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The notches now stretched almost the entire length of the bed, so for the sake of convenience, he had started grouping them in sets of ten, and then sets of twenty, and then whole months. By his count, he had been in the dungeons under Wealdan Castle for over nine months now. Outside, spring had come again, and he was just as cold and damp and miserable as ever down here.
He had very little to do, so he played a little game to keep his mind alert. Every morning, after his first meal of sad, oily stew, he counted the notches to figure out what day it was. Then he would sit on his cot and try to remember exactly what he had been doing a year earlier on that day. It was April now, and that was when he had ended things with Flora. Or rather, when Flora had ended things with him, and when Vittoria had seduced him in her turn.
Lawrence remembered Vittoria quite fondly, but somewhat vaguely. For some reason, the girl’s perfect young body had made very little lasting impression on him. He recalled Flora far more vividly. Sometimes he could relive entire evenings they had spent together in magnificent, scandalous detail. Vittoria was all well and good, but she was just another pretty Immani girl—they seemed to have an endless supply of them up there. In contrast, there was only one Flora Byrne. She had been his for a while, and somehow he had managed to lose her.
He was fully aware that she was not the worst loss he had suffered. Nearly every day he thought of the battle at Erstenwell, and he was forced to relive that charge up the hill, when it had looked for seconds like he was going to finally win, only to have the enemy come crashing down on both flanks. Hundreds of men had died in those few minutes, and some of them had been good friends of his. But he didn’t feel their loss as keenly as he still felt the loss of Flora. In some way he couldn’t quite understand, losing Flora had been the first harbinger of defeat. He couldn’t say why, but he was convinced that if she had continued as his mistress, they would never have lost that battle.
For this reason, he spent considerably less time thinking about how he could have won the battle, than he spent thinking about how he could have kept Flora. Perhaps he could have been a better lover. There was no doubt she was out of his class where sex was concerned. She did things and wanted things done to her that he had never imagined in his wildest dreams. So he did them, but in retrospect, he could see that he had never satisfied her the way she wanted to be satisfied.
Then again, there was the betrothal between Andras and Elwyn. It had been perfectly rational for Flora to want that marriage. It would have been the best thing possible to secure the alliance. A better man—a better uncle—would have been able to talk Elwyn into going through with it. A stronger man would have forced her down the aisle kicking and screaming, if he hadn’t been able to convince her any other way. But Elwyn had stubbornly refused, and of course Lawrence had let her have her way. He ought to have insisted. But he hadn’t.
One morning in late April, he was in the midst of his usual reflections—at the point where his romantic memories of Flora were turning into bitter regret at having lost her—when the lock clicked, and the door swung open.
It had been seven months since anyone but the two jailers had been through that door. But suddenly, there she was again: Muriel Gramiren. She had on a close-fitting dress of gray and silver silk and a half-cape of white fur. A little silver circlet with diamonds nestled in her hair. She looked as if she had come down after an official audience.
“Lawrence, I have to say I’m disappointed that you haven’t done anything with the place since the last time I visited.”
“Give me a pick and a shovel. I have some ideas for redecorating.” His voice came out as a thin whisper—he’d barely spoken a word out loud in months.
Muriel laughed. “It’s good you’re keeping your sense of humor. That’s the most important thing in situations like this. I mean, when you’ve lost your position, and your estates, and your family, and your honor, and your self-respect, a sense of humor is really all you have left.”
He looked hard at her face, trying to detect some hidden emotion there. “Something must have gone wrong,” he said. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t feel the need to come down and gloat over me again.”
“Gone wrong?” She chuckled. “Oh, Earstien, no. It’s just that we’ve all been celebrating upstairs, and I suddenly thought that I should really come share the good news with you. I’d be remiss as a hostess if I didn’t. Don’t you want to hear the latest?”
“I bet you’re going to tell me, whether I want to hear it or not.”
“Very true. Well, you see, Pinburg has fallen. Duke Roger finally gave in. I imagine seeing his city in flames made him finally, ah, see the light, as it were.” She grinned at her own stupid joke. “But that’s not all. My brother Lukas sends word that his bastard son, Halvor, has captured Edwin and Elwyn.”
After nine months in the cold and dark, Lawrence hadn’t thought anything could dismay him anymore. But he had been wrong. “No!” he said. “You’re lying.”
