The Legend of Broken

Baster-kin has seen her wield it, she has demonstrated admirable skill at the close quarters for which it was designed. He therefore treats the woman with far more respect than he would any common Broken noblewoman’s handmaiden, just as Ju plainly appreciates the fact that, difficult as her mistress’s long illness has been for Baster- kin, his lordship has neither ignored his wife, nor failed to allow whatever healers she desires to treat her, doubt though he may their abilities. Then, too, this strongest Merchant Lord in the history of the Baster-kin family has never lost his temper when Chen-lun, in the grip of fever and pain, has assaulted her husband with maddened fantasies, uttering indictments that Ju knows are often more than unfair.

But finally, and most importantly, Baster-kin and Ju share one terrible secret: the reason that their lady lies so grievously ill upon the bed between them. Ju knows that, in truth, her lady has been truly fortunate to have been tied to so unexpectedly decent a husband, whatever his occasional manifestations of pained disgust at the sickness that long ago destroyed the intimate world that once gave the pair not only pleasure, but unexpected solace, and which now separates them, both physically and as true man and wife, forever …

Chen-lun, too, knows how hard her husband struggles to relieve her pain and cure her disease without revealing the secret of its cause and destroying her name in the kingdom she adopted as her home upon their marriage. Indeed, if the full facts were known, they would likely ruin her even among her own people; and the knowledge of her lordship’s faith inspires the initially happy (if still feverish) attitude that she takes toward him, once she is indeed certain that her perception of his tall form emerging from the shadowy entryway to the bedchamber is more than the mere effect of illness or drugs.

“Rendulic,” she whispers, attempting a smile and some sense of composure; but her face and body offer living testament to the torment she has endured during the hours leading to this meeting.

For his part, Baster-kin does what he can to disguise the various forms of despair, masked by disappointment, that the progression of her disease causes deep in his soul. He tries to concentrate his attention upon her black eyes, which once shone in enchanting harmony with the long sheets of her utterly straight black hair as it fell across her skin and his own during the short time that they found joyous pleasure in each other’s embrace. That all too short a time …

The wedding of the newly invested Rendulic, Lord Baster-kin, to the exotic Chen-lun had seemed an entirely brilliant occasion. Only weeks after the ceremony — weeks during which the upper floors of the Kastelgerd were often heard to echo with the sounds of swordplay, in addition to bursting crockery destroyed by flying arrows, as Chen-lun (raised to be a most capable warrior, it should be recalled, in her own tribe) and Rendulic punctuated their long bouts of lovemaking with athletics of a wholly different order — the new lady of the Kastelgerd was declared by the family’s healers to be unquestionably with child; and a mere seven Moons later, the couple’s first son, a golden-haired boy that they agreed to call Adelwulf,† was born. The new scion appeared to be nothing if not a confirmation that Kafra had approved the match of an eastern princess and a loyal new leader of the kingdom over which the golden god had long ago elected to shower his radiance—

And then had come, almost as quickly, another son …

Later pressed by the family’s healers to recall his wife’s physical condition at the time of this child’s conception, Rendulic Baster-kin had replied that if some sign of disease or divine disfavor had in fact been present, he had not detected it. Certainly, the conception had taken place very soon after Adelwulf’s birth, perhaps unwisely soon; but Chen-lun had not experienced any signs of illness until the later stages of her carrying of the creature — and those had not seemed sufficient to explain the thoroughly misshapen condition of the boy; the mass of pustules and ill-formed bones that seemed to mar every part of his skin and body, and worse, to grow only more numerous and offensive during its first weeks and months of life.

