The Born Queen

by Greg Keyes

  “No,” Anne said. “I believe you expected it. I believe you did your level best to stop it—stop me—before I realized the extent of them.”

  “You can’t mean that,” Hespero replied. “Why would you think that?”

  Anne waved aside his protest. “Never mind that now. Why have you come here?”

  “To make an offer.”

  “And that offer is…?”

  “Your Majesty, I can train you. I can school you in the use of energies which, I assure you, are not done revealing themselves. You will soon face others whose gifts are a match for yours, who also wish to control the emerging sedos throne. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I do,” Anne said. “And the fact that I cannot seek you out in vision suggests to me that you are one of them.”

  “I have power,” he admitted. “I am the Fratrex Prismo of the holy Church, and the faneway one walks to ascend to that position carries…authority. But it isn’t me you should be concerned about. It’s the other. The one they used to call the Black Jester.”

  “The Black Jester? You mean from the histories?”

  “Yes—and no. It’s complicated. Suffice to say that he wouldn’t be the most pleasant fellow to sit the sedos throne.”

  “You’d rather have me, then.”

  He pursed his lips. “When I was quite a young man, I had an attish in the Bairghs, and there I discovered some very ancient prophecies that led me to very strange places. One of the strangest was here, below Eslen castle, where a certain prisoner was once kept. I think you know which one I mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “Those of us steeped in the sedos power have difficulty seeing one another, as you mentioned. But the Kept has no such constraints; the source of his power is not the same. And I extracted a vision or visions from him. He showed me, in effect, some of the results of what will soon happen. Now, as you also know, the future feeds back to the present. The thing each of us is to become beckons us to become it. You had a guide, a tutor, did you not?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “She is in part what was you in the past, but she is also Anne Dare after taking the sedos throne.”

  “That’s absurd,” Anne said, knowing as she said it that it wasn’t.

  “Not at all.”

  “So you’re saying I will take the throne, then?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he will.”

  “And that would be bad.”

  “I’m not sure. That’s not what I saw, but I imagine that yes, it would be bad. But what I’ve seen is you.”

  “Really? And what did you see?”

  “A demon queen, bruising the world beneath her heel for the thousand years it will take it to utterly die.”

  Anne had a sudden, vivid vision of her arilac, the first time she had seen her, a demon without mercy, a thing of pure malevolence. Was that her? What she would become?

  No.

  “That’s the most insane thing I’ve ever heard,” she said.

  “Without my help, that’s what will happen.”

  “And what sort of help are you prepared to give me? The kind you gave my father and sisters? The kind you gave the sisters of Saint Cer? Will you help me as you helped those at the sedos in Dunmrogh? Be aware I have a letter in your own hand implicating you.”

  “Anne,” Hespero said, his voice tinged with desperation. “The world teeters at the edge of collapse. Almost all futures lead to ruin. I can help you. Do you understand?”

  “No,” she snapped. “No, I don’t. I can’t imagine what is behind your contemptible lie or why you chose to deliver yourself to me, but hear me now: Fratrex Prismo or not, you will answer for your crimes.”

  “Do not make an unwise decision here,” Hespero said. “Don’t you understand? We must mend matters between us and move forward.”

  “I’ll hear no more of this. You’re a murderer, a torturer, and worse.” She nodded at her guards.

  “Take him.”

  “I’m sorry,” Hespero said. “Sleep, everyone.”

  Anne felt something warm brush her face. The guards collapsed in midstep.

  “What are you doing?” Anne said.

  “What I must,” he replied. “What I probably would have had to do in the end, anyway.” He stepped toward her.

  “Stop,” she said.

  He shook his head.

  Her fury boiled up, and she sent her will at him. His step faltered, but he came on. She couldn’t quite feel him, couldn’t boil his blood. Anxiously she pushed deeper, finally sensing something softer, something she could attack. And at least his gifts didn’t seem to affect her; she could feel them flailing uselessly about her like butterfly wings.

  But he was standing right next to her. She felt a sharp blow just under her ribs.

  “No!” she said, pushing away, staring at her habit and the dark stain spreading there, at the knife in Hespero’s hand.

  Then he caught her by the hair, and she felt it draw across her throat. She felt air blow through her head. She had to do something, stop him, stop him before it was too late…

  But she couldn’t think or feel him at all anymore.

  Or anything.

  Hespero knew he had to work quickly, while Anne’s blood was still pumping. Holding his hand to her head, he closed his eyes, opened himself to otherwhere, and searched for her life to catch hold of it before the dark river took it away. There he would find the attunements he needed to use her gifts. He would need them to face the Black Jester alone. To win the throne.

  But there was nothing draining from her, no memories or sensations, no power—no gifts.

  He opened his eyes. The blood still was pulsing from her carotid, which meant her heart was still beating. She was still alive despite her empty gaze.

  He’d killed her too fast, knocked the life out of her instead of draining it. He’d been in too much of a hurry. But she’d almost had him. Another few seconds would have been enough, and it would have been him, not her, lying there dead.

  The blood stopped. With a sigh, he stood and looked down at her pale corpse.

