The Tale of Oriel Read online

  LADY RAFELLA WOULD STAY IN the Queen’s care until her marriage day, it was decided, and the Queen wished to give her the trousseau appropriate to a lady of her birth. Oriel and Haldern returned to Haldern’s house, satisfied. Oriel hoped to meet Griff there, but he was disappointed. There was a message asking Oriel to call on Beryl, at an Inn just to the north of the city, but no word from Griff, and there was a message summoning Oriel and Lord Haldern to an audience with the King, on the first morning after the return of the company, to hear the King’s pleasure.

  The King’s pleasure, spoken with Lord Tseler and Lord Karossy at his back, was that the battles of the Tourney must be to the death. He had reconsidered his previous decision, and retracted it. Any man who wished to leave the contest under these terms might do so without loss of honor.

  The King’s pleasure left Oriel—and the others—wordless.

  “Men whose advice I respect had concerns,” the King said. “Also, a superfluity of contenders have come forward, and some are men of lesser birth. The lady, I have been told, feels devalued by the lower risk to her suitors. I have decided.”

  The audience chamber was crowded with men, many of whom Oriel had never seen before. Those who had traveled together into the south avoided one another’s eyes.

  “In three days’ time,” the King said now, “we will give a reception, to welcome Merlis, and to do her homage, and to let her greet those from among whom her husband will come. For now, go to your houses and apartments. The audience is concluded.”

  So dismissed, they couldn’t stay to argue, if any had so desired. Oriel couldn’t read in any face what the thoughts behind it were, except for Haldern’s, which revealed concern, and except for Tintage’s, which showed amusement at the vagaries of Kings and fortune. Oriel almost wished he could have Tintage’s ready laugh against any occasion. He wished for Griff’s return.

  Haldern fumed at the King, as they left the palace, but he judged that the King, having changed his mind twice, would not change it again. “Twice might pass as wisdom,” Haldern said. “Thrice admits indecision. You must set your heart to it, Oriel.”

  At Haldern’s house, Beryl awaited him. She waited with her cloak gathered around her. She waited without sitting down. She greeted Lord Haldern courteously enough, and did not ask after Griff, but asked instead—in a lifeless voice that belied her eyes, which seemed to burn like dark blue coals—if Oriel would grant her a private audience.

  Oriel thought it was luck to have Beryl there. He wished to talk with someone uninvolved, and someone other than Haldern, who had spent so many years in the King’s court that he was in the habit of believing that the way of the court was the world’s only way. He asked Beryl to take off her cloak, and offered refreshment—did she prefer fruit or cheese, water or wine?—and welcomed her. “I need advice,” he said, as the door closed behind him.

  But Beryl held her cloak close. “You shamed me, Oriel. To send Griff, so. Aye and you shame him, too.”

  Oriel at last saw that there was something amiss here, but she gave him no time to think.

  “You made no response to my message, so I came to see you here, and tell you. To say, you shame your friends.” Her face was pale with the fury that burned in her eyes.

  “Griff asked you to wed,” Oriel guessed. She nodded impatiently. “You have refused him?” She nodded. “As you would refuse any man?” She nodded again.

  Beryl had told them that the women of her family gave their hearts but once, and Oriel was sorry now to have taken hers so carelessly from her. He might have stopped her, he thought; but he wasn’t sure a man had that power over a woman’s heart, to forbid the gift of it. In any case, it was too late now. He made her the only promise he could. “I’ve seen women with their babes, Beryl,” he said. “I’ve seen what women will do, for their children. I would wish that you find a man who takes your babe to his heart, for then he may have your heart also.”

  She shook her head. “You know—nothing, nothing of me—” she said, and then shook her head again, as if to empty it. When she spoke then, it was in a cool voice. “I wish you well, Oriel,” she said. “I wish you success, and the lady. I take my leave,” she said, and left the room.

