The Bandit King Read online

  Ah. “Even more important in a Queen’s.”

  He nodded. “Even so.” He paused, as if he would speak. Settled for repeating himself. “Even so.”

  I drew my breath in softly; my hand curled around my rapier-hilt. All the Guard are trained in swordplay as well as Court sorcery; I had insisted upon as much when I took the reins of command. It had done little good for those taken by treachery. But those who had survived were the best of comrades—and the worst of enemies.

  Let us see how well I cast my dice. I found my throat full of something, could not speak for a moment. My gaze dropped to his boot-toes.

  My voice surprised me, rough as if I had been at ale or acquavit. “If I suspect di Cinfiliet of treachery, Adersahl di Parmecy, I will show no mercy.”

  A long pause, filled only with the snap and rush of flame. Would I have to be more explicit? I did not think so. What did he believe, if anything? There was a time when I would have been certain he would take my word as a writ from the Blessed themselves.

  Adersahl sighed. It was a long, heavy exhale, full of weariness. “I know nothing of treachery from his quarter. What would you have of me, Captain?”

  “You will remain with her when I cannot, and you will kill Adrien di Cinfiliet if he threatens her. And you will breathe no word of my orders.” Even as I said it, I flinched inwardly. It was the first lesson a Left Hand learns: The only way to keep a secret is to consign the bearer of it to Death.

  Including, sometimes, the Hand himself. That is the oath we take: As one already dead, I swear myself to service. I had often thought long and deep on the meaning of such a vow. If I was a dead man, did it matter who I killed or how I debased myself?

  The problem was, I was still alive. She had resurrected me.

  He still did not look at me. “You truly think di Cinfiliet so much of a danger?”

  “His aunt raised him to hate the King.” A world of meaning lived under those words.

  “The King is dead,” Adersahl murmured. “Long live the Queen.”

  Absolutely. “If I have aught to say of it, she will live to a ripe old age. No matter what I must do to ensure it. Do we understand each other, di Parmecy?”

  That caused his gaze to swing through the darkness, but not to me. He looked up at the ceiling, closed his eyes. Was he even now expecting a knife to the throat? The garrote? “I thought I understood you, Captain.”

  “And do you?”

  The weary old veteran examined the roof beams. “I am no fool.” He settled himself further in the chair’s embrace. “Loyal to a fault, but no fool.”

  “I am gladdened to hear it.” I turned on my heel, gave him my back. “Go to your rest, sieur. Tomorrow may well bring surprises.”

  “Of what sort?”

  “Of whatever sort Vianne will dream up next.” The skin of my back tightened and tingled, expecting… what, a blade? No, twas not in Adersahl’s nature. He had defended me to my d’mselle. My unease was the sort that had followed me since I arrived at Court, the expectation of danger such a constant refrain I could hear no other music.

  He said nothing else, and I left the room dissatisfied. The conversation had gone as well as could be expected… but still, there was something amiss.

  What bothered me—now that I had time to turn my attention to less pressing problems, as I closed the door and set off down a stone hall in the house of the Blessed—was what further use d’Orlaans and di Narborre had thought to gain from such a paper as the one my d’mselle now held.

  For I could have sworn I burned the only copy of that distressing oath, on paper as fine as any the King’s brother had access to, the night before the conspiracy broke loose.

  Chapter Five

  A priestess in green-and-white robes swayed gently out of sight down the hall as I relieved Tinan di Rocham of his vigil at my d’mselle’s door. The boy was pale, but he returned my salute and hurried away in the opposite direction, wincing as if pained. To be sent away from the lady’s door was probably mortifying. And he had recently come close to death, gut-stabbed by a Pruzian assassin and healed by sorcery. Wounds closed in such a manner sometimes pain one more in the aftermath than in the receiving. The body knows it has been violated, and not even the grace of the Aryx can dissuade it from remembering. Ghost-pain, the healers call it, the same term for a limb lopped off and yet still felt.

