Conqueror’s Moon (30 page)

And leave forever this place that had been her refuge for so long.

Urgent necessity gave her fresh energy. She speedily donned her disguise, then stepped in front of the long mirror and admired her reflection for a moment. She did not intend to travel invisible all of the time, so she had assumed the aspect of a hunchbacked crone—a role suitable for the drama she had planned for the entertainment of Beynor and the Didionities. Her gown was tattered and patched and splotched about the hem with dried mud—but for all its poor appearance it was made of sturdy new wool that would keep her comfortable in bad weather. Her boots were grubby but stoutly made. She had greased and dirtied her shining hair to resemble the stringy grey elflocks of neglectful old age, and used herbal dyes to make her face hideous. The judiciously selected necessities prepared for her flight barely filled the leather fardel that would rest comfortably on her upper back beneath her hooded cloak, stained and raggedy but fashioned of heavy, water-repellent melton cloth.

The fardel contained her lone unempowered sigil—a second Weathermaker— maps and battle plans, writing materials, a few instruments of sorcery, and a tiny flask of her favorite vetiver perfume. She had no need of gold but had removed her mother’s small portrait from its frame and wrapped it securely in velvet and oilskin. She intended to leave her jewelry behind, along with her fine garments. In time, all of them could be replaced.

But, oh, how she regretted having to abandon her library! At the last minute she included four precious little volumes that she could not bear to leave behind. The Book of Prophecies, alas, was not one of them. But she had closely studied the section dealing with the Question of Bazekoy and was fairly confident that she had deciphered King Olmigon’s enigmatic answer.

It was time to go. She tucked the all-important lesser sigil named Beastbidder into the capacious belt wallet she had substituted for her gold-mesh purse. Concealer and Sender already hung around her neck, and Interpenetrator was snug in its cleverly fashioned bag up her sleeve, where a quick tug would allow her fingers to grasp it almost instantaneously.

Fortress would have to be left behind, continuing to guard her rooms at the top of the tower so that Beynor would have no hint that she had decamped. She was desolated at the thought of losing it, but if she took great care, the power of Concealer would keep her reasonably secure from both searchers and watchers.

As for her own Weathermaker, it would remain inactive until she was far away from Moss, safe in some place where the pain-price of its empowerment could be borne without jeopardizing her plans. With luck, she might not need it until Didion was conquered and it was time for her to deal with Beynor.

“Now guide me as I make my escape, dearest Mother,” she prayed. “You forbade me to kill my vile little brother and I submit to your will, but I intend to leave him something to remember me by.”

A tug of the string up her sleeve let Interpenetrator fall into her hand, and a windwhisper conjured Concealer. Invisible, she walked through the closed door of her tower and set off on her journey.

eighteen

The King of Didion, Archwizard Ilingus Direwold, and Galbus Peel, commander of the flagship Casabarela Regnant and Fleet Captain of the Realm, stood together on the foredeck and studied the waterfront of Royal Fenguard and the rainbow-haloed castle perched on the crags above it. King Achardus and the captain used spyglasses, and the archwizard his modest windsight.

“Some sort of tarted-up barges putting out now from the big dock,” the king observed. “Welcoming committee, maybe.”

“Your Majesty is certainly correct,” said Ilingus, a middle-aged man in plain black robes, having the sad pouched eyes and pendulous flews of an old hound. His voice was high-pitched and his manner seemingly musty and pedantic. He was the King of Didion’s shrewdest and most trusted adviser. “Those in the lead boat attired in violet are members of the Glaumerie Guild, Moss’s highest coven of sorcerers. The leader of the delegation is one Ridcanndal, Grand Master of the Guild. You’ll know him by his buck teeth and his big red nose. Looks like a bibulous beaver. Those dressed in green and black are heralds and high-ranking warlock-knights of the young King of Moss… Oh, dear! I’m lip-reading bits of speech from some of them. I do believe they intend for you and the rest of the royal party to go ashore in those small watercraft of theirs.”

“Huh!” Achardus glowered his contempt. “No way I’m setting foot in any titchy bumboat like that. Damned thing would founder before we’d gone a half a dozen ells.”

“They don’t seem very sturdy, do they?” Captain Peel kept a straight face but his eyes gleamed with amusement. King Achardus weighed over three-and-twenty stone and stood six-and-a-half-feet tall. “Shall I lower our ship’s boats to ferry you and the others in, sire? Of course, the Mosslanders might take offense.”