  Oriel studied the door she had pulled closed behind her. He wondered what Griff was thinking of, to ask Beryl to be his wife, and he determined that he should never speak to Griff of it—lest the answer be what Oriel hoped it wasn’t, and the question an unkindness to Griff. But he wasn’t surprised to find at this measure of Griff’s worth that Griff was beyond all price.

  And there was so much he wished to speak with Griff about. He sent one of Haldern’s servants to call Griff from his books. When he looked across the table to see Griff’s bony face, and his brown eyes, and saw what pleasure it was to Griff to be once again in Oriel’s company, Oriel thought that the world had come right again. They shared a loaf of round bread and a roasted fowl, only the two of them dining, since Lord Haldern was paying court that evening to his lady. Oriel told Griff, who listened with interest and admiration, and curiosity, the events of the journey. Then he said, “It is once again a contest to the death.”

  “Will you fight?” Griff asked. “To the death, I mean.”

  “The land needs an Earl to govern it, the lords need their Earl over them, the Majors, too. So there must be an Earl, and he must wed, and that quickly—to get sons, since there must be an Earl to rule and his sons to inherit.”

  “As with the King and the Kingdom, as with the lords and their land grants,” Griff agreed, “and even the people and their holdings.”

  “Do you ever think that there might be another way?” Oriel asked. “There was another way for Selby.”

  “What are you thinking of?” Griff asked him.

  Oriel shook his head; he didn’t know how to shape his thoughts.

  Griff’s thought had a hard-edged shape. “I think, you might wish to fight, Oriel, to the death.”

  Oriel studied the familiar face. He remembered how it felt to dismount from his horse and stand with his two feet upon the ground, to walk along and feel under his feet the land that might be his own. There was something that hurt him in the way the hills rose so gently from the broad, rich southern plain. Something painful in the lazy curves of the river, golden under a sinking sun, shadowed by the trees that grew along its edges. He thought of the dark soil and fish-filled streams, of flat plains and muddy river edges, of houses built on the gentle hillsides. The land nourished all. If he would be Earl, he must be as nourishing as the land.

  “Oriel?” Griff interrupted his thoughts.

  Oriel raised a hand, for silence.

  After a while, Griff spoke again. “There are other countries than those we’ve seen. We could try our fortune elsewhere.”

  Of course Griff understood that if Oriel was not Earl Sutherland then he couldn’t stay in the Kingdom. There was never anything Griff hadn’t understood.

  “Might there not be another way?” Oriel asked.

  “Yes, but what?” Griff asked, and Oriel couldn’t answer. For there would be an Earl Sutherland. And that man would be wed to the lady Merlis.

  Chapter 26

  HE SAW HER FIRST FROM the distance. She stood beside the Queen. She was welcoming guests and she drew his eyes just as a layer of high mountain snow, shifting, would draw them.

  Her green gown was dark as summer leaves, and a falcon had been stitched in gold across the skirt. Her hair hung long, and straight, white gold like the sun in early spring. He came closer, to see that her face was as calm and carved as ice in winter, and her eyes the grey of the sea at autumn’s end. Her slender white neck rose out of the jeweled necklace that lay upon her dainty collarbone, and her slender white hands were clasped together in front of her. Her shoulders sloped gently, her arms were gentle curves, under the gown there was the suggestion of more curves, at breast and waist and hip.

  Oriel thought, if he could serve her in any way, he would give his life gladly. He thought
—with desire like a knife at his belly—what it might be like to have her naked in his bed. He thought he would like to wind her silky hair in his hand, and hear her laughter, dance with her, and watch while she dined to see how she fed herself. He wondered what was in her mind, to keep her face so still, and secretive.

  In its perfect beauty.

  One by one, her suitors were brought before her. They must formally declare their desire to wed, here before all the guests, and answer whatever question she might put to them. There were fewer suitors than there had been, for many men had left the contest under its renewed terms, but several yet remained. Lilos, raised in the court and at ease with the courtly ways of thought and conduct, had explained his decision: “Until I fight, I may always choose not to fight. And what if I dropped out, and then all the others did, too, all of you as well, and left the lady to some churl, whose only deserving lay in his having outwaited the rest of us? I can’t abandon the lady Merlis to such a chance, nor the southern lands neither. I’ll wait, and watch.”