  Which led me to the Aryx, the Great Seal of Arquitaine, its triple serpents twined in an endless knot and its power singing through my d’mselle. The Seal had been asleep since King Fairlaine’s time, true, but it was still a mark of the Blessed’s favor for Arquitaine. And now it was awake. Plenty of the old accounts of its power were… thought-provoking. Did Vianne know what other Left Hands had written of the Seal’s capabilities in the secret archives, she would no doubt seek to claw it from her flesh.

  One more danger to guard her from.

  I touched the door’s surface, smooth wood-grain under my fingertips. No line of candle or witchlight showed under its edge. She must be in her bed, prepared for dreaming with a soporific draught and left to embark on the sea of sleep. Danae would have prayed over her, and I pondered what wonder, if any, the priestess would have witnessed. Would the Aryx respond to this ceremony as it had responded to the marriage-vows?

  A chill walked up my back. The door smelled of hedgewitchery. A thread-thin tracery of green, visible to passive, sorcerous Sight, twined through the wood. Was it a defense, a hedgewitch charm meant to bar passage? Did she fear to sleep here, knowing I would be at her door?

  Not that. Please do not let her think that.

  I took up my position to one side, and listened. The temptation to enter the closet of Kimyan’s elect and peer through the darkened eyeholes, to perhaps hear her breathing, ran through my body like fever, like ague.

  Instead, I played the same game I have played through countless nights of watching and waiting. A Left Hand spends many nights in silence, like a viper under a rock, waiting in darkness for a victim to blunder past or an assignation to take place. Moreover, many a man has been proved unfit for the Guard, no matter how noble his blood, by the simple inability to wait.

  To wait successfully, a man fills the time as best he may. My game runs thus: I think of Vianne. I consider her in different lights—under a flood of sunlight in her garden, on her knees and digging, sometimes cursing under her breath before she worked hedgewitchery, a green flame on her fingers threading through whatever herb or flower she sought to save or replant. I envision her under torch- and witchlight during the Court dances, in the slow stately measures of a pavane or during the wild whirl of the maying, her feet unseen under her skirts and her dark curls flying.

  I think of her perched in a windowsill, bent over a book, the kiss of sun through glass bringing out threads of gold and darkness in her braided hair, gems winking against her throat and ears, sometimes with pearls threaded into the complex architecture of Court style.

  I think of the moment Henri told me of his design to marry her to some Damarsene tradesman-turned-noble, if his plans came to fruition and the ruling house of Hese-Arburg suffered a setback. To a king, the female side of Court is a garden, some flowers culled for pleasure and others to be used as bargaining chits, played for alliance or to shift the balance of power.

  That is a singularly unpleasant thought, though it arrives during any dark watch. So, I turn myself to remembering the grace of her wrist as she plucks at a harp, or of the grace of her wit when she and Princesse Lisele played riddlesharp and Vianne let the Princesse win, making a blunder too subtle to be anything but intentional.

  I had sweeter remembrances to take the sting away. The moment she turned to me, in a bandit’s hut in the Shirlstrienne, and told me her strength depended on mine. The moment I realized she was mine for the taking, that my patience had plucked the flower I had tended as carefully as she ever tended a bed of priest’s-ease or finicky aurlaine.

  The night wore on. That thin thread of green wedded to the
wooden door mocked me. I longed to touch the knob, to steal on cat-feet into the d’mselle’s chamber and whisper the truth in her ear. Would she take it for a god’s voice, and would I be struck down for blasphemy?

  What further blasphemy could I commit? Lying to tell the truth, lying to hide a truth, lying to cover my crimes, lying because I had lost the habit of truth itself—

  You? Tristan d’Arcenne, worrying like an old provincial m’dama about blasphemy? What next? Spending all your time on your knees in black skirts, counting your prayers on your fingers?

  I almost laughed at the vision. On a nightwatch, the mind does strange things.

  Far away, reverberating through stone, the temple bells tolled. I counted the strokes. A carillon, then twelve. Midnight. After now would come the time of deepest darkness, the time when I most often lay awake, listening to Vianne’s soft breathing next to me and cherishing each moment of her warmth. How long had we been married?

  Not nearly long enough to cool the fever in a man’s blood, when the only woman he wants is beside him and the world has spread itself at his feet. Or, at least, all of the world that matters.

