The Fatal Child (34 page)

‘Feel my fangs, lady,’ he whispered, and kissed her foot where the line of her shoe bared the naked skin.

Atti stared at him. Melissa stared, too.

‘Snakes bite in fear, but I cannot,’ he said as he let her go.

Atti kicked him in the face. ‘Off me!’ she cried. ‘Snake!’

He made no sound. He crawled from her on his hands and knees to the far corner of the room. There he crouched, watching her. She looked at him. And she laughed.

The walls bounced with the sound – the sound Atti never made. Laughter, like the peal of a trumpet. ‘Gueronius,’ she said, ‘you are not a snake.’

He said nothing.

‘I think you are a rat,’ she said. ‘A dirty, filthy sewer-rat.’

He watched her impassively.

‘I will go to the King now,’ she said, with a strange smile. ‘And I will lie with him.
He is
a good man, after all. And afterwards we will talk together. We will talk of you. Then, maybe, I will decide.’

With that she turned and went to the door. Melissa, enormously relieved, slipped out ahead of her and began to climb the stair. She had gone three steps ahead of her before she remembered that they had left the cell door open. She hurried back down to the bottom. The man was still crouching where they had left him. In that last glimpse from her lantern, as she closed the door, she saw the bruise beginning to show on his cheek, above his matted beard.

With shaking fingers she slid the bolts into their holes. At least these ones went all the way home, she thought.
Clunk, clunk
, shutting away the man in his darkness. But they could not shut away what she had heard.

They walked back towards the living quarters. Atti said nothing, but as they hurried along the wall she laughed again and the stones rang with her triumph. They reached the royal apartments and entered the Queen’s rooms. Softly Atti passed through the antechamber and the dressing chamber, and on into her bedroom.

There she stood for a moment.

In the far wall of the room, disguised among the panelling, was the through-door to the King’s bedchamber. On the other side of that Ambrose slept, with his servants in the antechamber beyond.

There was light coming from under the door.

Atti stepped quietly across the room. Her fingers drew the bolt, which the locksmiths and carpenter had fixed there during her panic of the night before. She passed through it and said something to the man who was in there.

Melissa heard Ambrose laugh, too, sudden with his surprise. The door closed behind Atti. Melissa was left in the Queen’s bedchamber, with a lamp in her hand.

o the Queen is holy now,’ said Puck as they sat together on a pile of stable-straw during another Grand Audience.

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Melissa.

‘She will go to a holy place.’

On pilgrimage,’ sighed Melissa, thinking of all the hurrying and scurrying, fetching, demanding and rejecting that there was still to do before Atti would be content with her costumes, horses, trappings and escort for the long trip into the south. ‘And she forgives her enemy.’

‘She did,’ said Melissa grimly.

But she did not think that Atti forgiving Gueronius was holy. And she was not sure that ‘forgive’ was the right word. Did you ‘forgive’ a new plaything?

Atti had intervened for him, in a carefully staged appeal before another Grand Audience. And Ambrose had granted her plea that Gueronius should be spared. The former King was banished to his estates with a warning that his life would be forfeit if he strayed outside
them or assembled too many men on them. And that, everyone thought, was that. But Melissa didn’t.

‘I don’t like the way she laughs,’ she said.

‘Laughing is good. More good when she has been sad.’

‘That depends why she’s laughing, doesn’t it?’

His eyes narrowed. His words might be clumsy but his mind was as quick as anything.

‘Why is she laughing, you think?’

‘Don’t know,’ said Melissa.

Which was true. She didn’t
know
. But she saw that light in Atti’s eyes. She had seen it first in the cell, in the gleam of her lamp as Atti watched the man crawling before her. Something had happened there – something big, in Atti’s head. Atti still laughed when she thought of it. And she wanted more.

‘You kiss me now?’ said Puck.

‘No thank you,’ said Melissa.

‘Oh,’ said Puck, sounding dashed. ‘Right’

‘Sorry,’ said Melissa. ‘I’m just not sure.’

He looked so dejected that she slipped an arm round his shoulders and gave him a hug. But she made it only a short one, in case he mistook her. He did not respond.

‘I’m in a bad mood,’ she said. ‘That’s what it is.’

They sat in silence for a while, listening to the small sounds of horses fidgeting and breathing in their stalls.

‘You busy?’ Melissa asked.

He stirred. ‘King travels. Queen travels. Much to do in stables. And I study, too.’

‘The King’s travelling as well?’

‘He will go to the lake. See Trant castle. Meet Outland-man there.’

‘You know a lot, don’t you? You’re very clever.’

He said nothing.

I’m
sorry
, Puck, she thought. I didn’t want to hurt you. It’s just that … Well, not yet. Not yet. I want to wait a bit and see.

‘Sing me that hill song, Puck,’ she said.

‘What song?’

‘That one you sang at our spring supper in the mountains. Like this.’ And she hummed the long, slow notes that she had heard once and never forgotten, and that seemed even now to be tinged with tears.

He frowned. ‘That is Lament. The World-Mother song.’

‘Sing it for me, Puck. I’m in that kind of mood.’

‘No. I don’t sing that. That is hill stuff. Leave that behind. Why bring her here? You don’t want her here.’ He sounded cross.

She looked at her feet and wondered what the point of anything was. ‘Well, if you’re busy, Puck, I’ll get out of your way, shall I?’

‘See you again. And next time, maybe you be sure.’

It wasn’t that she didn’t like him, she thought as she made her way slowly back to the royal apartments. Of course she liked him. He was clever, funny, nice, thoughtful. He would never be handsome – it was hard to imagine a hill face that would be handsome – but he was different. He had risked his neck for her in the mountains, bringing all that food across the valley
in the winters. She saw that now. And he had come all the way to Tuscolo by himself, learning a new language and new things among a strange people. That wasn’t just brave or clever. That was – well, it was lots of both. And he had just about told her that he had come because of her. She might meet a richer man, but she wasn’t likely to meet a better one, was she?