“Oh, trust me, Lawrence; at first, I didn’t let myself believe it, either. But then Halvor sent this along with a messenger.” From her belt, she drew out a sturdy little hunting knife with silver embellishments on the maple handle. Even from where he was chained, Lawrence could see the Sigor emblem and the initials “E.S.” It was Elwyn’s—he’d seen her wearing it hundreds of times. He’d seen her use it when hunting.
“I’m keeping it for myself,” Muriel went on. “A little trophy of the girl whose stubbornness started this whole blasted war.” She slipped it back in her belt. “Of course, we’re going to correct that dreadful mistake as soon as possible. I wonder how long Elwyn will last down here before she agrees to marry my son, the way she should have done in the first place.”
“Elwyn’s a lot tougher than you think,” said Lawrence.
“No. She’s simply tougher than you. I don’t think I’ll have much trouble convincing her. Sending bits of her brother to her in a box every day should do it, I imagine. Or perhaps something a little less bloody. Who knows? I still have a few days to make up my mind.”
“Your son will never agree to marry her under those circumstances. He’s an honorable man.”
“He is a very stupid young man, and when I am done with Elwyn, all my son will see is a very pretty, very compliant young lady who wants nothing more than to please him.”
Lawrence shuddered. He didn’t even like Elwyn, but the thought of her broken and frightened was almost worse than the idea of her being stuck in a cell like this forever. “Please don’t do that.”
“She’s mine to do with as I please now,” said Muriel. “The war is over. And on this happy day, I have a little present for you.” She reached into her bodice and slowly drew out a tiny silver and glass bottle on a chain. “I wore this every day last summer, right up until your defeat at Erstenwell. I have to confess, Lawrence, that some days I honestly thought you might beat us.” She set the bottle down on the stones and, with a nudge of her silk slipper, sent it rolling toward him. “It’s frighteningly powerful stuff—something my Annenstruker ancestors used to settle scores within the family. I’m reliably informed that it kills in seconds and leaves a lovely corpse behind. No foaming at the mouth or bleeding from the eyes or befouling oneself. Anyway, I’m giving it to you now, Lawrence. I won’t be needing it anymore.”
She left, and even after the door was shut, he knew where the bottle was. He found it, and he could feel the stopper at the top, secured with a little pin. Just seconds, and he could end it all.
“And why shouldn’t I?” he wondered. Edwin was as good as dead now, and Elwyn was heading for a fate even worse than death. The Sigor cause was finished, and it was all his fault. He was the one who had lost all those battles—Formacaster, Leornian, Keelweard, Erstenwell, and now Pinburg, too. He hadn’t even been at Pinburg, but the shame of the defeat was on him, as surely as if he had still been the captain general. It was his fault, because he had been so piss-poor at his job.
He thought back to the fall of Leornian. His sister, the queen, had decided to send him into exile with Elwyn and Edwin, while Sir Alfred Estnor, Elwyn’s fiancé, had stayed and died in battle. Why, oh why, hadn’t Rohesia chosen to let him stay and die, instead? Alfred would have won at Erstenwell. Elwyn would be settled and happy. Edwin would be safe on the throne. Lawrence would be dead, but at least his family would have been able to remember him with pride.
All his life, Lawrence had imagined he was smarter and braver than everyone else. Not that he was arrogant about it. He simply knew he was better, in the same way that he knew he was taller than most men, and had read more books than most people, and knew more about sword fighting than the average young knight. It was just a matter of fact, as far as he was concerned.
And then the king had married his younger sister, and he was suddenly a royal confidant. His father died, and he was a member of the privy council. And all of this seemed perfectly natural to him—the result of Earstien’s providence, because no one could be as clever and handsome and polished as Lawrence Swithin, Earl of Hyrne, if he weren’t destined for great things.
But he wasn’t great. He wasn’t even particularly good. And he wasn’t really very bad, either. He was a complete mediocrity. A thousand years in the future, when people spoke of this time, they would talk about the extremes of King Broderick’s character—a brilliant general with the morals of a viper. People would talk about the insatiable lust of Duke Lukas and the political cunning of Duchess Flora. But no one was going to remember the Earl of Hyrne. If he merited even a footnote, it would be as the pathetic punching bag who got beaten over and over by the Gramiren commanders.
“I could end it all,” he thought. He turned the bottle of poison around in his hands. Then he took it to the cot and smashed it to bits under one of the corner legs. “I could end it all, but I don’t deserve it.”
That was a fitting death for someone like Muriel—she was practically a legend already, even in her own lifetime. A nobody like him didn’t deserve a death like that.