  “You were always foolish,” he said. “You never minded your lessons.”

  He hesitated, looking around at the sleeping courtiers. Could he keep them all thus until his army arrived and he could rule safely here?

  Not without Anne’s gifts. He was going to have to leave, come back, and fight his way in. How annoying, when he was already here.

  Ever pragmatic, Hespero turned and left the room, the castle, and Eslen. Time was short, and he had leagues to travel and much to do.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  LEAVING

  MURIELE LIFTED pen from paper and turned her head; she’d thought she’d heard a distant strain of music. She went to the balcony but didn’t hear anything other than birdsong in the valley. She glanced at what she’d been writing and found she wasn’t in a hurry to get it done. It was just something she was doing to pass the time.

  There was a lot of time. Berimund had left men to serve and protect her, but he had departed more than a nineday ago. Her Hanzish wasn’t really good enough to have a decent conversation with any of her guards, not that any of them seemed all that interesting.

  She wished she had Alis with her, but she had to face the fact that Alis and Neil were probably dead or at least imprisoned. It wasn’t a pleasant thought, but she thought it best that she keep her feet on the ground from here on.

  So she spent her time playing card games with herself, writing letters to Anne that she had no way to deliver, trying to puzzle through the few books available—all in Hanzish except one, a book of meditations on Saint Uni, which was in Church Vitellian.

  She was still shocked at how wrong it had all gone. Was it her fault? Was it her own mouth that had condemned her? Maybe, but it seemed to her that Marcomir would have found an excuse even if she’d stayed as quiet as a mouse. No, it was the embassy itself that had been the mistake.

  But the man at the table always knows what the cook
should have done, and there was no going back.

  Maybe Alis had at least had time to find the Hellrune and do whatever Anne intended. That seemed to have been the actual point of the delegation, for Anne, at least. But even that seemed terribly unlikely. It was true the girl had gifts—she could even render herself unseen in the right circumstances—but to make her way through an unknown castle to find an opponent who could see the future seemed as dubious as her own mission of peace.

  She sighed and patted her belly, thinking it needed filling. Someone eventually would bring her something, she knew, but she had a taste for cheese and wine. She had the run of the pantry and nothing better to do, especially treading the same regrets and worries over and over again.

  She went to the stairs and started up, as the balcony room was the lowest in the underearth structure.

  She found the pantry and cellar and cut a slice of hard white cheese, poured herself some wine, and sat alone in the kitchen, eating and idly studying the hearth, marveling again at the craft involved in building this place. The kitchen was still some ten kingsyards beneath the surface, which meant a chimney must have been cut down to the fireplace, which drew perfectly.

  That led her to muse about the possibility of cooking something for the evening meal. She hadn’t cooked in twenty years, but once she had rather enjoyed the alchemy of it.

  She got up and started going through the pantry and was imagining what she might make from pork confit, pickled radishes, spelt flour, dried cod, and prunes, when she heard voices. She ignored them at first but noticed eventually that the language didn’t have the cadence of Hanzish. It sounded more like the king’s tongue.

  She abandoned her exploration of dried goods and made her way down a short corridor that brought her to the great hall, a lovely chamber that must have been partly natural, for it had stone teeth depending from the ceiling, as she had heard existed in caves.

  But the chamber didn’t hold her attention at the moment.

  The many dead men on the floor did.

  And Robert, talking to a fellow in a black jerkin. Robert, who now waved at her and smiled.

  “We were just wondering where you were,” he said.

  In the gray of almost dawn, Neil gauged the distance and wasn’t happy with what he thought.

  “Is this the only way?” he asked.

  “The only other way is down,” Brinna said. “There are twenty guardsmen between us and freedom there, and even at the peak of your fighting ability, I doubt you could manage that much killing.”

  He nodded absently. He was standing on the casement of the only window in Brinna’s suite, which faced another tower and another window. The second building was perhaps three kingsyards away, the window around a yard lower than the one on which he stood. He was being asked to jump from one to the other.

  Other towers jutted up all around, a virtual forest of them.

  “Where are we?” he asked. “This doesn’t look like anyplace I saw in the city.”

  “This is Kaithbaurg-of-Shadows,” she said.

  “You live in the city of the dead?”

  “I get my visions from the dead,” she said, “so it is convenient. Besides, haliurunnae are considered to be more dead than alive. Many people feel polluted by our presence.”

  “That’s terrible,” he said.

  “Can you jump that far?” she asked, passing the issue back into wherever seldom spoken of things belonged.

  “Why not just lower us down to the ground?”

  “The rope isn’t that long,” she said. “I took it from the boat, thinking I might have need of it one day, but I was only able to manage so much without it being noticed in my things.”

  “Well,” Neil said, “I’ll jump it, then.”

  He tossed the hauberk and sword first, worried at the echoing sound of their impact, and then flexed his knees.

  He knew he wouldn’t manage to land on his feet, and he didn’t. He hit the bottom of the window with his breastbone and caught his arms over the edge. His left arm cramped up in a ball, and the right went weak, but he managed to get one elbow up, then the other, so that he could squirm through.

  Alis tossed him the rope, and he tied his end on a roof beam above the window.