  “And if,” Wardel inquired, “the one man who was left was more worthy, what then?”

  “That I don’t know. But I will know when the time comes upon me,” Lilos answered, so readily that Oriel knew he had already asked himself that same question.

  Now Oriel waited to be presented to the lady, and feel her eyes on him. It seemed now, watching her as she held out a long slim arm, so that a suitor could bow over her hand, that it might be worth a fight to the death, for the chance of having her, if there was no other chance.

  Yet he couldn’t wish to kill any one of them. When he thought of driving his sword into Garder’s belly, and pulling it free while red blood followed after, he turned cold. His spirit refused the idea of smashing the shield back into Verilan’s face, so hard that the metal helmet Verilan wore to protect himself would be driven into the bone of his narrow nose and, when that broke, the bone of chin and forehead. Or hearing the snap of bones breaking, as Lilos fell to the ground, or Wardel, and being glad of it.

  And yet he could imagine it, and imagine himself being glad, now, when he thought that these men stood between him and the lady. He could imagine stepping over their bleeding faceless bodies, to claim for his own the lady and the lands she was dowried with.

  Oriel didn’t know what to think, and he was so dazed by the closeness of the lady, and the smell of flowers in the air around her, that when she asked him a question he barely heard her words. He had to answer—raising his face from her tiny hand, with the single ring on her finger, the little pearls in a neat row on the golden band—and seeing how her eyes were stormy grey, and cold—and he answered stupidly, for all sense of himself had fled when he held her fingers in his fingers—

  “I’m sorry—?” he said.

  He heard laughter behind him and the lady was not pleased. He drew himself upright, that she might see he was worthy of her and meant no mockery to her.

  “I asked you, Oriel, King’s man, as I have asked each of the others, if you would have me without the lands. If you would wed me yet not be Earl Sutherland.”

  Oriel would never tell her anything false. She must always know the truth of him. “Lady, I can’t say.”

  Again laughter, and he heard now how witless his answer had sounded. Even his voice had been swallowed back nervously, as he spoke. “How could I answer that truly,” he asked her, “when no man who weds you can do so without taking your lands also. You are the Earl’s daughter, lady,” he said.

  If she knew how much he honored her, and treasured her, she would not look at him that way.

  “You are alone among these suitors to speak so,” she scolded him. “Do you claim to be the only honest man among so many? For all the others will have me as I am, even landless.”

  Oriel could not answer. He thought he had been a fool not to prepare an artful speech, as he thought now the others must have. Then he thought she was too good and beautiful for the smallest falsehood, and so he did not speak, that he might not dishonor her.

  And that, too, angered her. Her face told him nothing, as a puppet face revealed nothing of the puppeteer behind it. But her eyes, and the voice in which she spoke to him, both told him more scorn than her words carried. “You are the King’s own man in the Tourney. I must welcome your suit,” she said.

  And that pricked him. He would not have her think little of him. “Your words do honor to the King, as they should,” he said to her. “Have you no honor or grace for me?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, and then stood icy angry, for she had lost her composure. “As much as you deserve.”

  These were words used like swords, and Oriel didn’t know why she should hope to wound him.

  “You may find, lady, that as much as I deserve is more than you think,” he said.

  “You know what I think, then? and on such short acquaintance?”

  “I think,” Oriel admitted honestly, “that I might know you all my life and never know your mind.”

  “Now you call me false!” she cried. “I have no more to say to you!” She waved him away.

  Oriel obeyed her wish. He thought, too late, that he might have said he would call her fair, fairer than any other. He thought, too late, that he might have sworn to her truly that he would be content to use his life in service to her.

  Later, although how much later he couldn’t have said, there was dancing. Between the time when he held her fingers in his hand and the time of the dance, there was wine, and food, and many people talking and laughing together, and candles burning in the hall; but he could remember only her voice, and her face, and the way she had of holding out her hand and at the same time drawing back as she stood there in her green gown with the falcon sewn into it in gold threads, welcoming her suitors.

