On the first step of the dais stood her brother, Guillaume, as tall and fit as their father was shriveled and weak, a direct contrast to their respective intellects. His white riding boot rested on the second step; he could not wait to climb into his father’s chair. Isabelle feared for anyone under his authority when at last all restrictions on his appetites were released. She might escape into this Aragothic marriage, but the people of Windfall would not.
Guillaume bestowed on Artifex Kantelvar a look of deep suspicion that turned into pure unmasked loathing when he gazed at Isabelle. His bloodshadow wriggled like a carpet of snakes at his feet.
“Ah, the traitress dares to show herself,” he said. “I might have seen her giving herself up to a dog, but I never dreamed she would stoop to be a Glasswalker’s whore.”
Isabelle returned his loathing but refused to rise to the lure. Father usually brought Guillaume when he wanted to taunt Isabelle to tears or bait her into foolish anger.
Beneath Guillaume on the step stood Lady Arnette, plump and healthy. Her round face might have been pretty were it not for eyes like chips of flint. “I don’t know about that, love. If the object is to weaken the Aragothic royalty, I can think of no better way than giving them Isabelle. I only wonder if the poor príncipe knows he’s getting damaged goods.”
Across from them stood an enormously fat man in a deep-red doublet with slashed sleeves showing cloth of gold beneath. His craggy face was brown as saddle leather, and his graying hair was brushed straight back and gathered in a queue. His eyes were orbs of pure silver.
He fluttered delicate fingers on hands that seemed much too small for a man of his girth. In a thick accent full of rounded vowels he said, “Comte, please, control your offspring.”
The comte replied, “Don Divelo, my apologies, but Célestial tradition requires that everyone be allowed to speak their mind in open court,” but he was looking at Kantelvar when he said it.
Liar, Isabelle wanted to say. Father was letting Guillaume carry on in the hopes of offending the ambassador enough to threaten the marriage contract and force Kantelvar to renegotiate whatever deal they had.
Kantelvar took no knee before her father, showing him less respect than he had shown Isabelle. “Pay them no heed,” he said to Divelo. “If dogs bark it is because their master allows them. These two curs are as toothless as their master is powerless.”
Arnette shot back, “Wolves howl when they hunt, when they come upon prey that is old, weak, and stupid.” Her bloodshadow flowed down the steps toward Kantelvar, a slow but inexorable flood.
Isabelle stepped back from the spreading crimson stain. She knew she couldn’t outrun a bloodshadow—they could snap out with the speed of thought—but that in no way reduced the urge to try.
Kantelvar raised his staff and slammed the heel down on Arnette’s encroaching stain. Sparks of green lightning shot through the bloodshadow, bright light scattering it in all directions. Arnette shrieked and toppled. Guillaume was too slow to catch her. She hit the marble with a thud and lay there twitching.
Isabelle gasped in amazement. She hadn’t known there was anything that could hurt a sorcerer through their bloodshadow.
Guillaume rounded on Kantelvar. “You bastard!” His bloodshadow flowed forward but came up short when he found himself staring at the cage of glittering sparks that danced around the hedgehog tip of Kantelvar’s staff.
Kantelvar said, “In point of fact, my parentage is of no consequence to my position, but if you want a discussion of bastardy, let us begin with the wretched sow drooling on your father’s floor. The thing that calls itself Lady Arnette was not sired by the Duc du Troisville. This would be of no great consequence if her mother had found another Sanguinaire with whom to dabble, but instead she lowered herself to rut with a mere cook.”
Arnette, still quaking, sputtered, “You lie!”
“Evidence can be provided, sworn testimony and physical proofs. The political complications would be messy and expensive for everyone involved. Now, does anyone want me to continue?”
Silence welled up, thick as tar, until Father wheezed, “Guillaume. Take your wife. Go.”
Guillaume whirled on his father. “You cannot let this stand!”
“Get out,” rasped the comte. “Try to sire some piglets on that great sow of yours, or get a swineherd to show you how.”
