CHAPTER TWO

Pelemere, the Central Kingdoms

M aximilian wanted peace and he wanted quiet, and above all he wanted the opportunity to talk with Ishbel. They had been married some two months, and still she was a complete stranger to him—even more the stranger now, he felt, than when he’d first met her. Events were crowding in, and murders and wars piling up around them. What Maximilian had thought would be a simple business—the procuring of a bride—was now becoming ever more dangerously difficult by the hour.

He was growing increasingly concerned about the escalating crisis between the Central Kingdoms and the Outlands. This, combined with the vision he’d experienced on the way to seduce Ishbel, solidified in Maximilian’s mind the certainty that Elcho Falling was about to wake.

Ishbel knew far more than she had admitted to him thus far, and Maximilian didn’t think he could go on much longer, or farther, without prizing some of that knowledge out of her. She must have some of the answers locked within her. Not all perhaps, but many, certainly. She was of Persimius blood, she’d come from the Mountain at the Edge of the World, and she was somehow intimately connected with Elcho Falling.

But, oh, what a complicated woman she was! Her refusal to discuss matters that held any discomfort for her frustrated Maximilian beyond measure, yet at the same moment Ishbel endlessly intrigued him. Her reserve challenged him, her reluctantly awakening sexuality inflamed his desire for her, while her secrets angered and discouraged him and added to his ever-growing anxiety about Elcho Falling and what he needed to do about it.

At the grove of trees, Maximilian had given the Emerald Guard some brief orders, then, as was his wont, had turned his horse off in another direction, taking himself and Ishbel northwest. He was heading for one of the isolated woodsman’s huts about which Borchard of Kyros had told him.

An hour after dawn, the new day’s light almost lost amid the deepening snowstorm, Maximilian carried Ishbel inside the hut.

She slept through most of the day, waking only in the very late afternoon when Maximilian kicked open the door and stumbled inside, his arms laden with wood.

“Maxel? Where are we?”

“A woodsman’s hut deep in a forest northwest of Pelemere.” Maximilian dropped the wood onto the heap by the stove, removed his outer clothing, shook it free of snow, then stood before the fire, warming his hands.

“Why?” she said, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and sitting up.

“Because we needed to get away from Sirus.”

“And the Emerald Guard? Garth Baxtor? Egalion? Lixel?” She dragged a blanket about her shoulders.

“They are secreting themselves deeper in the woods.”

“But we’re here. By ourselves.”

“Does that bother you?”

“Maxel…why?”

“I needed to talk to you without the others about.” I need to wrest out into the open some of the secrets crammed into that beautiful head of yours.

He could see her withdraw, see caution and anxiety shut down her face.

“And because I wanted time with you alone,” Maximilian continued, “just to know you. You are my wife, and I your husband, and yet we are strangers to each other.”

“That is not unusual in high marriage, surely.”

He shrugged and moved to a small cupboard, from which he removed some dried provisions. “Hungry?”

She answered him with her own shrug, which Maximilian chose to interpret as an affirmative, and so he tossed some dried peas and beans and herbs into a pot of water and set it to the stove to simmer. “I am afraid that this king and queen shall have to eat as peasants,” he said.

She gave a small smile at that. “I’m sure that it will be better fare than what Sirus would serve us in his dungeons.”

Maximilian chuckled, cutting thick slices from a loaf of very stale bread and scooping out a portion of their centers so that they could be used as trenchers for the soup.

Ishbel had wandered over to the stove, still wrapped in a blanket, and was now looking curiously at the soup. “How did you learn to cook?”

“I often tend for myself.” He nodded at the hut’s basic interior. “In Ruen I abandon my kingly duties from time to time and spend a few days by myself in a woodsman’s hut, similar to this, in the forests to the north of the city.”

“Why? Why the need to be by yourself?”

“Because I find it impossible to be surrounded by faces all the time. Because I find my own company healing.”

“Then it must be aggravating for you to have me here, now.”

“I could have sent you on with Egalion, but I chose to bring you with me.”

“Ah yes, to interrogate me.”

“Ishbel, sit down at the table with me.”

She hesitated, but finally did as he asked, taking a bench on the opposite side of the table.

“Ishbel, what do you think about the murders? Evenor, and then Allemorte, yesterday.”

“I don’t know anything about them, Maximilian. Why ask me?”

“I am asking for your thoughts, not for a detailed explanation.”

