by Carol Berg
One hour from now. If you have second thoughts, you know how to tell me.
And he was gone. No threats. No attempt to deny who he was or the things he had done. That surprised me. He was no quiet eddy in the mindstorm, either. That did not surprise me.
He was right that a public conversation would do my reputation no good. One hint of my connivance with Dante, a man despised and feared by everyone in both households, and suspicions would be raised about my loyalties. Lady Eleanor would recall my query. Mention of the device I’d shown her would recall the copper bracelet to Eugenie. And even if the queen never woke, my interest in a forbidden symbol could link my father’s murky origins to the Mondragons. The remnants of my family would be exterminated.
“Damoselle? Are you ill? Damoselle Anne?” Ella’s round face poked into the room, even while her fingers tapped a roundelay on my door. Her cheek wore the red crinkles of her pillow and her hair was bed-tousled under her cap.
“Dear Ella.” Emerging from my own mindstorm, I threw my ring in the kerchief with the other things and tied the corners into a knot. “Sorry to drag you out so deep in the night. Can you pass a message to Heurot? Right now?”
“Now? Well, I doubt—” She blinked. “Aye. He planned to sleep in Sonjeur de Duplais’ room, as he was so worried about him not coming back when he was expected. But you’ll not tell anyone, damoselle, will you? It’s presumptuous, and he could be accused—”
“I’ll not breathe a word. And Ella, I’ll ask your same discretion about what I’m doing. This is for Sonjeur de Duplais’ safety and the queen’s.”
“You know I’ll do anything for you, damoselle.”
“You’re a good girl, Ella,” I said as I set about writing a message to Ilario. “You were my first friend here. I’ll never forget that.”
Her expression crumpled in worry, bereft of its ever-present caution. “Oh, damoselle, are you leaving us?”
I smiled and shook my head. “Not until I set some things to rights.”
“About your family? It must be so awful, the things I’ve heard.” She whose father made bricks sixteen hours of every day, and whose drunken mother had been trampled by a carriage horse.
“My father didn’t do the things they say. My sister, not much older than you, died because of it, but she was as strong as you and immensely brave, as much as any Sabrian knight ever was. So I must be strong and brave as well.”
I scribbled the note to Ilario, outlining the meaning of the items in the bundle and telling him that the object of my search was in the same place he’d found “the devilish bracelet.” I told him that the person who had held the object was sure I’d taken it and was forcing me to meet with him. Ilario was not, under any circumstance, to trade the book for my life.
If worse came to worst, I hoped he would ignore that last and come riding to my rescue. My feeble courage did not extend to self-murder.
“Heurot must deliver this letter and this packet into Chevalier de Sylvae’s own hand at seventh hour of this morning’s watch, unless I inform him otherwise. He is to use every precaution to keep it from the attention of anyone else. Duplais’ very life may depend on it. Is that clear?”
“Aye. I can get them to him in a clean slops jar. None will ever look in that. We’ll figure a way to get them to . . . Did you say Chevalier de Sylvae? Are you sure?”
“You needn’t worry. Lord Ilario will pass them on to someone with more wit and forget about it before he has his breakfast.”
Her smile was tight. “I suppose that makes sense.”
Ella fetched the promised slops jar, and we stuffed the bundle and the note inside. One more thing to tidy up. “If at any time I should vanish without telling you . . . if no one in the palace has seen me . . . I want you to take the jewelry and money from the hidden drawer in the armoire and run away, as far from this palace, as far from Merona, as you can get. Take Heurot, if he’ll go.” I dropped the key beside my grandmother’s tessila.
“Oh, damoselle!”
The bells rang a quarter past fourth hour. The palace would soon be waking. A quarter of an hour and Dante would be waiting.
I dispatched Ella with a hard embrace. One drop of Lianelle’s potion and I was off. I wasn’t an entire fool.
CHAPTER 35
26 OCET, BEFORE DAWN
The escalon, or maze, that gave my goodfather’s palace its name was a whimsical garden, mingling colorful wildland flowers like gorse and broom with cultivated blooms like hibiscus and cascading bougainvillea. Poppies, wallflowers, and myriad colorful denizens of the maquis popped up in unexpected places, making the winding paths wholly different and wholly beautiful in every season. One needed Lord Ilario’s height to see over the tangled walls.
In the heart of the maze stood a rustic summerhouse. Even in the summer doldrums, a breeze could find its way through the latticed walls and bentwood arches to those who played or read or conversed beneath the vine-clad roof beams.
The airs were not so benevolent in these tarry hours before dawn. The moon hung huge and low in the west, almost obscured by racing clouds. Humid gusts thrashed the slender branches and whipped them into my face. But I gripped my shawl and welcomed the wild weather, the better to disguise my presence at the verge of the clearing.
No light shone through the latticework. The sorcerer had arrived minutes before, dark head bowed into the wind. Alone.
A cold raindrop struck my cheek as I circled the grassy clearing before venturing inside, assuring myself that no one else lurked in the shrubbery. Silly for me to take some solace from that. He might be able to summon the Aspirant with a call of the tangle curse.
The wooden step creaked under my slipper. I cursed silently, but his startled jerk allowed me to pick him out of the dark. He perched cross-legged atop a table pushed into a corner. His staff, gleaming white in stray moonlight, was propped against the wall at the opposite end of the elliptical structure. Was that to lull my fears?
