Kings of the North - Elizabeth Moon [149]
“I will,” Kieri said. He felt suddenly cold, but not the same way he had as a boy. “I would ask that you allow one of my Squires to attend me.”
“As you wish,” the king said.
Kieri called Berne; he came in the door in a rush. “It is no emergency. The king has offered me no violence, but would see my scars; I want someone in the room while I disrobe.”
“Disrobe? For this—”
“This visitor,” Kieri said carefully, “has asked proof of my history. The proof lies in my scars.”
“But … Sir King …”
Kieri shrugged. “If this ends our enmity, it will be worth any embarrassment.” With Berne in the room, he felt safe enough to pull his tunic over his head; the momentary blindness always bothered him, but less this way. With the king’s eyes on him, he unbuttoned his shirt, pulling it from his trousers and then taking it off. The scars had faded with age, as they did on most, but still made a raised pattern on his naturally pale skin. The newer scars, the ones from the wars he’d fought, were clearly made by weapons and overlaid the older, finer patterns laid on by his master in the years of captivity. He turned away from the king’s eyes, raising his arms so they showed clearly, from neck to waist.
When he turned back, the king was staring, mouth a little open; his mouth snapped shut abruptly, then he said, “That was done when?”
“I was taken when I was four winters old, and did not escape for at least eight years. There are more scars, which you will not see unless you kill me and strip my body.” Kieri said this as grimly as he felt; he saw understanding seep into the other king’s face.
“You were only a child … and you say this was a magelord who did it? How do you know?”
“He had the magery to force people to stillness.” Kieri put his arms back into the shirt Berne held for him, and buttoned it again. “He could force prisoners to silence even in great torment, or hold them motionless for the same.”
“How did you ever escape? Eight years … no normal child could survive …”
“He had no intent to kill me. He wanted me alive, to suffer. But—” Kieri looked over at the glass, now quickly running out. “—you promised to listen for only one glass. I would not abuse your patience.”
“Turn the glass again,” the king said. “I am not convinced I will not have to kill you, but I must know how you escaped.”
“It is part mystery and part your own people,” Kieri said. “How I was freed is the mystery; I do not understand it still, except as a gift of the gods. How I came back across the sea was a gift of the Seafolk, who, finding me hiding aboard and retching myself dry, did not throw me overboard to drown, but took pity on me for these same marks—some then still bleeding—and carried me across the sea to Bannerlíth and there set me ashore with a full belly, a few coins, and a shirt to my back. If not for the Seafolk I would not now be alive.”
“You did not tell them who you were?”
“I did not know, by then. The baron told me a short version of my true name over and over, until it was all the name I knew. I was too young—I had a few memories, but no way to describe them to anyone and all I had learned told me it was dangerous to try.”
The king chewed his lip for a long moment. “I heard a tale,” he said finally. “I am a king; kings have spies; you will not despise me for that—”
Kieri shrugged. “Of course not. Any man of war must have spies.”
“Good. Then—I heard a tale, brought by a spy from Tsaia, that you said something like this to that Council, and were believed.”
“Some of them believed,” Kieri said. “Some did not. But their belief or unbelief does not affect the truth of it.”
“It is a tale someone might tell,” the king said, “who perhaps had been orphaned and mistreated, and wanted to think himself a lost prince.”
“Indeed,” Kieri said. “But I had no thought of being a lost prince: not then, not later. I knew I had come from a good home, and had found myself in a bad one: that is all. When I came to Halveric—” It had been in this season, with the trees losing their leaves,