The Rose Cord Read online

  Melyn looked at the boy, knelt down and shook him. He looked like he’d hit his face with some force, almost as if he’d been thrown to the stone floor. His breathing was shallow and ragged, his skin flaccid and cold. Quickly Melyn hauled him up, marvelling at how slight he was, and carried him from the chapel. Earlier he had wanted Errol dead, had just wanted to be rid of him, but now he realized that the boy was too much of a mystery to discard so lightly. He had an ability unique in all of Gwlad, and Melyn would not rest until he had uncovered the secret of how it was done. He thanked the Shepherd for showing him the foolishness of his earlier rash actions. Here potentially was power and magic such as he had never dreamed of.

  As he carried the unconscious Errol along the corridor towards his private chambers, Melyn met the guard running towards him.

  ‘I hope the medic’s just behind you,’ he growled at the anonymous man, ignoring the way he stared goggle-eyed at the boy in his arms. ‘This lad needs attention and fast.’

  ‘Your Grace, I came as quickly as I could,’ the guard said. ‘I’ve searched the infirmary and his rooms. Usel is gone.’

  The crash of the fireball landing in Magog’s dinner brought Benfro back to himself. He was suddenly breathless again and very weary. Little beads of sweat pricked out around his scales and the glands beside his eyes. He was filled with confusion as one half of his brain tried to process what he had seen and the other tried desperately to pigeonhole it away before anyone else knew what he was thinking about.

  ‘So close, young Benfro.’ Magog extinguished the flame with a wave of his hand. ‘But not perfect yet. Still an admirable attempt. It’s just a pity you let your mind wander. You must learn to be more disciplined about your work, learn to focus.’

  Benfro reached for his goblet, wishing that there was something a little stronger than water in it this time. He should not have been shocked when the liquid he gulped down was wine, but he still managed to choke on it. He wiped the dribbles from his face before taking a more measured drink, feeling the magic liquid warm him all the way down to his stomach. It dulled the worry in his mind as well, quelling some of his confusion while adding a different bewilderment of its own, a pleasant befuddlement.

  The distraction was complete as pudding appeared in the form of a vast bowl of fruit and berries, most of which he could name only from pictures he had seen in books. Despite having eaten well, Benfro found that he was incredibly hungry still. He fell upon the fruit, shovelling it into his mouth as quickly as he could manage, barely tasting anything in his haste. It was only when his plate was nearly empty that he realized he had been eating summer produce.

  ‘How can you get these things?’ he asked, picking a melon seed from between his fangs with a talon. ‘Surely they won’t grow in winter.’

  ‘It’s not winter everywhere, Benfro,’ Magog explained in his long-suffering teacher’s tone.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Benfro said. ‘It’s winter outside.’

  ‘And on the other side of Gwlad it’s summer,’ Magog said. ‘And in the middle of the world it’s always summer, always hot. At either end of the world it’s cold. This is the way the world works.’

  ‘Oh’ was all he could think of to reply. Then something occurred to him. ‘Is this place near the end of the world then?’

  Magog put down his melon rind. ‘Not particularly, no,’ he said. ‘Mount Arnahi is at about the same latitude as Tynhelyg in Llanwennog, but much, much higher. That’s why the air’s so thin and why it’s so cold in winter. I’m surprised Sir Frynwy taught you nothing of this. He came from a family of renowned travellers and adventurers.’

  ‘He never said anything of having travelled,’ Benfro said. ‘He seemed, I don’t know, too old to go very far. My mother used to make poultices for him, to help soothe his aching joints.’

  ‘Your youth narrows your mind, Benfro,’ Magog said. ‘Sir Frynwy had lived more than a thousand years before you were born, yet you see him only in terms of the time you knew him. Is that how you look at everything?’

  ‘I … I don’t know.’ Benfro had been aware of the age of the villagers, but only in the same way as he had been aware of his feet. They were old – that was all that mattered. He had never really considered that they had had lives before he was around.

