Shards of a Broken Sword

by W. R. Gingell

  “Yes, lady. The countess was thrown from her horse in the courtyard and the princess was attacked by bandits when she returned home from a visit.”

  “How long between the betrothal and the death for the countess?”

  “A few weeks,” said Parrin, tugging at the cuffs of his jacket. He had been very fond of the girl, thought Markon with a pang: he had also been the one to find her.

  “The princess?”

  “A few months.”

  Althea frowned, a quick, reflexive action. “You weren’t immediately engaged again afterward, were you?”

  “No: I met Jeannie at court and we stepped out a few times. She disappeared before it even got about that we were thinking of each other. After that it seemed to take less and less to activate the curse.”

  “What set it off most recently?”

  “I smiled at a girl in one of the corridors,” said Parrin glumly. Markon couldn’t blame him: he remembered what it was like to be Parrin’s age, and the idea of being unable to so much as kiss a girl without something unfortunate happening to her was horrible to contemplate.

  “And how long was it before it took effect?”

  “A few days,” said Parrin.

  “I see,” said Althea. “Don’t move, please. You’re going to have to hold perfectly still.” Parrin nodded, looking rather nonplussed. To Markon she said: “Would you hold this? Thank you,” and pressed something circular and metallic into his hand. He looked down at the ring, somehow more real in his hand than it had looked on her finger, and took far too long to realise what she was doing. When he finally did understand, Markon started forward, his hand closing around the ring convulsively. By then Althea was on tiptoes with her hands cupping Parrin’s face, kissing the boy with some force and not a little skill if his reaction was anything to judge by.

  Markon felt a rush of molten anger unlike anything he’d ever felt before. He didn’t think he moved or even thought, caught up in the stunning heat of it, but that was his hand gripping Althea’s arm with white fingers and tearing her away from Parrin, and that was his other hand shoving the ring back on her finger, his own slightly shaking.

  Althea, her eyes rather big but not at all frightened, said a thoughtful: “Ow,” up at him.

  It was left to Parrin’s rather frantic: “Dad! Dad, she didn’t mean any harm!” to bring him to the realisation that he’d clutched Althea to his chest, and that he’d not been gentle about it. Parrin was evidently of the persuasion that his father objected to what could technically be called an assault on a royal personage. Markon, breathing heavily through his nose, released Althea. She hadn’t struggled at all and now merely smoothed her dress and hair as though she hadn’t just put herself wantonly in danger.

  “You said you were going to work from the outside!” Markon said furiously.

  “No, I didn’t,” said Althea, and there was a suggestion of stubbornness to her mouth. “I said I could if me working from the inside made you uncomfortable. I also said it would make more sense to investigate from the inside. You didn’t object.”

  “I object!” said Markon in exasperation. “I object very much!”

  “Well, it’s too late now,” Althea said reasonably. “And it’s proved remarkably useful, too. For instance, I’m now quite sure that you’re not dealing with a curse– well, not in any technical sense of the word, anyway.”

  “What?” demanded Markon, in less than cordial tones.

  “I was already pretty certain it wasn’t,” she told him. “None of the girls have anything clinging to them—well, apart from some rather nasty magic that isn’t attached the prince—and neither does the prince. As a matter of fact, they all seem to have– at any rate, I could only be certain that there was no curse by taking off the ring.”

  “And putting yourself in exactly the kind of danger I didn’t want you to be in!” said Markon. “I’ve a good mind to send you packing!”

  “No, you don’t,” said Althea.

  “Of course I don’t!” groaned Markon. She’d achieved more in a couple of hours than any of the girls (or in fact any of the enchanters he’d called in) had achieved in the last couple of years.

  “Parrin can’t be expected to live his life locked away from women–”

  “I should think not!” said Parrin feelingly.

  “–and it’s not good for your kingdom, either. After a while you get people making snide remarks about the crown sacrificing the people on the altar of succession, and then–”

  “Small disturbances that become bigger ones,” finished Markon, meeting her eyes. “Factions forming across the court and perhaps an accident or two for myself and Parrin.”

