It occurred to me, in jumbled flashes of panicky thought, that I could die here, really die, right here in this ridiculous fairyland. I’d been smacked with the flat of a sword here, and the bruise was still on my head when I returned to LA. So wouldn’t I be dead in LA if I was torn to pieces by this mob or tried and condemned and executed? And what if—almost worse—what if I was sentenced to life in the dungeon? What if I never got a chance to pass through another doorway and could never return to my life at home? Would I rot away in my cell, chained to the wall, dying in this dream while I dreamed of my lost life in Hollywood?
“Burn him!”
“Draw and quarter him!”
“Let us have him! Murderer!”
“We’ll cut him to pieces!”
The crowd kept roaring. The faces and hands kept trying to get at me. The guards kept shoving their way through, carrying me along with them.
It wasn’t far, thank God. The trip across the courtyard couldn’t have been more than twenty yards. After a few terrifying moments, two massive dark-wood doors loomed high above me just ahead. The doors swung open as the guards fought their way to them.
The mob charged us one last time. The guards stumbled into me. Hands reached. Contorted faces screamed. There were curses. There were clawing fingers. There were flashing silver blades.
“Get back, you animals!”
Then I was hurried through the doors, and the doors swung shut behind me with a boom.
The guards sheathed their swords and stepped away from me. My hands still manacled, I bent forward, panting for breath. Then, slowly, I straightened. I looked up.
I was in a small but majestic courtroom, lit by fire, by torches flaming from sconces and candles burning in the rims of chandeliers. In oaken boxes of tiered spectator benches to my left and right, lords and ladies and priestly types and who knows who else sat looking down at me. Their pitiless expressions flared and darkened in the shifting light and shadow. Behind them, wooden strips made chevrons on the yellow walls. Above them, shields and battle axes formed cornices beneath the dark wood ceilings. Like the eyes of the spectators, the murderous blades caught the orange fire glow and reflected it back to me.
Straight ahead at the end of a long, broad aisle was a high judge’s bench. It was an awful sight, towering almost to the rafters. A rampant red dragon was carved into the front of it, six feet tall at least. And seated at the top were two terrifying figures: the judges. They wore black robes, and their eyes burned red from the depths of the cowls that covered their heads and shadowed their faces. I took one look at them and I knew I was doomed.
Now two guards gripped my arms and marched me down the aisle between the spectators. They brought me to a railing under the high bench and left me there. I stood, manacled, blinking up at the judges.
Sir Aravist Tem swaggered up beside me, stroking his neat black beard with one hand, the thumb of his other hand hooked insouciantly in his sword belt.
“Lord Judges of the High Council,” he said in a soldierly voice that echoed in the reaches of the ceiling. “I deliver the prisoner Austin Lively to be tried for the murder of Lady Kata Palav.”
The room was deathly silent then. Not even a curious murmur stirred the stillness. The two judges way up there above me solemnly nodded their hooded heads. The one to the left spoke in the gravelly voice of an old man, though his face was hidden in shadow and I couldn’t tell his age.
“Summon Lord Netherdale,” he said.
Lord Iron Netherdale. Head of the High Council of the New Republic. I remembered his name from the character list too. And even in my daze of fear and confusion, it occurred to me now how bizarre that was. You know? That I should have read a name in a fantasy book. And that I should be there—in Galiana—wherever the hell that was—and that name should be called as if it were attached to a living man.
A bell tolled, a massive bell tolling massively, sonorously, somewhere in some tower nearby, out in the courtyard. There was a shuffling sound, and I turned to see that everyone in the courtroom was standing, the judges and the pitiless lords and ladies and priests in the spectator benches. Everyone.
And in came Lord Iron.
He entered from a doorway high up in the wall and moved briskly across a raised platform toward the bench. As he went, he smiled at someone in the audience and pointed at someone else and smiled at yet another. A public man. A politician, just like the ones we have back home in reality. If I held any hope of getting justice here, it died right then and there when I saw him.
