The Cursewright's Vow

Chapter 8: Lord Marhollow's Pursuit, Part 6

 During the time they spent in Talinara trying to find some trace of surviving cursewrights, they made little headway until, just as Vos predicted, Varallo Thray made their task a hundredfold easier. He might have assisted them even sooner had the Empress-Consort not taken sick with grief. Varallo Thray had witnessed it personally, and perhaps felt an obligation to see to Yvelle's health. It had been she, the Emperor, and an unusually subdued Silenio at dinner the night after the princess vanished from the Curate's Tower. The Princess Sarai was not there, as the Emperor, upon learning of Carala's disappearance, had commanded his household guard to keep Sarai and her handmaidens under protective custody in Sarai's old apartments. Sick with grief and worry, Sarai had not complained, and the Emperor had treated her with unusual compassion despite her virtual imprisonment. "She will return, Carala will. Her Lord Denisius will search for her soon, you will see."

Perhaps the remark had been meant to sting, to remind Sarai that the Lord Marhollow had not thought her fit even for his youngest son, but Sarai was too heartsick over Carala's fate to notice. Or, Denisius thought, perhaps she had noticed and had simply not cared. Some things were more important than her father's cruelty.

But whatever meagre, tainted compassion the Emperor had for his daughter, he had apparently reserved none for his son or his Empress-Consort. Varallo Thray had taken his meals with the Emperor and his family since that night in the Maathinhold, both to discuss possible courses of action and determine how the princess had come to be a target in the first place. No one believed this had been a matter of a random caravan guard with the wolf's blood sickness chancing upon Carala and becoming smitten with her. But Varallo Thray had made little progress, and the Emperor seemed loath to discuss it in any meaningful way.

Tacen's co-workers at the Swiftfoot caravan had provided nothing during their increasingly aggressive interrogations, other than that he had grown up somewhere outside Vilais. The Emperor had been so disappointed with the results that he had removed Varallo Thray from the interrogations altogether, replacing him with Imperial officers of his own choosing from Silenio's cohort at Fort Shale. The Grand Chancellor had not protested, likely grateful that he was merely being removed from an assignment he had not especially enjoyed rather than being removed from the world of the living altogether.

At that dinner Silenio opined that Carala must have been enchanted somehow; that his sisters were too clever to let themselves be taken by some rabble just because he happened to be pleasing to the eye. The Emperor countered that he was not so sure; that werewolves surely tended to seek as mates those who already had some flicker of a wolf inside them, and that perhaps Carala was not so clever nor so straitlaced as her family had always believed. The Empress-Consort raised her voice, protesting that she had raised her daughters better than that, and that it must have taken some extraordinary power to make Carala forget herself in such an audacious way.

"Oh, yes, yes indeed, my dear Yvelle, your teachings clearly made a great impression, I am sure we can all see that. But her new paramour's lessons are obviously much more intriguing. Shall I tell you a few of them? You will be most enlightened to hear them, I think."

If it had been possible to do so, at that point Varallo Thray would have extricated both himself and the Empress-Consort from high table at once. But the Emperor was more used to getting his way than the greediest Namarri tigress, and his way was exactly what he had. He launched into a graphic description of werewolf hunting and mating habits, especially how frequently she-wolves preferred the act, and with what vigor, and with what endowments of their chosen mates, werewolf and human and wolf alike. Even as the Empress-Consort began to weep and beg him to cease, he continued, a small satisfied smile pursing his thick lips. 

At last Yvelle broke down in screaming sobs, tearing her fine dress open, clawing at her undergarments, clawing at her face, tearing out great thick tufts of her midnight hair, so very like her youngest daughter's. Silenio and the Grand Chancellor escorted her from high table to the infirmary, and even when they left her in the care of the Madrenite sisters, the Empress-Consort was still weeping. Through it all, the Emperor never left his meal, smiling as he devoured his roast pheasant and occasionally humming a snatch of music from the last Vilais opera he had attended, The Pale Queen.

It took most of the night for the gentle Madrenites to calm the Empress-Consort's nerves, and another two days of Varallo Thray urging the Emperor to let her leave the capital until the matter with her daughter was resolved for good or ill. At last the Emperor consented, and so Varallo Thray, Silenio, and Sarai had seen Yvelle off on a carriage surrounded by a legion of household guards and her own handmaidens, headed toward her retreat on the Ismenian Coast. Still she had been pale, sickly, and so grief-stricken she could barely speak. Nonetheless she managed to kiss her children farewell, and even returned Varallo Thray's bow with as refined a curtsey as her long years of living in the Chalcedony Palace had taught her.

Vos and Denisius knew none of this until it was long over. They spent fruitless days combing through what records they could find in the capital, all of which were at least twenty years old and often fragmentary, usually due to the Emperor's own commands. They had made barely any progress, having compiled less than a dozen names. Vos suggested they contact Meryk Orveil in Summervale before they did anything else. "Though how he'll respond to a request from men in the employ of the Malachite Throne, I don't like to think, especially when one of them is a son of Erstan Gallis." Before Denisius could ask Vos what he'd meant by that, a knock had come at their door, which proved to be Varallo Thray, cloaked and hooded.

The Grand Chancellor had come to deliver them a few pages from the princess's diary which he thought they might find useful. "Many pages had to be stripped, my lord Marhollow, I hope you will understand. But I must protect the Princess Carala's dignity, especially since this beast Tacen has already so soiled it. I hope you do not feel I overstepped." At this point the Chancellor's carefully composed manner of respect, which so often felt like an act, had flaked away just the smallest bit, and a frown creased his features. "And I wished to protect her mother's feelings if it were possible."

The story of the Emperor's outburst and Yvelle's reaction they learned from a kitchen steward of Vos's acquaintance, not the Grand Chancellor, but it seemed he approved of his sovereign's behavior no more than had the Empress-Consort herself. Vos had sworn so floridly at the tale that Denisius had been forced to admire the rant.

But the pages were exactly what they needed. There were no accounts of Carala's various rendezvouses with Tacen, for which Denisius was profoundly grateful, but there were her rambling, wandering thoughts on who might be able to end her infatuation with the werewolf who had seduced her, including names she had heard discussed by her father and brother. That she might indeed have been acting in spite of her own will, as the Chancellor had suggested, encouraged Denisius tremendously.

And so, with little effort on their own, they had secured two names and a description: Meryk Orveil, Ammas Mourthia, and an unknown cursewright in Gallowsport. "His Majesty assures me that one is dead," the Chancellor had offered, "but I would not be so sure. The arcane brethren were much wilier than His Majesty sometimes admits. I cannot, of course, give you official sanction to go in search of any of these individuals, but if you do, and they lead to the princess's rescue and especially her cure," Thray had fixed Denisius with an uncomfortably steely look at this, "then I can assure you none of the usual penalties for such actions would apply. Quite the contrary."