The Conqueror

Chapter Twenty-Three

He stood in the cellars of the Nest early the next morning, a torch slammed into the cresset on the wall, angling the lighted end out into the air. In front of him was a door. An essentially hidden door, tucked here in the darkest recesses of the cellars.

He had stopped short at this crossroads in the tunnels and, half by touch, half by memory, found the door. The shadows danced in ghostly leaps, attesting to the presence of fresh, or at least moving, air that Griffyn could not detect.

He raked his fingers through his hair. “I’ve forgotten for all these years, and now I remember it so well.” He leaned forward and peered down the long, dark expanse of the tunnel running to his right. It went on and on. “That goes to a cave in the wood, if I recall,” he murmured, more to himself than Alex, who stood at his side, eyebrow lifted.

“You played down here?”

Griffyn smiled faintly. “All the time.”

Alex shuddered. “And Guinevere? She was a child here too. Did she play down here?”

“I do not know,” he murmured. The leather of his hauberk creaked in the narrow space; they’d come straight from work with the men in the practice fields at dawn. The hunt was going out this morning, but Griffyn sent Jerv at its head, claiming too much work, promising to join them the following day.

But Griffyn knew what was really happening. The infection was spreading. He was Christian Sauvage’s son. It was in the blood.

Still, he considered, Gwyn did not seem to be stricken with the sickness that had destroyed their fathers. She was different. Different from anyone he’d ever known.

“But I would like to know,” he said aloud. “I would like to know if she played down here.” It was dank, close, dark, and would have been dense with cobwebs if spiders ever dared venture down here. They didn’t, but an imaginative child certainly would. “I think she did.”

“You’re both mad, then,” Alex muttered with conviction. He pointed the tip of his short blade at the door before them. A monstrous padlock hung off it like a fang, carved in the shape of a dragon’s head. “Are you going to open it?”

“Are you going to ever start Watching?” Griffyn muttered in reply. Then he shoved the iron key around his neck into the lock. He hit a barrier. The key didn’t fit.

Alex cursed.

He tried again, pushed harder. Nothing.

“Hack it off,” Alex urged, his words swift and low.

“That’s ludicrous,” Griffyn said sharply, but in his mind it seemed more sacrilegious. “I think not.”

Alex lifted his brows. “So, what now?”

“We wait.”

Alex’s eyes snapped to his. “In God’s name, Griffyn, wait for what? How long can you wait?”

Griffyn drew back at the unprecedented fury. “Longer than you apparently.”

Alex’s granite gaze hardened even further. “Griffyn. I have been a Watcher for more years than you’ve been alive. I have been waiting for you my whole life. And now, all you do is wait. The world is at your command, if you do but reach out and take it.”

“You have no idea,” Griffyn replied in a low, barely controlled voice. “I never wanted this thing, your whole mission has been to have me reach out and take it, and now you’ve succeeded, and I want it, I am seeking it, and I hate it. So, I wait, a few days, a year: what matters that? In the end, I will be like all the others. Twisted, warped, missing from my own life.”

Alex was quiet a moment. “Not all of them, Griffyn.”

“I do not care!” he roared. The thunder bounced off the walls and kicked down the dirt tunnels. “I cannot say it any more clearly than this: I despise it. And now, all I can do is seek it. I leave my woman to follow the mere hint of it. I dream of it at night.”

Alex paused. “What kind of dreams?”

Griffyn dropped down on a huge block of stone, jutting out a few feet from the rest of the close-set stones, almost as a seat for someone like him, sitting and pondering how to get into the inner chamber. He put his elbows on his knees, his forehead in his hands. “Leave.”

“Griffyn, my every move has been to serve you. If—”

“Leave me.”

Alex stood a moment, then turned and strode away. The torch flame stretched and swayed in the breeze of his retreat, then grew still and steady again. Griffyn pressed his face into his palms. He could smell the cold metal of the keys on them. Again, he was here, in a cellar, while the whole world was waiting in the fresh air above him.