Vengeance

‘Sit!’ she said.

They sat. Rix stared at his father’s grossly misshapen, purple-veined monstrosity of a nose. He could see the veins throbbing. Was this what he would look like when he was old? Was he halfway to becoming his father already?

‘Where is she?’ said Lady Ricinus.

Rix stared. ‘Where is who, Mother?’

‘The Pale traitor you found near the Rat Hole.’

So that’s what this was about. He should have known that she would find out about Tali. Her network of informers was the best in the land.

‘I didn’t find a traitor near the Rat Hole,’ he said, matching her coldness and raising it a blizzard.

‘Don’t lie to your mother, boy,’ growled Lord Ricinus from the settee. ‘We know you met the scrag there.’

Rix leapt up, shaking with fury, and for the first time in his life failed to show Lord Ricinus the respect due to him. He loomed over his father, dominating him with his own size and strength and knotted fists.

‘The woman’s name is vi Torgrist, Father, and hers is one of the oldest houses of all. Far older than yours.’

His father tried to lurch to his feet. Rix was about to push him down again when his mother’s voice cut through the room like a flaying knife.

‘Sit down! Rixium, lay one finger on your father and I will have you flogged in the city square.’

Since she made a fetish out of keeping the family’s secrets, the threat indicated her dire state of mind. Rix went back to his seat, acid searing a track up his gullet.

‘There is no House vi Torgrist,’ said Lady Ricinus. ‘It died out centuries ago.’

Rix could have crowed. Her spies had failed her. It was the tiniest of victories, but any victory over his mother was rare and all the sweeter for that.

‘ Lady Tali can trace her name back to the Second Fleet. And she has her house seal. Tobry checked it, and as you know, there’s nothing he doesn’t know about the noble houses.’

‘It will do her no good,’ said Lady Ricinus. ‘Even if her claim could be proven after all these centuries, no Pale traitor can inherit.’

Rix did not reply. The more he said, the more his mother would use against Tali.

Waves the colour of purple grape juice washed across Lord Ricinus’s face. His slack mouth opened and closed; he clutched at his chest. ‘Drink! Need a drink.’

Rix’s mother tossed him a little key. ‘Get your lord father a drink. If I do it, I’m liable to jam it down his throat.’

The expression stirred a troubling memory, but it submerged before Rix could ease it up into the daylight. He opened the locked case on the far side of the room, took down a bottle of brandy and gave it to his father. Lord Ricinus sank a third of it in one gasping swallow, wiped slobber across his cheek with his forearm, then lay back, ‘Aah, aah, aaaahhh!’ His twisted mouth gaped.

Lady Ricinus looked as though she wanted to smash the bottle over his head, but swallowed her bile. She turned to Rix and said, through lips so pursed that a needle could not have been inserted between them, ‘Your impassioned defence of this woman disturbs me. Do you have feelings for her, Rixium?’

‘Certainly not,’ he lied, meeting her eyes. Few people could deceive her but he’d had twenty years of practice. ‘She’s not to my taste, insipid little thing that she is.’ He paused, wondering if he could make the planned half-truths convincing. ‘But I did help her escape the Cythonians.’

‘Why would you risk your life to help a Pale?’

‘Tobry and I had just seen the ruins of Gullihoe. When Hightspall needs to counterattack, a Pale who knows the enemy’s realm from the inside will be priceless.’

‘Indeed,’ she said, licking her lips, ‘and whoever can provide her will earn great favour with the chancellor. Favour we sorely need. In that, at least, you did well, Rixium. Tell me everything about her. Omit not the smallest detail.’

Rix sketched out their rescue of Tali and the subsequent hunt, glossing over all the risks he had taken and the number of times he had narrowly escaped death. It would do no good to tell his mother that. He also omitted every detail she could use against Tali.

‘Then why,’ she said when he had finished, ‘since you went to such trouble and took such stupid risks to rescue the chit, did you hide her from my seneschal?’

Rix was prepared for the question, though he did not imagine his answer would satisfy her. ‘After the enemy’s cowardly attacks on Gullihoe and half a dozen other places, I feared for Tali’s safety if I revealed her presence.’

‘Nonsense. Parby is a prudent man and would have recognised her value. Where is she now?’

‘I don’t know,’ Rix said truthfully. Tobry had found no sign of her, nor Rannilt, and he was terrified that the chancellor had captured them. He was a hard man who would do anything to protect his country — even torture secrets out of a girl and a child.

‘Lagger does. Where did he take her?’

‘To Abbess Hildy.’

Lady Ricinus smiled. ‘But Hildy turned her away.’

‘Well, I haven’t seen her.’

So that’s why she was so agitated. His mother thought he was having a scandalous affair with a Pale traitor. One that, if it got out, would ruin the Honouring and all she had been scheming for these past years.

‘Liar! You sneaked out of your tower last night.’

He nodded stiffly, afraid to speak. How did she know so much?

‘Where have you hidden her?’

‘I don’t know where she is.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘I went to see Luzia, if you must know, and I found her dead. Murdered!’ It came out as a wail.

She rearranged her face into the appropriate expression. ‘I’m sorry. I know she meant a lot to you.’

And she meant nothing to you.

‘Rixium,’ she continued, softly now, almost wheedling, ‘if you have a liaison with this treacherous Pale, it could ruin your father’s Honouring.’

‘The Pale have been slaves ever since Hightspall abandoned its hostage children a thousand years ago,’ said Rix. ‘Tali is the first to escape. She’s strong and brave — and she saved my life. You should be thankful to her.’

‘I’ll show her how thankful I am when I meet her.’

Rix did not like the sound of that.

‘What matters is not what she is,’ said Lady Ricinus, making a meaningless concession, ‘but what the Pale are universally believed to be — traitors. Nothing you or I can say will change that belief, and any relationship with her could ruin us.’

She put on a smile worthy of a jackal queen. ‘But if we can make her over to the chancellor for use in the war, it will double our power and confound our enemies. We have powerful enemies, Rixium, and they will do anything to bring us down.’

‘I worry about them all the time,’ said Rix.

‘Leave the worrying to Lord Ricinus and me. All I want from you is her hiding place. And the finished portrait.’

‘I have no idea where she is.’ Rix rose. ‘The portrait will be finished on time, if you’ll allow me to go back to it.’

‘I am most disappointed in you, Rixium.’ Lady Ricinus waved him away.

‘Mother will never give up,’ Rix said that evening. He was in his studio, dabbing at the portrait, which he hated more every time he looked at it. He wanted to hack out his father’s image and burn it in the fireplace.