Shadow Hand

by Anne Elisabeth Stengl

  “Six months,” said the baroness. She gazed wetly up at Lionheart, and more tears brimmed in her red-rimmed eyes. “Six months to the day, almost! He vanished soon after my own sweet girl did—on their wedding day, more’s the pity. Two weddings spoiled! That’s got to be bad luck, don’t you think? And her lovely dress all ripped to shreds . . .”

  As she spoke, the baroness’s gaze darted momentarily to the door. Lionheart followed that glance, then strode across the room and shut the door firmly, locking it and pocketing the key. He turned to face the baroness again. The baroness, who sat at his mother’s own desk in his mother’s own chambers. Granted, Queen Starflower had died years ago. But the queen’s rooms remained hers until such a time as a new queen might be crowned.

  The desk that had once held documents of state now supported an assortment of perfumes and jewelry and feathered accessories. From that desk, Queen Starflower had given orders and made rulings equal to those of her husband. Now the Baroness of Middlecrescent sat there, looking twice the fool she was by comparison.

  It was a crime for such a woman to sit in his mother’s place.

  Lionheart swallowed back the bile in his throat. The idea that six months might pass in what had seemed only a night did not disturb him as much as it might have once upon a time. But six months was a long time to a kingdom without an heir.

  “There,” he said to the baroness, patting the pocket where the key now lay. “No one will disturb us, not for a little while at least. Tell me what has transpired since Foxbrush’s disappearance. Why, pray tell, are the barons gathering now? Why did I see royal insignias among the arriving carriages? Why is this House done up for a festival?” And why do you sit in my mother’s chair?

  “It’s the coronation,” the baroness said, mauling her handkerchief in twisting fists. “They’re all here for the coronation tomorrow morning.”

  “The Eldest?” Lionheart asked. “My father?”

  The baroness sniffed and dabbed at her face again. “Poor, poor King Hawkeye!” she said. “He died soon after Prince Foxbrush did. Or, I mean, soon after we thought Prince Foxbrush did. No one told him about the murder . . . if there was a murder. Did you murder him? I don’t even know! But we couldn’t bear to tell the Eldest; he was already so low after banishing you. He slipped off gently enough in the end, and he’s with the dear queen now, interred and safe.”

  Her sniffs grew louder, and Lionheart feared he might lose her entirely to a storm of sobs. He grasped her by the shoulders, gave her a shake, and demanded, “If my father is dead and Foxbrush supposed so, who are they crowning tomorrow morning? Who has been named successor?”

  He did not need her answer. And it was just as well he didn’t, for at that moment, the door handle rattled.

  “My dear?” came the Baron Middlecrescent’s voice from the hall. “My dear, have you locked me out?”

  “Oh!” The baroness stared up at Lionheart, and her face, red from crying, went ghastly white. “Oh, he’ll kill you if he finds you here!”

  She was on her feet in a moment, grabbing Lionheart’s hand and pulling him across the room. A great, floor-to-ceiling wardrobe stood against the wall, in which Queen Starflower had once stored documents of relative importance. The baroness flung it open now, revealing an array of crinolines and petticoats. “Quick, inside!” she whispered even as the baron rattled once more at the door.

  Lionheart obeyed without a thought, climbing in behind a curtain of petticoats scratchy with lace (a style far too heavy for Southlands’ heat but all the rage among the courtly ladies nonetheless). “Give me the key, and hurry!” the baroness snapped, and once more Lionheart did as he was told. There was something altogether strange and a little horrifying about hearing such tones of command from the soft mouth of the baroness. He fished the key from his pocket and pressed it into her plump hand. “Now keep quiet as a wee mousy!” she hissed, shutting the wardrobe door in his face.

  Lionheart put his eye to the crack between the doors and watched. The baroness bustled across the room, answering her husband’s calls in a fluttery voice. “Oh dear! Oh gracious! Oh, Lumé! I’ve misplaced the key, my love!”

  “Do hurry, sweetest one,” said the baron from the other side, his voice just verging on the fringes of patience. Lionheart pondered the advantages of having everyone in the world assume one to be a complete fool. After all, he had spent about five years as a jester himself.

