CHAPTER 24
To the Honorable Lady Corning,
It is my greatest joy to inform you of the wellbeing of your eldest daughter, Rosalind Corning of Havencourt, and her latest achievements in the fine, feminine arts. She is a sparkling jewel in my crown of ladies-in-waiting, musically gifted, charming, courteous, and, as always, with a needle she is exceptional.
Yours in Good Faith and Friendship,
Her Majesty, The Queen, Astrid of Yavarid
Havencourt was a hulking stronghold at the base of Mount Sooth, built smartly into the side of the mountain and boasting never-breached walls. The county it laid claim over was not an especially large one, but the Cornings had been around for as long as the idea of owning land had, perhaps longer, and when something is old, it is also often rich because time itself pools gold.
Rosalind hadn’t been home in at least three years, Elayne knew, having met her on her first day at Yavarid Castle and never spending a day without her since. She could feel the trepidation in her friend’s long stare up at the spires of the castle when it fully came into view. “Come on,” she said, mustering what little joviality she could. “Time to impress mom and dad with those sewing skills you picked up at court.”
Rosalind glanced down at Frederick’s body on the sledge they’d constructed of pine boughs. “You better be worth it.”
An open field stood between them and the walls of the castle. From across the grass, a horse thundered at top speed, and Rosalind jogged out ahead to take a better look. Far in the distance there were two other horses following. She threw her hand in the air and signaled to the rider who made a sharp turn and barreled toward them.
“Rosie?” A feminine voice shrieked from across the field as the horse sprinted in their direction. The animal came to a sudden halt, and a young girl propelled herself off its back, nearly tripping over her gown as she raced at them. She was the spitting image of a younger, much shorter Rosalind, but with long, free hair. “What in the godless gorge happened to you?”
“Don’t swear!” Rosalind shouted back, her arms open to catch the girl as she flung herself forward. She spun the young girl around and squeezed her tightly, “Violet, you’re so tall now!”
“Not as tall as you! Where’s all your hair?”
“Nevermind that.” Rosalind set her back down and clamped onto her shoulders. “We need help. My friend’s been badly injured.”
Violet peeked around her to see the others, her light eyes curious and concerned as they fell on the bloodied knight. Two men on horseback rode up then, out of breath despite having not run themselves, calling out to release the girl or face certain death.
“Shove it, numbnuts,” Violet called back. “It’s Rosie!”
The two dismounted, grumbling, but immediately staggered into awkward bows when they took a longer look at Rosalind.
“Violet, seriously. Manners.”
The girl rolled her eyes. “Please shove it, numbnuts.”
The guards swept Frederick up and rushed him off along with Neoma and Bix at Rosalind’s direction. Though Elayne wanted to accompany him, she knew there was nothing she could do at this point: Neoma had made it clear that only medicine and time would heal him. And the look in Rosalind’s eyes said she actually needed her more.
Covered in dirt, sweat, and dried blood, Duchess Elayne Orraigh and Lady Rosalind Corning walked out onto the polished tiles of Havencourt’s main hall. The place wasn’t as grand as Yavarid Castle, but after so long with either trees or cave as their ceiling, the arch of the hall’s interior felt too grand, and Elayne wiped at her face, hoping her glamour at least would stay put.
A man sat at the far end of the room at a high table with parchment spread out before him. He leaned over the pages while two younger men looked on beside him. He barely noticed the two girls when he first glanced up at their presence then immediately back to his work, but then he stood.
“My Rosalind?” His lips barely moved, but his voice, bewildered, carried across the hall.
She grinned through the caked-on dirt and hurried up the hall to her father. Count Corning was a massive man, wide-chested and tall to boot, and for the first time Rosalind looked small in his tight embrace.
He held her away from him then and looked her up and down. “What in the godless gorge has happened to you?”
Violet giggled at Elayne’s side, leading her across the hall and closer to them.
