Gregory Keyes - The Blood Knight

Yet it stayed sweet this time, if clumsy and amateurish.

Groaning, he pushed at the sticky womb of dream until he tore through to wakefulness.

He thought for a moment he had merely moved to another dream. He lay not on the cold, stinking stone he had become accustomed to but on a soft pallet, his head nested on a pillow. The stench of his own urine was replaced by the faint odor of juniper.

And most of all—most of all, the hammarharp was real, as was the man who sat on its bench, poking awkwardly at the keyboard.

“Prince Robert,” Leoff managed to croak. To his own ear his voice sounded stripped down, as if all the screaming he had done had shredded the cords of his throat.

The man on the stool turned and clapped his hands, apparently delighted, but the hard gems of his eyes reflected the candlelight and nothing more.

“Cavaor Leoff,” he said. “How nice of you to join me. Look, I’ve brought you a present.” He flourished his hands at the hammarharp. “It’s a good one, I’m told,” he went on. “From Virgenya.”

Leoff felt an odd, detached vibration in his limbs. He didn’t see any guards. He was alone with the prince, this man who had condemned him to the mercies of the praifec and his torturers.

He searched his surroundings further. He was in a room a good deal larger than the cell he had occupied when last sleep and delirium had claimed him. Besides the narrow wooden cot on which he lay and the hammarharp, there was another chair, a washbasin and pitcher of water, and—and here he had to rub his eyes—a bookshelf full of tomes and scrifti.

“Come, come,” the prince said. “You must try the instrument. Please, I insist.”

“Your Highness—”

“I insist ,” Robert said firmly.

Painfully Leoff swung his legs down to the floor, feeling one or two of the blisters on his feet burst as he put weight on them. That was such a minor pain, he didn’t even really wince.

The prince—no, he had made himself king now, hadn’t he? The usurper was alone. Queen Muriele was dead; everyone he cared about was dead.

He was worse than dead.

He stepped toward Robert, feeling his knee jar oddly. He would never run again, would he? Never trot across the grass on a spring day, never play with his children—likely never have children, come to that.

He took another step. He was almost close enough now.

“Please,” Robert said wearily, rising from the stool and gripping Leoff’s shoulders with cold, hard fingers. “What do you suppose you will do? Throttle me? With these?” He grabbed Leoff’s fingers, and such a shock of pain exploded through Leoff that it tore a gasp from his aching lungs.

Once it would have been enough to make him scream. Now tears started in his eyes as he looked down to where the king’s hand gripped his.

He still didn’t recognize them, his hands. Once the fingers had been gently tapered, lean and supple, perfect for fingering the croth or tripping on keys. Now they were swollen and twisted in terribly unnatural ways; the praifec’s men had broken them methodically between all the joints.

They hadn’t stopped there, though; they had crushed the bones of each hand as well, and shattered the wrists that supported them. If they had cut his hands completely off, it would have been kinder. But they hadn’t. They had left them to hang there, a reminder of other things he would never, ever do again.

He looked again at the hammarharp, at its lovely red-and-black keys, and his shoulders began to tremble. The trickle of tears turned to a flood.

“There,” Robert said. “That’s right. Let it out. Let it out.”

“I-I did not think you could hurt me more,” Leoff managed, gritting his teeth, ashamed but almost, finally, beyond shame.

The king stroked the composer’s hair as if he were a child. “Listen, my friend,” he said. “I am at fault for this, but my crime was that of neglect. I did not supervise the praifec closely enough. I had no idea of the cruelty he was visiting upon you.”

Leoff almost laughed. “You will forgive me if I am skeptical,” he said.

The usurper’s fingers pinched his ear and twisted a bit. “And you will address me as ‘Your Majesty’” Robert said softly.

Leoff snorted. “What will you do if I don’t? Kill me? You have already taken all I have.”

“You think so?” Robert murmured. He released Leoff’s ear and withdrew. “I have not taken everything, I promise you. But let that pass. I regret what has happened to you. My personal physician will attend you from here on out.”

“No physician can heal this,” Leoff said, holding up his maimed hands.

“Perhaps not,” Robert conceded. “Perhaps you will never again play yourself. But as I understand it, the music you create—compose—is done within your head.”

“It cannot come out of my head without my fingers, however,” Leoff snarled.

“Or the fingers of another,” Robert said.

“What—”

But at that moment, the king gestured and the door opened, and there, in the lamplight, stood a soldier in dark armor. His hand rested on the shoulder of a little girl whose eyes were covered by a cloth.

“Mery?” he gasped.

“Cavaor Leoff ?” she squealed. She tried to start forward, but the soldier pulled her back, and the door closed.

“Mery,” Leoff repeated, lumbering toward the door, but Robert caught him by the shoulder again.

“You see?” Robert said softly.

“They told me she was dead!” Leoff gasped. “Executed!”

“The praifec was trying to break your heretic soul,” Robert said. “Much of what his men told you is untrue.”

“But—”

“Hush,” Robert said. “I have been charitable. I can be more so. But you must agree to help me.”

“Help you how?”

Robert smiled a ghastly little smile. “Shall we discuss it over a meal? You look half-starved.”

For what seemed an eternity, Leoff’s meals had consisted of either nothing or some nameless mush that under the best of circumstances was more or less without taste and under the worst reeked of putrefying offal.

Now he found himself staring at a trencher of black bread that had been heaped with roast pork, leeks braised in must, redbutter cheese, boiled eggs sliced and sprinkled with green sauce, and cream fritters. Each scent was a lovely melody, wafting together into a rhapsodic whole. His goblet was filled with a red wine so sharp and fruity, he could smell it without bending toward it.

He looked at his useless hands, then back at the meal. Did the king expect him to lower his face into the food like a hog?

Probably. And he knew that in a few more moments he would.

Instead, a girl in black-and-gray livery entered, knelt by his side, and began offering him morsels of the repast. He tried to take it with some measure of grace, but after the first explosion of flavor in his mouth, he gulped unashamedly.

Robert sat across the table from him and watched him without apparent amusement.

“That was clever,” he said after a time, “your lustspell, your singing play. The praifec greatly underestimated you and the power you wield through your music. I can’t tell you how angry I felt, sitting helplessly as the thing unfolded, unable to stand, speak, or bring it to a halt. You put a gag in the mouth of a king, Cavaor, and you tied his hands behind his back. I don’t suppose you expected to escape without some punishment.”

Leoff laughed bitterly. “I hardly think that now,” he said, then lifted his head defiantly. “But I do not accept you as king.”

Robert smiled. “Yes, I quite gathered that by the content of the play. I am not entirely a buffoon, you see.”

“I never took you for one,” Leoff replied. Vicious and murderous, yes, stupid, no , he finished silently.