  ‘It’s not something over which you need concern yourself.’ Magog cut into his thoughts in much the same way that Corwen had done, as if he could see them like runes on a parchment. ‘Only something of which you must be aware. Don’t judge things solely by what you can see of them. But I digress. You asked me a question, and I was showing you the answer.’

  Benfro was confused for a moment, his mind muddled by the wine and the tiredness he felt from having held the ball of flame. Then he remembered.

  ‘The fire,’ he said. ‘You showed me how to handle it, but how do you make it?’

  ‘Good,’ Magog said. ‘You’re learning a little discipline. Try not to be drawn from the subject of your enquiry until you have an answer that satisfies you.’

  ‘So how’s it done?’

  ‘Think, young apprentice. You know already how it’s done, although you’ve not yet shown the inclination to do it.’

  Benfro stared at the candelabra with its multiple points of flame. He could picture the fire and the twin sconces ablaze somewhere above him. How could he possibly know how it was done? All he had ever done was wish for a flame and it had appeared. Was that all there was to it?

  He held up his hand, cupped as it had been when he had held the flaming orb. Nothing happened. He screwed his eyes up, trying to make out the aura that had swirled about him. It was difficult with the dulling effect of the wine pulling his senses apart, but eventually he managed it. He wished the flame would appear.

  Still nothing happened.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said, dejected, after some minutes of determined hopefulness had ended in a complete lack of success.

  ‘Wishing for something won’t make it so. If that were the case then my brother wouldn’t have had to gift the men their magical skills,’ Magog said.

  Benfro slumped on his bench and stared at the table in front of him, searching for inspiration. There was nothing but his pudding plate, a few sorry fruits still heaped to one side, along with the hard skin of the melon he had consumed. And then it hit him. The food had come from all over the world. Why not bring fire that way as well? And for that matter, why not bring candles, firewood, furniture – anything? But how was it done? It was to do with the Llinellau, that much he knew, but how did it work?

  He stared at the candelabra again. Where it sat in the middle of the table two fine Llinellau intersected. Neither of them passed where he was sitting, but other lines, finer still, branched and forked their way to him. He studied one route, then another, looking for something in them but not quite sure what. For a moment the task absorbed him completely and it felt as if he were travelling down each track, stopping, backing up and starting again. He had read of mazes grown from vast hedges and designed for amusement, although, having himself been hopelessly lost, he was unsure of what fun there was in getting so on purpose. This was a bit like he imagined a maze to be, but the task was strangely compelling, almost addictive.

  A candle flame was his centre of attention now. It was a goal that needed to be reached. He knew there was a correct way to get there; it was just a matter of seeking it out. But what would he do when he got there? The question came too late as he finally found the path.

  It was difficult to describe. He was sitting on the bench, staring at the nearest candle on the candelabra, but he was also in the flame, surrounded by its fire and heat, yet untouched by either. For a moment he could feel the panic rising in him, but he fought it down. There was no cause for alarm. Surely he could not be hurt by a candle.

  He reached out, at once aware that he lifted his hand above the table and that he grasped for the flame that surrounded him. The flame had the same tingly quality as the orb that Magog had
made, brushing his aura as he tried to get a grip on it. Like runny mud, it slipped and slithered through his fingers, defying his grasp. Frustrated, he tried to encase it in a ball, which he extended from his hand. To his surprise this seemed to work. Now all he had to do was get the flame back to his real hand.

  Even though he had managed to find the route to the candle flame, it was just as difficult, if not more so, to retrace that strange path. The route back to his self was not as obvious as he had assumed it would be. The criss-cross pattern was a confusion of light. The Grym was intoxicating, pulling him this way and that like a fallen leaf in an autumn storm. He began to panic again as he became lost in the maze. It was frustrating too, as all the while he was sitting on the bench and staring at the candelabra.

  It felt like he could go anywhere, but everywhere clamoured for his attention. He could hear the sounds of laughter and screaming, waves crashing on a shore and the moan of wind in the trees. He could smell flowers and honey, the stench of blood and the reek of burning flesh. There were places of perfect quiet and scenes of such breathtaking beauty he had to close his eyes to stop being drawn to them. Even then he could still feel their pull. And all the while he had to concentrate on the thin web of aura restraining the fire and keeping it from burning him.

