The Curse of Chalion

High in the wall of the keep, a casement window swung wide, and Ista's companion leaned out and stared down into the garden. Apparently reassured by the sight of her lady in gentle conversation with her shabby courtier, she waved and disappeared again.

Cazaril wondered how Ista passed the time. She did not sew, apparently, nor did she seem much of a reader, nor did she keep musicians of her own. Cazaril had seen her sporadically at prayers, some weeks spending hours in the ancestors' hall, or at the little portable altar kept in her chambers, or, far more rarely, escorted by her ladies and dy Ferrej down to the temple in town, though never at its crowded moments. Other times weeks would pass when she seemed to keep no observances to the gods at all. "Have you much consolation in prayers, lady?" he asked curiously.

She glanced up, and her smile flattened a trifle. "I? I have not much consolation anywhere. The gods have surely made a mock of me. I would return the favor, but they hold my heart and my breath hostage to their whims. My children are prisoners of fortune. And fortune is gone mad, in Chalion."

He offered hesitantly, "I think there are worse prisons than this sunny keep, lady."

Her brows rose, and she sat back. "Oh, aye. Were you ever to the Zangre, in Cardegoss?"

"Yes, when I was a younger man. Not lately. It was a vast warren. I spent half my time lost in it."

"Strange. I was lost in it, too... it is haunted, you know."

Cazaril considered this matter-of-fact comment. "I shouldn't be surprised. It is the nature of a great fortress that as many die in it as build it, win it, lose it... men of Chalion, the renowned Roknari masons before us, the first kings, and men before them I'm sure who crept into its caves, on back into the mists of time. It is that sort of prominence." High home of royas and nobles for generations—rank on rank of men and women had ended their lives in the Zangre, some quite spectacularly... some quite secretly. "The Zangre is older than Chalion itself. It surely... accumulates."

Ista began gently pressing the thorns from her rose stem, and lining them up in a row like the teeth of a saw. "Yes. It accumulates. That's the word, precisely. It collects calamity like a cistern, as its slates and gutters collect rainwater. You will do well to avoid the Zangre, Cazaril."

"I've no desire to attend court, my lady."

"I desired to, once. With all my heart. The gods' most savage curses come upon us as answers to our own prayers, you know. Prayer is a dangerous business. I think it should be outlawed." She began to peel her rose stem, thin green strips pulling away to reveal fine white lines of pith.

Cazaril had no idea what to say to this, so merely smiled hesitantly.

Ista began to pull the whip of pith apart lengthwise. "A prophecy was told of the Lord dy Lutez, that he should not drown except upon a mountaintop. And that he never feared to swim thereafter, no matter how violent the waves, for everyone knows there is no water upon a mountaintop; it all runs away to the valleys."

Cazaril swallowed panic, and looked around surreptitiously for the returning attendant. She was not yet in sight. Lord dy Lutez, it was said, had died under the water torture in the dungeons of the Zangre. Beneath the castle stones, but still high enough above the town of Cardegoss. He licked slightly numb lips, and tried, "You know, I never heard that while the man was alive. It is my opinion that some tale-spinner made it up later, to sound shivery. Justifications... tend to accrue posthumously to so spectacular a fall as his was."

Her lips parted in the strangest smile yet. She drew the last threads of the stem pith apart, aligned them upon her knee, and stroked them flat. "Poor Cazaril! How did you grow so wise?"

Cazaril was saved from trying to think of an answer for this by Ista's attendant, who emerged again from the door of the keep with a hank of colored silk in her hands. Cazaril leapt to his feet and nodded to the royina. "Your good lady returns..."

He gave a little bow in passing to the attendant, who whispered urgently to him, "Was she sensible, my lord?"

"Yes, perfectly." In her way...

"Nothing of dy Lutez?"

"Nothing... remarkable." Nothing he cared to remark upon, certainly.

The attendant breathed relief and passed on, fixing a smile on her face. Ista regarded her with bored tolerance as she began chattering about all the items that she'd had to overturn and hunt through to find her strayed thread. It crossed Cazaril's mind that no daughter of the Provincara's, nor mother of Iselle's, could possibly be short of wit.