Well of the Damned (10 page)

Edan
knocked and entered. “Sorry to interrupt. I found something you
need to read.” He handed a piece of paper to Gavin. “This
was among the messages I’ve been reading through.”

Though
Gavin had been working on his reading skill the last three months, he
often struggled with cursive writing. The message, however, had been
written in a plain style and, although it took time to sound out some
of the words, he managed to read it himself.

1
Julis 1624

To
the warrant knight Gavin Kinshield:

Your
claim to the throne is false. Thendylath has an heir to the crown,
and his name is Brodas Canton, epithet Ravenkind. He is descended
from King Ivam, and we have proof of it. It was Ronor Kinshield and
the former Lordover Tern who conspired to keep our ancestor, the
infant Oriann, from claiming her right to rule. It was they who wrote
the law, proclaiming “whoever claims the king’s
bloodstone shall rule as king.”

We
demand you cancel this fraudulent coronation and restore the crown to
its rightful heir. Do not, and this land shall be flooded by
unceasing rain until you submit and acknowledge your wrongdoing.

Fabrice
Canton, mother to the true King of Thendylath

“Today’s
what?” Gavin asked. “The sixteenth of Renovare? This
letter was written two and a half months ago. Why haven’t I
seen this afore now?”

“Pryan
took that message for the ranting of a madwoman and not a real
threat,” Edan said. He’d hired the young man to help sort
through the hundreds of messages that had begun poring in as soon as
Gavin started cleaning out the palace in preparation for taking up
residence. “He put it with the other messages deemed trivial.
It was an understandable mistake. Do you know anything about this
girl Oriann? Could she have passed down a legitimate claim to the
throne?”

“No,”
Gavin said. “She couldn’t pass down what she didn’t
have. Her mother and father were siblings.”

“Ah,
yes,” Edan said, “I remember reading about that in Mr.
Surraent’s encyclopaedia, though he listed her name as Orlan.”

Gavin
snapped his fingers, recalling a task he’d promised to see to.
“Did you send the original encyclopaedia back to Ambryce?”
He’d enlisted a team of scriveners working in shifts to copy
the entire book in a plain script that he could read with his
unpracticed eye. The museum curator would be glad to have his prized
possession back in his arms.

“I
did, a few days ago. He should have it soon.” Edan relaxed in
the chair beside him. “Are the scribes finished writing the
index?”

“Not
yet, but they’re making good progress.”

Gavin’s
blood stilled in his veins when a thought came to him. Magic ability
was inherited, and Brodas Ravenkind had been a powerful mage with
black hair and brilliant blue eyes, like the two women Adro had seen.
Had Ravenkind’s mother been in his home? For what purpose?
Looking for Brodas? For Gavin? “Those two women Adro saw —
I wonder if this Fabrice Canton is one o’them.”

Edan blanched. “Perhaps she
came to challenge you for the crown.”

“Then
why wait until three weeks after the coronation?” Gavin asked.
“She could have contested it at the time, in front of
thousands.”

“What
else could she want here?”

“Maybe
she thinks we’re holding her son. Hell, if I’d seen this
letter two months ago, I could’ve told her about Ravenkind’s
death then and saved us all this rain.”

“If
she brought it, maybe you could stop it.”

“If
I knew how. Would you look for mentions o’rain brought by magic
in the encyclopaedia? You’d find it faster than me.”

“You’d
find it more quickly than I.”

“Huh?
No, I wouldn’t.”

Edan
smiled. “You said—”

“Awright,
I get it.” Edan had recently picked up Daia’s habit of
correcting his speech habits, as if talking with perfect grammar was
as important as what he was saying. They understood what he meant, so
their constant badgering to talk right was growing more annoying by
the day. “If we don’t stop her, we’ll lose the
crops.”

“You’ve
already appointed a Supreme Councilor of Agriculture. Kollie’s
ambitious and determined, and he knows plants. Let him worry about
the crops.”

