David Coe - Bonds of Vengeance

Still she remained by the window for a long while, listening as the cheers grew nearer and finally faded. Javan was in the castle.

Only a short time later, she heard voices from the corridor and then footsteps just outside her chamber. She had known the duke of Curgh would come to her eventually, but she didn’t expect him so soon, nor had she thought that he would bring his son and wife, as well as Grinsa and a second Qirsi who must have been his first minister.

“This is her?” the duke asked, stopping before her door, his lean, bearded face framed in the small grate.

“Yes, my lord.” Grinsa.

Javan stared at her, his eyes boring into hers. Bryntelle gave a small cry, and his gaze flicked to her for just an instant before returning to Cresenne.

She shifted Bryntelle to the other side, feeling uncomfortable under the duke’s glare.

“I assumed you were helping the king so that you might avoid the gallows.” Javan glanced at the baby again. “I see now that you had other reasons.”

Cresenne could think of nothing to say.

“If it were up to me, you’d hang anyway. I suppose you know that.”

He watched her, as if awaiting a response. She gave none. A part of her wished that Grinsa would say something in her defense, but she knew that he wouldn’t. And they had the gall to call her a traitor.

“You have nothing to say to me?” the duke demanded.

“No, my lord. I don’t.”

His lip curled up, as if he were snarling at her. “Kearney is wrong to show you mercy. You’re a beast and I pity your child.”

She shouldn’t have cared what this noble thought of her. She should have kept her silence. But his words stung, and Cresenne found that she couldn’t just let him leave.

“I cost you the throne, my lord, and little more. If your ambitions had been the only casualties of my actions, I would feel no remorse at all. As it is, I feel that I owe an apology only to your son, and to the family of Lady Brienne.”

“Now I truly feel sorry for the babe you hold in your arms. For if you believe that my son’s imprisonment and torture cost me nothing, then you don’t know what it is to be a parent.”

He might as well have slapped her. She felt tears fall from her eyes, and a tightness in her chest that almost stopped her breathing. Before she could answer him, Javan stepped away from her door. A moment later another face replaced his. The duchess. She had golden hair and bright green eyes, and she looked at Cresenne with an odd mix of distaste and sympathy, as if she couldn’t quite bring herself to hate the woman she saw, though she knew she should.

“I’m sorry,” Cresenne whispered, tears now coursing freely down her cheeks.

The duchess offered no reply, and a moment later was gone.

Tavis appeared in the door’s window next, his face truly a blend of his mother’s and father’s, though he was forever marked by the rage and grief of Kentigern’s duke. Strangely, he seemed to hate her least of the three of them. He didn’t say anything, however. And having just apologized to the boy’s mother, Cresenne couldn’t bring herself to say the words a second time. She and Tavis merely held each other’s gaze until finally the boy stepped away from the door.

She heard someone speak in the corridor, but couldn’t make out what was said. For a few moments it seemed that all of them were leaving the tower. Then another face loomed in the small opening. Grinsa’s.

“The others have returned to the king’s chamber,” he said.

“You should have gone as well.”

“I was concerned for you.”

She gave a harsh laugh. “Of course you were.”

“I should have known that you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Yes, you should have. You should have known it, and so you should have gone away with your Eandi friends.”

He whirled away from the door, and once more she thought he would leave her. Instead he called for one of the guards.

Almost immediately, Cresenne heard the familiar sound of boot on stone.

“Open the door,” Grinsa said.

The man did as he was told.

“Now go.”

The guard stared at him briefly. “I don’t take orders from you. And I’m not going to leave two white-hairs alone, not when one of them is a traitor.”

“I’m the baby’s father.”

“All the more reason for me to stay.”

“I’m also a friend of the king.”

“So you claim.”

Grinsa gritted his teeth. Then he turned to look at one of the torches, and an instant later it exploded like shattered glass, sending embers and fragments of wood in all directions.

“I could do the same to this door any time I wish. I could also do it to your sword. Or your skull. If I wanted to help her escape, I could do so any time I wished, and there would be nothing you and your friends could do to stop me. But that’s not my intention. Now leave us.”

The guard looked frightened, but still he hesitated.

“Leave!”

At last, the man hurried to the tower stairs, and with one last backward glance, started down them to the floor below.

The gleaner entered the chamber.

“I don’t want you here,” Cresenne said. “I have nothing to say to you.”

“What is it you think I’ve done to you, Cresenne? I’m the one who’s been wronged, not you. You lied to me. You used me to get information about Tavis and his gleaning. You sent an assassin to kill me. All I did was love you.”

“That’s not true, and you know it. We both lied. I didn’t tell you I was with the movement, and you didn’t tell me you were a Weaver.”

He cast a quick look toward the door, as if fearing that one of the guards had heard. But no one was there.

“You can’t possibly equate the two. I kept my powers hidden to protect myself and. . and others as well. I even wanted to protect you. That’s how much I cared for you. I thought that there was a chance we might remain together forever. And you know as well as I what the Eandi do to the wives of Weavers.”

“And still you serve them.”

“I serve no one. I seek only to prevent war.”

She laughed. “You really believe that, don’t you? With one breath you speak of saving yourself and the people you love from Eandi executioners, and in the next you claim to be your own master. You’re a fool, Grinsa.”

He looked as though he might say more, but then he heaved a sigh, shaking his head. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose I am.”

Without waiting for her reply, he turned and stepped from the chamber, pulling the door closed behind him.

Bryntelle started at the sound, then began to cry.

“Grinsa, wait.”

Cresenne crossed to the door, fearing that he would leave the corridor. But reaching the grate, she saw that he was standing at the entrance to the stairway, looking back at her, his face pale in what remained of the torchlight.

She wasn’t certain what she wanted to say to him. She just knew that she didn’t want him to go after all. At least not like this.

“When I told you before that I didn’t love you, that I’d never loved you. .” She looked away. “That wasn’t true.”

“I know,” he said, and left her.

The rest of her day seemed to stretch on for an eternity. Mercifully, no one else came to see her, her solitude interrupted only by the arrival of her evening meal as the sky outside her window began to darken. But even then, too sickened by her encounters with Javan and the gleaner to eat, she merely sat on the bed, feeding Bryntelle when the child cried, and waiting for the day to end so that she could just sleep.

Still, when sleep finally came, it caught her unaware, like an army advancing through a mist-laden wood. One moment she was sitting beside Bryntelle on the bed. The next she was on the broad plain she had come to know so well, the Weaver before her, framed by the harsh white sun he always conjured for these dreams, his hair looking as black as the sky and even more wild than usual.