“You should have seen it, Dad!” Rosalind’s voice carried. “I fought off bandits, and escaped from trolls, and I met this nice guy who just gave me this staff, oh, and El did this crazy, soul-sucking magic, and we’ve got a thousand year old elf in a jar, and—”
“All this blood.” His voice was low, but it stopped her. He turned her hands over in his own. “I’ve heard no news. Was Yavarid Castle attacked? How…how did you escape?”
“Nothing like that, those guys are fine, but we were attacked by this crazy shadow thing.” Rosalind took a breath and her voice dropped to a more somber tone. “Father, there are creatures out in the woods and on the mountain. Dark creatures. And Violet was just riding around outside past the castle walls! It’s not safe!”
“Dark creatures?” Count Corning glanced over at the men who he had been speaking with. They’d gotten to their feet and were staring at the girl intently. “Rosie, what did you see?”
Rosalind looked back to Elayne, her brow furrowed with an even deeper confusion than it normally wore.
Elayne glanced at the other men, then back to the lord. “Sir, if I might?” Elayne offered him a curtsy, but she could not muster a smile. “There was something in the woods, something that wounded our friend.” She took a breath, pushing away the image of Frederick’s still body from her mind. “And I fear it may be from…my home.”
“Your home?” The lord peered at her. Of course, he did not know her.
“Oh, Dad, yeah, this is El.” Rosalind slapped her on the back, rocking her a bit. “She’s the duchess of Heulux, and also my best friend.”
Count Corning looked distressed as he hurried them into a room off the hall. He hollered two names in a voice one would expect from the massive mound of a man. Elayne felt exceptionally tiny when they showed up, both the size of Rosalind’s father, as tall as an elf and as wide as two of them put together, and when the youngest one threw his arms around Rosalind and lifted her, Elayne flattened herself against a wall to avoid being knocked over. She suddenly understood why dwarves were always puffing up their chests and making a racket—it was much better than being stepped on.
They were Rosalind’s uncle and cousin, a grizzled older man with grey flecks in his beard, and a bright-eyed giant of a boy only just on the cusp of adulthood. When Rosalind officially introduced Elayne to them, they bowed deeply—she was, after all, a duchess—but she was embarrassed by the sincerity as no one had been so humble in her presence in these last ten years. They were not, however, able to hide their confusion. They knew better than most the annexation of Heulux, being so close to the border, and that the Orraigh line was no more save for a cruelly disfigured daughter. And yet here she stood, unmarked under all of the dried blood and dirt. Thankfully, they were too polite to say anything.
“The duchess and my daughter report something dark in the forests on the mountain,” Rosalind’s father told the two.
“What were they doing in the forest?” Her uncle seemed quite put off by the idea.
“We’re questing!” Rosalind told them excitedly, and Elayne squirmed.
“It’s my doing,” she quickly cut in, “I wanted to return to Heulux.” She tried explaining to them what they’d been through thus far without highlighting to her friend’s family that she’d nearly gotten her killed on multiple occasions, but Rosalind had a way of adding back in the omitted bits with a flourish that focused almost solely on danger. “Here, in the forest on Mount Sooth, the most dangerous thing we’ve encountered was a dark figure, and I hate to say it, but it was very…elf-like.”
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Rosalind’s cousin slapped his hand on the table. “With skin blue like midnight and eyes like moons?”
“Uh,”—she weighed his language in her head, then shrugged—“that’s it exactly.”
“You see!” He turned to his father.
“What?” Rosalind bounced on her toes. “You mean you knew? And Violet’s been allowed out there like that?”
“I can rein her in as well as I ever could you,” her father grumbled. “And anyway, she was not alone.”
“I saw that thing fell the most skilled knight I know. And what it did to Elayne,”—Rosalind shuddered—“Two of your guards wouldn’t have been able to protect her.”
“Damn.” Her father turned away and paced the length of the room. “It’s been ten years, and nothing’s gotten through that barrier. Why now? Why at all?”
Rosalind put her hands on her hips and lifted her chin. “We don’t know, but we intend to go and find out.”
