by Carol Berg
“And what weight would such testimony hold against a drowning prince’s lifeline, when that prince sees his brother’s legions bearing down on his royal city? None. Not even when that prince is Eodward’s noblest son.”
That we could know who committed such a crime and have no way to see justice done was outrageous. There had to be a way.
“What of the child’s mother? Do we know who she might be? We don’t even know Fleure’s real name.” Irinyi would know, but a priestess could not be forced to testify without incontrovertible proof of her own crime.
“We’ve one possible lead, again from Pleury. He was talking with a scullion from the palace whose mam was wet nurse for Prince Perryn’s own children. When Pleury asked her if her mam suckled other nobles’ babes, the girl said she did, and mentioned that the woman had even been called in by Prince Perryn’s mistresses a time or two, as her milk set so well with his blood. Pleury’s thinking to talk to the wet nurse herself tonight when she goes home. I’m leery of it, though. It’s a risk to prance around the noble districts, talking of a prince’s mistresses and a dead bastard. Purebloods, if they gave a pig’s snout about a dead ordinary, might live through such a folly, but not the rest of us with heads less protected.”
A certain desperation possessed me, inspired by the doom-saying Cicerons and Curator Damon’s threat. The time to accomplish anything of worth was so short. “What of the other dead children? I could copy their portraits and brush out the royal lilies. If we could learn their names . . . find witnesses to their deaths . . .”
But Bastien denied me even as I babbled. “Don’t you see?” he said, when my arguments ran dry. “Were the shades of all five dead bastards pointing their bony fingers at Tremayne ’twouldn’t make no difference to the outcome. No matter his own character, Perryn needs his every ally. I was hoping we’d come on a weaker man, one out of favor or—I don’t know. It was ever a fool’s hope. If only you were— Pssh!”
Words could not encompass his frustration. Nor mine. In any other circumstance Bastien could hold his inquest on the steps of the palace, because the testimony of my bent would be unassailable. But not if my own kind proclaimed me mad.
Rain dribbled around the shutters and spattered on the floor, the quiet sounds not peaceful but infuriating as they emphasized our dearth of ideas. Bastien strode round the chamber, his jaw like rock.
“Perryn must be told his own servant is a murderer,” I said at last. “Tremayne is surely a spy—Prince Bayard’s or the Harrower priestess’s—which means Perryn’s legitimate heirs could be next in line for poison or strangling or trampling. How could an honorable prince, Eodward’s noblest son, ignore the death cries of his own blood? With your persuasion and my magic, we can convince him to give up Tremayne. If he’s not honorable . . . well, then we’ll know.”
“And we’ll be dead as well.” Bastien kept walking. A determined hammering on the door halted him midstride.
“Coroner, come out!” It was Constance banging and rattling the latch.
Bastien rolled his eyes and yanked the door open. “How thick-headed are you, draggletail? I told you never to interrupt me here.”
Constance, hair lank and garments dripping, did not flinch. She was quivering with excitement, the smoking torch in her hand not half so fiery as the spark in her colorless eyes. “Get to the wall and lay your eyeballs on what’s come. Him as is in there with you might ought to see, as well.”
Without a question Bastien unlocked my shackles and jerked his head to the door. I grabbed my mask and my already damp blanket and followed them down the stairs, through the deserted prometheum, and across the lane to the eastern wall.
The necropolis walls weren’t thick enough for a wall walk. Who would need to guard a city of the dead? But every few hundred quercae of the wall’s length, a stone stair led up to a height where one could reach one of the stone cauldrons mounted atop the wall.
I doubted Garibald’s linkboys ever had occasion to light the cauldrons; the quantity of oil needed for such grandeur would far outreach any but a king’s funeral fees. But as the gray afternoon lapsed into rainy night, surely everyone who worked in the necropolis crowded the stairs or perched on the wall, looking out. Eerily quiet. Even the rain seemed to tiptoe across the dirt lane and the courtyards.
“Move aside!” Bastien’s command split the air like a lightning flash.
Linkboys and washing girls scrambled away or jumped from the sides of the steps to make way.
Clutching the damp wool about my shoulders, I hurried behind him up the nearest stair. The view beyond the wall took my breath.
