As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  Dismissal was like a poultice—best done quick. He offered it to her with dignity, but the threat behind it was not missed either. She screwed herself up with something approaching dignity, declined his offer, and fled the room as gracefully as she could muster.

  In the old brick confines of Sara’s tower, Charlotte returned to those she had left behind. Dartrek sat with Sara, the window beside her bed the only one allowed open to the heat of the day. This was for one reason only: at that window were Dartrek’s booted feet, and from those boots rose the sinewy limbs of a man accustomed to death, a longbow in his lap and a short sword at his hip. He said little. Moved less. But the eyes—the eyes were always moving.

  He acknowledged her approach with a half-rise, before he settled back at his post. Another chair sat next to him, but Charlotte shunned it for a seat by Sara’s bed.

  Beyond them, beyond that room, where the sick stench of a beaten girl lingered like a soporific, a drum was beating as surely as the ticking of a clock.

  Some said it was the eyes that were a mirror inward. The skin was not so terrible a judge either. Sara’s had grown a shade shy of chalky, and though the blood had been wiped from her, the bandages which now encased too much of her lovely body reddened regularly. Charlotte had taken it upon herself to change them more than once—no matter how much Dartrek objected.

  Why you? Why now?

  Words bounced like children, gained faces, twisted into blond hairs which twined around and around about the confines of her mind, leading her to others. Why them? Why here? War traded in captives—it was a fact of nobility. Yet the greater question then became what nobles, and how valuable, and whether it was enough to save them. If her father had let them see the Matair brats, however, she did not suppose it likely.

  One tended to isolate the knowledge of captives. Suppress it. One did not offer grace unless they did not care, and one did not care unless…

  Information was always death. She clutched her friend’s hand in her claws and whispered the same mantra over and over: I should have been able to do more. It was the same mantra she could hear in the creak of Dartrek’s chair.

  Sara lay comatose. The doctors were not certain when—if ever—she would rouse again. The blows had been too many and too furious, and in part of the squabble, her skull had been cracked like the shell of a beetle. She had watched, in the hours after, as those sanguine men in bloodied robes cut away inch after inch of the princess’s hair to expose the wound, to drain and patch the wound in turn.

  Swelling was the greatest danger now. If the swelling within did not go down, Sara’s skull should press against her brain as a man diving against his own sword. Greatest danger. A lark. She should have laughed, if it weren’t so depressing. If the swelling did not burst her bald head, then it might be bone raining upon her heart, or a putrefaction of the blood, or so many other things it dizzied her mind. Leeches came. Bandages wrapped and rewrapped. They turned her, and turned her again, that sores should not take to her cool flesh. Sometimes it was easier than others.

  Everything about her friend was cracked, broken, dismantled. She did not even look like Sara anymore. What wasn’t gone pallid flushed with the sickly purple-yellow hue of ruptured somethings. An eye—a perfect green eye—was swollen shut and her heartbeat, when Charlotte pressed her fingers against her neck and listened, was faint, so terribly faint. Even her breaths were as the whisper of a dormouse.

  They were faint enough she nearly sprang when she looked up to find the one good eye fixed upon her and the brush of a fingertip reaching for her cheek. “Dartrek!” she screamed, and the man was up with sword in hand in no time at all, but the hand fell, and the panic slowly subsided—though her heart still raced—and they were left, the three of them, staring disbelievingly between them.

  “I gave up drink for this…” Dartrek murmured, face like one ghost-haunted.

  She didn’t have the attention span to scowl at him. Instead, she crept forward, a timid child in a situation so far beyond her as to be incomprehensible, and her hands gingerly took that one fallen hand into her own. She hoped, desperately, that in her fear had not crept greater hurts.

  “Sara…?”

  The breath that forced a voice from Sara’s lungs was tremulous, and long—a thing uncertain of its own bearings. “Where are her bones?” Scratched were the notes that rose. Yet they scarcely stirred her throat—too much energy required to move it. It sounded like something from a nightmare.

