Sunshield

by Emily B. Martin

  “Ellie, baby! What’s wrong?”

  I spring for the bedroom door. Rou is swooping down to Eloise’s bedside, where she’s slumped over with one hand on the side table, as if she’d been reaching for the water jug just out of reach. Her breath sounds like a stone caught in a milling wheel, thick and rocky. Her skin has a grayish pallor to it, filmed by sweat, and her bonnet’s askew. Several dark curls cling to her damp forehead.

  “Oh, blessed Light, she’s on fire.” Rou flings an arm toward the door. “Get the physician—get somebody!”

  Without a pause I scramble back for the parlor, my heart in my throat. Halfway across, I shuck off my shoes and run barefoot into the hall. I fly down the corridor and take the staircase three steps at a time, angling for the physician’s ward. She’s at her counter rolling pills when I burst into her office.

  “Come quick, please—it’s Princess Eloise.”

  Ten minutes later, I’m hovering behind Rou, who’s hovering behind the physician. She has an ear cone to Eloise’s chest, her lips in a thin line.

  “Rainshed,” she says, leaning back.

  “What’d she say?” Rou looks over his shoulder at me, almost like he’s choosing not to understand.

  “It’s rainshed fever,” I confirm, my stomach left somewhere down on the third floor.

  Rou inhales, his face gray. He goes to Eloise’s bedside and closes his fingers around hers.

  “What’s it usually like?” he asks, his voice gravelly.

  I translate for the physician.

  “High temperature, lethargy, low appetite, a thick cough,” she replies. “In about half the cases, it runs its course in ten to twelve days, usually with persisting weakness afterward.”

  “And—the other half?” Rou prompts when I’ve finished the translation.

  The physician pinches her lips. A sick sense of dread fills my stomach. Please don’t make me tell him that.

  “There’s a higher survival rate with the first case,” the physician says tactfully. “A relapse would be more dangerous. Has she taken feather-plant before?”

  “Has she ever taken yarrow?” I ask Rou. “It grows along the western edge of the Stellarange.” Mama sometimes uses it in her scout kits to stanch blood flow.

  He shakes his head. “I don’t think so. She has some allergies. Her physician at home often uses poultices.”

  “I’m going to start her on feather-plant, and a small measure of skunk cabbage to help control her cough,” the physician says, rising from her chair. “I’ll send someone to bring more firewood in case she gets the chills.”

  Whatever Rou’s about to say next is cut short as Eloise breaks into another bout of coughing. He turns back to her bedside, and the physician slips out the door to the hall.

  Eloise’s cough gets deeper and sharper, her shoulders shaking. Rou strokes her forehead, tucking a few curls back under her bonnet.

  “Papa?” she whispers hoarsely.

  “Hi, lolly,” he replies with hollow cheerfulness.

  “What did—” She coughs again. “What did they say at the meeting?”

  “Nothing important. Just odds and ends.” He brushes her sweaty forehead. “You rest, okay? We’re getting something to help with your cough.”

  “I wanted to make notes.”

  “I’ll jot some things down for you later. You rest now.”

  “No, I want—” She clears her groggy throat. “I want to stay caught up—the exchequer is supposed to be at dinner tomorrow—”

  “Sweetheart—you’re not going to dinner tomorrow. None of us are. We’re leaving.”

  My insides freeze. “What?”

  Her fluttering eyelids snap open. “What?”

  “We’re going home,” Rou says, his face set. “We’re chartering a coach and team to take us back across the Ferinno. This trip has been a failed effort—it’s time to cut our losses.”

  “Wait, no—we can’t. Papa . . .”

  “We’re just starting to make progress,” I say.

  “No, we’re moving backward.” He gestures to the door to the hall. “For weeks we’ve been handled and danced around and put off, only to find out we’re potentially being blamed for political blackmail nobody knows about.”

  Eloise’s startled gaze jumps from him to me. “We’re being blamed for blackmail?”

