Still clutching Rat, I unstick myself from the wall and turn into the study.
The queen follows.
The door clicks behind us.
Veran
There’s something like a collective sigh in the room as the door to Colm’s study closes.
“Earth and sky,” Vynce mutters next to me. “They look exactly alike, don’t they?”
I give a vaguely affirmative sound. I feel bad. I’d downplayed our arrival in Callais to Lark, because I really didn’t think it would be so overwhelming. I knew Rou would be emotional, but I didn’t expect Queen Mona and half my family to be here the minute we arrived. And now Lark is shut up in a room with Queen Mona, who’s maybe the only other person I can think of who’s as terrifying as the Sunshield Bandit.
Rou stands in front of the closed door, rigid, until Eloise takes his elbow and guides him down to the couch. Provost Gemma comes in from the kitchen, carrying a tray. She sets it down on the coffee table, pours Rou a mug, and presses it into his shaking hands.
I look around at my family. “How did you get here so soon?” I ask. “You must have set a record.”
“We traveled fast through Cyprien,” Mama says. She’s watching me with a shrewd look. “Mona insisted on changing teams and driving through several nights. None of the usual lengthy stays with senators.”
Papa shakes himself and turns to me. “We’ve heard all kinds of things, first in Rou’s letter and then in yours . . . you didn’t really go out into the Ferinno alone, did you? Tell me I misunderstood.”
“No,” I say. “I did. Twice.”
Vynce stares at me, just short of gaping. “And were you really robbed by—” He gestures to the closed door.
“It’s . . . more complicated than that,” I say wearily.
“Well.” Mama’s voice is like a branch breaking underfoot. She waves to the chairs. “We’ve got the time. Sit. Let’s get started.”
Lark
I stand at the far side of the little room, watching the queen calmly take off her traveling cloak. Even after having come hundreds of miles by boat and coach, she’s the most polished person I’ve ever seen, even compared to the dandified nobility in Tolukum. The door cracks open and a servant slips in with a tray, which she places on a low table in front of a squat adobe fireplace. The queen murmurs her thanks, hands her cloak to the maid, and then we’re alone again.
The study is lined with books of all sizes, and maps and notes coat the walls. The breeze from the cracked window creates a quiet ruffle of pages. The queen looks me up and down, from my scuffed, dusty boots to my hat with the splits in the brim. Her eyes are gray—the kind of gray you see in a thunderhead as it towers on the horizon.
Most folk forget that lightning can strike even if you’re nowhere near that thunderhead.
“They tell me your name is Lark,” she says.
I try to swallow some moisture into my throat. “Yes’m.”
“My name is Mona Alastaire,” she says. “But I suppose you already knew that?”
“Yes’m.”
She nods down at my arms. “Who is this?”
“Rat. My dog.”
“Will he come near me, do you think?”
I flick my gaze down to him, where he’s piled in my arms with his big, silly ears perked forward.
“Maybe if you sit down,” I say.
She moves to one of the chairs by the fireplace and settles onto it. She holds out her hand.
“Here, Rat.”
He cocks his head, looking at her empty palm.
“He thinks you’re going to give him food,” I say.
She plucks a corner of a corn cake off the coffee tray and holds it out to him. “Here, Rat.”
He twists in my arms, and reluctantly I let him down. He lopes forward and sniffs her hand. She holds still while he nips the cake from her palm. She pats him on the head, and he plops his rump down next to her, looking expectantly at the coffee tray.
“He’s a nice dog,” she says.
“He can tell when Veran’s about to have a seizure,” I say quickly, feeling absurdly like I have to validate my mangy coyote mutt to her. “He gets all worked up, and Veran knows to sit down.”
Her perfect eyebrows rise. “Does he now?” She looks at him again, turning her pat into a scratch. “How fascinating—and how helpful. What a smart dog you are.”
He closes his eyes lazily. I drift a little closer.
She turns her attention back up to me. Her face is narrow and smooth, with just a few faint age lines around her mouth and between her eyebrows. Freckles dust her cheeks and nose—like mine and Eloise’s.