  “I never thought…I would call myself…Durvalle.”

  Beneath the rasp, there lay a double resonance to the voice, something throatier, ill-at-home in Sara’s body. There were men in the villages, littlefolk, who spoke of witches able to take another’s form. If she had watched one burn a man alive from miles beyond, and set a town ablaze, how much further from reality was that notion, truly?

  Charlotte’s mouth twisted into a false smile. “Usuri, do you so use a friend?” she cut in coldly.

  The head rolled, the body lolled, and all was still. For a moment. Then the eyes drifted back distantly on her, but they were not Sara’s eyes. Something looked through them without depriving them of sleep’s glossy sheen.

  Dartrek made a symbol in the air and stepped back, muttering a curse.

  Rasping, Sara said, “A man…you sent a man to me. Take the body, say they! Burn the killer! Burn the traitor! But his clothes, what care they for his clothes? But I…but I…Hairs, the world upon the edge of a hair…like a thimble. And I use them, use them as I will.” She swallowed, licked her lips in spite of her own lack of substance. “And I trust no one but mine own word. I know.”

  “Know?”

  “The…the worth.”

  “Is Sara…?”

  “Yes,” Usuri said through the unconscious woman’s lips. “She is. But dead men tell me…it was your father’s game…”

  “You speak with spirits now as well?” Charlotte snapped.

  The sad smile that greeted was pitiful, half-cocked. “Not…spirit. Haaiirrss. Such a clump of someone’s…a piece of you, a piece of princess, a piece of death and…a piece of a spider.”

  The lump caught in her throat. “Out with it!” she barked.

  “A piece of us is a link to the whole, and Boyce…lies at the whole.”

  Sara winced, shuddered, and the foreign voice added, “This is…difficult. She is so dim.” There was a twinge of grief in that calling.

  “Then stop using her!” Charlotte shrieked. “Stop it! You kill her just to tell me this? To give me hairs? Away with you, witch, I’ll no more of it!”

  The head lolled, the distant eyes fixing her. “It was you gave me the hairs, little bird. Because…you knew.” This last accusation led into a limp lip, the eyes rolling with the descent of the lids, head slumped back into the pillows that held it aloft. No more animation—just a sick girl, lost in the confines of her own mind again.

  They were alone. Though it was more than the slightest bit unsettling to know that the witch, much as Charlotte felt for her, might be in any of them, at any moment, listening. More and more tricks, that girl unveiled, and Charlotte was not sure how to treat them.

  She put her hand immediately to her friend’s head, to feel the heat. Sweat-licked there, but no fire. She rounded on the horrified Dartrek and barked an order for water. Hesitation held him for a moment, but under her stare he eventually relented. Charlotte then felt Sara’s pulse for any change. There was none.

  “Oh, Sara…I am so sorry…”

  For they were all using her, it would seem. Tools within tools, and every one of them thinking they had some right the world did not offer. Perhaps might made right, but birth certainly did not. Entitlement was nothing before those that could—and would—take.

  It was clear. All evidence came to it—had come to it, in truth, before there even was any evidence. But still she hated to think it—the mind made infinite excuses, no matter how it knew better, for those who lay closest to one’s own heart. Which was laugh
able, of course. Putting the heart and Walthere Cullick in the same sentence was about as natural as a Drakkon.

  Naturally, the mind compartmentalized such things. It reduced it to a face, a moment—a brown strand of hair brushing against a fingertip. Her hand lay flush against Sara’s cheek, keeping that wan face clear. Broken beauty—is this what we are left with, if we do not surrender ourselves to family and to the men behind them? Heretical, some might have called that. Women had a place. Gladly, she would have spat on them and that damnable notion then.

