As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  “As madness is mine.”

  It was so fleeting a thing, the smile that touched the edges of Sara’s face. How beautiful she is, Charlotte thought, far from the first time—ten years her senior, and never once to look it. Yet the smile faded, as all do, and in the grimace that replaced it, Charlotte knew what fortune tellers must know, for she saw a glimpse of the future, and the lines that had aged the face behind the smile. Sara was no one’s fool—a lesser figure in her father’s drama, but still far from a pawn.

  “I have to ask you something very serious now, Usuri,” Sara said cordially. “I ask only that you give me truth.”

  No witty repartee. No rebuttal. The girl looked on, eyes as glossy as a cow’s.

  “You killed my brothers.”

  It hit the girl—that much was plain. She flinched, but slowly nodded to the statement.

  “Yet you did not kill my stepmother or I. Why?”

  Conspiracy exists in many corners. A timely glance could give away much—it’s why so many think they see deceit in every fearful look. Most don’t realize: some people are just looking for help.

  Their eyes met across the silence, held the conspiracy between them. Charlotte purposefully held it longer than she should have, that there might be no doubt of where the girl looked. “Answer her, Usuri,” she softly spoke.

  “Transference. I killed those of your family to whom I had links.”

  Evasion, in spite of it all.

  “And how did you acquire these…links?”

  The softest flutter of a breath left the witch. “Walthere.”

  She had suspected. Clearly, from the moment Charlotte had told her the truth of Usuri, the princess had suspected. She closed her eyes, head bobbing to herself. Weighing. Always weighing, as their kind were forced to against the inevitable march of time and betrayal.

  “And my sister?” she asked more softly.

  Usuri blinked, her gaze rising ever-so-slightly. “The child?” Sara nodded. “Whoever’s doing, that, it was none of mine. I would bleed to a man those responsible for my father’s death. Not a child. Never a…no, not a child.”

  Breath finally left the princess again. With it, her eyes slid open anew, and some of the tension seemed to drift from her. She was within every right, every common bit of sense, to denounce them all for traitors and demand their heads. Except for the fact that if she did, it would be as good as a death sentence from her father in turn.

  Diplomacy—even in forgiveness, deal from the greater height.

  Charlotte realized how tightly she was squeezing her friend’s hand and tried to casually unlace herself. Sara’s own grip tightened more fiercely in reply.

  “Honesty is…so rare a thing,” Sara said. “Charlotte, would you leave us a moment, dear? There is something more I must say, and I should like it very much if it were but the…lady, and I, who were to share it.”

  The rejection hurt, in a way she should not have expected. To have come so far…have I not earned a place in this new conspiracy? A lack of trust was earned, but even so—she dipped her head as low as she could bring herself, and slipped away, to the men, to the fire, and to the innocence of their ribald talk.

  Yet for all they spoke, she had eyes only for the women who bent over one another, as sisters, in the darkness beyond the fire. No one else commented on it; they hated the magic as much as anyone, were unnerved by it. Were it their choice, they probably would have left the girl to drown, or to have burned before that. They did not, only because they listened to Charlotte. They were her men. The phrase still tasted strange upon her tongue.

  Between the shadows, something passed. It was bundled in a fist and in cloth, a fanciful nothing that promised everything—so long as its contents were left only to imagination. Charlotte stirred. Yet Usuri did not pause with it, nor pry it open. She, grave as a stone, buried the thing in the clothes against her breath, and Sara turned, and whatever Charlotte had set in motion passed with a gesture of the hand, beckoning her back into the fold.

  For a moment, she thought she smelled blood. It was only the chicken.

  Riding beside Dartrek at the core of their group, Charlotte forced her weary body to meet the castle town they neared. Tucked into the few hills that differentiated this stretch of farm and grazing land from all the others beyond, Fürlangen was beginning the descent into shadow when they arrived. Lights had begun to spot the windows as the guard made their final rounds before they closed gates for the night. If she squinted hard enough, she could still see the remnants of Usuri’s flames, black splotches on a stone-dappled scene.

