Wrath Of The Medusa (Book 2) (40 page)

It was an ordinary knife.  Not a hunting knife, not a throwing blade, just an ordinary knife for slicing meat on a plate.  But it was not on the plate.  The tray of food and drink sat on the chest by Hepdida’s bed, next to the bowl of water they used to wet her lips and sponge her brow.

The knife was in her hand.

She was kneeling on the bed.  All four ropes that had tethered her lay slack upon the bed.  Their cut ends hung from hempen bracelets around her wrists and ankles. 

The knife was in her hand.

She gripped the handle with knuckle whitening force.  The blade was turned inwards, its point resting just below her ribcage, slightly to the left and tilted to point upwards.

The three of them could never cross the room in time.  Before they’d taken one step the girl could have driven the knife home in a wound that no Grace of the Goddess would heal.

“Don’t Hepdida!” Niarmit heard herself say.

“I’m sorry,” the girl began.  The streak of white in her hair was broader now, another pustule blistering by her cheek.  She looked thin and ill and jaundiced yellow and she was crying, sobbi
ng as she held the knife against her night shift.  “I’m sorry.”

“No!” Niarmit cried.  “Don’t you
dare.  Don’t you dare be sorry.  Hepdida, this is not going to be how we say goodbye.”

“I have to,” The girl was shaking her head. 

Niarmit sensed Kimbolt trying to edge sideways past her, but Hepdida saw him move and jabbed at herself with the blade.  He stopped then, a little circle of red staining the nightdress where she had pricked her skin.

“Don’t you see,” Hepdida went on.

“No I fucking don’t.  This is not our way, this is not the way of the Goddess.”

“I’m holding you back.  Your people need you.”

“Fuck the people.  If I can’t save you I’m not saving any of them.” 

“You’re needed elsewhere, and you’re staying here watching me slowly die.
It’s wrong, Niarmit, all wrong. I’m tied to a bed to keep you all safe, half the time I’m a raving maniac and I can see what I have become. To be demented and aware, do you know how horrible that is? I don’t want to do it anymore. I should have died months ago when Sturmcairn fell. Maybe this is how the Goddess punishes those who cheat death.”

Niarmit hissed some visceral rebuttal of the blasphemy.  “No,” she said.  “Put the knife down Hepdida.  I won’t let you.”

Hepdida shook her head scattering tears on the bedclothes.  “You can’t stop me Niarmit.  I’m dying and you can’t stop that either. Let me make my own choices.”

“You’re not dying child!”  Elise spoke a voice of soothing calm.  She stepped forward, past Niarmit and Kimbolt, two, th
ree strides across the room. Hepdida watched her, mouth open, in surprise.  “This disease won’t kill you.”

The knife was loose in Hepdida’s hand.  Elise was close enough to reach for it.  Sh
e stretched out and seized the Princess’s other hand in a firm grip.

“How do you know that?” Hepdida asked suspicion mingled with hope.

“Because it didn’t kill me,” Elise replied, throwing back her hood.  “It was a close run thing,” she admitted, shaking free a tumble of pure white hair.  “But it didn’t kill me and it is not going to kill you.”

The knife fell from Hepdida’s hand onto the bedclothes
.  Niarmit raced to embrace her, but Elise had already gathered the girl in her arms and was rocking her gently back and forth.

“Seneschal!” 

Quintala
walked on through the cloisters, pretending she had not heard the unctuous hail.

“I say, Seneschal Quintala.”
This time the call was accompanied by hurrying footsteps across the flagstones.

With weary resignation the half-elf turned to face her pursuer
. Bishop Sorenson’s brow wore a deep frown, but his lips stretched out a wide smile.  He bobbed before the half-elf with anxious gratitude, too pleased at her acknowledgement to say why he had stopped her.

“Yes
, your reverence?” Quintala prompted.

“I just w
anted to ask, the mistress Hepdida, how is she?”

“She is well, better than she has been.”

“Oh good, that is very good, oh yes, Goddess be praised.”

“I think we have our herbalist friend to thank more so than the Goddess. Following her ministrations the Princess is sleeping more easily and her moments of lucid wakefulness grow longer and more frequent.”

“I see the hand of the Goddess in all things, Seneschal,” Sorenson hurried to annex the credit to his deity.  “People, even the Mistress Elise, are but the vessels through which she performs her wonders.”

