“So you expect us to believe you’re not as Lady Nerus described?” Alaric said.
“As you expect me to believe you don’t intend to assassinate me,” Derekian said. “I think we all need to exercise a degree of faith.”
Alaric nodded once. “Understood… your Majesty.”
“Don’t bother to bow,” Derekian said drily. “You’re free to go. If you’d like to be transported to your lodgings, I can arrange it.”
“What about the artifact?” Sienne said. “We need to dispose of it.”
“What was your plan?”
“To drop it in the sea.” Keeping that secret from the king was pointless.
“Clever.” Derekian smiled. “I think I can come up with something more permanent than that.”
“But—it’s our responsibility—”
“Not anymore,” Derekian said. “I intend to make certain no one ever sees it again. You’ll have to trust me,” he added, when they all began to protest. “I assure you no one is more invested in making it disappear than I am. Now, if you’ll follow me—”
“Wait,” Sienne said. “Your Majesty, please don’t tell my parents where I am.”
“They’re very worried about you, Sienne.”
“In the way that says they’ll drag me home for my own safety. This is my life now. I don’t mind if you tell them I’m safe, but… please, your Majesty. I’ll go home when I’m ready.”
Derekian shrugged. “I doubt they’d believe me if I said you prefer to be a nobody scrapper than a duke’s daughter. Very well.”
“Thank you.”
“We should probably go to Annis, if your wizard can do that, your Majesty,” Dianthe said. “We left all our things there.”
“I think my wizards can manage that.”
“Then there’s just one more thing,” Alaric said. “A question of payment.”
Derekian’s eyebrows lifted nearly to his hairline. “I was right. You do have balls of solid brass.”
“We prevented your assassination. I think we’re due a little consideration.” Alaric’s voice was cool, but his stance said he was willing to force the issue.
“I see.” Derekian nodded. “How much would you like?”
“Not money,” Alaric said. “I had something else in mind.”
27
It was late afternoon two days later when Sienne and her friends plodded into Fioretti. It had been an uneventful two days of beautiful, warm weather, but Sienne was tired of traveling and wanted only her own comfortable bed in Master Tersus’s house. Spark, too, seemed eager for her own stall, and Sienne had to tug on the reins to keep her from taking the familiar turning. They still had one thing left to do.
Tonia Figlari’s mansion looked, if anything, more rundown than it had the first time they’d seen it. But new green sprouted between the cracks in the stone pavement, giving the place an appearance of simultaneous freshness and decrepitude, and the smell of first summer wafting up wherever Spark’s hooves crushed the grass heartened Sienne. She still wasn’t entirely convinced Alaric’s plan would work, but it was worth trying. They’d run out of other options.
A servant, not the elderly Haritt but a young woman, answered the door. She looked surprised to find five strangers on the doorstep, leading five horses. “Yes? Are you expected?”
“Sort of,” Alaric said. “Would you tell Tonia Figlari that her hired scrappers have returned? And have someone watch our horses?”
The servant nodded and held the door wide, gesturing them inside. The hall was as dark as Sienne remembered and still smelled of tallow and polish. This time, the portraits lining the wall looked anticipatory, as if they’d expected their arrival and were eager to see what the scrappers had brought.
Footsteps on the uncarpeted stairs announced Haritt’s arrival. The old man walked slowly, with one hand on the banister. He, at least, seemed unsurprised to see them. “Welcome,” he said in his creaky voice. “My lady will see you now.”
Alaric handed Haritt a small sack. “The remainder of the two hundred lari you paid us.”
“That’s unnecessary. It’s yours.”
“I’d rather have my honor,” Alaric said. “We took this job under duress. We won’t keep a centus more than we used.”
Haritt shrugged. “As you wish, sir.”
They trod up the stairs, making them groan softly. Sienne hesitated to touch the elaborately carved balusters, though she was curious about what they represented. It was hard to see details in the dimness, but they appeared to represent mythical figures, satyrs and dryads and other beasts of the natural world no one had ever encountered. True, people had thought carricks were mythical until about a century and a half ago, so there was no reason other creatures might turn out to be similarly real. Sienne examined a goat-legged man with two horns and a sensual smirk, and hoped that one stayed mythical.
The brightly-lit hall, and the white room beyond it, felt warmer today, with the windows closed and a small fire burning in the hearth. Tonia Figlari reclined on one of the gilt-edged sofas. Her nose was red again, but so were her eyes, and Sienne judged she had a nasty cold. Tonia set aside the blanket covering her and rose. She wore casual trousers and a shirt embroidered across the yoke and cuffs with daisies, and was in her stocking feet. Rather than appearing embarrassed at her state of undress, she held her head high and clasped her hands in front of her.
“You’re back,” she said. “I didn’t know when to expect you, but I thought it would take longer than this.”
“You’re wondering if we were successful,” Alaric said.
Her chin lifted higher. “I am.”
“Let’s sit,” Alaric suggested, and took a seat near Tonia’s sofa without waiting for an invitation.
Tonia raised an eyebrow, but sat, bundling the blanket beside her. Sienne sat next to Alaric and watched the others find places. She folded her hands in her lap to stop them trembling. This could still go horribly wrong.