“See to it, Peel, and signal our other ships as well. We’re going ashore in force and in our own style. Who cares if the Mossbellies’ bloody feelings are hurt? We’re the ones doing them honor by coming to their bogland shindig. And speaking of honor, where’s the royal whelp himself? No sign of young Beynor on the quayside, just a rabble of townsfolk, liveried flunkies, and some coaches flying our flag.”

“The King of Moss probably intends to welcome you at the castle in a more elaborate setting,” Ilingus said. “He and his sorcerers can perform their glamourizing tricks more readily indoors than out.”

Achardus waited until the departing captain was out of earshot, then said to the wizard, “I wish we hadn’t come, Lingo. Why the hell did I let my sons talk me into this? Politics and sorcery are a devilish mix! You know it and I know it. Hon and Somar think they can manipulate this boy Beynor without having to pay too high a price for his services, but I’m not so sure. What say you?”

“I think that I’ll withhold my opinion until I have more information. Ask me again tomorrow, Your Majesty, after the coronation.”

“Slippery as usual, and probably with damned good reason.” Achardus lifted the spyglass again and swept it over the structures on the shore. “Are you positive they’ve magicked up the place to make it look more presentable? Everything seems real enough to me—except for that idiotic rainbow.”

“That, oddly enough, is quite real,” Ilingus said with a sigh. “Its threefold nature is extraordinary, of course, but what’s truly amazing is its persistence. We’ve viewed it for over an hour now as our flotilla moved up the channel, and the castle has remained at the precise center of the phenomenon for all of that time. Your Majesty is of course well aware that the colored heavenly arcs are produced by sunlight refracting and reflecting from drops of precipitation. One would expect the arcs to fade or change their position relative to the castle as our ship sailed along, or as winds aloft carried the rainclouds northward. But that has not happened.”

The king scowled. “What’re you saying, man? Speak plain!”

“Some extremely powerful sorcery is controlling the wind direction, the amount of rainfall, the very size of the drops themselves, and perhaps even the direction of the sunbeams. In view of your sons’ report of Beynor conjuring fair winds for the voyages to and from the Continent, we must assume that he is also responsible for the peculiar triple rainbow.”

“A silly enough stunt,” Achardus scoffed.

“Not at all.” The archwizard’s voice was dark with foreboding.

The king’s brow creased in perplexity. “You mean, it’s a really hard thing to do?”

“To produce an illusion of a triple rainbow like this one would be well within the power of any competent wizard. Until today, I would have said that creating the real thing and keeping it going for such a long time was quite impossible. Yet Beynor has done it, no doubt to impress us. And I’m impressed.”

“Hmmm.” The king’s expression of angry bafflement intensified. His brows came together to form a single hedgerow of wiry hair, and his lips tightened within a thicket of grizzled beard. He had not yet donned his massive ceremonial helmet, crested with a winged bear, and his carefully curled grey locks hung to his shoulders. He was accoutered for the occasion in a suit of dazzling silvery scale mail decorated with gold lattenwork. His surcoat was of white doeskin, emblazoned with Didion’s snarling black bear’s head, and he wore a cloak of heavy black-and-silver silk damask, lined with ermine.

“Your Majesty inquired about the enchantment used to disguise the town and the castle,” Ilingus continued. “This is being accomplished by a more ordinary form of magic called glamour, no doubt the work of Beynor’s coterie of wizards. The spell is so well-woven that I’m unable to dissolve it.”

“So we won’t know what’s real and what’s bogus once we get ashore, is that it?” the king grumbled. “They could be feeding us pig-swill and entertaining us in a mucky pesthole, and we’d never know it.”

“Only the eyes are deceived by glamour, Majesty. The Conjure-King won’t dare to feed us poor food, nor perpetrate any other gross imposture. I’ll be on the alert every moment, you may be sure, and so will my assistants.”

“You’d damn well better be.”

A piping voice cried, “Eldpapa! Eldpapa! See pretty boats? Boats come! Wanna ride pretty boat!” Two-year-old Prince Onestus, son of Crown Prince Honigalus, came running across the foredeck, pursued at some distance by a red-faced nursemaid and his young aunt, Princess Risalla.

The gigantic king knelt, beaming like a jack-o‘-lantern, and held his arms wide. The child leapt into them, heedless of the armor, and squealed with delight as Achardus bestowed a resounding kiss, all but burying the small face in his beard.