  Within a few hours of that city, however, they had parted ways with the witch. By the time Usteroy had swallowed them all, she had become more the burden again and less the confidante. The night before she had woken screaming. The day after was spent mumbling to herself or staring off into the nothingness of distance, like she had killed again.

  Charlotte’s scrutiny had narrowed. Like, but not quite. Part of the after-sickness, perhaps. The travails of a broken mind, more like. She had to remind herself that any creature lost to tragedy essentially existed in two worlds: the one they controlled, and the one they didn’t. Sometimes Usuri simply went too far beyond herself.

  “I don’t know where to stop,” the witch confessed.

  They had been parting, perched beside a road marker to three different villages no one would ever put to a map. “You will wait for me?” Charlotte countered, attempting to steer the conversation.

  The witch nodded, sunk lower still, and started to move away. There was a certain cabin, undoubtedly in the path of any invading armies, but suitable for their purposes. Usuri would go there and await her next instruction. Recover. Hopefully.

  “What you did back there,” Charlotte had called after her unnecessarily, “it will help, you know. The more people we reach…”

  No words. Who was she convincing? The girl rode on, without looking back. So Charlotte rounded in her own coterie, and continued on the road into Fürlangen.

  On her return, she was ushered ungraciously from her steed into the keep proper, carefully separated from a worried Sara, and led by fops to her father’s study. He waited there, brooding like some rat in a corner, eyes sunken into caves. On the desk before him sat a thick-backed copy of La Femme Triste, a narrative of a lonely queen of Asantil, whose uncle sought to kill her and whose father killed her husband. Alone, adrift, she sought salvation in the arms of a childhood friend, and made to flee from one and all. It was born of another age, but its lessons still had meaning, and its sympathetic view of the monarchy made it adored in higher circles.

  It did not end well.

  “Daughter,” he said.

  “Father,” she replied with a curtsy. She could see the need to tread carefully. He shifted, nodded to something abstract.

  “Has something happened?”

  Wrong footing right out of the gate. The pits opened before her and folded hands slipped and slithered across the desk.

  “Two days ago, your uncle set out south—without my leave—on the words of spies. The words? Split Tooth Valley.”

  Perhaps the greatest bit of geological variance in the country—outside of Meschen’s Crater—the valley was miles of pristine crags and fertile fields—when it didn’t flood—spilling into the crater in the west and the wine coast on the east. It was also one of the most orthodox, staunchly Visaj stretches of land in the whole empire, the hills that rose to make its southern wall rising into the mountains that were their shield against Ravonno. It was nearly 150 miles south, with little in the way of shield on the march. Horror laid hands on her.

  “Do you know what is there? Besides fanatics? Thousands of Imperials, safe in their own lands, untrained perhaps, but what of it? They are in one of the most easily defensible positions in the country, drilling martial importance into their blasted souls, and instead of waiting until they were on the move, as I instructed, your uncle set out to kill them in their own beds.

  “Tha
t leaves me with a half-trained boy who—do not mistake me, he has promise, but he suffers the same misfortune as you: youth, stupid, arrogant, incurable youth—has just a few hundred soldiers. As if to press the point, Mauritz has already driven another force hard into our southern stretch, right behind your uncle’s rearguard, and seized the castle at Stierkreuz.”

  In other words: their way back. The very tip of southern Usteroy. She knew the knight that held it—a Ser Kast—an unimposing man, devoted but unremarkable. Dead now, most like, because he never would have yielded the castle while he breathed. She remembered a scrap of blond beard and a hopeful smile. Gods, is that all men come down to when they pass?

  “And the defenders?” she said at once.

  Disdain made a wan smile of his lips. “A paltry few against a host. They sacked the place. I received word only this morning. What could be burned was burned, more than a dozen were taken captive, and Ser Kast is dead. Crossbow bolt, Boyce tells me, as he walked the walls. Someone among his captains yielded not long after, Assal damn the man.”

