DemonWars Saga Volume 2: Mortalis - Ascendance - Transcendence - Immortalis (The DemonWars Saga) (133 page)

De’Unnero pulled up a chair then, and spent the rest of the day speaking with Olin, but only in general terms, sharing a vision of the Church and the world that he knew the old man would embrace, despite his reluctance and his doubts. He didn’t reveal his second secret to the abbot, concerning the parchments he had kept all these years and now had rolled up beneath his tunic.

When they finished, Abbot Olin spent a long time sitting in his chair, staring and thinking. “I will see what I might learn,” he at last agreed. “Though I understand not at all how any of this will make a difference in the world. We agree that things are not as we would desire—”

“Are not as God would desire,” De’Unnero interrupted, and his words brought a burst of laughter from Abbot Olin.

“Do you doubt?”

“Do I believe that there is a God who cares?” Olin replied.

It was De’Unnero’s turn to sit back and take a more informed measure of this man across the desk from him. He had come in here thinking to appeal to the piousness
he had always thought to be within Abbot Olin, to elevate the discussion, the plan, to the level of a holy crusade. Had he miscalculated? He looked hard at Olin, then, and finally asked, and bluntly, “Does it matter?”

“Return to me tomorrow, after vespers,” said Olin, and De’Unnero took his leave.

“ ‘B
ut hear ye all and scribe in stone,’ ” Abbot Olin read from a parchment spread upon his desk the moment De’Unnero entered his private audience hall the next night and the escort went away. “ ‘That should Jilseponie bear a child, then that child, male or female, will enter the line of succession immediately behind me, above even Prince Midalis of Vanguard.’ ” Olin looked up, smiling. “So declared King Danube Brock Ursal on the day of his wedding to Jilseponie.”

Marcalo De’Unnero’s eyes sparkled as he digested the words—a declaration more promising than anything he could have ever hoped to hear. “What else did King Danube say concerning the offspring of Jilseponie?” he asked, seeming almost afraid of the answer.

“Nothing,” said Olin. “Since he believed, as we all believed, that Jilseponie had never borne a child, he saw no need to address that potential problem. And since he believed then and still believes that she would never betray him—and even if she did, the rumors seem true that the woman is barren.”

“He said nothing more because there was nothing more to be said,” De’Unnero summed up. “But what does this truly mean? Those words would never be accepted in context given this extraordinary situation.”

“Your companion will not ascend the throne without a war,” Olin assured De’Unnero. “But in the event of King Danube’s demise, your companion does have a claim to the throne, one that will be decided by the noble court or by battle.”

De’Unnero sat back in his seat, reminding himself that patience was the key to all this. He had an idea, a long-term plan to bring Aydrian to prominence and to ride that wave to his own redemption, and Olin’s information certainly allowed that plan to continue. Nothing more.

“How many know of the boy’s parentage?” Olin asked earnestly. At that moment, De’Unnero understood that the old man’s hesitance was a defensive measure and that in truth Olin had embraced De’Unnero’s promise with all his heart.

“Four,” De’Unnero answered, “including the boy and including you.”

“And so you are left with a secret,” Olin then remarked, “a potent one, but one that, I suspect, will bring you nothing but another …”

De’Unnero’s smug expression and movement, the former monk reaching under the folds of his tunic, gave Olin pause.

De’Unnero pulled forth the parchments and tossed them onto Olin’s desk.

“What are these?” the old abbot asked, unrolling them, and recognizing them as navigational charts of the great Mirianic.

“The way to a treasure that mocks the coffers of King Danube himself,” said De’Unnero. “The way to Pimaninicuit.”

Olin’s glowing eyes seemed as if they would fall out of their sockets. “How?” he sputtered. “Why have you … what can you hope …” He looked up, shaking his head in complete disbelief.

“Consider the riches that lie beneath the sands of Pimaninicuit,” De’Unnero remarked, “centuries, millennia, of gemstones fallen from the Halo.”

“They have not been blessed, and so are no longer magical,” Olin countered.