  The bells quieted, stone vibrating slightly against my back. I closed my eyes and touched the edge of her door, running my fingertips over the knob as if it were the sweet curve of her hip. So soft, and so—

  I snapped into full alertness.

  Boots. The jingle of spurs, metal clashing.

  I hesitated. If twere merely news, there might be no need to disturb her. If twas something other…

  They rounded the corner, torches spilling witchfire, almost the full half-dozen of the Queen’s Guard. Jespre di Vidancourt, named for a stone; dark Jai di Montfort; Tinan di Rocham pale as death, swept along with them. At their head, Jierre, my lieutenant, with his countenance graven. He seemed to have aged ten years since I had commissioned him to my father’s Keep.

  I stepped forward, hand to hilt, and Jierre drew, steel singing from the sheath and his left hand lighting with venomous yellow witchfire, Court sorcery capable of blinding a man.

  Treachery? Here?

  “Hold!” Jai di Montfort yelled. His dark hair was disarranged, and he clasped Jierre’s shoulder, his other hand occupied with a torch dripping orange witchfire. “You have your orders, di Yspres! Stay your hand!”

  We faced each other, the Guard and I, and I shifted my balance a few crucial fractions. Did they come for my d’mselle’s door, we would find whose steel rang truest. My fingers tightened, tendon-knots, on my hilt.

  Six against one. I have taken worse odds, and Jierre will attack inquarto. He always does.

  Did he come for Vianne, I would kill him, lieutenant or no.

  Tinan di Rocham gasped for breath. “The order. Captain, the order—”

  “Silence!” Jierre’s tone cut harsh as a clothier’s knife through silk. “Tristan d’Arcenne, you are under arrest.”

  What? “What madness are you about?” My forearm tensed. The first thing to do would be to douse the torches, a flashy bit of Court sorcery but one I had practiced well. Darkness is where a Hand does his best work. “I stand guard over the Queen of Arquitaine!”

  Di Montfort’s fingers dug into Jierre’s shoulder, white-knuckled, holding my second-in-command back. “Tis our d’mselle herself who commands it, Captain.” Jai was ever the voice of reason, one of the most levelheaded of the Guard. Tinan held up a scroll, its heavy waxen seal visibly imprinted with the symbol of royalty—the three serpents of the Aryx, twisting about one another.

  My left hand leapt, not for a charm or killspell, but for the doorknob. It yielded, unlocked, the thin thread of hedgewitch-illusion that had darkened it breaking, and the door swept open as Jierre and the others surged forward. I saw the penitent’s cell, lit by a globe of glowrock and the low-burning lamps, guttering untended. The cot was smooth, unruffled, and I remembered the priestess swaying her way down the hall as I relieved Tinan of his guard duty. A priestess with a familiar gait, but I had seen the green-and-white robes and dismissed it.

  Outplayed, Tristan, and by your very own d’mselle. I halted, and the killing rage sharpened under my breastbone, cracked against the chain of duty like a cur snapping at its leash.

  “Captain.” Tinan di Rocham, his young voice breaking. “Please. We know not what the Queen is thinking—”

  “I know what she thinks, boy. Hold your tongue.” Jierre shook free of di Montfort’s restraint. “We have orders to bring you whole and hale, d’Arcenne, but do you resist and it shall go ill for all concerned.”

  The best of friends, the worst of enemies. I gathered myself, and tension sprang through them, as the springs and ropes of a siege engine will tauten when the engineers apply the levers.

  I had subtly encouraged them to swear their fealty to her, had fostered their loyalty to her, had tied their fates to hers. A hedge of safety around my Vianne, and she had used it against me. Fair blond Luc di Chatillon had the chains, their rattle strangely subdued.

  “I am to be arrested?” I made a show of slowly unbuckling my swordbelt, moving carefully. The angles of Jierre’s face contorted, whether with agony or murder I could not tell. “On what charge?”

  “Treason.” Pillipe di Garfour said it like a curse, as a man would spit out sour wine. “Written in your own hand, Captain. You are to be tried.”

  Oh, Vianne. You were so careful with Adersahl. “Tried by whom?”

