Throne Shaker (The Clash and the Heat Book 3)

by Val Saintcrowe

  He looked at me. “I should have come to you right away. Now so much time has passed… At first, I thought I would find her straightaway, that she simply had wandered off the path and grown lost, but… the woods out there are not very big, my queen. I could see the walls around the fortress at all times when I was looking. She is not lost. She… I have been looking for her for so long, because I don’t want to admit to myself what the truth of this is.”

  “Don’t say things like that.” I squeezed his hand. “No, Bisset, she wandered too far, that is all. We’ll have men combing the entire area, and we’ll have her back before morning.”

  A rap sounded at my door.

  I opened the door to Solene.

  “You summoned me?” she said.

  “Bisset’s wife, Marguerite,” I said.

  “We are not married!” called Bisset. “We never got married.” His voice broke.

  “She’s gone missing in the woods,” I said. “I need search parties organized. She must be found.”

  “Of course,” said Solene, nodding. “Can Bisset answer some questions for me, so we have an idea where to start looking?”

  “Yes,” I said. I gestured to Bisset. “Ask him.”

  Bisset looked through Solene. “I kept thinking that if I just kept looking, I’d find something, but it’s preposterous to think that she’s lost her way out there.”

  “Well, perhaps she wandered too far and fell,” said Solene. “She could be wounded or unconscious. You look dead on your feet, Bisset. I think you must rest.”

  “How could I?” he said. “I will go out with you. I will show you the last place that I saw her.”

  “Just describe it to me,” said Solene. “You must sleep. You’ll be no good to her otherwise.”

  “You know, I could have been with her in Dumonte,” said Bisset. “There were all those months, after we came back from Rzymn. I had no reason to push her away, but I did. Because I was self-righteous and I thought that I’d be distracted from my duties if I ever…”

  “Bisset,” I said. “Where did you last see her?”

  “By the path near the north wall,” he said. “She waved to me. Said she’d be back in a few hours. I should have gone with her.”

  “I know where that is,” said Solene. “We’ll begin our searching there.”

  “It’s dark,” said Bisset.

  “We can’t wait until morning,” said Solene.

  “No, indeed,” I said. “She’s already been out there one night on her own.”

  “Oh,” said Solene. “Well, the distance she could have covered in that time…”

  “I know,” I said. “That’s why there is no time to be lost.”

  “No time at all,” said Solene, nodding at me. “I’ll organize the knights, and we’ll be scouring the woods as soon as possible.”

  “Thank you,” I said to Solene.

  She left us.

  Bisset stared after her, shaking his head. “I keep thinking about her last moments. Was she terrified?”

  “She’s not dead,” I said, glaring at him.

  “I hope she’s not,” said Bisset, taking a long, slow breath. “But…” He swallowed, and his eyes were shining. “There’s a way I’ve felt, ever since the first time I spoke to her. It’s hard to explain, but there’s a sort of awareness I have, a shimmering at the edge of my subconscious, just knowledge that Marguerite is there. And, my queen, it’s gone.”

  I seized both of his hands in mine. “You mustn’t entertain such dreadful thoughts. Come, I will help you to your quarters.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I can’t bear to be there without her.”

  “Another room, then,” I said. “You must get some sleep.”

  * * *

  My rooms in the fortress were in the interior of the building for safety reasons. There were no walls of the rooms that were outer walls, so there were no windows on the walls, although there was a skylight overheard that let in some light to keep the rooms from being frightfully dark.

  Supposedly, no one would be able to get into my room this way. There was only one door, and I kept guards on it.

  However, I had to admit that since Remy had retreated, security had become noticeably lax, because there was no real danger. At one point, I had been afraid of Jalal, but I no longer had any concerns in that direction.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised that Ophelie found her way into my room.

  But when I woke up to someone crawling over me in my bed, I was surprised. My heart beat out a frantic rhythm, and I wrapped my arms protectively around my belly. I gazed up at the shadow over me for several moments before I made sense of it, recognizing the shape of her head and the way she held herself.

  “Ophelie,” I breathed.

  “Fleur,” she said, rocking back to sit on the bed next to me. She held a hand aloft and it lit up with living flame, illuminating her face.

  I scrambled to sit up in bed, pulling the covers up tight to my chin. “Please, Ophelie, if you kill me now, you kill my child as well, and certainly even someone such as you has some trepidation about taking the life of a baby.”

  “I’m not here to kill you,” said Ophelie.

  She would probably say that regardless. She’d try to lure me into a false sense of security. I couldn’t trust her. I had a pistol that I kept in the table by my bed, something I’d insisted on since I was queen.

  But one night last week, the table had been jostled and the pistol had gone off, ruining my other bedside table and putting a hole in the wall. I had decided that it wasn’t safe to keep the pistol loaded.

  So now what I had next to me was entirely worthless. I could just see myself trying to pour the gunpowder and ram the ball in with the ramrod all before Ophelie struck.

  The pistol was practically useless.

  I should have opted for a knife.

  “Do you feel temptation, Fleur?”

  “What?” I said. “Everyone feels temptation. What are you talking about?”

