The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle) (34 page)

“You cannot do this,” he said.

Du Corse spat. “I can, my lord, and I will. I need lose no more knights.”

“We are the better men.” De Vrailly was enraged. “By God, ser knights, do you doubt this?”

Du Corse shook his head. “Not in the least, my good de Vrailly. But in this case—these men are like assassins. They have drunk wine or taken opium or something like it. They intend to fight to the death. I see no reason to give them any more of my knights.”

De Vrailly looked up at the new marshal. “I was against this surprise attack. And look,
Marshal.
It was no surprise. The Occitan prince was warned, and he has slipped away—leaving a handful of very brave men to die.”

“A foolish choice.” Du Corse was resentful. He might have said,
amateurish.

De Vrailly spat. “As God is my witness, my lord, you have erred grievously in this. And the Prince of Occitan left these men to lure us to shame. Shame! I say, he left a few good knights to prove that we were base. And par Dieu, monsieur, so we have proved ourselves to be.”

“The Occitan prince’s cause has been found wanting on the field of battle,” Du Corse said. “That is all.”

“Let me take my squires,” de Vrailly pleaded. “Let me fight them. Man to man. One to one. Until we have killed or taken them. We will—
Deus Veult
. I know it.”

Du Corse motioned at the captain of his crossbowmen. “Monsieur de Vrailly,
you
may have a very different fight tomorrow.” He nodded. “We cannot have you exhausted for the Queen’s trial.” He pointed at de Vrailly’s foot. “You are wounded. I insist you retire.”

The crossbowmen were just thirty yards from the tight circle of Occitan knights. The Occitans saw them, but at first refused to believe it.

As the crossbowmen—most of them Albans—spanned their heavy arbalests, the Occitans called insults.

Clear in the cool spring air, one accented jibe carried to Du Corse. “These are the Gallish knights of whom our fathers told us?”

One of the Occitans had a wine cup from somewhere. He held it aloft, his visor up, and he laughed and drank.

The Occitans began to sing. They were big men, but men who trained in singing as well as in fighting, and their voices rose in a polyphony.

De Vrailly’s face darkened and grew mottled with rage. Occitan and Gallish were different enough in pronunciation—but the words were clear enough.

The crossbowmen leaned their spanned weapons on the tops of their great pavises to steady them.

“No!” bellowed de Vrailly.

“You can send your squires to fight the survivors, if you insist,” Du Corse said. He turned in his saddle. “Loose!”

Desiderata was very far gone when the woman came.

She was scarcely able to distinguish between the real and the
aethereal
anymore. At first she thought the woman was Blanche, come to help her. Reality and the
aethereal
had all but merged to her sight, and she had begun to overlay the
aethereal
version of the world on the real, so that the shadows were darker where the thing called Ash seemed to pool, and the bright green coils that some other power was laying, hideously, about her and what bloomed inside her showed stark against the walls of her cell.

But despite the crisis in her sanity—and her outward attempts to repel her enemies, if they were not creations of her mind—she was also aware that it was Easter—the greatest festival of the Christian year. And the moment of rebirth in all the old ways. The moment when young spring killed old winter.

In between her prayers to the Virgin—a ceaseless litany—she thought of her springs. Of her riding out in spring with fifty knights to make the May come in. Of the fecund earth, and the dances. The green of the grass.

It was with these two thoughts in her head—the green of the leaves of spring and the Virgin—that she first saw the woman come through the door of her cell.

The closed door.

She did not shine. In the
aethereal
, she appeared solid, and in the real, she appeared insubstantial. There was no outward sign of power about her—a tall, grave woman who wore a simple kirtle of rich brown.

But as Desiderata looked at the brown, she thought it was perhaps a foreign textile, some wonderous silk of Morea or farther afield. The brown was itself made up of a thousand tiny patterns—there, of flowers, a riot of colour covering whole fields, if only for a few days, and then another portion with a border of birds so cunningly wrought that they appeared to move and sing, and another, a lady on horseback, riding with a hawk on her wrist…

The lady had a dignified face. The face of mature wisdom, and fecund strength. Motherhood and virginity, or perhaps something older and better than mere virginity—a serenity of strength.