“I’m glad to see your locks are still in,” she says. “You always hated your hair loose like Eloise’s. After you saw Senator Fontenot’s, you declared you wanted them, too.”
Her comment makes me realize I still have my hat on my head—surely a rude gesture. I swipe it off quickly, gripping the brim.
“Was it . . . you who got them started, then?” I ask. The question feels bizarre.
“No, I didn’t have the skills. I took you to Madame Binoche in Lilou, and she got them started and taught me how to take care of them.” Something flickers in her eyes. “I didn’t have much opportunity to practice, though. That was the week before the summit in Matariki.”
The place where I disappeared.
Without realizing it, I’ve drifted to the edge of the short couch beside the table. Rat noses the tray. The queen pinches off another piece of cake for him. Slowly, I sink down at the very edge of the couch, with the coffee table between us.
“Do you remember anything from that day?” the queen asks.
“No, ma’am.”
“Not a face, or a ship?”
“No.”
“Do you remember anything from before?” Her voice, like her face, is unreadable. Not sad, not angry, hardly emotional at all.
“Only . . . small things,” I say. “I don’t even know if they’re really memories . . .”
“Like what?”
“Coffee,” I say automatically, though it’s a stupid thing to start with. “With cinnamon.”
There’s the barest twitch at the corner of her lips. “Rou has always taken it that way.”
“You don’t drink coffee,” I say without thinking. I don’t know why I recall this, why it came to me just now—that he was the coffee drinker and she the tea.
“No,” she says, and we both look down at the coffee tray. The edge of a metal tea strainer peeks out from under the lid of the pot.
She folds her hands in her lap. “What else do you remember?”
“I . . . I think, waterfalls. Water in general. A lot of it.”
“That’s both Lumen Lake and Cyprien. You had a great deal of water in your early years.”
“And . . . some of the names,” I say. “They feel familiar. Colm and . . . Gemma.”
“Yes?”
“I named my horse Jema,” I blurt out. “I don’t know why.”
She gives another very slight smile. “I’m sure she’ll be pleased to hear it.”
I start to smile back, just as small as hers, but I quickly pinch my lips. This is going too well, too quickly. Too unreal—I need to slow it down, to pull it back, to let her down gently.
I clear my throat. “Just, um, just so you know—I mean, there are other things, too. Things you should know about me, before you . . . get too attached.”
She lifts her eyebrows again, just a little. “Oh?”
“It’s just—you know I was an outlaw. Right?”
“I’d heard, yes.”
“With a price on my head.”
“And a reputation, if I’m not mistaken,” she says.
“No. Yes. I mean . . . you’re right. And . . .” I look again at her hands, her smooth, fair skin. “I have tattoos. Lots of them.”
“Of what?”
“My sword and buckler. A river. A lark. A singing coyote. The sun.” I turn my wrists. “These words.”
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“What do they say?”
“Strength, and perseverance.”
She gives a little hm, lifting her chin. “Those are good words.”
I move on quickly. “Also, I don’t believe in the Light.”
She gives a short nod. “Neither do I.”
That throws me off, so I jump to the important thing. “I’ve done things that most folk would find . . . objectionable. Downright wrong, in a lot of cases.” I make myself raise my chin to match hers. “And I don’t regret them.”
She holds my gaze. “We have more in common than you might think.”
“It’s just—you heard about me wrecking Colm’s stage?”
“He told me, yes.”
“Well, his wasn’t the only one. And there were plenty of storehouses I’ve robbed. Oh, and I worked as a cattle thief for a while.”
“What are you expecting, Lark?” she asks finally—coolly, with that same even voice as before. “Do you think something you say will upset me, and I’ll storm away and have nothing to do with you? That I’ll deny who you are?”
Yes, that is exactly what I’m expecting.
I shift at the edge of the couch. “I just want you to know what you’re dealing with. I’m not like Eloise.”
“You were never like Eloise,” she says.
