Miles Cameron - The Dread Wyrm

In the great hall, for the Red Knight a day that had begun well with Ser John proved trying. His mother refused to discuss vassalage; she was using the council to press her claims to a kingdom, and her pretensions were scaring the Brogat barons. By dinner, she was flirting outrageously with Lord Wayland, whose slow and cautious politics were in danger of being overwhelmed by the main force of a low-cut gown and a pair of flashing eyes.

After dinner, Ser Gabriel sent a note by means of Nell, and then went in person to his mother’s door. The bronze-eyed girl opened it and bade him welcome, her cool, demure voice oddly at odds with her body and eyes.

“Your lady mother bids you wait, sir knight,” she said.

Ser Gabriel bowed distantly and sat in a chair in the solar. He leafed through an illustrated breviary; he picked up a very prettily inlaid lute and started to play an old troubadour song, and found it wildly out of tune.

He began to tune it.

Time passed.

A string broke and Ser Gabriel cursed.

Bronze-eyes smiled prettily.

There were noises on the other side of his mother’s door, but none that made any sense, and eventually, having found a set of strings inside the belly of the instrument, having stripped the offending string, which had been the wrong-sized gut all along, having replaced the string and then tuned the instrument to its intended range and not the very odd tuning that his mother had arranged, he played Prende I Garde.

“You are splendid!” Bronze-eyes said, enthusiastically. She clapped her hands together.

Ser Gabriel rose. “Please tell my mother I was most pleased to have this opportunity to tune her instrument, and she may call on me at any time.” He handed the lute to the servant girl. She dropped a beautiful curtsey.

“If there is anything I might do to help you pass the time,” she whispered.

He paused. And sighed. “Have a pleasant eve,” he bade her, and passed the door.

He considered going to the great hall and joining the men there. He considered inflicting his anger and his annoyance on strangers.

He even paused outside the chapel, where he saw a straight-backed nun in the gown of the Order kneeling at the altar. He stood and watched her.

She didn’t turn her head.

Eventually, he took his irritation to his own rooms. Toby and Nell stayed out of arm’s reach, and with the assistance of two cups of wine, he managed to get to bed.

To the ceiling over his bed, he said, “I prefer fighting.”

Then he lay and felt the fracture in his leg throb. He lay there with the pain, and thought about life and death and Father Arnaud. And Thorn, and his master, and where it all had to end. He was beginning to see the end. He lay, and imagined it.

Eventually he began to consider his miraculous survival of the recent ambush. That gave him the opportunity to savour each error he had made in the course of the fight-committing the knights too early, over-powering his emergency shields so that they drained him of power. Allowing an oak tree to fall on him.

He shook his head in the darkness.

At some point in the night he began to consider the constant flow of ops that had trickled to him while he lay awaiting death.

He heard Toby toss on the straw pallet at his feet.

Ser Gabriel considered many things, and eventually, his annoyance increased by each new thought, he entered into his memory palace and walked along the floor.

Prudentia nodded coolly. “You remind me of an unruly boy I knew once,” she said.

“Are you simply magicked to say these things? Did he invest you with some particular ability to assess my thoughts and make suitable witticisms?”

Prudentia’s blank ivory eyes seemed to glance at him. “I believe my re-creator discovered that a great many of my habits of thought were overlaid on your memories and he retrieved them.”

“Well,” the Red Knight said. “Well.” He went to the door to Harmodius’s palace. “I need to see something from another angle.” He opened the door and went in.

It was dustier than before. Now that he thought about it, he realized what the old man must have done. Because somewhere in his memories, he must hold Prudentia’s palace. And that suggested that if he spent too much time here, in Harmodius’s memories, he might-just possibly-be in danger of either becoming the old man or empowering some sort of simulacrum of him.

“Not what I’m here for,” he said.

He went and stood in front of the mirror.

In the reflection, he seemed to be wearing a ring of fire, and around his right ankle was a golden band. The band was joined to a chain.

“Son of a bitch,” he said.

Eventually, he must have slept, because he awoke, his eyes feeling as if they were made of parchment and his mouth dry and his head throbbing. He lay, listening to Toby lay things out on the chest at the foot of the bed, and then the scale of his disaster and the throbbing of his right leg coincided, and he rose into the chilly air, his mood already savage.

He dressed quickly, and Toby kept his head averted. The boy’s fear of him angered him further. He could sense his own failure to modify his temper.

At some remove, he didn’t care.

“Where’s Nell?” he asked.

“Stables, your grace.” Toby was not usually so formal. “Shall I send for her?”

“No,” the captain said. He sat and stewed. He knew what he had around his ankle, in the aethereal. He knew it was very powerful, and he suspected he knew where it came from.

Nell came in.

“Message for you, your grace,” she said.

Nell brought him a note, and he read it at his own table. His colour heightened and his face went blank.

“Wine,” he said.

It was early morning, and Toby frowned.

“I’m sorry, Toby, is there a problem?” Ser Gabriel asked in his most poisonous voice.

Toby glanced at Nell, who, having handed over the note, was busy sorting clean laundry in the press. Toby stood up straight. “I have hippocras,” he said, and went to the fire.

“I asked for wine,” the captain said. “Hippocras has all the spirit boiled out.”

“May I say-” Toby began with all the dignity a seventeen-year-old can muster.

Ser Gabriel raised an eyebrow. “No,” he said. “Your opinion is not required.”

Toby reached for a wine bottle, but Nell reached out and tipped it on the floor.

It smashed.

Before the pieces were done moving, the captain was out of his chair and had Nell by the throat. “I asked for wine,” he hissed. “Not adolescent criticism.”

She looked at him, eyes wide.

He let her go slowly.

Nell shook herself and glanced at Toby, who had his hand on his dagger.

The captain sighed-a long sigh, like the air hissing out of a dead man’s lungs. Without apology, he stepped out into the hall.

He didn’t slam the door.

He didn’t get a cup of wine, either.

Gabriel was almost insensible to the world around him as he stalked along the tower’s outer hall and down the winding stairs, so angry at himself that he could barely breathe. He walked through the great hall without acknowledging anyone, and brushed past his mother without a word.

She smiled.

He paid her no heed, but walked out into the muddy yard and collected his riding horse, saddled by a pair of frightened grooms, and mounted. His anger communicated itself instantly to the horse, who began to fidget.

“Perhaps if you were to hit it very hard,” came a soft voice from the gloom of the stable.

At the sound of her voice, his rage drained away, leaving him merely-deflated.

He turned the horse. The yard was almost empty, and his Morean page, Giorgos, was the only one of his own people in the stable.