Spellbreakers (2 page)

“We have heard these terms, lord ambassador. The king
and his council will reflect on them. You will have your answer within three
days.”

He glanced back at the king, who nodded. He was
deathly pale.

The court was abuzz. People high and low threw worried
glances towards the royal family. Leal glanced at her father. He looked tired,
older, and more troubled than ever. Unlike his brother, who wore his court
clothes with flamboyant ease, the king always huddled in them as if looking for
shelter. He was talking to his brother quickly, and Leal had the feeling that
he was avoiding meeting her eyes. Queen Amara was talking urgently with one of
her ladies, and shaking her head repeatedly with a troubled and anxious face.

Finally, since nobody else was paying her any
attention, Leal turned and stared into Daria’s perfectly horrified face. Leal
had never thought to see her maid and friend so shaken.

“Crap,” said the girl, drawing some disapproving,
astonished, or plain shocked glances from the queen’s ladies. Leal took no
notice.

“I must get hold of Dee. I am sure they can’t possibly
consider this seriously, Challenge or no Challenge,” she said. “Let’s get out of
here.”

They made their way through the crowd of the royal
entourage, towards the back of the hall, where a couple of doors behind the
thrones gave the higher nobility a quick way out of the great hall. Leal
grabbed her skirts impatiently to climb the few steps through the door and
heard a muffled oath behind her. Daria had just stumbled on the edge of her
dress again. Even in that dismal moment Leal grinned. She got a glimpse of the
dark cloak and white hair she was looking for and made her way towards the
Master of Enchantments as fast as possible in her ungainly court skirts.

“Dee! Dee! Wait!”

He turned and glanced at her sternly, then shook his
head and made a sign with his index finger, bringing it to his pursed lips and
then turning it vaguely in mid-air.
Not now; we’ll talk later
. The
king’s council was already gathering around him, each man bawling and arguing
as loud as they could. Nobody even looked at her, not even her father, as if
marrying King Admund was a mere political topic, nothing personally to do with
her.

“Damn,” she said, and then turned to Daria. “I’ll
catch him later. Let’s go up. At least I can get out of this bloody dress.”

In Leal’s room, a snug low room on the west side of
the keep with a little window looking out towards the snowy peaks of the
Canigou Mountains, Leal helped Daria out of her dress. It was not the usual
procedure between a princess and her maid, but Daria was not likely to ever get
out of that gown without help, and she was so obviously miserable in it that
Leal would not let her wear it a second more than necessary.

“I swear,” said Daria, muffled by a tent of cloth as
she wrestled out of her petticoats like a cat in a sack, “that I’d rather be a
lowly butcher boy than the highest lady of the court. How can those gabbing
geese wear stuff like this every day just
beats
me.”

She threw her clothes in a corner of her cot and
quickly dressed in a pair of well-worn breeches and a plain practical linen
tunic, and then, sighing as if she had been freed from heavy irons, she helped
Leal undo the ties of her tight corset.

Leal was trembling with tension.

“I am sorry, princess,” said Daria with infinite
concern. “Here I am, prating about my wardrobe
sorrows,
and you...”

“And I am to marry Black Admund,” said Leal in a
stricken voice.

“Never believe it. It will never, ever happen. No
Escarran lady has ever married a Hassian king, not in four hundred years. We
are surely not going to start now, are we? Your father will never consent. And
Old Dee will think of something. You know he will.”

Leal nodded. She was not sure that her father would
stand up for her, but she took some comfort from Daria’s words nonetheless.
Guillem was an affectionate father to his children, more than was usual in a
royal family. She knew that putting politics before his daughter’s happiness
would grieve him beyond words. Still, he was a shrewd king, and Leal knew very
well that in the end he would always put the good of the kingdom first. She
could not put much faith in him, in the circumstances. Dee ... Dee was a
different kettle of fish altogether.

The Master of Enchantments, Leal’s uncle, was her
favorite person in the world. Well, he and Daria.

He was the most erudite man in Castel Argell, and he
had been closer to her than either of her parents, since she had chosen to
study the history and geography of Escarra and the western kingdoms under his
tutelage rather than wasting time on learning the harp, and the complex court
dances, and embroidery and fine deportment and all the princessy things her
elder sisters had always liked. Perhaps because of this, he had always been
very fond of her and Daria, who had often studied with her, more out of love
for her than out of a genuine interest in book-lore.

If someone could tell her frankly what had transpired
at the council, it was Dee. And he would come up with some wondrous plan to
defeat the Hassian champion at the Challenge and save her from marrying Admund.

Leal changed into soft brown suede breeches, a pale
blue tunic and a black doublet, hugged Daria quickly, and ran out of the door
of her room.

“I’ll talk to Dee as soon as they are done,” she said,
turning in the doorway, before closing the door. “If ever you bothered with
praying to the gods for anything, do pray for me now, will you?”

Daria nodded gravely. She had never been so pale.

****

The king and his council sat in their chamber for
hours. The oak doors of the council room were not quite thick enough to shut
off the raised, agitated voices within, but no clear words were discernible.

Outside, the weather had finally broken. A gale of
wind hurled sheets of grey rain against the old walls of the castle, drumming
against the window panes and splashing down along the lofty
archeres
of
the donjon’s stairs. Castel Argell stood in the storm like a timeless island of
pale stone. Atop its sheer-walled cliff, dominating the Val d’Eran below in
three directions from its vertiginous height, nothing had ever bothered the old
towers of the fortress.
 
No enemy had
ever attempted taking it.