  Yet what she found most terrifying about this woman before her, feelings aside, was how much of herself—the possibility of herself, at least—she saw in her. Fear like she had known in those moments of the assassination had been unfamiliar—she had no true defense against them. Years of training had not made her ready for that raw brutality. There had been movement in the darkness, then hands, hands and steel and the recession of consciousness. It terrified her how many of the bits and pieces could slip in the aftermath of necessity.

  She was a woman who prided herself on detail. The knife in the darkness—the slight slant to which he held it, favoring the right side. The cloth the dead man wore, down to the hairs that had formed her later decision. Even the perfume Sara wore that day, with the weight of oceans behind its turbulence. These things she remembered, inconsequential when it came down to it, while other, more seemingly important ideas, fled at the merest inkling of interest.

  Like a cornered hound, she supposed. The mind lashed out to what it could, and sometimes it snared little details in its jaws. Panic was indiscriminate, though. It could not gobble everything down.

  Gradually, she grew aware of the smell of her own stale sweat. Terror remained still near. Yet not so far beyond—anger. She reached for it, tried to seize it before this, too, diminished.

  Once she had it, she began to recreate. Dimensions separated, pulled apart into the interlocking web of why, as her father had taught her so long ago. All things had reason, had purpose, at least amongst the sane. If one could find that purpose, they could find the spider at the end of its string.

  By the time Dartrek returned with a compress and a bucket of water, Charlotte had some semblance of a plan. Out there, her uncle was fighting a war, her cousin was fighting battles, and lands all around the reaches of the Empire burned with the stratagems of men accustomed to the field. She was not accustomed to the field. It was not her domain. Children and fops and nobles were, from their words down to their skirts, and it was a field as deadly as any battle.

  She saw why the mother had to go. Outlived her purpose, she had. The daughter had been nothing—a liability, another Durvalle that might have claimed a throne, and older than her own future husband. She saw the men her father had enlisted for it—first the witch, to strike those first, unseen blows when caution was necessity, then the assassin when it had become impossible. She saw feints within feints, was not certain that first attempt on Rosamine’s life had ever truly been a failure—more of an intentional setback.

  One by one, she counted out the names of those people at the heart of Walthere’s cabal—all those loyal, all those bought, all those to whom it was the name, rather than the man, that mattered. Last of all, she came to a child, with those Durvalle eyes like emeralds, who cried himself to sleep at night because his world was not what it once had been.

  It took a child to turn to children. Hair. Children. Purpose. All points coalesced and knelt upon the neck of the moment: Who are those damned blond children, and what is their part in all of this?

  Too much, with what she had. But there was one thing she might do, at least. One thing which Usuri had made painfully clear to her. With a sense of fatalism, she ordered another man from Dartrek, a soldier to be trusted, and she told him where the witch might be found. Then she sent for a runner, to send a second message. The wait which followed was its own torment.

  By the time Boyce arrived, it was late indeed. She had not felt comfortable sending for him until she had word from Usuri. It had come in the form of a dream. Both had been naked. Back in the field. She blushed to think of it—knew the witch used it as a firm chastisement for her earlier rebuke.

  The spymaster’s rheumy eyes glittered as he entered the sitting room, the energy of his movements betraying none of the weariness she beheld there. He entered only at her command, bowed low without even that.

  She settled in her chair, would not rise to greet him. “I should wonder,” she said after he situated himself, “if you might be so kind as to grace me with honesty, Boyce.”

  The twinkle in his eyes remained as he smiled. “Such has ever been my pleasure, Lady.”

  “That…is not a promising start. You care for me, Boyce. I know that. As you care for my father. But I assure you, I am like him in certain regards—my ruthlessness among them. We lions are impulsive creatures. We do not like being toyed with.” She took a long, steadying breath. “We have always had a good relationship, you and I.”

  “Strained though, at times,” the spymaster admitted. A shred of truth, at least.

  “I did not invite you here to discuss history.”

  “A shame,” the man said with a shrug. He did not look the least concerned.

  She sighed. “Earlier I asked who those children were. I would not have that question redressed.”