  There was nothing in Usteroy that should have taken much more than a day to reach from any other point in the province. Any fool worth his salt should have known relief would come—but some fools saw only the fear of the present. Her father’s captains would debate the whys for days to come, no doubt, of why a castle, even a weak castle like that, should have fallen so swiftly. As to the traitor himself, a much simpler fate: execution, if he were ever found again.

  I pray for your victory, uncle, and more importantly, your swift return.

  Which brought her back to the point. She tensed, realizing what all this coalesced into. In this, she was an open book for her father. There were no longer any proper words.

  “You would know all this if you had actually gone to the camps.” Unrepentant, unbridled fury pitched the contours of his flabby face. “You will tell me where you were, Charlotte.”

  So like him, to feel some inherent claim upon her time, her place and her person, by virtue of blood alone. Though inwardly she seethed, she found the blatant emotion in her father’s outburst had the opposite effect he might have expected. It should have cowed her. Instead, it centered her.

  “To what end?”

  “Pardon?” He heaved himself up and advanced on her, eyes bulging, red hands shaking like little sausages. “You take our princess and you ride beyond this castle on the basis of a lie. And you cover it with a lie. And if that weren’t at all poor enough, child, they are all of them poor lies, rendered in the barest disrespect that is to think you can spin them plainly to my face.

  “To what end? To the end that I am your father, that if your father can no longer trust you, where exactly does that leave you, and to the end that I still have another child to which I can turn if you insist on writhing down this ungrateful little path.”

  After, she would ask herself why, in that strange, drugged stupid world, she had ever thought to reply: “Alas, you slit the throat of the only thing that might have made him viable.”

  She saw the moment the fire went out of him. It flashed and faded, a flame pelted with oil and penned, suddenly, in a cloistered room. The look he turned on her then was less the angry patriarch and more the grieving father. He looked honestly pained, and in this motion he looked older, ill—the wrinkles became him and she was reminded, however briefly, that he was mortal. Painfully mortal. His hand reached for hers, took it gently from her bearing. It was a delicate touch, more accustomed to the courtier than the lord.

  “Child, is this what you think, or what Sara thinks?”

  Less sadness than fear. When she saw it, she did not even answer him. Instead, she pulled her hands from his and stalked into the corridors, cursing the day a kitten gave birth to a lioness.

  Later, Charlotte paced the confines of Sara’s room, wordless but violent all the same, saying—she imagined—more in the madness of her bearing than a thousand words might ever suffice. Sara need not have been an observant woman to know something was wrong—nor to guess what that something was. For all this, the woman spoke instead of the capital, of what awaited them there, of the river when the sky was nothing but a ribbon of claret…

  The routine helped her, in its way. Not enough, but it did help.

  Even the routine had its downsides, though. Sara could talk of Anscharde all she wanted, but every time she did, there was the image of a child hovering at the edge of that same scene, a ring in his prepubescent hand and a whole generation between them. Husband and wife. A farce, as sure as any Charlotte’s father had concocted. God, but I’m bitter. It was not healthy for a woman so young to be so callous yet. Would that she drank.

  “You are going to have to leave this room sometime,” Sara said after a long while.

  The pleats of her hair were undone by then, left long as a maiden’s down her back, a dark mess of freedom that suited her wholly too well. Charlotte stopped her pacing.

  “And when you do, all of this will still be there, waiting for you. It is not easy, but you do have to be strong.” Her voice softened then, adding, “There’s others depend on that, you know.”

  “Like who?” Charlotte asked, puzzled. “Plans and plots and preparations. I weave my tiny webs, and my father weaves them into his, and beyond us the world goes on weaving all its own, and nothing I do has the tiniest effect. Who weaves a tinier web than I?” Foolish, of course. She knew plenty. Men who wove but a single thread, women that wove not a strand at all.

  Sara understood this and gratefully bowed her head. “I, for example.”

  “At least you’re a princess,” she countered, though she recognized the weakness of it.