  But the baroness is not so cunning, he thought. Or . . . is she?

  The baroness opened the door at last and stood fanning herself with her handkerchief as her husband stormed into the room, scowling but unsuspecting.

  “Oh my! What could have come over me?” she gasped. “I thought I’d put it on my little table, but it wasn’t—”

  “Never mind, darling,” the baron growled. He wore gorgeous robes similar to but newer than the robes of office worn by Eldest Hawkeye himself. They were light and flowing but heavily embroidered after the fashion of Southlands, and the fibula pinning his cloak was shaped like a seated panther.

  The emblem of the crown prince.

  The baron moved to Queen Starflower’s desk and began riffling through one of the drawers. He looked over his shoulder, suddenly scowling as he took in his wife’s attire, a ruffled dressing gown tossed over several layers of petticoats and a corset. “You’re not clothed to come down. Have you rung for your ladies?”

  “Oh no,” said the baroness with a heavy sigh and sank into a chair. She fanned herself still more and dabbed at her forehead. “I just don’t think I could face it tonight, beloved.” If a voice could be fluffy, hers was like duckling down. “Not with our dear girl still missing, and that dreadful Baron of Blackrock always makes such eyes at me, and I so dislike those barbarous foreigners from the north, and—”

  Although the baron could boast not so much as a trace of beauty, at the moment he turned upon his wife he looked startlingly like Daylily, whose face always concealed such a storm of fury behind the most placid of masks.

  “You aren’t coming down?” he asked.

  “That’s what I’m telling you, dear,” the baroness replied with a twirl of her handkerchief. “I just can’t seem to find the will for it. And with tomorrow being what it is, I think it best if I go to bed early and get my beauty sleep—”

  “You are my wife,” said the baron. “You are to be Queen of Southlands. You will attend me on this night of feasting, and every night I desire. You will support me.”

  The baroness, seemingly oblivious to the daggers in his voice, sighed and put a hand to her forehead. “Oh, sweetest love, I just can’t seem to manage it! I do think it cruel that they’re putting up such a fuss and feasting when dear Hawkeye is scarcely cold in his grave. If our own Daylily were back already, then maybe . . .”

  The baron’s cold fish eyes narrowed. “Daylily is not coming back.”

  “How can you say that?” cried the baroness, sitting upright in her chair. “How can you say that, husband? Really, you are too cruel sometimes! Of course she’s coming back. Prince Foxbrush went to rescue her.”

  “Prince Foxbrush is dead. How often must I tell you this?”

  “Nonsense, he can’t be dead” was her reply. She settled back in her chair, her face all practical reason. “He’s gone to rescue our ducky, and you can’t expect heroism to happen overnight. He might even now be facing a dragon for her dear sake! How can you give up on them so easily?”

  Middlecrescent ran a hand down his face, which was now more tired and vulnerable than Lionheart remembered ever seeing it. For the first time in his life, Lionheart wondered if even the baron might be human.

  “Why must you be so against this rise of ours, my dear?” he said. “Why do you resist my kingship? Don’t you realize what this means for your house as well as mine? Don’t you see the good of Southlands in our ascension?”

  “Oh, don’t be silly, dear,” said the baroness with a dismissive toss of her curls. “You know I don’t know about such thin
gs. My mind goes whirling when I try to think about it!”

  The baron’s mouth worked as though he wanted to speak. Instead, he returned to his search of the desk. After riffling through papers and not finding what he wanted, he slammed a drawer. “You think I’m wrong, don’t you,” he said, his back still to his wife. “You think what I do is . . . evil.”

  “What makes you say such a thing?” said she, tilting her head. “You’re my husband.”

  “Then why,” said he, turning suddenly and fixing her with the full force of his large eyes, “will you not come down?”

  “I’ve told you and I’ve told you!” said she, sounding very like a child. “I think we should wait for Foxbrush to return! With our Daylily. How silly would you feel, husband, if they were to come out of the Wilderlands in another day or two and you had to step down from the throne?”