Silence hangs between us. Rat sets his head on his paws, one ear cocked back.
Queen Mona lets out a little breath. Some of the crispness slides from her shoulders. She leans forward and plucks a teacup off the tray.
“Has anyone told you anything about the circumstances of your birth?” she asks, filling the cup with steaming tea.
I clench the brim of my hat. “No.”
“I got very sick. I’d miscarried twice before you two, and when the healers determined I was carrying twins, no one was very hopeful that we’d all survive. In fact, I had all the documents in place to transition the throne to my youngest brother, Arlen.” She sips delicately from the hot cup. “Rou was a ball of nerves. He’d mourned the other two we’d lost, but the prospect of losing anywhere from one to three of us was agonizing for him.”
She sets the cup back on its saucer with barely more than a clink. “The details of the labor aren’t important—like most mothers, I remember very little of it. Suffice it to say, it lasted hours, and my health was already very poor, but you were both born alive, and I managed to hang on, too. But my most vivid memory from that night is that you cried.”
“I was a baby,” I say, mystified.
“Yes,” she says. “A skinny, red, premature baby who looked exactly like your sister. Except you cried. She didn’t. Great Light, you cried for hours. Eloise was silent as nightfall. I’ve never heard anything as frightening as that lack of sound. Not a peep out of this tiny, sick infant. The healers, understandably, descended on her in force. They tried everything. Rou and Ellamae helped them. They thumped her feet, they suctioned out her airways, they massaged her body, they pinched and prodded and tried everything to get her to respond. Meanwhile, you lay in my arms, squalling like a stuck piglet. And I remember lying there, barely conscious, and thinking what a picture of health you made—those deep breaths, that red face, the force of your cry. You were strong.”
I’m creasing the brim of my hat so hard my knuckles are going numb. I try to relax my grip. Queen Mona swirls her teacup, observing it contemplatively.
“Eloise came around, obviously, but those first few hours of your lives were portentous ones. Because I was so sick, I couldn’t produce enough milk for both of you. Eloise would only nurse on me, and only if I held her a certain way, and only if Rou dabbled her with a wet cloth to keep her from falling asleep. You were satisfied with anybody. So you had a wet nurse, while Eloise had me. Later on, Eloise was colicky for months, crying for days and nights on end, while you were content to lie and look at your mobile. So she was coddled and rocked and crooned to by a never-ending parade of family and nurses while you babbled at the little mother-of-pearl fish over your bassinet. Eloise never learned to sleep through the night. You slept like a rock. So her bassinet was pulled right alongside our bed, so I could nurse her without getting up every two hours. Yours was over in the corner, and later in a separate room, so her crying didn’t wake you.”
She waves a hand. “This continued. For five years it continued. Eloise startled at loud noises. You learned to pull yourself up in your bassinet to see what the loud noises were. Eloise was scared of the water. You tried to crawl into it when you were barely seven months old. Everything made Eloise sick—shellfish, strawberries, goat’s milk. You ate anything and everything. You can imagine, then, the discrepancy this led to. The squeaky wheel, as they say.”
She takes a long sip from her cup. “It was hard on Rou to figure out how to treat you both. He’s one of triplet brothers himself. Eloise is named for one of them, the one he was closest to. But he and his third brother never got along, ever, and he always regretted it. And I think he worried the same would happen to you two. You were so different. So he tried to shower you both with affection—it’s a strong point of his. Eloise took to it like a bee to honey. Oh, she loves her father. And you loved him, too, but you also had important things to do. You had missions to accomplish. You would squirm from his grip while Eloise snuggled close to him.
“You came to me instead, Lark. You knew I wouldn’t blow raspberries on your belly at any idle moment. You knew I wouldn’t plump your cheeks when you tried to talk to me. I had different ways of showing I loved you. To Eloise, I wasn’t nearly as much fun as your father. To you, I was stable, predictable. You liked that.”