  “I don’t know,” I say quickly. “I only said it’s a possibility—”

  Rou shakes his head with force. “Even if it’s not, you’ve caught the fever everyone’s been worried about, Eloise, and I refuse to take risks where your health is concerned.”

  “How could I have caught it?” she whispers, her eyelids heavy. “I’ve done everything they told us to do.”

  “It doesn’t matter so much how,” he says. “The point is, you’ve got it, and we know almost nothing about it, and the physician says it could be worse if you were to relapse. I know it’s a disappointment—for all of us—but nothing worked out the way we expected.”

  “Let me talk to Iano,” I say, trying to keep from wringing my hands. “Let me just sit down with him—”

  “And what, Veran? You had the chance to talk a few nights ago at the ball, but I hear rumors it didn’t exactly go well.” I drop my gaze. “I’m not saying that to make you feel bad—I need you to understand how the deck is stacked against us. Diplomacy was apparently not the intent of our visit for Prince Iano. I’ll be damned if I understand why, but he’s not interested in talking policy. And part of good diplomacy is knowing when a graceful retreat is best.”

  “But . . . but . . .” I get a vision of me arriving back home, rejoining my family dragging such a monumental failure behind me. They’ll expect me to tell them everything, every twist and turn and nonevent. I’ll have to tell them—Vynce in his new Woodwalker boots, Ida bristling with stripes on her uniform, Susi with a blue-zillion new silver bells on her fringe . . . and Viya, sitting silently, probably keeping a mental tally of all the things she could have done better in her sleep. Papa and Mama, he with a sympathetic smile, she with a few punctuated remarks meant to lighten the weight of my defeat, but both sharing that silent conviction—he shouldn’t have gone. He was never up to it.

  “We can’t,” I croak to Rou. “This could be the only chance—”

  “It’s not our only chance, V. Diplomacy is a long game.”

  “I want to keep trying,” Eloise says, her words shallow as she tries to hold off her cough. “I’ll be okay in a few days.”

  “No, you probably won’t, Ellie. You hold on to even a chest cold longer than most folk, and this is much worse.”

  “But we can do it,” I insist. “I know we can make it work—”

  “Veran—”

  “Moquoia is the key to everything we’ve worked for.” I press despite the palpable sparks in the air. “Too much is at stake—we just need more time—”

  I’ve gone too far. Something in Rou’s posture snaps, throwing every line rigid. He leans toward me. “I am not hanging around, working a cold forge, so Eloise can die twelve hundred miles from her mother in the country that already took her sister away from us.”

  My mouth slams shut, something it should have done about half a minute ago. Eloise’s lips scrunch up, her gaze flicking down to the coverlet. Rou’s face has gone from weary to uncharacteristically fierce. He takes a sharp breath, looking between the two of us.

  “Take a second to get your head around things—both of you. This isn’t debate team or philosophy class. I know you both feel like eighteen years old is the height of maturity, but bellringer—it’s not. And you both have more cause to be concerned about your health than most folk. Eloise—you’re the single direct heir to Lumen Lake.” His voice gets a little rockier. “Since we lost your sister, and since the miscarriages, you’re all we have. Veran, you’re not any less important. And if this is all just some kind of ego boost for you, then maybe you need the failure to reorient yourselves.”

  I don’t know how his words are affecti
ng Eloise, but they hit me like hammer blows, shuddering my chest with each one. Rou’s never harsh. He never snaps. Where Queen Mona is brisk, Mama rough, and Papa calm, Rou’s always the one to lighten the mood, to provoke a laugh, to ease the tension among quarreling parties. The fact that I’ve been callous enough to spark such a reaction from him makes me feel worse than I have so far in this whole five-week debacle.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumble. “I—I wasn’t thinking.”

  Rou lets out another breath, and he rubs his face. “I know it’s not what we hoped for. I’m disappointed, too. It’s going to be hard to explain at home, and it complicates our next attempts with Moquoia. But it’s for the best. You can see that, can’t you?”

  “Yes, sir,” I say instantly.

  “Ellie?”

  “Yes, Papa.” Her gaze is still lowered, but it’s not with the same cut-edged mortification I feel. Rather, she seems to be thinking.