  “The things that I would see every day, they would tempt me, and I would try to fill the needs within myself with what you suggested. You said I should kill thieves and abusers, bad men who deserved it. And I would go out and do as you bid, but then I would come back, and my temptations would still be burning brightly.”

  “I thought you weren’t going to kill me,” I said. “Truly, if you’re going to talk me to death before you do it, going on about how tempting you find me—”

  “I’m not talking about you,” said Ophelie. “This was back in Dumonte, and I didn’t think of you that way. For a long time, I thought you were worthy of me, truly worthy of me, that you and I were building something together. I thought someday maybe you’d look at me the way you looked at Dubois or the king, but you never did. Now, I don’t know, Fleur, I could kill you, I suppose, but it would never be as satisfying as I imagined being with you could be. I wanted to kill with you, you know.” She sighed.

  “I hear that you’ve been taking young women and burning them,” I said. “If you think I’m going to let you go again, simply because of our past—”

  “You owe me so much, Fleur,” she said. “How many times did I fix problems for you? I should think that would count for something.”

  “No,” I said. “Not when it comes to my people. You can’t slaughter the daughters of Islaigne and expect me to sit by and allow it to happen.”

  “You’re getting me off track,” Ophelie said, sounding annoyed. “How about you don’t interrupt me anymore?”

  I reached out a hand to touch her. I was going to extinguish her magic.

  But she darted out of the way, climbing off the side of the bed. “Where was I?”

  I pushed aside the covers and got out of bed, going after her.

  “Ah, yes, temptation. I thought it would be out of sight, out of mind, and it was… until I saw her again. There she was in the woods, and I felt the temptation again, only a hundred times as strong, and there was no way on earth I
could resist.”

  I stopped, a chill going through me. “Marguerite,” I whispered.

  “So pretty, don’t you think?” said Ophelie. “And she and I, we were often together, because I would be guarding your room, and she would be there seeing to the duties of a maid. I would look at her profile, the way her lower lip puffed out—”

  “And you thought about cutting it off?” I snapped. “What is wrong with you?”

  “Don’t get like that,” said Ophelie, annoyed. “It’s so predictable, the outrage.”

  “You killed Marguerite, and you don’t think I’d be outraged?”

  “She’s not dead,” said Ophelie.

  I let out a noisy breath. “What?”

  “She’s alive,” said Ophelie. “At least for now. I thought we could play a game. If you win, you can have her back. If I outsmart you, then I get to do what I want with her.”

  “Ophelie, no games. You will give Marguerite back or—”

  “I am the one who has the power here,” she growled. “I have her, and if you want her back, you will do what I tell you to do, and I tell you, we’re playing a game.”

  I shuddered. “You’re utterly mad.”

  She smiled, and in the flickering light of the flames, she looked like a demented doll. “Riddles.”

  “Riddles?”

  “I love them, don’t you?” She leaned closer to the flames, so that they licked up the side of her face. Of course, she wasn’t burned. “I have hands, but I can’t clap. I face east, but the sun never touches my face. What am I?”

  I gaped at her. “You expect me to solve that? How could I possibly? I can’t think right now, not after you’ve told me about Marguerite. Is she hurt? Have you burned her? What have you done?”

  Ophelie backed away from me, abruptly putting out the flame on her hand, plunging us into darkness. “You have until noon today to find her. After that, I’ll kill her.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I didn’t bother to knock at Bisset’s door, I just barged in, calling his name.

  Bisset was awake and sitting up immediately. “What is it? What’s happened?

  It really wasn’t fair. Bisset had been up for too long and had needed to rest, but there was no time to waste. I had to wake him up.

  “It’s Ophelie,” I said.

  “What?”

  “She has Marguerite.”

  Bisset let out a sound, rather like a wounded animal, something not nearly human.

  “She’s alive,” I hastened to add. “But Ophelie, she wants us to play some horrible game of wits to find her. I don’t even understand it. She’s given me a riddle. I don’t know how solving the riddle is even supposed to help us find her. I’m not even good at riddles.”

  “Alive?” whispered Bisset. “Truly?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Are you good at riddles?”

  He pushed past me and lit the lamp by his bed. He gazed into its flame, rubbing his face. “What’s the riddle?”

  “Uh…” Oh, blazes, what if I had forgotten it? But no, I had forced myself to take note of it. “I have hands, but I cannot clap. I face east, but the sun never touches my face. What am I?”

  He furrowed his brow.

  I hugged myself. “I don’t understand any of it. Perhaps if your hands were forced apart or something, you wouldn’t be able to clap. Do you think that makes any sense? And the sun wouldn’t necessarily touch your face if you were inside, but what person faces east constantly?”

  “It’s obviously not a person,” he said. “That’s not how riddles work.”

  “Oh,” I said. I chewed on my bottom lip.

  It was quiet.

  I spoke up. “Anything?”

  He shook his head.

  I looked toward the door. “I should send someone out after the search parties. We know she’s not in the woods.”

  “Do we?” said Bisset. “What if Ophelie is lying? What if she’s claiming responsibility for something she didn’t even do? She might like the idea of making you dance like her little puppet.”

