Lois Bujold - The Curse of Chalion

Iselle smiled across at her husband, and Bergon smiled back at her; last night, they had looked excited and tired and a little scared. This morning, they looked like two people in love. With blackness boiling up around them both like the smoke from a burning ship.

As they approached, Iselle sang him a cheerful, "Good morning, Lord Caz!"

Bergon grinned, and said, "Will you not join us, sir? We have much to give thanks together for this morning, do we not?"

Cazaril's lips drew back on the travesty of a smile. "I... I... a little later. I left something in my room."

He heaved himself up and rushed past them up the stairs. He turned and looked again from the gallery as they passed out of the courtyard. Still trailing shadows.

He slammed the door of his chamber behind himself and stood gasping, almost weeping. Gods. Gods. What have I done?

I haven't freed Iselle. I've cursed Bergon.

Distraught, Cazaril kept to his chamber all morning. In the afternoon a page knocked, with the unwelcome news that the royse and royesse desired him to attend upon them in their rooms. Cazaril considered feigning illness, though he hardly need feign. No, for Iselle would surely bring physicians down upon him, probably in packs—he remembered the last time, with Rojeras, and shuddered. With a boundless reluctance, he straightened his garments, making himself presentable, and walked out around the gallery to the royal suite.

The sitting room's high casement windows were open to the cool spring light. Iselle and Bergon, still in festive dress from the noon banquet at the March dy Huesta's palace, awaited him. They sat around the corner from each other at a table that bore paper, parchment, and new pens, with a third chair pulled invitingly to the other side. Their heads, amber and brown, were bent together in low-voiced conversation. The shadow still boiled slowly around them, viscous as hot tar. At Cazaril's step, they both looked up at him and smiled. He moistened his lips and bowed, his face stiff.

Iselle gestured at the papers. "Our next most urgent task is to compose a letter to my brother Orico, to acquaint him of the steps we have taken, and assure him of our most loyal submission. I think we should include extracts of all the articles of our marriage most favorable to Chalion, to help reconcile him to it, don't you think?"

Cazaril cleared his throat and swallowed.

Bergon's brows drew inward. "Caz, you look as pale as a... um. Are you all right? Please, sit down!"

Cazaril managed a tiny headshake. Again he was tempted to flee into some malingering lie—or half-truth, now, for he was feeling sick enough. "Nothing is all right," he whispered. He sank to one knee before the royse. "I have made a vast mistake. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

Iselle's wary, startled face blurred in his vision. "Lord Caz... ?"

"Your marriage"—he swallowed again, and forced his numb lips to speak on—"has not lifted the curse from Iselle as I'd hoped. Instead, it has spread it to you both."

" What? " breathed Bergon.

Tears clogged Cazaril's voice. "And now I know not what to do..."

"How do you know this?" Iselle asked urgently.

"I can see it. I can see it on you both now. If anything, it's even darker and thicker. More grasping."

Bergon's lips parted in dismay. "Did I... did we do something wrong? Somehow?"

"No, no! But both Sara and Ista married into the House of Chalion, and into the curse. I thought it was because men and women were different, that it somehow followed the male line of Fonsa's heirs along with the name."

"But I am Fonsa's heir, too," said Iselle slowly. "And flesh and blood are more than just names. When two become wed, it doesn't mean that one disappears and only the other remains. We are joined, not subsumed. Oh, is there nothing we can do? There must be something!"

"Ista said," Cazaril began, and stopped. He was not at all sure he wanted to tell these two decisive young people what Ista had said. Iselle might take thought again...

Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be , Iselle had cried. It was much too late to shelter her now. By the wrath of the gods, she was to be the next royina of Chalion. With the right to rule came the duty to protect—the privilege of receiving protection had to be left behind with childhood's other toys. Even protection from bitter knowledge. Especially from knowledge.

Cazaril swallowed to unlock his throat. "Ista said there was another way."

He climbed into the chair and sat heavily. In a broken voice, in terms so plain as to be almost brutal, Cazaril repeated the tale Ista had told him of Lord dy Lutez, Roya Ias, and her vision of the goddess. Of the two dark hellish nights in the Zangre's dungeons with the bound man and the vat of icy water. When he finished, both his listeners were pale and staring.

"I thought—I feared—I might be the one," Cazaril said. "Because of the night I tried to barter my life for Dondo's death. I was terrified that I might be the one. Iselle's dy Lutez , as Ista named me. But I swear before all the gods, if I thought it would work, I'd have you take me outside right now and drown me in the courtyard fountain. Twice. But I cannot become the sacrifice now. My second death must be my last, for the death demon will fly away with my soul and Dondo's, and I don't see how there can be any getting it back into my body then." He rubbed his wet eyes with the back of his hand.

Bergon gazed at his new wife as if his eyes could swallow her. He finally said huskily, "What about me?"

"What?" said Iselle.

"I undertook to come here to save you from this thing. So, the method's just got a little harder, that's all. I'm not afraid of the water. What if you drowned me?"

Cazaril's and Iselle's instant protests tumbled out together; Cazaril gave way with a little wave of his hand. Iselle repeated, "It was tried once. It was tried, and it didn't work. I'm not about to drown either one of you, thank you very much! No, nor hang you either, nor any other horrid thing you can think of. No!"

"Besides," Cazaril put in, "the goddess's words were, a man must lay down his life three times for the House of Chalion. Not of the House of Chalion." At least, according to Ista. Had she repeated her vision verbatim? Or did her words embed some treacherous error? Never mind, so long as they deterred Bergon from his horrifying suggestion. "I don't think you can break the curse from the inside, or it would have been Ias, not dy Lutez, who put himself into the barrel. And, five gods forgive me, Bergon, you are now inside this thing."

"It feels wrong anyway," said Iselle, her eyes narrowing. "Some kind of cheat. What was that thing you told me Saint Umegat said, when you'd asked him what you should do? About daily duties?"

"He said I should do my daily duties as they came to me."

"Well, and so. Surely the gods are not done with us." She drummed her fingers on the tabletop. "It occurs to me... my mother lay down twice in childbed for the House of Chalion. She never had the chance for a third such trial. That is certainly a duty that the gods give to one."

Cazaril considered the havoc that the curse might wreak, intersecting with the hazards of pregnancy and childbirth as it had intersected with the chances of Ias's and Orico's battles, and shivered. Barrenness like Sara's was the least of the potential disasters. "Five gods, Iselle, I think we'd do better to put me into the barrel."

"And besides," said Bergon, "the goddess said a man. She did say a man, didn't She, Caz?"

"Uh... that was Lady Ista's account of the words, yes."

"The divines say, when the gods instruct men in their pious duties, they mean women, too," Iselle growled. "You can't have it both ways. Anyway, I lived under the curse for sixteen years, unknowing. I survived somehow."