  “Good.” He rises heavily from Eloise’s bed. “I’m going to look into chartering a coach, or at least traveling with a caravan. And I’ll have to start making the case for our exit. Veran, you go ahead and start packing.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Eloise plucks a handkerchief off the bedside table and holds it to her mouth in time to cover a few short coughs. Rou tucks a few damp curls back under her lavender bonnet. He stoops and kisses her forehead.

  “Get some rest. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” With one more sigh, he heads out into the parlor. Only when the hall door closes behind him do I let out my breath.

  “I’m sorry, Eloise. That was so stupid of me.” I wave to the bedside table. “Do you need anything? A drink? I can heat up the kettle . . .”

  She drops the handkerchief from her lips. “Okay, so we’re potentially being blamed for blackmail?”

  My hand halts halfway to the kettle. “Uh, what?”

  “Hurry—I need answers if we’re going to get anything done.” Her voice is whispery and raw. “Who’s blackmailing whom?”

  “Your pa said you should rest.”

  “Papa . . .” she begins, and then takes a short breath, pressing her palm to her chest. A cough escapes her. “I won’t go against Papa. If he thinks we should leave, then we’re leaving. But by my guess the earliest we could leave is tomorrow morning, which means we don’t have a lot of time—but we have some.”

  “Time for what? What can you possibly do in less than twelve hours when you can barely get out of bed?”

  “Not much—that’s why you’re going to have to do most of the heavy lifting. It may be a long night for you. Are you up for it?”

  “I don’t know,” I say warily, thinking back to my string of failures, and my hopes that she wouldn’t ask me to take on anything else without her. “What am I agreeing to?”

  “First, to answer my questions.” She settles her head against her pillow, her eyes underlined with shadows, but her expression set. “Tell me about the blackmail.”

  Quickly—a little hesitantly, given Rou’s admonition a moment ago—I fill her in on what I learned during Kualni An-Orra the day before. The threats by way of Fala, the likely connection to the ashoki, Iano’s anger during the meeting earlier.

  “He wants to send soldiers into the Ferinno,” I say. “Supposedly to root out bandits, but I’m sure it’s to find the ashoki. But that kind of military presence crossing a border . . .”

  “Would be clear grounds for a defensive show from Alcoro,” Eloise murmurs. “Which would ripple out to the rest of the East and set a clear pretext for war—which would be the greatest strain on the Eastern Alliance since it was founded.” She coughs into her handkerchief again and rubs her chest. “All right. Priority one, then, has to be clearing our name—we can’t leave with him thinking we’re behind everything. It’s only going to snowball into something we can’t control.”

  “I tried that at Bakkonso, but he barely gave me a chance to get started.”

  She frowns, but before she can respond, there’s an almighty thump at the window. We both jump.

  “What was that?” she asks.

  My stomach curls. “A bird.” I get up and go to the window, craning my head to look down, where a little body lies on the ledge, its head bent like the ones I saw along the palace foundation. I start to turn back to Eloise, but then I pause—there’s a small drift of moving air. Did the bird break the glass? There are no cracks above it. Curious, I twitch the curtain aside. The main window is made of one giant sheet, but where the drapes hide the edges, they transition to less opulent panes, each just a few inches wide.

  In the very corner of the window, where the casing meets solid wall, one small pane has been broken out, hidden by the thick folds of the drapes. I frown—there are no glass fragments inside, but the curtain is soaking wet—it’s been broken for some time. I lean right up against the casing and look down at the outside sill, wondering if it was somehow cracked from the inside.

  There’s no glass on the sill, but there is something else—a small bowl full of rainwater. Tucked into the corner of the window, it’s protected from the weather beyond. Puzzled, I bend closer.

  And see the hundreds of mosquito larvae writhing in the water.

  I straighten so quickly the curtain drags on its rod. My fingers shoot impulsively through the missing pane—not broken, I realize, but purposefully removed—and push the bowl off the sill. It sails into open air, spilling its infested water as it drops away.

  “What are you doing?” Eloise asks.

