The Fatal Child by John Dickinson Read Free Book Online Page A

you did, but it would be
nice
to have a reward for it, too.
    ‘Is he here, in the city?’ murmured the girl suddenly.
    ‘Who? The Prince Under the Sky? No. If he is real at all, he is on the other side of the lake. Or so I believe.’
    ‘Is it a long way?’
    ‘A very long way, my dove.’
    Silence again, in the cooing air. They sat side by side until the bell chimed the hour. He felt her hand slip from his own.
    ‘You must go now,’ she said. ‘There is a service.’
    She said it as though it were an instruction. But, alas, it was indeed time to go. The King’s business waited for no one.
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Cheer up. I will come again tomorrow, and we will talk some more about where we might place you.’
    And he had come, smuggling some forbidden sweetmeats in the folds of his robe. Rules were rules, but he had wanted to see her smile.
    He had come, but she had not been there.
    The Lady of Develin searched his face. ‘She
dreamed
of him?’
    ‘So it appears. We could find none among the sisters or servants who had spoken to her of him.’ Not though the convent mothers had plied their canes with a will.
    ‘And now she has run off in search of him.’ She frowned at the fire. Her fingers were drumming on an arm of the chair. ‘I find this disturbing. For more than one reason.’
    Padry nodded. ‘You see the urgency of my mission.’
    ‘My reasons may not be yours. This dream – what did she see?’
    ‘I know only that she thought he spoke with her.’
    ‘And what does Gueronius know of this?’
    ‘The King? Nothing, my lady. He is in Velis.’
    ‘So I had heard – and this disturbs me also! The Kingdom is barely won. Two summers of peace do not make men forget war. Yet the King plays shipwright and dreams of adventure beyond the seas. Is it true he will captain this expedition he plans?’
    ‘Oh,’ said Padry (noting how firmly she had changed the subject), ‘we will persuade him from it, my lady. The Kingdom cannot afford his absence.’
    ‘It cannot. I hear he would make the lords Joyce and Seguin co-regents in his absence. We would have power struggles and blood spilled within six months of his going. Such …
folly
in a man for whom I have given the lives of my soldiers! The Kingdom cannot be his plaything, to be left on the shelf while he amuses himself with other toys! It tries me, Thomas. And it tries me that you do not see it so! You should be there, not here. You are the one man he has the wit to listen to for more than a minute at a time!’
    ‘I
will
go to him, my lady,’ he said soothingly. ‘As soon as I have finished—’
    ‘Thomas Padry!’ she cried.
    Padry jumped.
    ‘Do you forget what men are? After what you have seen in this very house? And I have been giving thanks every evening that it is you who advises the King! But now I see you have dropped your pen and run off in a direction opposite to the one in which you are most needed – on a goose-chase here in the south after some brat of a dead lord! Men have not changed in two summers, Thomas. Feud breaks out like pox wherever I look. Faul’s men raided a village of minelast month – under this King’s peace! Must I go to war with Faul because neither King nor chancellor can tear themselves from their fancies?’
    ‘All men know the value of peace, my lady—’
    ‘Do they? Yet they take up iron whenever there is dispute. We are cursed with it – cursed by Heaven, and blessed with too few who are willing to heal it!’
    Padry was shocked by the blasphemy. ‘My lady,’ he said slowly. ‘If you ask me from my heart, I say that I do not believe we are cursed. Although I do believe that we must know evil as well as good, so that we may know the difference when we go to the Angels. It would be a terrible crime to return to Paradise as innocent as when we were sent from it.’
    ‘A dry answer, sir. I thought your heart had grown since you left this house.’
    ‘I hope that it has, my lady. But it still tells me the