The land fell away quickly from the plateau where the necropolis stood. Below us the rolling hills of Ardra lay as soft and smooth as women’s breasts. Rivers of torchlight flowed through the pooled night between the hills, a gathering flood as they neared the eastern gates off to our right beyond the tarry canyon of the hirudo. I had never seen so many torches. Thousands.
As we gaped, a deep and throaty roar rolled through that throng and a fanfare of trumpets blared welcome and warnings to every creature with ears to hear them. Perryn of Ardra had come home, dragging with him his battle-weary legions and his war.
PART IV
HARSH MAGIC
CHAPTER 28
If the rest of the morning’s plan was going to proceed as badly as its beginning, Bastien and I might as well skip our meeting with Prince Perryn and offer ourselves straight up to the local hangman.
“Look out!” In a single deft move, Bastien dodged a rattling dung cart, shouldered me out of its way, and sent it careening down the steep lane. The erstwhile driver of the cart grappled in the mud with the fool who had tried to steal the stinking rattletrap.
I hoped both thief and drover drowned in the cold muck. I hoped the cart flattened a few of the drunken louts whose pawing, vomiting riot had caused us to lose two hours on our way to the palace and my meeting with Perryn of Ardra. We were almost out of time.
Five days since Perryn had marched into Palinur, and he had yet to impose any sort of order. He could not have picked a worse month to make a stand in his royal city, when the long winter had depleted meager stores and famine dug its claws into every citizen’s belly. My own gut ground its sides together, raw from naught but a lump of pignut bread.
And to shut thousands of soldiers behind city walls after months in the field was madness. Amid the cartloads of pikemen dead from battle wounds and the increasing numbers of the diseased and starvelings were hundreds dead from riots and no few from licentious usage.
Matters would certainly be worse if the Prince’s thuggish elder brother took the city or, gods save us all, if Sila Diaglou and her Harrowers grew bolder than they were already. Garen and Pleury reported the Harrowers wore their orange scarves openly, demanding sacrifice, destruction, and burning to appease their angry Gehoum. Rumor had both brother prince and priestess racing toward Palinur like wolves toward a wounded buck.
Most citizens of Palinur blamed Perryn’s generals, his soldiers, or his Guard Royale for their terror, thereby fueling the constant brawls between townsmen and soldiers; others blamed the Elder Gods, the Karish god Iero, twistminds, or witches. None blamed Perryn. Good Eodward’s fair-haired middle son held all their hopes. And ours.
We squeezed past the thief’s dull-eyed brood. Bastien’s powerful elbow battered a reeling thug into the wall, clearing us a path through the narrow alley. His sword had been in and out of its sheath so often, I expected to see the leather charred.
“Damn and blast, Lucian, can’t you do something?”
“No.” I kicked a clawing hand from my ankle and yanked my rucksack from a hard-eyed woman’s grasp. “I can’t. Not unless we’re desperate.”
Over and over I’d reminded Bastien: no magic. If we were to expose a murderer this day and live to see him hang, then I needed to hoard every scrap of my power. Nor did I dare call attention to us. In blatant violation of law and custom, I wore no mask and no cloak of a p
ureblood’s claret hue, but a hooded cape of dingy brown. In part, this was to deceive our necropolis spy; we had sneaked out of the necropolis gates in a flood of mourners. But my disguise was also meant to save us trouble weightier than an unruly mob. Until order was restored in the lower city, I could not count on fear- or drink-maddened fools to let a lone pureblood pass without challenge. To stop and teach idiots the law would cause more delay we could not afford and grab Registry attention.
We’d thought we had more time. But early that morning, Bastien’s runners had brought in two critical tidbits of gossip. First, despite the continued unrest, the Prince of Ardra’s conciliatory venture to the Registry Tower—and thus my long-awaited opportunity to see the curators’ portraits—was set for the morrow. Second, Perryn was feasting with his household knights at midday. Such a meal could extend long into the night. If Fleure and her half siblings were to have justice, it had to be now.
Both purebloods and ordinaries would call us lunatics to pursue a resolution so small amid the agonies of a kingdom. Yet the cause of a few dead children had become the cause of Navronne and the cause of a good man. The noble line of Caedmon and Eodward was at risk, and Bastien believed the case would tell the tale of his worth.
