Sky of Swords

by Dave Duncan

  Malinda went over and knelt beside her. “Because he’s the only really nice person in our entire family! He’s adorable! I have missed him sorely these last few days and I expect he has missed me. He’s talking now and…well, you’ll see. Let me show you around the palace, dear Aunt—how exciting this must be for you! We’ll go and visit Amby and then—”

  “No, we won’t! The state dinner is tomorrow and tailors are coming to measure me for—”

  “Phooey!” Malinda clutched at the clawlike hand. “Tailors wait on princesses, not the other way ’round. Let me pull that bell rope, Aunt, and if my maids have not all been beheaded, I’ll have you dressed up in no time. One of Lady Arabel’s gowns will fit you well enough for now. They’ll do your hair, primp and titivate you, and inside an hour you and I can saunter forth to astonish and amaze the entire court!” Somewhere in that hour there ought to be time for Malinda to tuck away a couple of pastries or a lightly grilled ox….

  Princess Agnes glared—suspicious, but tempted now. “What are you up to?”

  “Aunt, Aunt! Nothing, I swear! Whose side do you think I am on? I have no quarrel with you, but my father has treated me very badly—not as badly as yours treated you, but badly enough. All I did was steal a kiss! He thinks he’s been very clever, setting you up as my guard dog, but we have far more in common than he realizes, you and I. I intend to be on my very best possible behavior, honestly! I want you and me to parade past dear Ambrose IV arm in arm, noses in the air, bosom friends. Then what will he think? Now may I pull that bell rope?”

  Her aunt scowled darkly, and then—very slowly, like a snowman melting in a Secondmoon sun—nodded her permission.

  8

  His Majesty has granted the following noble personages his gracious leave to withdraw from court…

  COURT GAZETTE

  Malinda’s scandal was totally eclipsed by the sensation of her aunt’s return to court after a forty-year absence. No one ever supplied grist to the palace gossip mills like Princess Agnes. She did restrain herself for a few days, just long enough for Courtney to be formally proclaimed a prince of the realm and Duke of Mayshire. Then she let rip on morals, manners, fashions, and whatever else caught her jaundiced eye, slashing everyone in sight, for she had the same razor tongue as her son, although she totally lacked his humor. Ambrose and she had never gotten along; time had healed nothing between them. She called him a fat despot to his face and said he had never grown up; he was heard shouting that he should have left the old sow in her mire. She was a sore trial to Malinda—crabby, suspicious, and stubborn as a granite barbican; but she did need a friend and guide in the palace, as Malinda had guessed, and the two of them combined in a reluctant and shaky alliance against Ambrose’s tyranny.

  Courtney, who had cadged off women all his life, was suddenly rich, moaning that he did not know what to do with himself anymore. Ambrose had been generous, and could well afford to be, for rivers of wealth were already flowing into his treasury from the confiscated elementaries. Free of the constraints of Parliament as no king of Chivial had been in centuries, he wallowed in his good fortune. He showered lands on his favorites, reinforced the Rector’s army in Wylderland, began planning massive renovations to all his palaces, and built up coastal defenses against the savage Baelish raiders. He even talked of creating a navy that could carry the war to Baelmark itself, although no one took that idea very seriously while the Baels’ blockade was strangling every port in Chivial.

  Now, if he wished, he could provide his daughter with a truly royal dowry. Malinda was required to sit for several artists, but where the portraits were sent was kept secret even from her. Chancellor Montpurse would have confided in her. The odious Lord Roland would not admit that the sun usually rose in the east.

  Sir Eagle was seen no more and no one knew what had happened to him. The Blades had not forgiven Malinda.

  Although Lady Wains was sent back to her family, the rest of Malinda’s household survived the crisis. Agnes made halfhearted efforts to recruit her own ladies-in-waiting, with a not-surprising lack of success, but since she insisted on keeping Malinda right under her eye, the two of them must necessarily share a single establishment. That was one source of friction between them. Their widely divergent interests were another.

