Chapter Twenty-Eight The Cobra and the Duke #2
From a shadowed stone corridor came a long scream. The screech of metal on stone went from shriek to whine, until the chair came into view. The figure in the chair looked as if he should be on the walls, draped in grey with his long, coal-black hair.
“Is that you with the blood pudding, boy?”
“My lord father,” said Marius, “it is not.”
The scream stopped. The chair’s spinning wheels ground to a halt. The father looked slowly up at the son, for the first time in seven years.
Even from the chair, he could still make Marius feel small. His lord father’s lessons, however, guaranteed Marius would never show weakness to any foe.
The duke’s tarnished-mirror eyes swept over Eric’s gold-embroidered garments. “Whose bedizened catamite is this?”
“You know, I like to think of myself as my own bedizened catamite,” remarked the Cobra. “Spiritually.”
Marius said, coldly, “Have a care how you speak of him.”
“Or what?” the duke snarled. “Is there anything more you can do to me!”
“Yes, Father. I can think of several things I could do.”
His father preferred an easy target. His bitter gaze roved back to Eric.
Anyone at court looking for an easy target would look anywhere but at the wicked marquis, but the Duke of Valerius had not visited the court in a decade.
He nodded at Eric’s hands covered in glittering rings, Eric’s hair sheened with chiming gold.
“Look at you!”
“Well, I can’t, can I?” asked Eric, very practical. “Someone’s broken all the mirrors.”
The Cobra gestured illustratively around at the gaping frames on the walls.
“You can still look at me, I suppose,” he added. “You’re welcome.”
“Do you call yourself a man?”
“Depends what you mean by that,” Eric said thoughtfully.
“Is a man a great thing to be? If you mean someone who will not be bullied, who will guard what he cares for against the world and care nothing for the world’s opinion, I try.
If you mean someone who scares women and children, who grinds down everyone he thinks weaker than him to paste for sheer love of destruction – then I suppose you think of yourself as a man. ”
I suppose you think of yourself as a man. Nobody had ever spoken to the Duke of Valerius thus in his whole life. He insulted others and they never dared retaliate. That was power, so Marius had been taught throughout his boyhood: to be violent past caring.
“That I should be brought so low that a thing like you would dare speak thus to me,” the duke gritted out. “That my own son brought me so low!”
His eyes blazed silver murder at Marius. The sheer concentrated blast of hatred made Marius take a step back, as though driven by a winter wind.
“If I were what I once was, you would never dare. You cannot imagine how strong I was!”
Eric knelt, laid a beringed hand gently on the duke’s grey lap blanket over his shattered legs, and shook his head.
“I read the past and the future. I saw you stand tall as a tower, and you towered over the weak with your hand raised,” Eric told Marius’s father, and his voice echoed as the Lady Rahela’s did sometimes.
As distant as a call from another world, amplified by stone and water, issuing from a cave or a tomb.
The voice of prophecy. Marius had never heard Eric sound like that before.
“All your life you stayed in your hole and gnawed on your family’s brutal history like an animal on its bones.
You never won a great battle, even against the worst impulses of your heart.
You never did anything but shrink into yourself and resent the world for your smallness.
You are what you always were. Nothing more than an obstacle to be overcome on your son’s path to greatness. ”
At court the Cobra used words to dazzle people, wrap them about with golden comfort and mislead them. He did the same now, though what he said was absurd. Eric’s voice could even silence the Duke of Valerius.
“I come as a courtesy, Father,” said Lord Marius.
“Oh yes.” The duke’s tone was bitter as seawater. “My courteous son!”
“One of the dead is at the door, and my friend says he is asking for me. We are Valerius. We alone remember the legend of the talking and thinking dead. We saw the last of that type into the pit centuries ago. They must obey the laws of the living. You are still lord of this manor. Would you have me invite the dead in?”
The duke cackled. “To be sure. Let the dead feast on your bones!”
A charming sentiment.
“I will bar him from our chambers,” Marius continued.
“I welcome death.”
“You can die any time you choose.” Marius inclined his head towards the armoury. “You have blades here.”
“I should not have to use a blade.” The duke flung the words at Marius’s back like the accusation they were. “I have a son! You should be my blade!”
