The Stone of Farewell (83 page)

“Of course,” Elias nodded, calm again. “Of course.”

Scowling Guthwulf had gone away, but the king stayed for some time, staring out into the cloudy sky, listening to the wind as carefully as if he understood its mournful tongue. Rachel, Mistress of Chambermaids, was beginning to feel very uncomfortable in her cramped hiding place. Still, she had learned what she needed to know. Her mind was full of ideas quite beyond her usual concerns: lately, Rachel the Dragon had found herself thinking thoughts she had never dreamed possible.

Wrinkling her nose against the harsh but familiar scent of polishing grease, she peeked out of the crack between the stone doorframe and the warped wooden door. The king was still as a statue, gazing off into nothingness. Rachel was again filled with horror at her own transgression. Spying like the most slatternly, brought-in-just-for-the-holy-days servant girl! And on the High King! Elias was the son of her beloved King John—even if he couldn't hope to match up to his father—and Rachel, the Hayholt's last bastion of rectitude, was spying on him.

The thought make her feel faint and weak; the odoriferous grease did not help. She leaned against the wall of the bell-ringer's closet and was grateful for its narrow confines. Between the stacks of rope, the bell hooks and grease pots and brick walls standing close at either shoulder, she could not topple over even if she tried.

 

She had not meant to spy, of course—not really. She had heard the voices as she was examining the woefully dirty stairs at Green Angel Tower's third floor. She had stepped quietly out of the spiraling passageway into a curtained alcove so as not to seem to be listening to the king's business, for she had recognized Elias' voice almost immediately. The king had climbed past, speaking as though to the grinning monk Hengfisk who accompanied him everywhere, but his words had seemed like babbling nonsense to Rachel. “Whispers from Nakkiga,” he had said, and “songs of the upper air.” He had spoken of “listening for the cry of the witnesses,” and “the day of the hilltop bargain coming soon,” and of things even less understandable.

The pop-eyed monk followed at the king's bootheels, as he always did these days. The mad words of Elias washed over him, but the monk only nodded ceaselessly as he scrambled along behind—the king's grinning shadow.

Fascinated and excited in a way she had not felt for some time, Rachel had found herself following through the shadows a few ells behind the pair as they climbed what seemed a thousand steps up the tower's long stairway. The king's litany of incomprehensibles had continued until at last he and the monk disappeared into the bell chamber. Feeling her age and the throbbing of her infirm back, she had remained on the floor below. Leaning against the oddly-tiled stone walls, fighting for breath, she had wondered again at her own boldness. An open workroom lay before her. A great pulley had been spread in pieces on top of a sawdust-mantled block; a sledge lay on the floor nearby, as though its owner had disappeared in midswing. There was only the main room and a curtained alcove beside the stairwell: thus, when the monk suddenly came pattering back down the steps, there had truly been no choice but to bolt for the alcove.

At the far end of the niche she had discovered a wooden ladder leading up into darkness. Knowing she was caught between the king above and whoever his cupbearer might bring from below, she had seen no other choice but to climb upward in search of a more secure hiding place: anyone walking too close to the alcove might brush the curtain aside and reveal her, delivering Rachel up to humiliation or worse.

Worse. The thought of the heads rotting like black fruit atop Nearulagh gate spurred her old bones up the ladder, which turned out to lead straight to the bell-ringer's closet.

So it had not really been her fault, had it? She had not truly meant to spy—she had been virtually forced to listen to Elias' confusing conversation with the Earl of Utanyeat. Surely good Saint Rhiap would understand, she told herself, and would intercede on Rachel's behalf when it came time to read from the Great Scroll in Heaven's anteroom.

 

She peered out through the door-crack again. The king had moved to another window—this one facing north, into the churning black heart of the approaching storm—but otherwise seemed no nearer to leaving. Rachel was beginning to feel panicky. People used to say that Elias spent many sleepless nights at work with Pryrates in Hjeldin's Tower. Was it the king's particular madness to walk around in towers until the break of dawn? It was only afternoon now. Rachel felt another bout of dizziness. Was she to be trapped in here forever?

Her eyes, wildly darting, lit upon something carved on the inside of the bolted door and widened in surprise.

Somebody had scratched the name
Miriamele
into the wood. The letters were cut deeply, as though whoever had done it had been trapped like Rachel, fidgeting away the time. But who would be here in the first place that might do such a thing?

For a moment she thought of Simon, remembering how the boy would climb like an ape and get into trouble that others could not even find. He had loved Green Angel Tower—wasn't it just a bit before King John died that Simon had knocked over Barnabas the sexton downstairs? Rachel smiled faintly. The boy had been a very devil.

Thinking of Simon, she abruptly remembered what the chandler's boy Jeremias had said. The smile dissolved from her face.
Pryrates.
Pryrates had killed her boy. When she thought of the alchemist, Rachel felt a hatred that burned and bubbled like quicklime, a hatred quite unlike anything she had ever felt in her life.

