The Shadow Within Page 5

  Simon could not have been more stunned had Ethan slapped him in the face.

  “He’s just coming ashore in the king’s launch down there,” Laramor went on. “You can clearly see it’s him with the glass.”

  He offered his spyglass to Simon, who continued to stare dumbly at him, cold now from his head to his feet. He saw again in his mind’s eye the tall, bearded blond he’d noted earlier on Wanderer’s deck. The one that had seemed familiar. Abramm?

  It can’t be.

  But somehow, even before Simon had the telescope focused on the man, he knew that it was, and the knowing turned his heart to icy stone. The boy had debarked and was now walking slowly up the dock, preceded and followed by the royal armsmen in their tattered uniforms—now Simon understood why they had come and the Guardians had stayed. And that older, birdlike Mataian at his side was on the Mataians’ High Council. Perhaps the two flanking them were, as well. Indeed, it likely would’ve been High Father Bonafil himself, if the stick wasn’t too holy to walk himself down to the docks through that press of unrighteous humanity. No doubt he watched from somewhere safe, farther back. Simon lowered the scope to scan the surroundings and saw at once the white canopy trimmed in red, set up just down the main road in a small outswelling that served as overlook.

  The people through whom Abramm walked—thankfully Simon recognized few of Springerlan’s upper crust among them—grinned and cheered, some reaching out to touch him as he passed, an indignity he allowed. Occasionally he even stopped to speak to them and clasp their hands as if they were not commoners at all, but fellow highbloods. Even from a distance Simon saw that they loved him.

  The boy moved stiffly, as if in pain, his height, his dark, level brows, deepset eyes, and narrow aristocratic features bearing the unmistakable stamp of the Kalladorne bloodline. A bloodline whose heritage he had once mocked with his pacifist Mataian robes and that long womanly hair tied now into a queue at his nape. The weakest, sickliest, most cowardly of King Meren’s sons, the one who had shamed the family by joining the Holy Brethren, then shamed them more by failing the final test of his Novitiate, the one everyone believed—and secretly hoped—was dead and forever forgotten, now stood before them, very much alive.

  “If you’re not careful, Sire, you could lose the Crown.”

  “And who’s going to take it from me? You, Uncle?”

  A stream of muttered blasphemies tumbled from Simon’s lips. Fire and Torment! Pox and plagues! How in all creation could this have happened?

  He lowered the glass, telescoping it shut with trembling hands. If I go down there to meet him, I’ll have to ride with him. And if I ride with him, it’ll be thought I support him.

  Simon drew a deep breath, nausea clenching his middle. What to do? What to do? He eyed the white-and-red canopy again, gray-mantled holy men clustered in its shadow, glanced again at Abramm just as the boy lifted his gaze to look right at Simon. Decision crystallized. Tight-lipped, Simon hauled his horse around, plunging heedlessly through the crowd until he broke free of it. Then he kicked the beast to a canter, racing back up the Avenue of the Keep to the palace.

  Come to claim the Crown, indeed! What does he know of being king? A scholar, a religious boy, and now a former slave? It’s madness.

  His horse was lathered and blowing hard when Simon pulled up to the palace’s main entrance and vaulted to the ground. Throwing the reins at the waiting footman, he took the steps two at a time, breathlessly asking the steward at the top if the king had left for the dock yet.

  “No, my lord,” the steward stammered. “They’ve only just found him. He spent last night with Lady Amelia. She’s a new one. No one even thought to look for him in her—” The steward broke off and backed a pace as Simon realized he was sputtering blasphemies again.

  CHAPTER

  4

  When Abramm looked up and saw his uncle Simon sitting his big bay horse atop the ramp, his heart lurched with hope. But barely had he focused on the man when he saw him stiffen with that all-too-familiar hostility. Then he was handing off the telescope to his companion and wheeling his horse around, flying back to the palace and Gillard.

  Disappointment curdled in Abramm’s middle, feeding the anxiety that had nagged him all morning. He suspected exhaustion was to blame—he hadn’t slept in over thirty-six hours, the last fourteen of which he’d spent engaged in some of the hardest, heaviest work he’d done since his days in Katahn’s galley ships. They’d passed the night patching Wanderer together enough to catch the wind again, and even then the kraggin’s weight required towlines. So this morning most everyone, him included, had taken a turn at the towboat oars.