  Althea nodded. “Exactly. I’m rather good at this sort of thing, actually. Try to trust me a little.”

  “You have a fortnight,” said Markon.

  Day Two

  Althea brought the contract to him the next day. Markon, who had been restlessly moving about his library all morning in the resolute determination that he was not waiting for her, tried to tell his steward that he would be available in a few hours but instead found himself ordering the man to send her straight in.

  When she came in, Althea looked decidedly weary. Her hair was braided more tightly than ever, and today she wore a severe black dress that did nothing to soften the fact that she had dark bruises below her eyes and that her skin was decidedly pale.

  “Good heavens, what happened?” Markon demanded, surprised into taking a step toward her.

  “I don’t sleep very well on my first night in a new bed,” said Althea, her eyes slipping past him.

  Hm. So she was lying to him. No, not lying: withholding. Markon thought about it and came to the conclusion that he knew exactly what she’d been up to before she came to see him. “How did your experiment go?” he asked.

  He was rewarded by that brilliant, sudden smile. “Very well,” she said. “Miss Augusta will make a full recovery, though she’ll be bed-bound for a few days yet until her mind recognises that her bones are healed. Mind doesn’t take to healing magic as well as bones and flesh do.”

  Markon, forgetting the contract for the moment, asked: “Is there anything you can do for the others?”

  “Nothing that Charlotte isn’t already doing,” said Althea briskly. She dug briefly through a small satchel and brought out a neatly folded piece of paper, which she passed to Markon. “Though if the sleeping girl–”

  “–Rosemary,” said Markon, recognising his cue. He unfolded the paper and found a neat, precise, and orderly set of terms. A neat, precise, and orderly signature sat demurely below them.

  “Thank you. If Rosemary had a sweetheart before her head was turned by Prince Parrin, it might be a good idea to send him up to kiss her.”

  Markon ran a jaded eye over the contract and found it to be delightfully straightforward. “Really?”

  “Oh yes. They love that sort of thing. They think it’s romantic.”

  “They?” he asked vaguely, signing his own name beside hers. It didn’t occur to him until he’d done so that Althea had been watching him very closely. That made him pay attention properly. “What do you mean, ‘they’?”

  “The Fae,” she said. “They like to play games. They like little puppet people and little puppet romances.”

  “This was an attack by Faery?”

  “I’m not exactly sure yet,” said Althea. Her voice sounded troubled. “It’s all Fae magic, but I’d swear it’s from different Fae each girl. Some of it is horribly powerful, like Miss Augusta and the first two fiancées, and some of it is more spiteful than anything.”

  “The girl with the missing hair,” nodded Markon. He folded his arms and leaned into his desk.

  “You had me sign that contract before you told me about the Fae.”

  Althea flicked her eyes up at him. “I thought you wanted to sign the contract.”

  “I did want to sign–” Markon stopped, and ran his fingers through his hair. “What’s your plan?”
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  “I’ll gather a little information, and then I’ll try to find the Door that was used.”

  “A door? What door?”

  “A Door through to Faery,” said Althea. “There are a few things I want to know first, though; and if I’m fortunate I won’t need to go through at all.”

  “There aren’t any Doors to Faery here in the castle,” objected Markon. “We’ve got wards and such things on every wall and tower.”

  “I don’t mean a Door from their side,” Althea said. “I’m looking for a Door from our side.”

  “Who would be stupid enough—not mentioning the small matter of it being treason—to open Doors into Faery?”

  “Well, why pick on Prince Parrin?” said Althea reasonably. “For that matter, why magic away a girl’s hair? There’s a lot I don’t know, but what I do know right now is that your subjects have been attacked by several Fae. Your wards would prevent Doors being opened from the other side; therefore, someone from this side must be opening them.”

  “Can you can find one?”