Queen Amara had come as a young girl from the rich,
fruit-laden plains of Andalou in the south, with its palaces of white marble,
singing with fountains in mosaicked halls and enclosed gardens, and she hated
the stern stone fortress she had married into. But to Leal it was home. She felt
safe here, always. It was the rock-solid haven in the storm, in the cold of
winter, in the dark of the night. It was the place to ride back to when she was
tired from the hunt. She laid a hand on the stone wall, feeling the steadfast
coolness of the castle, and tried to calm down, but in vain.

She took to walking up and down the corridor once
more, seething with impatience.

The rain had ceased, and the sun was peeping out of
fleeting clouds on a washed world by the time the meeting was over. When the door
opened the chancellor and the king’s secretary scurried out, deep in talk,
utterly ignoring her. The Lord Marshall of Escarra, imposing even out of his
armor, bowed deeply to her, but barely addressed her with a mumbled greeting.
The Chief of Justice gave an appreciative look to her breech-clad thighs then
quickly schooled his face into a disapproving expression. The Lord Treasurer,
an enormously fat man with teary eyes and a wheezing breath who had always been
as kind as an uncle to the king’s brood, kissed her hand distractedly, mumbling
something about “a shame, a damn, damn shame.”

Before he could say anything more the Master of
Enchantments swept out of the council chamber like a storm cloud full of
thunder, grabbed her by the elbow and whisked her away at top speed.

They walked fast along corridors and smaller halls,
towards the east tower of the keep.

“I hope you took particular notice of my thunder
effects earlier. For a moment even I thought it was the weather,” said Dee with
strained cheerfulness, as they marched through the castle. “It took me a long
while to find the right spot where to place the thunder device, you know? Of
course the minstrel gallery would have given a much better sound quality, but
it might have been too obvious from the hall.”

Leal glared at her uncle in exasperation. “Dee, I have
known of your thunder device since I was as small as Bea. Forgive me if I am
not going to take any notice of it today. What is this damn shame old Lord
Corder is babbling about? Don’t tell me that my father is really marrying me
off to—to that monster?
To Black Admund?”

For a man of his age, and one who apparently spent
most of his days in his library, the Master of Enchantments could walk fast. He
took the winding stairs of his tower two at a time, and Leal had to scurry
behind him in a most undignified way to keep up.

“Your father is not
marrying you off
, Leal. He
undertakes that
should the Challenge be lost
, the heir to the Escarran
throne, whoever that may be, will wed the king of Hassia, sealing the union of
the two kingdoms. It is a reasonable political move. The Challenge is a symbol,
a ritual, but it is the only thing that held Hassia at bay for the last three
hundred years.
The Challenge and fear.
If we lose the
Challenge, and there appears to be no doubt that we will lose it this time,
Escarra will be nothing but loot for Hassia. A royal wedding may well be the
only way of maintaining a degree of sovereignty on the kingdom, Leal. If Admund
had not suggested the union, we might have had to do it ourselves.”

While saying this, Dee reached the massive carved
doors of his library.
 
A valet stood in
front of them, and opened them, bowing obsequiously. As they went through the
doors closed softly behind them.

In the padded silence of his room Dee turned round and
spoke again, in a much softer, lower voice. “That said
,
I am grieved to the heart that this weight should fall on you, my dear.”

Leal hissed in pure revulsion and stalked to the
nearest window, and then back. But before she could answer Dee spoke again.

“You understand of course, that this was never
intended to be your role. If things had been different one of your elder
sisters would have had to marry Admund. It is doubly tragic that they both
perished of the White Death.”

His tone had an edge to it that suggested that while
he was sorry for her, he would not take any mewling, any tantrums, any
wallowing.

He sat on the high chair behind his huge,
book-scattered desk, and stared at her expectantly.

She sat down on the chair on the opposite side of the
table and banged both elbows on top of the desk. She put her face in her hands.

“I am sorry.
Of course.
I was
extremely lucky to survive the White Death. I am grateful to be alive. I am.
And I am the heir to the throne now. I see that it is not all bread and
lollies. I see that I have ... duties.
Responsibilities.
You know I care about the kingdom and all that. I’d do anything to save
Escarra, anything. But he is a brute. I would be what, his fifth wife? And what
happened to the other four? Two died mysteriously, one was beheaded, and what
about the other one? Oh right, that one just died of childbirth because the
whelp was monstrously deformed. He is older than my father, and fatter than the
Lord Treasurer. I am a strapping strong mountain girl, but I won’t live to see
the dawn after my wedding night, Dee!”

Dee smiled grimly. “It could be argued that with a bit
of effort and, uhm, application, he could be the one to not see the light of
dawn. Elderly, crapulous men of obese constitution are easily victim to
apoplexy, strokes, calenture and all sort of other interesting incidents when
subject to much excitement and physical exertion.”

Leal groaned. “I am a royal princess. I was raised to
be virtuous and innocent, so I can pretend not to know what you are babbling
about. Please, Dee, tell me that you will save me from this. It is too horrible
to contemplate. And if I just throw myself from the highest tower of the
castle, or run away, the lot will just fall on Amata, and she is of delicate build.
The prospect does not bear thinking of.”

“Leal, my darling, would that I could. But they have
the most formidable champion, as you know. They say Hristo Straightaim can core
an apple at two hundred paces. The king’s messengers have been scouring the
kingdom for the last five years. They sent messengers as far as Umbria and
Andalou, but not an archer they could find who could beat Straightaim. They
will
win the Challenge this time. And once that happens, there is nothing at all
that we can do to reverse the judgment. Rejecting the Challenge’s verdict would
mean condemning Escarra to a completely hopeless war. You know very well that
Escarran war-magic is not what it used to be.”

“Can’t you give me something?
Anything?
There must be a solution!”

Dee spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness.