Innocence Lost

by Patty Jansen

  *     *     *

  It was only after she had left the barn that Johanna remembered that she had to go to that dratted ball tonight—how could she ever have forgotten that? Maybe she could have some time before leaving?

  This stupid ball would be so embarrassing, with her as a dressed-up sugar cake a thousand times less elegant than the girls to whom nobility came as second nature.

  She could already hear the scorn as soon as she walked up those palace steps.

  She should have stayed with the sea cows.

  That dress would have looked nicer on a bitch in heat.

  That would be unbearable. She wished the whole thing was already over. Of course the royal family would have no real interest in her. What was Father thinking?

  She could, of course, refuse to go, or refuse the dance her father had brokered with the prince, but he was right about one thing. Octavio Nieland should not get the business. Those ships were going to remain under the Brouwer flag.

  When she came home, she met Nellie walking up the stairs carrying a box with a ribbon that would contain the dress Mistress Daphne had adjusted.

  “You’re just in time for dinner, Mistress Johanna, and then we should get ready.”

  What, already? What about Loesie? “But the ball is not until tonight.”

  “Yes, and that will be only just enough time to get everything done.”

  “The whole afternoon?” But the horrible realisation sank in. Last time she’d gone to a formal occasion—her cousin’s wedding—she had also spent ages sitting in her room being primped up by Nellie.

  “We need to do your hair, your powder, your jewellery.” Nellie counted off on her fingers. “We have a lot to do. The coach comes at six. You have to be ready by then.”

  But, I promised Loesie . . .

  There was no point in resisting. Whatever needed to be done needed to be done.

  First Nellie started on Johanna’s hair, combed, braided and fluffed it up so it would sit neatly under the beaded hairnet that used to be her mother’s. Nellie took forever putting it up in a pile on her head.

  Koby brought some tea and biscuits. “Don’t eat too much, Mistress. It will look rude if you don’t eat at the banquet, and people will gossip.”

  “People find the silliest things to gossip about.”

  She gave Johanna an exasperated look.

  Then the dress. Nellie helped her do up all the fiddly buttons and hooks and laces at the back.

  Nellie brought the pretty box that sat on the dressing table in her bedroom, mostly untouched. Inside, gold and silver chains, gemstones and strings of pearls lay draped over a bed of red velvet. Most of these had been her mother’s, pure Estlander silver with precious stones. Johanna felt like a fraud trying on the different pieces. Her mother had been a minor royal, and Johanna was nothing but a fishwife in comparison. She didn’t want to meet prince Roald. She knew of the balls, of the infighting between the royal families of neighbouring kingdoms, of the gossip between nobles, and wanted no part of any of it.

  Johanna chose her mother’s silver necklace with its huge ruby pendant. It lay cool against her skin in the hollow between her breasts.

  “Isn’t this a bit scandalous?” Johanna asked, putting her hand on the skin of her chest. So much skin. Since when had the open and low-cut dresses become the fashion?

  “Not if we make your skin all nice again.” Nellie draped a cape over Johanna’s shoulders to protect the dress from powder. She already had the powder box out, tut-tutting at Johanna’s expression. “If you covered your hands in gloves and used an umbrella when going out, you wouldn’t get all these horrible freckles and you wouldn’t need so much powder.” She dusted powder over Johanna’s face.

  The smell made Johanna’s nose tickle.

  Then Nellie took the cape off, brushed some hair off the dress and declared Johanna ready to go. She caught sight of herself in the mirror. That young woman in the blue dress with her hair curled and piled in a bun and covered with a gemstone-studded hairnet didn’t look like her at all. In fact, she had to move her hand and turn around a fraction just to make sure.

  “You look so elegant, Mistress Johanna. You’re sure to turn the heads of all the young men at the ball.”

  Johanna felt like rolling her eyes.

  She rose, and found that with the dress’ hoops, she could no longer see her feet. When she had tried on the dress with Mistress Daphne, that hadn’t been so important, but now Nellie had to help her down the stairs to make sure that she put her feet on the steps.

  Father waited in the hall, dressed in his best silk shirt with ruffled collar and the magnificent purple cloak he’d bought on one of his recent travels. Apparently it was dyed with the pigment of thousands of snails. His hair was tied at the nape of his neck, and he had trimmed his beard. He wore his watch and gold chain and enough perfume that she could smell it halfway down the stairs.

  He stared at her, his mouth open.

  When Johanna joined him, she noticed a glitter in the corner of his eye.

  “You look so much like your mother,” he said, his voice unsteady. He cleared his throat and went on, “We went to the ball together a few times. I would be waiting here and she would come down just like you. Looking beautiful. You should wear pretty dresses more often.”

  Johanna felt uneasy and didn’t know what to say. She’d just spent the entire afternoon hating getting dressed up. If it pleased Father, why did she complain?

  The rattling of wheels on cobblestones, and the clip-clop of a horse’s hooves, drifted in from outside.

  “There is the coach.” Johanna was glad to break the silence.