  I nodded. “All right. The search parties keep searching. We must figure out this riddle.” I laced my hands together. “If Guillame were here… He always had the head for this sort of thing. I never have.”

  Bisset stood up. “All right, well, let me get dressed.” He looked me over. “You get dressed too.”

  “We have until noon,” I blurted. “I didn’t tell you that part. Ophelie says she’ll kill her at noon.”

  “But it’s not yet dawn.” He turned to look at the window, even though we could both see it was dark outside.

  “No,” I said.

  “So, we have time. We can solve this stupid riddle between now and then.”

  I didn’t answer. Did we have time? Could we solve it?

  * * *

  Bisset met me in my chambers within five minutes. I called for something to eat and some coffee. I thought we could use the sustenance if we were to be at our best capacity.

  I clutched at my coffee cup and blinked my bleary, sleep-deprived eyes. “If it’s not a person and it has hands, it must be an animal, I suppose.”

  “Not necessarily.” Bisset stared at the bread set out on the tray. “I can’t stop thinking of her. Where is she? Marguerite isn’t getting any breakfast.”

  “Yes, but we must be sharp,” I said. “So eat something.”

  He considered this and then used his knife to pick up some cheese spread. He scraped the knife against a slice of thick, brown bread. “All right, well, listen, with riddles, it’s often about the turn of phrase, you know? It may not be the sort of hands we’re thinking of.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said.

  “It might be a stationary object, you know? You were saying that if something were inside, it wouldn’t see the sun, and so it would be something that sits inside all the time.”

  “Right,” I murmured. I drank some coffee. “But what sits inside with hands?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we should walk around the fortress after we’ve eaten, see if we see anything that strikes us.”

  “All right,” I said.

  We talked a bit more as we drank our coffee and ate, but we had no ideas.

  Finally finished, we set off into the hallways, carrying a torch with us to look around since it was still dark outside.

  The sun came up, and we were no better off. There wasn’t much to see in the hallways here. The house was massive, with two main wings, east and west, but the wings mostly contained rooms and hallways and some portraits on the walls.

  At some point, after the sun was high enough in the air that the sky was no longer stained red, we thought we should determine exactly what time it was, and so we went to the entrance to the east wing, where there was a large pendulum clock.

  It was only when we stopped in front of it that we both seemed to realize it at once.

  “Hands that don’t clap!” I said.

  “Face east and the sun never touches my face,” said Bisset. “This is the answer to the riddle.” He pulled open the door to the clock’s mechanisms and there was a piece of paper.

  The writing on it was even with flourishes, as if the writer had taken her time making it look perfect.

  “What does it say?” I asked.

  “What is gold, then green, then orange, then black?” said Bisset.

  “Another riddle?” I said. “Blazes, how many of them are there going to be?”

  * * *

  “What are things that change color?” I muttered as we strode through the hallways. “The sky? The sky is gold sometimes, isn’t it? And orange? And black?”

  “But not green,” said Bisset.

  “Right,” I said, nodding. “Perhaps we need more coffee.”

  “It’s a tree,” said Bisset. “It’s the seasons. Gold in the spring. Green in the summer. Orange in the autumn, black in the winter.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yes, I can see that. I might have gone with white for the winter.”


  “Well, the tree itself isn’t white,” said Bisset. “The snow would be, if it lay on the branches. Which is not quite the same thing.”

  “Well, not all trees are gold in the spring,” I said. “In fact, I don’t know any which truly are. Some have yellow buds, but—”

  “Well, that’s what we need to know,” said Bisset. “A tree, a specific tree, with yellow flowers in the spring.”

  “Wouldn’t it be handy if it were springtime now?” I said.

  “It’s not.”

  We both sighed.

  “Listen, the tree in front of the wall,” I said. “The very tall one? If it’s a specific tree, could it be any tree besides that one?”

  “We might as well go there, I suppose,” said Bisset.

  We strode out of the castle and out of the gates and examined the tall tree there. It was quite tall, so tall that when approaching this fortress, it was visible from miles off, the first sign that one was getting close. I remembered seeing it when we had been running from Remy’s armies.

  But there were no holes in the tree containing more riddles and no other signs that it might have more information for us.

  Bisset and I circled the tree for some time. Bisset even hoisted himself up into the branches and climbed up in the tree, looking about for any clues.

  There was nothing.

  Eventually, we went back inside and asked some of the guards about trees that had yellow flowers. But all of them had come with us from Castle Ignis, and none were familiar with the particular flora of this place, so we had to get someone to fetch one of the women who was employed here year round. She was washing floors in the west wing, and it took nearly a quarter of an hour before she appeared.

  When she did, she was wiping her hands on her apron because they were still wet.

  “Yellow flowers?” she said, clutching at her apron. “Well, only the thick tree out in the courtyard. It’s an ugly one, that, but the flowers are pretty.”

  We went out into the courtyard and there, in over in the corner was the thickest, most gnarled tree I’d ever seen in my life. It was an ugly thing, lumpy and twisted and squat.

  Bisset and I approached the thing and as we did, I felt a strange bit of nervous anticipation settle in my stomach. I put my hand over my belly button, protectively, as if I could shield the baby within me from whatever we were getting close to.