He was in his fifties, tall and substantial, straight-backed and broad-shouldered, fit and trim. He had a thick head of brown-blond hair speckled with gray and a handsome, confident countenance that went before him like the prow of a ship. I could see at a glance he was smart and schemey, the master of the place. Whatever happened here, it would be his doing or by his will.
He was followed close behind by another man, a much smaller man, very short and very wizened, very thin. He wore a robe of deep indigo that flowed about his desiccated frame like liquid night. He had a face like a raisin with small, glittering eyes buried deep in the wrinkled flesh. A gray tuft of hair rose like a little wave up top; a gray tuft of beard hung limply from his chin.
Lord Iron settled into his seat between the two other judges, and when he sat, all the others in the hall—the judges and the spectators—sat down as well. The little man in the indigo cape took up a place directly behind him, standing.
“This tribunal is in session,” Lord Iron said in a voice that was both relaxed and strong, casual and yet authoritative. He looked down at me from his great height. I felt his power over me, the power of life and death. It made my guts curdle. “Austin Lively,” he said—and I hated to hear him speak my name. It was disorienting, unreal, as if my name should have been on the character list on my computer along with his. “You are charged with stabbing Lady Kata Palav to death. How do you plead?”
I didn’t want to answer. I didn’t want to admit that this was happening, that I was actually here. But what could I do?
“I’m not guilty,” I said as forcefully as I could.
The little graybeard behind Lord Iron leaned forward and whispered into the Lord’s ear. The Lord smiled knowingly and gave a little snort. My heart sank. Doomed.
“Summon Lady Betheray to the stand,” he said.
Lady Betheray. Yes, I remembered that name from the character list too, like Sir Aravist’s name and Lord Iron’s. And now—she was coming here? How crazy was this? Really, what the hell? Had I become a character in a novel?
Everyone turned, and so I turned. I saw a small door set in the wall at the rear of the room behind the spectator’s box. The door swung open, and out from the darkness within walked a woman into the firelight, a woman like no woman I had ever seen before.
She took my breath away. It wasn’t just that she was beautiful—though she was beautiful, she really was. She was young—in her early twenties at most. She had lush, raven hair held in bangs on her brow by a silver tiara studded with gems. The rest of it spilled with heart-stopping abandon down the sides of her rose-and-ivory valentine of a face. Her lips were soft and rich, and her eyes were brilliant green. A golden chain with a round, golden locket set off the grace and elegance of her throat. Her long gown of white and gold draped a shapely figure at once sensual and majestic. She was beautiful, no question. But I lived in LA. I saw beautiful women all the time.
No, it was more than that. It was the grace with which she came down the aisle as if floating on air. It was the way she never turned, never glanced either left or right at the staring, murmuring spectators. It was the way she kept her hands clasped beneath her breasts in a position of such modesty and self-containment. Everything about her—it was all just so incredibly … what was the word?
Womanly. So incredibly womanly.
I watched her walk past me. I couldn’t stop staring. Sir Aravist Tem opened a gate in the railing for her. She inclined her chin half an
inch in thanks and passed through. I watched her as she climbed up the narrow stairway to the witness box beside the high bench, climbed so smoothly she almost seemed to levitate.
She took her place in the box, stood there behind its low rail, erect, dignified, her hands still clasped before her.
“The witness will state her name,” Lord Iron said.
“My name is Lady Betheray Netherdale,” she answered. Her voice was like silver bells.
“And your station.”
“I am honored to be your wife, my lord.”
Lord Iron smiled blandly. “And it is my great pleasure that you are,” he said.
As the watching crowd tittered its approval, I thought: That’s right. I remembered that from the character list: she was Lord Iron’s wife. A recent prize for him, I would have bet, considering what had to be the more-than-twenty-year difference in their ages.
“Before the fall of the queen and the rise of the New Republic, did you have another station as well?” Lord Iron asked her.
