Lois Bujold - The Curse of Chalion

The courtiers of Chalion had pulled three charred bodies from the rubble the following morning; only the differing heights allowed them to tell divine from page from roya. Shocked and terrified, the trembling court had awaited its fate. The courier from Cardegoss, galloping north with the news of loss and woe, met the courier galloping south from Ias with news of victory. Funeral and coronation were celebrated simultaneously within the Zangre's walls.

Cazaril stared around at those walls now. "When Royse—now Roya—Ias returned from the war," he went on to Betriz, "he ordered the lower windows and doors of his dead father's tower bricked up, and proclaimed that no one should enter it again."

A dark, flapping shape launched itself from the tower's top, and Betriz squeaked and ducked.

"Crows have nested in it ever since," Cazaril noted, tilting his head back to watch the black silhouette wheel against the intense blue sky. "I believe it's the same flock of sacred crows the divines of the Bastard feed in the temple yard. Intelligent birds. The acolytes make pets of them and teach them to speak."

Iselle, who had drawn closer as Cazaril had discoursed upon her royal grandfather's fate, asked, "What do they say?"

"Not much," Cazaril admitted, with a quick grin at her. "I never saw one that had a vocabulary of more than three squawks. Although some of the acolytes insisted they were saying more."

Warned by the outrider dy Sanda had sent on ahead, a swarm of grooms and servants rushed out to assist the arriving guests. The Zangre's castle warder, with his own hands, positioned a mounting bench for Royesse Iselle. Perhaps thrown into consciousness of her dignity by this gentleman's bending gray head, she used the step for a change, parting from her horse with ladylike grace. Teidez tossed his reins to a bowing groom and stared about with shining eyes. The warder made rapid conference with dy Sanda and Cazaril of a dozen practical details, from stabling the horses and grooms to—Cazaril grinned briefly—stabling the royse and royesse.

The warder escorted the royal children to their rooms in the left wing of the main block, followed by a parade of servants lugging the baggage. Teidez and his entourage were given half a floor; Iselle and her ladies, the floor above them. Cazaril was assigned a small room on the gentlemen's floor, but at the very end. He wondered if he was expected to guard the staircase.

"Rest and refresh yourselves," the warder said. "The roya and royina will receive you at a celebratory banquet this evening, attended by all the court." A rush of servants bringing wash water, clean linens, bread, fruit, pastries, cheese, and wine assured the visitors from Valenda that they were not abandoned to starve between now and then.

"Where are my royal brother and sister-in-law?" Iselle asked the warder.

The warder made her a little bow. "The royina is resting. The roya is visiting his menagerie, which is a great consolation to him."

"I'd like to see it," she said, a little wistfully. "He has often written me of it."

"Tell him so. He'll like to show it to you," the warder assured her with a smile.

The ladies' party was soon deeply involved in a frantic turning out of luggage to select garments for the banquet, an exercise that quite clearly did not require Cazaril's inexpert assistance. He directed the servant to place his trunk in his narrow room and depart, dropped his saddlebags on his bed, and rooted through them to find the letter to Orico the Provincara had strictly charged him to deliver, into the roya's hand and no other, at his earliest possible moment upon arrival. He paused only to wash the road dirt from his hands and spare a quick glance out his window. The deep ravine on this side of the castle seemed to plunge straight down below his sill. A dizzying glint of water from the stream was just visible through the treetops far below.

Cazaril only lost his way once on the way to the menagerie, which was outside the walls and across the gardens, an adjunct of the stables. If nothing else he could identify it by the sharp, acrid smell of strange manures neither human nor equine. Cazaril stared into an arched aisle of the stone building, his eyes adjusting to its cool shade, and diffidently entered.

A couple of former stalls were converted to cages for a pair of wonderfully glossy black bears. One was asleep on a pile of clean golden straw; the other stared up at him, lifting its muzzle and sniffing hopefully as Cazaril passed. On the other side of the aisle stalls housed some very strange beasts that Cazaril could not even put a name to, like tall leggy goats, but with long curving necks, mild and liquid eyes, and thick soft fur. In a room to one side, a dozen large, brilliantly colored birds on perches preened and muttered, and other tiny, equally bright ones twittered and flitted in cages lining the wall. Across from the aviary, in an open bay, he found human occupants at last: a neat groom in the roya's livery, and a fat man sitting cross-legged on a table, holding a leopard by its jeweled collar. Cazaril gasped and froze as the man ducked his head right next to the great cat's open jaws.

The man was currying the beast vigorously. A cloud of yellow and black hairs rose from the pair as the leopard writhed on the table in what Cazaril recognized, after a blink, as feline ecstasy. Cazaril's eye was so locked by the leopard, it took him another moment to recognize the man as Roya Orico.

The dozen years since Cazaril had last glimpsed him had not been kind. Orico had never been a handsome man, even in the vigor of his youth. He was a little below average in height, with a short nose unfortunately broken in a riding accident in his teens and now looking rather like a squashed mushroom in the middle of his face. His hair had been auburn and curly. It was now roan, still curly but much thinner. His hair was the only thing about him that was thinner; his body was grossly broadened. His face was pale and puffy, with baggy eyelids. He chirped at his spotted cat, who rubbed its head against the roya's tunic, shedding more hairs, then licked the brocade vigorously with a tongue the size of a washcloth, evidently pursuing a large gravy stain that had trailed down over the roya's impressive paunch. The roya's sleeves were rolled up, and half a dozen scabbed scratches scored his arms. The great cat caught a bare arm, and held it in its yellow teeth briefly, but did not close its jaws. Cazaril unwound his clutching fingers from his sword hilt, and cleared his throat.

As the roya turned his head, Cazaril fell to one knee. "Sire, I bear you respectful greetings from the Dowager Provincara of Baocia, and this her letter." He held out the paper, and added, just in case no one had mentioned it to him yet, "Royse Teidez and Royesse Iselle are arrived safely, sire."

"Oh, yes." The roya jerked his head at the elderly groom, who went to relieve Cazaril of the letter with a graceful bow.

"Her Grace the Dowager instructed me to deliver it into your hand," Cazaril added uncertainly.

"Yes, yes—just a moment—" With some effort, Orico bent over his belly to give the cat one quick hug, then clipped a silver chain to its collar. Chirping some more, he urged it to leap lightly from the table. He dismounted more heavily, and said, "Here, Umegat."

This was evidently the groom's name, not the cat's, for the man stepped forward and took the silver leash in exchange for the letter. He led the beast to its cage a little way down the aisle, unceremoniously shoving it in with a knee to its rump when it paused to rub on the bars. Cazaril breathed a little easier when the groom locked the cage.

Orico broke the seal, scattering wax on the swept tiled floor. Absently, he motioned Cazaril to his feet and read slowly down the Provincara's spidery handwriting, pausing to move the paper closer or farther and squinting now and then. Cazaril, falling easily back into his old courier mode, folded his hands behind his back and waited patiently to be questioned or dismissed at Orico's will.