The Born Queen Read Free Page B

then,” Hespero said.
    “Don’t be impertinent,” Fabulo snapped. He leaned back in his chair. “I’ll never know what Niro Lucio saw in you, I really won’t. I know you took your vows together, but that was more than thirty years ago.”
    “I don’t understand what you’re implying,” Hespero said.
    “When you left the college, you went off to some tiny attish in the Bairghs and distinguished yourself in no way whatever. But Lucio stayed here and rose in rank. When he was lustrated as praifec, he called for you. He swayed the senaz to make you amplulo of Crotheny and later praifec.”
    “I’m flattered you know so much about me.”
    “What I know does not flatter you,” he snapped. “And yet I knew Lucio. He was loyal, above all loyal to the Church. He was not one who usually counted friendship toward a qualification. I wonder if something more than friendship did not prompt your rise in position.”
    “Does my record since that time suggest I was unqualified?”
    Niro Fabulo shook his head. “No, indeed. You have been exemplary in every way, or at least that is what the record reflects. Until the last year or so, that is, and there things go very wrong. Shall I catalogue your major failures?”
    “If it pleases you, your grace.”
    “It does not, but I shall do so.” He leaned forward.
    “You failed to stop William from naming his daughters as heirs. You promised to manage that mistake, yet again you failed. Not only is one of the daughters still alive, she now sits the throne. Now, that in itself is enough failure for a lifetime, Hespero. You failed to quicken the faneways of the shrouded lords in the King’s Forest. And despite all of this”—he mopped his brow with his sleeve—“despite all of this, my predecessor, your dear friend Lucio, entrusted you with the arrow of Aitas in order to slay the Briar King. This also you failed to do, and now the arrow is lost to us.”
    Hespero started to retort to that last accusation, but thought better of it. What was the point? It was mostly true, especially as concerned Anne. He could only blame himself for choosing such unstable allies in the matter. The faneways were of little consequence, really, and Lucio had known that.
    But Lucio was dead, most probably at the hand of the man now accusing him. Niro Fabulo didn’t begin to understand Hespero’s real failure.
    “Finally,” the
prismo
concluded, “you took cowardly flight from your post in Eslen.”
    “Did I?”
    “Yes.”
    “Interesting. In what month do your reports have that happening?
    “Just after Yule.”
    “That was when King Robert was on the throne and months before Anne raised her army. What do you imagine I was fleeing?”
    “You left no explanation of your whereabouts,” Fabulo said. “What are we to assume?”
    “Does it matter?” Hespero asked, his voice sounding eerily calm and uncustomarily blunt in his own ears. “You’ve murdered Lucio, and now you’re purging his friends. I’m one of them. Why all this talk?”
    “Lucio was a fool,” Fabulo said. “Lucio never really understood the prophecies or what must be done now. He was too much of the past. But I think you and he were up to something. And I rather want to know what that was.”
    “A failure like me? What could I be up to?” Hespero asked.
    “That’s what we’re going to find out,” Fabulo said.
    Hespero felt his throat go dry, and for an instant the words stuck in his throat, coming out as a sort of gasp.
    “What?” the
prismo
demanded.
    Hespero took a deep breath and raised his head.
    “You
are
going to find out,” he repeated, clearly this time. “But not the way you’d like.”
    Hespero saw Fabulo’s brow descend and his mouth open to speak.
    I am Hespero,
he thought. He clenched his teeth, then relaxed and let the incantation come.
    “Shadowed saints who walk all ways, know all fanes. Be with me.”
    He let the cold waters beneath the world rush in through his feet, and they went numb,