  I stand immobile, clutching the curtain. My breath is shallow and quick.

  “Eloise,” I finally say. “Did you know a windowpane over here is missing?”

  “No. Is it broken?”

  “It . . . it looks like it was taken out. There’s no jagged glass.”

  I hear the frown in her voice. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  I swallow. “There was . . . a little bowl of water just outside it. With mosquitoes in it.”

  There’s silence behind me. It stretches out until it fills the room, thick with impossibility. At long last, I turn around to face her. Her face is tense, her forehead creased.

  She adjusts her position on her pillows. She refolds her hands. The silence sticks a few seconds longer.

  “Well,” she says.

  “Do you . . . do you think someone put it there?” I ask.

  “I can’t think of many other options,” she replies evenly.

  We fall silent again.

  “Though it seems like an unreliable way to make me sick,” she says. “Just hoping an infected mosquito might find its way in. Why not just slip me poison?”

  I gesture to the window. “Nobody could say this wasn’t an accident.”

  She purses her lips, but she doesn’t say anything. Stiffly, she smooths the quilt over her lap.

  “Don’t tell Papa,” she says. “He’s already made up his mind about leaving, and if he starts accusing the Moquoian court of deliberately infecting me with rainshed fever, he’ll look like a fool at best and make himself a target at worst. I’ll tell him when we’ve gotten out of the country. Until then, keep your door locked, all right?”

  “What about Iano?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “I suppose I’ll have to write him a letter and hope it will be enough to convince him not to invade the Ferinno. I’d thought about sending you to make a plea at his door, but if we have an enemy in the palace, I don’t think that’s a good idea anymore.”

  I turn back to the window, hoping to hide my disappointment. My gaze falls again on the dead bird on the sill. Iano being blackmailed, but not by us; Eloise being infected, but we don’t know by whom—and all the while this ashoki, her conspicuous death hovering at the edge of the court, altering the tide of diplomacy, breaking alliances. If only Iano could make his search without threatening war on the East and alerting the wrong people in court. If only we had someone we knew for certain we could trust, someone we knew didn’t have a hand in this mess of politics.r />
  My gaze roves over the bird, finally recognizing its patterned feathers, speckled black and white above a shock of yellow. It’s a western bird, not a Silvern one, but I remember it from the canyon rim around the university, piping its sweet fluty song. A meadowlark.

  A lark.

  My mind sputters over several things at once.

  A captive in the Ferinno. A puzzling account of the attack. A confirmed attack on Colm’s stage, a day’s ride in the other direction, happening right around the same time.

  The need for someone to trust.

  I did find out one significant thing—her name.

  It’s Lark.

  I lean back from the window, my heart pounding.

  “I need to talk to Iano,” I say quickly, staring out at the rain.

  “Fetch me some parchment—if you tell me what you want to say, I’ll include it in the letter.”

  “No,” I say. “You don’t have to write a letter. I’ll talk to him face-to-face.”

  “Veran, if someone purposefully broke my window to let in mosquitoes, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to make too much noise on the eve of our departure.”

  “I can do it without the court finding out.” I search for a fast lie. “There’s . . . a cocktail party on one of the terraces tonight. I can talk to him there.”

  “Privately?”

  “Yes.”

  I can feel her gaze boring into the back of my head. “It doesn’t involve anything . . . I don’t know, excessively risky, does it?”

  “Of course not—you know my pa’s rules.”

  “I also know now that you squirreled through a mess of trees yesterday to spy on a foreign monarch. Turn around and tell me to my face that you’re not going to take stupid risks.”

  I turn around, trying to force all emotion out of my expression. Solemnly, I raise a hand. “I swear with a scout’s honor I’m not going to take stupid risks.”

  She squints at me, frowning. “All right, then.” She doesn’t sound at all like she believes me, so I turn for the door as nonchalantly as I can.

  “I’m going to go pack,” I say. “For the trip home.”

  She doesn’t reply. I feel her gaze follow me until I’m out of the room. Once in the hall, I take a deep, shaky breath.