the main palace building. There was a smell of fire in the air, and thick smoke drifted through the gardens from somewhere behind the complex. As they skirted the pond, Wynter caught a glimpse of the line of men carrying their various packages and bundles around the back of the buildings, heading for the source of the smoke, heading for the fire. A group of empty-handed men trailed back in the opposite direction, smoke in their hair, tension on their faces.

Lorcan mounted the granite steps on the opposite side of the garden and proceeded down a black and white tiled corridor. Suddenly Wynter knew where they were going and her heart sank. The library.
Oh, Dad
, she thought,
not the library
. The roll of tools was suddenly an ominous weight on her shoulder.

Lorcan opened the door, and there it was, just as Wynter remembered it, with its everlasting smell of wood and polish and sun-baked dust.

Jonathon had made this his life’s work. In a time when books were regularly burnt, condemned, outlawed or banned, Jonathon had avidly gathered tomes and volumes of every type imaginable, in every language, of every creed, representing every philosophy known to man. He had been responsible for saving innumerable works of science and medical research from the many crusades, pogroms and purges that tore their way through the kingdoms around him. And then he had made the library freely available to anyone willing to pay a good scribe to make copies for their own use.

Standing in the enormous room, surrounded by the King’s magnificent collection, it was impossible not to be impressed by the immensity of the project, the scope of his vision. It was the wonder of the Europes, perhaps even of the world, a tremendous shining light in the increasingly black void of ignorance that was foisting itself on the populations of the other kingdoms.

Wynter paused at the door and watched her father as he came to a halt in the centre of the room. He put his roll of tools gently down onto the floor and stood looking all around him. Wynter heard his throat click, and his shoulders rose and fell with a deep sigh.

It wasn’t the books that he was looking at, though they were breathtaking in their own right. It was the bookshelves, the wall panels, the ornately carved ceiling beams. Thirteen years of Lorcan’s life had gone into this room. Thirteen years of steadily carving and sanding and polishing the hard redwood that now glowed in the early afternoon sun.

At the far end of the room was the wall panel that he’d been working on when Jonathon had sent him away. The entire frame was pricked out in detail, but less than a third of it had been carved. It showed Jonathon, Oliver and Lorcan standing on the wooded path, their hounds flowing around their legs, their bows slung across their backs. Razi was with them, and Wynter and Alberon were waving to them from the steps. At the two children’s feet lay some of the many cats that had been under Wynter’s care, all sublimely recognisable in their individual quirks and poses. Like all of Lorcan’s work, it was warm and domestic, lacking the stiff formality of much palace art. It hurt Wynter’s heart to see it. It spoke of days lost, never to be retrieved.

Lorcan had chronicled all their years here, using his incredible talent to draw them out in wood. Often at Jonathon’s specific request, many times at his own whim but with Jonathon’s blessing, Lorcan had detailed the births, the babyhoods and the childhood years of the palace children. There were countless flights-of-fancy poems, written by Jonathon and carved into the walls by Lorcan, so that the children would always remember when Razi rode his first horse, when Alberon caught his first fish, when Wynter broke her arm falling from a tree. The whole of their young lives were here, a permanent and indisputable reminder of what had gone before.

He had also perfectly captured the intense feeling of brotherhood and the happy camaraderie enjoyed by himself, Jonathon and Oliver.

Over and over again, all around the room, were images of Alberon and images of Oliver; their names were carved into numerous plaques, their crests incorporated into imaginary coats of arms. And now Wynter understood, completely understood, why it was that her father was here, the magnitude of the sacrifice that Jonathon had demanded from him in return for her future.

Lorcan spoke gruffly, with his back still turned to her. “You know what we are to do?”

“Yes,” she whispered, her voice small.

Lorcan cleared his throat and picked up his tools. “You start on the smaller bookshelves,” he said, “I’ll take the walls.” He made his way through the stacks to the far wall. Wynter didn’t shift from her position at the door. Unable to move, she watched as her father took a rough file from his roll of tools. He stood before the big wall panel for a moment, looking up at it. Then carefully and with great precision, he began to remove Alberon from the picture.

At the first grating rasp of Lorcan’s file on the wood, Wynter made her way to the smaller bookshelves in the far corner of the room. Carefully she chose her starting point, then bent and unrolled her tools. She selected a file, looked for a moment at the piece of art before her and then turned to her work, her mind and her face as empty as blank paper.

Secrets

O
ver the next two days, Wynter and her father rose early and retired late. They walked to the library before dawn, when the palace was a silent tomb, and returned to their rooms long after midnight when the halls were an echoing crypt. Wynter felt as though they were the only people left alive. They spent each day with their backs turned to each other, working solidly and without rest. Each night they fell into bed, exhausted, and slept like corpses until dawn. Even when they paused to eat, they did not talk. Lorcan would sit, his back to one of the big windows, his face blank, chewing stolidly at his food, draining his drink and then silently returning to work. It was as though he had retreated down a long corridor and only saw his daughter vaguely, from a distance, through a fog.

No one came near them all day, no one visited them at night. Even Jonathon had yet to make an appearance, and though Razi sent regular gifts of food and drink to their room, he was nowhere to be seen.

After two days and nights of utter silence, Wynter’s mouth felt fused, her lips stiff, as if they couldn’t recall how to speak. She thought that her head might actually burst with the pressure of her unspoken thoughts; they were trapped inside her, bumping against each other like beetles in a box.

Her work, which had always been her solace and her joy, failed her now. As soon as she’d become absorbed, as soon as her hands would achieve that steady, hypnotic rhythm so familiar to her, her mind would slip its leash and wander into territory it shouldn’t. Before she knew it, terrible images would rise up before her. She would see Lorcan, gasping in the dark, a wounded animal. Razi, grey faced and shaking, blood running down his stomach and pooling on the white cloth in her hand. Christopher, silent as a grave, his fist smashing into that man’s face, blood flying up in a fine spray. But most of all, she would see that awful chair, those instruments, and Razi rising up out of the smoke and flames, haloed in screams. Her chisel would slip, her hammer falter and she’d have to clench her teeth and her hands, and force herself to be still.