“Do they have to be?” asked De’Unnero. “Is an emerald a thing without value if it is not possessed of magical powers?”

Abbot Olin pushed the parchments back De’Unnero’s way. “This is forbidden,” he declared, obviously terrified by the prospect.

“By whom?”

“Church canon!” Olin cried. “Since the beginning of time. Since the days of St. Abelle!”

“Does it matter?” De’Unnero replied, mimicking Olin’s tone from the previous day’s discussion when the conversation had turned to the matter of God.

Olin spent a long while considering his reply, and the maps on the desk before him. “What do you ask of me?” he asked quietly. “And what are your plans?”

“You have ties to the sailors,” De’Unnero replied. “I will need ships for this journey—fear not, for if there is trouble, your name will not surface.”

“How many ships?”

“As many as I can muster,” De’Unnero replied. “For each will return with a king’s treasure in its hold, the funds we will need to raise an army, the funds we will need, when the time is upon us, to bring Aydrian to the throne of Honce-the-Bear.”

“And then use that gain to reshape the Church,” Olin reasoned.

De’Unnero only smiled.

“King Danube is a younger man than I,” said Olin, “by decades, not years. I will not outlive him.”

The sinister De’Unnero only smiled again.

Chapter 25
 

I
T WAS A GRAY AUTUMN IN
U
RSAL THAT FALL OF
G
OD
’
S
Y
EAR
843. T
HE MOOD AND
the sky were one.

“You will go to see them?” Duke Kalas asked Danube one rainy afternoon. The two were walking in the garden, despite the rain and the chill wind, speaking of Constance and Danube’s sons, who were now living in Yorkeytown, the largest city in Yorkey County, the rolling farmlands east of Ursal and a favored retreat for the nobles of Danube’s court.

“My place is here, beside my wife,” Danube replied resolutely, and he didn’t miss Duke Kalas’ wince.

“It is commonplace for a king and queen to winter separately,” Kalas reminded.

“For a king to winter with his former lover?” Danube replied with a chuckle. “With the mother of his two children?”

“Constance would be pleased to see you,” said Kalas, who had recently visited the banished noblewoman and had not been pleased by what he had seen.

“I’ll hear no more of it,” said Danube.

“They are your sons, heirs to the throne,” said Kalas. “You have a responsibility to the future of the kingdom—a greater one, I daresay, than any duty toward your wife.”

“Beware your words!”

Danube stopped as he issued the warning, turning and staring hard at Kalas, but the Duke, who had been Danube’s friend since before Danube had ascended the throne as a teenager, did not back down, and matched the King stare for stare.

“You knew when you became king that there was a point where personal preference had to be ignored,” Kalas reminded. “A point where the responsibilities of king and kingdom outweighed the preferences of a man, of any man. And I know the same to be true of my own position as duke of Wester-Honce. Would I have ever gone to Palmaris to serve as baron, however briefly, if I had seen any choice in the matter?”

King Danube didn’t blink.

“Merwick and Torrence are in line for the crown,” said Kalas. “Merwick only behind your brother, who lives in a wild land, and Torrence next behind him. It is very likely that one of them will one day be crowned king of Honce-the-Bear. Is this not true?”

Danube looked away.

“A fine king either of them will become, so removed from court and from their father,” Kalas said with obvious disdain. “And what resentments might they feel to learn that their father would not even come to visit them? Perhaps you should
consider your responsibility to Jilseponie in the event of your death. How will your successor, if it is not Midalis, feel toward your queen?”

Danube took a deep breath. He wanted to scold Kalas, wanted to turn and punch the man in the face for speaking so boldly. But how could he deny the truth of Kalas’ words? And why, why had Constance decided to leave Ursal? How Danube’s life had turned upside down since that event! For many of the court had secretly blamed Jilseponie. Danube heard their angry whispers against his wife and noted their scornful glances Jilseponie’s way.

“Why did she leave?” he said aloud, speaking more to himself than to Kalas.