Isabelle’s heart fired with vindictive glee as Guillaume’s face darkened to the color of a turnip. True, his humiliation did not aid her at all, but even had she been waiting her turn on the gallows she would have grinned as her brother tried to help his bride out the door without actually touching her.
“Now to the matter of concessions,” the comte said to Kantelvar. “You lied to me when you bargained for Isabelle. You said your plans for her were of little consequence, and now I find she is to be a Blessed Queen. You have bargained in bad faith, and a bargain in bad faith is no bargain at all.”
“I said,” Kantelvar enunciated, “my plans for Princess Isabelle were of little consequence to you.”
“I am about to be related to el rey de Aragoth, a matter of great consequence.”
“This is the man to whom you referred as, I quote, ‘a lack-witted, spineless scrap of lady’s ribbon whose sole contribution to history will be the remarkable ignominy and brevity of his rule.’”
“Do not spin word webs at me, you old spider,” Father snarled, leaning forward with such force that he nearly fell out of his chair. “Let me make myself plain. You will not have Isabelle unless I have satisfaction. She belongs to me!”
“What is it you want?” Isabelle asked, since nobody else seemed about to.
“Shriving,” Father said, not even bothering to level a curse at her. To Kantelvar he said, “Rid me of this!” With obvious effort he lifted his hand and let it fall on the arm of his chair and the bloodshadow draped there. “I know it can be done.”
Isabelle followed the comte’s calculation. Losing the bloodshadow would cost him much, but not so much as his life.
“The bloodshadow is a gift from the Builder,” Kantelvar said flatly. “Even if I could separate it from you without killing you, which I cannot, to destroy it would be heresy of the greatest order.”
The comte snorted. “Compared to the obscenity you are planning, I think not.”
“Regardless, it cannot be done,” Kantelvar said.
“Then I shall keep my daughter,” Father said. “Let Aragoth burn.”
Don Divelo said, “Your Excellency, be reasonable. You ask the impossible.”
Isabelle was not quite so sure of that. If Kantelvar could revivify Marie, why not remove a Sanguinaire’s bloodshadow? Of course, the ability to perform one miracle did not imply the ability to perform another.
Kantelvar made a mollifying gesture. “Pay him no heed, Don Divelo. As I said, he is powerless.” From somewhere in his voluminous robe he produced a large scroll stamped with the Great Seal of l’Empire Céleste. “Comte Narcisse des Zephyrs, your lord and master, His Imperial Majesty le Roi de Tonnerre, Leon XIV, hereby grants his permission for Princess Isabelle des Zephyrs de l’Empire Céleste to marry Príncipe Julio de Aragoth and commands you to give her all aid and support … should she accept this mission.”
Then he turned to Isabelle. “Highness, do you accept?”
Isabelle felt dizzy; she hadn’t anticipated Grand Leon, but of course her imperial cousin must have been party to this contract. She took a deep breath—for time, for courage—and sought for clues. There were many ways Grand Leon could have phrased this proclamation. He could have ordered her to go on pain of death. He could have taken her away from her father and made her his own ward. Instead he gave her permission. True, an imperial permission was just one eyelash short of a command. It was not expected to be refused … but it could be. And he’d called it a mission, an adventure with purpose, sanctioned by the crown.
In a strange sort of way, across time and distance, a man she’d never met seemed to be asking
, “Are you brave enough? Do you dare?”
Answers had consequences.
“Yes,” she breathed. “Yes, I do.”
CHAPTER
Five
Isabelle stood beside one of the cushioned wing chairs next to the big bay windows in the hub-ward sitting room that had become her de facto audience chamber. For two days she’d received a constant stream of … she wanted to call them petitioners, but none of them were actually asking her for favors. Well-wishers, she supposed. They were mostly her father’s subordinate lords, guild leaders, and military officers, none of whom would have attended her funeral if she’d died before her betrothal.
Now every last one of them insisted on performing some minor service for her in the hopes that she would remember them as she ascended to the lofty social altitude of an Aragothic princesa, or possibly, hopefully, queen. There was no guarantee that King Carlemmo would actually appoint Príncipe Julio his heir once he married, or that the succession would not be the subject of armed debate. Yet even if she ended up as a reserve princesa with no real authority, she would have unfettered access to those who did, an advantage even the loftiest ambassador could not match.
