Chapter XVII Rimmed in Red
XVII
Rimmed in Red
Waltrude had mixed the wine and water herself, but still the leech did not drink.
The carafe between them remained untouched.
He sat across from her at the table in the little princeling’s chambers, close enough that her hand could reach out to touch him, ghosting through his beige robes.
Yet she did not dare. He was not a creature to desire comfort, or to offer it.
So Waltrude merely looked on as Pliny’s stare, which was unblinking, grew glazed with a grief that seemed quite unlike him.
He was also not a creature to linger on what had been lost.
“You have seen her, have you not?” At last, the leech’s eyes slid to Waltrude.
“Seen, no,” Waltrude replied, “but heard—yes, heard. A great many things I have heard. I have thought to ask you which are true.”
“All and none,” Pliny said. “Words are only representations of things, flitting shadows on the walls of our minds. I can tell you what I was given to witness, but it will still not be exactly the truth.”
Waltrude did not like this version of Pliny, morose and submersed in enigmatic philosophies. With a stifled sigh of irritation, Waltrude said, “Then speak.”
The leech was silent a moment, his gaze watchful.
As lost in obscurities as he seemed, he was still canny and missed nothing, not even Waltrude’s quiet, ornery exhale.
I have known him too long, she thought. Seven years was hardly a notch on the long white branch of her life, and yet—We have become as accustomed to each other’s flaws as our virtues.
“You departed after the masque,” said Pliny, jolting her from these thoughts, “with the young prince Tisander. You took him straight to bed, and remained in his chambers for the night—yes?”
Waltrude nodded. “Yes.”
“And did he sleep in peace?”
“Yes,” said Waltrude, “as a dormouse in its winter nest.”
“Then he heard nothing from the feasting hall, or from the corridors, or the parapet?”
“No.” Waltrude frowned. “Nor did I.”
“That is for the best,” said Pliny. “He will not be haunted by such horrors as we witnessed, and he will still regard his father as a just and noble man.”
This greatly alarmed Waltrude. Her heart beat faster, and the skin of her neck prickled with cold. “I grow no younger, Pliny the leech. Tell me—what transpired that night while I sat ignorant in the dark?”
Pliny drew up his narrow shoulders around his ears, giving him the look of a bald, dour vulture on its perch.
When he spoke, his voice was low and bitter.
“The success of the lady’s masque did not presage what was to come,” he said.
“At the outset, all was joyous, at least at the prince’s table.
The guests came one by one to give their honors.
The prince and the lady amused themselves especially well with the Master of Hearts and his lady wife—I am told she was once handmaiden to the queen.
” He paused, his lips thinning into a grimace. “Much wine was drunk by all.”
“By all?” Waltrude shook her head. “No, it cannot be. The prince does not indulge himself in such mortal pleasures. He has always been ascetic by nature, heedful and restrained.”
“Yet is he so restrained? For years he has carried on with his mistress while his legal wife languishes in a locked tower. We who know him well can see this as love—as heed of another duty. He has sworn a vow with his heart that even the laws of man cannot trespass.” Pliny’s voice grew yet lower. “But others will not think the same.”
Waltrude’s chest had become almost unbearably tight. “Go on.”
There was a beat of silence, and the leech again averted his gaze as he spoke.
“The last house to come pay honors was the great House of Eyes. Lord Thrasamund approached with his son and heir, Childeric—a man of good, if facile, humor, and graciousness to compensate for his lack of wit. Yet Thrasamund had none of his usual jocular disposition. He was remote and cold, even while asking for gold and arms from the Crown. And perhaps…perhaps if the prince had not been too deep in his goblet, he would have recognized this for the ill portent that it was. Had he only quarreled in words with Lord Thrasamund instead.”
“What was Lord Thrasamund’s grievance?” Waltrude recalled him very dimly as a pleasant, boisterous man, not given to sulking.
“He did not say,” Pliny replied, “though it is plain enough for those with half a mind to see. His daughter was in attendance. The dowager lady of the House of Blood, Ygraine.”
Ygraine. Waltrude remembered her from Agnes’s calamitous wedding to Lord Fredegar: a rather nondescript slip of a woman, pretty enough though no great beauty, but well mannered as befit a lady of her stature.