  Now his legs trembled, his back ached, his palms were blistered, and his hands were stiff and sore from too much pulling. He was getting a headache, too, and his stomach had become seriously uneasy thanks to the sharp, ammoniac stench of the kraggin permeating his clothes and hair and beard— even his skin. With all his extra clothing lost when the monster had splintered the stern cabin, he’d had nothing to change into, and the smell hadn’t seemed so bad out on the water. Ashore and in this crowd, however, it was strong enough to choke. Ahead, the people lining the dock wrinkled their noses as it first hit them, frowning, glancing at their neighbors, then realizing what it was and returning to their cheering. At least he was not the only one the kraggin had anointed with its stench. And no one could accuse him of not having been involved.

  With Lieutenant Channon and two of his armsmen pressing a path through the crowd, Abramm walked a gauntlet of grateful citizens, his old discipler, Brother Belmir, beside him. He would have preferred it be Trap, but they’d agreed that was out of the question, given that Trap had supposedly been executed six years ago. Belmir had changed little. His gray guardian’s braid was whiter, his back more crooked, his face more wrinkled, but overall he was still the same bespectacled, birdlike man Abramm remembered. Except for the fact he was Master Belmir now, recently promoted to High Father Bonafil’s council of spiritual advisors. He and his two aides had been there to greet Abramm when he disembarked from the king’s launch, their warm, excited manner not what he’d expected after Rhiad had gone ashore earlier to present his suspicions to his superiors. Evidently they viewed him as mad as the royal armsmen did. Either that or they realized that in accusing Abramm they’d also have to admit it was Terstan power that slew the monster and not their precious Flames. In which case he figured they would not have shown up at all.

  He walked slowly, as much because he was tired as because he honestly wanted to clasp the hands held out to him and look into the eyes of those whom he would rule, see the pain and relief and gratitude and know that what had been risked and sacrificed was worth it.

  “You’ve saved our lives.”

  “My children will eat now.”

  “We owe you everything.”

  Many a tearstained face presented itself, and it must have been fatigue that made his throat keep closing up. These were not highborn nobles, but commoners—freemen, merchants, and sailors—and he was humbled by their response to him.

  The nobles, thankfully, had not turned out yet. Stiff with exhaustion, ragged, dirty, and stinking of sweat and sea and kraggin, Abramm could not have presented a less regal impression if he’d tried. The commoners might not mind, but the nobles would be aghast. And in light of what he hoped to do in the coming days, he wanted nothing so much as to get to the palace and a bath as soon as possible.

  That would deliver him from Belmir, too. After the Guardian’s initial greeting, when puzzlement mingled with an apparently genuine pleasure at their reunion, the man had said little, walking at Abramm’s side in a quiet display of Mataian support. That Abramm allowed it, hinted as well, unfortunately, that the Mataio had Abramm’s.

  Working his way up the dock, Abramm had been clasping hands and receiving thanks without much thought beyond satisfaction at this validation of his choice to return. But when his gaze caught on a small golden shield glittering between the open
neck edges of a man’s fine leather jerkin, a mark supernaturally burnished into the man’s flesh, he stopped in his tracks. His gaze flicked up to the man’s face—pale, age wrinkled, with dark bushy brows overshadowing shrewd brown eyes and bristly salt-and-pepper hair cut short in defiance of current fashion.

  The man stuck out his hand. “Everitt Kesrin, Your Grace. Owner of the Westland Shipping Company. You have saved the livelihoods of myself and all whom I employ, and for that you have my thanks.”

  At his side stood a plain young woman, her fawn-colored hair hastily caught into a pair of Chesedhan-style braids, her wide blue-gray eyes fastened upon Abramm as if he were Alaric the Second reborn. She was not the only one to stare, though the others in the suddenly silent crowd had perhaps different reasons. As Abramm regarded the offered hand, a squall of conflicting thoughts blew through his mind—the realization of what this man was doing, the understanding that Abramm’s own action would be marked and replayed for days to come, the fear of where that would lead, the purpose of his return. . . .