  Later still he approached her again, to claim a dance from her, and she did not see him and so turned her shoulder to him as she went off on Verilan’s arm. He came up to her again, where she stood with Tintage, who had somehow caused her to laugh. Tintage was telling the story of Rafella’s rescue from Yaegar’s house. Oriel thought that the lady might think well of him, for Tintage told the tale unsparingly. “As always, in my father’s presence, I was the fool,” Tintage said. “I dared not go to the side of my friends, for fear of my father’s hand; I dared not stay back from the event, for fear of my father’s mockery—and my brothers ready to follow his lead—and Rafella, who had been like a mother to me, to comfort my fears and failures, to speak on my side of a question, to find me worthy of a place in her heart. And I could not move to her side, to aid her, not even to stand beside the better man.”

  The lady spoke gently to Tintage’s unhappiness. “Is it better, then, never to know doubt? never to fail? Stones have such lives, do you say it is better to be a stone than a man? Do not speak of better men, Tintage. I know what you have had to endure.”

  In the lady’s presence, Oriel lost much of his quickness, but he understood from the gentle way she spoke to Tintage that she might not admire a man only for the deeds he had done. She must also see the testing of his heart. Oriel thought his own heart had been tested; but he was not sure. His strength had been tested, and his courage, his cleverness and his loyalty, his boldness, endurance—but where was his heart in all of that?

  This lady touched his heart, and painfully, as no other had done; just as her lands—and he thought of her lands, looking at her as she spoke generously to Tintage—touched his eyes, and the soles of his feet, and the palms of his hand as he ran the rich soil through his fingers.

  “Lady, I ask the honor of the dance,” Oriel said. The heart he wasn’t sure he had thudded in his ears.

  She held her hand out, with a smile, but held it out to Tintage.

  “Merlis, it wasn’t I who asked the honor,” Tintage said.

  “Ah, but it is you whom I choose,” she answered. After a pause she added, “for the dance.”

  “I can’t be so churlish as to refuse,” Tintage said, but he looked ruefully ove
r at Oriel. “Don’t be upset, friend. It doesn’t matter who the lady wants, since she goes to the Earl.”

  Her cheeks turned pink with shame; and Oriel wished to punish Tintage for that; and he saw in the dark mole eyes that Tintage had chosen his words carefully, and now measured their effect. But Tintage should not, Oriel thought—his heart like a clenched fist to see it—give the lady pain.

  Merlis drew back, and drew her hand out of Tintage’s. “I’ll have neither of you!” she cried.

  Her voice was such that people nearby stopped speaking, and turned to see what caused her to speak so.

  “The choice is not yours, lady,” Tintage reminded her.

  “Leave her,” Oriel said to him. “Let her go.” Maugre the shame of it, he would fight Tintage here, before all of the assembled guests. “Can’t you see how you offend her?”

  “I am the unhappiest of women,” Merlis said, her voice soft again now—and Oriel thought she might be, and he wished that she might live to say of herself that she was the most fortunate.

  He wouldn’t trouble her again, he thought. It would be gall to a proud spirit to know she must marry whoever proved strongest in the Tourney, whoever was most willing to slaughter men—men who were perhaps his friends—for the prize of her hand, and her lands. Oriel couldn’t blame Merlis if she felt bitter to the world, and betrayed by it.

  He thought, watching her walk away from him, that he could be nourishing as the land for her, and patient, too, and let her grow into a life with him as a garden would grow—slowly, greenly, into its own flowering.

  ALL SOON KNEW HOW THINGS stood with Oriel. Only Tintage dared to front him with the knowledge, but he felt the laughter in which the others joined when he was absent, and he almost admired Tintage for his forthrightness. At practice, Oriel had only to think of his opponent as winning Merlis’s hand to have grief and despair and a desperate anger added to his strength and skill. For he couldn’t long deceive himself: The lady liked him least of all the men who sought her hand.