  Sara looked at her with a smile that said she understood too well. “And you’ll be an empress. Names and titles. Things. You make your marks regardless of them. Look at your Boyce. How many webs has he woven, with naught a name or title to be pinned to his breast?”

  “How do you do it?”

  Sara blinked. “Do it?”

  “Put yourself above all this.”

  A wider smile. “I have a husband—one of three now—who does not care what I do. He prefers, I might add, the company of other men. I am barren. My brothers are petty twats or well-meaning fools or dangerous zealots, and I, one in a mass of them that have no idea where their place is in all of it.” She sighed, fluttered her long lashes. “Sister, the trick is to realize that people will do what they will do. There is not always a reason to it—at least not one the rest of us can see. Worrying about it just gives them power over you and shortens the mirth of your own life. Everyone plays everyone else. Even your father. No, especially your father—I should know; I joined him in it. The trick? Find what you want. Have faith. Roll it past the rest.”

  Their conversations were like this, dancing between the abstract and the all too prevalent. Sara was her ground. If Usuri helped her to realize what she could be, Sara helped her to remember what was. Each had their part to play and she would not have traded them for anything.

  Yet time brooded. Her father had taught her that. It left her to ponder Sara’s words over days and nights, and every time, as much as she railed and ranted against her father, she had to admit: Sara was only half-right. It might have sounded childish, or naïve, but there was a truth to what her father did: he played people, but he played them for the betterment of those he held most dear. His family. He had said as much; time and again he had shown as much. The problem was, the ones you cared about didn’t always understand what it was you were doing for them.

  By the time she had formulated this into an argument days later, though, and carrying them up to Sara’s rooms, Sara was meeting her with an obscene amount of energy, throwing the door to her chambers shut and taking her by the hands. Girlish was the only description of her bearing, down to the nightdress she wore.

  “Tell me, Charlotte, what sorcery did you have her weave?”

  “Sorcery?” she asked, genuinely confused.

  “Usuri! Maker be good, how
did you do it?”

  “I confess I am lost.”

  She chuckled. “Oh, but I must sound like a fool. Has Boyce not told you? Your uncle! He somehow slipped past the castles at the base of the Split Tooth and fell upon the host of my nephew’s men near Carolsweiler am Rotenfels. Crushed them. Absolutely crushed them.”

  Her head was buzzing, exultant for all that, by the end of Sara’s onrush. “H-how? I don’t—” A breath to steady herself. “Your nephew’s? I thought they were Mauritz’s.”

  “You think Mauritz would be so far from the capital? Now?” The princess beamed, most unregally. “Not with that lot. Untrained whelps, the lot. I suppose he left the drilling to Joseph’s son—Haruld—but more’s the pity, Haruld was no Joseph. I am told they fell amongst them in the night and scattered the whole force.”

  “Dead?” she asked, a second before she realized to whom she spoke. Those were not the sort of details after which Sara would inquire. Such tactical characteristics were…well, suffice to say, they favored a certain side of Charlotte’s family.

  Some of the flowering left Sara’s face, but she managed to maintain composure. “My nephew, yes. Sword through the chest, I am told. Some dozen or so lords at his banner. Captured or killed beyond that, I am afraid I cannot speak…”

  “No need!” Charlotte said quickly, squeezing her friend’s hands with a grin wide enough to renew her own. “Maker be good, Sara, and I was come to tell you of our own little adventure’s flowering, but this…this…”

  This did not mention, as yet, how Maynard or their men intended to get home before Mauritz mustered a counterattack of spite. A nibbling voice, that, but she tried to suppress it, telling herself that Maynard, brilliant, strong Maynard, would find a way back somehow. He had already beaten the odds once.

  “Oh? Do they speak of a woman so driven by her passions she could not live in a world of such malevolent child-murderers any longer?” Sara replied with a swoon.

  Or rather, she started to, when something exploded outside. Low rumbles gave to bright roars. Many somethings. Many different colored somethings. Charlotte blinked, focused on the shapes beyond the window, glittering, shimmering, falling down across the sky.