The Curse of Chalion

CAZARIL AND HIS COMPANIONS WERE, OF COURSE, invited to dine that night in the roya's hall. Near sunset, Cazaril and Bergon went walking together along the sea strand below the fortress. It was as close to private speech as he was likely to obtain, Cazaril thought, waving the dy Guras back to trail along through the sand out of earshot. The growl of the surf cloaked the sound of their voices. A few white gulls swooped and cried, as piercing as any crow, or pecked at the smelly sea wrack on the wet sand, and Cazaril was reminded that these scavengers with their cold golden eyes were sacred to the Bastard in Ibra.

Bergon bade his own heavily armed guard walk at a distance, too, though he did not seek to dispense with them. The silent routine of his precautions reminded Cazaril once more that civil war in this country was but lately ended, and Bergon had been both piece and player in that vicious game already. A piece that had played himself, it seemed.

"I'll never forget the first time I met you," said Bergon, "when they dropped me down beside you on the galley bench. For a moment you frightened me more than the Roknari did."

Cazaril grinned. "What, just because I was a scaly, scabbed, burnt scarecrow, hairy and stinking?"

Bergon grinned back. "Something like that," he admitted sheepishly. "But then you smiled, and said Good evening, young sir, for all the world as if you were inviting me to share a tavern bench and not a rowing bench."

"Well, you were a novelty, of which we didn't get many."

"I thought about it a lot, later. I'm sure I wasn't thinking too clearly at the time—"

"Naturally not. You arrived well roughed-up."

"Truly. Kidnapped, frightened—I'd just collected my first real beating—but you helped me. Told me how to go on, what to expect, taught me how to survive. You gave me extra water twice from your own portion—"

"Eh, only when you really needed it. I was already used to the heat, as desiccated as I was like to get. After a time one can tell the difference between mere discomfort and the feverish look of a man skirting collapse. It was very important that you not faint at your oar, you see."

"You were kind."

Cazaril shrugged. "Why not? What could it cost me, after all?"

Bergon shook his head. "Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I'd always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at his ease before his own hearth."

"Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice—if not whether, then how, they may endure."

"Yes, but... I hadn't known that before I saw it. That was when I began to believe it was possible to survive. And I don't mean just my body."

Cazaril smiled wryly. "I was taken for half-cracked by then, you know."

Bergon shook his head again, and kicked up a little silver sand with his boot as they paced along. The westering sun picked out the foxy copper highlights in his dark Darthacan hair.

Bergon's late mother had been perceived in Chalion as a virago, a Darthacan interloper suspected of fomenting her husband's strife with his Heir on her son's behalf. But Bergon seemed to remember her fondly; as a child he'd been through two sieges with her, cut off from his father's forces in the intermittent war with his half brother. He was clearly accustomed to strong-minded women with a voice in men's councils. When he and Cazaril had shared the oar bench he had spoken of his dead mother, although in disguised terms, when he'd been trying to encourage himself. Not of his live father. Bergon's precocious wit and self-control as demonstrated in the dire days on the galley weren't, Cazaril reflected, entirely the legacy of the Fox.

Cazaril's smile broadened. "So let me tell you," he began, "all about the Royesse Iselle dy Chalion..."

Bergon hung on Cazaril's words as he described Iselle's winding amber hair and her bright gray eyes, her wide and laughing mouth, her horsemanship and her scholarship. Her undaunted, steady nerve, her rapid assessment of emergencies. Selling Iselle to Bergon seemed approximately as difficult as selling food to starving men, water to the parched, or cloaks to the naked in a blizzard, and he hadn't even touched yet on the part about her being due to inherit a royacy. The boy seemed half in love already. The Fox would be a greater challenge; the Fox would suspect a catch. Cazaril had no intention of confiding the catch to the Fox. Bergon was another matter. For you, the truth.

"There is a darker urgency to Royesse Iselle's plea," Cazaril continued, as they reached the end of the crescent of beach and turned about again. "This is in the deepest confidence, as she prays to have safe confidence in you as her husband. For your ear alone." He drew in sea air, and all his courage. "It all goes back to the war of Fonsa the Fairly-Wise and the Golden General..."