The Vanished Queen

by Lisbeth Campbell

  “A lie,” said Lukovian, cool as could be. “As you can see now, the arrest was clearly in error.”

  Esvar smiled. “But you cannot deny the existence of rumors if you were arrested about them, regardless of the correctness of the arrest.”

  That bought him a moment of silence. Lukovian was accustomed to dealing with prisoners who were weak and frightened and would never try to trick him. He wasn’t prepared to be on the receiving end of an interrogation.

  But he was not a fool. He would not have the position he did if he were foolish. He said, a simple and therefore nearly unassailable lie, “I was arrested. I was not charged. I was told nothing.”

  Esvar struck the floor with the flail again. Even the guards jumped. “Are you sure you want to hold to that story?”

  The problem with having backed Lukovian into a corner was that now he could see exactly how things lay. Insolently, he said, “Yes.”

  “Oh?” said Esvar. He pulled the flail across the stone, the metal rasping loudly. He said to the guards, “Tell Captain Marek to come in now.”

  Marek was followed by a man robed in black. One of the witnesses audibly breathed in. Nikovili twisted in his chains and, seeing the man, said, “No. No.”

  The Truth Finder advanced. Any noise his feet made was drowned out by the sound of Marek’s boots. Lukovian was the only person in the room besides Doru who did not draw back to some degree, however slight. He looked confident. He had worked with the Truth Finder for years and had to be certain the man would lie on his behalf.

  “My lord,” said the Truth Finder with a smooth bow. He was tall and thin, with grey hair and pale, long-fingered hands. Esvar had been afraid of him when he was younger.

  Am I really going to do this? Esvar thought. If it went well, it was an act Karolje would approve of. If it failed, he was signing his own death warrant. And it might well fail. He knew he was not a traitor, but if Karolje—or Doru—had told the Truth Finder to lie, the Truth Finder would. For an interminable moment he wished he could change his mind.

  “My name has been called into question,” he said. “Each of these men denies the slander. I have two questions, and two only, for you to put to each of them. Does he have knowledge that I have collaborated with foreigners against the king for my own gain? And has he ever told another person that I have so collaborated?”

  The Truth Finder repeated the questions and, on Esvar’s affirmation, said formally, “If I report untruthfully, may the gods strike me down.” Esvar suspected the Truth Finder did not believe in the gods either, but it was a necessary part of the show.

  “Begin,” he said, and stepped away. His stomach curled in on itself again.

  The Truth Finder placed his hand against Nikovili’s forehead. Silver light glowed at the tips of his fingers. At the touch, Nikovili fainted, which was the best thing he could have done for himself.

  It was done in a few breaths. Then the Truth Finder turned to Lukovian.

  The interrogator stepped backward. Esvar hoped the man would lose his nerve and run for it. That would be so much easier. Lukovian held firm until the glowing fingers touched his skin. “No!” he shouted. He screamed. Esvar’s teeth bit hard on his lip. He was roused, tense; it felt hideously like lust.

  The Truth Finder lowered Lukovian to the floor. His limbs jerked violently. His eyes were closed.

  “This man,” said the Truth Finder, pointing down at Lukovian, “spread the stories. He believes them to be false. The other man knows nothing.”

  “This is the truth?”

  “This is the truth.”

  “I thank you for your service.” He was glad of the ritual words; he would not have known what else to say. The Truth Finder bowed.

  Esvar said to the guards, “Take the men back to the cells. Get a doctor for them if they aren’t conscious by then. Provide plenty of clean water.” He faced the witnesses. “Nikovili remains guilty of smuggling. For him, nothing has changed. Lukovian I judge guilty of calumny against a prince of the realm. The penalty for such false claims is the penalty for the crime alleged, in this instance, death. You are dismissed.”

  He let his eyes find the chancellor’s. Goran looked evenly back. This was not close to over.

  His glance slid to Doru, who smiled. The spymaster might regret losing one of his more forceful examiners, but he probably thought it worth it as a blow against the chancellor.