  Agnes did nothing and went nowhere. She suffered greatly from pains in her joints, which the Healer General attributed to an imbalance of humors, and specifically an excess of choler and black bile—a diagnosis her son described as self-evident. The skilled palace enchanters could provide some relief, so a visit to an octogram became part of the old lady’s daily routine and perforce of her niece’s routine also. Apart from that, Agnes had no interests, no friends, and certainly no intention of exerting herself. After a lifetime of lonely poverty in a tumbledown castle, she enjoyed the luxuries of court—meaning fine food, music, and just sitting around. Malinda sat beside her and endured excruciating boredom. However bad marriage might prove to be, it could never be worse than this.

  Her penance ended, without warning, one summery sunny morning in Fourthmoon. The court had just moved to Oldmart, and the two princesses were sitting with their ladies in a shady corner of the terrace, listening to a group of lutists. The players were quite skilled, but Malinda was surfeited with culture and sorely in need of some physical activity. She fretted and fidgeted. In the pause between two pieces, while the lutes were being retuned, a gawky page approached her, bowed clumsily, and offered a letter on a silver tray. She did not recognize the arms on the seal nor the handwriting nor yet the heavy floral scent. Intrigued, she was just starting to slide a finger under the edge when the paper was snatched from her hand.

  “I’ll read that first!” her aunt announced.

  Malinda pealed like thunder, blasted half the oaks in the deer park, flooded the arable lands of Dimpleshire…not quite. Somehow she kept hold of her temper. “It really does not concern you, Aunt,” she said sweetly. “It’s just some Blades wanting to know if I can meet them in the stable again tonight.”

  Agnes had less humor than a cockroach. With a sniff, she broke the seal and unfolded the paper. And died.

  The King was not in the palace; both the Chancellor and Sir Bandit were with him, wherever he had gone. The meeting convened an hour later in the Princesses’ presence chamber was addressed by the Deputy Commander, who looked haggard far beyond his years. A dozen other grim-faced Blades stood by the door. The Guard had rounded up all the witnesses, including the three footmen who had come running when the cry went up, the healers who had been summoned, even the page. He was in tears. Most of the women were still pale and shaking, including the two White Sisters whose job it was to detect such lethal enchantments. Prince Courtney of Mayshire was the calmest person present, looking more amused than distressed; but then Courtney was a cynic, never a hypocrite. During the month he had known his mother, the two of them had avoided each other as much as possible.

  Malinda had taken the chair with cloth of estate that Agnes had installed only the previous week, but everyone else had to stand. She was grinding her teeth in fury at the crime while simultaneously despising herself for not being as upset by her aunt’s death as she ought to be. But she had narrowly escaped death and the nervous reaction might be still to come.

  “It seems likely,” Sir Dreadnought said, “that the traitors intended to kill Her Highness, and only accidentally slew Her Royal Highness instead.”

  “A brilliant formulation of the obvious!” Courtney was leaning against the side of Malinda’s chair as if unable to straighten under the weight of his finery.

  “Was this the first attempt on my life?” she asked.

  Reluctantly Dreadnought said, “No, Your Grace.”

  “Indeed? When Commander Bandit returns, inform him that I wish to see him at his earliest convenience!” How dare he!

  “Yes, my lady. Rolf?” The page looked up, red-eyed. “You bear no blame, lad. You were only doing your duty. We shall find out how the letter was d
elivered to the palace, but I doubt if that will lead us any closer to the killers. Er, Sisters…”

  “Yes, we failed!” snapped Sister Ember. “But we will make our report to Mother Superior.”

  Dreadnought thrust out his jaw as if he were about to argue. Malinda forestalled him.

  “When you do, pray mention that I am also partly to blame.”

  The room erupted in hubbub.

  “Quiet!” Dreadnought barked. When he had silence he asked, “How so, Your Grace?”

  “Because Agnes went to see the healers every morning. I noticed that the Sisters tended to stay well back from her for several hours afterward—not just Ember and Willow, here, but any Sister assigned to us. I assume that the taint of conjuration distressed them. I was amused and said nothing, whereas I should have recognized the danger and spoken up.” As she certainly would have done if the idiots had informed her of the earlier attempts. “It was foolish of me. Had you been closer, you would have sensed the conjuration—wouldn’t you?”