So now everybody wanted a share of her. It was a bitter irony that she’d only become someone worth knowing at home when she was on the verge of being shipped away forever. Still, she gained nothing by spurning her various supplicants. A noblewoman’s primary function, aside from bearing heirs for her noble husband, was being connected to other nobles, and the contacts she cultivated here would serve as her currency for investment in the Aragothic court.
Isabelle smiled up at her current supplicant, a stout nobleman with a vein-webbed nose and watery eyes. He had just given her a an exquisite jewelry box of polished blackthorn wood.
Isabelle inspected it dutifully. “Thank you, Lord Antionne. I’m afraid I don’t have any jewelry to go in it.”
Lord Antionne’s expression grew a bit wooden, and Isabelle realized he must have thought she was asking him to cough up a trinket on the spot.
He said, “That was imported all the way from l’Île de Noire.” It was supposed to be a reminder of his successful trading ventures. His contacts on Craton Riqueza made him a useful man for a princesa of Aragoth to know.
“I will treasure it.” She propped up an awkward smile, an expression that fooled no one, she feared, but sometimes all one could do was move past the current awkwardness to the next awkwardness.
Marie, who hovered always at Isabelle’s side like an unquiet ghost, took the box and placed it on a table with Isabelle’s other presents. It was starting to look like a pile of bier gifts.
The business of the audience finished, Lord Antionne let himself out, and not before time. Never had she talked so much, said so little, or felt quite so lonely. As useful as all her newly affirmed acquaintances might have been, none of them were really interested in her for her own sake. They didn’t know her, and the one person who did remained conspicuously absent.
Jean-Claude had been missing since they parted on the steps of the library at the hour of Professor Isaac’s lecture. Could something have happened to him? The thought gave her jitters.
The only mention of him had come when her father had introduced her to a thin, pointy man whose doublet was festooned with dueling ribbons and whose face was marked with scars. “This is Captain Vincent. He will be the head of your new honor guard, a troop of reliable men, loyal to the family, and we will finally be rid of that damned musketeer.”
Isabelle’s stomach soured at the thought of being surrounded by a dozen of the comte’s spies at all times, extending his control of her far across the deep sky.
Her father must have seen the dismay on her face, for his lips compressed into a thin but satisfied smile. “Jean-Claude’s much vaunted, much flaunted authority does not apply in Aragoth, and I cannot imagine His Majesty would wish to sully l’Empire’s reputation by sending the sot to a foreign capital any more than I would wish to tarnish your appearance by including him in your entourage.”
“Fear not,” said Vincent in a voice of smoothed grit, like oiled steel. “I am sworn unto my death to protect you, and I have never failed in any charge.”
Isabelle wanted no more to speak to Vincent than to her father, so she merely nodded without enthusiasm. Somehow, she had never imagined her world without her fey but faithful musketeer ambling through it. The comte’s revelation only made it more urgent that she speak with him.
She finally reached a lull in her flood of petitioners. Her head ached and her energy was depleted down to the bone. She had tried to offer only small talk and social platitudes, but saints only knew what ammunition she had inadvertently given them all to hurl at her … and this was only a very small sample of what she would experience in a royal court.
Anticipating dinner, Isabelle sent Marie to fetch the right-hand prosthesis she used to feed herself, then sat in the wing chair and basked in the rippling golden rays of the late afternoon sun. The sunbeams diffracted through the beveled edges of the windows, forming tiny rainbows, an obvious demonstration of the principle of diversity in aetheric density. What does it tell us about the nature of light that it can be subdivided? What does that tell us about the nature of the Builder?
If at all possible, one of her first projects as princesa or queen would be to build her own university. That would give her much opportunity to rub up against the world’s brightest minds. She would have to dedicate at least one laboratory of her future university to the study of light. It seemed far too fundamental a thing to be left unexplored.