The then-obscure Healer Raban had stepped forward to suggest to young Lord Baster-kin — who every day grew more desperate for an explanation that would remove not only some part of the revulsion engendered by merely gazing at the child, but the terrible sense of guilt he felt when he remembered his own sickly youth, and then gazed upon this fruit of his loins — that the child might not be a Baster-kin at all; that, much as his lord- and ladyship may have passed every night together, throughout the period during which the monstrous child was thought to have been conceived, there were nonetheless alps† living in the forests of Broken’s slopes who could make themselves undetectable to men of true virtue. Worse still, there were stronger and more artful such creatures inhabiting Davon Wood: enemies of Broken that might well have made the journey across the Cat’s Paw and up the mountain, if they were certain that a member of a Broken noble house had taken to wife a woman who was, by both blood and nature, less innately virtuous than a daughter of the Kafran kingdom would have been …

At first, this notion enraged Rendulic Baster-kin, causing him to seize Raban by the throat and then use the flat of his short-sword to drive the healer from the Kastelgerd. Mysterious as the origins of the infant’s vile condition might be, Baster-kin was by now determined to discover them — for he was a man who had had some experience of the strange and painful paths down which it was sometimes necessary to walk, in order to find true cures for seemingly magical or divine ailments. And he had an advisor who was well practiced at traveling such paths with him, at this moment as at an earlier point in his life: the man he had made seneschal of his household shortly after taking the rank of Merchant Lord, Radelfer. In all the years since the seeming end of his preoccupation with Gisa’s young apprentice from the Fifth District, Rendulic Baster-kin had never asked his old friend and guardian to find either the maiden or the crone; but now, the young lord did beseech Radelfer to undertake that journey, in the interests, not of his earlier infatuation, but of both his wife and his second child. It was, after all, a near-certainty that he would wish to father more children; and if Chen-lun was, for reasons of this world or any other, unfit to allow him to do so successfully, it was necessary that Baster-kin know.

Radelfer disliked the notion, without question; but he understood the importance of the matter, both to his former charge and to the clan he served. It was never wise for a house of such importance to rest all its hopes upon one heir alone; and so, departing alone at nightfall of the next day, Radelfer ventured into the Fifth District.

Not very far down the Path of Shame, as it happened, Radelfer encountered a fellow veteran of the Talons, and learned that Gisa was in fact living, not in the small house near the southwestern city wall in which she had tutored and raised the orphan Isadora, but in the latter’s very fine home nearby. Isadora, it seemed, had become a bride, herself, only a few years earlier, marrying one of the most promising young officers in the Talons, a man that Radelfer had only met once or twice during his years of service: Sixt Arnem.

Finding that Arnem was on guard duty atop the city walls that night, but that Gisa and Isadora were at home and willing to receive him, Radelfer next learned that his luck would not carry him very much farther: both women were adamantly unwilling to involve themselves again in the affairs of the illustrious Baster-kin family. However, Gisa did suggest a solution that seemed, as Radelfer made his way back to the Kastelgerd, ever more adequate to Rendulic’s dilemma.

Gisa knew of only one healer in Broken whose knowledge rivaled or surpassed her own; and, now that her former patient had become Rendulic, Lord Baster-kin, he had every right to call upon that illustrious figure’s talents and resources. She was referring, of course, to the Second Minister of the realm, the foreign-born scholar called Caliphestros. Provided the God-King Izairn was amenable, Caliphestros could hardly refuse the appeal for assistance; indeed, everything that Gisa knew of the man suggested that such a request would appeal to his scholar’s vanity. With this seemingly sound plan formulated (and truly relieved that there would be no risk of Rendulic ever crossing the path of the crone’s former apprentice again, having seen that the maiden Isadora had by now grown into a truly beautiful woman who had thus far mothered no fewer than three irrepressibly healthy children), Radelfer reentered the Kastelgerd in fine spirits, and relayed the substance of Gisa’s suggestion to a very curious young lord.

{v:}

Radelfer determined, when making his report that night to his master, to deny ever having seen any member of the Arnem family; and he was quickly given reason to be glad that he had taken such a decision, when Rendulic Baster-kin made it apparent, through a succession of ill-disguised questions, that he had used a series of disreputable spies from what was now his Personal Guard to discover just whom Isadora