Cerúlia jumped on the empty cart bed of another wagon that was just leaving. The other haulers looked at her in surprise.
“Say, wench, where’d you spring from?” said one with bad teeth.
“Missed the cart I came in on,” she replied shortly.
“Kind of scrawny for a hauler,” said another man, eyeing her body with a leer and poking her waist with a dirty finger.
“You’ll leave me alone if you know what’s good for you,” Cerúlia replied in a firm tone, placing her hand on her dagger’s hilt.
“Temper! Temper!” retorted the man. “Don’t flatter yourself. You ain’t no prize pigeon.”
A few streets outside the palace, when the cart paused in heavy traffic, Cerúlia leapt off. She scurried down a narrow and shadowed alleyway, fearful that someone would be following her. She pressed herself into a doorway, scanning both directions.
She had tried her acting skills, and this time they hadn’t been sufficient.
How am I going to get into the palace? It’s guarded so tightly.
Deep in her memories, Cerúlia recalled a play park and a gate that squirrels could open. It had been called … West Gate, so it must be on the west side of the palace. Cerúlia oriented herself and began striding in that direction.
The neighborhood of wealthy mansions near the royal grounds sat quieter than the middle of the city. Cerúlia walked purposely, pretending in her mind that she worked as a stable lad, and that her master had sent her on an important errand. The blue tanager flew over her shoulder and perched for a moment on the stone in front of her.
Where didst thou go? he asked.
I tried to get into the palace, but the way was blocked. Do you know a small gate on the west wall?
Course one does.
He led her to a small iron gate in the tall stone wall. The day had run on: light had begun to wane. Cerúlia tried the gate, only to discover that it was locked and double-barred from the inside. At her request, squirrels attempted to free the door, but they did not have the strength to lift the iron bars.
Tanager, is there any other way for me to get in the grounds?
The squirrels and the bird conferred; then the tanager led her to a stately tree that had a long bough stretching over the stone wall. Cerúlia regarded it with a scowl. This tree would be difficult for Ciellō; how could she, with her compromised shoulder, manage it? She studied the handholds and footholds carefully in the gathering gloom. After looking around to make sure she was unobserved, she took a running start to jump up a pace high, grabbing a lower branch and wedging her feet into rough spaces in the bark. She clung for a moment, then reached for another handhold. The bark under her left foot gave way, and she slid, scraping against the trunk, all the way down.
Thinner trousers would have ripped. Even with her thick material her legs felt chafed inside the fabric and her hands and forearms sustained deep scratches. Cerúlia rubbed her hurts a moment while studying the tree more carefully, trying to recall the way she had climbed the cliffside into Oromondo. She tried again. This time her foothold broke only after she had grabbed the treasured upper bough with her right hand. She hung there perilously. With great effort she got her left arm around the branch too, but even both arms lacked the muscle to pull her up and astride. She swung her legs a little, then a little more, making her feet hit flat against the stone wall; then she walked her feet horizontally up the wall so she could cross them over the branch, leaving her hanging upside down like an opossum. She wiggled her body forward along the branch and over the wall until the palace grounds appeared below her, then dropped her feet and hung by her weary arms. She let go and tried to absorb the fall in her knees. The twinge in her ankle was insignificant; she could walk off the sprain.
The tanager had flown over the wall easily and now perched a pace in front of her. All right. I’m inside the palace grounds. Now what? she asked the bird.
The palace lieth a long way in this direction.
Her legs were tired, but the princella set out at a steady pace, grateful for all her training aboard Misty Traveler. Soon the tanager, a daytime bird, took his leave. The moons came out, both just slivers in the inky sky. She passed amongst trees and shrubs that might remember her from her childhood, but which loomed about her as unfamiliar shadows. Had she ridden this path on Smoke? She tripped on a root in the darkness and just barely caught herself before she tumbled.
Finally, after more than an hour, when she could see lights from the palace, she paused to consider her next step. Could she climb a roof? Find an open window? Sneak inside the palace?
