by Carol Berg
The strands of pearls dangling from her ears clicked softly as she shook her head. “I wish I could tell you more. Your father’s background is of immense interest to several most influential people. Which leads me to think—Well, it just doesn’t make sense. But I refuse to believe your mother has succumbed to nervous collapse. I’ve heard insinuations that her condition was precipitated. And now your sister is dead.”
“What was done to my mother?” I blurted. “Who says it? For mercy’s sake, if we knew what was wrong with her, we might find a remedy.”
She shot to her feet, uncertainty dismissed. “I’ll not betray my informant’s trust, any more than I would betray yours. Not yet. Just . . . tread carefully. Now, we must move on before the queen returns.”
“My lady, please!”
“While Her Majesty is unendingly gracious and lenient in matters of protocol, she does have a few very particular requirements. One window on the east and one on the south must be opened each night, no matter the weather, and each must have . . .” Lecturing serenely, as if she had never imagined purposeful madness or murder, Lady Cecile led me into Queen Eugenie’s bedchamber.
After a quarter hour of fruitless fury, I became caught up in my bizarre schooling. The queen must indeed be the most superstitious of women. Nighttime rituals involved more of placing charms and burning enspelled herb bundles than of tooth cleaning or hair brushing, and of lighting particular fragrant candles to burn through the night than of smoothing sheets.
“. . . and always to close the bed curtains before the lamps are lowered.” Lady Cecile demonstrated how to refasten the silver clips once the heavy silk curtains were released about the wide bed. “Except for this one.”
She led me around to the side of the bed nearest the windows, the side one might assume the first to be curtained off against the chill and the last to be opened. The curtain at the head of the bed had been sewn in two panels, and she showed me how to release the wide panel nearer the center of the bed. The narrow panel nearest the bedpost and pillows was always to be tied open unless the queen herself closed it.
“Now bring a lamp and we’ll examine her medicine box.”
As I made to follow, the strangest thing caught my eye. Half hidden behind a painted screen, a metallic ring perhaps a metre and a half in diameter had been embedded in the wood floor between the bed and the open window. The ring seemed to suck the golden beams right out of the lamp, stretching them impossibly thin and bending them around its perfect circumference.
“What is this?” Fascinated, I sank to my knees and brushed a finger along the ring. To my surprise, it was not metallic at all, but more akin to amber glass. And the stretched light beams were not some trick of sputtering flame and startled vision, but actually streaked around the circle of amber, regardless of my viewing angle. Likewise the shadows were not just the inverse of the light beams, but shooting splinters of blackness independent of the light.
“Ouch!” I snatched my hand away. A snap of heat had shot straight up my arm to the center of my forehead, like a charge of the virtu elektrik.
The air in the sitting room stirred, as if an open door had let in a winter draft. The lamp guttered and almost went out.
“Anne?” Lady Cecile peered around the bedpost. “Grace of angels, girl. Never touch that.”
“Whatever is it?”
“That sorcerer’s filth.” She spat her answer in such a way as to close off further probing.
That sorcerer. Dante.
We spent a half hour with Eugenie’s extensive collection of potions and tonics. I would never remember it all, especially as a ferocious ache in the center of my brow grew worse every moment. The lamplight glancing from the faceted glass vials and bottles sliced through the air like sabers.
When the west tower clock struck ninth hour, Cecile began reordering the medicine box, which required pulling out a few remaining items lying loose in the bottom—a flat tin that rattled as if filled with buttons, a drawstring pouch of gray silk, a bundle of cinnamon sticks tied with string—and installing everything again. “Always leave things tidy, and be aware: Antonia’s word is law in this room.”
“Our mistress might dispute that, dame.”
My spirit froze. No mistaking the resonant baritone from the doorway behind us, though it was bereft of madness on this night. Not the least sound or movement had warned of his presence.
Lady Cecile jostled the cabinet as she twisted around, clinking and rattling the bottles and vials. “Master Dante,” she said, “why are you here?” Her challenge was undermined by a slight quaver.
