The Curse of Chalion - Lois McMaster Bujold [57]
He glanced aside at a movement, to find a face familiar and coolly smiling, but not one he welcomed. Chancellor dy Jironal gave him a slight bow of greeting; he pushed off the wall and returned it. His wits fought their way through a fog of food and wine to full alertness.
“Dy Cazaril. It is you. We had thought you were dead.”
I’d wager so. “No, my lord. I escaped.”
“Some of your friends feared you had deserted—”
None of my friends would fear any such thing.
“But the Roknari reported you had died.”
“A foul lie, sir.” Cazaril didn’t say whose lie, his only daring. “They sold me to the galleys with the unransomed men.”
“Vile!”
“I thought so.”
“It’s a miracle you survived the ordeal.”
“Yes. It was.” Cazaril blinked, and smiled sweetly. “Did you at least recover your ransom money, as the price of that lie? Or did some thief pocket it? I’d like to think that someone paid for the deception.”
“I don’t recall. It would have been the quartermaster’s business.”
“Well, it was all a dreadful mischance, but it has come right in the end.”
“Indeed. I shall have to hear more of your adventures, sometime.”
“When you will, my lord.”
Dy Jironal nodded austerely, smiling, and moved on, evidently reassured.
Cazaril smiled back, pleased with his self-control—if it wasn’t just his sick fear. He could, it seemed, smile, and smile, and not launch himself at the lying villain’s throat—I’ll make a courtier yet, eh?
His worst fears assuaged, Cazaril abandoned his futile attempt at invisibility, and nerved himself to ask Lady Betriz for one roundel. He knew himself tall and gangling and not graceful, but at least he was not falling-down drunk, which put him ahead of half the young men here by now. Not to mention Lord Dondo dy Jironal, who after monopolizing Iselle in the dance for a time had moved off with his roistering hangers-on to find either rougher pleasures or a quiet corridor to vomit in. Cazaril hoped the latter. Betriz’s eyes sparkled with exhilaration as she swung with him into the figures.
At length, Orico woke up, the musicians flagged, and the evening drew to a close. Cazaril mobilized pages, Lady Betriz, and Sera dy Vrit to help carry off Iselle’s booty and store it safe away. Teidez, scorning the dancing, had indulged in the spectacular array of sweets more than in drink, though dy Sanda might still have to deal with a bout of violent illness before dawn as a result. But it was clear the boy was more drunk on attention than on wine.
“Lord Dondo told me that anyone would have taken me for eighteen!” he told Iselle triumphantly. His growth spurt this past summer that had shot him up above his older sister had been occasion for much crowing on his part, and snorting on Iselle’s. He trod off toward his bedchamber with feet barely touching the floor.
Betriz, her hands full of jewelry, asked Cazaril as they placed the gauds into Iselle’s lockable boxes in her antechamber, “So why don’t you use your name, Lord Caz? What’s so wrong with Lupe? It’s really quite a, a strong man’s name, withal.”
“Early aversion,” he sighed. “My older brother and his friends used to torment me by yipping and howling until they’d driven me to tears of rage, which made me madder still—alas, by the time I’d grown tall enough to beat him, he’d outgrown the game. I thought that was most unfair of him.”
Betriz laughed. “I see!”
Cazaril reeled off to the quiet of his own bedchamber, to realize he had failed to pen his faithfully promised note of reassurance to the Provincara. Torn