allowed to wander about on his own, but not so old as to have other duties to attend to; an adventurous boy who would venture into the dark corners where prisoners were kept.
"The king had many of the interests of his kind. He could hunt and ride as well as any of his men. He danced with grace and could play the lute. None of his guardsmen or nobles could stand long against him with sword or staff." Tier had always had some doubt about the king's prowess - what kind of fool would beat his king at swordplay?
Tier fought to picture the king in his mind, pulling out details that weren't in the story. He'd be a slender young man, like Tier's son Jes - but his hair would be the pure, red gold of the eastern nobles....
Seraph had told him that some of the Bards had been able to create pictures for their listeners, but his cell stayed dark as pitch.
"But what the king loved most was learning," he continued, in the proper words. "He established libraries at every village, and in his capital he collected more books than had ever been assembled together then or since. Perhaps that was the reason for what happened to him."
Tier found himself grinning as he remembered Seraph's contemptuous sniff the first time he'd told her that part. Books weren't evil, she'd explained loftily, what people did with the knowledge they'd gleaned was no judgment against the books that held it.
"Time passed, and the king grew old and wizened as his sons became strong and wise. People waited without worry for the old king to die and his oldest son to take the crown - for the heir was every bit as temperate and wise as his father."
Tier took a sip of water, experience guiding his hand to the place where he left the earthen bowl. He let the pause linger, as much a part of this story as the words which followed. "Had that happened, like as not, our king would have gone to earth and be as forgotten as his name."
"One evening the king's oldest son went to bed, complaining of a headache. By the next day he was blind and covered with boils; by that evening he was dead. Plague had struck the palace, and, before it left, the queen and every male of royal blood was dead."
Tier's voice trembled on the last word, because he heard, as clearly as he'd heard his own breath, a woman's voice wailing in grief. He'd done it - and he found the thread of magic that powered the eerie sound.
A board creaked above him, closer than the sounds of the mourning woman, recalling Tier back to the dark cell where there was no plague, no dead women and children.
"The king became haunted, spending hours alone in his great library. But no one took much note, because the plague had spread in short order to the capital city and then to the towns and villages beyond. A horrible, ravening sickness that touched and lingered until its victim died a week later, deaf and blind to anything except pain."
Cautiously he tried to feed energy toward the path that had allowed the woman's cry to sound. It seemed to him that he could feel the unhealthy miasma of evil coating the emptiness of his cell floor. He stood up abruptly, but the feeling ebbed as he stopped feeding the story. The control reassured him. It was only a story, his story.
He resumed his efforts as he continued the story. "One day, after the last of his grandsons died, the king went to sleep an old, broken man and woke up a young man of eighteen again. They called it a miracle at first, some kind god's deliverance from the ghastly illness that killed two of every three that came down sick. But the plague spread further, unaffected by the king's miraculously returned youth. It traveled across borders, devouring the royal houses of the kingdoms all around, until there was only one kingdom and one king."
Tier's voice stuck there, as the magic of the generations-old words caught him in brutal understanding of the numberless dead whose death had fed the evil that was in the king.
"He ate their lives," said a voice abruptly from the ceiling above Tier.
A shiver ran down Tier's spine, though the words were the exact ones he'd intended to use himself. Somehow the oddity of his listener knowing the words to a