“We can’t leave right now, Celeno,” I said.
He threw open the wardrobe door. “Yes, we can!”
“It’s almost nightfall. It’s snowing. Are we planning to walk down the river?” He didn’t answer, jerking his travel-stained bolero and trousers off their hangers and throwing them over his shoulder. “Celeno, listen to me—at least give me tonight. Give me one more night. Let me go to the dinner, and then I’ll come get you, and you can come with me to the library. Colm has information that could help us, that could change things—”
His shout was muffled inside the wardrobe. “Yes, let’s let another Alastaire sibling make decisions for our country!”
My twisted hands tightened into fists, and I stepped closer to him. “He can help, Celeno—trust me.”
He whipped around from the wardrobe, his clothes piled in his arms, his face creased in outrage.
“Trust. You?”
Those two words carried more weight and anger than an entire soliloquy could have, hitting me like shots from twin crossbows. I took a step back. We stood just a few feet apart, the air between us smoldering. His face twitched and jumped as he glared at me. I couldn’t move, rooted.
Through the wall, I heard a voice in my room, and then a knock on the adjoining door. A maid peeked around the edge.
“My queen requested I help you dress for dinner,” she said, oblivious to the tension between us.
Celeno’s gaze bored into my own, waiting, watching for my reaction.
Slowly, I straightened. I didn’t break his gaze.
“I’m going to dinner,” I said as calmly as I could. “I’m going to try to smooth things over with everyone, and then I’m going to come get you, and we’re going to go to the library to talk to Colm. You rest, and drink your tincture. I’ll be back in a little while.”
Using every ounce of strength left in me, I turned away from him and headed toward the adjoining door, where the maid was watching us with some curiosity. I passed her, shut the door, and slid the bolt into place. As soon as it locked, I crossed my room to the hall and poked my head out. Two burly guards stood in front of Celeno’s door like ominous palace décor. They both glanced in my direction.
Good. He wouldn’t be able to leave.
At least—not without a fight.
I stepped back into my room and turned around to face the maid. I was so jittery and distracted that it took me a moment to focus on the splash of glimmering silver-blue fabric hanging on the wardrobe.
“That can’t be for me?” I said, stopping short at the sight.
“Yes, Lady Queen. The measurements should be right.”
Dark colors and golden accents were considered the height of drama back at home—this gown would have stood out like a gem in a coal bucket, flickering and flashing in the firelight from the sheer number of tiny pearls sewn into the embroidery. Unaware or unperturbed by my dizzy apprehension, the maid shunted me to the changing screen. She reached for the buttons of my blouse.
“I can get out of my clothes,” I said hastily. “And into the gown—you can fasten up the back.”
“Be careful with the sleeves,” she said. “The lace is delicate.”
I’ll say it was—the shoulders down to the wrists were fashioned out of exquisitely tatted blue lace, overlaid with iridescent seed pearls in swirling patterns. I eased my hands and arms through them, trying not to pull the fabric. I bit my lip as I studied my arms—I could just barely see my wine stain through the lace. Perhaps it would only be obvious to those who knew to look for it, but the thought unsettled me. I was already facing so many unknowns, I didn’t want to have to worry about my marred skin. Experimentally, I pulled the neck of the gown closed behind my back—it, at least, was made of solid fabric and rose an inch or two above my collarbones. If I asked the maid to leave my hair down, it would hide any peek of my stain above the fabric.
She put my hair up.
After tightening the laces along the back, she sat me in front of the mirror and wound my hair into an elegant chignon, pinning it with pearl pins. She dotted rosewater behind my ears and threaded pearl teardrops through my lobes. As she was distracted with fetching my shoes, I turned my head this way and that, trying to memorize which positions were safe and which betrayed a slip of purple above my collar.
I had just gathered up the scalloped skirts—there were several layers, with the same pearled lace overlaid on the silk—when there was a knock on the adjoining door.
“Gemma?” Celeno called. “Are you still there?”