And she had already performed the foremost duty of her station: She had given her husband a son, and the House of Blood an heir.
Her late husband, Waltrude amended. Indeed she remembered as well the horrors of the scene in the dungeon.
Ygraine on her knees, a dreadful sight, and even more dreadful as the moments ticked on.
As the blood poured and Lord Unruoching choked.
She had swooned then, and fainted, and her retainers had carried her out.
Waltrude had not imagined she would ever hear of the woman again.
She knew well what happened to ladies whose minds were lost to grief.
“She has remained all these years a ghost of herself,” Pliny said, “mired in her sadness. Time has not strengthened her spirit. She has only withered. I saw so myself at the feast.”
Waltrude looked down at her hands. They were ancient hands, more bone than flesh, hands that had served two kings, reared two princes, and attended two queens.
The kings had both gone uncaringly to their vices.
The princes were gentle boys who had become men she struggled now to recognize. And the queens had died.
“What of her son?” Waltrude asked. “The Master of Blood. Gamelyn.”
“I have not known him since he was a boy. He was sweet then, his only flaw being the ordinary impatience and impertinence of youth. But I cannot say how he has grown. Manhood can as easily corrupt virtues as it can engender them.”
“Yes,” Waltrude said. “That I understand well myself. I ask only for the sake of the little girl…Meriope. Her husband’s character will shape the rest of her life. If she is to be happy, it will be all to his credit. And if she is to suffer—”
“It is not Lord Gamelyn alone who steers her fate,” Pliny cut in.
A rare thing for him—he was nothing if not always courteous, rigidly observant of etiquette.
“He did not wish for this. That much I could read on his face. What man wants a bride who was not so long ago weaned from her mother’s breast?
She is closer to an infant than to a woman. His disgust showed itself openly.”
Waltrude drew a breath.
“Will he be cruel to her for that? Perhaps. I am no longer given to know what occurs within the halls of the House of Blood. His father, the late Lord Unruoching, was a coarse and barbarous man, all the more cruel for his stupidity. Yet his grandfather, the late Lord Fredegar, was just and kind, possessing every virtue that a man in his position ought. Has Gamelyn drunk the poison of his father? Or sipped the nectar of his grandfather? I confess I cannot say.”
“You said that Gamelyn alone does not steer the girl’s fate,” Waltrude reminded him. She had to suppress a shiver. “How do you mean?”
The leech shifted, leaning forward over the table and resting his chin in his folded hands. His soberness could almost be felt, like an emanation of chill air.
“I mean,” he said lowly, “that this matter was settled at the Crown’s discretion.
The House of Berengar is still preeminent in all things.
The king may be gone to madness and gluttony, but the prince knows the truth of this arrangement: not a marriage, but a treaty.
Not a bride, but a hostage. The girl is a pawn in her father’s game for peace.
So if there is sympathy between the House of Blood and the Crown, Meriope will be treated accordingly.
And if relations sour, she will pay the price for it. ”
All along Waltrude had known this. How could she not? She had seen the tortures inflicted upon women for the crimes of men. Even queens were not exempt. And the princess in the tower knew this, too. For all her grief, her mind was sharp, her teeth sharper still.
“The prince, then,” she said thickly. “Pliny…what has he done?”
“He has sacrificed his daughter for his love. He has wrecked his honor for his heart. And he has lost the sympathy of two great houses. A crime committed in the haze of drunkenness, in the fever of passion. I did not think him capable of such an act. I must see it only as a lapse. A mistake that will not be repeated, not a true reflection of his character. Else I would…”
Pliny’s voice faded into silence.
“You are wise to arrest yourself before treason, Your Scrupulousness,” Waltrude bit out.
“No man is without fault, even such a one as our prince. What is this terrible act, which you cannot bear to even put to words? If you are even half as old as I am, surely you have seen worse. What transpired in your old master’s halls—”
“The blackest and bitterest tragedy, yes,” Pliny cut in. “The anguish of Lord Fredegar’s death has not worn thin. Yet that crime was already repaid twice over, with Unruoching’s blood, and now with the young girl’s maidenhead. The prince has taken more than was his right.”
“To the minds of some men,” Waltrude murmured, “everything that a prince takes is his right.”