The Cup of the World Read Online Free PDF Page B

the man, for whom the prayer of fellow travellers was, it seemed, an empty formality.
    ‘And Raphael guide our way, for we are far from home,’ Phaedra replied. ‘You are to be our guest? Sir, with pleasure. For how long?’
    Father's look told her she had said the wrong thing.
    ‘Longer than you or I would wish, I fear,’ the baron answered. ‘Let us not bear each other ill-will for it.’
    Then she realized that he was not carrying a sword. The scabbard that hung at his saddle was empty. Two Trant men-at-arms hovered on their horses close behind him.
    They had been travelling for an hour across the sun-hammered plain around Tuscolo before Phaedra could bring her pony alongside her father's mount.
    ‘I regret that I have embarrassed our house, sir.’
    ‘You mean Lackmere? I should not trouble on it. Another time remember that no good hostess asks how long her guests intend to stay’
    ‘Another time I shall be forearmed, and perhaps forewarned as well,’ she said, to make her point.
    He brooded on her words, as he would do for no one else.
    ‘He was wished on me in the last hearings yesterday. By the time I returned to our quarters you were asleep, and rightly so. He remains with us until the King pleases otherwise. He was lucky to escape with so little harm.’
    ‘What has he done?’
    ‘He has been a rogue and a fisher of troubled waters for years. But he was rebel and an ally of rebels when we caught up with him. Good men were lost bringing him down. He might have been blinded and stripped of his lands. The King was moved to grant him clemency because he would not ask for it. We have to teach him gentility girl.’
    Phaedra looked ahead to where the baron rode bareheaded in the sun. So that small man, riding insolently in advance of the banners, was one of the faceless enemy against whom Father had ridden four times through the wasted fields of the Kingdom. He was not looking back at the long procession that followed him. He would neither acknowledge them, nor pick his way in the dust of the men who were his captors. What might he do? The two Trant men-at-arms rode a short space behind him.
    ‘Will he try to escape?’ she asked.
    In the distance sun glinted on mail. Outriders of the column were moving slowly along the top of a low rise to the south of their line of march. Phaedra could see the smudge of dust raised by their hooves against the solid blue of the sky. A horn-blast would bring them sweeping in to head off the runaway.
    ‘Who knows? I have his word. And if he runs, he will be outlawed and his lands forfeit. He has a family who willsuffer. If he bears the King's sentence he may yet see his home in peace again.’
    So he was bound by word, by guard and by the threat of blood. But the very tightness of the grip upon him made him seem dangerous. And he would be fed in her house, and would rise from her table each day, an enemy and a rebel still.
    Safe in Trant, Phaedra had been only half aware of the rebellion of the Seabord barons and their southern allies as it had raged around the Kingdom. She still understood little of the complex of disputes and rivalries that had made them league themselves against the crown, or how they had won their early victories over the odds, and so shaken the King's grip upon his throne. For her, the chief effect had been that Trant had been half-empty for months at a time, as Father and his knights answered desperate summons from Tuscolo. But the knights had brought back with them stories of an enemy whose strength was not in numbers but in war-skill and, they had said, witchcraft beyond nature. And in her few weeks at court she had listened to others, who had known a town burned or friends killed, or things so changed that they would never be the same.
    Ambrose was also watching the baron, and frowning. He too must be thinking of the King's judgement. Only the King could give justice among the high lords, so that they might do the same among their knights and barons,