The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [78]
It must have been dark when they’d left, but now light began to filter through the cloth. It grew colder, as well, and the air ripened with the scent of salt.
After an interminable period, the carriage ground to a halt. He was cold and very stiff now. He felt as if steel screws had been tightening into his kneecaps, in his elbows, and along his spine. His hands ached terribly.
They tried to carry him, but he fought to keep his feet on the ground, to count the steps on gravel, then stone, then wood, then stone again, and finally steps. He cringed as heat suddenly billowed against him, and the blindfold was removed.
He blinked in a cloud of smoke issued by a huge fire blazing in an extraordinarily large fireplace. A spitted side of venison sizzled merrily above it, filling the air with the scent of charred meat.
The room was round, perhaps fifteen kingsyards in diameter, and the walls were drapped in tapestries whose subjects were not immediately obvious to him but that glowed in the firelight: umber, gold, rust, and forest green. A gigantic carpet covered the floor.
Two girls had just swung a huge wooden beam away from the fire. There was an iron kettle suspended on it from which they poured steaming water into a bathing basin that had been sunk into the floor.
A few yards away Robert, the usurper, reclined in an armchair, looking comfortable in a floral black-and-gold dressing robe.
“Ah,” Robert said. “My composer. Your bath is just prepared.”
Leoff glanced around. Besides Robert and the serving girls, there were the men who had fetched Leoff, two more similarly dressed soldiers, a Sefry on a stool plucking a large Safnian-style theorbo, a prim youngish fellow in red robes and a black cap, and finally, the physician who had been tending Leoff in the dungeon.
“No, thank you, Majesty,” Leoff managed.
“No,” Robert said, “I altogether insist. It’s not just for your convenience, you know. We all have noses.”
A general murmur of laughter followed that, but the joviality did nothing to relax Leoff; after all, these were Robert’s friends, who might be even more amused by, say, the evisceration of a small child.
He signed, and the soldiers began stripping off his clothes. His ears burned, for the serving girls were of age, and he found it extremely inappropriate that they should have to look upon him. They seemed not to notice, however. He might just as well have been another object of furniture. Still, he felt exposed and uncomfortable.
He felt better in the water, though. It was so hot that it stung, but once he was immersed in it, he no longer felt naked, and the heat of it began to settle pleasantly toward his bones, ameliorating the aches that the cold had insinuated into them.
“There,” the usurper said. “Isn’t that better?”
Leoff had to reluctantly admit that it was. It was better yet when one of the girls brought him a cup of mulled mead and the other cut a great dripping slice of the venison and fed it to him in small bites.
“Now that you are settled,” Robert said, “I would like you to meet our host, Lord Respell. He has graciously agreed to be your guardian while you work on the compositions I have requested of you, to offer whatever aid you might require, and to see to your comfort.”
“That’s very kind,” Leoff said, “but I thought I was to work in my old room.”
“That dank place? No, it has proved inconvenient in a number of ways.” At that, his gaze became a bit more hawklike. “You did not, by chance, have a visitor yesterday?” he asked.
Ah, Leoff thought. Here it is. It was a ruse, and this is my reward for not falling into the trap.
“No, Majesty,” he said just to see what result that would get.
It wasn’t what he expected. Robert frowned and placed his arms on the rests of the chair.
“The dungeons are not as secure as my predecessors believed,” he said. “They were invaded yesterday by a sneak thief. The thief was caught, questioned, and garroted, but where one can come, others may follow.
“There are