She gave another small, disinterested shrug, and would not meet his eyes. “I have no thoughts on them. I was so isolated in Serpent’s Nest that I am naive in the ways of the outside world.”

Naive in the ways of the world. Maximilian really didn’t know what to make of that. In many ways she was—that she’d been terribly isolated he had no doubt—but in other ways Ishbel appeared as old as the very land itself.

“Ishbel,” he said gently, “yesterday a man fell dead at our feet, murdered with poison. How did it happen? Who did it?”

“It wasn’t me.”

“I wasn’t accusing you, Ishbel, but, oh, murder is starting to follow you. Why?”

She dropped her eyes, and fiddled with a nonexistent particle on the tabletop.

“Ishbel?” Maximilian said as gently as he could. “Please…”

Again, a shrug. “I don’t know, Maximilian. I don’t.”

He reached over and took her left hand. “Ishbel, all I want to do is to get home safely, with you and with our child. But at the moment I very much fear we’re not going to get there, not safely or not ever. I hold you at night, and feel you drifting ever farther away from me. I want a marriage, Ishbel. I want you. I want a family. And I want to know why you were the target of that assassin yesterday, not Allemorte.”

Her hand was very cold and still in his, and Maximilian wondered if that coldness and stillness extended all the way to her heart.

“Perhaps it was Sirus,” Ishbel said. “He doesn’t like me. He doesn’t like any Outlanders.”

“It wasn’t Sirus. There was magic involved yesterday, and darkness swirling all about us. When my ring—”

“I don’t want to talk about the ring. Not any ring.”

Maximilian resisted the urge to pick something up and smash it against the wall. Instead, he contented himself with tightening his grip about her hand. “Ishbel, please—”

“I don’t want to talk about the rings!”

“Well, I do. For all the gods’ sakes, Ishbel, there is nothing to be afraid of about two chatty rings!”

She looked at him then, and Maximilian’s heart turned over in his breast. He’d never seen anyone look so lost, or so afraid.

“I’ve heard them before,” she said, so softly that Maximilian had to lean forward to catch her words, and even then he wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly.

“What? The rings?”

“The whispers.”

She was trembling now, and Maximilian slid around to her side of the table, sitting beside her on the bench and wrapping her in his arms. All his anger of a moment earlier was gone.

“Tell me,” he said, very softly.

She was silent a long time, and Maximilian did not think she would answer.

Then, just as he was about to sigh and stand, she began to speak.

“When I was eight a plague came to my family’s house.”

Maximilian said nothing, but tightened his arms about her slightly, settling her more closely against his body, resting his cheek against the top of her head.

“My family all died within a day. Everyone in the house died, save me.”

“The plague spread fast,” Maximilian said.

“Yes. Too fast. The people of Margalit barricaded the house, refusing to allow me out in case I carried plague with me. They hammered shut all doors and windows, and did not listen to my pleas. I begged, over and over, beating at the closed door, but they turned their hearts against me.”

“Oh, Ishbel…”

“It lasted forever. At least that’s how it felt to me. Aziel later told me it was a month. I tried to kill myself.

I thought that was the only way I’d escape. I rolled in the vileness excreting from my mother’s body and…and…”

“Ishbel…sweetheart…”

That endearment, combined with the closeness and comfort of his arms and body, broke down Ishbel’s final barriers.

She shuddered, leaning in as close to Maximilian as she could. “One day my mother’s corpse began to whisper to me.”

Maximilian stiffened, horrified. “Whispered?”

“It would not stop, Maxel. I ran all about the house, and it whispered and whispered, and I could not escape it! It spoke with the same voice as did the rings. Maxel…”

Maximilian could hardly force the words out. “What did the whispers say, Ishbel?”

“They told me…to…to…prepare, prepare, for the Lord of Elcho Falling shall rise again.”

Maximilian froze. Nothing worked. His heart appeared to have stopped, his brain could not manage a single coherent thought, he could not force his breath in or out of his lungs.

The Lord of Elcho Falling shall rise again.

Even though he’d been steeling himself for this moment, the sudden, absolute confirmation of his worst fears threw Maximilian into utter denial.

“No,” he finally whispered, “I don’t believe you.”

She tore herself out of his arms.

“Then stay away from me if you cannot believe me! Stay away!”

The next moment she had thrown open the door and had run outside, clad in nothing but her underclothes and a blanket.