The Rose of the World (59 page)

It was as if she taunted him with her nakedness. Tycho Issian blinked, looked away from her shining presence, and found he could clench his hands into hard fists.

‘I know what you are doing,’ he said furiously, all the compressed, thwarted frustration of these several months now raw in his voice. ‘You are trying to face me down. And I will not have it!’

‘Indeed, you will not.’

He was not mistaken: she sounded amused. She was suppressing a laugh – he was sure of it – a laugh generated by his trussed-up erection, his pitiful devotion, his pathetic, subservient posture.

‘How dare you! You, for whom I launched a fleet into the dread seas of the Northern Ocean: you, for whom I dared all, brought war – roused an entire nation, just for you: you, whom I have personally delivered from the hands of barbarians, whom I have saved from perversions and disgrace!’

‘I did not need saving.’

He risked a glance at her; but it helped him not at all, for she stood there, more relaxed now, her weight shifted slightly onto one foot, one leg angled out so that he could glimpse a fraction more of the mystery which obsessed him so. And now he could not look away.

‘How could you? How could you let that barbarian touch you? You let down your defences for him, you let him invade your sacred body.’

‘I loved him. It was no invasion.’

Tears burst out of Tycho Issian’s eyes then, tears of rage and horror.

‘Love? How could it be love? No one could love you the way that I love you. All he wanted was a child to secure his succession!’

She tilted her head to look at him curiously. ‘Ah yes, the child.’

‘You gave him a child.’ His face was a mask of misery, horribly contorted as he struggled to stop the shaming tears.

‘I gave him a child,’ she echoed. ‘Unfortunately, it was not my child to give.’

‘I saw you, with my own eyes, in the crystal. I saw you, all swollen and proud and bursting with it. I saw you standing there beside him, with your hands folded so primly and protectively on top of your great belly. I
saw
you!’ he bellowed.

A tiny line appeared between the Rosa Eldi’s fair brows.

‘The child was not mine. It was your daughter’s.’

Silence fell between them, silence except for the ragged breathing of the man crouching on the floor like a beaten dog. Then: ‘My daughter’s?’ he echoed plaintively.

‘Selen Issian. Whom I knew for a time as Leta Gullwing. She is with it now.’

Now the Lord of Cantara was entirely perplexed. ‘How can that be? I gave it into the . . . care of the Duke of Cera’s seneschal. To be . . . looked after.’

The Rose of the World closed her eyes and now Tycho Issian found that he could both move and breathe. He got to his feet and stood there, swaying slightly, as if drunk, or faint.

Selen had a child? The thought of which brute northerner might have fathered it upon her was too foul to approach. Then another thought occurred to him. He groaned. ‘They are together? The . . . child . . . and my daughter?’ He paused as the calamity of this struck him. ‘By the Lady, are they both dead, then?’

‘Dead?’

‘The seneschal . . . his orders . . . were to kill the child.’

‘This does not surprise me,’ she said slowly. ‘For I know you have killed many children. Many women, too; many men. What could one more death mean to you?’ She paused. ‘Unless it were your own.’

Now the Lord of Cantara went sickly pale.

‘I do not know what you mean,’ he rasped. His brow wrinkled horribly. ‘How can you know these things? Are you a witch?’

‘I see many things.’

‘You have seen my death?’

‘How quickly the concern for your daughter and her son is eclipsed,’ the Goddess mused, ‘by the prospect of your own demise.’

She stood there, her lips quirked in a cold smile, and he felt a shudder run through him and he looked away, for if he stared longer he felt sure he would see his death reflected in those jade eyes.

The Rosa Eldi watched the man tremble, watched the sweat bead his forehead and his gorge rise with the bile of terror. At last she said, ‘Your daughter is with her son. In the kitchens of this castle where she is even now giving him warmed milk to stop his crying. The seneschal had . . . a change of heart.’ And was even now standing with the crowd below the window, gazing upward, wishing for miracles. Like the others, he had been touched by a blessing in the night, had heard the voice of Falla and been assailed by the scent of musk and roses.

‘Thank the Lady,’ he breathed, though he hardly dared believe it.

‘I wish no thanks from you.’

This puzzled him further. He blinked. Then: ‘Stay here,’ he ordered, unnecessarily.