  “I think so,” said Althea. “I told you: I’m rather good at this. What I’m more interested in knowing is who did it.”

  Markon said bluntly: “I’m more interested in stopping the accidents than knowing who’s opening Doors to Faery.”

  “That’s because you haven’t thought it through properly,” said Althea, standing very straight and still. She was frowning, so deep in thought that Markon knew it didn’t occur to her that she’d just insulted him. “If we know who’s doing it, we can stop it from this side. It’s always a good idea to avoid going into Faery if you possibly can.”

  “I take it you’ve spent a great deal of time in Faery,” said Markon, with just a feather edge of amusement to his tone. The air of ancient knowledge sat whimsically on her youthful face.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “I was a changeling.”

  She couldn’t have knocked the smile from his face more thoroughly if she’d said she was troll-stock. “Excuse me?” he said.

  That made Althea look up in surprise. She said hastily: “I was stolen, I mean. I’m a human changeling, not Fae. I had to claw and trick my way back here every step of the way.”

  “And the Fae?”

  Althea went rather blank and stiff. “She’d drowned my little sister in the pond behind my mother’s house a few days earlier. She was waterfae, you see. They do that quite a lot: even the little ones. I got rid of her but she had my face and my voice as a glamour and I don’t think my mother understood.”

  “I see,” said Markon, feeling sick. “What are the chances that you’ll have to go back into Faery for this?”

  “Middling to high,” said Althea, her voice still carefully blank. “If the Door-opener has been careless about where they open Doors it shouldn’t be too hard to find out who did it. If they’ve been careful I’ll have to go straight to Faery and ask questions there.”

  She gave him a short, regal nod and turned briskly. She was halfway to the door before Markon realised in some bemusement that she had excused herself and was in fact leaving without his dismissal. Before he could stop himself, Markon darted forward and caught her by the wrist. Althea turned on her toes and looked enquiringly at him. “I want daily reports,” he said, releasing her wrist with a faint warmth to his cheeks. “More, if you discover anything of importance.”

  “All right,” said Althea. “Will you be available?”

  “I’m always available for this particular situation.”

  Althea’s back was as stiff as ever, and her face as serious as before, but he thought she was pleased at his reply.

  “One more thing,” said Markon. “If it comes to going into Faery, I’m coming with you.”

  Althea opened her mouth, paused, and seemed to reconsider. “All right,” she said. “But we’ll have to go at night, when you won’t be missed. The last thing we need is a panic because your staff think you’ve gone missing too.”

  “Oh, have you misplaced the odd monarch or two?”

  “Not exactly,” said Althea. To his great amusement she gave him another regal little nod and then swept from the room without answering further.

  Markon found himself disagreeably busy after that. The neighbouring kingdom of Wyndsor had kindly (or was it cleverly? he wondered) sent their most respected practitioner of magic, accompanied by an excessively large-nostriled emissary who used those unusually large nostrils to look down on everything he could conceivably look down on. The practitioner of magic had been housed with him in the guest wing of the castle for the past three weeks without any more sign of solving Parrin’s problem than the girl with missing hair had shown of the hair growing back. This fact didn’t prevent both Doctor and Emissary from eating the best Montalier had to offer, making a nuisance of themselves around the castle generally, or popping up in inconvenient and highly suspect places.

  Unfortunately, it also didn’t prevent Doctor Romalier from bursting into Markon’s library a bare half hour after Althea had left it, quivering with indignation from the curled up toes of his pointy shoes to the curled up point of his tiny white beard. Markon looked up at the rattle of the doorknob, his attention snatched away from contemplation of several proposed export and trade contracts.

  “Your majesty!” uttered Doctor Romalier.

  “I’m beginning to wonder,” said Markon, somewhat coldly. He was prepared to allow Althea to be less than formal because he liked her. He was not prepared to extend the same liberty to the doctor, who already seemed to be taking enough liberties of his own. “Did you lose your way, doctor, and find yourself in my private library through some mistake?”