The Registry would say I had no business risking my safety for either cause. And yet my venture into the Registry Tower on the morrow was where the truer danger lay. I hoped the curators’ portraits would tell me who had murdered my family and why, but my chances of evading capture were wickedly small. If my fate was imprisonment, whether in the Tower cellar or Damon’s mysterious house of reflection, even one small success in the cause of right might make the future bearable. Besides, a Remeni always fulfilled his contracts.
And so with brazen foolery we’d set out for Perryn’s palace, not knowing if we could so much as get past his gates. Faith in Bastien’s sword, my magic, and good Eodward’s blood that flowed in Perryn’s veins had brought us this far. We were determined the riot would not turn us back.
“Not that way!” I grabbed Bastien’s arm as he turned into a refuse-choked lane that led toward the pocardon. “We save half the distance if we cross the Council District instead of the market, and you’ll not have to fight our way through. Believe me, no one will bother us today.”
Skeptical, Bastien snorted. But he followed me up a long stair toward the city’s fairest heights.
The chaos of the streets fell away with every worn step. By the time we reached the top of the stair, one would think we’d traveled to a fortunate land that had never heard of war or beggary. A tree-shrouded lane followed the winding course of an ancient wall. Behind the wall, sheltered by trees and spacious gardens, great houses sprawled so that every chamber could catch the fairest breezes of Ardran summers. Purebloods, high-ranking clerics, and members of the royal household occupied these grand estates, built by our Aurellian ancestors two centuries past.
“Oughtn’t be up here,” said Bastien, shifting his shoulders uneasily.
“Everyone who lives here will either have left the city already or be holed up behind magical wards or private armies. And we must make ourselves presentable. There’s a perfect place along our way.” As he was just now, guards would sooner throw Bastien into a pigsty than admit him into the house of Navronne’s kings.
The hoary wall was far older than the houses. A few hundred paces from the head of the stair, it was interrupted by a knob of native rock. Water bubbled from a moss-lined notch in the rock into a pool the size of a wide-brimmed hat. Palinur lore said that the pool, called the Aingerou’s Font, never dried up and never froze, and that every spring a different variety of flower grew out of the cracks in the rock. Perhaps so; perhaps not. No enchantments lurked there. Nonetheless, it was a pleasant place, an islet of peace in the noisy city. Before the weather had taken its wretched turn, I’d often sat and sketched the views or the passersby or the font itself—something other than pureblood faces.
Glancing nervously from side to side, Bastien scrubbed at his hands, face, and hair, then dabbed at his leather jaque, but only succeeded in grinding the filth into it. With a grumbled curse, he pulled it off.
“Best wear it,” I said, pointing to the left side of his ancient green velvet tunic. The seam must have given way in his wrestling match.
Meanwhile, I switched the ugly cape for a mask and the fine wool grave wrapping Constance had spent five days cleaning, dying, and stitching into the semblance of a pureblood cloak. It had been too late to keep my Tower visit secret, though Bastien swore fifty times that he himself could sooner be our spy than Constance. He refused to believe any of Caton’s people could betray him. But he’d also made sure no one knew of this day’s venture.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Bastien, his gaze flicking from shrubbery to either direction of the deserted lane. “This place gives me the willies.”
“I’ll be quick.” I dipped my own hands in the clear water, astonishingly unsullied by Bastien’s mud.
“Aagh! Magrog’s fiends!” I clamped my hands under my arms. Hard.
“What’s wrong?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “Water felt like acid.”
I stared at the little font. I’d drunk that water fifty times. Splashed my face on a long-ago day when the sun burned hot. Why would it affect me in exactly the same manner as the White Hand portal in the hirudo? As if I were forbidden to use it anymore.
The tower bells rang the half hour. Bastien shouldered the rucksack and nudged my arm. “We’ve got to go. Once Perryn sits down with his knights, we’ll never get a hearing.”
Indeed. I dipped a corner of my cloak in the font and used it to dab at my hands. No sting. And then I slipped my father’s ruby ring onto my finger. What pureblood would appear at court without a single jewel?