  Followed by Marek, Esvar left by the side door and went to his rooms. He dismissed the captain to wait outside. He had forgotten it was summer, sunlit and warm. The chill of the Green Court was all through him.

  He was not at all surprised half an hour later to hear the clank of heavily armed men approaching. He said to Marek, “Get your orders from Tevin. Don’t fight,” and let the soldiers take him.

  They stopped at the second level of the dungeons, whose purpose Esvar knew only too well. He stopped walking and let all his weight go into their arms as they dragged him forward. It relieved him when they went into the third room. He wasn’t to be killed then, or blinded, only to be hurt. Pain, he could withstand.

  They removed his shirt and chained him kneeling to the whipping post, wrists cuffed to the post-arms. The floor was discolored with years of blood. He was not granted the grace of a hood, and they would report his every expression to the king. There would be no questions, no verbal taunts, just pain. He hoped they would not use the whip he had brought to the Green Court, but he expected it.

  After chaining him they went away, leaving him time to think, to imagine, to weaken in body and soul. The chains rubbed painfully against his wrists if he slumped at all, and the stone floor hurt his knees.

  Deep in himself was a place of quiet, where he could shelter if he reached it before the pain became too great. He remembered the journey to the mountains five years ago, when Karolje tested him with rebellion. He stood on an outcrop of rock, alone except for the wind, and looked down at the soaring birds and the far, far distant and noiseless river. Mountains filled the space to the horizon. The wind was the sound of the turning earth, and he meant nothing more to the world than the birds did. Whatever he did, whatever was done to him, the wind would always be there.

  He was a thing of meat and blood and bone, of skin and hair and nerves, each breath reaching to the ends of his body, and he was in a quiet secret place that expanded beyond the world, both stillness and motion. Sharp incandescent light, balanced with infinite blackness. If he fell, he would float and drift. The wind was the tide of his beating blood, ebb and flow, ebb and flow, every moment a silver spider thread stretched out infinitely across universes.

  The whip cut into his back.

  It’s only pain, he thought. A thing, a sensation of the body. It did not belong to him and could not enter this place without his permission.

  A second stroke, thin and fiery. A narrow wire lash, which would cut deeper but heal faster. He was not to be scarred like a slave or a prisoner, back a bark-like mass of thickened skin from whipping upon whipping upon whipping. He pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth.

  Another, and another, and another.

  Birds and wind.

  A respite. They would come back. This was only a subtler form of torture, leaving him to wonder when the next blow would fall.

  Pain was increasingly harder to hold off. It had no edges. He was light-headed. He smelled his own blood, felt the warm moisture on his back. His arms and face were sweating, stinging his wrists and eyes. His breath was ragged and rough. He had bitten his tongue.

  I will kill you, Karolje, he thought. He could bring no force to it.

  Another lash. His body jerked, and he banged his forehead against the post. For an instant the blossoming pain in his head overtook the pain of his back.

  He reached for the silence again. It was gone.

  The whip whistled before it struck him. It cut through skin and into muscle. The world turned grey. He writhed, and the cuffs on his wrists dug into the skin there.

 
It might be a good idea to pass out now.

  On the next stroke, he did for a few seconds. He was brought back by pain in his shoulders and wrists as he slumped, shivering from the cold water they had doused him with. Fresh blood speckled the post in front of him. He imagined the flesh and skin of his back as ribbons. Another lash, and he cried out despite himself.

  His knees were miles away, the bloodied floor waving. He could no longer feel his arms or hands. He faced down a tunnel, its dark edges closing in, and his head spun. His scream did not come from his own lungs. He had no breath left. Can’t give in, he thought, can’t. Kill the king.

  Karolje’s black eyes stared into him, seeing everything. His mother’s blood darkened the white sheet.

  * * *

  When he came to, he was lying on his stomach on a cot in an interrogation room. His wrists and back were bandaged. It hurt, but not intolerably. His brother sat nearby on a wooden stool.

  Esvar closed his eyes again. “How bad is it?” he asked.