Quintala frowned, suddenly impelled to puncture the Bishop’s certainty.  “And what wonder did she seek to perform through you, your reverence, when she led you to leave your dinner plate within the Princess’s reach?”

Sorenson shrunk back at the jibe no less piercing for the softness of the half-elf’s tone.  “I…. er…. That is  I can’t think how it happened, Seneschal.”

“By all accounts your reverence, a fraction of a second’s delay and the Princess would have been beyond anybody’s cures. Her life taken by her own hand and your knife.”

Sorenson waved his hands, splayed fingered, as
if to stem the flood of accusation.  “I was sure I had not left it there. I was not even by her bed when Fenwell came to summon me.”  He saw Quintala’s eyebrow raised in doubtful query and hurried on.  “Still, the thing that matters is she did not do it.  Mistress Elise’s arrival saved her from the sin of suicide.”

“It would have been a very convenient suicide.” Quintala was in no hurry to let the matter drop.  “I know how much you fretted that the Que
en would not ride to Nordsalve, all because of the Princess’s sickness.  Hepdida’s death would have been so convenient for the cause of Nordsalve. You could not have wished for a more fortuitous act of self-destruction.”

Sorenson recoiled as if struck.  “You cannot think that, Seneschal, you sur
ely cannot believe….” A still more horrible thought creased his features in dread.  “The Lady Niarmit, she cannot believe… she cannot believe that of me.  I am a man of the cloth.  I would never…”

“I cannot say what her M
ajesty believes, your reverence.  We are just all grateful for the charms that have so far protected the Princess.”

“And she will soon be better?”

“She makes steady progress, but recovery from this illness is a journey not an event, your reverence.”

“And the Lady Niarmit?”

“What of her Majesty?”

“Do you think she might be minded
now to consider my Lady Isobel’s petition?”

“Ah!” Quintala cried in triumph.  “
You hope that if not  Hepdida’s death, then now Hepdida’s health might free the Queen’s attention for the affairs of Nordsalve.”

Sorenson grimaced.  “I can only repeat, Seneschal,
that I had no part, beyond some unfathomable accident, in the Lady Hepdida’s brush with self-destruction.   However, I make no excuses in representing the interests of my Lady Regent and her people.”  He sighed.  “If the emissary from Nordsalve had been less urgent, his news more auspicious, then I am sure I would have a clearer recollection of what I did when Fenwell summoned me from Hepdida’s room.   But I am grown old and it is all a blur.”

Quintala snorted,
“strange to think that your Lady’s herald was arriving by the front gate at almost the same time mistress Elise arrived at the back gate.” 

“At least one of them brought good news,”
Sorenson muttered.    “My Lady Isobel is now beset from within as well as without.”

“Yes,” Quintala mus
ed.  “What is this Lord’s name, the one who troubles your lady so?”

“
Torsden,” Sorenson spat the name out.  “He is a brute, a coarse oaf.  As fierce in battle as the much lamented Prince Hetwith, but with none of the charm or grace.”

“But still he has ambitions above his station.”

“The rogue would make himself regent.  He presses his suit upon my poor lady even as we speak.  He claims Nordsalve must look to itself for its own protection, that a woman alone cannot rule the province, that she needs a man at her side.  A man to guide her and to teach the boy.”

“That is an opinion which will not find much welcome in Queen Niarmit’s ears.”

“That is why my Lady Isobel is most anxious that the Lady Niarmit should visit her court, to show Torsden and his thuggish allies that Nordsalve has not been abandoned.”

“Maybe the Queen would prefer to have
Torsden be her ally in the North, in place of Isobel.  In truth she has got little succour or support from your Lady Regent.”  Quintala smiled at the horror her suggestion wrought on the Bishop’s face. His features twisted in distress as he tried to discern if the half-elf was teasing him.

“You cannot be serious, Senesch
al.  If Torsden should become Regent, I would not answer for the safety of the young Prince.  Those who stand in Torsden’s way have a tendency to disappear.”

She clapped him on the shoulder.  “Ah, your reverence, you might have hit upon the magic formula. 
You could tell her Majesty that a dead prince’s widow has an unwelcome suitor and I am not sure you would move her to action, but tell her a child is in danger from a murderous bully? Aye, you may just get your petition heard.”

