The Charnel Prince - J. Gregory Keyes [82]
“And you trust him completely? He has something of the look of those knights who attacked you at the coven.”
“He was my mother’s most trusted servant,” Anne assured him.
“And is he still?”
Anne paused at that. Sir Neil said that he had come from her mother. But she had no proof of it. From what she remembered he had come to court only a short time before she’d been sent away. True, he had saved her mother’s life at Elseny’s party, but what if that had been a ruse? The murderers of her father and sisters had not been named in the cuveitur dispatches. What if Sir Neil had been one of them?
With a cold shock, she suddenly understood how well it all fit. Only her mother and Erren had known that she had been sent to the coven Saint Cer. And perhaps, as her mother’s bodyguard, Sir Neil. That would mean Roderick wasn’t her betrayer. Not that she had ever really believed that, but . . .
Cazio observed the change in her eyes and nodded soberly. “Yes, you see? It is all too suspicious. Just as I finally find us passage on a ship, along he comes.”
“It— Mother trusted him.”
“But you don’t,” he said. “Not now that you’ve thought about it.”
“Not now that you’ve put the idea in my head,” she said miserably.
She noticed that the little woman was gone. Neil now stood by himself, trying to appear uninterested in their conversation.
For all she knew, he was fluent in Vitellian.
“Go find Austra,” she whispered. “And z’Acatto. All of you go to the ship. I will follow in a short while.”
“Why not go with me?”
“Because he’ll insist on going. Even if he is who he says he is, and he is true to my mother’s service, he won’t let me that far from his sight now that he’s found me.”
“But he may murder you the moment I am gone.”
That was true.
“Ospero,” she said. “Do you think he will help?”
Cazio nodded. “He’s still just outside. I’ll tell him to watch you,” he said.
She nodded. Then they returned to the street.
“Cazio’s going to get the others,” Anne told Neil. “I’m going upstairs to pack my things. Would you keep watch here?”
“I will,” Neil said. He looked wary. “Is there something I should know?”
“Not at the moment.”
He nodded. When she went up the stairs, she was relieved that he did not follow.
She did feel a pang of guilt. If he was telling the truth, Sir Neil had come a long, hard way to find her, and she was betraying him.
But she could not take the risk, not when she knew him so little. If she was wrong, he could return home the way he had come, and she would apologize.
She would apologize a great deal.
CHAPTER NINE
LIFE OR DEATH
ASPAR REGARDED STEPHEN’S STILL face in the fireglow.
“How did you meet him?” Ehawk asked, reaching to turn a spit, which speared the sizzling body of a sizable hedgehog.
Aspar grinned wryly and stared at a twig he’d been worrying with his fingers. He tossed it into the fire. “Up on the King’s Road,” he said, “about two days west of the Owl Tomb Bridge. He’d set out for Virgenya to study at the monastery d’Ef. Alone, because he thought it would be the sort of adventure he’d read about in books. When I ran across him, he’d been kidnapped by bandits.” Aspar shook his head. “Didn’t think much of him, then. He was always saying stupid things, carrying thousand-year-old maps as if they might do him some good.”
“But he was your friend.”
“Yah. Saved my life more than once, if you can believe it.” He poked at the fire with a stick, and sparks gyred up toward the sky.
“He’s not dead,” Winna said anxiously. “Will you two stop talking about him as if he were dead?”
“Winna,” Aspar said softly, “he has no pulse that I can find. There’s no breath.”
“He’s not dead,” Winna insisted stubbornly. “He’s never gone stiff, has he? It’s been four days, and he still hasn’t started to stink.”
“Those the greffyn killed didn’t rot, either,” Aspar pointed out.
“Aspar White—” Winna broke off, turning to hide the tears in her eyes. Aspar stood and turned away, too, for he felt dangerously near tears himself.
He remembered Stephen’s last, terrible scream. Then the boy had dropped as