The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [10]
“Where hides Master Tharkis?
That I cannot tell—
But the sound that you do hark is
The chiming of his bell.
So swifter than a lark is
The mischief he’d best quell—
For nothing else so dark is
The deepest dungeon cell.”
Aryn couldn’t suppress a satisfied smile as Lirith gaped at her. It wasn’t a bad little poem, if she did say so herself.
Evidently Tharkis agreed, for the fool sputtered, pawing at his jangling cap so that strands of lank hair escaped.
“Come now, Fool,” Aryn said. “It is your turn in the game.”
“Must I beg it on my knees? A moment, spinstress—a moment please!”
Tharkis turned toward the alcove, back hunched, and muttered under his breath. Aryn didn’t waste the chance. With the way clear before them, she grabbed Lirith’s hand and dashed down the corridor.
They had already turned a corner when they heard a shrill howl of dismay behind them. The sound spurred them on, feet pounding on stone, until at last they were forced to stop and sag against a wall, gasping for breath and laughing.
Aryn wiped tears from her eyes. “Was he truly king once, as the stories say? It’s so hard to believe when I see him.”
Lirith smoothed the tight, black coils of her hair. “Indeed he was, sister. For many years Tharkis ruled the Dominion of Toloria. But one day while out hunting he fell from his horse and struck his head against a stone. When he awoke again he was like this. I fear his brain was addled without repair.”
Aryn had heard the tale. King Tharkis had neither wife nor heir, and after his mishap Toloria was torn by strife as various barons vied for the throne. Had it not been for Ivalaine—a distant cousin of Tharkis who, within days of reaching the age of eighteen, managed to unite all the barons—the Dominion might have been sundered forever.
“So Tharkis truly is mad, then,” Aryn said. “Yet it seems cruel to keep him like this. A man who was king should not be the court fool.”
“And would it be less cruel to lock him high in a tower where none might see him? This is who he is now. And I think, after a fashion, he enjoys it.”
Lirith was right, of course. All the same, there was something very wrong about Tharkis. The less Aryn encountered him, the better.
“Come,” Lirith said, “the queen awaits us.”
“In order to berates us,” Aryn said with a grin.
A guardsman bowed to them as they approached the door to the queen’s chamber.
“You may enter, my ladies,” he said.
Aryn and Lirith exchanged quick looks, their mirth vanishing as they stepped through the door.
“Such disobedience is not to be tolerated,” said a voice as clear and hard as diamonds.
Aryn froze. Was the queen not even going to greet them before chastising them? A hasty apology rose in her throat, but before she could open her mouth a voice spoke sharply in her mind.
Quiet, sister. Do not confess your crime when you have not been asked. It is not to us the queen speaks.
Aryn bit her tongue. She still hadn’t gotten used to Lirith’s ability to speak without words. It was not a skill Aryn had mastered herself. However, her shock was replaced by relief as she saw that Lirith was right.
The queen’s antechamber was a spacious room, lined on one side by high windows that caught the reflection of the rising moon in a hundred small panes. Queen Ivalaine stood in the center of the chamber, towering over a slight young man who hung his head, his long, black hair concealing his visage. Beside him, her expression at once stern and motherly, stood Lady Tressa, the queen’s plump, pretty, red-haired counselor. It was the young man who had been the focus of the queen’s hard words.
“You were forbidden to enter the stables again,” the queen continued, her words precise as arrows, “yet you did so today, and by your pranks caused such agitation among the horses that one broke her halter and escaped. And in regaining her, one of the stableboys fell and broke his arm.”
“So I’m to blame for clumsy stableboys?” the young man said without raising his