  The Sisters exchanged worried glances. “We should have been able to detect the trap from where we were,” said Willow, the tall one.

  “Not necessarily!” Dreadnought took control of the meeting again. “The traitor enchanters are developing an ability to smuggle conjurements past the Sisters. We don’t know how they are doing it, but you can see how dangerous this will be for us. From now on, you will have to stay much closer to your wards, Sisters. Leader will discuss this with Mother Superior…. The villains are getting better, and we must stop them from finding out how good they are, how close they came to success today. So I am going to keep the Princess’s death a secret. Do you understand?” He glanced around the big room and the score or so of shocked faces, then uncertainly at Courtney. “Your Grace, of course, we all offer you our deepest sympathy in your sad—”

  “Please don’t.”

  Dreadnought bit his lip. He was very good with a sword, but a poison-tongued prince was an unfair opponent for anyone. “I hope to have the Gazette announce that you and your mother have withdrawn from court to visit your new estates.”

  “Announce anything you like, dear boy. Who ever reads it?”

  “Then Your Highness will cooperate?”

  “No.” Courtney yawned, quite indifferent.

  Malinda intervened. “Do you think you can actually do this and keep it secret, Sir Dreadnought? I mean, smuggle my aunt’s body out of the palace? And I suppose she will have to die officially somewhere else in a week or two? Can you possibly keep so many people from talking?”

  He nodded earnestly. “I think it can be done, Your Grace. Obviously His Majesty will have the final say when he returns, but in the meantime I should like to take an oath of secrecy from everyone now present.” Dreadnought was not capable of working all this out by himself, certainly not in an hour. He was following a pattern, which probably meant that this could not be the first such deceit.

  “Then I give my consent,” she said. “I will be the first to swear.”

  “I really must dash,” Courtney said. “I am auditioning musicians for my new orchestra and I’m hours late already. Your courage uplifts us all, darling.” He bowed and pranced off toward the door.

  Malinda waited until he had reached the center of the room. “You have my permission to take him into custody, Sir Dreadnought.”

  “I am most grateful to Your Highness.”

  The Blades at the door smirked as Courtney stopped and looked all around him. Then he regarded his cousin under the cloth of estate.

  “You can’t arrest me, darling!”

  Malinda smiled and decided that was answer enough.

  The fat little prince scanned the room again. Perhaps he was eager to spread the juicy story of murder and attempted murder. Perhaps he just enjoyed being a bur under any available saddle. But he knew when he was beaten. “Oh, very well. I’ll give you my word.”

  “I’m afraid that is no longer enough,” Malinda said before Dreadnought could speak. “Since you refused your parole before, you may later claim that you give it now only under duress. The Guard will take you in custody until my father returns to judge the matter. You officially left court an hour ago, remember?”

  Ambrose would certainly approve. He would laugh his head off.

  Courtney spluttered. “This is tyranny!”

  “Yes,” Malinda said. “I had no idea it was so enjoyable. Do carry on, Sir Dreadnought.”

  The Trial, Day One

  (CONCLUDED)

  “The witness has admitted,” the chairman rasped, “that Princess Agnes had been set in unwelcome authority over her, that public announcements concerning the death of Her Royal Highness were deliberately falsified, that she was in fact assassinated by a murderous conjuration, and that she received this poison from the witness’s hand. The inquiry is adjourned until the morrow at the same hour.”

  “Wait!” Malinda yelled.

  She was hoarse and battered by hours of interrogation, but she had forgotten how fast a day could go, after months when they did not go at all. The windows were black now, with the flames of lanterns and candelabras standing as leaves of gold in darkness and faces as pale moons with eyes. The inquiry had taken only one break, during which she had been conducted back to her cell to dine alone on foul-smelling water and sour gruel while the commissioners were entertained in the Governor’s quarters. They had been entertained so well that half of them had put their heads down on the table and snored all afternoon.