  There had to be some way of identifying his self in the roaring growing tumult of everything that battered his senses. He knew himself like he knew nobody else; if only he could latch on to that uniqueness that made up Benfro. Fighting to suppress the fear that lapped at the edges of his reasoning, he tried to think of a memory that was uniquely his. It came straight to him – a lifeline that he would rather drown than take – his mother, subservient, prostrated; cruel malevolence personified in those burning red eyes; a blade of fire conjured from nowhere like the flame he now held but shaped into something far more deadly; a death as brutal as it was pointless.

  With a snap he was back in his body, and in his hand burned a tiny orb of flame. He should have been proud, but the visceral memory poured cold grief on any other emotion he might have felt.

  ‘Thirty minutes,’ Magog said, his voice flat, uncomplimentary but at least not sneering. ‘I’m impressed. Most novices your age can’t stay in the stream for more than ten. I fully expected to have to come in and get you out. Using such a visceral memory as an anchor was inspired, if a little unorthodox. And you even managed to bring back the flame. You’d better put it out though, because any minute now you’re going to faint.’

  Melyn strode with angry haste, his palms itching to do someone harm. His personal guards followed him along the endless corridors of Emmass Fawr at a short distance, none of them anxious to get too close, he presumed. Their cowardice only fed his rage. Then, as they turned a corner, Captain Osgal came into view, his face red, his breath short.

  ‘Despite or perhaps because of your inability to carry out the most simple of tasks,’ Melyn said, ‘I have the boy. He’s under guard in my personal chambers. Perhaps you’d like to explain how he turned up in the inquisitor’s chapel? Didn’t I tell you to take him from there and cast him into the Faaeren Chasm?’

  ‘He disappeared, Your Grace,’ the captain gasped. ‘I threw him off the edge, and he just vanished. He hadn’t fallen more than a few feet. I searched around the cliff, but there’s nowhere to hide and he wasn’t even conscious when I—’

  ‘And you expect me to believe you? You expect me to believe that some force more powerful even than me rescued a condemned traitor from his just punishment.’

  ‘Your Grace, that’s what happened. I swear by the Shepherd.’ Osgal dropped to his knee, bowing his head in supplication.

  Melyn was about to strike the captain for blasphemy but checked himself. He knew well enough that Osgal had carried out his task; the man didn’t have the imagination to do anything else. There was no point wasting his anger on those loyal to him.

  ‘We’ll talk of this later,’ he said. ‘Right now we’ve a medic to track down. Take some of the guard and sweep the whole monastery. I’m going to check the mortuary.’

  Osgal departed with half of the guards and the air of a man reprieved. Melyn watched him go then led the remainder of his men down the long steps into the depths of the mountain and the halls of the dead.

  It had been many years since last he had come to the mortuary. He had forgotten how cold it was, cut off from the Grym by so much solid lifeless rock. And he had forgotten that smell of dead flesh; not rotten like a battlefield after the fray, but just as disturbing.

  The long vaulted room was lit by torches, their black smoke disappearing through holes in the ceiling. Mostly they cast more shadow than light, but at the far end a number of lamps had been rigged up with glass lenses to illuminate a small working area. There was a desk cluttered with papers, jars, medical instruments and several heavy books. There were a number of wooden scroll boxes shoved against one wall beside a deep sink stained with centuries of strange chemicals and blood. An arched doorway led through to the storage room, where cadavers lay in narrow alcoves carved from the rock.

  Melyn grabbed a torch from its sconce and went through. There was no sign of the medic, but something else had been bothering him, and now that he was down here he realized what it was. It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for, and he directed two guards to carry the covered stretcher back into the autopsy room.