Rachel shook her head, dizzied. It was horrifying to think about Pryrates. What Jeremias told her about the hairless priest gave her ideas, black thoughts she had not known she was capable of thinking.

Frightened by the power of her feelings, she forced her attention back to the wall carving.

Squinting at the careful letters, Rachel decided that, whatever other mischief Simon had gotten into, this carving was not his doing. It was far too neat. Even with Morgenes' instruction, Simon's writing had wandered across a page like a drunken beetle. These letters were made by someone educated. But who would carve the princess' name in such an out of the way place? Barnabas the sexton used this closet, no doubt, but the idea of that sour, juiceless, leathery old lizard carving Miriamele's name laboriously into the door beggared even Rachel's imagination, and Rachel could imagine men committing virtually
any
evil or stupidity if freed from the proper influence of women. Even so, sexton Barnabas as a pining lover was too much to conceive.

Her thoughts were wandering, Rachel chided herself angrily. Was she indeed so old and fearful that she must distract herself at a time when she had many important things to think about? A plan had been forming in her mind since the night she and the other chambermaids had rescued Jeremias, but a part of her wanted to forget about it, wanted things to just be the way they once were.

It was harder and harder to hide from such decisions these days. Confronted with the runaway chandler's lad, Rachel and her charges had eventually realized that there was no solution but to help him escape, so they had smuggled him out of the Hayholt one day's end, Jeremias disguised as a chambermaid returning home to Erchester. As she watched the ill-used boy go limping to safety, Rachel had been seized by a revelation: the evil haunting her home could be ignored no longer. And, she now thought grimly, where the Mistress of Chambermaids saw that which was foul, she must make it clean.

Rachel heard the scuffling of heavy boots across the white stone floor of the bell-chamber and risked a peek through the narrow opening. The king's green-cloaked form was just disappearing through the doorway. She listened as his steps descended and grew fainter, then waited a long while after they had passed from her hearing altogether before she clambered back down the ladder. She stepped out from behind the curtain into the airiness of the stairwell, then patted at her forehead and cheeks, which were damp with perspiration despite the cold stone. Stepping carefully and quietly, she began to descend.

The king's conversation had told her much that she needed to know. Now, she must only wait and think. Surely planning such a thing could not be half as complicated as commanding a spring cleaning? And, in a way, that was what she planned, was it not?

Her old bones aching, but her face stretched in an odd smile that would have set her chambermaids to shuddering, Rachel walked slowly down Green Angel Tower's endless stairway.

Binabik's eyes would not meet Sludig's across the cookfire. Instead, the troll swept his sad pile of knuckle-bones back into their bag. He had cast them several times that morning. The results seemed to give him little pleasure.

Sighing, the troll pocketed the sack, then turned and poked in the ashes of the fire with a stick, digging out their breakfast, a cache of nuts that he had located and dug from the frozen ground. It was a bitterly cold day, and their saddlebags were empty of food: Binabik was not above stealing from squirrels.

“Do not speak,” the troll said abruptly. After an hour of silence, Sludig had just opened his mouth. “Please, Sludig, for a moment be saying nothing. Just the flask of kangkang from your pocket I am asking for.”

The Rimmersman sadly handed over the flask. Binabik took a long swallow, then wiped the sleeve of his jacket across his mouth. The sleeve made another pass across the troll's eyes.

“A promise I made,” he said quietly. “I was asking for two night's fires and you gave them. Now I must be fulfilling the oath that of all I would be most happily breaking. We must take the sword to the Stone of Farewell. ”

Sludig began to speak, but instead accepted the flask back from Binabik and took a deep draught.

Qantaqa returned from a hunting foray to discover the troll and the Rimmersman wordlessly bundling their few belongings onto the packhorses. The wolf watched them for a moment, then uttered a low moan of distress and danced away. She curled up at the edge of the clearing and peered solemnly at Binabik and Sludig over the fence of her brushy tail.

Binabik lifted the White Arrow out of the saddle bag and held it up, then pressed its wooden shaft against his cheek; the arrow shone more brightly than the powdery snow lying all around. He tucked the arrow back into the bag. “I will be back for you,” the little man said to no one present. “I will find you.”

He called for Qantaqa. Sludig swung up into his own saddle and they vanished into the forest, the string of pack horses following. The downsifting snow began to fill in their footprints. By the time the muffled sounds of their passage faded, all trace of their presence in the clearing was gone.

Sitting in one place lamenting his fate wasn't going to do him much good, Simon decided. In any case, the sky was becoming unpleasantly dark for mid-morning and snow was beginning to fall more heavily. He stared ruefully at the looking glass. Whatever Jiriki's mirror might be, the Sithi prince had spoken truth when he said that it would not bring him magically to Simon's side. He put it back in his cloak and stood up, rubbing his hands.