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Tharin tousled Tobin’s hair. ‘As good as, my prince. When I was old enough, I was made his squire and later he made me a knight and granted me my lands at Hawkhaven. We’ve never been separated in battle.’
Tobin pondered all this a moment, then asked, ‘Why don’t I have a squire?’
‘Oh, you’re young for that yet. I’m sure you will when you’re a bit older.’
‘But not one I’ve grown up with,’ Tobin pointed out glumly. ‘No boy has been born here. There aren’t any other children at all. Why can’t we go live at Atyion, like you and Father did? Why do the children in the village point and stare at me?’
Tobin half expected Tharin to put him off, talk of other things the way his father and Nari always did. Instead, he just shook his head and sighed. ‘Because of the demon, I suppose, and because your mama is so unhappy. Your father feels it’s best this way, but I don’t know …’
He looked so sad as he said it that Tobin almost blurted out what had happened that day in the tower. He’d never told anyone about that.
Before he could, however, Nari came to fetch him. He promised himself he would tell Tharin the following day during their ride, but Koni and old Lethis came too, and he didn’t feel right speaking in front of anyone else. Another day or two passed and he forgot about it, but his trust in Tharin remained.
As Cinrin wore on there was little snow, hardly enough to dust the meadow, but the weather turned bitter cold. Tharin kept the men busy hauling firewood from the forest and everyone slept in the hall, where the hearth fire burned night and day. Tobin wore two tunics and his cloak indoors. During the day Cook kept a firepot burning in the toy room so that he could amuse himself there, but even so he could still see his breath on the air.
The river froze hard enough to walk on and some of the younger soldiers and servants went skating, but Nari would only let Tobin watch from the bank.
He was playing alone upstairs one bright morning when he caught the sound of a horse galloping up the frozen road. Soon a lone rider in a streaming red cape came riding up the meadow and across the bridge. Leaning out over the sill, Tobin saw his father come out to greet the man and welcome him inside. He recognized the red and gold badge all too well; this was a messenger from the King and that usually meant only one thing.
The man did not stay long however, and was soon off again down the road. As soon as Tobin heard him clatter across the bridge he hurried downstairs.
His father was by the hearth studying a long scroll weighted down with the King’s seals and ribbons. Tobin sat down beside him and peered at the document, wishing that he could read it. Not that he needed to, to know what the message was. ‘You have to leave again, don’t you, Father?’
‘Yes, and very soon, I’m afraid. Plenimar is taking advantage of the dry winter to raid up the Mycenian coast. The Mycenians have appealed to Erius for aid.’
‘You can’t sail at this time of year! The sea’s too stormy, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, we must ride,’ his father replied absently. He already had that faraway look in his eyes and Tobin knew he was thinking of supplies and horses and men. That would be all he and Tharin would talk about around the hearth at night until they left.
‘Why is Plenimar always making war?’ Tobin asked, angry with these strangers who kept causing trouble and taking his father away. The Sakor festival was only a few weeks away and his father was sure to leave before then.
Rhius looked up at him. ‘You remember the map I showed you, how the Three Lands lie around the Inner Sea?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, they were all one land once, ruled by priest kings called Hierophants. They had their capital at Benshâl, in Plenimar. A long while ago the last Hierophant divided the lands up into three countries, but the Plenimarans never liked that and have always wanted to reclaim all the territory for their own.’
‘When can I go to war with you?’ Tobin asked. ‘Tharin says I’m doing very well at my lessons!’
‘So I hear.’ His father hugged him, smiling in the way that meant no. ‘I’ll tell you what. As soon as you’re big enough to wear my second hauberk, you may come with me. Come, let’s see if it fits.’
The heavy coat of chain hung on a rack in his father’s bedchamber. It was far too big, of course, and puddled around Tobin’s feet, anchoring him helplessly in place. The coif hung over his eyes. Laughing, his father placed the steel cap on Tobin’s head. It felt like he was wearing one of Cook’s soup kettles; the end of the long nasal guard hung below his chin. All the same, his heart beat faster as he imagined the tall, strong man he’d someday be, filling all this out properly.
‘Well, I can see it won’t be much longer before you’ll be needing this,’ his father chuckled. And with that he dragged the rack across the corridor to Tobin’s bedchamber and spent the rest of the afternoon showing him how to keep the mail oiled and ready.