  He waited impatiently as Alis tied off their end, then showed Brinna how to hang on the rope by her hands and knees. Even though it was a downward slope, he could see the princess was having trouble. Although she didn’t make a sound, tears were running from her eyes by the time Neil received her on his end.

  He was astonished at the lightness of her body as he drew her in, at the feel of her. For an instant their gazes locked, and he wanted to brush the water that had collected on her cheeks.

  He set her down instead and followed her gaze as she looked at her hands. They were bleeding, and he suddenly understood that she almost hadn’t made it, that what he thought of as a minor physical effort was at the further limits of her ability. Living one’s life in a tower didn’t do much to toughen the body.

  Courage, he reflected, was a relative thing.

  Alis came across as quickly and surely as a spider while Neil armed and armored himself.

  They had no choice but to untie their end of the rope and let it dangle on the other side to inform pursuers of where they had gone. Not that there was anywhere else to go, really.

  Alis had brought a lantern, which she unshuttered to reveal three rickety chairs and rotting tapestries on the walls.

  “Down,” Brinna said.

  They had to cross the next room to continue, and there they were greeted by a skeleton in a rotted gown looking very relaxed in an armchair.

  “My great-grandmother,” Brinna informed them. “When we die, our rooms are sealed off, and we remain in them.”

  That seal was their next obstacle; a wall obstructed the stairs; fortunately, it was of rather desiccated wood rather than brick or stone. Neil was able to smash through it with the hilt of the broadsword he had chosen, and they continued down through the crypt until they reached the lowest level, which was sealed by an iron portal that, also fortunately, was not locked.

  The northern wall of Kaithbaurg loomed a few kingsyards away, casting a permanent shadow on the bases of the cluster of fifteen towers that formed the heart of the shadow city. Moss was thick and springy underfoot, jeweled with colorful mushrooms.

  “Quickly,” Brinna whispered.

  They set off north on a path paved in lead brick, through the mansions of the dead that crowded up to the Hellrune towers, into the meaner dwellings beyond, and finally to the tombs of the poor, mass graves with nothing more than dilapidated wooden huts to act as shrines. It began to rain, and the path, no longer paved, quickly turned to viscous mud.

  They came at last to a large iron gate flanked by stone towers in a wall that enclosed the necropolis and went around to join the one guarding Kaithbaurg.

  A man in lord’s plate stepped from the gatehouse, raising his visor so that Neil could see the aged features within. His breastplate bore the hammer of Saint Under, marking him as a Scathoman, a guardian of the dead.

  “Majesty,” the knight said, his voice formal and quavered by the rain. “What brings you here?”

  “Sir Safrax,” Brinna said. “It’s raining. I’m cold. Open the gate.”

  “You know I can’t do that,” he said apologetically.

  “I know you will,” she replied.

  He shook his head. “Princess you may be, but my holy task is to see to the dead and keep you where you belong.”

  Neil drew his sword. It was heavier than Battlehound.

  He didn’t insult the older knight by saying anything. He just took a stance.

  “Alarm!” the knight shouted, then drew his weapon and came at Neil.

  They circled for a moment before Neil took the first swing, stepping in and cutting hard toward the juncture of neck and shoulder. Safrax turned so that the blow glanced from his armored shoulder and cut back. Neil ducked that and went unde
r his arm and behind him. His arms already were aching, so he spun and hammered the blade into the back of the other knight’s helm, sending him down to his knees. Two more strokes ended it.

  But by then three more knights had come clattering out of the tower, and he heard a horn blowing to broaden the alarm.

  Robert smiled and gestured toward an armchair.

  “Have a seat, my dear,” he said. “We should chat, you and I.”

  Muriele took a step back, then another.

  “I don’t believe I will,” she said. Every fiber of her wanted to run, but she knew that she would only sacrifice her dignity if she did so. Robert would catch her.

  She tightened her belly and stood her ground.

  “I don’t know how Hansa has put up with you this long,” she said, “but now you’ve killed your host’s men. I think you’ve worn out your welcome.”

  “I’m going to sit,” Robert said. “Join me if you wish.”

  He folded his lean frame into a second armchair. “There are a few things wrong with your supposition,” he said. “The first is that anyone will ever find these bodies. The whole point of this place is that it is secret, yes? And if Berimund returns—and that is itself a very large if because his father is quite mad with rage at him—there is no reason for him to suspect my hand in this. But a much more profound trouble with your reasoning is the fact that I’m leaving Hansa anyway. It proved a useful haven, but I’m not so foolish as to believe that Marcomir would put me on the throne.”

  “What are you up to, then? Where could you possibly go?”

  “Crotheny. I have one small thing in Newland to tidy up, and then I’ll be on to Eslen.”

  “Anne will execute you.”

  “You know I can’t die. You tested it with my own knife.”

  “True. So your head will live after it’s struck off. Perhaps Anne will keep it in a cage as an amusement.”

  “She might, but I don’t think so. Obviously, or I wouldn’t go back there. It’s all about to happen, Muriele. I’ve no idea how things will turn out, but I have nothing to lose and everything to gain.”