  He offered her his arm. They left the house and went down the steps and into the street, where people stopped to look. Even though he greeted the people politely, Johanna could feel, beneath his clothes, that Father was nervous, maybe even more so than she was.

  She knew the cab driver and his magnificent black horse.

  “Good evening, Master and Mistress,” the man said. He held the horse by the reins and patted its flank. The animal breathed out through flaring nostrils, tossing its head.

  “Nice weather today,” the man said.

  “That, it is,” Father said.

  Indeed the sky was cloudless, though less clear than the previous day. The first stars were already visible.

  Father helped her up into the cab with the awkward hoops in her dress, climbed in himself, and the driver shut the door while Johanna and her father sat down, facing each other. The driver then walked past the cab and jumped onto the driver’s seat. The cab wobbled under his weight and a moment later jerked forwards.

  Father stared out the window, pulling at his ruffled sleeves.

  “We are not in any kind of trouble, are we?” she asked him when the silence lingered.

  He sat with his hands interlaced, elbows leaning on his knees. “We are not, but Saarland is, or, more precisely, the royal family,” he said in a low voice. “Johanna, please don’t speak of this to anyone else.”

  “What sort of trouble? Is Estland making threats? Or Burovia?” Most of the inland nations envied Saarland’s position, because of its harbour city and the river trade. There had been plenty of threats in the past, but Saarland had been at peace for a long time. She remembered the visions in the wood. Demons crawling through the marshes, unseen to the unsuspecting citizens of the city.

  “No threats, as far as I know. Not that sort of trouble.” He paused for a bit, looking at the streets glide past out the window. “Or, not that kind of trouble initially.”

  Why didn’t he just say what was going on?

  His eyes met hers. Johanna felt chilled with the seriousness in his expression. “The envoy from the King came to us for financial help.”

  So she’d heard that right. Eavesdropping was really a most useful thing.

  “And you named your price for the Brouwer Company’s financial assistance, which was to get me into the palace?” Those wo
rds sounded so strange in her mouth.

  “No, Johanna.” His eyes met hers; then he looked down. “Or maybe yes. One dance with the prince only. There will be others. It still remains the King’s choice. But there are a number of important things in your favour: Roald needs to marry as soon as possible. There really is no time to waste. Dare I say the king has already wasted too much time? Secondly, the king has expressed displeasure with the way many of the nobility ridicule the Church and the way he’s spent money on it. Most of the nobles are not in his good books.”

  Not without reason.

  “Thirdly, he’ll want a woman who goes to church. I think you would be perfectly suited. The royal family doesn’t need a pretty princess; they need someone with some common sense in a position where they can make hard decisions. King Nicholaos doesn’t seem capable of making these decisions anymore.”

  “No more wasting money on statues and religious buildings, huh? How does this help the company?”

  “You will inherit it and it will remain under your control . . . if you were to be chosen. The queen is the only woman who can inherit in her own right.”

  “I’ll marry the prince, just like that?” She couldn’t even believe she was saying this. Why would the royal family have any interest in her?

  Father looked at her; there was sadness in his eyes. “Daughter, we need to be strong. Our country needs us. You need to be strong and look after the company. But you can’t do it too openly. I wish there was a world where a woman was not bound to her father’s or husband’s wealth, but there isn’t. I can’t change that for you.”

  Johanna looked towards her knees, under the hoops of the frills. She was angry, angry as she hadn’t been for a long time. Angry with herself that she’d been so stupid to expect a free life.

  She let a long angry silence pass, but, being who she was, couldn’t stay angry for long. There were worse candidates for potential marriage, and even if, as was likely, nothing came of it, she could still say she’d danced with the prince. But the bubble of laughter that rose in her—why on earth would the prince want to dance with her?—quickly evaporated when the coach passed the markets and she remembered Loesie and the demons.

  “Did the king say why he wanted to have a bigger army?”

  “He wouldn’t divulge what happened and why, but the king seems to have deeply upset a Burovian religious order.”

  “The one that owned the boat and the sanatorium where Roald was?”

  “I’m not sure. No one has gone into details about it.”

  “Does this order belong to the Church of the Triune?”

  He held his hands up. “I don’t know. What I’m telling you is what the envoy told me. I’m sure there is a lot more to it, but this is all I know. Although I’m guessing you already know a fair bit of it.” He met her eyes squarely.

  Blood rose to Johanna’s cheeks. Outside the cab, the driver yelled at the horse.

  “Really, Johanna, if you’re going to snoop in the store room, you need to be a lot more careful. You weigh a lot more than when you were eight, you know.”

  She ignored that comment. “The king wants to put together an army?”

  “He is afraid. It seems he did something that made the members of this religious order exceedingly angry. That wouldn’t have been such a problem had the order not had strong ties with Baron Uti of Gelre. I understand he is exceedingly angry as well, although he has not publicly expressed his displeasure. Baron Uti is also a guest at the ball. He has probably been invited as a gesture of reconciliation, but the king’s envoy let slip through that they don’t expect much in the way of negotiation.”

  “And the king has ignored the army in much of his spending recently,” she added.

