Choubris was taken aback. He’d never seen the prince weep like this, not sober (everybody knew that to drink was to increase the hydrographical pressure within a body, thus expressing the relevant fluids from all available bodily orifices, so that didn’t count).
He ought to try to comfort him somehow. Perhaps he’d misunderstood. He’d try to get the matter clear.
“Sir, are you really saying that,” he began, then he too looked round as though afraid of being overheard, “that tyl Loesp, your father’s best friend; the glove to his hand, the very edge of his sword and all that, murdered your father?” He spoke the word in a whisper.
Ferbin looked at him with a face of such desperate fury and despair that Choubris felt himself flinch at the sight of it. “Plunged his filthy fist into my father’s chest and wrung the living force out of his beating heart!” Ferbin said, his voice sounding like it never had; all gasped and rough and wild. He sucked in a terrible, faltering breath, as though each atom of air hesitated in his mouth before being hauled howling to his lungs. “I saw it clear as I see you now, Choubris.” He shook his head, his eyes filling with tears and his lips curling back. “And if trying to think it away, if trying to persuade myself I was in any way mistaken, or drugged, or hallucinating, or dreaming could make it so, then by God I’d jump at that, I’d welcome that with both arms, both legs and a kiss. A million times over I’d rather be safely mad having imagined what I saw than know my only derangement is the grief of having seen what did take place!” That last phrase he roared into his servant’s face, one hand grasping the collar at Choubris’ throat.
Choubris put one hand behind his back, partly to steady himself so that he did not fall over backwards and partly to bring the army pistol within quick reach. Then his master’s face went slack and he seemed to crumple in on himself. He put one hand on each of Choubris’ shoulders and let his head fall to his servant’s chest, wailing, “Oh, Choubris! If you don’t believe me, who will?”
Choubris felt the heat of the other man’s face upon his breast, and a dampness spread across his shirt. He lifted his hand to pat the prince’s head, but that seemed too much like the action one would take with a woman or a child, and he let his hand fall back again. He felt shaken. Even at his most raucously or self-pityingly drunken, the prince had never seemed so moved, so affected, so distressed, by anything; not the death of his elder brother, not losing a beloved mount to a wager, not realising his father thought him a dolt and a wastrel – nothing.
“Sir,” Choubris said, taking the prince by his shoulders and setting him upright again. “This is too much for me to absorb at the single sitting. I too would rather think my own dear master mad than entertain the possibility that what he says is true, for if it’s so then – by God – we are all halfway to madness and the heavens themselves might fall upon us now and cause no increase in disaster or disbelief.” Ferbin was biting both his quivering lips together, like a child trying not to cry. Choubris reached out and patted one of his hands. “Let me tell you what I’ve heard, various but consistent from a mixture of guileless strapping military types, and seen on an army news sheet, too; what is the official and authorised version, as you might say. Perhaps hearing this will make a compromise in your poor head with the fever possessing you.”
Ferbin laughed bitterly, putting his head back again and sobbing even while he seemed to smile. He raised the wine bottle to his lips, then let it fall aside, dropping it to the bare ground. “Pass me the water; I’ll pray some dead cur upstream polluted it, so I may poison myself by mouth as you pour it in at my ear. A job worth doing!”
Choubris cleared his throat to hide his astonishment. This was unprecedented; Ferbin putting aside a bottle unfinished. He was mad with something all right. “Well, sir. They say the King died of his wound – a small-cannon shot to his right side.”