I hesitated, wondering what more he wanted to say to me, or what I would do if he demanded I leave the country with him. I certainly wasn’t going to be doing anything more strenuous than raise a fork dressed like this. Arranging the gown, I unlocked the door and pulled it open. He stood clutching the coverlet around his shoulders. His face flickered briefly in surprise as he looked me up and down.
“Oh,” he said, straightening. “You look . . . very nice.”
He did not look nice. His hair was all mussed to one side, and his skin had started to break out from sweating so much.
“Thank you,” I said without emotion. “Did you take Ellamae’s tincture?”
“I will in a moment,” he said. “It just occurred to me, though . . .”
“What?”
He took a breath. “I want you to take one of the guards with you.”
“To dinner?”
“Yes. And anywhere else you go. I just . . . Gemma, anything could happen here. Now that I think about it, you shouldn’t have gone out of the palace on your own.” His gaze darted around my room, as if searching for assassins in the corners. “You’ve said yourself that we have to remember what these folk think of Alcoro, and all it would take is one angry villager, one angry servant . . .”
“We’ll be in Mona’s court dining room,” I said. “I think it should be secure.”
“Just take one with you,” he said. “That’s all I’m asking.”
The words were out before I could stop them. “Why do you care all of a sudden what happens to me?”
They were cruel words, and I immediately regretted them, but I couldn’t take them back. I forced myself instead to return his stare, his face frozen.
After a moment he broke his gaze away. “Never mind,” he muttered. “It was just to give me some peace of mind.”
I allowed myself a deep, internal sigh and a silent rebuke to my stupid, weak heart. “If you drink the tincture and rest, and if you agree to come with me after dinner, I’ll bring one of the guards with me.”
He pulled the coverlet a little tighter around his shoulders and gave a little sigh, turning back toward the bed. Taking that as a reluctant acquiescence, I closed the door and locked it again. I gazed silently at the wood for a moment, uneasy, before breaking myself away and heading to the door to the hall.
The two soldiers looked my way again as I stepped out. One was big and beefy and looked like he’d take a lot of pleasure in snapping a person in half. The other looked like she’d enjoy it just as much but might do it with less unnecessary pain. I nodded at her.
“I’ve been asked to bring you along with me,” I said. “To guard my person in the palace.”
“Our orders are to guard the Alcoran king,” she replied.
“I will explain to Queen Mona why you’re not at your post if the question arises,” I said. “For now, please accompany me to the court dining hall.”
If she disliked the request, she didn’t show it. As she left Celeno’s door, the other guard sidled until he was squarely in front of it, his meaty hand on the hilt of his sword.
Mona’s dining hall was draped in white banners, with arrangements of beech branches along the walls, their golden leaves glowing in the firelight pouring from the double-wide hearth. A harpist sat in the corner, plucking out a delicate, unobtrusive melody on her strings.
Mona detached herself from a knot of courtiers and approached me. My trailing guard slipped among a few of
the others posted along the edges of the room—they all shuffled slightly to make space.
“Welcome to the day after the solstice,” Mona said.
“Thank you for moving everything on my account,” I said. “And thank you for the gown—it’s beautiful.”
She held me at arm’s length, looking satisfied. “That color suits you—I knew it would. It’s nice not to have someone physically fight me off over an attractive garment.”
I looked past her to Ellamae, engaged in a hearty debate with a Lumeni who was miming parries with an invisible sword. I thought she looked beautiful, wearing a stylishly cut tunic of rich green over silver breeches, her dark brown curls sweeping her back and her customary fringed boots beaded with mother-of-pearl. Valien seemed to think the same, because he kept smiling over the shoulder of the courtier he was chatting with.
“How’s Celeno?” Mona asked ceremoniously.
“All right,” I said, trying not to let the bad taste from our last interaction show. “He’s resting.”
“Good.” I had the distinct sense that was all she planned to discuss of him tonight. She beckoned behind me. “Don’t just hover in the corner, Colm.”