  “You lost a lot of blood, but the strokes were all clean and narrow. They will heal well enough, though you won’t want to put your back against anything for a week or so, I expect. The wrists are just scraped.”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “No. There’s to be no further punishment. What the hell did you think you were doing?” There was both anger and anguish in his voice.

  “Tilting the board,” Esvar said. He cleared his throat. “I’m sick of playing Karolje’s games.”

  “By using a bloody Truth Finder? Any other method, Esvar, but not that one.”

  It had been hard to justify to himself at the time and was harder to justify to his brother now. He tried anyway. “I needed the king to know I’m willing to use his tools against him.” Even if you aren’t, he did not say.

  “That particular tool has a way of slipping in one’s hand.”

  “I knew what he’d say. I knew I was innocent.” The words were hollow.

  “That’s not the problem of a Truth Finder,” Tevin said, gone from hot anger to deep cold.

  Esvar knew the problem: the invasion of a mind, the damage it caused. There was no good in being found innocent if it wrecked your mind in the process. He had watched men go mad as a Truth Finder probed, seen the sanity drain from the eyes. It was like watching a death, except the light in the eyes changed into a feverish glitter or dull distance. Tevin had ordered him years ago never to use a Truth Finder and he had abided by that, until Lukovian and Nikovili.

  “I’m not fifteen anymore, older brother.” He didn’t have the strength to put all the force he wanted to into it.

  “Well, you’ve made Karolje aware of that too, and now he’s going to be scrutinizing you more closely. You didn’t tilt the board, you stepped right into the hole he had dug for you.”

  Esvar opened his eyes and twisted his hand in an obscene gesture. “You play your own cards much too close to your chest,” he said. “You started the whole damn thing by complaining to Karolje about Lukovian. Why didn’t you just have a quiet word with Lukovian and head all the conflict off at the source? Once the king dared me to clear my name, there was nothing else I could do.”

  “I told you to be patient and let me act. You didn’t question the arrest when you first heard. You should have come to me, since it was my fault.”

  The mockery hurt more than the whip had. “I sent you a message. What do you think you could have done?”

  “Go to Goran, point out that it was a bad precedent for examiners to be telling tales about their betters, and remind him that there were things he wouldn’t want rumored about himself. All you’ve done is give him a reason to slander you further.”

  “If I knew what you had on him, I could have blackmailed him myself.”

  “It would have been easier for him to bluff his way past you. You aren’t old enough to remember the things that matter.”

  Esvar glared up at him. We shouldn’t keep secrets, he thought. Not now. He was too weak to argue further. “What time is it?”

  “Just past dinner. Are you hungry?”

  “Thirsty.”

  “I’ve water. Can you sit up?”

  With an effort, he did. His breath came short. He took the flask his brother offered and drank most of it. Water spilled out of his mouth, and he wiped futilely at his chin. He had never been this weak. He could only remember the whipping in patches now. Had he cried, or begged?

  Tevin took the flask. “I’ll get it refilled,” he said. “The doctor wants you to stay here for the night. You’re not fit to walk yet. It’s saving you some embarrassment too.”

  “What’s the story being told?”

  “Nothing. All the king has said is that the Truth Finder has spoken. Lukovian will be executed at dawn tomorrow.”

  “I need to be there.” He lay down again, carefully. The pain that had been a hum when the conversation started was becoming a roar. “I want to see the doctor.”

  “I’ll send him,” Tevin said. “You need rest. Esvar, you went out this morning. What was that about?”

  At first he could not remember. “I had to see someone,” he said. “It was personal. Not to do with any of this.”

  No, just with raids and a dead queen and a woman braver than himself, who looked steadfastly into his eyes as he could not with Karolje. Anza, with the dark hair and the dark eyes and the small, strong body. She would always be birdlike, light and quick. Bones made angles on her wrists and shoulders. Not at all fashionable. In a portrait she would be pretty but not beautiful; no painter would be able to capture the diamond-sharp intensity of her gaze. She had no idea what it was to yield, though he was not sure she knew that about herself yet.