“I
know, but it’s not a problem one person can manage. With all
the rain, the fields are probably flooded. If there’s no
harvest, there’s no grain or food crops for the winter. If
there’s no grass, there’s nothing to feed our livestock.
If our livestock starves, we have no meat. If we have no meat, grain
or vegetables—”

“I
get the idea,” Edan said. “What can you do that Kollie
can’t?”

Gavin
threw up his hands. “I don’t know, Edan. That’s why
I’m asking the Supreme Councilor o’State. You’re my
adviser. Tell me what I can do.”

“All
right, calm yourself. Give me the book. I’ll start searching
for magical rain tonight. In the morning, I’ll send some people
out to find this Canton woman and arrange a meeting between Kollie
and the scholars at the Institute of Science. Maybe they’ll
have some ideas about how to evaporate the water more quickly. In the
meantime, why don’t you try it?”

“Try
it? How?”

“Start
with a dish of water or something. I don’t know. You’re
the mage. In a matter of a few months, you learned to read shadows,
find people, back-travel, visit other realms of existence, summon a
demon, move objects, shoot lightning out of your sword... Try it,
Gavin. You might surprise yourself. If you can do it, surely other
mages can, too. We can send teams of them to farms across the country
to dry them out.”

Gavin
felt foolish. Of course, his friend was right. He’d learned to
use much of the magic King Arek had left him. If it were possible, he
would learn to do it and teach others the skill. “They’re
hazes, not shadows,” he grumbled.

“How’re
you coming with a detection spell for the bridge?” Edan asked.

“It
wasn’t difficult.” Gavin had found a reference to such a
spell in the encyclopaedia, which gave him an idea for storing the
spell in one of the gems he’d found in King Arek’s vault
in the basement. He didn’t know how to make himself invisible
as Ravenkind had done, but he’d borrowed the stable dog, cast a
spell to double its size, and had the stable hand walk it over the
bridge. The magic he’d put in the gem removed the size spell,
and the dog had set feet on the island at its normal size. “I
don’t know if it’ll reveal invisible women, but it’s
a start.”

Chapter 12

Aldras
Gar
,
the sword whispered in his mind.

Hands
grabbed him. Claws snapped the rings of his mail and dug painfully
into his flesh. He screamed. Ritol lifted him over its head and
hurled him again into the rocks.

He
landed so hard, he heard something crack. Pain exploded in his side.
“Daia,” he whispered. The pain lasted only an instant
before blackness engulfed him.

Gavin
awakened with a start and found himself in his own bed. His sword,
the finely crafted and enchanted blade he’d received as
valour-gild for saving the drowning wife of a blacksmith, leaned
against the wall to his left. The gems in its hilt were dark. He
heaved a sigh and relaxed back into the mattress and pillow to still
his pounding heart. Ritol was gone. He’d banished it from this
land, and everyone was safe.

“You’re
awake,” Feanna said.

With
elbow bent, Gavin propped his head on his palm and watched his wife
from their wide, four-poster bed as she stepped into the tub. Her
robe dropped to the floor. Though rain pattered softly on the
windows, the morning sunlight kissed her silky, bronzed skin with a
radiant glow. She was a lovely figure of a woman with curves in the
right places, and a delicate, womanly muscle tone — not like
the battlers he kept as guards, but like a woman who’d spent
her life working for what she needed. He appreciated that she wasn’t
overly modest about her nudity and didn’t try to cover herself
while she bathed.

Something
had changed in her. It wasn’t so significant a change that
others would notice, but over the three months since they were wedded
he’d become intimately familiar with every inch of her, and he
knew something was different. He unfocused his eyes and looked at her
with his hidden eye.

The
mystical, hidden eye was roughly between his eyebrows over the bridge
of his nose. Everyone had one, but few ever learned to use it. With
the help of the mage who’d enchanted his sword, he’d
learned to find people at great distances, identifying them by what
he called their haze — the unique, egg-shaped bubble every
living being had.