Tobin still clung to the hope that his father and the others could stay until the Sakor festival, but his father’s liegemen, Lord Nyanis and Lord Solari, soon arrived with their men. For a few days the meadow was full of soldiers and their tents, but within the week everyone was gone to Atyion, leaving Tobin and the servants to celebrate without them.
Tobin moped about for a few days, but Nari cajoled him out of his dark mood and sent him off to help deck the house. Garlands of fir boughs were hung over every doorway, and wooden shields painted gold and black were hung on the pillars of the hall. Tobin filled the offering shelf of the household shrine with an entire herd of wax horses for Sakor. The following morning, however, he found them scattered across the rush-covered floor, replaced by an equal number of dirty, twisted tree roots.
This was one of the demon’s favourite tricks, and one Tobin particularly hated, since it upset his father so. The Duke would always go pale at the sight of them. Then he had to burn sweet herbs and say prayers to cleanse the shrine. If Tobin found the roots first, he threw them away and cleaned the shelf with his sleeve so his father wouldn’t know and be sad.
Scowling to himself now, Tobin pitched the whole mess into the hearth fire and went to make new horses.
On Mourning Night Cook extinguished all but one firepot to symbolize Old Sakor’s death and everyone played games of Blindman’s Gambit by moonlight in the deserted barracks yard.
Tobin was hiding behind a hayrack when he happened to glance up at the tower. A faint glimmer of forbidden firelight showed through the shutters. He hadn’t seen his mother in days and that suited him very well. All the same, a shiver danced up the knobs of his spine as he pictured her up there, peering out at him.
Suddenly something heavy knocked him to the ground and a burning pain blossomed in his right cheek, just below his eye. The invisible attacker vanished as quickly as it had come and Tobin blundered out from behind the rack, sobbing with fear and pain.
‘What is it, pet?’ Nari cried, gathering him into her arms.
Too shaken to answer, he pressed his throbbing cheek against her shoulder as she carried him into the hall.
‘Someone strike a light!’ she ordered.
‘Not on Mourning Night …’ the housemaid, Sarilla, said, hovering at her side.
‘Then fetch the reserve coals and blow up enough flame to see by. The child’s hurt!’
Tobin curled tightly against her, eyes shut tight. The pain was subsiding to a dull ache, but the shock of the attack still made him tremble. He heard Sarilla return, then the creak of the firepot lid.
‘There now, pet, let Nari see.’
Tobin lifted his head and let her turn his cheek towards the dim glow. Mynir and the others stood in a circle around them, looking very worried.
‘By the Light, he’s bitten!’ the old steward exclaimed. ‘Go fetch a basin and a clean cloth, girl.’ Sarilla hurried off.
Tobin raised a hand to his cheek and felt sticky wetness there.
Nari took the cloth Sarilla fetched and wiped his fingers and cheek. It came away streaked with blood.
‘Could it have been one of the hounds, Tobin? Perhaps one was sleeping in the hayrack,’ Mynir said anxiously. Dogs couldn’t abide Tobin; they growled and slunk away from him. There were only a few old ones left at the keep now, and Nari wouldn’t let them in the house.
‘That’s no dog bite,’ Sarilla whispered. ‘Look, you can see –’
‘It was the demon!’ Tobin cried. There had been moonlight enough to see that nothing with a proper solid body had been behind that rack with him. ‘It knocked me down and bit me!’
‘Never mind that,’ Nari said soothingly, turning the rag to a clean side and sponging away his tears. ‘Never you mind. We’ll talk about it in the morning. Come to bed now, and Nari will keep that old demon away.’
Tobin could hear the others still whispering to each other as she led him towards the stairs.
‘It’s true, what they say!’ Sarilla was whimpering. ‘Who else does it attack like that? Born cursed!’
‘That’s enough, girl,’ Mynir hissed back. ‘There’s a cold, lonesome road outside for those who can’t keep their mouths shut.’
Tobin shivered. So even here, people whispered.
He slept deeply with Nari close beside him. He woke alone, but well tucked in and could tell by the slant of the sun through the shutters that it was mid-morning.
Disappointment swept away all the terror of the night before. At the dawn of Sakor’s day he and Mynir always woke the household to the new year, beating on the shield gong by the shrine. The steward must have done it without him this year and he hadn’t even heard.