  Boyce stiffened. It leant him a vulterous image. “You surely have your own reports,” he ventured cautiously. “What troubles, my lady?”

  “Tonight, I do include coyness in my request for honesty, Boyce.”

  “As you wish, my lady.”

  “Who are those children, Boyce? I shall not ask again.”

  The spymaster shrugged. “My lady puts me in an impossible position. My loyalty is first to your father. This does not mean it is not also to you.”

  It shall have to be the shock then, she thought miserably. I had hoped to avoid this.

  Yet even so, she had planned for it.

  There was that other presence, lingering at the edge of her knowing, listening without acting. It was amazing what a strand of hair could achieve.

  “I dislike blind spots in my living, Boyce. You should understand that much.”

  The old eyes blazed, and Boyce started to rise, saying, “You ask me to betray a confidence. It shall not be—”

  “I did not dismiss you, Boyce,” she snapped.

  The words were like the crack of a whip. Their effect was instantaneous, a seizing rigidity, for the man fell back into the chair so suddenly it seemed that every bone in his body, and every muscle, must surely have failed at once. On his face, writ large for once, was a mix of shock and terror so poignant as to be childishly comical.

  Yet the mind was a different animal altogether. The speed at which she watched him wrench from terrible uncertainty, to stunned understanding, and race along at an unparalleled pace into possibility from the unknown was, without a doubt, utterly unnerving.

  “The witch still lives!” he snarled.

  She gathered herself for a fight. Do not let pride better you, she eased into her addled mind. He is shocked. Afraid. You could crush him with the weight of what you might unveil. Ease it out.

  “You are not, as you have long estimated, the only one whom plays at secrets, Boyce. That knowing has made you successful. That that knowing has been done in the name of my family is the only thing that keeps you alive now.” She nodded, and the shadow which had attracted so little initial attention from the spymaster now slid from the corner. Dartrek was a big man, somewhat yellowed, she supposed, by an old life with the drink—but there was no one quieter. “We understand each other, Boyce. Scarcely have our days been spent eye to eye, but the understanding is there. At a time such as this, that is no longer enough.”

  Boyce swallowed hard. She could see that even this small act was a struggle of will. It was as though his body obeyed without consultation of the mind. Not so much a puppet on the strings as a child held down by another, much larger child. There wa
s a struggle in him that wrenched her innards, but it was necessity. There was no better alternative.

  “When we work at cross purposes to achieve the same ends, it is as two wheels of the cart twisting in different directions. They will end up nowhere at all. Do you understand me?”

  He stared at her, squinted and trembled with the force of his captivity.

  “Why should you deprive of us a weapon such as she?” he asked.

  Which was, of course, moving at cross purposes once again. She shook her head.

  “Boyce. You will have to trust me when we are through here, trust me that I have spirited her away for all of our own goods. My father uses tools and discards them as quick. I would build upon their foundations—leave something lasting. And you will have to trust me because, when all of this is done, I will take the chance to trust you. I will let you walk from this room with that knowledge of her living, of my part in that living, and the knowing that there are other men whom have known it all along.”

  “You play a dangerous game.”

  “As do we all. This is war, is it not? Which is why I must know what those children mean to us, and when my father will discard them.”

  Boyce lowered his head, trundled through something before looking askance at her through angled lids. Surprise had briefly unmanned him. Control was slipping back, bit by bit.

  “You need not worry about the children, Charlotte.”

  “That is not what I—”

  He cut her off, saying, “They are already dead, Charlotte.”

  So there it was. It was she that sank deep into the folds of her chair then, feeling too much of the fight go out of her. Pride had not done it. Disbelief had. Quickly, she had thought she had moved. Not enough. It was never enough.

  But Boyce could see the question in her eyes, continued, “You wouldn’t have known them. I suppose the shades of their eyes did not hold the color—not children of the blood, by the blood. Yet people are, all the time, caught in the orbit of misfortune. You are aware, of course, this emperor did not come from Ravonno alone?”