  A muscle in the baron’s broad forehead ticked. Lionheart could almost hear his teeth grinding. Then he said: “I have mastered Southlands as no Eldest in a hundred years has mastered it. Even with the Dragon’s poisoning of our fields and our people, I have brought it under my rule. Hawkeye never united the people so. Foxbrush never could. Even that fool, Lionheart, had he not betrayed his own with loyalties to demons and monsters, could never have brought the strength to Southlands’ throne that I will bring! I am the true Eldest, even if no royal blood flows in my veins. And to this, all the barons have agreed.”

  The baroness replied with a guileless smile, “Only because you forced them. Only because they’re afraid of you.”

  A long silence crackled the air between them. In that silence, Lionheart could hear a future of screaming and bloodshed and doom. He waited, unable to breathe, for what he knew must follow from the fire burning behind the baron’s cold eyes.

  At last, however, the baron sighed. He crossed the room and caressed his wife’s plump cheek. “But you aren’t, are you, my dear?”

  “Aren’t what?” asked she, blinking.

  “Afraid of me.”

  “Oh no!” said she, getting to her feet and taking him in her arms. “Silly man! Why would you ever ask that?”

  And she kissed him. Lionheart moved away from the wardrobe door, embarrassed at glimpsing such a tender moment between the baron and his wife. He felt his face flushing and dared not look out again for some moments, though he could guess a little at what went on by the lack of talk without.

  Finally he heard the baron say with a deep sigh, “Very well, my love. Stay here if you must. Rest and make yourself easy while I face the vipers below. But tomorrow, you will wear the robes I ordered, and you will take the crown when I place it on your head, and you will be the queen I make of you.”

  The baroness giggled. “Have a nice supper, sweetest,” she said.

  The stamp of feet, the opening and shutting of a door, the click of a lock, and Lionheart dared breathe again. But the baroness’s hurrying footsteps across the room made him draw himself upright just as she flung wide the wardrobe door.

  “Get out!” she said, beckoning with both flustered hands. “Hurry, hurry!”

  He stumbled into the room, tripping on petticoats. When he saw the baroness crossing the room to her bellpull, he gasped. Would she summon the guards? But why would she give him away now when she hadn’t to the baron?

  “What are you doing?” he demanded sharply, wondering if he should tie her up or gag her or both.

  She looked around at him, her mouth a little O of surprise. “Why, I’m ringing for my page boy, of course.”

  “What for?”

  “So you can clunk him on the head and take his livery.” At Lionheart’s openmouthed stare, the baroness shook her curls, laughing. “You don’t think you’re going to stop the coronation without a disguise, do you? Don’t be a ninny, and get behind that door. You must do your part, or there’s no way we can have ourselves a rebellion!”

  12

  THAT A VOICE COULD BE HEARD above the lion’s roaring was testimony both to its wrath and its range.

  “Little BOY did you call me?”

  Foxbrush lay in a pile of helpless horror, his vision one moment full of teeth and mouth and all things ravening . . .

  The next moment, full of woman. And such a woman!

  She was tall and willowy but simultaneously full and completely feminine, with legs long as a gazelle’s and shoulders straight and bare above a dress made entirely from ferns held together by who-knows-what magic. Her skin color shifted from white as snow to dusky shadows, like a forest’s ever-changing visage. Her hair fell in thick black coils about her face, but was grown over with moss and leaves and flowers that seemed to blossom from the hair itself. Vines coiled up her bare arms and legs, living bangles, and more flowers bloomed on these.

  The only similarity between her and the child of a moment before were those red-rimmed, furious eyes.

  “Do you want to call me a boy again?” she demanded.

  A woman’s wrath is a thunderbolt, quick and electrifying, or so the poets say. Foxbrush, as he lay beneath the fir tree and watched this vision of exquisite beauty descending upon him like the bolt of a lightning god’s lance, trembled with the terror of her beauty. Her fists were raised as though to strike, and though they were the most perfectly formed fists in the worlds, Foxbrush did not doubt they would slay him.

  But she stopped at the last moment, and her enraged face twisted into an expression of surprise. She took a step back. The white lion—a lioness, really, and all the more vicious for it—padded up beside her and snarled, black lips wrinkling back to better display a set of amazingly bright teeth.