  Father nodded, gravely. “Since Celine’s death, the king has lost his grip on pretty much anything, including finances. He’s been so consumed by grief that he’s spent vast amounts on churches—as if that’s going to bring her back—and not enough on things that matter—no, and before you say anything, Johanna, churches do not make any money; they sponge off those who are willing to give it. That could be because they have a lot of money, or because they are somehow deluded that giving to the Church will help them. I suspect the Shepherd promised King Nicholaos salvation for his stricken family, and the king was too addled by grief to see that no one can solve his problems except he himself.”

  Johanna had often entertained these same thoughts, but hearing them from her father’s mouth gave them so much more weight.

  Father continued, “That was all fine up until the floods last year, which affected a large part of the royal farms, and the royal family’s income from those farms. King Nicholaos did not want to know about it. He sacked the adviser who suggested that they cut spending. Then he neglected to deal with the succession problem.”

  “Does anyone know why Roald’s younger sister was made heir?”

  “Roald was sickly. He was not expected to live.”

  But he did live, and Celine had not. Now he was back, but why was there so much secrecy still? “And now the king wants protection with extra troops? Against priests?”

  “Yes, I know, I thought he was crazy, but the envoy said that it was necessary to protect our borders, which is fair enough, and something that should have been done long ago. I just didn’t think that it was worth the level of investment that he wanted. I knew there was something that he wasn’t telling me. But something else happened that helps me understand it. I got this today.” He reached into his pocket and gave her a crumpled piece of paper that looked like a page torn from an account book. Which, when Johanna unfolded it, was exactly what it turned out to be.

  In the neat writing she recognised as belonging to Master Willems, it said,

  I have it from sources I can’t disclose that there are hostile actions at the border. There are marauding groups of bandits, affiliation unknown, accompanied by creatures that may or may not be demons. They have reportedly invaded farms at the Bend. Their origin is unknown. They are coming in our direction.

  Johanna met her father’s eyes. They both knew what Master Willems meant—he had seen this on the wind—but his insistence at denying his ability amazed her. At least he had done as she told him.

  In a few sentences, Johanna told Father of Loesie and her baskets.

  Father knew of Loesie, had met her even, and had never told Johanna to stop seeing her, although he no doubt wished she would. Loesie did not meet the “appropriate lady’s companion” standards. The world of willow magic and wind magic was strange to him, but he seemed to understand the need for her to talk to other people with magic, even if those people were a little odd.

  Probably Johanna’s mother also had the gift of magic, although her father had never explicitly said so. He would have been used to magic. He might even have married her because of that; many river and ocean traders did.

  “This is the thing that worries me. There are lots of rumours about impending attack that seem to have no basis, but when you add up all the stories, the picture becomes quite disturbing. You have seen these demons, and Master Willems has seen them. Your friend has been attacked by them, and had her family killed by them. People like to say that demons don’t exist, but things live in those eastern forests that no one has any knowledge of. I’ve only been into the edges of the forest, but I’ve heard the murmurings and whisperings in the leaves.”

  Johanna nodded. She had been with him in that Burovian forest. The thought of that forest still made her shiver, with its gnarled tree trunks and whispering leaves. She still heard the voices, and still felt the fear that they might call her deeper in until she had lost her way.

  Father continued, “People from the court say that the king genuinely believed that Celine would rise from the dead. One night, soon after her death, he claimed to have seen her ghost wander the corridors of the palace. He got the Shepherd to do prayer sessions at the spot where he saw her. When that didn’t work, he started giving money to the Church. He bui
lt a new church. He bought the statue. He encouraged everyone in Saardam to go to church. More prayer would mean more chance that Celine came back.”

  “But that obviously didn’t work either.”

  Father shook his head and sighed. “It gets very strange after that. The court envoy told me that the king employed an ever-stranger string of people. He said they danced on her grave and performed rituals.”

  “Was that why a Burovian religious order got involved?”

  “I honestly don’t know.” But it worried him, she could see that.

  A chill crept over her back. In her mind, she heard the words of Shepherd Romulus. You’re asking for someone who can perform an exorcism. The Church does not provide these people. Exorcisms are quackery that most likely make matters worse than they are. Demons are manifestations of the Triune. They are repelled by prayer, not by fake magicians with horseshoes, goat’s blood and other items that wouldn’t look out of place in the Lord of Fire’s dungeons.

  Exorcism, necromancy, both aspects of the darkest corners of magic.

  She looked out the window, where the roof of the palace protruded from above the houses.

  Would King Nicholaos have been so stupid to have engaged the services of a necromancer? Why, if he was as devout a churchgoer as his behaviour suggested? Why, if his Church forbade any of those dark arts performed by people who were said to have sold their souls to the Lord of Fire? Why, if the king had another child? “If I understand correctly, the king wants to quickly put together a bigger army because he fears trouble with Burovian magicians?”

  “That pretty much sums up my conclusions. Another reason why you could be a good choice: your unusual abilities.”

  Father grabbed her hand and squeezed it, and that was as much a sign of affection as he would ever give her.