Paul Kearney: The Iron Wars

Golophin smiled. “I am trying to regain my lost strength, lady, and perhaps I am trying to forget how I lost it. Pay me no mind.”

She liked his frankness, and sat without saying a word. She somehow realized that it would be better if she were not to make small talk.

“Are your apartments to your liking?” Golophin asked absently.

She had been given a vast lonely suite that belonged to some long-dead Hebrian queen-Abeleyn’s mother, perhaps. The rooms were hideous with sombre tapestries and hangings and devotional pictures of Saints. The furniture was huge and heavy and dark-wooded. The place felt like a mausoleum. But she nodded and said: “They are very fine.”

“Never liked this place myself,” the wizard admitted. “Abeleyn’s mother Bellona was a fine woman, but a bit austere. I see you’ve pulled the hangings away from the balconies. That’s good. Lets in what sun there is in this black month of the year.” He threw back another glass of the wine. Isolla thought privately that it was not the third or even the fourth glass he’d had that morning.

“I remember you as a child,” he said. “A patient little creature. Abeleyn liked you, but had the cruelty of all small boys. I hope you do not hold it against him.”

“Of course not,” she said, rather coldly.

He smiled. “You have a head on your shoulders, lady, or so I am told. That is why I am here. Were you another tinsel-brained princess, you’d be kept in the dark and told whatever we thought you’d believe. But I have a feeling that will not suffice. That is why I am willing to do what I am about to do.”

Ah, she thought, and straightened. “Brienne, leave us.”

Her maidservant exited the room with a piteous look. Golophin rose from his chair and paced about the floor like some huge cadaverous bat, his mantle billowing out behind him. No-he was more of a raptor, a starved falcon, perhaps. Even his movements were as quick and economical as a bird’s, despite the wine he’d quaffed.

He went to the far wall, pulled back the hideous tapestry that hung there and pressed hard on the stone. There was a click, and a gap appeared, rapidly broadening into a low doorway.

Isolla sucked in her breath. “Magic.”

He laughed. “No. Engineering. The palace is riddled with hidden doors and secret passageways. Now you must come with me.”

She hesitated. She did not like the look of the hole he was gesturing at. It might lead anywhere. Was there some kind of plot afoot?

“Trust me,” Golophin said gently. And then she saw the suffering in his eyes. There was a grief there that he held bottled up as tightly as a genie of eastern myth. Despite herself, she rose and joined him at the secret door.

“I am going to take you to meet your betrothed,” the wizard said, and led her into the darkness.

Isolla had seen bale-fire before, as a child. A ball of it hovered above Golophin’s head in the dark and lit the way for them. But it was a guttering thing, like a candle almost burnt down to the wick. She suddenly realized that the old mage was damaged in some way-something had stolen away his strength and made him into a caricature of what he had once been. It was the war, she guessed. It had drained him somehow.

The passage they trod was smoothly made out of jointed stone, and it rose and wound like the coils of a snake. There were other doors off its sides, leading to other rooms in the palace, Isolla supposed. She knew she, a foreigner, was being trusted with some of the secrets of the palace. But then she’d be Hebrion’s queen soon enough anyway.

They halted. The bale-fire went out and there was a grating of stone. She followed the wizard’s lean back through another low door like the one in her own chambers, and found herself in a high-ceilinged room that was almost totally dark. A rack of tall candles fluttered by the side of a massively ornate four-poster bed, and she could make out weapons on the walls gleaming in the gloom. Maps and books and more of the dull hangings. A bedstand with jug and ewer of silver. And everywhere engraved or embossed, the Hebrian Royal arms. She was in the King’s chambers.

“Speak normally. No whispers,” Golophin told her. “He is far away, but not gone, not entirely. It may be that a new voice will reach him as a familiar one might not.”

“What-?” But Golophin took her arm and led her to the side of the huge bed.

The King. Her horrified eyes took in what was left of him at a glance, and her hand flew to her mouth. This thing was to be her husband.

Golophin was watching her. She sensed a protective anger in him that was not very far from the surface. She brought her hand down from her face and touched Abeleyn’s where it lay on the coverlet.

His features she recognized: the dark hair as thick as ever despite the threads of grey. The face she had known as sun-brown was as pallid as the sheets behind it. She was surprised to feel grief, not for herself who was to be joined to this wreck of a man, but for Abeleyn, the high-spirited boy she had known who had pulled her hair and said cruel things about her nose. He had not deserved to end up like this.

“What was it?” she asked, uncomfortably aware of Golophin’s hawk-like scrutiny.

“A shell. One of our own, God help us, in the moment when the battle was won. I was able to seal the stumps, but I had already exhausted myself in the fighting and could do nothing more. It would take a great work of theurgy to heal him completely, something I’m not sure I would be capable of even if I were at my full strength. And so he lies here, his mind in some fathomless limbo I cannot reach. We have made discreet enquiries for Mind-rhymers, but those who were not murdered under Sastro di Carrera’s regime fled to the ends of the earth. The Dweomer cannot help Abeleyn. His own will must pull him through, and whatever human warmth we can give.” Here he glared at Isolla as if he dared her to contradict him.

But she was not so easily cowed. She released the unconscious King’s hand and faced the old mage squarely. “I take it there will be no wedding until the King is brought to himself again.”

“Yes. But there will be a wedding. The country needs it. We may have slaughtered Carrera’s retainers and expelled the surviving Knights Militant, but there are still ambitious men in Hebrion who would stoop to seize a crown if they saw it fall.”

“You cannot fool the world for ever, Golophin. The truth will out, in the end.”

“I know. But we have to try. This man has greatness in him. I will not abandon him to rot!”

He loves him, she thought. He truly does. And she warmed to the fierce old man. She had always responded to lost causes, had always sided with the underdog. Perhaps because it was how she had always seen herself.

“So you brought me here to join your little conspiracy. Who else knows the true condition of the King?”

“Admiral Rovero, General Mercado, and perhaps three or four of the palace servants whom I trust.”

“The whole city is in mourning.”

“I had to put out a bulletin on the King’s health. He is dangerously ill, but not dying. That is the official line.”

“How long do you think you can keep the hounds leashed?”

“A few weeks, maybe a couple of months. Rovero and Mercado have the army and the fleet firmly under control, and in any case Hebrion’s soldiers and sailors fairly worship Abeleyn. No, as always, it is the court we must worry about. And that, my dear, is where you come in.”

“I see. So I am to make reassuring noises about the palace.”

“Yes. Are you willing?”

She looked down at the wrecked King again, and felt an absurd urge to ruffle the dark hair on the pillow. “I am willing. My brother would wish it so anyway.”