Desiderata was on her knees, and her mouth was already saying the Ave Maria.

She raised her hands to the woman.

Who smiled.

“Oh, my child,” she said sadly. “Would that I might tell you
they know not what they do
.”

Her voice was low and clear, vibrant with energy. Just to hear her made Desiderata straighten her back.

The woman bent, a hand on Desiderata’s head and another on her back.

All of Desiderata’s pains fell away, leaving her only the ache of knowing how near to term her pregnancy was.

The pools of black became palpable, and manifested.

“Tar, you hypocrite!” said the dark voice.

“Ash, you try me.” The woman moved a hand.

“You interfere as freely as I do,” Ash said.

The woman interposed herself between Desiderata and the pool of darkness. “No,” she said. “I obey the ancient law, and you break it.”

Ash laughed, and nothing about the laugh was like a laugh save the outward sound. “The law is for the weak, and I am strong.”

The woman raised her arms. “I, too, am strong. But I obey the law. If you flout it, it will punish you. Stronger immortals than you—”

“Spare me your mythology,” Ash said. “I will have the child. Now you have interfered directly, breaking the compact. Now you are as much a law-breaker as I.”

“Spare me your immaturity. I did not strike the first blow, or the tenth. And you know—you must know—how tangled has become this skein.” She brought her arms together.

“So tangled that only I can follow it. Come, entangle yourself, and I will destroy you, too.” Ash’s voice grew in strength.

“Can you?” Tar asked.

“Enough that I know that this one will die by
your
hand.” Ash’s laughter was like the cries of souls in torment. “And the child either will never be born, or will be mine from birth, by the actions of
your people
.”

Even as he spoke, he grew, and as he grew, his assault on Desiderata’s mind became more intense, until it was like a barrage of trebuchets.

Had she not prepared…

But she had. Her golden wall of power accepted blow after blow.

The woman spoke again, even though by now she was surrounded by darkness.

“If you continue to waste your strength on mortals, you will in time
teach them to fight you. Look—even now, this daughter of mine has built a wall you cannot easily breach. What if she teaches it to others?” She sighed. “Are you so sure that you can survive what is to come?”

“Survive?” Ash asked. “I will triumph.”

The blackness filled the room.

His power in the real was something against which Desiderata had no defence, and she was losing the will to breathe.

The woman was no longer visible. Desiderata had time to wonder what she was hearing—whether this apparent conversation between Satan and the Virgin was occurring in the real or in the
aethereal
. Or somewhere else.

Or just inside her head.

One of the golden bricks in her wall of solitude shifted. The shift was minute, but terrifying.

Ash chuckled, like blood running over a stone.

“You were a fool, woman, for coming to
my
place of power.” Satan’s voice was strong and level.

“Really?” the woman asked. “My power thrives equally in light and darkness.” She seemed to sigh. “Does yours?”

The progress of time outside in the room was glacial. Seas rose and fell. Lands shifted—mountains grew and then stone cracked and they eroded away. Erosion changed the shape of worlds hanging in the infinite universe of hermetical spheres.

Or so it seemed to Desiderata.

And then something in the cell was different.

The air smelled of decay. And mould.

But also of new life.

“Many things grow in the darkness,” the Virgin said. “And
you cannot stop them.
”

The choking blackness gave way to a thicker darkness and a wider range of smells. Earth. Old basements. A wine cellar and the wine. Old cheese.

“You!” Ash said.

“Of course,” the other voice said. “Many beautiful things grow in the darkness. But I am not restricted by the darkness, and you have made an error.”

Suddenly, light flooded the room.

The floor of the room was gone—the cold stones, the hole in the corner, the recess where plates were left.

All gone.

The floor was a hand’s breadth deep in rich loam. And now, in between beats of Desiderata’s rapidly beating heart, something sprouted in the soil, and strands of green—not the virulent green of the Wild, but the natural green of the wilderness—leapt from the rich soil and began to grow. It grew straight into the pools of darkness, piercing the darkness the way the light could not. Even as the green spikes grew, they developed barbs.