He sped past the door-guards, took the stairs three at a time and arrived, dishevelled and perspiring, at the kitchens in a faster time than even the most terrified slave could have achieved. Flinging open the double doors – doors designed to allow egress for the massive banquet trays for which Cera had, in the time of its dead duke, been famed throughout the empire – he burst in and stared wildly around. In shock at this unannounced interruption, someone dropped a cooking pot with a clang which reverberated off the stonework, and this was followed by a frenzy of activity as someone else was burned with hot soup, someone was trodden on, the hounds started baying, and a baby started to wail its head off.

Tycho Issian’s head swivelled like a striking snake towards this latter noise. There, in the corner of the room, seated on a tall stool at the peeling table, was the woman he had once thought of as his daughter, brazenly bare-headed and cradling a brat with a bright red, roaring face.

‘Selen!’

Everyone fell silent. A pair of the Duke of Cera’s hunting hounds slunk through the doors to the yard, followed by the stableboy, who shouldn’t have been in the kitchens at all, and two veiled dairy maids. The kitchen staff backed away, trying to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible. All of them knew the Lord of Cantara’s cruel reputation.

‘She said you would be here: you have conspired against me, I see; and though I do not know how you have contrived this reunion, believe me when I say I shall find it out. And wearing no veil, you shameless trollop: that, too, will be remedied shortly,’ he raged. ‘Is that your child?’

Selen Issian stiffened as if she felt already the kiss of her father’s lash. Intrigued by the sudden change in his mother’s demeanour, Ulf stopped his wailing and turned to regard the shouting man with his unnerving violet eyes.

‘It is.’ Selen’s arms went tighter around the wriggling bundle.

Tycho crossed the room and gave his daughter a hard look. She held his gaze defiantly so that at last he was forced to stare down at the baby instead.

‘It looks little like the usual run of Eyrans to me.’

‘Why should he look Eyran at all?’

He regarded her as if she were half-witted. ‘Why, for his parentage, of course. And because the . . . Queen . . . passed him off as her own.’

Selen’s jaw firmed. ‘She took him from me.’

‘Ravn is, I suppose, dark, so she may have got away with it, for a time.’ He cocked his head and scrutinised the bundle. Then he looked up sharply again. ‘Is it his child?’

Selen flushed. ‘No,’ she said, very quickly. ‘It is not. Though better it had been. This child was got upon me by Tanto Vingo when he ravished me in my booth at the Allfair last year.’

That made her father’s mouth drop open. ‘Tanto Vingo? Surely you are mistaken: the boy fought off a host of Eyran brigands, and took a terrible wound . . .’

‘I am not mistaken. Not in the least. And it was I who stabbed Tanto Vingo, in my own defence. I hear it carried him near to death,’ she finished with some satisfaction.

‘Death came to him,’ the Lord of Cantara said grimly. ‘But it was not from the wound he took.’ He leaned in closer.

The baby screwed its face up and howled again, louder than ever before. But rather than recoiling, Tycho Issian reached over and lifted him out of Selen’s clasp and held him at arms’ length, so that his feet kicked in mid-air.

At once, Little Ulf stopped crying. He wriggled in his grandfather’s arms and stared up at him. Then he reached out and grabbed at his lord’s chain, the great ornament of office Tycho had donned that morning as he prepared to impress himself upon the Rose.

The Lord of Cantara grimaced. ‘He has a good eye for silver! And what a grip.’ He tried to prise the little creature’s fingers off the chain, but Ulf was not letting go. ‘So, you would take it from me, would you, little man? You think to inherit my title and my wealth, do you? You think to wheedle your way into my affections and steal what is not yours?’ His voice rose in pitch. ‘I shall be lord of this whole empire before long. I cannot have grasping little bastards dogging my steps, trying to take what is mine. Not when my own son will soon be born.’

‘Your son?’

He raised mad eyes to Selen.

‘I shall marry the Rose of the World and beget many sons upon her,’ he declared.‘She shall carry one after another after another till I have made a ruler for every province in Istria, and they shall all answer to me, and me alone.’

His daughter smiled thinly. ‘You had better think again,’ she said. ‘For the lady is as barren as the Bone Quarter. Why else do you think she stole my child?’

‘You lie!’