“Absolutely not!” The door to the ready room swung open, and a woman, as tall as Rosalind but unlike her in every other way possible, entered, flanked by two servant women. Elayne stood straighter instinctively in her presence, and the woman’s eyes fell over them both with contempt. “What have you done to yourselves? Rosalind, your hair!” She reached out for the shaggy ends but stopped short. “A bath, immediately! And new clothes, and gods, I don’t even know what else.”
“Hello, mother,” Rosalind mumbled.
“Karine, this is the duchess of Heulux.” Rosalind’s father grit his teeth and gestured to Elayne.
“What, under all that dirt? She doesn’t make a very good impression, does she?” Karine gave her a trite curtsy, but never broke her gaze. “Abducting my eldest and nearly killing a knight of Yavarid? Do you know a man lays on his deathbed in our apothecary right now? And with him a Trizian and a goblin?”
“He’s a kobold,” Elayne and Rosalind insisted in unison.
The look that crossed Karine’s face would have melted a weaker woman, but Elayne was not quite so meltable anymore. “If you would prefer I leave, then I will at once, but please, my companion is gravely injured, and yes,”—she swallowed—“it is my fault, but he should not die because of it.”
“Of course,” Count Corning told her as his wife made a sort of wailing, annoyed sound. “We can, uh, discuss these issues while he heals.” He faltered, his eyes flicking around the room. “But there will be time for that later. Perhaps it would be best if you rested a bit from your journey.”
“Father—”
“Your father has spoken,” the countess snapped.
***
Maw is oftentimes a dangerous place. Within, there are beasts, there are monsters, and there are, as our heroes learned, those creatures who have been corrupted by a dark and mysterious magic. But then there are things that don’t exactly look like any of those other things at all but are sometimes even worse.
One of those things was Rosalind’s mother.
Tall and gorgeous, even when wearing a glower that would send a pack of rabid dragons—if they existed—back flying the way they came, a portrait of Countess Karine Corning could do her no justice, though there were many attempts throughout the castle. She looked a bit different in each, but it was not the chosen feature—a fancy hat, a small dog, a daughter—that caused this. It was as if the artists had tried, and failed, to capture her. She would love the Trizians, thought Elayne, as she was marched down a long hall of portraits depicting the countess with each of her daughters. Karine was incredibly proud of the fact she’d given birth five times but still looked, as she called it, like “one of Va’ye’s chaste maidens.”
There had been no time for anything else: they had to be clean and fitted for proper clothing. There had been a lot of scrubbing, and it had gone on for so long that it was suddenly time for supper before Elayne could even deign to ask about seeing Frederick.
The Cornings were massive people—the rumors about them having dwarven ancestry more likely confused with giant—but dressed daintily in frills and pastels. Rosalind’s pants had mysteriously vanished after they’d bathed, so she found herself again in a too-fancy, powder blue dress, and the ends of her hair curled up to mimic a longer coif that had been tied away. Elayne too had been dressed in something tight and in a shade she could only call insufferably pink. She had managed to keep the stone around her neck, of course, but if not for Belladonna, the next eldest of Rosalind’s sisters, she might have lost the parchment from Bard Blackiron. The girl had given it back to her before secreting away their clothes.
Neoma and Bix were nowhere to be found at the table once they were sat at it, but Rosalind had shaken her head as if to tell her friend not to ask. The conversation was pleasant though forced. Count Corning struggled through topics as he attempted to discuss the dark being from the forest and was shot down by his wife. “Not in front of the girls,” she insisted, her other daughters lined up beside her at the table. Instead they discussed courtly life, specifically the status of Prince Quilliam and what was expected of him on his nameday.
“I had hoped,” Karine said with a glance at Rosalind, “our daughter’s presence at court might catch the eye of His Majesty, but clearly my efforts were in vain.”
At Elayne’s side, Rosalind’s shoulders hunched inward. She felt a familiar heat in her belly. “Ro actually gets a lot of attention at court,” she said quickly. It wasn’t a lie, and Rosalind perked up. “Anyway, Countess, I’m surprised you haven’t already left for Yavarid City for the coronation.”
“Yes, well.” She glowered. “The harvest is going poorly, as I understand it. I don’t see what the big fuss is, they’re not even our crops.”