Feanna’s
haze had an unusual ring of white hovering around the brilliant
golden-yellow bubble, which he suspected had something to do with her
empathic gift. In the center of her haze, he glimpsed something new —
a tiny bubble so pale-white it looked almost clear. It was so small
and fleeting, he immediately lost sight of it. Unsure whether he’d
imagined it, he rose, still naked, and knelt by the side of the tub.
Her handmaiden, Eriska, averted her eyes and blushed, but Gavin
barely noticed her embarrassment. He put his hand over the spot where
he’d seen the peculiar bubble, just above her navel and beneath
the surface of her bath water.

“Gavin,
what are you doing?” Feanna asked, a laugh in her voice. She
scooped the scented water in a cupped palm and lifted it to her
shoulder to let it wash down her arm.

He
shut his eyes and examined her with his hidden eye again while he
felt for the tiny bubble with his haze. Almost indistinct from
Feanna’s haze, it had a delicate softness to it, like eider
down. “Your haze — it’s different. There’s
something—-” He gasped when he realized what it was.
“You’re pregnant!”

Her
smile fell away, and she stilled. “Don’t trifle with me,
Gavin. I couldn’t take it. I skipped my last menses, but that’s
happened before.”

“I’m
not trifling with you.” With his haze, he tentatively touched
it again, so gently. Yes, this had to be the newly formed haze of a
baby. He grinned as the realization sank in. “I’m going
to be a papa.” Exhilaration and joy threatened to burst through
his skin. Leaping to his feet, he thrust his fists into the air. “I’m
going to be a papa,” he shouted.

Feanna
began to cry, covering her face with her hands.

Gavin
fell to his knees beside her once again and took her wrists to gently
pull her hands away. “Aw, sweetheart. What’s wrong? Don’t
you want this?”

She
nodded and cried harder. “More than anything. I’m so
happy,” she managed to say between sobs. She put her wet arms
around his neck and held him tightly, desperately.

He laughed again and kissed her
cheek soundly several times. She released him, laughing and crying in
the tub. He couldn’t remember the last time he was so happy. “A
papa.” He leaped to his feet again and shouted, “Papaaaaaaaa!”
By now, he was fairly sure the news was spreading through the palace,
starting with his own manservant, Quint, waiting outside with the
clothes and boots he would wear that day, or the battler standing
guard at the door. No doubt the whispers were at this very moment
igniting excitement and relief throughout the palace and soon the
city — an heir would be born to ensure the kingdom didn’t
go another two hundred years without a monarch.

“Are
you sure, Gavin?” she asked, standing. “We can’t
announce this news if you’re not absolutely certain.” Her
grinning handmaiden handed her a towel and helped her step out of the
tub, and she began to dry herself.

“I
am. Completely, utterly,” he said, unwilling to admit to that
sliver of doubt in his mind. He’d never sensed a woman’s
pregnancy this way before. It could have been something else, he
supposed, but what? An illness? A tumor? No. No. Those possibilities
he pushed from his mind. A baby it was, and that was that. His baby.

He
took his wife, mostly wet and wrapped in a towel, into his arms and
spun her around so that she squealed with both fear and joy. They
laughed together and kissed, and after Eriska had stepped out of the
room and shut the door behind her, he took Feanna to the bed and made
love to her.

“Can
you tell whether it’s a boy or a girl?” she asked later,
lying in his arms.

He
shifted, moving her gently aside. “Let me try again. Hazes
aren’t male or female, but when I use the healing magic, I can
feel if the person’s a man or woman.” Sitting
cross-legged beside her, he placed his hands on her belly and shut
his eyes. His hands began to warm, but they didn’t heat up the
way they did when he was healing an injury. There was movement under
her skin, like the flow of a river, but it went in both directions —
her blood, maybe. He identified the female nature of her body, which
permeated every drop of blood, every speck of tissue and bone, and
focused on what it felt like and how different it was from his
maleness. There was more he could sense if only he had more strength
in his magic.