I looked over my shoulder as Colm joined us, his cheeks a little flushed, perhaps from his earlier work in the wind. He was dressed in a similar royal blue as Mona, with an embroidered capelet that fell to his waist, fastened with a pearled pin.
“Colm informed me you watched the progress on the Wild Indigo this afternoon,” Mona said, selecting three glasses of white wine from an offered tray and handing two of them to us.
“Just for a short while. I enjoyed the chanty they were singing,” I said.
“Well, you’ll hear more than that tonight. The royal choir prepares for the solstices all year long.” Her gaze drifted past me, and her face reddened slightly. “Oh, Light. Excuse me—he’s riling up my councilors.”
She hurried to the far side of the dining table, where Rou was engaged in an energetic conversation with several Lumeni courtiers. They hardly seemed unhappy, though—they let loose a robust round of laughter just as Mona reached them.
Colm rotated his glass in his fingers.
“You look lovely,” he said, and his cheeks flushed a little more.
I snapped my black thoughts away from Celeno, trying to force myself into a diplomatic mindset. It was difficult—I was out of practice. But our work depended on me maintaining my few tenuous alliances. “Thank you,” I said. “Your sister has excellent taste.”
“It’s a strong point of hers.” He looked down to study the capelet around his shoulders. “Though I admit I feel a bit like a flagpole wearing the fashion of the court.”
“It’s a handsome flag,” I said. “In a high wind you’d be the pride of the turrets.”
It was a poor excuse for witty banter, but he gave a good-natured laugh anyway. The sound shook away my last lingering threads of anger, and I smiled.
What a relief just to smile.
He cleared his throat, and his own smile broadened as he ducked his head.
“I, ah . . .” He shifted. “I went through the Ballad of the Diving Menagerie.”
“The what?” My eyes widened as our earlier conversation in the palace doorway came rushing back to me. “The ballad! The diving iguanas! Yes, yes—and so?”
“I checked the appendices, and even cross-referenced the footnotes.” He looked up, his eyes twinkling. “There is no mention of a diving iguana.”
My mouth dropped. “You’re not serious.”
“Not a single line.” He lifted his arm, where he’d had something clamped underneath the capelet, and withdrew an elegant leather-bound book, its edges worn with age, inlaid with golden rushes on the cover. He held it out to me.
“It’s yours,” he said.
“Wait,” I said. “You just said . . .”
“They’re not in the ballad. But I pulled our one book on Samnese natural history, and Maglean’s Biota Extant.” He opened the cover to a page of handwritten notes. “And as it turns out, they do, in fact, dive. The ballad is incomplete.”
My laugh broke from me, and I clapped my fingers over my lips to muffle it. He laughed as well, and a nearby courtier looked over her shoulder in puzzlement. We both struggled not to break the pleasant murmur of the dining room.
Smiling, I took the book from him and thumbed through a few pages. It was clearly a relic, each page beautifully illuminated in an old Lumeni style, with intricate knotwork along the margins and boldly colored animals that grimaced and grinned. I admired a black and gold mink, brushing my fingers over its serpentine tail. My illustration style was too sketchy and loose to achieve such an effect—I itched to curl up somewhere quiet and pore over each page.
“It’s a beautiful book,” I said, looking up. “But I believe our bet was that the ballad would include iguanas, not that iguanas could dive.” I handed it back to him. “I think I’m the one who owes you something.”
He puzzled at the book. “That doesn’t seem right, to win based on semantics and not accuracy.”
I shrugged, still smiling. “We both agreed. After the singing, I’ll ink you an iguana. But I think I’ll show it diving.”
His smile twisted to one side, still genuine and bright. “You knew they could swim, ballad or no ballad. You knew the song was wrong.” He pushed the book back into my hands. “I’ll gratefully take a swimming iguana, but keep the book, as a reminder of my own silly fallacy.”
“No, no—it’s yours,” I said, even as my fingers closed on the cover, my mind tracing the twining lines of the mink again.
“It is,” he agreed. “And I want to give it to you. If anything, it will remind me to do better research before I make bets.”
