The Born Queen - J. Gregory Keyes [75]
About then the sun went out.
He came back to his senses, and the only thing he saw at first was a long rectangle of grayish brightness and a thousand tiny lazily drifting motes. It didn’t make sense at first, but then he gathered that the rectangle was light on a stone floor, thrown there by a shaft spearing through a window some four pareci above. He blinked, looking away from the light, but it took a few moments for his eyes to adjust. He tried to remember. He’d been ambushed…
“Oh, I think he’s with us,” someone said. The language was Vitellian, but crefo was pronounced more like “crewo,” the telltale of the aristocratic accent from z’Irbina.
“Wonderful,” another voice said. This was also in well-cultured Vitellian, but with a faint foreign lilt to it.
“Let’s have a talk with him.”
As his eyes adjusted, the faces came into focus, but they were faces he didn’t recognize any more than he did the voices. Their clothes, in contrast, he recognized very well. One was clad in the black gown and red mantle of a patir. The other was all in black, with a single red star at the collar. Only one man in the world was allowed to wear that habit.
“Fratrex Prismo,” Cazio murmured.
“Oh, a devout,” the fratrex said.
“I’m only devout to the saints that love me,” Cazio said. “But I’m from Vitellio. Your portrait is everywhere. But it isn’t your portrait, is it? You aren’t Niro Lucio.”
“You’re two nirii behind,” the man said. “I am Niro Marco.”
“You’re a long way from z’Irbina, your grace,” he observed. “I’m flattered you came so far to see me.”
“Cover your teeth!” the patir shouted. “You’re speaking to the Voice of the Saints.”
“Oh, let him talk,” the Fratrex Prismo said. “He seems an interesting fellow—a Vitellian dessrator sent to invest a castle with Crothenic troops? I can really think of only one person he is likely to be.”
“Oh, it’s him,” another voice said from his right. Cazio turned toward the third man. “You I know,” he said. “Sir Roger, yes?”
“Yes,” the fellow agreed. “I wonder what you’re doing here.”
“I was just traveling with the soldiers,” Cazio lied. “Hoping for a free meal and a bed here tonight.”
The highest man of the Church wagged a finger at him as if he were a little boy eating berries in the wrong garden. “Now, that’s clumsy. Have you forgotten you were carrying a letter from Anne?”
Right.
“No,” he said. “Just taking the chance that you can’t read.”
The patir started forward, but the fratrex held up a hand, and he stopped in his tracks.
“I really don’t understand your hostility,” he said.
“Your men attacked me,” Cazio said.
“Naturally. You were invading a castle we have occupied in the name of the saints. If you hadn’t had an army with you, we might have spoken first, but since you came on unfriendly terms—”
“I offered no terms, unfriendly or otherwise.”
“Where servants of the saints are concerned, Crotheny’s standard terms seem to be slaughter,” the fratrex said.
“We have fought corrupt churchmen, if that is what you mean,” Cazio said. “Very near here, in fact.”
“That? That was a handful, and that was before Anne Dare made claim to Crotheny. I’m talking about since she usurped her uncle’s throne: the military expeditions. I’m talking, for instance, about the butchering of five hundred men at Tarnshead.”
“They meant to do the same to us,” Cazio said. “Ask Sir Roger there. They believed the odds were in their favor, and they were wrong.”
“Their throats were cut as they slept,” Sir Roger exploded.
“No, they weren’t,” Cazio said.
Sir Roger’s brow wrinkled, then cleared.
“Oh. You weren’t there, were you? You never saw what happened to them.”
Cazio opened his mouth to retort, but he hadn’t been there. Anne’s Sefry guard had led that attack.
He felt a nasty something in his belly. The Sefry had lost only two men. Maybe the Sefry had killed them in their sleep. Anne wouldn’t have known about it, but the Sefry might have done it.
“He didn’t know,” the fratrex said. “I never thought a dessrator would be involved in such a despicable business, especially the son of the Mamercio.”
The name