  Doctor Romalier had the presence of mind to bow at once, apologising stiffly and formally, and somehow managed not to say exactly how he’d managed to bypass Markon’s steward– or the guard on the only set of stairs that led to the library. Markon as stiffly accepted the apology, regretfully aware from the gleam of righteous indignation in the doctor’s eye that the interview was far from over. He would have liked to call his steward and throw the man out, but Wyndsor/Montalier relations were already strained enough without the sort of scandal that would bring.

  Instead, he said: “You seem disturbed, Doctor.”

  Doctor Romalier immediately swelled. “I have just learned, your majesty, that you have engaged a female magic user to break the curse on Prince Parrin!”

  “I have,” said Markon.

  “Well, your majesty!”

  Markon let his eyes fall conspicuously to the trade agreements in his hand and flicked them back up at the doctor. “You seem disturbed, Romalier. Are your concerns for the fact that I hired another practitioner, or that she’s female?”

  “I’m certainly not threatened by the investigations of an enchantress,” said Doctor Romalier stiffly. “If your majesty chooses to hire a woman to do the work of a doctor, that is of course your right. I was merely concerned about the young woman’s safety. She is young and fragile.”

  “She’s certainly very young,” agreed Markon. “I think you’ll find that she’s reasonably resilient, however.”

  “I see,” said the doctor coldly. “I’m sorry your majesty felt such a lack of confidence in my abilities, and in Wyndsor’s willingness to assist.”

  “I’ve never doubted Wyndsor’s willingness,” said Markon. “However, in Montalier we have a saying, doctor: One man may eat a pie, but two men can eat three.”

  “How—er, pithy—your majesty.”

  “Yes, isn’t it?” said Markon, and for the first time during this interview, his smile was a real one. “The enchantress is conducting a rather different kind of investigation. I’m sure your two styles can coexist.”

  “I will not be responsible for any danger the Young Person may find herself in,” said the doctor, more stiffly than ever.

  “Then I suppose it’s just as well I haven’t asked you to be responsible for her, isn’t it?” said Markon gently. He didn’t add that he was quite capable of l
ooking after the young women of the castle because it occurred to him just in time that the trail of bodies and mutilated young women would prove an embarrassing veto. “Wyndsor has been very...attentive...in this matter, but I do expect cooperation with anyone else I choose to hire for the job. Thank you for your concern, Doctor.”

  “I will of course cooperate to the best of my ability,” said Doctor Romalier, an angry light to his eyes. And then, since he couldn’t do anything but accept the dismissal, he bowed short and sharp, and said: “My apologies for interrupting you, your majesty. I shall remove myself.”

  Oh, if only! thought Markon wearily, and went back to his trade papers.

  By evening there were two trays of cold food on the occasional table beside Markon’s desk, and he had managed to lose the important part of the Avernse/Montalier export proposal. He was engaged in sifting through the mess on his desk when Althea’s voice said: “You should try a new filing system.”

  Markon looked up rather wildly through the sea of paper. “You know, I’m beginning to wonder why I employ a guard for that staircase.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” said Althea. “I noticed your Doctor Romalier slipping past him earlier, so I showed the guard how to look at things from the corners of his eyes. You shouldn’t have any more unexpected visitors.”

  “Yes, but you’re here,” protested Markon. It was obvious that the Avernse/Montalier trade agreement was not going to be finalised today.

  “Well, yes. I didn’t show him how to stop me getting past.”

  “Of course not!” said Markon. “How can I help you, lady?”

  “You should eat more,” Althea said. She was looking over the two trays of untouched food. “You’re too thin.”

  “You said I was handsome yesterday,” said Markon, forgetting about the trade agreement in pursuance of more interesting topics.

  “You are,” Althea told him. She tossed him a peach from one of the trays, and took another for herself. Markon found himself eating it because it was there, and discovered that he was really very hungry. “But you need to take care of yourself.”