  He hesitated only an instant, then clasped the man’s hand firmly, a scribe’s hand he judged it, soft as his own had once been. “It is my privilege to serve,” he said quietly, holding the merchant’s gaze. “And my pleasure to know you.”

  He started onward, but Belmir lingered behind. “Freeman Kesrin,” he said dryly. “Bold as ever, I see.”

  Kesrin was executing a short bow as Abramm turned back to observe. “Why should I not be bold, Master Belmir, when I stand enfolded in Eidon’s Light? Though I fail to see boldness in my actions today. Am I not allowed to express my thanks to our celebrated deliverer like everyone else?”

  “As you make sure he knows exactly what you are when he accepts that thanks. Don’t think your motives are not obvious, Freeman.”

  No more than yours, Master Belmir, thought Abramm.

  Kesrin only shrugged. “I find no fault in my motives. We have long been free in this land to pursue whatever faith we choose. I hope that will not change with the coming of our new . . . king?” His dark eyes shifted back to Abramm, one bushy brow lifting, and Abramm was seized with the desire to conjure a kelistar in front of them all. That would certainly be an action noted by the crowd. And Gillard. And the Table of Lords.

  He put away the crazy bravado and said, “You have nothing to fear from me, Freeman. I have every intention of enforcing the freedoms Kiriathans have long guarded.”

  “Even if Eidon’s law says otherwise?”

  “I have always understood that is Eidon’s law.” He glanced at Belmir. “That, in fact, it was this very freedom which allowed the Matiao itself to survive two hundred years ago when it was but a tiny gathering of eccentric cultists.”

  Belmir frowned over his spectacles. As he drew breath to speak, however, some intuition of the need to maintain royal decorum spurred Abramm to end it. Nodding to the Terstan merchant and the starstruck girl at his side, he strode forward to acknowledge the next person in line. In his wake he heard Kesrin say, “Master Belmir, are you sure this is your Guardian-King?”

  Guardian-King? Abramm’s stride faltered. Was that why Belmir was here? Because they had decided—Eidon alone knew why—Abramm was their Guardian-King? The thought made his incipient nausea lurch. No wonder Simon had raced away and Everitt Kesrin had come out to bait him.

  Belmir ignored Kesrin’s jibe, returning to his post at Abramm’s side, smiling and lifting his hand to the crowd as if nothing untoward had happened. But after a moment Abramm leaned down toward him and said quietly, “I must tell you sir, that if you believe I am your Guardian-King, you are gravely mistaken.”

  Belmir flicked him a smile. “You killed the kraggin, my son. You have to be him.”

  “Brother Rhiad did not share your assessment.”

  “Rhiad sees Terstans around every corner. He means well, but all know he is unbalanced. It’s clear the power he sensed was not in you, but in the kraggin as it fought for its life against the Flames.”

  Abramm smiled and waved, chilled by the mingle of truth and falsehood in the Guardian’s words and not knowing how to counteract it without saying everything.

  “He had hoped to have the victory over it himself,” Belmir went on, “and was not pleased when Eidon favored you instead. Still, we all see it for what it is: Eidon’s Chosen returning to take up the Crown that has awaited him since he left.”

  “But that is not possible,” Abramm said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I no longer hold with Mataian teachings.”

  “You may have strayed from the fold, my son, but you’ll be back.”

  “I assure you, I will not.”

  Belmir smiled benignly over his spectacles. “Eidon’s hand is upon you. You cannot help it.”

  From suspected heretic to the Mataio’s prophesied Guardian-King in but a few hours. Incredible. It was the ultimate irony that Abramm would use his Terstan power to kill the kraggin—in a blundering, uncontrolled, appallingly visible burst—and have it viewed as proof of Eidon’s anointing. If it were not so galling, and if he were not teetering on the edge of being found out, his bid for the crown ruined before it began, it might have been humorous.

  Ahead, where the pier met the main dock, the Mataians had erected a red-and-white awning above an overlook from the street ramping down to dock level. Several benches had been brought down, upon which were seated what appeared to be the High Father of all the Mataio and his chief aides. Abramm didn’t suppose he could ignore the High Father of one of the major faiths of his land, particularly in light of what he’d just said about respecting his people’s religious freedom. Fortunately he also saw, standing on the dock below the holy men, the horses he’d asked Lieutenant Channon to procure for him and his armsmen. If he had to meet with High Father Bonafil, at least he would do it eye to eye.