  “I know, I know,” the woman said, as though in response to the lioness. “I see it too. But are you quite sure?”

  The lioness shook her massive head. Tall though the beautiful woman was, the animal’s ears still reached as high as her shoulder.

  Foxbrush stared from one to the other, and it crossed his mind that he’d rather not die. He tried to swallow and couldn’t, so it was with a dry throat that he said, “Um, may I—”

  “Quiet!” snapped the woman, and the lioness’s lip curled again. They circled, the woman one way, the lioness the other, until both had circumnavigated their prey and stood once more before him.

  “It’s true, then,” the woman said, as if something had been decided that Foxbrush could not guess. The expression on her face was of displeasure.

  But the lioness settled down into a comfortable position, no longer snarling, and began grooming one of her colossal paws as though she had no further interest in the matter. She spread her toes and chewed them thoughtfully, her eyes half closed with dozing.

  The woman, on the other hand, crossed her perfectly rounded arms and narrowed her eyes. Tears still clung to her lashes. She said, “Speak, mortal!”

  Foxbrush opened his mouth but found he didn’t know what to say. Usually if he started talking, something would happen, but now there simply were no words. Worse still, he felt a sneeze coming on, of all things. That horrid tickle behind his sinuses, that inevitable foretelling. And he hadn’t a handkerchief!

  “Um . . .”

  “Speak!” The woman took a menacing step. “Tell me at once why you are on that Path!”

  The tickle was getting worse. Were thistles hidden among the ferns? He’d always been allergic to thistles. “I . . . I do beg your most excellent pardon—”

  “Well, you can’t have it,” she replied. “Tell me now. Why the Path?”

  She would have sounded petulant were her tone not that of honey and velvet and vanilla cream all rolled into one. The very smell of her was heady and wonderful. And it did not help the oncoming sneeze. Lights Above, was he allergic to her?

  He grabbed his nose and caught the sneeze so that it burst angrily in his head and ears. “Um. Pardon me,” he gasped, rubbing his eyes.

  The woman stared at him. “Did you explode?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  Her eyes narrowed. “I think you exploded.”


  “No,” he protested thickly. “No, I’m still quite whole.”

  “Are you magic?” she demanded.

  Again he shook his head. “No. I’m not. I’m just—”

  “Then what are you doing on that Path?”

  “What path?”

  “That one, of course!” said she, and pointed at his feet. He looked but saw nothing other than crushed ferns and pine needles. Twisting in place, he sought some other sign of a path nearby. As far as he could discern, there was none.

  As the woman watched him, her fury dissipated into curious interest. “Don’t tell me you can’t see it.”

  “Your pardon, my . . . my lady,” he gasped, then sneezed again, once more startling her so that she stepped back and stamped one of her feet like a nervous filly. Foxbrush wasn’t entirely certain that “lady” was the correct form of address for this maiden who certainly would not be welcome in the courts of the Eldest attired thusly. But it seemed the safe bet at the moment. “I see no path.”

  “Ha.” The first sound was not a real laugh. But the next “Ha!” she gave, was. Then she tossed her bounty of hair, and her fern dress rustled, and the vines on her arms writhed as she laughed for real. “You walk the Path of the Lumil Eliasul, and you don’t even know it!”

  She shrieked as though it were the finest joke she’d ever heard. The lioness, by contrast, looked up from her grooming, gave a disinterested sniff, and put back her ears.

  “If I might inquire,” Foxbrush managed with some shred of dignity when at last she seemed to be quieting. “What is this, um, Lumil Eliasomething, please?”

  He might have been the stupidest thing to ever crawl out from under a rock for the look she gave him. Foxbrush died a little on the inside; a man doesn’t like a woman such as she to look at him that way.

  “The Lumil Eliasul?” she said, shaking her wild hair and blinking her amazing eyes. Everything about her, every movement, every word, was huge, not in its size but in its power. Even the trimness of her waist was huge in its own way. “The Prince of Farthestshore? The One Who Names Them, the Song Giver, the Eshkhan, the . . . I don’t even remember all his names! Don’t you know any of them?”