“We’re having to redistribute,” her husband stated, scooping up a spoonful of peas from his plate. “A striking number of our fields along the western border didn’t produce as expected.”
“The western border?” Elayne put down her fork and leaned in: that was the border closest to Heulux.
“Enough of that,” Karine cut in, raising her voice. “I’ve got to listen to that every day, but with such an interesting guest I’d expect better conversation. Now, I intend to present both Camillia and Belladonna as our most eligible prospects for marriage to the prince. Duchess, what do you think?”
Rosalind was the oldest of five. The next eldest, Belladonna, nearly dropped her fork. Put together perfectly, but meek as they came, the girl’s eyes bugged and she made the first noise Elayne had heard from her all evening, a squeak followed by a suppressed cough.
“Belladonna has proven herself adequate in every task I’ve put her to. Though she doesn’t particularly shine at any of them, the sum of her talents may well be considered acceptable.” Belladonna’s mouth was hanging open. “Close your mouth, dear, or you’ll be confused for a harlot. Now Camillia is of course much more impressive, her looks more pleasing as well, but she may be a bit young.”
The middle Corning daughter simply smiled down at her food. Belladonna coughed again, patting her chest.
“Belladonna, please,” her mother snapped, then grinned at Elayne. “Duchess, you will of course return to the castle by the prince’s nameday.” It was a statement more than a question.
“That’s the plan.” She remembered Frederick’s words wistfully.
“The prince will ascend from what I understand. King Harry is abdicating on his son’s nameday, isn’t that right? Belladonna, for M’ye’s sake, pull yourself together!”
Belladonna slammed her hand against her chest again. Her face had gone quite red, and her eyes were tearing. Rosalind recognized the danger first, jumping and running around the length of the table. She pulled her sister from her chair and began beating on her back. Their mother shrieked, followed by the frantic cries of the other girls, silverware crashing down onto dishes, glasses spilling, and servants suddenly in a frenzy.
“Gods!” Count Corning jumped up as well.
“Get a hold of yourselves!” Karine looked absolutel
y petrified. “It’s only a short trip, Bella!”
“She’s choking!” The count hurried around the table.
Rosalind slapped Belladonna’s back a final time, and a hunk of meat flew out of the girl’s mouth across the table, wet and half-chewed, to land perfectly between the well-presented breasts of the countess. Silence fell over the room as Belladonna gasped for air, sliding limply back into her seat. Then Violet burst into hysterical laughter, Poppy, the youngest, following suit.
“Stop it!” Camillia hissed, but the younger girls could not, the sight of their mother jumping to her feet and instead of picking out the hunk of barely chewed food, shimmied and shook, trying to bounce out the hunk, knocking into the table and upturning her chair in the process.
“My dear, calm down!” her husband insisted, plucking out the hunk where her servants had failed, unable to dodge the frantic flapping of the long-limbed woman’s arms.
Karine wiped at her brow, the girls’ laughter met with that of Rosalind’s. Elayne bit her cheek to keep from cracking a smile.
“Well!” Karine cleared her throat, glaring at the younger girls and silencing them. “Belladonna, I expect you to represent yourself better than that in front of the future king!”
“She was choking, mother!” Rosalind rubbed her sister’s back as Belladonna slumped forward in the chair.
Her mother sneered. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
CHAPTER 25
The apothecary was located across the courtyard of Havencourt. The squat building was overstuffed with tinctures and jars and many high tables for working where even late into the evening a small group of servants toiled, crushing herbs and measuring ingredients. Rosalind took Elayne down a set of stairs to a windowless chamber lit by a fire at its end and smelling strongly of mint and wood smoke.
Frederick was laid out on a table at the back of the room, and Neoma stood at his side. When she heard them enter, she looked them over with a scrunched-up nose. “Don’t say anything,” Rosalind warned, scooping the ends of her dress into her hands so she didn’t trip. Bix was sitting up on a stool and inspecting the innards of a green jar, but he peeked around it to see them and started laughing.
She's All Thaumaturgy Page 20