  “Take his sword, Tinan.” Jierre’s stare was pitiless, and empty. Of all of them, he would feel the most betrayed. How had she reached him, to turn him thus?

  I offered it with both hands. Should I play the innocent? “I insist on seeing the order, di Yspres. It is my right.”

  “You dare—” My lieutenant took a single step forward, and a shining inch of steel showed between hilt and scabbard. He was perilously close to murdering me where I stood—that is, if the knife in my boot did not find his heart when I killed the lights.

  Jai di Montfort sank his callused fingers into Jierre’s shoulder again, drawing the man back. “Tis true. But I think it would not be wise of you to insist, d’Arcenne. Let us be calm, as befits the Queen’s Guard.”

  “In the Queen’s name.” The words fair sounded to choke Jierre. His face shifted again, terribly, and shame suffused me.

  I thought I had plumbed the depths of any shame I could feel the first time I killed an unarmed man in service of Henri di Tirecian-Trimestin.

  I was wrong.

  “For the Queen’s honor.” The words were ash on my tongue. My swordbelt was handed over. Luc di Chatillon did not clasp the irons overly tight, but he did make certain of them, and handed the key not to Jierre but to di Montfort. Jierre stood to one side, watching, hand on his rapier-hilt, and fury fair boiled the air around him.

  When I was braceleted with iron and standing quiescent enough, Jai di Montfort let loose of my lieutenant’s shoulder. “Come. We are due at the Keep.”

  Jierre appeared not to hear him. His gaze sought mine, and we weighed each other for a long, endless moment.

  “I would have followed you even to the gates of the underworld, Captain,” Jierre said quietly. “I would have wagered my life on your word. I did wager my life on it.”

  What could I say? He spoke truth. “You are still alive,” I pointed out. “I trust Vianne to your care, if she is to be robbed of mine.”

  Even Jai di Montfort was not quick enough to stop him. He struck me across the face, a good blow with muscle hardened from campaigning and daily drill behind it, and I made no move to avoid it. It took Luc di Chatillon and di Montfort both to restrain him, and Pillipe di Garfour and Tinan brought me to my feet, near dragging me down the hall. My jaw had not broken, though I could feel the swelling in my cheek already. Twas not a love-tap, and yet my heart ached worse.

  It is ever so, with men who are too loyal and too honest. Not even the thought of eventual revenge can restrain their rage when they find they have been used.

  Twas why Jierre di Yspr
es would never have been a fit Left Hand.

  Chapter Six

  This cell did not stink, at least. I paced it—fourteen strides one way, eight another. There was a pallet, and no oublietta.

  So I was not meant to be forgotten in a dark hole. At least, not yet.

  The chains gave me lee to pace, fastened to a staple driven into the stone of the wall, and a witchlight torch outside the bars gave me no shortage of flat orange light. My face ached, dull pain spreading down my neck, and I winced every time I turned, chains rattling, measuring off each stride with a definite snick of my booted heel.

  They had not searched me, and thus had overlooked the knife in my boot and the thin flexible stiletto in my sleeve. The lock on the cuffs would yield to some persistence, and there was no guard at the door. They had simply left me here, Jierre fiercely silent, Luc di Chatillon with an apologetic glance, and Tinan di Rocham looking halfway to tears.

  I could expect visitors, but I could not know when. Would she not wish to measure my wounded countenance, see me in chains, present me with the proof?

  What could I say?

  He sought to take you from me, m’chri. You were the lure that killed a King.

  One more reason not to tell her.

  Arcenne throbbed above. An army drawing near with siege engines and some thousands, my d’mselle was probably still awake, planning feverishly with her nimble brain, seeking a way through the mire that did not mean shed blood. As dawn approached, the Keep would be readying itself, and the walls of the city would be alive with men, criers dispatched with orders to tell the common people their home was about to be flung into the maw of war.

  You will fret yourself into a lather, d’Arcenne. You have waited in a prison cell before. Do so again.

  The last time I had been trapped in a donjon, it was waiting for the Duc d’Orlaans to send a knife in the dark—because for all his bluster, he would not have had me publicly beheaded. It would have meant he feared me, did he put me before the crowd as meat.