And yet a voice within her said:
No. Wait
.

Wait, because something else might happen. Things would not go on as they had done. She did not know why, but she felt a change was coming. And what would it bring?

Could it bring the moon within reach?

Wooden scaffold cloaked the stained and crumbling battlements. Hammers sounded faintly from within the old courtyard. Out on the huge, glittering lake the sails of fishing boats moved silently. The roofs of the hamlet by the water’s edge were bright with new straw. The hillsides had been broken to fresh earth for the first time in years. A flock of goats moved peacefully under the olive trees, sounding the lazy tonk of their bells along the shore. Hearth-smoke drifted in the autumn air. And a thing done with a pen, eighteen months before in Tuscolo, had become real. Settlers had reclaimed the waste around Trant castle.

Below the walls, on the green slopes that ambled gently down to the shore, a gaily-coloured crowd had gathered. The King was there. So were his counsellors and much of the nobility of the land. Among the
hundred banners that stirred in the gentle breeze were the devices of Trant and Tarceny, of Develin, Inchapter and Lackmere from the south, of Velis and the Seabord, of Herryce, Faul, Joyce and even Seguin from the heart of the Kingdom. Sunlight gleamed on gold chains, lit bright cloth and flashed from polished steel. Two thousand eyes watched the lake, and the slow progress of the three small boats that bore an ambassador from Outland to meet the King.

‘We still haven’t decided what we are going to decide,’ fumed Ambrose as the boats crept closer in towards the quay.

‘Your Majesty,’ murmured Padry. ‘Nothing will be
decided
today. He will make a speech of friendship and we will answer. If he makes proposals or demands, we will undertake to consider them. No more. We can hardly know what we are going to do before we know what he asks. And remember. His King is but one of many in Outland, some greater, some less than we. We do not buy from the first stall in any market – not until we have been up and down the stalls and heard what is offered and for what price.’

Padry had in fact already drafted much of the record of the meeting for the King’s chronicles. It had been childish stuff, but he was pleased with it.

The Ambassadors were led before one of high bearing and rich dress, and they fell on their faces before him, saying: Surely this is Ambrose Umbriel, the great King. But those who stood by him said: Nay, this is the Lord Chancellor Padry, who is wise in the
King’s council. And they were led to another place, where stood a lord and a lady of such nobility and splendour that again they fell down on their faces and cried: Surely here at last are Ambrose Umbriel and his Queen Astria, for the word of the Queen’s beauty has travelled beyond the ocean and we see that it is true. But again those who stood around them said, Nay, these are the Baron Aun, the Wolf of Lackmere and the Lady Sophia, the Woman of Develin, who are mighty indeed but not the King. And they were led to another place …

All good stuff for the Kingdom to read and repeat in gossip. Put Outland in its place, that’s right…

‘Maybe we should not go to the market at all,’ said Ambrose.

Padry was still wondering how he would deal with the Queen’s absence in his chronicle. He took a moment to absorb what the King had said.

‘There are three possibilities, Your Majesty,’ he replied. ‘You may return to the monopoly of Velis, or something like it. Meetings shall happen only in certain places, neither in our land nor in theirs, and only certain merchants of ours shall be permitted to traffic with the Outlanders, for which right they will pay a toll to you. Or, second, you permit Outlanders to enter our land freely, and go wherever they wish so long as they abide by our laws and pay the same tolls in our markets as our own merchants do. Or you steer a middle course—’

‘You have not mentioned the fourth way,’ said Ambrose. ‘Which is that we forbid all contact between our people and the lands beyond the sea.’

In that close crowd it was difficult to avoid being overheard. Two paces away, the Lady of Develin turned and looked at them.

‘It is harder to pour wine back into a bottle than it was to pour it out in the first place,’ said Padry, dropping his voice further. ‘Harder still when the wine is Knowledge.’

‘What I know is that Wulfram brought a great evil from over the sea,’ said Ambrose. ‘We live with it today. What new evil will follow now?’

‘There you go again,’ said Aun, from the other side of the King. ‘But in one matter I agree with you. This black powder the Outlanders have, which takes sudden fire and hurls metal or stone balls long distances like trebuchets – you should ban all use of this except by your own armourers, on pain of treason. If there is a weapon here that will bring down walls such as these, then the only safe course is to make sure we have it and deny it to anyone else.’

‘It is not simply a matter of powder, Aun …’

‘Your Majesty,’ said Padry more firmly. ‘We deceive ourselves, I think. I could write you a decree, banning meetings with the Outlanders. And you might have it published throughout the land. But so long as there is profit in it, the traffic will continue. It will slip through your fingers like water that you tried to hold in your fist. And a king must not make laws that will not be obeyed, or men will discover the habit of not obeying his law.’

The Lady of Develin was still watching them. She might not be able to hear what was said, but she
was reading Padry’s lips. As he finished, she nodded. Then she turned to face the lake again. They all did.

The boats were creeping closer under the gentle breeze. They were ordinary, single-masted, open-decked lake-craft from the northern end of Derewater, engaged to bring the ambassador and his party down from Watermane. It was possible to see the crewman in the bow of each, the helmsman at the stern, and the heads and shoulders of others squatting in the waist.

Just ordinary boats, crewed by the King’s own men; and yet, thought Padry, they were three. Wulfram had come to land in three ships, according to
The Tale of Kings
. And in these three craft were men who had been born on the shores from which Wulfram had set sail, three hundred years ago. There was something powerful in the thought. It was more than powerful. Everyone sensed it. There was a shiver of excitement in the crowd. These would be the first Outlanders any of them had ever seen.