There was no answer. I wondered if he had killed the lad with one blow. “Pick him up,” Laudwine ordered someone. I heard the sound of a chair dragged across the floor, probably to receive Civil. A moment later, Laudwine continued, “I asked you a question, boy. Why are you suddenly turning traitor on me?”
Civil’s voice was muffled. He’d probably been hit in the mouth or jaw. “Not a traitor. Don’t owe you anything.”
“Don’t you?” Laudwine laughed. “Your mother is still alive. Don’t you owe me for that? You are still alive. Doesn’t she owe me for that? Don’t be a fool, lad. Do you believe the Mountain Queen’s false promises? That she wants to listen to us, to make things better for us? Faugh! She wants to lure us in, like rats coming to poisoned grain. You think I’m a threat to you, that I could end your lives by betraying you. And so I could. But only if you betray me first. For now, I hold you in the palm of my hand, and I protect you. I am far more reasonable to deal with than some of the Piebalds that follow me. Be grateful that I keep them reined in. So let’s have no more foolishness. You and I, we share too much to oppose one another.” His tone changed to one of genial inquiry. “What brought this on, anyway?”
Civil hissed out an accusation I could not hear.
Laudwine laughed. “So. She is a woman, boy, and one of our own. I know it’s hard for a lad to think of his own mother as a woman, but so she is, and a comely one as well. She should take it as a compliment, and as a reminder. She has lived too long apart from us, denying what she was, consorting with ‘the nobility’ as if they, or she, were better than we are. It’s going to come full circle, Bresinga. Consider yourselves fortunate that we accepted you as part of us again. For when we come to power, those of Old Blood who have denied their magic and turned their backs on their kin and even betrayed us to the Farseer filth . . . all of them will die. They’ll die in their own King’s Circle, just as that bastard Regal killed so many of us. And for what? Why did so many of our parents and their animal partners die in those circles? For the sake of creating a Witted turncoat, one that would hunt down the Witted Bastard for him. Full time and past due that the Farseers paid for that.”
And, ear pressed against the cold wood, I knew a familiar sickness in my bones as I crouched in the gathering cold and dark of the night. Ah yes. Once again the Farseers’ past had returned to haunt us. For what Laudwine spoke was true. Regal had so hated and feared me that he had decided the only way to bring me down was to find one of the Witted who would help him. Many a man and woman died under Regal’s torture before he found one who would hunt Old Blood for him. The painful scar in the center of my back came from that man’s arrow. Yet what I had always thought of as Regal’s wrongdoing against the Witted would still be toted up against the Farseer family account.