“Is it fresh?”

Kimbolt looked at the crushed snow in the bowl, sucking the last vestige of heat from his hands through the porc
elain.  “It is entirely fresh, Mistress Elise,” he assured her.

The herbalist rose from the bed, on which Hepdida lay sleeping, and came to inspect the Captain’s burden.  “And your hands were cleansed?”

“I washed them in iced water and gathered the snow up with my bare fingers.” Kimbolt could barely feel his hands, beyond a numb sensation of swollen fingers cupped around the bowl.  In the meagre warmth of Hepdida’s sick room he was disappointed at how his painful harvest of ice was melting.  For all his efforts at gathering and compacting it, the snow melt seemed likely to rise to barely a fifth of the bowl’s depth.  Elise noticed the shortfall too.

“You will have to go out for more, Captain,” she said.

“Of course.”

The readiness with which he agreed drew a sharp look of suspicion from the herbalist.  “It is essential the Princess has only the purest freshest water past her lips, Captain,” she said, bright eyes glaring within her pockmarked face.

“I know.  I will do whatever is necessary.”

She nodded
and took the bowl from him to set it on the dresser.

“How has she been?” Kimbolt asked, looking at Hepdida’s sleeping form.  The
white streak in her hair remained, but the blistering pustules had already began to dry and shrink without having broken.  Her skin, while still sallow was a lot less jaundiced than it had been but more than that, her sleep was restful and untroubled.  “Has she woken or said anything?”

Elise shook her head.  “Not since this morning.”

“At least she was free of the demons then, more like her old self at last.”  The sentiment felt foolish even as it slipped from Kimbolt’s lips. Her old self?  What was her old self?  The servant girl from Sturmcairn could never return, too much had changed for Hepdida, for who she was and what she had known. 

“We can never go back, Captain,” Elise said
her words echoing his thoughts.  “Things cannot be as they were. No matter how much we might wish it.”

They stood a moment, the herbalist who wore the scars of sickness upon her face, and the soldier who bore the wounds of treachery within his heart.

“How old were you, when the sickness caught you?”  Kimbolt immediately tried to retract the intrusive question. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”

“Twelve, Captain.  I was twelve, my sister was nine.”  She looked him in the eye. “How old do you think I am now?”

“I couldn’t say.” He tried to be gallant.

“Go on Captain, how old?”

He shrugged then had a guess and subtracted a decade for chivalry’s sake.  “Thirty four?”

“I’m twenty nine.”

“Oh.”

“The disease was caught with me much later than with the Princess here.  My face a mass of blistered bleeding bo
ils which wept more freely than my eyes.  Time may heal all wounds, but they are still wounds nonetheless.”

“Your sister, what happened…”

“Rancine?” Elise tasted the name on her lips, toying with a sound made unfamiliar through neglect.  “She died.  Perhaps it was better that way.  She was always the pretty one, father’s favourite. She could not have born to be ugly.”

“You are not ugly,” Kimbolt stumbled in an
increasingly inaccurate search for the right thing to say.  “You have,  you have…”

“An inner beauty?” she raised an eyebrow at him.

“I’m sorry mistress Elise, for what you have suffered.”

She shrugged, “why was it your fault?”

“No, at least I don’t think so, though I feel sure I am to blame for most of the ills that beset us.”

“Don’t flatter yourself Captain. Wallowing in guilt is a most unbecoming habit.”

“I don’t wallow…” He began.

“Aye sure you don’t and dogs don’t bark at me in the street,” she sniffed.  “Ah, your relief has arrived.”

Kimbolt looked across at the doorway where Kaylan had slipped unheard into the room.  The Captain gave the thief an ingenuous smile of welcome, pleased beyond measure at the arrival of a newcomer to rescue him from the caltrop littered field of conversation with Elise.

“Another fool who thinks he is the root of all evil, I trust you two are not going to have some ‘I’m guiltier than thou’ sparring match.”

Kaylan gave Kimbolt a quizzical look, unsettled by the herbalist’s acerbic tone.  The captain returned a cheerful grin as he walked past.  “Good luck with the snow gathering, Kaylan.” He urged, touching the back of his frozen hand to the thief’s cheek.  Kaylan started at the chilling contact and looking back Kimbolt was sure he saw a smile break across Elise’s ravaged features.