To my sorrow the light of my father’s enchantments that had once instilled a richness to the ruby’s blood-red heart had faded. Though only to be expected, it struck me hard. As we hurried toward the palace, I could not shake off a sense of profound estrangement, as if the world I knew had taken some path without me. As if I had somehow become disconnected from my own self. What had Pons told me? You are a deviant soul, Lucian de Remeni-Masson. . . . You have no place in this world.
* * *
“The prince expressed a particular wish to meet with me in the Antiquities Repository before his visit to the Registry Tower,” I said to Hugh de Orrin, the court functionary summoned to the palace gate. “Inform His Grace that the gods have healed all trace of my illness. As the divinities so clearly favor the Prince of Ardra in this sorry conflict, I took that as a sign that I should heed his invitation immediately on my return to Palinur. And”—the properly deferential young man had bowed and half turned away—“my man must be brought immediately into the bailey and offered suitable refreshment. Fail in this and I shall take it as a personal insult as well as interference in my business.”
“Of course, Domé Remeni. As you say.” Orrin failed to mask his disapproval. “Yet I must repeat that even for one of the gods’ chosen from such a noble house as your own, an unscheduled audience is extremely unlikely. I’m sure His Grace will arrange to meet with you another time at a place of his choosing.”
The gate guards had escorted me to a waiting room inside the palace’s west gate and comfortably out of the damp wind. But they had looked askance at my dead men’s finery and Bastien’s rough turnout and insisted my servant remain outside the walls. I didn’t like it. No riots had erupted so near the palace, but the approaches teemed with nervous men-at-arms, gossips, and brazen thieves. Any one of them could be a spy. We couldn’t afford for Bastien to be caught up in a fight.
My fingers tingled with magic as I readied a simple illusion of fog and fearsome noises. Magic might keep us safe, but only if we were together.
Anxiety would not let me sit on the padded bench, but I commanded my feet not to pace and my hands to stay relaxed at my back. The bells would ring midday any moment. If Perryn was prompt to h
is feasting, we could be cooling our heels all afternoon. Time for the necropolis spy to figure out that Bastien and I were not closeted in my studio with a difficult corpse. Time for news of Lucian de Remeni’s disobedience to reach the Registry and news of Lucian de Remeni’s madness to reach Perryn. We had chosen not to apply for this meeting, but rather just to present ourselves at the gate to avoid those very eventualities.
The bells rang midday. Then a quarter past. Had Bastien been brought inside the walls? The gratings in the waiting room wall gave me no good vantage on the outer bailey. Two guards were posted at the open doorway, and no pureblood would ever peer through the grate to judge if his orders had been carried out. I had to wait. Whether for admittance, arrest, or a Registry guard with shackles and silkbindings, I wasn’t going to know in time to do much about it.
As the first hour past midday rang, hurrying footsteps crunched on the gravel outside the waiting room. Orrin, flushed and breathless, bowed much deeper and more sincerely than earlier. “My apologies for the delay, domé. Prince Perryn will be most pleased to give audience to Lucian de Remeni-Masson in the Royal Antiquities Repository.”
I gave the young man a cold nod. That I did not sag into a puddle of relief was a monumental accomplishment.
Orrin extended his hand to the arch. “If you will follow me, domé . . .”
“My man accompanies me.”
“As you wish, domé.”
Sure enough, as we left the waiting room and circled around through a wicket gate and into the inner bailey, Orrin’s wave brought a grim Bastien into our party. Another strand of anxiety released.
Veterans were gathered around fires of the inner bailey, some with families alongside. As we traversed courtyards, arcades, and dormant gardens, servants and courtiers clotted every doorway and corner, gabbling excitedly. Rumor infested both city and palace.
We hurried past a bakehouse, yet smelling of the morning’s bread, a scent surely more sacred to any god than incense. But it was when we came to the armory—an endless fascination when I was a boy—that my pulse began to thrum, for just beyond a hedge garden stood a long, low building of limestone blocks. Carved into the pediment atop its columned portico were glyphs of ten ancient languages that named it a house of clarity, philosophy, wisdom, and destiny—the Royal Antiquities Repository, the king of Navronne’s own archives, where my grandsire had held sway for seven-and-twenty years.