“Your Highness.” Jean-Claude’s jovial voice boomed from the glass-paneled double doors on the far side of the room, as if finding her here were a delightful surprise rather than a deliberate act.
She bounced from her seat and smiled at him in melting relief. “Monsieur musketeer, welcome. I trust you have heard my most excellent news.” She prayed it was excellent, because it was certainly forever.
He was dressed in a drab brown coat over his fine linen blouse. He doffed his white-plumed hat and made a leg for her, pointing the toe of his scuffed and dingy boots. Refusing to dress up when he entered the château was one way he tweaked her father’s nose.
He strolled across the room, his hound-dog eyes and drooping mustache looking genuinely puzzled. “News, Highness? I’m afraid nothing of any importance ever finds its way into these hairy ears.”
Isabelle laughed. “You are incorrigible. I know you’ve heard of my betrothal. You’d have to be considerably more deaf than a post not to have, but that’s not the whole of it. The artifex, Kantelvar, has promised to bring back Marie!”
Jean-Claude’s bushy eyebrows rose in true surprise. “Truly? That is wondrous indeed, but I have always been given to understand that such a thing is impossible.”
“He says he has done it before. He himself.”
Jean-Claude’s expression became thoughtful. “Did you ask him when, and why you, who have scoured every mountaintop and rabbit hole for news of just such a miracle, have never heard of it?”
With more than a little effort, Isabelle simmered her roiling enthusiasm down. “I didn’t think of it at the time, and I haven’t seen him since my audience with the comte.” And, if she was to be brutally honest, this was one assertion she didn’t want to challenge.
She asked, “But where have you been?”
He ran a hand through his thinning, graying hair and leaned against a white pillar. “I have been in my cups, of course, listening to a constant babble and gabble of rumor. Apparently there’s been an incredible transformation. A woman once feared as a witch has transformed into a beautiful princess, and she’s sailing off to become a good and noble queen of a distant land.”
Isabelle puffed a disbelieving breath. “Am I supposed to be flattered by this change of heart?”
Jean-Claude shrugged. “Their praise is offered with the same passion and sincerity as their slander, and should be taken just as seriously.�
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Isabelle blinked, slightly stunned, but of course he was perfectly right. She’d have to think on that later. “But surely such gossip wouldn’t take you three days to collect.”
“True. Mostly what I have been concerned with were the rumors of your predecessor’s death and how mysterious it was.”
Isabelle’s mouth opened to respond before she fully grasped what Jean-Claude had said. She found herself spluttering. “Predecessor? Explain.”
“I found out from Mademoiselle Odette the dyer that Príncipe Julio was betrothed before. Captain Kyle of the Sunflower, a merchantman, informed me that the príncipe’s bride-who-was-not-to-be was one Lady Sonya de Zapetta from El Sangre Aragothia on Craton Riqueza. Unfortunately, she took ill en route to San Augustus. She was diagnosed with the gray pest, so the story goes, and chose to fling herself overboard rather than risk infecting the crew.”
Isabelle blanched at this horrific tale and made a warding sign against the pest. “How … noble of her.”
“Yes,” Jean-Claude said acidly, “it’s not at all likely that a pack of cowardly sailors seized a terrified young woman from her sickbed and threw her screaming into the abyss. In the end, the crew was let off on a quarantine skyland, and the ship was burned down to the aetherkeel, but by the Builder’s grace, no one else got sick. It’s a miracle to be sure; the pest strikes like a hurricane, not like an assassin’s knife.”
Isabelle quieted her voice. “You believe Lady Sonya was murdered.”
“A metaphor only,” Jean-Claude insisted, but he belied his assertion when he added, “Cântator’dok, the Gyrine Windcaller, just arrived from San Cristobal, where the plague-ship crew was eventually landed. He spoke to some of that crew. The disease they describe is inconsistent with the progression of the pest. Monsieur Clovis, the vintner, has received a recent letter from his brother in El Sangre Aragothia. He mentioned an excess of fire beetles, and an ongoing drought, but no gray pest. ‘Plague’ is not a word I would choose to describe just one death. We shall have to be on our guard.”
An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors--A Novel Page 8