Then her eyes fell upon the base of the building, and she noted the ring of guards stationed at intervals of fifty paces around the circumference. The palace walls stretched low around the entire grounds, and as she had just proven, they were hardly impregnable. Matwyck’s Marauders—their sashes bloodred instead of the white of the ordinary guard—encircled the palace itself, providing another layer of protection. Cerúlia watched these men for a while. They had been marshaled out in force, and from their posture and stance she judged that they were vigilant. She had little chance of sneaking by.
So. With guards everywhere she turned, she couldn’t steal into the palace. She would need to be invited.
38
Lemle couldn’t sleep, but that was not unusual. The jail cells were so crowded with men caught up in the Marauders’ dragnets that no one could find a place to stretch out, and the air hung fetid with waste and body odors.
Noises reverberated against the stone walls. The prisoners would cough, mutter, or moan, while the guards would laugh amongst themselves or purposefully make a clatter to destroy desperate dreams of open air and freedom. Lemle found that he missed the quiet woodland sounds of crickets and birdsong that had surrounded Rooks’s shack as much as he missed the sunlight that he used to take for granted.
As near as Lemle could count, he had been held in captivity for two moons. When Rooks had died last winter and Stahlia and Percie had returned from their safe—if stilted—refuge in Naven Manor for the funeral, Lemle had told Percia he wanted to move to Cascada and pursue his dream of becoming an engraver. Stahlia had loaned him the money for his voyage, and Lordling Marcot had kindly arranged a position for him at the Type and Ink Press in a commercial neighborhood of Cascada.
Lem recalled how excited he had been by his job and the sights and crowds of the capital city. He’d felt as if a new world had opened to him and he was finally about to live on his own terms. He’d gazed at the men on the streets and wondered if an unrecognized future love was right that moment passing by.
He’d been such a naive fool.
Lemle had only been working at the press for a fortnight when the shop was raided by guards in red sashes. They had grabbed the owner and thrust a handful of leaflets in his face.
“Did you print this? Did your shop print this?” their leader demanded.
Lemle’s new master had denied it ever more vehemently during the repeated questioning, but the soldiers didn’t believe him. Picking up one of the leaflets from the ground, which was a cartoon of Lord Matwyck as a bloated pig, Lemle didn’t believe him either, because he recognized the paper stock the Type and Ink used, and the page had a small tear at the corner characteristic of one of their hand presses.
The men started beating the owner. They held back Lemle and the three other apprentices either with rough handholds or pointed weapons. Then the brutes stuffed his master’s mouth with leaflets and held his nose while he choked, thrashing on the floor, clawing on their hands, and his face took on a purplish color.
After this display of sadism the guards gathered up the four stunned workers and carted them off to jail.
“I’ve only been here a fortnight!” Lemle protested. “I had nothing to do with this leaflet!”
“Shut up,” said a guard, and he punched Lem in the stomach for emphasis.
When they reached the holding cells on the edge of Cascada, Lemle tried again, shoutin
g to the jailers, “Just let me send a message. I’m sure my patron will want you to release me.”
A uniformed man delivered a volley of blows to his belly and finished him off with a kick to his privates. Lemle shuddered, remembering the agony.
When Lemle came out of his shattering pain on the cell floor, a group of wiser prisoners set him straight.
“Look, boy, it don’t matter if you are guilty or innocent. Most of us are innocent, or at least innocent of what they say we done.”
“Look, boy, no friend nor family nor patron can help you here. No one can get word to wives or fathers. Once Matwyck’s Marauders have you, your only choices are imprisonment or death. If you wise up, you might yet live awhile.”
Death might come any number of ways, Lemle learned, as he wised up over the next weeks. Guards randomly selected men for the public executions that were held to frighten the populace. Or if you caused him too much aggravation a jailer might just bash in your head. Or a desperate fellow prisoner might strangle you for your rations. You could also die of the flux or any one of a score of other illnesses.
