David Drake - Mistress of the Catacombs

“All right, Carus,” Sharina said, and Tenoctris echoed, “Yes, yes, of course.”

Liane nodded instead of speaking. Her expression remained guarded for a moment. At last she forced a smile, and said, “Yes, of course. I’m sorry, this has been a…”

Liane’s mood broke in a trill of laughter. “I was going to say it was a shock to me,” she said. “But not so great as it was to you, I realize. I’ll be all right.”

“Right, then, right,” Carus said. He’d become less tense after blurting his real identity, but this was a man who preferred the open air to the inside of a building. “To business, then.”

He looked at the women, grinning. He wasn’t her brother, but Sharina found him as easy to trust as she did Garric and Cashel.

“The business is,” Carus said, “that the kingdom needs Garric to hold it together. The Ornifal nobles will follow him—and the common people, they’d walk over a cliff if he told them to, the most of them.”

“Ornifal isn’t the Isles,” Liane said, quietly, but speaking to hear the king’s response.

“No, and it never will be,” Carus said with enough edge to his tone to show that he knew he was being tested. “King Garric will rule the united—the reunited—kingdom, though—on my honor!”

He paused, relaxing his face into the smile of moments before. Nobody looking at Carus could doubt that this was an older man than the youth who’d worn the flesh only minutes before. “The rulers of the other islands won’t bow to Garric yet, but even now they respect him enough to be careful. The way Lerdoc’s using the Confederacy of the West for a stalking horse proves that. Not so, milady?”

Carus leaned across the small table. He’d have chucked Liane under the chin if she hadn’t jerked back in amazement. Tenoctris watched the byplay with the mild interest she might have shown for finches fluttering about a sunflower.

Carus straightened, and continued, “So long as all but a few think Garric’s hand is still on the reins of the kingdom, we’ll have time—you’ll have time, w-wiz…Tenoctris, that is. Time to bring him back in all truth.”

“You can pass for my brother,” Sharina said. “You are Garric, in body at least.”

“Aye, and I’ve looked through Garric’s eyes in the months since he began wearing this,” Carus said. He waggled the medallion, then dropped it back beneath his tunics. “I have Garric’s memories besides.”

“You know everything Garric knew?” Sharina said.

“No,” said Carus. “But I know everything he remembered . He’s forgotten a lot of things, everybody does. But I’m not going to be tripped up because somebody greets me on the street and I don’t know he’s Cog or-Varsel who had the goose that followed him into the tavern every evening at sundown. Where the problem’s going to be, though…”

Carus grimaced. He touched the wall where painted birds perched on a painted trellis in the painted sunshine. He looked like a trapped cat again.

“You see,” he went on softly, “it’s not what Garric’s done that’ll trip me up, it’s the things he’ll be asked to do. I’ll have to make the choices a king makes, handle usurpers in the kingdom and quarrels in the council. I’ve been king, ladies; friends, I mean.”

He slammed his balled right fist into his left palm with a crack! like nearby lightning.

“Been king and failed at it!” Carus said. “I thought all virtue lay in quickness, but sometimes I should have waited; I flew hot when things happened that I should’ve let pass, the first time they happened anyhow.”

He grinned, an expression as common to Carus’ spirit as it was to Garric’s face—but forced this time, almost tentative. “And I hated wizards the way some men hate spiders,” Carus said. “Hated wizards and feared them, my friends, and so I let wizardry bring the kingdom down. I had no one to help me against the dangers that my sword couldn’t cure.”

Sharina put her hand on Tenoctris’ shoulder. “You’ve a wizard to help you now—”

Tenoctris nodded crisply. “For what my help is worth,” she said.

“It’s been worth the kingdom’s salvation in the past,” Carus said. He touched his cheekbone with his finger. “As I’ve seen through these eyes.”

“And I know my brother relied on Liane’s advice regarding both the court and the kingdom,” Sharina went on. “In addition to what the royal council suggested.”

“Liane’s advice and your own,” Carus said. “Yes, I know that, and I’m relying on you to help me as well. But your first business, friend Tenoctris, must be to retrieve Garric so that I can go back to being only another of the prince’s advisors.”

He shook his head ruefully, and added, “Echeus isn’t the first man whose head I took off in anger when he might better have lived to answer some questions. I regret that stroke, for all that I wish somebody’d taken him out of this world a few hours earlier and saved me trouble.”

Tenoctris stood. “I think the Intercessor will give me some idea of what he was about,” she said. “His brain’s still fresh, you see. If I may be excused, ah, Carus?”

The ancient king winced as though the reference to necromancy had been a knife in his stomach. “Yes, milady, do what you must do,” he said. “So long as I don’t have to watch—”

His face hardened. “Though I’d do that if I must,” he said. “For the kingdom’s sake, even that.”

“There’ll be no need,” Tenoctris said as she started for the door. “Though perhaps Ilna will help me?”

She made the words a question. Carus nodded. He was neither smiling nor grim but …something . “Yes,” he said, “and I’ve business with her Master Chalcus next. Pray get Ilna to help. And whoever else you wish—that has the stomach for it!”

Sharina and Liane rose to go out with Tenoctris. Carus raised a finger for attention. “Sharina?” he said. “I’d like you to stay during my interview with Chalcus. I think…it will be a more quiet affair, perhaps, with a young woman present.”

Sharina smiled. “Yes,” she said as she settled back on the ivory stool. “I can see that it might be.”

Liane was fiddling with a latch of her travelling desk so that she had an excuse not to meet Carus’ eyes. She said, “Ah…your, that is Carus , you said that you watched everything that Garric…?”

“If I said that,” Carus said, “then I lied, milady. Anything that may have passed between you and Prince Garric privately remains private. And you’ll hear no other story from these lips though I die for it.”

With a great laugh, he added, “Dying’s a matter I’ve experience with too, you’ll remember,” he said. “And in the end, I proved better at it than I did at kingship.”

Still laughing, he escorted Liane and Tenoctris to the door, one on either arm.

The morning sun was so low behind Cashel that the island shadowed the reef on which Tilphosa’s ship had broken up. The wind had dropped still further; foam outlined the rocks, but there was no high-dashing spray as he’d seen at the height of the storm.

Barca’s Hamlet was on the east coast of Haft. Until a few months ago, it wouldn’t have crossed Cashel’s mind that you could look at the sea and not be looking east.

“Master Cashel?” Tilphosa said. “What are we going to do now?”

Cashel turned, frowning. It was a good question, one he’d been turning over in the back of his mind, but he didn’t see why the girl seated on a lava block would be asking him.

“What’s your wizard say?” he said. He frowned still deeper. Personally, he wouldn’t trust Captain Mounix’s judgment much farther than he would that of sottish Kellard or-Same back in the borough, but Tilphosa had boarded the fellow’s ship. Maybe she felt otherwise. “Or the captain, I suppose.”