  He knew his fatigue was all too obvious when Channon offered to help him mount—he refused, of course. No self-respecting Dorsaddi accepted help in mounting. It was bad enough he had to use the stirrup to climb aboard rather than simply swinging into the saddle, but he could barely move his left shoulder and his back was ominously twitchy. Well, only a little longer and he’d have some privacy in which to attend to both his person and his hurts.

  As Abramm reined his horse over to address the men sitting on the overlook, he saw that Belmir had rejoined his holy brethren and was whispering something into the High Father’s ear. Abramm recognized none of the others. He only knew the High Father’s name because Channon had told him earlier that Saeral had died of a heart attack four years ago and Bonafil succeeded him. The new High Father was the typically handsome, placid-faced sort that ascended to his station, with mild blue eyes and soft lips. His auburn hair, liberally sprinkled with gray, frizzed now with age above the long braid. As befitted his station, he wore no rank cords, a sign, the Mandates said of his extreme humility. At his throat—as at the throats of all Guardians—gleamed the red amulet of the Holy Flames, said to carry the very spark of Eidon himself. It was an amulet Abramm had once longed for with a passion that was painful, an amulet that now reminded him chillingly of those worn by the evil priests of Esurh’s Khrell. Right down to the dim, fluttering glow lurking within each one of them. Not the spark of Eidon at all, but something else entirely. And he wondered as his gaze stopped on Bonafil—was this Saeral in a new body?

  The breeze rushed around Abramm and over the waiting holy men, widening their eyes, wrinkling their noses, and inciting a startled exchange of glances. A couple of them even coughed slightly, and one man sneezed.

  Bonafil kept his nose-wrinkling to a minimum, remarking in a gentle voice, “Sweet Fires, man. That is quite a stench.” No one else in all this crowd could have spoken such even to the crown prince, let alone the man who could be king by week’s end.

  “You’ll forgive me, then,” Abramm said, “if I hasten on to the palace, where I may indulge in the bath we all agree is needed.”

  “I’ll only take a momen
t, Your Highness.” Silence once more enfolded them as Bonafil’s blue eyes moved down Abramm’s form and up again. “Is that a weapon you wear on your hip, my son?”

  “It is, in fact, an Andolen rapier, Father.”

  The High Father received this information without reaction, studying Abramm’s robes and hands and face. He wrinkled his nose again, then looked across the crowd and the docked ships to Wanderer, forced by her deep draft to anchor farther out in the harbor, while at his side, Belmir smiled with calm assurance. Bonafil’s gaze returned to Abramm. “Are you indeed responsible for the monster’s death, then?”

  “I and the men with me, yes.”

  “ ’Tis a remarkable feat you have accomplished, then.”

  “ ’Twas by the power and mercy of Eidon.”

  Light flickered in Bonafil’s eyes and simultaneously in the amulet at his throat, raising the hairs on Abramm’s nape. “And now you come to claim the Crown.”

  Not Saeral. Abramm thought. Another.

  “You will need Eidon’s help, I think,” remarked Bonafil.

  “I will indeed, Father.”

  Again the silence and the thoughtful regard. Then Bonafil nodded as if Abramm had passed some unspoken test. “You will have the Brotherhood’s full support.”

  And here it was: the moment to speak or keep silent. Abramm spoke: “I appreciate your generosity, sir, but as I told Master Belmir, I no longer hold with Mataian teachings.”

  Bonafil nodded. “Nevertheless, you have our support.”

  It was on the tip of Abramm’s tongue to declare he neither wanted nor needed their support when suddenly he understood. No one knew he had become the White Pretender, or that he had spent the last four years as the close friend, confidant, and advisor to King Shemm of the Dorsaddi. High Father Bonafil no doubt saw him as a simple scribe fresh out of slavery and easily manipulated. This was a bid for power. Abramm could probably offer any insult short of revealing the shield on his chest, and Bonafil would bear it.