Anonymity and mistrust added to the prisoners’ miseries. Lemle didn’t know whether the fellow printers he’d been arrested with were already dead or whether they, like him, had just been shifted to another holding place. The population of the cells shuffled almost daily with new prisoners coming in and others being taken away. Lem shrank from trying to form a bond with another prisoner, because the pal you made today might be gone tomorrow, or might sell you out to the guards for extra rations.
Tonight Lemle gave up trying to sleep and sat up. The old man sitting on the bench in the corner nodded at him. Lemle had noticed the elderly prisoner when he’d been brought to this cell a couple of weeks ago. The man’s lank hair floated all the way down his back, indicating he’d been in captivity a long time. He looked frail, but the jailers didn’t mistreat him; in fact, Lemle observed that when passing out food they often gave him a large portion and served him first.
Smiling encouragement, the old man patted the bench next to him and beckoned Lemle. Lemle was so disconsolate that he snatched at any offer of companionship, so he threaded his way over his other dozing cellmates, trying very hard not to step on anyone, getting cursed at when he didn’t succeed.
The ancient prisoner slid over to make room for Lemle on the bench.
“You’re not from Cascada, are you?” he whispered.
“No, I just came here recently, from Androvale,” answered Lemle.
“Androvale. Major city, Gulltown. Principle crops: apples and hardwoods,” muttered the old man.
“That’s right,” said Lemle. “Have you ever been there?”
“Been there? No. But I could tell you were country-bred by how much you tossed about. Rural folks have a hard time adjusting.”
“Where are you from?”
“I believe this is my nineteenth jail,” his seatmate answered, ignoring his life beforehand.
“Nineteenth! How do you stand it? How long have you been captive? How do you keep from going mad?” Lemle kept his voice low and cast his eye on men lying nearby; he really didn’t want to disturb anyone from their escape in sleep.
“How do I stand it? The trick is to find little boons. For instance, this place is better than the one that had mold and much better than solitary confinement. I get to talk to people here, such as a smart young man like you.”
“Focusing on tiny benefits has kept you going?”
“I refuse to go mad, and I refuse to die. I just won’t give them the satisfaction.”
“How long have you been imprisoned?” Lemle repeated.
“What year is it?”
“Year Fifteen of the Regency.”
“Really, is it now?” The old man grinned. “Then I’ve been held for fifteen years. How are things in the outside world?”
“Not great,” said Lemle glumly, seeing in his mind an image of the owner of the Type and Ink choking to death. “You’ve been held since the beginning? That’s forever.”
“You are a young man; you should hold on to hope of outliving this regime. I am an old man, and I refuse to give up. What’s your name?”
“I’m Lemle of Wyndton. What’ll bring about this miraculous turn for the better? What’ll save you and me and all the other wretches?” Lemle gestured out at the sea of misery that surrounded them.
His cellmate patted Lemle’s knee and whispered in his ear, “The queen’s return.”
“Pah! What makes you think she’s coming? She might be living a life of ease in Lortherrod, she may have abandoned us, or she could be dead by now. Or she might try to return and not be able to overthrow them.”
“No. She’s too strong for that.”
Lemle snorted at this rosy vision. “You’re living in a fantasy, sir. Or, no offense, but you have lost your senses.” He closed his eyes, feeling weary and wondering if he could nod off sitting up on the bench. But he didn’t want to desert the first person who had treated him kindly in days. “You didn’t give me your name.”
“No, I have faith,” said the stranger, picking up lost threads of the conversation. “You see, I knew her when she was a child. A strong and smart child. I had the privilege of serving as her tutor. I am Master Ryton.”
“So what?” Lemle wasn’t usually rude to his elders, but the man’s persistent optimism grated on him. “I’m sure that hundreds of people knew her. That doesn’t mean you can see the future.”
Stubbornly, the elderly man batted away Lemle’s doubts with frail hands.