Without warning, that dust from earlier rises back into my throat and up into my nose, stinging my eyes. I realize I’ve been staring at a divot on the edge of the coffee table for the past several minutes, but I can’t make myself tear my gaze away. Everything in my head is muddled again, all swirling and tumbling around like brush in a storm. Another silence stretches out. There’s a clink of the teacup on its saucer.
“Do you know how a pearl is made, Lark?”
I don’t know why she’s asking that question. My gaze slides from the coffee table to her hands holding the saucer—that’s as high as I can make myself look. She’s wearing two rings, one on each hand. On her left is a large white pearl set in gold filigree. Her wedding band, I suppose. On her right is a mother-of-pearl seal.
“It starts with a wound,” she says when I don’t respond. “Perhaps a bit of sand gets into the mussel. Maybe it gets nicked. To protect itself, it builds up layer after layer of nacre—mother-of-pearl. In a sense, that’s what happened to Rou and Eloise after you disappeared. It broke your father, Lark, what happened to you. He feels things deeply. That third brother, the one he never got along with—when he died, Rou mourned him as if they had been best friends. It’s his nature. And he loved you far, far more intimately than he ever loved Lyle.”
She sees me staring fixedly at her hands, and she tilts her wedding ring so I can see it better. “So to protect himself, he made a pearl. Eloise is the pearl of his heart and always will be. He nurtured her through her whole life, he cloaked her with love. Oh, he let her live, too, enough that she’s more than capable to stand alone, and well at that—she’ll be a good queen someday. But she is his, and he is hers—that’s how it’s always been.”
Silence falls again. She finishes her tea and sets the saucer back down on the coffee table. She folds her hands in her lap again.
“Lark,” she says. “May I tell you something I’ve never told anyone else?”
No, no, no, no you may not. I think of all the times I’ve been caught in sand devils, holding my breath in the stinging whirlwinds, and I could swear I’m caught in one again.
“Not my husband, not Eloise, not my brothers or my closest friends,” she continues as I persist in staring at her lovely fingernails. “Because it’s a guilty thought, Lark. A thought no mother should ever have, and one I hate myself for.”
My eyes drop ag
ain, to the floor between my feet.
“But can you imagine, that day in Matariki—if it had been her instead of you? Delicate, sensitive Eloise, who despite the responsibilities of a single heir still finds a way to be generous and kind to everyone, without fail. Sweet Eloise, gentle Eloise. What would have happened to her? What would have happened to Rou?
“That day and the ones that followed were the worst of my life, Lark, and I’ve had my share of very, very bad days,” she says. “I’ve had a hole inside me ever since that nothing will fill—not my second daughter, not my husband. I won’t say it was all worth it in the end, because it wasn’t. I would take the person who took you from us and kill them myself without—as you said—regretting it for one moment. But I sit here and look at you, Lark, and I see who you’ve become, and I see victory. You are strong. You are mighty. You’ve fought, and you’ve won. And I don’t care if you hate me for what happened to you—you certainly have the right—as long as you see what I’m seeing. I’m stunned and overwhelmed and relieved beyond belief, but I’m also vindicated. Because all this time, I knew that no matter where you were, no matter what had happened to you, you would beat it. And you have.”
I drop my hat. I don’t mean to—but my hands aren’t working right anymore. Nothing is. My throat is closed up and choking, my nose is streaming, and my eyes—damn my eyes to the sun and back. I wipe my nose on my sleeve.
“You can cry,” she says quietly.
“I hate crying.”
“As do I,” she says. “But sometimes we must.”
I squeeze my eyes shut and duck my head, tightening my fists. The tears fall before I can stop them, landing in two fat drops on my fallen hat. Once they’ve started, they don’t stop. I jam one of my fists into the bridge of my nose, my breath hitching uncontrollably deep in my chest. There’s a rustle of fabric, and the cushion sinks next to me. Her soft fingers close around my other fist. She leans until her forehead comes to rest against my temple, and then she kisses me right where she kissed the other two. I hear her own uneven breaths, and I know she’s crying, too.
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