Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

The cardinal died in his bedroom, alone. He looked small in the wideness of that bed, sunken, old before his time. If he’d been drinking then the maids had removed the evidence and tidied him up.

He’d gone into a decline following his trip to Roma. The pope’s scolding was a thing to behold by all accounts, and accompanying Reymond Kendeth back to Vermillion, along with a heavy burden of shame, came the pope’s own man, Archbishop Larrin, whose only job appeared to be making my father do his. Some men thrive on old age, others feel the world narrow around them and see no point in the path before them. A man’s first taste of the poppy gives him something glorious and wonderful, something that he strives to recapture with each return to the resin, but in the end he needs to smoke it just to feel human. Life is the same for many of us-a few scant years of golden youth when everything tastes sweet, every experience new and sharp with meaning. Then a long slow grind to the grave, trying and failing to recapture that feeling you had when you were seventeen and the world rolled out before you.

The funeral took place three days later, Father’s corpse under guard until then while the most pious of the faith filed past to honour the office if not the man. We gathered in the Black Courtyard, a sizeable rectangle between the Poor Palace and the Marsail keep, generally used for exercising horses but traditionally reserved for gathering with the coffin before the slow walk to the cemetery, or the church, depending on the deceased’s station in life. Today, under a sullen and blustery sky, there was to be a cremation. Split logs of rosewood and magnolia, selected for fragrance, had been stacked into a pyre taller than a mounted man. Father’s coffin lay perched atop the wooden mountain, polished, gleaming, chased with silver, a heavy silver cross placed upon the lid.

The entire palace turned out. This was the Red Queen’s youngest son, the highest cleric in the land. In the tiered seating for the royals Garyus’s palanquin sat highest, with Martus, Darin and me in the row beneath, our cousins arrayed before us one row lower. Father’s elder brother, Uncle Parrus, remained in his holdings in the east. The message hadn’t had time to reach him, let alone allowed time for him to return, and in any event with Grandmother’s thrust into Slov it would hardly be the time for the grandest lord in the east to abandon his castle on the border.

I had reports demanding my attention-disturbances in the outer city that morning-but I couldn’t begrudge Father his due. Somehow, after Mother’s death we never had anything to say to each other. I should have fixed that. You always think there’s going to be time. Put things off. And then suddenly there’s no time left at all.

“Here he comes.” Darin to my left, nodding down at the courtyard. A crowd of the aristocracy emerged from the Adam Arch, chattering brightly despite their sombre blacks and greys.

“Grandmother’s only been gone ten days and he thinks he owns the place.” Martus on Darin’s far side.

I could make out my father’s eldest brother, my Uncle Hertet, at the centre of the crowd, not because of his height-which was modest-but by virtue of the shirt of brilliant yellow-and-green silk showing through the wide gap in his mourning robe, all of it stretched to contain an ample belly. His entourage swept before him, the phoney court he maintained as practice for when the throne would supposedly be his. To watch him you might imagine that he considered his mother gone for good-not merely on campaign but to her grave.

Hertet’s sons, Johnath and Roland, peeled off to the lowest row to sit beside our other cousins along with the lords and barons. Their father, sweating in his finery despite the cool breeze, lumbered up the timber steps to the highest tier where he wedged himself alongside Garyus’s palanquin. The heir-apparently-not gave no hint of a bow nor acknowledged his uncle’s presence in any way other than that forced on him by having to squeeze in beside the curtained box.

“Hurry it along.” Hertet raised his voice behind us. I turned to see him brushing a hand up through the damp straggles of his grey hair, plastering them back over his forehead. With sagging jowls and bloodshot eyes he looked a far more likely candidate for the reaper’s scythe than my father ever had. “Reymond kept me waiting long enough in life with those damned masses of his. Let’s not have him waste any more of our time.”

Seeing Hertet’s waving arm the archbishop down in the square began to read aloud from the huge bible held open for him by two choirboys.

“Damned nonsense all this pyre business.” Hertet continued to grumble behind me. “Got better things to do with my morning than sit and smell Reymond cook. Should put him in the crypt with the rest of the Kendeths.”

Since our family name passed down through the monarch we were all Kendeths despite Grandmother’s three sons having three different fathers. I’d always taken pride in the name before, though sharing it with Hertet soured that pride somewhat there on the tiers. I hoped his opinions on cremating the dead didn’t escape the palace. It was proving hard enough convincing Vermillion to exhume and burn her dead as it was, without Hertet Kendeth declaring it foolishness.

At length we were done with the Latin and the lies. Archbishop Larrin closed the huge bible with a thump that echoed around the Black Courtyard, and the finality of it sent a chill through me. Father’s seal hung around the man’s neck, catching the light. A minor cleric handed Larrin a burning brand and he duly tossed it into the kindling heaped at the pyre’s base. The flames took hold, grew, crackled, found their roar and started to devour the logs above them. Thankfully the breeze blew from the south and carried the smoke away from us, drifting in grey clouds across the Marsail keep, over the palace walls, and out across the city.

“Ballessa said an odd thing.” Darin kept his eyes on the flames and I could imagine he hadn’t spoken. “She said she passed by Father’s chambers the afternoon he died and heard him shouting something about the devil . . . and his daughter.”

“Father doesn’t have a daughter,” Martus said, with the kind of firmness that indicated if some bastard child were discovered she should be forgotten again pretty damn quick.

“Daughter?” I watched the flames too. Ballessa wasn’t given to flights of fancy. You would have to look far and wide to find a woman more firmly grounded than the major-domo of Roma Hall. “He was just drunk and shouting nonsense. He was in his cups when I saw him a few days back.” Darin looked at me with a frown. “Father hadn’t drunk for weeks, brother, not since he came back from Roma. The maids told me it was true. You can’t hide anything from the people who clean up after you.”

“I-” I didn’t have anything to say to that. Father had said it for me. He wished that he had done a better job of being a father. Now I wished that I had been a better son.

“Jula was with him at the end,” Darin said.

“He died alone! That’s what I was told!” I looked at my brother but he kept his eyes forward.

“A cardinal shouldn’t die alone with a cook, Jal.” Martus gave a snort. “She was there, even so,” Darin said. “She brought him his broth personally. She’s been his cook longer than any of us have been his sons.”

“And Jula said?”

“That he faded quietly and she thought he’d fallen asleep. Then, seeing how pale and still he was she thought him dead. But he surprised her. At the end he was violent, struggling to rise-mouthing words but making no sound.” Darin looked away from the burning pyre, up, past the smoke, into the blue heavens. “She said he seemed possessed. Like a different person. She said his eyes met hers and in that moment he reached for his seal beside the bed, and on touching it collapsed back to his pillows. Dead.”