His eye was quickly becoming accustomed to the smoky half-light, which was generated by flaming torches placed in wall sconces around the room. There was a balcony that ran clear around the second-floor level. This had been a small dining room when Ryan had been a child, and there had been music-mandolin, dulcimer and banjo-played from the balcony.
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Now Harvey Cawdor, baron of the ville, stood there with his woman at his side.
“We welcome you, Master Thursby, to Front Royal. You will understand that we must take precautions-” he stretched the word out to an absurd length, as if he sa-vored every elongated syllable “-precautions… against them that trespass against me. You saw our crop of flowering trees as you came here, Master Thursby?”
“Yes, Baron.” Ryan made a half bow to the shadowy figure.
“Good, good, good. You see, dearest, that here is a man of culture and understanding who will be welcome. Not some ragged and double-poor fucking bastard who would covet everything I own!”
Ryan took a deep breath. The change from the effusive and elegant welcome to the foul words-delivered in a rising and hysterical scream-was totally unexpected, bringing to Ryan the realization that his older brother might well be full-crazy.
“Where are the other visitors, brother? Brother Thursby?”
At that moment the door opened again, and Krysty Wroth came in, wearing a dark blue blouse and knee-length skirt of the same Front Royal livery. Her ankle boots were of plain untanned leather with a low, stacked heel. She’d used a piece of thin cord to tie back her cas-cade of hair. Even in the poor light of the vaulted room it still blazed like a coronet of living fire.
“Brother, wel… Come… sister. Sister welcome. Is she…?”
Ryan heard a woman’s voice for the first time, pitched low, but with the crack of a command to it. The bulky figure of the man shifted sideways a few steps, until it stood directly beneath one of the torches.
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Then, at long last, Ryan was able to properly see his brother. He had the same clumsy, shuffling, crablike walk with the right leg trailing and the right shoulder lifted in an unsightly hump. His face was partly in shadow, but Ryan could detect that there was some malformation of the mouth and nose. After so many years it gave him a thrill of vicious pleasure to see that his parting punch into his brother’s hooked nose had been so brutally success-ful.
But above all of this was the astonishing way that Harvey Cawdor had grown grotesquely fat.
Not plump. Not just obese. But grossly, obscenely fat. He wore a flowing gown, like a cerise bed sheet, but it couldn’t conceal his size. A quick guess put him around the 350-pound mark. His clothes were covered in delicate filigree embroidery, in woven patterns of silver and gold. His chubby hands were smothered in rings, one with what looked like a human eye set in a stone of amber.
Lady Rachel moved, with an infinite grace that caught Ryan’s attention, to stand near the lord of the ville. Her face turned away from the light to peer down into the gloomy cavern of the hall at the man and the woman. She was taller than Harvey Cawdor, slim and elegant, wear-ing a gown that looked like black velvet, soft as sin. Her hair was cropped to her narrow shoulders, dark and lus-trous. Her cheeks were very pale, and her eyes had van-ished like gemstones of midnight jet in the hollows of their sockets. She wore no facial makeup, and her fingers were long and strong without any jewelry.
“Is the woman mutie?” she asked in a soft, caressing, melodious voice.
“No, she’s not, Lady Rachel,” Krysty replied in a loud, ringing voice, startling Ryan as he felt it wash over him like a breath of fresh air. Only then did he realize that the
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room carried the scent of some floral incense. One of his father’s serving women had used something like it. The odor was clinging and sickly sweet, like the rotting meat that attracts the most beautiful of butterflies.
“Where are the others of your party, Master Thursby?” the lady asked. “There are two more men and then two more that have fled our hospitality into the unfriendly Shens.”