He padded barefoot across the cold floor to the small bronze mirror above his washbasin and inspected his cheek. Yes, there it was; a double line of red teeth marks, curved like the outline of an eye. Tobin bit his forearm just hard enough to leave an impression in the skin and saw that the two marks looked very much the same. Tobin looked back at the mirror, staring into his own blue eyes and wondering what sort of invisible body the demon had. Until now it had only been a dark blur he sometimes saw from the corner of his eye. Now he imagined it as one of the goblins in Nari’s bedtime tales – the ones she said looked like a boy burned all over in a fire. A goblin with teeth like his. Was that what had been lurking at the edges of his world all this time?
Tobin glanced nervously around the room and made the warding sign three times over before he felt brave enough to get dressed.
He was sitting on the bed tying the leather lacings over his trouser legs when he heard the door latch lift. He glanced up, expecting Nari.
Instead, his mother stood framed in the doorway with the doll. ‘I heard Mynir and Cook talking about what happened last night,’ she said softly. ‘You slept late this Sakor’s Day.’
This was the first time in more than year that they’d been alone together. Since that day in the tower.
He couldn’t move. He just sat staring, with the leather lacing biting into his fingers as she walked to him and reached to touch his cheek.
Her hair was combed and plaited today. Her dress was clean and she smelled faintly of flowers. Her fingers were cool and gentle as she smoothed his hair back and examined the swollen flesh around the bite. There were no shadows in her face today that Tobin could see. She just looked sad. Laying the doll aside on the bed, she cradled his face in both hands and kissed him on the brow.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she murmured. Then she pushed his left sleeve back and kissed the wisdom mark on his forearm. ‘We’re living in an ill-starred dream, you and I. I must do better by you, little love. What else do we have but each other?’
‘Sarilla says I’m cursed,’ Tobin mumbled, undone by such tenderness.
His mother’s eyes narrowed dangerously, but her touch remained gentle. ‘Sarilla is an ignorant peasant. You mustn’t ever listen to such talk.’
She took up the doll again, then reached for Tobin’s hand. Smiling, she said, ‘Come, my dears, let’s see what Cook has for our breakfast.’
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_5d0ebadb-0a8b-5d0b-9dd6-3f703b1360fe)
Since that strange Sakor’s Day morning, his mother ceased to be a ghost in her own household.
Her first acts were to dismiss Sarilla and then dispatch Mynir to the town to find a suitable replacement. He returned the following day with a quiet, good-natured widow named Tyra who became her serving maid.
Sarilla’s dismissal frightened Tobin. He hadn’t cared much for the girl, but she’d been a part of the household for as long as he could remember. His mother’s dislike of Nari was no secret, and he was terrified that she might send the nurse away, too. But Nari stayed and cared for him as she always had, without any interference.
His mother came downstairs nearly every morning now, properly dressed with her shining black hair braided or combed in a smooth veil over her shoulders. She even wore some scent that smelled like spring flowers in the meadow. She still spent much of the day sewing dolls by the fire in her bedchamber, but she took time now to look over the accounts with Mynir and came out to the kitchen yard with Cook to meet the farmers and peddlers who called. Tobin came along, too, and was surprised to hear of famine and disease striking in nearby towns. Before now, those were things that always happened far away.
Still, as bright as she was during the day, as soon as the afternoon shadows began to lengthen the light seemed to go out of her, too, and she’d retreat upstairs to the forbidden third floor. This saddened Tobin at first, but he was never tempted to follow and the next morning she would reappear, smiling again.
The demon seemed to come and go with the daylight, too, but it was most active in the dark.
The teeth marks it left on Tobin’s cheek soon healed and faded, but his terror of it did not. Lying in bed beside Nari each night, Tobin could not rid himself of the image of a wizened black form lurking in the shadows, reaching out with taloned fingers to pinch and pull, its sharp teeth bared to bite again. He kept the covers pulled up to his eyes and learned to drink nothing after supper, so that he wouldn’t have to get up in the dark to use the chamber pot.
The fragile peace with his mother held, and a few weeks later Tobin walked into his toy room to find her waiting for him at a new table.
‘For our lessons,’ his mother explained, waving him to the other chair.
Tobin’s heart sank as he saw the parchments and writing materials. ‘Father tried to teach me,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t learn.’