“Our lady queen bade me survey her chamber before her return. To make sure there be no . . . unwanted intruders.”
He entered the pooled lamplight, a dark-haired man of modest height and simple, sober garb—black breeches and hose, and a full-sleeved shirt the hue of overripe plums. His silver collar glinted in the lamplight, bright against the shadowed hollows of his face.
Close to, the mage appeared far younger than I would have guessed—no more than thirty—though his eyes . . . My skin shivered. Set in a fine spiderwork of sun creases, his eyes were not black, but the deep, intense green of a sunlit wildwood. They hinted at experiences more remote than those of my great-grandsire Cazar, who had witnessed the ending of the Fassid Empire and the last, lingering scourges of the Blood Wars.
“I ween I should bespeak an introduction, dame.” The cool interest, voiced with the slight patois of the northern mountains, might suggest him a more disciplined sort than the man who had beaten his adept in the Presence Chamber, save that one of his black-gloved hands gripped the infamous white staff.
“Certainly, Master. May I acquaint you with Her Majesty’s new maid of honor, Anne de Vernase?” Familiar forms seemed to restore Cecile’s more customary calm. She took my hand and drew me forward. “I am training the young lady to the queen’s service. Anne, Master Mage Dante, Queen Eugenie’s First Counselor.”
Grudging, I inclined my head. My forehead ached and burned, as if a carpenter had attacked it with an auger, but I summoned anger and resentment to reinforce Cazar discipline. This man would not see me quail at his mere presence. No matter this mannered arrogance, no matter his true allegiance, he was a brute. If the ducessa was right, he had slaughtered my mother as truly as any knife-wielding barbarian.
“You expose a braver soul than mine, Dame Cecile, to bring the Great Traitor’s daughter to this chamber. Mayhap I should banish her, as I do haunts and spectres.” He drifted across the room toward the windows, passing between us and the bedstead, inspecting the various charms and wards tucked here and there along the way, touching this one, adjusting that, breathing a whispered word on another. He touched every bottle and jar in the medicine box. “What danger do you represent, damoselle?”
“None, sonjeur,” I said to his back, purposely failing to acknowledge his rank, as he had with the ducessa. “What grievance could I have with Queen Eugenie, who demonstrates such tolerance as to welcome me here?”
He reversed sharply, his back to the tall windows. His eyes were narrowed, his black brow raised skeptically. “You carry many a grievance, I think. Your traitor parent searches for sorcerous power he cannot wield himself. Who better to benefit from his findings than his nurtured childer, who carry the mark of blood inheritance? Have you nae wish to take your share of his discoveries and right the wrongs of the world? Your mother’s nerves remain fractured, I hear.”
Hatred exploded in my breast, shooting fire to every limb. I felt as if I could have lit a bonfire with a touch. How dare he speak of my mother? “You know nothing of me, mage. But be sure of this: Were I gifted in the practices you call magic, I would not share in my father’s work, or your work, or any such vileness, even were it the sole means to heal my mother’s injury, so cowardly inflicted, or return my innocent brother’s freedom, or turn back time itself to prevent my sister’s diabolic murder!”
The clang of tuned bronze sliced through air turbulent with
lamplight and shadow, as the palace bells pealed the half hour. Lady Cecile, pale as stone dust, used the interruption as an excuse to drag me toward the door. Her heart’s pulse rattled like a rabbit’s. “Time runs. We must abandon you to your duties, Master, and return to our own. Come, Anne.”
He may have answered. He may have laughed. I couldn’t hear, for the world blurred as she bustled me through the dim-lit rooms and past the bowing guardians in the scarlet waiting room. By the time we stood in the deserted outer salon, I was shaking. Dizziness threatened to drop me on the gray carpet.
“Are you an entire fool, girl?” she spat through clenched teeth. “To speak like that to him?”
“Angels defend us, my lady. What is he?” I said, clamping my trembling arms around my stomach. Not even Duplais’ razored questioning had left me feeling so raw.