“We have bad news,” Alaric said. “The Figlari dukedom is overrun. We encountered carvers who’d taken up residence in the keep and barely escaped with our lives.”
Tonia’s eyes went wide. “I thought carvers were a story.”
“Definitely not that. We killed some of them, including their leader. Whether that will make them move on, we don’t know. But it’s a consideration.”
“I don’t see the falcon stone. More bad news?”
Alaric took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “The story your grandfather told of the falcon stone was untrue. It wasn’t an artifact and it never spoke to anyone.”
“You’re lying!” Tonia exclaimed. “My grandfather—how dare you call him a liar!”
“It’s unlikely he was lying. Probably he believed the story. But our wizard—” Alaric indicated Sienne—“assured us the stone was not an artifact, and proved it by destroying it.”
“You had no right to do so! Haritt!”
“I’m not finished,” Alaric said. Sienne marveled that he could stay so calm when Tonia was ready to throw them out. “The falcon stone concealed something else. An actual artifact.”
Tonia stopped mid-word calling for Haritt again. “So you did find the artifact!”
“Not the one you sent us after. This was completely different. Sienne?”
Sienne clasped her hands tighter. “We don’t know at what point the artifact was encased in stone,” she said, “but it was long before the Figlaris acquired it. It was hidden the whole time your family occupied the dukedom.”
“Then—it belongs to me. Where is it?”
“It was a powerful weapon, too powerful to belong to anyone. We…disposed of it. Put it somewhere no one will ever find it.” Sienne prayed briefly to Averran, as she had every night since meeting the king, that Derekian had been true to his word.
Tonia’s mouth hung open. She swallowed. “So what you are telling me,” she said in a level voice that promised an eruption was on the way, “is that you destroyed the proof of my iden
tity, you got rid of a powerful artifact that belongs to my family, and you left me with nothing.”
“That’s not quite true,” Alaric said. He reached into his pack and brought out a black leather scroll case. “In exchange for disposing of the artifact, we got this.” He handed the case to Tonia.
Puzzled, Tonia opened the case and shook its contents into her hand. She unrolled the sheet of creamy parchment and read its contents. She blanched. “This is…”
“Patents of nobility,” Alaric said. “Declaring you duchess of Figlari and restoring your property and titles.”
Tonia was silent. Perrin said, “It is properly signed and witnessed. However, you must keep this concealed, revealing it to no one, until tomorrow. If you do not, the title is void and you will never again have the chance to restore it.”
The king had been very clear about this. “I need a few days to bring the Marchenas to heel,” he’d said, “but if you can assure me Tonia Figlari can control herself, I’ll give you the papers now. No offense, but I’d rather not see you people again.”
Dianthe had suggested they wait a day to give the scroll case to Tonia, just to be sure, but Alaric had said, “This will prove whether Tonia has the willpower to do what else it takes to regain her status—to herself, if no one else. And we’ve already waited long enough.”
Now Tonia scanned the parchment once more before allowing it to roll up in her hand. “You were supposed to bring me the stone falcon,” she said, and Sienne’s stomach knotted up. If Tonia was going to balk at the letter of their agreement…
“Those papers are what you wanted, ultimately,” Alaric said. “The falcon was just a means to an end. This way, you don’t have to negotiate with the king and risk him turning you down no matter what proofs you have.”
Tonia stared at him. “An artifact that powerful must be worth a lot of money,” she said. “And you traded it away for this. Are those knives worth so much to you?”
“The artifact was priceless,” Dianthe said, “which is the same as saying it’s worthless, in the sense of being able to sell it. We got for it exactly what it was worth.”
“We’ve fulfilled our end of the bargain,” Alaric said. “We’d like what you promised us.”
Tonia still looked stunned. Rising as if in a dream, she walked to the table beneath the window and withdrew the leather bag. She returned and handed it to Alaric. Alaric opened it and checked the contents. “Thank you,” he said. “Don’t call on us again, if you don’t mind.”
“Thank you,” Tonia said. She gestured toward the door.
“What will you do about the carvers?” Sienne asked.
“Now that I have a right to the Figlari dukedom, I can fight for it,” Tonia said. “Mythical creatures or no, it sounds like you’ve proved they die like anything else.” A cunning smile touched her lips. “I will take back what’s mine.”
“Good luck,” Sienne said, and meant it.
Outside, Sienne drew in a deep breath of untainted air and mounted Spark. “Home, finally?” she said.
“The stables, then home,” Alaric said. “And then the real work begins.”
Spread out on Leofus’s new table, the five ritual knives looked, not mysterious and alluring, but old and tarnished. Each was sheathed in leather in varying stages of decrepitude, most of which had once had designs impressed on them. One sheath was capped with rusted steel. All five were the same length, about nine inches long from hilt to tip. The grips of two of them were wrapped in leather strips that were falling apart; the others had lost their wrappings years, perhaps centuries ago. The only things that set them apart from ordinary knives were the decorated stones in the pommels. Each bore a semi-precious cabochon stone engraved with a stylized animal. Sienne reached out to touch a delicately carved badger, but withdrew her hand quickly when Alaric reached over her shoulder and picked one of the knives up.