“Nesti! So you want a boat ride, do you, lad? But you’ve been riding on the Casya for two days now.”

“Casya too big, like a house,” the boy objected. “Wanna ride little boat like that.”

He squirmed out of his grandfather’s grasp and darted to the rail, which had stanchions dangerously far apart. Risalla and the nursemaid screamed a warning, still too far away to go to the child’s rescue, but the archwizard, moving with surprising speed for an older man, had already laid hold of the tiny prince, scooping him safely up into his arms.

Achardus scowled at the two women, who now bobbed sheepish curtseys before him. The maid took charge of the prince, inspecting him for non-existent harm, while Risalla faced her father’s anger. “Here’s a pretty state of things,” he exclaimed, “letting a wee lad run loose on shipboard! Where’s your brains, girl? Come to that, where’s his mother?”

“I’m so sorry, sire,” the princess said in a tremulous voice. She was twenty years of age, the king’s youngest child and as yet unmarried. Her face was wan and plain, save for eyes as blue as cornflowers, which now brimmed with frightened tears. Her honey-brown hair, partially covered by a thin white veil of sendal and crowned with a narrow golden coronet, was dressed in a multitude of thin plaits threaded with jeweled bangles. She wore a silken gown that matched her eyes and a pelisse of snow-mink.

“Dala and I were minding Nesti while Crown Princess Bryse was putting on her finery. The boy begged to come on deck and I just couldn’t refuse him. It seemed safe enough, now that we’re at anchor, but I tripped coming up the companionway steps and let go of his hand for an instant, and he was off…”

“Why wasn’t the nurse holding him as well?” Achardus demanded.

“Sire, the companionway is narrow, and—”

“That’s enough! You there!” The king beckoned to the nursemaid, who was now eyeing him with terror, while keeping the wriggling Onestus restrained with both hands. “Give the prince over to Her Royal Highness and come here.”

When the woman was on her knees before him, he addressed her in a voice full of quiet menace. “We are about to disembark into a city crawling with sorcerers, where maneating Salka and God knows what other fiendish beings lurk among the rocks and cessponds. Prince Onestus is your responsibility. If any harm should come to him, you will be skinned alive, then drowned in boiling oil.

Never again let the boy out of your sight and care unless his parents command otherwise. Do you understand?“

The nurse’s voice was nearly inaudible. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Now take Onestus below.” He turned to the archwizard. “Lingo, go with her. Find my sons and their wives and tell Their Royal Highnesses I said to hotfoot it up on deck. The boats bearing the Mossland welcomers are almost here, and I want everyone ready to meet them.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” the two of them said. The nursemaid rose, took the child from Risalla, and fled with him. The wizard followed at a more stately pace.

The princess stood with lowered eyes and hands clenched tightly in front of her. “It was my fault Nesti got away, not Dala’s.”

“You dare to take the wench’s part?”

Risalla lifted her doleful face. She had her father’s strong jaw, but her lips were budlike and soft. “Yes, Father, I do. Dala is a good woman who does her duty and loves Nesti with all her heart. She’d give her life for him.”

“So she will indeed,” the king said suavely, “if anything happens to the heir of Honigalus during our stay in this benighted land of Moss.” Abruptly, he changed the subject. “Daughter, it’s time you were wed.”

She stared at him, mouth open in horror as she realized what was in his mind. “Not this Conjure-King Beynor!”

“I haven’t made up my mind about him yet, but your brothers seem to believe we’d be well-advised to seek a match.”

“You refused Princess Ullanoth as a bride for Somarus,” she reminded him bitterly.

“Watch your tongue, madam! Sauce me and I’ll flog you myself with a silken lash!”

She inclined her head in a wordless bow of submission. Tears trickled down her broad, pale cheeks.

“It’s not a certainty. We’ll have to see whether Beynor’s as great a sorcerer as he pretends to be. But he did come up with the idea that we peddle warships to the Continent, which helped keep our people from starving, and he claims he can shut off the Wolf’s Breath. What’s more, he’s told your brothers that he can defend Didion in case Cathra attacks us. He wants gold, of course, but he says he’s willing to wait for payment until our national fortunes are restored. A dynastic marriage would cement the alliance more securely than any treaty. It’s the lot of a royal princess, lass. Accept it.”