  Melyn pulled back the sheet and looked at the well preserved corpse. ‘Princess Lleyn, it’s been a while.’ Behind him one of his warrior priests made retching sounds but Melyn ignored him, concentrating on the body. It was very well preserved, but that was to be expected of gallweed poisoning. Under her leathery skin the princess had dried almost to nothing, her limbs tight in agonized contortion. Usel had made some effort to lessen this, cutting open joints and slicing tendons, but the princess was not a beautiful sight. Her head was tipped back as if she were screaming; her stiff belly was still round with the shape of the child she had carried. She looked like a corpse giving birth.

  But where was the child? Melyn bent close, looking carefully at the cuts. He was not trained in medicine, but even he could tell the difference between Usel’s work and the incision that had been made before the princess had been buried.

  ‘Bring that light closer,’ he barked at one of the guards, cursing his inability to conjure up light in this lifeless place. The guard was hesitant and stepped back again as Melyn put his hand through the incision in the corpse’s abdomen, feeling for the dead heir that should have been inside.

  ‘By the Shepherd, man, she’s been dead for fifteen years,’ he shouted. ‘Now stand there, still, or I’ll suck the life out of you to make a light for me to see by.’

  It was hard work, but slowly he managed to inveigle the egg-shaped form out of Lleyn’s dry womb. Finally he held it out to the light, turning it over in his hands, inspecting the detail of its construction as his rage grew ever greater.

  ‘Find Usel. Put every warrior priest on to it. Post his name around the whole country. A reward of a year’s salary to the man who brings me his head.’ Melyn weighed the object in his hand, observing the perfection of its form. He had not seen magic of this skill performed in many a decade. ‘No, make that ten years’ salary.’

  He almost ran out of the mortuary in his haste to get back to his chambers. He needed to contact Beulah with utmost urgency, but even more importantly he needed to see Errol, to make sure that the boy couldn’t escape him again. And such was his preoccupation that he forgot completely the homunculus clutched in his angry grip.

  Beulah lay on her back and stared at the dark ceiling. She was exhausted, but it was a deeply satisfying exhaustion that made her arms and legs feel weak and burned in her belly like a warming fire. Beside her Clun slept, his breathing so light he could almost have been dead. She worried that she might have been pushing him too far, not that he was an unwilling partner in their lovemaking. But he was still not fully recovered from his wound.

  Or maybe h
e was. Maybe she simply wouldn’t let herself accept the truth because she wanted to keep him close by, to tend him and care for him the way she had never been cared for. She liked him being dependent on her as much as she liked his naivety and inexperience. And there was no real reason to worry about him leaving; despite their ongoing physical relationship, outside the bedroom Clun still treated her with the deference due to his queen. He was still awkwardly coming to grips with the nuances of royal protocol and finding out the hard way that not everyone was prepared to think the best of people until shown otherwise.

  It was amusing to watch the various reactions to rumours of the affair. Some noble families acted as if nothing were happening at all, still pressing their suits and jockeying for position to provide a consort to the queen, a father to the royal heir. Others had melted away from Candlehall, returning to their provincial seats to nurse bruised egos and plot how to make the most of the new situation. Within the palace itself there was a buzz of disbelieving excitement, as if the servants were all living in a daft fairy tale. Even now Padraig was laying the foundations of a story that would make Clun appear an eminently suitable consort. Favours would be called in, old skeletons aired and a hundred and one other ways found to exert pressure on the noble houses until they all agreed. Beulah didn’t much like the seneschal, but even she could see he was a master of the art of politics.

  ‘Your Majesty.’ The voice was a tiny whisper, almost an idea rather than something she had heard. Beulah knew the voice, and with little effort she slipped into the aethereal. Melyn’s figure materialized at the side of her bed.

  ‘Melyn,’ she said. ‘What perfect timing.’

  The inquisitor looked around the room, saw the sleeping Clun. ‘I see you’ve ignored all the advice Padraig and the others have been giving you.’

  ‘Clun is sweet and innocent and heroic, and I thank you again for sending him to me as a gift,’ Beulah said.

  ‘It pains me to say this, but you’d do well to take Padraig’s advice,’ Melyn said. ‘And if you must marry Clun, it’d be better if your belly wasn’t swelling at the time.’