“This is the one,” he said. It was missing the leather wrapping for its hilt, which was made of bone, its sheath was scarred and scratched from years of neglect, and the red jasper stone bore the carving of a cat. “The others may have use in other rituals, so I don’t think we should get rid of them.”
“We paid too high a price acquiring them,” Perrin said. “I am reluctant to discard any.”
“If we repair them, maybe they will be useful,” Kalanath said, picking up a knife with a lapis lazuli stone in its hilt and touching its pitted edge gingerly.
“We’ll store them for later,” Alaric said, holding out the bag for the others to put the knives away. He set the bag to one side and laid the cat knife on the table, beside the brass goblet incised with Ginatic characters. “One step closer.”
Sienne ran her finger over the words on the cup. After nine months, she knew them by heart.
“‘From the center, to the heart,’” she recited, “‘to open what is closed, I am forever faithful.’” She traced the line around the base of the goblet. “‘That the center will accept the offering, let this cup by my hand open the gate.’” Or door, or path—that was a word she hadn’t been sure of. That she’d been able to decipher so much was a miracle.
“The knife the wizard used was newer,” Alaric said, prodding the cat carving with one finger. “But the red stone, and the carving, and the shape—they’re all the same.”
“So we have two objects that were used by the wizard to bind the Sassaven and were part of some other ritual in the south, for a purpose we don’t know,” Dianthe said. “Is that progress, really? I mean, I don’t want to sound discouraging, but there’s still so much we don’t know.”
Alaric picked up the goblet and regarded it distantly, his eyes unfocused. “That memory blessing was effective. I can still remember the ritual as clearly as if it were happening now. The wizard picked up the goblet and held it to Mauden’s lips for him to drink. He pricked his finger with the knife and drew a symbol on Mauden’s palm, then cut Mauden’s finger and had him repeat the symbol on his—the wizard’s—palm. Then they clasped those hands, and one of the other participants looped a silver chain around their wrists, and Mauden and the wizard recited the lines on the cup.”
“Except there was an extra line in the middle,” Dianthe said.
“Yes. “‘To bind and seal what is broken by the chain of forgetting.’”
“And that is all you remember,” Perrin said.
“It’s all I witnessed. I was there those three times as escort, not participant. Only Sassaven who’d undergone the ritual, who were full Sassaven, were allowed to take part in the rest. Some had unicorns as their other selves, the rest didn’t, but all of them were bound.”
“But you heard some of the rest,” Sienne said. “Slow, lots of vowels—that’s enough for me to identify the spells the wizard cast as transforms.”
“And I’m sure the liquid in the goblet was some kind of sedative, because it smelled of varnwort, and I remember collecting that every fall and taking it directly to the wizard’s chambers. It’s a relaxant,” Alaric explained. “I don’t know what else went into the drink, though.”
“Then it sounds like we need to discover that next,” Dianthe said. “If the recipe was written down in some book somewhere, that book might contain information about the ritual or rituals it was used in.”
“I wish I’d heard more of the spells he cast. That would tell us a lot,” Alaric said.
“You wouldn’t be able to remember them if you had, no matter how well your memory was enhanced,” Sienne pointed out. “The human mind isn’t made to comprehend the magic languages for more than a syllable or two at a time. So it doesn’t matter that you weren’t included in the ritual. Knowing they were transforms already limits our search substantially.”
“Then we must search books,” Kalanath said. “It may take a long time. I am not good at reading Fellic.”
“And I still don’t dare use the university library. You don’t suppose the king would feel it was his duty to tell my parents where I am?” Sienne’s hand close
d into a fist under the table.
“I doubt it. He didn’t sound like he thought it was his business,” Dianthe said. “I’m still stunned that we were face to face with royalty. And some of us were rude to royalty.” She glared at Alaric.
“He’s not my king,” Alaric said. “And he never apologized for hitting Sienne. I don’t give a damn if he’s the king, that’s not behavior that will endear him to me.”
“At any rate, we have no guarantee that the book we seek is in Fellic,” Perrin said. “It might well be in Meiric, or Sorjic.”
“And I’m not nearly so fluent in Meiric as I should be,” Sienne said. “I didn’t think I’d ever need it.”
“I didn’t know you spoke Meiric,” Alaric said.
“Pay attention, Alaric, Sienne specialized in linguistics at her fancy school,” Dianthe said.
“I speak Sorjic very well, though,” Sienne said in that language.
Alaric’s eyebrows rose. “I hope I’ve never said anything you shouldn’t have overheard.”
“You’re very discreet.” Sienne grinned, and added in Sorjic, “And very handsome.”
“Me say in Sorjic some,” Dianthe said. “Think you be careful.”
Sienne blushed, and Alaric roared with laughter. “Sorry, no more talking in languages you don’t understand,” he said to a mystified Perrin and Kalanath. “Let’s all be grateful we have the continental languages covered, so we aren’t likely to miss the recipe we need for lack of understanding.”
“Then tomorrow, we begin a new search,” Perrin said, sweeping the bag up. “I will hold on to these, in case they become important.”
Stone of Inheritance Page 29
