The Game of Kings Read Online Free PDF

Blackbeard, red with shame, disappeared through the screen door—“come along, ladies. Leave your female Telemachus alone for a moment; she’s not dead.”
    He surveyed them pleasantly. “Epilogue,” he said. “We have heard sweet-voiced Calliope busily shrinking me like a sea worm and calling me play actor. And the lady of Buccleuch taking heart there-from to give us a roaring, a howling, a whistling, a mummying and a juggling, with sorry results. And Mariotta, trying to wring shame from the unshamable.”
    He turned his head, and the girl’s heart jumped. “Qu’es casado, elRey Ricardo. Weel, weel, sister, what shall we do with you, Mariotta?” He watched her thoughtfully, and then looked beyond her and smiled. “Observe,” he said. “Their eyes lit like corpse candles. I beg, under the circumstances, to be original.… Yes?”
    Blackbeard had reappeared. “All finished, sir; and the horses are ready.”
    “All right. Get them out.” The men began to leave, and the reports came in: “All doors barred, sir. Valuables loaded, sir.”
    With careful and porcelain tread, Crawford of Lymond walked to the screen, and the women fell back before him. At the door he turned. “We’ve had a deal of bad poetry, haven’t we? Suggesting the climax to this thrilling and literary spectacle. The Olla Podrida, my sweet-hearts, will now be set on the fire. I regret Richard isn’t with you. No matter. God hath a thousand handēs to chastise and I have two—how can Richard escape us both?”
    He scanned them all, and they gave him back contempt for reflective stare. “I don’t suppose,” he said regretfully, “we shall meet again. Goodbye.”
    The door shut behind them all, and locked. The women stared at it, mesmerized, and observed across it the wavering shadow of an uncanny cloud. Behind the chamfered windows the sun was obscured by drifting wreaths of grey smoke, and the silence filled with the crackling of flames. The youngest surviving Crawford, in leaving, had deftly set fire to the castle.
    *  *  *
    The bonfires stacked against its walls were blazing merrily when the party from Boghall shot down the incline toward the castle. Behind Richard came every able-bodied man from Lord Fleming’s garrison. They tore away the faggots and, using hatchets, broke through the main door and again through the door of the Hall.
    Richard, gripping his wife, looked over her head at his mother. “Who did it? What happened?”
    But Mariotta answered. She shut her eyes; the darkness showed her a cool blue gaze, and she opened them again. “It was your brother. He must be insane.”
    “Not insane, dear.” Sybilla, speaking gently, contradicted. “Not insane. But magnificently drunk, I fear.”
    He listened to what they had to tell him; he dropped beside Janetas she lay nursing her shoulder wound and spoke to her, and came back with an unseeing face to his mother’s side through the babble of relief and hysteria. Through white lips he said, “I appear to have made a fool of myself. But not again, in that way, I promise you.”
    Buccleuch’s hand was on his arm. “By God, when we come back …”
    “Back?” said the Dowager.
    Sir Wat’s beard folded; a sign of concern. He said flatly, “You’ve not heard the news?”
    “What
news?”
    Without looking at Mariotta, Richard answered for him. “We heard at Boghall. It’s open war, and sooner than we thought. The English have collected an army and are on their way north. We are all summoned instantly to the Governor to fight …
    “… So Lymond—dear God, Lymond must wait.”
    *  *  *
    Only eight months had gone since Henry VIII of England had been suspended in death, there to lie like Mohammed’s coffin, hardly in the Church nor out of it, attended by his martyrs and the acidulous fivefold ghosts of his wives. King Francis of France, stranded by his neighbour’s death in the midst of a policy so advanced, so brilliant and so intricate that it should at last