“I did, my lord. I was lady-in-waiting to Queen Elinda.”
“And in that capacity, you served with Lady Kata Palav, the victim in this case, did you not?”
“Yes, my lord.”
Yes, I remembered this too. Lady Kata had been Lady Betheray’s friend. Which meant Lady Kata’s death—her murder—must have really grieved this woman. I couldn’t see any signs of grief on her face—of course not; she was too poised, too seemingly serene. But I had to wonder: Was she sorrowful enough to be angry, angry enough to want vengeance, vengeful enough to assume I was guilty, to actively try to condemn me here in her testimony?
There was a brief pause as, once again, the wizened graybeard in the wizardly robe leaned forward and whispered in Lord Iron’s ear. The politician’s large head inclined in agreement.
Then he said, “Lady Betheray, during the time you were a lady-in-waiting, did you ever have occasion to witness Lady Kata in a secret meeting with a man?”
“I did, my lord.”
“Would you describe that occasion?”
Lady Betheray went on in her silvery voice, gazing straight ahead, never turning, her hands still clasped in front of her. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was radiant in her womanly dignity and modesty.
“It happened one evening at the end of summer, just at twilight, shortly before the fall of the queen. I was doing my handiwork, sitting on the window seat of the ladies’ chamber in the queen’s quarters in order to catch the last rays of the sun to see by. As the daylight failed, I put my work away in its basket. I was just preparing to leave when I happened to glance down into the hedge maze in the garden directly below me. I saw Lady Kata there. She was walking in the maze, moving toward its center.”
“You could identify her even in the fading light?” Lord Iron asked.
“I could, my lord. There was still light enough, and I knew the lady well.”
“Very well. Go on.”
“I was curious as to what Lady Kata was doing in the maze at that hour, so I stood and watched for a few moments. She made her way to the center and sat on the stone bench in the statue garden there.”
“And then?”
“And then she waited. And it got darker. And after a few minutes, when it was full night so that I could no longer make out anything of her but her silhouette, a man approached her.”
“You saw him enter the maze?”
“I did not, my lord,” said Lady Betheray. She spoke into the air before her, looking neither to her husband nor anyone else. “It is my belief he had been standing in one of the maze’s alcoves, hidden behind a statue. I remember it seemed to me as if a statue had come to life and approached her.”
Again, the little wizard guy hovering behind the bench whispered to Lord Iron, and again Lord Iron nodded.
“Please go on, Lady Betheray.”
“The man made his way to the center of the maze and joined Lady Kata in the statue garden,” she said.
“And in what manner did she greet him?”
“She—Lady Kata—leapt from the bench on which she was sitting and rushed into the man’s arms.” Even from where I was standing far below her, I saw a faint flush of pink tinge the ivory of Lady Betheray’s cheeks. It occurred to me somewhere in the back of my mind that I had never seen a woman blush like that before—blush because she was speaking about romantic stuff, I mean. I had only read about women doing that in books. But here it was in real life—if real life is what this was.
“She embraced him, you mean?” Lord Iron asked.
“Embraced him passionately and then kissed him, my lord.”
“Kissed him like a relative?”
“No, my lord. They kissed as lovers kiss, and for a long time.” The crowd murmured, and Lady Betheray’s blush deepened, and something about it, I don’t know what—the old-fashioned, ladylike modesty of it, I guess—but whatever it was, I felt it pierce me through like a sword point, even here, even now.
Lord Iron had one of those gavels without a handle that just fit in the palm. He banged it on the bench.
“Order!” When the spectators had fallen silent, he turned back to his wife. “Lady Betheray, would you describe to this court your reaction to what you witnessed.”
“I was quite startled, my lord. I was shocked. I had always known Lady Kata to be a woman of virtue and true religion. She was married to Lord Gaunt, who was still alive at that time. And though he was much older than she was and had been sick of late, I had always known Kata—Lady Kata—to be faithful to her vows. I had not expected this.”
“And did you confront her about her infidelity?”
