no few of his knights, whispering like roaches in the rushes. The whispers vanished when he came near and sprang back up as soon as he was past.
The messenger spoke to Leferic briefly in the privacy of his library and was gone before daybreak. He left two sealed letters behind; one of the servants caught a glimpse of them before Leferic tucked them into his cloak, and that spurred rumors of its own, especially when their lord told no one what the letters said.
Whatever the news was, it must have been direly troubling, the gossips agreed. For two days and two nights after, Leferic did not sleep. He grew haggard and clumsy, and the castle folk murmured that the messenger must have bewitched him with the same foul magic that had killed his brother and made a soul-broken husk of his father. Several muttered that the Langmyrne should have been given a quick death and sent to the pyre rather than being allowed to ride away, peace-banner or no.
Heldric reported all these whispers to his lord, but Leferic did nothing. Rumors are poison dropped in the ear, Inaglione had written, and can be deadly if not swiftly cured. There was truth in that, Leferic knew, but grief and indecision made him too weak to act on it. He was beginning to understand why his father had retired to his silent bed.
Then, cold and early on the morning of the third day, a new messenger arrived. This one came from the north, not across the river from the west, and he wore King Raharic’s green oak wreath on a surcoat of snowy white. Unlike the last rider, this one stayed through the day; and as he lingered in the castle, and exchanged courtesies with the knights and servants, word of his tidings began to spread. It was in that fashion, slowly, that the people of Bulls’ March came to see the true shape of things.
Or so they imagined, Leferic thought dourly as he sat at the paper-strewn desk in his library. The real truth, and the burden of its guilt, were his to bear alone.
He ran a hand through his lank blond hair, trying to force his thoughts into something like order. By all rights he should be preparing to meet Raharic’s messenger, but the royal herald had sent word that he was exhausted by his travels and would prefer to reserve the formal audience for tomorrow.
The real reason for the delay, Leferic suspected, was that the herald was using this time to quietly feel out his liegemen and how they had reacted to the news of Albric’s betrayal. He wondered what the messenger would make of the fact that most of them hadn’t heard it. The knights, for their part, would probably assume that Leferic’s delay in sharing Albric’s confession with them meant that he’d plotted along with the dead man. They had little love to spare for him as it was: easy enough to believe he’d been part of a treacherous conspiracy.
They’d be right about that, of course. Which was part of what made this so hard.
Leferic raked his fingers through his hair again. His gaze strayed to the books that filled the shelves on every wall. Nearly three hundred volumes of scholars’ research and sages’ wisdom, histories and legends, religious precepts and secular wit.
Three hundred volumes, and no answers.
Even Inaglione, that wisest and most cynical of courtiers, could offer only limited counsel across the chasm of centuries and the great silence of the pyre. Leferic had recognized, that first day when he came up to the library after learning of Galefrid’s death, that he would have to rely on his own wholly inadequate wits to survive. It was not a new thought. But it had never been as brutally urgent before.
Now, for the first time, he saw just how lonely a path he had chosen.
He’d have no friends on this road, no close confidants. His only guide was the shade of a dead courtier, writing to him across the gap of ages and a culture that had fallen from Rhaelyand and Ardashir’s golden palaces to this miserable pile of rocks in the woods.
Any friends he might make would eventually be sacrificed to the needs of his position. Leferic didn’t know if he could bear that again, even if the choice were open to him. Better to keep his friends limited to books and ghosts. Better to be lonely and remember the real price of power: that everyone in