The Curse of Chalion - Lois McMaster Bujold [94]
I don’t understand.
If Dondo is slain, and yet I live…I cannot have been granted a death miracle. And yet Dondo is slain. How?
How else but that someone had beaten Cazaril to the deed?
Belatedly, his wits caught up with dy Jironal’s.
Betriz?
No, oh no…!
He surged out of bed, fell heavily to the floor, scrambled to his feet, and staggered after the crowd of enraged and baffled courtiers.
He arrived at his invaded office antechamber to hear dy Jironal bellowing, “Then bring her out, that I may see!” to a disheveled and frightened-looking Nan dy Vrit, who nevertheless blocked the doorway to the inner rooms with her body as though ready to defend a drawbridge. Cazaril nearly fainted with relief when Betriz, frowning fiercely, came up behind Nan’s shoulder. Nan was in her nightdress, but Betriz, rumpled and weary-looking, was still wearing the same green wool gown she’d had on last night. Had she slept? But she lives, she lives!
“Why do you make this uncouth roaring here, my lord?” Betriz demanded coldly. “It is unseemly and untimely.”
Dy Jironal’s lips parted in his beard; he was clearly taken aback. After a moment, his teeth snapped closed. “Where is the royesse, then? I must see the royesse.”
“She is sleeping a little, for the first time in days. I’ll not have her disturbed. She’ll have to exchange dreams for nightmare soon enough.” Betriz’s nostrils flared with open hostility.
Dy Jironal’s back straightened; his breath hissed in. “Wake her? Can you wake her?”
Dear gods. Might Iselle have…? But before this new panic closed down Cazaril’s throat, Iselle herself appeared, pushed between her ladies, and walked coolly forward into the antechamber to face dy Jironal.
“I do not sleep. What do you want, my lord?” Her eyes passed over her brother Orico, hovering at the edge of the mob, and dismissed him with contempt, returning to dy Jironal. Her brows tensed in wariness. No question but that she understood whose power forced her to her unwelcome wedding.
Dy Jironal stared from woman to woman, all indisputably alive before him. He wheeled around and stared again at Cazaril, who was blinking at Iselle. Aura flared around her, too, just like Orico, but hers was more disturbed, a churning of deep darkness and luminous pale blue, like the aurora he’d once seen in the far southern night sky.
“Whoever,” grated dy Jironal. “Wherever. I’ll find the filthy coward’s corpse if I have to search all of Chalion.”
“And then what?” inquired Orico, rubbing his unshaven jowls. “Hang it?” He returned a raised-brow look of irony for dy Jironal’s driven glare; dy Jironal whirled and stamped back out. Cazaril stepped aside to let the entourage pass, his gaze flicking covertly from Orico to Iselle, comparing the two…hallucinations? No one else here pulsed like that. Maybe I’m sick. Maybe I’m mad.
“Cazaril,” said Iselle in urgent bewilderment as soon as the men had cleared the outer door—Nan hurried to shut it behind the invaders—“what has happened?”
“Someone killed Dondo dy Jironal last night. By death magic.”
Her lips parted, and her hands clasped together like a child just promised its heart’s desire. “Oh! Oh! Oh, this is welcome news! Oh, thank the Lady, oh, thank the Bastard—I will send such gifts to his altar—oh, Cazaril, who—?”
At Betriz’s look of wild surmise in his direction, Cazaril grimaced. “Not me. Obviously.” Though not for want of trying.
“Did you—” Betriz began, then pressed her lips closed. Cazaril’s grimace tilted in appreciation of her delicacy in not inquiring, out loud before two witnesses, if he’d plotted a capital crime. He hardly needed to speak; her eyes blazed with speculation.
Iselle paced back and forth, almost bouncing with relief. “I think I felt it,” she said in a voice of great wonder. “In any case, I felt something…midnight, around midnight, you said?” No one had said so here. “An easing of my heart, as if something in me knew my prayers were heard. But I never expected this. I’d asked the Lady for my death…” She paused, and touched her hand to her broad white