A small frown creased her forehead at the mention of his father, but it quickly passed. Dipping a quill into the inkpot, she held it out to him. ‘Let’s try again, shall we? Perhaps I’ll be a better teacher.’
Still dubious, Tobin took it and tried to write his name, the only word he knew. She watched him struggle for a few moments, then gently took back the quill.
Tobin sat very still, wondering if there would be an outburst of some sort. Instead, she rose and went to the windowsill, where a row of his little wax and wooden carvings stood in a row. Picking up a fox, she looked back at him. ‘You made these, didn’t you?’
Tobin nodded.
She examined each of the others: the hawk, the bear, the eagle, a running horse, and the attempt he’d made at modelling Tharin holding a wood splinter sword.
‘Those aren’t my best ones,’ he told her shyly. ‘I give them away.’
‘To whom?’
He shrugged. ‘Everyone.’ The servants and soldiers had always praised his work and even asked for particular animals. Manies had wanted an otter and Laris a bear. Koni liked birds; in return for an eagle he’d given Tobin one of his sharp little knives and found him soft bits of wood that were easy to shape.
As much as Tobin loved pleasing them all, he always saved his best carvings for his father and Tharin. It had never occurred to him to give one to his mother. He wondered if her feelings were hurt.
‘Would you like to have that one?’ he asked, pointing to the fox she still held.
She bowed slightly, smiling. ‘Why, thank you, my lord.’
Returning to her chair, she placed it on the table between them and handed him the quill. ‘Can you draw this for me?’
Tobin had never thought to draw anything when it was so easy to model them. He looked down at the blank parchment, flicking the feathered end of the quill against his chin. Pulling the shape of something from soft wax was easy; to make the same shape real this way was something else again. He imagined a vixen he’d seen in the meadow one morning and tried to draw a line that would capture the shape of her muzzle and the alert forward set of her ears as she’d hunted mice in the grass. He could see her as clearly as ever in his mind, but try as he might he couldn’t make the pen behave. The crabbed scrawl it drew looked nothing like the fox. Throwing the quill down, he stared down at his ink-stained fingers, defeated again.
‘Never mind, love,’ his mother told him. ‘Your carvings are as good as any drawing. I was just curious. But let’s see if we can make your letters easier for you.’
Turning the sheet over, she wrote for a moment, then sanded the page and turned it around for Tobin to see. There, across the top, were three A’s, written very large. She dipped the pen and gave it to him, then rose to stand behind him. Covering his hand with hers, she guided it to trace the letters she’d drawn, showing him the proper strokes. They went over them several times, and when he tried it alone he found that his own scrawls had begun to resemble the letter he was attempting.
‘Look, Mama, I did it!’ he exclaimed.
‘It’s as I thought,’ she murmured as she drew out more practice letters for him. ‘I was just the same when I was your age.’
Tobin watched her as she worked, trying to imagine her as a young girl in braids who couldn’t write.
‘I made little sculptures, too, though not nearly as nice as yours,’ she went on, still writing. ‘Then my nurse taught me doll making. You’ve seen my dolls.’
Thinking of them made Tobin uncomfortable, but he didn’t want to seem rude by not answering. ‘They’re very pretty,’ he said. His gaze drifted to her doll, slumped in an ungainly heap on the chest beside them. She looked up and caught him staring at it. It was too late. She knew what he was looking at, maybe even what he was thinking.
Her face softened in a fond smile as she took the ugly doll onto her lap and arranged its misshapen limbs. ‘This is the best I ever made.’
‘But … well, how come it doesn’t have a face?’
‘Silly child, of course he has a face!’ She laughed, brushing her fingers across the blank oval of cloth. ‘The prettiest little face I’ve ever seen!’
For an instant her eyes were mad and wild again, like they had been in the tower. Tobin flinched as she leaned forward, but she simply dipped the pen again and went on writing.
‘I could shape anything with my hands, but I couldn’t write or read. My father – your grandfather, the Fifth Consort Tanaris – showed me how to teach my hand the shapes, just as I’m showing you now.’
‘I have a grandfather? Will I meet him someday?’
‘No, my dear, your grandmama poisoned him years ago,’ his mother said, busily writing. After a moment she turned the sheet to him. ‘Here now, a fresh row for you to trace.’