  The chairman rose to his incredible height. “The inquiry is adjourned. Remove the witness.”

  “I was telling the truth!” Malinda shouted, as loud as her abused throat could manage. “You have inquisitors. Let them testify that I was speaking the—”

  A hand like a wolf’s jaw closed on her arm. She jumped, not having realized that there was anyone so near. The squad of men-at-arms was clanking toward her from the door, but two black-robed inquisitors were right beside her and might have been standing behind her chair for hours.

  “Tell them I was telling the truth!” she yelled, and was roughly jerked around. The other man caught her other wrist and doubled her over in an arm lock. He was shorter than she but infinitely stronger.

  “You will be silent or be hurt,” the first man said. “Walk!”

  It was unfair! If she lied, they would know and denounce her, but they would not confirm it when she spoke the truth. The chairman had deliberately left the commissioners with the impression that she had knowingly killed Agnes.

  She had to stagger several paces in a crouch before the inquisitors released her and let her straighten up. The men-at-arms closed in around her and marched her back to her cell.

  The door clanged shut behind her and locks grated. Down on the floor a single candle flickered beside her evening meal—a bowl of gruel, a slab of black bread, an earthenware pitcher of stinking water. The candle was a special luxury, because most days she was fed at sunset and left in the dark till morning. The winter nights had been very long.

  It could have been much worse, of course. There were dungeons in the Bastion where the sewage rose and fell with the tide, where prisoners were chained upside down or subjected to unthinkable torments. At least she was aboveground.

  “I’m back!” she said cheerily. “Horatio? Winter? Moment? I’m back. They didn’t cut my head off, just asked a lot of silly questions.”

  She, who had owned a dozen palaces, lived in one room now. It was square and barren—rough stone, rough planks. A window tunneled through the wall offered a restricted view of the river, and she spent many hours just staring between the bars at the boats and ships going by and at the tiny-seeming houses on the far bank. Her world was furnished with a straw mattress, a threadbare blanket, a couple of bags to hold clothes, a rickety chair, and a bucket, which her jailers might omit to empty for days on end if she annoyed them. Little else, not even a table. A second door led out to a walkway, where she could exercise to her heart’s content.


  Her jailers were two square, solid women with the unwinking fishy stare of inquisitors. Although both were shorter and older than she, they knew a thousand ways to hurt and hold people, and in the first few days of her captivity they had quickly trained her to obey—twisting fingers, pinching ears, applying pressure to the sides of her neck and other places she had never known were so susceptible to pain. Singlehandedly, either one of them could crumple her up and make her howl for mercy. They rarely spoke. They had never revealed their names, so she called them Pestilence and Nightmare. Theirs had been the only faces she had seen in months, until the hearing that morning.

  She removed her dress and folded it away in a bag. “Have to look nice tomorrow, don’t I?” Shivering, she put on her other one and sat down on her mattress to eat the mess in the bowl. “I hope you all had a nice quiet day without me bothering you? Guess what, Horatio? Your namesake was here, in the Bastion! He talked at me all day!”

  Horatio lived above the door. He had very long legs. Winter was the clever one who had chosen the best hunting ground, skulking in a safe crack in the masonry and spinning his web between the window bars. Moment was very tiny, like Malinda’s friend Sister Moment, and she lived in a crack in the floorboards. After the first week of her captivity, Malinda had decided she must hear a voice, even if it was her own voice; and talking to spiders would be no worse than talking to nothing—as long as they did not answer back, of course, and so far they never had. On really bad days she would break a thread in a web just to watch the owner repair it, which might pass a whole hour or so. It seemed so unkind that she did not do it very often.

  “They wanted to break me, you know!” Talking while she ate helped to keep her mind off the food. “And since they’re going ahead with the trial now, they probably think I’m mad enough to suit their evil purposes. But they’re wrong! They haven’t broken me. I got through the whole day without weeping or screaming or begging. I didn’t confess to anything. I expect tomorrow they’ll get to Father’s death and try to make me seem guilty of treason. Well, they won’t succeed!”