“The queen’s current favorite is what he is. Dangerous beyond dreaming is what he is. Some say it was no earthshaking but this mage caused the destruction of the Bastionne Camarilla—yet the prefects do not, cannot, touch him. There are more reasons than border uprisings or disaffection that keep the king away from Merona.” She smoothed her hair and mustered her more accustomed dignity. “Now, are you quite well? I must get back to Belinda.”
She must have interpreted my tremors as affirmation, as she hurried back to the Rose Room without allowing me to speak. “Not at all well,” I whispered to her back.
My childhood memories of Eugenie de Sylvae were like the sweetened versions of old tales told in the nursery, all starlight, elvish singing, and happy endings. Present truth seemed more like true folk tales: monsters, dark deeds, and unexplained evils—all personified in this one man. Why did she keep him here? What had possessed me, whom my family named unflappable, to insult him? I felt as if I’d been ravished by a horde of stinging ants.
Returned to the Rose Room, Lady Cecile finished inspecting Belinda’s work and bade the two of us a peaceful night. As Belinda stacked her letters, I broached the subject of my brother.
“I’ve no influence with the king, Anne,” said the ducessa, cool as a spring night, “and know naught of prison protocols. I’ll see you tomorrow morning, as usual.”
I could have gnawed my way out of an iron cage.
SLEEP ELUDED ME THAT NIGHT. Telling my father’s story had brought the best of him to life for me again. Yet the letter that had sent Edmond de Roble to torture and death was scribed by Papa’s hand, as was another asserting he would never again be subservient to a king. My father had vowed to see Sabria overturned, and I, the daughter he had once called the child of his mind, could not deny his guilt. My testimony had affirmed my father a traitor and left my brother hostage to a king’s wrath. Paralyzed by guilt and fear, I had retreated to Montclaire and for four years had never looked beyond its walls again. What kind of traitor did that make me?
CHAPTER 9
17 OCET, AFTERNOON
Over the next few days I was steeped in the lore of Sabrian nobility and the outfitting of a queen’s household, learning more than any person could ever wish to know about demesnes major and minor, property settlements, the advantages of silk made in Tallemant over silk imported from Hematia, and the particular linen sheets the queen preferred. The voyages of exploration King Philippe sponsored had brought enormous wealth to Sabria, as well as new fabrics, foods, artworks, and ideas. On one morning we were taken to an importer’s warehouse down at the docks and shown a grand variety of things I’d never seen before.
In years past, I would have reveled in such an outing. But the restless anger grown in my viscera would have been better satisfied by smashing porcelain than by admiring it. What was wrong with me?
More than tenday gone and I’d learned nothing to explain my sister’s death. I had applied to every undersecretary in the steward’s office and the chancellor’s, as well as to the Temple Minor and the king’s First Secretary, for permission to visit Ambrose, but no one had been able or willing to help. Though I scoured the royal library, hoping to discover what poisons might destroy a woman’s mind or how else such a thing might be accomplished in the matter of a day, I had found no answers. Neither sleep, study, exercise, nor conversation had provided relief for the agitation that afflicted me when thrust among strangers. Bees might have been nesting in my ears.
On the long afternoons I roamed the edges of the queen’s salon or sat by a window, trying to stay inconspicuous and avoid screaming with boredom. I knew I should speak to people, try to make acquaintances, or at least convince someone I was not leprous. This was my life now, and I needed to make something of it. I listened to gossip and collected rumors of more strange incidents in the city—including a violent whirlwind that had destroyed the Plas de Gierete, the Punishment Square where criminals were publicly whipped or executed.
Every day I swore to find someone among the women who might enlighten me about Lady Cecile or Duplais or exactly what services the mage Dante provided for the queen. But whenever one of the less-intimidating ladies in the room was between conversations, my mouth went dry and my head seemed entirely abandoned by any idea worth expressing.
I needed to see Ambrose. Perhaps if I could pour out the tale of these events, the two of us together might make some sense of them.
A FEW DAYS AFTER MY unsettling encounter with the mage, I dawdled too long in my bedchamber, writing a letter to Bernard and Melusina. As I hurried down the window gallery, late for the first of a flurry of evening engagements, none of which I anticipated with pleasure, a light touch on my shoulder spun me around so fast I near burst my skin.
