The Curse of Chalion - Lois McMaster Bujold [165]
He scarcely dared whisper it. “But five gods, how?”
Her head jerked. “We discussed a hundred schemes; how might one kill a man, and yet bring him back to die again? Impossible, and yet not quite. We finally settled on drowning as the best to try. It would occasion the least physical injury, and there were many stories of people who’d been brought back from drowning. Dy Lutez rode out to investigate some of them, to try to determine the trick of it.”
Cazaril’s breath huffed out. Drowning, oh, gods. And in the coldest of cold blood…his hands were shaking, too, now. Her voice went on, quiet and relentless.
“We swore a physician to secrecy, and descended to the dungeons of the Zangre. Dy Lutez let himself be stripped and bound, arms and legs tight to his body, and hung upside down over the tank. We lowered him down headfirst. And raised him again, when he stopped struggling at last…”
“And he’d died?” said Cazaril softly. “Then the treason charge was…”
“Died indeed, but not for the last time. We revived him, just barely.”
“Oh.”
“Oh, it was working, though!” Her hands clenched. “I could feel it, I could see it, the crack in the curse! But dy Lutez—his nerve broke. The next night, he would not undertake the second immersion. He cried I was trying to assassinate him, for jealousy’s sake. Then Ias and I…made a mistake.”
Cazaril could see where this was going, now. Closing his eyes would not spare him from seeing. He forced them to stay open, and on her face.
“We seized him, and made the second trial by force. He screamed and wept…Ias wavered, I cried, ‘But we have to! Think of the children!’ But this time when we drew him out, he was drowned dead, and not all our tears and prayers revived him then.
“Ias was shattered. I was distraught. My inner vision was stripped from my eyes. The gods turned their faces from me…”
“Then the treason charge was false.” Profoundly false.
“Yes. A lie, to hide our sins. To explain the body.” Her breath drew in. “But his family was allowed to inherit his estate—nothing was attaindered.”
“Except his reputation. His public honor.” An honor that had been all in all to proud dy Lutez; who had valued all his wealth and glory but as outward signs of it.
“It was done in the panic of the moment, and then we could not draw back from it. Of all our regrets, I think that one gnawed Ias the most, in the months after.
“Ias would not try again, would not try to find another volunteer. It had to be a willing sacrifice, you see; no struggling murder would have done it, but only a man stepping forth of his own volition, with eyes wide-open. Ias turned his face to the wall and died of grief and guilt”—her hands stretched the scrap of lace almost to tearing—“leaving me alone with two little children and no way to protect or save them from this…black…thing …” She drew breath, her chest heaving. But she did not spiral into hysteria, as Cazaril, tensing to spring up and call for her attendants, feared. As her breathing slowed, he let his muscles slacken again. “But you,” she said at last. “The gods have touched you?”
“Yes.”
“I am sorry.”
An unsteady laugh left his lips. “Aye.” He rubbed the back of his neck. It was his turn for confession, now. He might shade the truth with others, for expediency’s sake. Not with Ista. He owed her weight for weight and value for value. Wound for wound. “How much news had you from Cardegoss of Iselle’s brief betrothal, and Lord Dondo dy Jironal’s fate?”
“One messenger followed atop another before we could celebrate—we could not tell what to make of it.”
“Celebrate? A forty-year-old matched to a sixteen-year-old?”
Her chin came up, for a moment so like Iselle that Cazaril caught his breath. “Ias and I were further apart in age than that.”
Ah. Yes. That would tend to give her a different view of such things. “Dondo was no Ias, my lady. He was corrupt—debauched—impious, an embezzler—and I am almost certain he had