The duke hunched in his chair, counting over his grievances as a miser counted gold. “Battles between father and son must come. The young lion hates the old. Blood runs hot with hate, and Valerius blood catches fire.”
The Cobra turned his head aside. Marius heard him murmur what must be an obscure and foreign incantation, protection against evil. It sounded like “nature documentaries”.
“That glittering fool at your side will never understand. No mortal can. They do not have the heart to endure it. We are the only ones. I know you feel it too, every day, raging through you like fire, consuming all reason. The divine wrath.”
The berserker rage, his father meant. The murderous fury that ran in Marius’s bloodline, that couldn’t be controlled.
Marius must control what couldn’t be controlled.
The cold steel of control was armour as well as a weapon. “Die any time you choose. But it will not be at my hand, or through my fault. That was my choice. It remains my choice.”
“All these years, and you never once regretted?”
Every day of every year. And yet.
Marius inclined his head in the smallest bow possible. “I remain, in all save this, your dutiful son.”
The duke hurled a helmet at him. There was no skill, only force, in the throw.
Marius stepped aside and gestured for Eric to leave first, wanting the Cobra out of this place of old blood and despair.
The helmet hit the stone wall and spun, red-gleaming steel not dented, staring up at them with empty eyes.
“Damn your icy eyes and frozen courtesies! You’re that woman’s whelp. I should have silenced her mealy mouth when you were in the cradle. You were meant to be my son, none of hers! Come back here. I’ll whip you until you’re my son. Come back here and… and…”
The duke’s voice made the cobwebs tremble like scared ghosts. The words thundered down the dark hallway like the steps of a great animal that might catch up to and devour them.
“Come back and kill me! Kill me! KILL ME!”
“With my family, it always ends in blood. Our sword’s name is Starving for Blood, and so are we.”
The training grounds were empty and full grey with the coming of evening, as if someone had mixed ink in with the air. Marius leaned against the barricade of an observatory point, staring at the dust where men had practised battle.
“War is the curse of the world and the blessing of my family. War is how we leave this world with honour, how we devote our rage in service to what we believe in. The First Duke, he who crowned the first king-in-waiting and banished the dead to the abyss, went down into the abyss to guard the land. Legend says he guards it still. The second duke, the third, they died in battle and were named heroes. For all the rest of our bloody history the Valerius line has striven to be heroes again. Every one of us fails.”
“Not you,” Eric broke in.
Eric of all people should know better.
Marius shook his head. “Valerius women often die in childbirth, which is better than being killed by your lord husband. Either way, the Valerius blood kills them. I have cousins who killed each other in a duel, which was a mercy too. Many a Valerius has tried to burn the manor down. A Valerius great-great-uncle turned to religion, since the First Duke said we of Valerius would be the chief servant of the Great God and his mouthpiece upon this earth. His speeches became very popular.”
“Oh, that’s great,” Eric encouraged. “That’s great to channel your feelings in a productive—”
“He personally burned witches and tortured sinners, starting a movement called the Eyam Inquisition.”
“That’s not ideal.”
“He preached the fire and brimstone of the ravine to crowded balconies, until one day he flung himself from the balcony to join the First Duke below. My grandfather married noblewomen, set tests for them and kept the dead brides who failed his tests in our dungeon beneath the manor. And my father was meant to marry my mother’s elder sister, but she died of a broken neck the night before her wedding day.
My mother had to marry the duke instead.
She had me, and she lived, and she had my sister, and she lived.
My father… was clear that between them there was neither affection nor—” Embarrassment strangled off the word.
“Desire,” said Eric.
The word seemed to hang oddly upon the air, as though written in fire.
In his cups, his father would speak disrespectfully of his mother often. In court years later, others spoke in the same way about Lady Katalin Domitia, Rahela’s mother. That made Marius pity Lady Katalin, which was a mistake.
Desire was a trap. Like love.
Marius nodded. “The fact my father took little interest in my mother kept her safe. She kept Caracalla from his notice. As the heir, I was raised by my father’s hand and at his side.
My lady mother was gracious to grant me what attention she could, while maintaining her distance for safety’s sake.
I was allowed to carry Caracalla to her chambers, before the door was barred at bedtime. ”
Eric shook his head, to argue against the obvious. “You would never harm Caracalla. You were a child—”