Lemle insisted, whispering, “And even if she comes, is she bringing an army with her? Do you think this lot”—he nodded his head toward the coarse jailers down the hallway, drinking and playing cards—“is going to roll over for one queen?”
“‘One day the drought shall be broken,’” muttered the old man, reciting a line from the famous poem about the queen’s eventual return.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that too. ‘And the wondrous Waters will course clean’ and all.”
“Really?” The old prisoner was astonished. “You know those lines?”
“You’ve been in jail too long. Everybody knows the whole ‘Dusty Throne’; that’s gone around for ages.”
“Truly?” asked the old prisoner.
“Of course.” Lemle scratched his neck, wondering if there were fleas here. “You’ll hear it in every tavern in the land and ofttimes in a Church of the Waters. Or at least you used to, until reciting it became a crime.”
“Has it now?” Master Ryton broke into a self-satisfied smile. “I didn’t know. You see, I wrote it in jail five. Jail five had rats—I had to stay up nights to fight them off—but there I was blessed with paper and ink.”
He marveled, “How did my composition travel? Mayhap a jailer picked it up.… But you are from Androvale, you say. My verse traveled that far!”
Despite his depression, Lemle was impressed to meet the poet of the now-famous rhyme. He was about to say so when a jowly passing guard called out, “Hey fellas, come look at this. The loon’s found himself a young beau.”
Only one of the jailers was interested enough to stir himself. He came to the bars of the cell and leered at Ryton and Lemle, then made a rude joke to his fellow that had the two guffawing.
“Isn’t that pretty boy on our list for the gibbet?” one jailer said to his chum.
“Yep, but all executions have been halted this week. Orders from above ’cause of the wedding. The old loon can enjoy his pet for a short while.”
And the jailers puckered up their lips and made kissing noises.
39
Cerúlia slept fitfully under a thick lilac bush that was threatening to bloom, until a skunk that kept watch over her through the dark hours woke her in the morning.
One must seek one’s den. It’s getting too bright for one.
Did anything happen while I was asleep?
No human saw you. A male came this direction, but one chased him away. The
skunk chortled. Just a determined little rush and they always flee!
Thank you for your help. Cerúlia stroked the small animal from the top of its dapper head to the end of its long tail. The skunk flicked his long tail in a goodbye salute and scampered out of sight.
As the light grew bolder, Cerúlia tried to make herself more presentable, rubbing the dirt and dried blood off her hands and patting her braid (she had allowed Ciellō to fix it in a chignon to hide her burn) back into shape as best she could.
She spied on the red-sashed guards, noticing with relief that their rounds ended in the daytime hours. Servants, administrators, gentry, and white-sashed guards began carrying on their business around the palace; everyone looked busy and excited rather than wary. The princella carefully chose a place to join a traveled footpath and strolled out of the bushes with a pretense of normalcy. No one on the grounds paid any attention to a lone woman in working garb.
She asked the tanager to lead her to an inconspicuous doorway. It looked promising; only one footman, holding another clipboard, stood outside the unprepossessing entrance.
Cerúlia smiled at him. “Is this the way into the palace?” she asked in her most innocent voice.
“For servants of the wedding guests,” he frowned.
“Ah. What if I am Mistress Percia’s maid?”
“The wedding party came with no servants. And you’re not in livery.” The footman started frowning. “Guards!” he called, grabbing her arm. Immediately, two burly soldiers appeared from an interior vestibule.
Not a good choice, tanager, she sent to the bird, who looked away and pecked at nothing, avoiding responsibility.
“This woman tried to walk in,” said the footman to the soldiers. “Yet she can’t be a visiting servant. Look how dirty she is!”
“What’s your business here then, eh?” asked the taller of the guards.
“I’m a friend of the bride’s family,” Cerúlia answered, falling back on the truth.
“Ah! That would explain why you come to the palace dressed like this! Bumpkins! I told you!” said the footman to the guards with undisguised contempt.
A Broken Queen Page 31