The Virgin allowed herself to sink onto a bench that had appeared.

The sound of a choir began—

A shriek began—

And both were buried under the voices of a hundred thousand angels—or perhaps faeries. The briars leapt to the ceiling, which was now a luminous gold. The briars gave forth blossoms, a profusion of them so rich as to beggar thought, and they burst into flower—red and white and pink roses, and the smell of roses swept the cell like a cleansing tonic and routed the darkness like an avenging army.

And then every blossom began to move—the petals began to fall and the legions of faery angels seized on each falling petal and carried them to the figure of the woman seated in the middle of the rose garden.

Desiderata sighed. For the first time in as long as she could remember, the black assault on her wall had ceased. “Oh, Blessed Virgin! You have saved me,” Desiderata said.

The woman turned slightly, and raised a corner of the wimple that hid her face. “This is not victory, my child,” she said. “Nor is this even the turning point. I have only restored equilibrium.”

“Liar!” shouted Ash. “Hypocrite!”

But he was very far away.

The first day of the tournament—the day of the Queen’s trial by combat—dawned grey and foggy.

The guards found the Queen asleep in her cell—a cell, they said, that had become a rose garden overnight. Many men—hard men—fell to their knees as the Queen emerged from the cell. She was dressed in a plain brown gown, and her pregnancy was so pronounced as to make her ungainly—yet she was not. She was calm, and beautiful.

They put her in a wagon. They did so with surpassing gentleness.

She was taken through the streets of the city, and she could see how few people there were. She knew nothing of what had passed, but she could guess much from the burned buildings and the silence.

But what men and women there were bent their knees as her cart passed. And many, many men, and not a few women, buttoned their hoods against the unseasonable cold and damp and followed the cart out to the tourney grounds.

The gates of the city were open and, outside the city, the lists and the stands and all the pavilions for a great tournament were prepared.

And mostly empty. Thousands had left the city.

They took her from the wagon and set her on a chair—not in the stands, the formal stands, to be above the lists, but at eye level with the men who would fight.

Only then, quite late in the proceedings, did she fully understand. Her understanding came from seeing the pole of iron, with a huge pile of wood already piled about it.

She did not avert her eyes. She looked at it.

She turned to one of the men guarding her. “Is that for me?” she asked. Her voice sounded deeper than she had expected.

“Your grace, I…” He swallowed.

“It is, if my champion fails,” she insisted.

Her guard nodded.

“Is my brother here?” she asked calmly.

Her guard would not meet her eye. “No,” he admitted.

In the middle-distance, emerging from the fog of early morning, she could see a great column of richly clad nobles and ladies approaching. At its head she saw the King, attired in his usual red. He appeared listless, puffy-eyed and absent as he approached.

By him was Jean de Vrailly, in armour, cap-à-pied. And around him were half a hundred other Galles, all fully armoured, even de Rohan. There was no shortage either of Alban nobles, men and women. Many of the Alban knights wore harness, too.

The King was directed by a sergeant-at-arms to the pavilion where he would await the events, but he rode past the gesticulating man, and his horse’s hooves rang on the ground as he approached like a bell tolling her doom.

But his face was working like an infant in the moment that the pain hits, just as it opens its mouth to cry.

One of the Galles—de Rohan—tried to take the King’s reins. “You must not speak to her,” de Rohan insisted. “She is a criminal and a heretic.”

The King jerked his reins expertly from the other man’s grasp, and just for a moment the Queen was reminded of who he truly was—or had been. The best knight.

The Queen rose, made a curtsey. “A boon, your grace!” she called. Again, her voice was as clear as a perfect spring day.

He nodded. He closed his eyes—as if he had to concentrate to hear her.

It came to her that he was drugged. Or crazed.

“Save our son,” she said.

The archbishop laughed mockingly. “Save your bastard?” He shook his head. “You—”

The King raised a hand for silence.