And at this, Little Ulf opened his mouth and, turning in his grandfather’s hands, vomited a copious, foul-smelling stream of milk onto Tycho’s rich crimson robes.

‘Aaaarggh!’ The Lord of Cantara regarded the damage to his finery, horrified beyond words. Catching up the boy by an ankle, he swung him violently away from him, then let go with a flourish. Ulf flew through the air, his eyes wide with amazement at this new experience. A second later, he struck the nearest granite pillar head first.

Dazed silence swathed the room. Then Selen Issian fell from the stool and scrabbled across the tiles to Ulf’s body. A pale pink translucent liquid had begun to leak out of the upmost ear and trickle down the side of the tiny skull.

Lord Tycho Issian stared down at the pair of them with an unreadable expression on his dark face. Then he turned and walked quickly from the room.

On his way back up the stairs to the tower room, he glanced out of one of the arrow slits and was bemused to see that a large group of people had gathered at the foot of the castle. When he reached the next level, he swung into the first state room he came to, taking no notice of the occupants – Lord Varyx of Ixta and a group of women apparently tending to his wounds, which seemed well enough healed that he had been able to remove a good deal of their clothing with his one remaining arm – walked over to the window and looked down.

‘What in Elda’s name—?’ he began.

There were hundreds of them. Women, children, merchants, farmers, soldiers, fishermen, slaves, Footloose. And not a modest sabatka veil to be seen. He leaned out, fuming. ‘Away with you!’ he yelled. ‘You women, veil yourselves at once!’

The crowd lowered their gaze from the tower room to this new distraction; but finding it irrelevant to their purpose, moved their eyes back to the Rosa Eldi’s window.

‘Get away!’ he bellowed again. ‘Away!’

But they were not even listening to him. He leaned out of the window and twisted around to see what it was they could be looking at, but saw only stone and sky. He frowned, then turned on his heel and strode out into the corridor.

‘You, guards!’

The two soldiers playing dice at the end of the hallway looked up boredly. They were Cera castle guards: they had very little to do to earn their keep, and they liked it that way.

‘Go disperse the crowd outside. Drive them away.’

The soldiers exchanged a glance. ‘They’re not doing any harm,’ the first one said belligerently. He had been winning rather handsomely and didn’t trust Coro to redeem his debt if they didn’t finish out the game. Besides, he had no idea who this loudmouthed noble was, and since the good Duke of Cera had lost his life in the storming of Halbo, no idea to whom he was supposed to report in his absence.

The Lord of Cantara came towards them with thunder in his face and the guards straightened up reluctantly. Reaching the end of the hallway at a run, he kicked over their table with more violence than seemed necessary so that dice, goblets and tallystones skittered everywhere.

‘I am Tycho Issian, Lord of Cantara, and leader of the Ruling Council, and now that your do-nothing duke is dead and gone, master of this castle and you will do my bidding NOW!’

They went to do his bidding with alacrity.

Tycho raced up the stairs to the tower room, suspicion itching in his head. She must have called for help, he thought. Somehow, she must have let them know that she was being held prisoner. But this made little sense, he realised: the people outside were Istrians, or nomads: and either cared little what should become of the Eyran queen, or owed loyalty to nothing and no one. So they must be curious, then. He smiled as this idea came to him. And why not? She was the most beautiful woman in the world. It was no wonder they should come to gaze on her.

Suddenly he regretted sending the guards to disperse the crowd. How much better it would be for his reputation and status if he were to display his prize to them all, show them the woman he had saved from the heathens.

On the next level he found another knot of guards and sent them to countermand his previous order.‘Tell the people to wait there and I shall bring the Queen of the Northern Isles, the Rose of the World, out to them that they may feast their eyes upon this prize I have brought back from our great victory in the holy war against the old enemy.’

By the time he burst into the tower room he had imagined the crowd swelled to a thousand and more, imagined how they would cheer his name, how they would demand that the ancient title of emperor be bestowed upon him, the only man worthy of the name in three hundred years, how that demand would roll out across the continent, gathering weight and pace, till none could gainsay it.

The Rosa Eldi stood naked where he had left her.

‘Well,’ he laughed, with forced jollity, deliberately pressing away the fear that she instilled in him. ‘We must clothe you and you must stay close to me: two steps behind, no more nor less, as is meet and proper for my finest chattel.’