  He had never met anyone like her. Most of the women of his acquaintance were nobly born, cosseted and indulged, selfish if charming. And afraid. They had been taught by their mothers and sisters and servants to be careful in his presence, to refuse him nothing, to flatter. They had the queen’s example before them. Once when he was seventeen, he had looked at the woman lying naked beneath him in the bed, her hair dark and curly with sweat at the sides of her face, her mouth open in pleasure, her eyes like shuttered windows. He thought the pleasure had been real, but the woman had been holding back her soul. Since then he had expected nothing of his lovers but their bodies.

  He wasn’t going to get that from Captain Havidian’s daughter. A soldier’s daughter, who should hate him for what had been done to her father. Why had she put herself in his hands again? Mirovian had told him she was not motivated by money, and he believed that now. What did she want?

  Revenge. His heart thumped and his mind slid pieces together faster than words. Mirovian had remembered her at the house. He had spent a long time staring at the gable window. She was the missing resister, she had to be. She matched the description. She had somehow acquired a forbidden book. She had the courage, the size, the father who could have taught her the bow and given her arrows. The intelligence to understand politics and the bravery to question him. The resistance would value her.

  He could talk to them. His breath hitched. He did not dare waste this opportunity.

  It occurred to him that he might be imagining things in a haze of blood loss and hatred for the king. Then he thought of her small, lithe, muscular body, which would have been able to get out the window and onto the roof. The newly healed cut on her hand so like the one Mirovian had got from a slate. It had been bandaged the day he met her, the day after the resister’s escape.

  Karolje had better not find out about her. If the king got curious, he might subject Esvar to a Truth Finder. Gods, it had been a stupid thing to do, hadn’t it, challenging Lukovian. He needed to be at the execution.

  His thoughts were spiraling. That was what pain did. He closed his eyes. A door shut.

  Hands lifted his head and held a flask to his mouth. He swallowed automatically, tasted the bitterness of opium mixed with wine. He gagged, but it was too late.

  Do me the courtes
y of assuming I still have a soul, he heard someone say through the fuzziness of descending sleep. Then the darkness.

  A PARTY AT JANCE’S lordly cousin’s house was not how Anza had imagined renewing their friendship. It was a better option than a smoky tavern or a loud coffeehouse, but she hesitated for a long time before accepting the invitation. She had attended such parties with Rumil and was not intimidated by the scene; it was the potential for coming to someone else’s attention that gave her pause. Her life had enough secrets in it already. At last she decided that if she kept herself quiet and polite, she was unlikely to be of interest to either suitors or spies.

  The carriage Jance had sent for her arrived at his cousin’s mansion when the western sky was the fine gold of imminent sunset. It would be dark when she left, but Lord Darvik had been able to get curfew passes. She alighted at the front door. A candle shone on every windowsill, and dozens of paper-covered lights glowed on the drive. Music spilled out the open door and windows. A footman on the right-hand side of the door presented her with wine in a crystal glass, and a footman on the left offered her a choice of eye masks. She gave him the wine to hold while she tied her mask on. It was half-white, half-black, with white and black feathers as trim.

  Some of the guests must have known masks were to be part of the entertainment, because they wore masks that covered everything but the mouth and chin. Animal faces, patterns, gems, feathers, anything that could be adornment was. The clothing matched, silk dresses and velvet trousers, short satin cloaks, long gloves and gauzy scarves. Anza expected to see some familiar faces among the commoners, but the masks made it more challenging.

  Tables of food and drink were at one end of a great room, and musicians at the other. In between, dozens of people stood in pairs or groups, talking and laughing, while white-clad servants carried wine bottles and collected glasses. Doors opened to a large terrace, steps descending to a lawn and garden. Hanging paper-covered lanterns shone on paths and benches and fountains. Roses climbed profusely on trellises and adorned the flower beds. The Citadel was not far away, but the large trees beside the wall circling the place blocked it from view. Bats flitted at the upper branches.