Chapter 43
FORTY-THREE
Though it is customary that Highness be followed by the familial name
of a non-blood member of the Khaimlic royal house, rare exceptions can
be made to address one with a given name, when either feud or other
incident creates desired distance from one’s own heritage.
Khaimlic History and the Centuries of War with Cyngalon,
E. van der Vos
FORTY-THREE
The Great Hall parted as they entered, the heralds trailing off into silence.
Silence that spread as Osian strode up the central aisle to the royal table, climbed the dais and set Gelens’ head squarely before Aldreda.
‘Lord Gelens is dead.’ He did not have to raise his voice for it to carry. ‘As you can see, it was the work of the sorcerer.’
The head was barely recognisable: a mess of flesh and roots Osian had pried from the remnants. There was enough of a patch of greying hair, and the metal of an earring.
Aldreda, risen, sent Edeva silently to Freda and away. ‘Osian, what in the—’
‘The killer is someone in this room.’
Murmurs. Confusion, and fear.
He turned and allowed the weight of the words to settle. His sword was bare in his hand, and he did his best not to glance at Meilyr, who had drifted purposefully to the side of the royal table to survey as many people as possible.
Captain Radnor rose heavily from his seat near the dais, haggard and hounded. He leaned on the table, staring at what was left of Gelens. ‘The answer is plain, then. Arrest the prince consort. He did this.’
A predicted accusation, but one that still burned Osian’s blood. ‘He is not responsible. Both of us were attacked, and my consort would have died had we not—’
‘It has to be him,’ another said. ‘It has to be! We all saw it, the timing, the way Lord Leighton pawed over him. He came after the captain’s son, and those crownsworn. It’s all him!’
Shouts of agreement. Calls for action.
‘If not him,’ someone said, ‘then who? One of them, certainly – single out every person with Denelands blood, immediately!’
‘We will not fall into the follies of our forebears,’ Osian said. ‘It is only a matter of time before we find the one responsible, so I am giving them this chance. Announce yourself, and face fair trial. I will grant leniency and mercy.’
‘Mercy!’ Captain Radnor spat the word. ‘They killed my son – they want us all dead!’
‘And have you never wanted your enemy dead, Captain? Whoever this is, we have driven them to it. The bloodshed must end now, but we must also bear responsibility for the horrors—’
The captain’s plate smashed as he cracked his fist into it. ‘My son… Responsibility? You are blinded, but we all see it. It’s him’ – he pointed at Meilyr with a shaking, food-dirtied and bloodied hand – ‘your Denelander consort.’
Further concurrence.
‘Enough, Captain. I know the course of his blood, and his heritage has never birthed one of the Old Blood.’ A lie, but one Osian delivered perfectly. ‘He is being used as a scapegoat, and each moment we argue—’
‘Then interrogate everyone of Denelander blood!’ Another stood, searching for agreement from their peers. ‘Send for an Ectheid, torture them, it doesn’t matter!’
Nearby, Lady Faina flinched, as did many others.
Demelza rose. ‘We cannot fall to such barbarity.’ Her voice soothed something in some as she forced back her exhaustion. ‘Prince Osian is right. We cannot succumb to hatred when faced with the wrongs of Khaim’s past.’
Assent, and dissent.
‘The wrongs of our past?’ someone said. ‘Their sorcery was evil, heretical! It led to the Sundering! Evil deserves to be put down, and all we ever did was protect our own!’
‘Enough,’ Aldreda ordered. ‘This is getting us nowhere.’
But she was agitated, hiding it expertly. Her eyes went to Meilyr, then Osian, asking. Doubting.
A younger noble rose, recognisable at once: one of Wystan’s circle, from Leighton’s March. ‘Majesty, Majesties, surely this has gone on long enough? Prince Osian, forgive me, but we all know the truth of your blood. The late Queen Ena—’
‘One more word,’ Aldreda growled, ‘and it will be your very last.’
No one dared speak against her.
Except her own brother.
Wystan stood. He reached with trembling fingers towards the patch of hair visible in the state of Gelens’ skull, tears in his eyes.
Osian’s chest tightened. He had never liked Gelens, but it was for the older lord’s treatment of Wystan that he had come to despise them. Always smiling with a honeyed word, a hand on a shoulder. A whispered secret, a promised reward.
Something in Wystan broke, cracks spreading through the ice. Osian was surprised how much it hurt when his brother’s pain spilled into desolated anger and fixed on him.
‘You let this happen…’
‘Wystan,’ Aldreda warned.
‘You let this happen. You – you want to be good, and loved… You love, and you love, and you love them so much you’re willing to let us die for them.’
‘Wystan, enough!’
‘I told Father you didn’t have the stomach to rule this place, but of course he wouldn’t listen. Of course he loves you, as everyone does – cannot bear to look at you for the memory of your damn whore of a mother—’
Aldreda grabbed him, but he pulled out of her grasp and around the royal table. He stumbled from the dais, into the aisle, opposite Osian.
‘I told them. I told them there were better ways to deal with you than having you killed, but perhaps they were right.’
‘Majesty!’ the young lord hissed as the secret spilled.
‘Perhaps then Gelens would still be alive,’ Wystan said. ‘Perhaps all this would have ended…’ Tears spilled down his face, twisted in grief. ‘And I still cannot hate you – why can’t I hate you and be done with it?’
‘Wystan, sit down,’ Aldreda said, ‘or I swear to the gods—’
‘The gods do not give a shit about us. Not here.’ He stepped back from Osian as if drunk and drew the gwaed-steel dagger from his hip. The one their father had given him on his thirteenth birthday.
