The Curse of Chalion

"No trouble at all, lady," said Cazaril automatically. "That is, um..." He glanced at Ista, who gazed back at him levelly, with an unsettling tinge of irony. Well, it wasn't as though Ista were given to shrieking and raving. Even the tears he had sometimes seen in her eyes welled silently. He gave the companion a little half bow as she rose; she seized him by the arm and took him a little way around the arbor.

She stood on tiptoe to whisper in his ear. "All will be well. Just don't mention Lord dy Lutez. And stay by her, till I return. If she starts going on again about old dy Lutez, just... don't leave her." She darted off.

Cazaril considered this hazard.

The brilliant Lord dy Lutez had been for thirty years the late Roya Ias's closest advisor: boyhood friend, brother in arms, boon companion. Over time Ias had loaded him with every honor that was his to command, making him provincar of two districts, chancellor of Chalion, marshal of his household troops, and master of the rich military order of the Son—all the better to control and compel the rest, men murmured. It had been whispered by enemies and admirers alike that dy Lutez was roya in Chalion in all but name. And Ias his royina...

Cazaril sometimes wondered if it had been weakness or cleverness on Ias's part, to let dy Lutez do the dirty work and take the heat of the high lords' grumbling, leaving his master with the name only of Ias the Good. Though not, Cazaril conceded, Ias the Strong, nor Ias the Wise, nor, the gods knew, ever Ias the Lucky. It was dy Lutez who had arranged Ias's second marriage to the Lady Ista, surely giving lie to the persistent rumor among the highborn of Cardegoss of an unnatural love between the roya and his lifelong friend. And yet...

Five years after the marriage, dy Lutez had fallen from the roya's grace, and all his honors, abruptly and lethally. Accused of treason, he'd died under torture in the dungeons of the Zangre, the great royal keep at Cardegoss. Outside of the court of Chalion, it was whispered that his real treason had been to love the young Royina Ista. In more intimate circles, a considerably more hushed whisper had it that Ista had at last persuaded her husband to destroy her hated rival for his love.

However the triangle was arranged, in the shrinking geometry of death it had collapsed from three points to two, and then, as Ias turned his face to the wall and died not a year after dy Lutez, one alone. And Ista had taken her children and fled the Zangre, or was exiled therefrom.

Dy Lutez. Don't mention dy Lutez. Don't mention, therefore, most of the history of Chalion for the past generation and a half. Right.

Cazaril returned to Ista and, somewhat warily, sat in the departed companion's chair. Ista had taken to shredding her rose, not wildly, but very gently and systematically, plucking the petals and laying them upon the bench beside her in a pattern mimicking their original form, circle within circle in an inward spiral.

"The lost dead visited me in my dreams last night," Ista continued conversationally. "Though they were only false dreams. Do yours ever visit you so, Cazaril?"

Cazaril blinked, and decided she was too aware for this to be dementia, even if she was a trifle elliptical. And besides, he had no trouble catching her meaning, which would surely not be the case if she were mad. "Sometimes I dream of my father and mother. For a little time, they walk and talk as in life... so I regret to wake again, and lose them anew."

Ista nodded. "False dreams are sad that way. But true dreams are cruel. The gods spare you from ever dreaming their true dreams, Cazaril."

Cazaril frowned, and cocked his head. "All my dreams are but confused throngs, and disperse like smoke and vapors upon my waking."

Ista bent her head to her denuded rose; she now was spreading the golden powdery stamens, fine as snips of silk thread, in a tiny fan within the circle of petals. "True dreams sit like lead upon the heart and stomach. Weight enough to... drown our souls in sorrow. True dreams walk in the waking day. And yet betray us still, as certainly as any man of flesh might swallow back his vomited promises, like a dog its cast-up dinner. Don't put your trust in dreams, Castillar. Or in the promises of men." She raised her face from her array of petals, her eyes suddenly intent.

Cazaril cleared his throat uncomfortably. "Nay, lady, that would be foolish. But it's pleasant to see my father, from time to time. For I shall not meet him any other way again."

She gave him an odd, tilted smile. "You don't fear your dead?"

"No, my lady. Not in dreams."

"Perhaps your dead are not very fearsome folk."

"For the most part, no, ma'am," he agreed.