“I did, my lord. I considered it my duty as a friend. I spoke to her in private the very next day.”
“And can you describe that conversation?”
“Lady Kata was in great distress, crying grievously. She begged me to say nothing to the queen or to her husband. And yet she feared she would be undone in any case.”
“Undone. Because?”
“Lady Kata confessed to me …” And now, for the first time, the lady faltered, lowering her eyes almost imperceptibly. “Go on, my lady.”
She drew a breath and lifted her head, willing herself back to composure. “Lady Kata confessed to me that she feared she was carrying her lover’s child.”
You could hear that pass through the crowd like a bolt of electricity, the murmur moving from one end of the hall to the other.
“And she knew that it was her lover’s child and not her husband’s?” asked Lord Iron calmly.
“She did, my lord. Lord Gaunt had been grievously ill for many months, as everyone at court was aware. Lady Kata feared that when her condition became known, she would face trial for adultery.”
“As she would have,” said Lord Iron. The wizard type behind him leaned in again to whisper, but he held up his hand to silence him and continued. “Lady Betheray, did Lady Kata confess to you the name of her lover?”
“She did, my lord,” the lady replied.
It sounds crazy, I know, but to that point, I had been so hypnotized by her loveliness, so wrapped up in the narrative of her testimony, so completely convinced down to the bottom of my soul that that narrative had nothing to do with me, it was only in the moment before she answered that I realized with horror what she was going to say.
Until then, she had spoken almost without moving, her hands clasped before her, her eyes straight ahead. But now, she turned her face, just a little, just enough, so that her piercing green eyes were directly on me.
“She said that her lover was Austin Lively.”
“What? No!” I shouted. I’d always wondered why people in courtroom dramas on TV shout out like that. It makes them look so bad. I always thought they would be smart enough to control themselves. It turns out, you can’t help it. “It isn’t true!” I shouted, straining against my manacles as a nearby guard grabbed hold of me. “I never touched her! I never met her! She isn’t …”
I wa
s about to say, “She isn’t even real in my world!”—but Lord Iron hammered his palm gavel against the bench and I caught myself.
“Order!” he commanded. “Thank you for your testimony, Lady Betheray,” he said then. “You may step down.”
One more thing happened then—one more thing, I mean, to set my whirling mind whirling even faster.
Lady Betheray descended from the witness box, floating down the stairs as she had floated up them. She glided beneath the judge’s bench to the railing. Sir Aravist opened the gate, and she glided through.
And just then, just as she was gliding past me, close to me, near enough to touch me, near enough so that I thought I caught a wild, yearning scent from her like the scent of night-blooming jasmine, she turned and faced me—fully faced me. There was no mistaking it. This was not some subtle gesture like her nod of thanks to Sir Aravist, or her modest glance downward on the stand. She turned her head. She looked right into my eyes, gazed right into my eyes. And as I gawked back, my mind still reeling with horror and bewilderment, I saw … I couldn’t have said just then what I saw. Just then, I was too crazed to figure it out. But her gaze struck me like a broadside blow and an image came to life in my mind, a memory—more than a memory, a visceral flashback—her lips on mine, her soft shape against me. And in her eyes, I saw …
I thought about it later. And when I thought about it, what I thought was: I saw in her eyes that she loved me.
It was impossible. It was insane. I didn’t even know her—plus, she’d just condemned me. But then, all this was impossible. It was all insane. And the more I thought about it, the more certain I was of what I saw. Her eyes condemned me, her eyes were furious with me, but it was the condemnation of betrayal, the fury of her pain, of her love.
And there was that kiss, that remembered kiss …
AFTER THAT, AFTER all that, I was in such a stupor of confusion that the rest of the trial passed by like a procession seen through deep fog.
There was other testimony. I remember a physician of some sort took the stand. He testified that what Lady Betheray said was true: Lady Kata had, in fact, been pregnant when she was stabbed to death.
Another Kingdom Page 6