The air in the hall tensed.
‘Wystan,’ Aldreda warned, very different to before. Her eyes flashed between her brothers. One hand subtly signalled her crownsblood. ‘Do not do anything stupid.’
‘I want to believe you, that it’s not him.
’ Wystan’s gaze flickered to Meilyr – Meilyr, who had started forward at the appearance of the knife, only for Demelza to grasp his wrist. ‘I really, truly do. But perhaps I’m as blind as you,’ Wystan said.
‘Perhaps even after everything, I still want… I still cannot…’
Osian stood more firmly between him and Meilyr. ‘Wystan, this does not have to happen.’
‘It was always going to happen.’ Wystan sounded hopeless. Lost. ‘That was what they raised me for, all they wanted from me. A puppet. Only a puppet. In my blood, as in yours. If I do this – if I tear out the thing that blinds you – maybe we can finally…’
He raised the dagger towards Meilyr, and listed sideways as though he had had too much wine.
Osian moved, part to stop him, part to steady him.
But Wystan stared at his own hand where it clutched the knife. It slid from his fingers and clattered on the stone.
‘Oh,’ he said, and staggered slightly, looking at his hand as though discovering a cut. ‘Yes, I suppose that…’
The colour drained from his face, just as the bindweed bloomed a beautiful bell-shaped white flower through his palm for all to see.
Screams. Terror.
Osian froze in shock.
Wystan’s gaze finally widened as the bindweed curled around his hand. He looked at his brother. ‘Help m—’
Forked leaves tumbled from his mouth, coiling around his neck.
‘Wystan!’
The bindweed crawled out through the holes between his buttons. His clothes bled dark. It twined around his wrists, his head, the tops of his boots. Sprouting flowers whilst his eyes still saw. Still reflected.
Osian lunged, tore at the vines encasing his brother’s chest. But they only replaced themselves faster. Long strands thickened and resisted. Wystan’s face was disappearing, eyes wide and weeping, fixed on Osian. Bleeding. Beseeching. Begging—
Aldreda’s sword impaled his heart.
Then she stepped out and cleaved his head from his shoulders, in the form she had mastered when she was nine.
The once-human congealment of bindweed stilled. Wystan’s body crumpled in the aisle of the Great Hall, between his two siblings.
Aldreda’s cry of frustrated fury and grief was the first sound to restart Meilyr’s locked lungs.
Osian stood before Wystan’s body, sword loose in his fingers, his pain an ache in Meilyr’s blood.
‘Gods protect us.’ One of the nobles who had spoken out before. ‘Prince Wystan…’
‘Did anyone see?’ someone shouted. ‘Did anyone see who did it?’
‘We all saw!’ Another turned on Meilyr. ‘The prince was moving to attack the prince consort! It’s him, it has to be!’
‘Silence.’ Aldreda’s voice was cold, detached steel.
‘If he is the sorcerer, do you truly believe him foolish enough to choose then to strike? With all our eyes upon him?’ But her youngest brother lay dead at her feet, and she had dealt the blow.
She signalled her knights. ‘Take him to the Eagle Tower, under guard. If he resists, kill him.’
There was continued bristling, but it stayed subdued beneath the weight of the Heir Apparent’s rage.
Meilyr wanted to grab Osian and run from the hall and never look back. He wanted to be gone from this, from this horror.
Demelza’s hand shook once on his wrist. She had stopped him moving between Osian and Wystan’s knife. As she opened her fingers, she took him under the elbow, face wet with silent weeping. He held her arms as she held his, as Aldreda’s crownsblood marched them both from the hall.
‘Cover the body,’ Aldreda said. ‘No one else leaves until I say so. Osian, with me. Now.’
The nine-sided tower room was more suffocating with Osian and Aldreda side by side. With their father’s words thick in the air, heavier than the dust and the cloy of refracting water, the near-blinding striations from the off-golds of the rained-upon windows.
‘My King,’ Osian replied, Aldreda’s shock silent beside him. ‘You cannot—’
The nature of the pool changed, and with a rush King Oswald’s watery visage rose.
His children dropped to a knee, heads bowed.
The king never showed himself. But if there were ever a time…
‘I can,’ the king said. His water-self mirrored the bitterness in his expression, the way he stood, formidable even with his long-injured knee.
His crown was framed with the rest in constant-running, constant-reforging water.
‘I can, and you should have, long before this. I gave you the Denelands to regain control, to bring the Marches to heel. You have disappointed me – failed me. Your methods would have us all dead, one after the other.’
‘My King,’ Osian tried again. ‘The sorcerer must be someone at court. Please, if you allow us—’
‘I will not allow more failure. More death.’ The water shivered, concealing something. Perhaps grief, or merely disappointment. ‘You have been blinded, my son. How easy it has been to fool your soft heart from your own bed.’
‘Father—’
‘I should have seen it. You are truly too much like her, gods protect her. Yet I understood your weakness, your hope. And now my youngest heir is dead. You are to blame, Osian. For Wystan, and for all that comes now. Do not forget that.’
‘Father – My King. Meilyr has nothing to do with—’
‘A warning must be sent to the Denelands. Across the Marches. Since you are too weak of heart to do it, I will take that burden from you. I only pray you will learn from the lesson I must teach you. The lesson I learned when I lost your mother.’
‘Father—’
The visage of the king receded into the pool, which bobbed and lapped against the stones around it.