“Because she could not bear to watch you with Jilseponie,” Kalas answered—his honest opinion, for, of course, Constance had not told anyone the truth: that she had been poisoning Jilseponie. And neither had Jilseponie spoken of the crime, to Danube or anyone else.

“She knew the truth of my heart long before Jilseponie became queen,” Danube pointed out. “For years I was traveling to Palmaris to visit Jilseponie, and never did I hide my true feelings from Constance. Neither did I embrace those feelings at the expense of Constance’s heart.”

“Are you asking me if you did anything wrong?” Kalas bluntly asked.

Danube stared at him hard.

“You did,” Kalas dared to say, and Danube winced but did not interrupt or try to stop him. “You should have taken Jilseponie as your mistress and left her in Palmaris, where she belongs, where she fits. If you were to name a queen, it should have been Constance Pemblebury. You chose to satisfy your needs above the needs of the court—”

“Damn you and your court to Bestesbulzibar’s own hellfires!” Danube roared. “You dare to imply that Jilseponie does not belong in Ursal because the overperfumed ladies are angry that an outsider broke into their precious little circle and stole the throne most of them coveted? The throne, I say, and not the man who sits on the throne beside the queen. Nay, never that!”

“You doubt that Constance loves you?” Duke Kalas asked incredulously.

Danube bit back his response and simply growled in frustration. “How dare you speak to me in such a manner?”

“Am I not your friend, then?” Kalas asked simply.

“And as my friend, you should have helped me in this,” Danube pointedly replied, poking a finger Kalas’ way. “I notice that Duke Targon Bree Kalas has done little to help Jilseponie settle into life in Ursal. I have not heard Kalas defending his queen,
defending his friend’s wife
, from the vicious whispers and rumors that hound her every step!”

Kalas stood very straight, he and Danube staring at each other hard for a long while, both realizing that this fight had been a long time in coming and both understanding, and regretting, that there would be no turning back from this critical point.

“I will winter in Yorkeytown,” Kalas announced.

“Constance should not have gone,” King Danube said evenly.

“She felt she had no choice.”

“I should not have allowed it.”

Duke Kalas nearly choked on that, his eyes going wide.

“I should not have allowed the children to go,” Danube clarified. “Indeed, they will return to Ursal in the spring and spend every summer here; and they may return to Yorkeytown each winter to be with their mother, if they so choose, or Constance may, of course, return to Ursal. Yes, that is my decision.” He looked up at Kalas and raised an eyebrow. “Comments?”

“You are the king. You can, and will, do as you see best,” the Duke of Wester-Honce replied diplomatically, though a hint of sarcasm did sneak into his voice.

Kalas bowed then, rather stiffly, and turned and walked away; and Danube knew without doubt that things between them had just changed forever.

S
he pretended not to hear the critical whisper, whatever it might be, or the ensuing giggle, but when Kenikan the chef entered the room from the door opposite bearing a tray of treats, and the two women giggled again, all the louder, Jilseponie found them harder to ignore.

For this latest rumor, that Jilseponie and the chef had become somewhat more than friends, could not be taken lightly, the Queen knew. This was a rumor of treason, one that would harm more than her reputation, would go to Danube’s heart.

Keeping her gaze forward, her expression calm, Jilseponie altered her course just a bit, so that she would pass right before the two women. “I should be careful of the gossip that leaves your foul mouths if I were you,” she said. And it was the first time in months that she had bothered to confront any of the gossipers, except of course for her fight with Constance.

“Fear not the reputation of Jilseponie the Queen,” she quietly continued, walking past and not looking at the pair. “Fear instead the reputation of Jilseponie, the wife of Nightbird.”

She did glance once at them, to see one blanching and the other staring back at her incredulously, as if Jilseponie had somehow just elevated the tension of the confrontation beyond all bounds of reason—which had been Jilseponie’s point exactly in putting her threat into physical terms. These women of the court were quite used to the battles of gossip, the constant sniping and rumormongering. But the experience of actually confronting an enemy, of doing battle face-to-face, was quite beyond them.