I couldn’t help but smile, looking again at the rushes on the cover. “You’re a better scholar than most of the academics packing our debate halls—able to accept a conflicting idea based on new evidence.”
He shrugged. “It does no good to argue with truth. I still would very much like the iguana, though.”
My burst of laughter was thankfully drowned by a rising glissando from the harpist, and we both struggled to quiet down as the ambient conversation in the room hushed. With a placid smile, Mona gathered up Rou’s arm, forcibly guiding him mid-word away from the enchanted courtiers, and made her way to the head of the table. The court followed, taking their seats in some pre-organized arrangement. An attendant guided me to the end closest to Mona, seating me next to Rou and across from Ellamae and Valien. Colm took the chair on my other side, the corners of his mouth twitching as I surreptitiously set the book of the ballad under my chair. Mona lifted her wineglass and gave a short, cordial speech about allies and friends and the heralding of a new year, and then the meal began.
I could have cried—honestly, I was close—at the sight and scent of so much steaming food. Would I always be this hungry, or was it just a product of stress and uncertainty? I didn’t know, and at the moment, I didn’t care. I devoured the first course of fish stew and the plate of greens and dumplings that came afterward. I barely stopped to laugh at Rou’s only partially concealed despair at the fried mussels, spearing as many on my fork as would fit at a time. By the time the meat pie was served, I had settled into a contented silence, happy to listen to the lighthearted conversations happening around me.
“You know, Gemma . . .”
I looked up at Ellamae, who was watching me with her cheek on her fist.
“You don’t have to worry,” she said. “I’m sure Mona plans to serve more food tomorrow.”
I flushed, my mouth still full of venison and sweet potatoes. She grinned as the others around us laughed appreciably.
“Don’t mind Mae,” Colm said, lifting his wineglass. “I’ve seen her eat a bear’s weight in wild strawberries. You’d think she was planning to dig a burrow and sleep for a few months.”
“As I recall, we went on to liberate a country,” Ellamae replied. “Besides, our only other meal had be
en prison food.”
“Not quite true,” Mona said. “We roasted fish on a stick up in Scribble Cave.”
Ellamae chewed her venison thoughtfully. “You’re right—we did. That was a damn smart idea, hiding out in Scribble Cave. You all might thank me for that sometime—getting us somewhere the Guard couldn’t find us.”
“I routed the Guard down the Palisade Road,” Valien said. “Or else they’d have followed you.”
Ellamae choked on her venison. “You did not.”
“Camped them on the hardwood ridge,” he said.
“Liar.”
“With orders not to march until mid-morning, to give you time to get down to the lake,” he finished.
“I will tan your sorry hide.”
He lifted his glass to his smiling lips. “Not in front of Mona’s court, I beg you.”
While they exchanged a heated look that suggested something a bit more intimate than a flaying, Mona dotted her lips with her napkin. “You know, I’ve wondered about Scribble Cave.”
Colm’s fork and knife clattered unsteadily against his plate. I’d taken a swallow of wine and attempted not to cough on it.
“Those petroglyphs up there,” she continued, seemingly unaware. “Such a strange place for them to be.”
Ellamae broke her husband’s smoldering gaze to jerk her head around to Mona. “Why do you say that?”
Mona shrugged delicately. “It’s just so remote.” She looked at me. “I wonder if you might like to see them, Gemma. Your comments about folklore earlier made me think about them. I’m sure the script is different, but some of the symbolism may be similar to yours.”
My heart pounded, and my uncomfortably full stomach squirmed. Here we’d been wondering how to explain to Mona about the petroglyphs, and she was bringing them up herself! I jumped on the opportunity.
“I’d love to see them,” I said. “It would be fascinating to compare them with our own.”
She leaned slightly so a server could take her empty plate. “Perhaps when the weather breaks, Mae might take you up.”
Ellamae cleared her throat somewhat loudly as a server placed a baked apple in front of her. “Sure thing.”
Creatures of Light, Book 3 Page 25