“Damoselle de Vernase. Would ye come with me, damoselle?” A trim young serving man whipped his hands behind his back, only to pull one out again to dash a lock of yellow hair from his eyes. “My master would have a word with you.”
“Who are you? Who is your master?” My address was much too abrupt, but if he answered Dante, I was sure to heave up my lunch.
The young man grinned cheerfully. “I’m Heurot, damoselle, saints please ye for asking, gentleman’s attendant and aide to Sonjeur Portier de Savin-Duplais, Administrative of Her Majesty’s household. My master bids you report to his chambers as you are required.”
Every day since the humiliating spectacle at the Arothi tribute ceremony, I had expected Duplais’ summons. Hoped for it, once I’d accepted him as my only route to Ambrose. I’d have damned pride and sought him out, but my time had been occupied at every hour he was available. And again tonight . . .
“I’m expected by the Ducessa de Blasencourt just now, Heurot. Tell Sonjeur de Duplais that I’ll attend him after the presentation tonight.”
Heurot looked distressed. “But, damoselle . . .”
“Later, I promise.”
The gloomy afternoon had grown chilly and threatening as I hurried through the inner courts toward the west wing. I was to sit an early supper with the other maids of honor and meet with Lady Cecile for another hour of frustrating nothing. The evening’s culmination was to be our formal presentation to Queen Eugenie. The prospect was unbearable. With an ache as sore as any wounding, I longed to be home.
Halfway down the portrait gallery leading to Cecile’s apartment, a youthful figure hovered beneath a greater-than-life-sized image of Philippe de Savin-Journia, my king and goodfather. The youth popped to attention as I passed. “Damoselle, please wait.”
“Heurot! How did you—? I told you I’ve engagements for the next few hours.”
“My master does sincerely wish a word with you, damoselle. He is most insistent.”
Resolution faltered, then hardened into a different shape. “All right. Give me a few moments.”
The women were picking at poached pears and lettuce when I was shown in and promptly begged leave to withdraw with a headache. Though I believed the lie must be written on my face for all to see, none of our three mentors seemed particularly surprised. Lady Patrice flared her nostrils in disapproval, but she could hardly object. The other maids of honor, including her
especial favorites, fostered headaches enough for a regiment of unhealthy young women.
“We’ll see you at the presentation, then,” said Lady Cecile. “Angels’ peace, Anne.”
I was surprised when she rose from the table and escorted me to the door. As I lowered my guilty gaze and bade her a peaceful evening, she pressed a small leather-bound book into my hand. “Read this for our next meeting,” she said quietly. “Be prepared to discuss it. I believe it relevant to our discussion of several days ago.”
My eyes shot up. Her smooth, elegant forehead was seamed with worry, and her usually rosy complexion had a dreadful gray cast to it. A damp sheen coated her upper lip. “My lady—”
“Be off now.” In a swirl of plum satin, she returned to the others, beckoning her maidservant, Slanie, to close the door behind me.
Alone outside the door, I examined the worn little book. The title, scribed on red leather in faded gold lettering: A Brief History of the Demesne Gautier.
Heaven’s gates! Gautier was the name on Lianelle’s books of sorcery! I was instantly torn. Heurot waited in the gallery, ready to take me to Duplais. My yearning to hold my brother in my arms, to comfort him in his lonely prison and share the dreadful events of the past month had swelled to bursting, and the only way I could see to ease that ache led through the queen’s administrator. But this book . . . Dates and names and lists, sketched maps, and genealogical charts tantalized me as I thumbed through it. An entire section was titled “Collegia Magica de Gautier.” Surely this book was enlightenment.
But the needs of the living must trump the concerns of the dead, no matter how dreadfully, hurtfully, they had passed beyond the Veil. I stuffed the little volume deep into the pocket of my underskirt. First I must persuade Duplais to get me into Spindle Prison. Then be “presented.” Then I would delve into Lady Cecile’s book.