It didn’t.
Deeming it best to let the invisibility potion wear off in the deepest shadows, I slipped around the periphery toward a stretch of solid wall. The floor might be less likely to creak along the edge.
Dante jumped up, halting my steps. But he merely moved to one of the arched openings and rested a fist on each facing. Raindrops spattered on the steps and whispered across the grass beyond him. Uncloaked, his gaunt frame stood outlined against the night. He wore no gloves.
As the potion lost potency, the mindstorm faded into a muted chaos. Somehow all the incisive opening volleys I had planned along the way faded as well. In the dark, scarce able to pick out his shape, all I could remember were snips of past conversations . . .
No, not dead. Just buried in a place I’d rather not be.
It is so . . . fine . . . to hear another . . . to know I am not the only one.
The aether is the medium of souls.
Yet the most memorable part of our exchanges had not been the words themselves but the richness . . . the completeness . . . of their speaking: all the shyness, longing, wry humor, sympathy, emptiness, the shared wonder at the sky and its principled behavior, our awe at magnificent ideas, yet another form of seeing.
How could a daemon who had little understanding of people falsify such perceptions? How could one who demonstrated such . . . exaltation . . . at the marvels of the natural world scheme to upend it? He had expressed a reverence for magic and a prickly sensitivity to injustice. He had bought me a reprieve. To prison you with an unworthy partner would be abomination.
“Where is Duplais?” I said, reclaiming anger with memories of Ambrose’s terror and Eugenie’s blood and children with empty eyes—true abominations.
He spun, startled, picking me out of the shadows. “Is there no end to the lady’s surprises?”
The cold, flat baritone, so different from that other voice, banished my febrile imaginings.
“You wished to speak,” I said. “So begin. Tell me how you came by Duplais’ journal. He wou
ld not part from it willing.”
“We’ve a great deal to discuss before we get to that. Such as how you were present in my chamber without me seeing you. And you must return—”
“Why did you break my mother’s mind?”
He turned his back on me then, returning to his position in the doorway. “You are blind, muleheaded, and naive. I saved your mother’s life.”
I almost choked. “A life of chewing her nails until her fingers bleed? Of setting her home afire to purge it of daemons? Of forgetting her children’s names?”
“She was going to be silenced one way or another. She is not dead. Someday you may be grateful for that.”
“Grateful? Then I’m sure to be delighted at what you’ve done to my brother. Where is he?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Then there is little point in asking questions.” The air between us crackled. “I said we needed to talk, not interrogate one another.”
“I say nothing more until you tell me one true thing. Anything.” And then my tongue made a liar of me, continuing without my consent to the question threatening to fracture my skull, as if my eyes were trying to see two distinct bodies occupying the same space. “What are you?”
A complete and utter lunatic.
His answer struck me with such astonishing clarity, and such abject, reluctant, bitter horror, as if he had been forced to strip naked and reach into the maw of a lion, that for one moment I did not realize he’d spoken in that other voice and not the one directed at my ears. And if deep and abiding belief made an assertion true, then no one had ever spoken more honestly. I was speechless.
“I could give you a thousand reasons for that assessment,” he snapped, his manner redolent of his night’s fury. “Wanting what I want. Living as I do. Imagining that the one honest man in the world gave me a purpose that only I could fill.”
He reversed positions but remained in the doorway. The night trapped in the summerhouse left his visage a cruel imagining.
“But let me begin with my lunacy with regard to you. Born in a tent? Delivering foals? Gadding about the wilderness with a collection of schoolmasters, reciting legends of star patterns? And naive—gods save me from abject idiocy—trusting a person you’ve never seen and traipsing off to meet Raissina Nialle, who makes dockside thief lords tremble. The moment Raissina reported she had no information about you to sell me—and I did not ask her for it, by the by—I should have known you had managed a deception I believed impossible in the medium of souls.”
His vehemence drove me backward.
“This astounding person, so oddly simple, so incredibly complex, so . . . jubilant . . . unlike anyone I’ve ever encountered—gods, you asked me if I was dead as innocently as if that might be possible without corruption. Made me want to inquire if you were one of these angels the damnable peacock lord babbles about. Who could guess that this clever maid in the aether, sharing a curse I’d come to believe was mine alone, could be the aristo knife-tongue, the daughter of Michel de Vernase, a woman who in less than a month confounded Warder Pognole, the most calculating brute in five kingdoms, wormed her way into the queen’s bedchamber confidences, and rousted the sneaking vermin Jacard to a panicked mistake the size of all Sabria . . . the same woman who reeked of power and illicit secrets from the day she walked into Castelle Escalon, yet hid it all behind the most formidable mental barriers this side of the Aspirant himself ? Even yet I’ve not disentangled that enchanted powder from your bedchamber.”
He paced like a chained beast, never coming so much as a step closer to me. A good thing, that. Light-headed, my nerves pricking as if spiders traveled along them, I was near bolting.
“Once only did the notion pass through my mind that the two might be the same person, but I dismissed it, assuming it was a result of this work I do. Overreaching . . . undoing in the night all I do during the day . . . creeping corruption . . . this incessant, flaying, devouring need to strike . . .”
I gasped . . . confounded . . . remembering: light . . . that’s life’s finest pleasure . . . but, of course, some work has to be done in the dark. “Stars of Heaven, you’re still Duplais’ man!”
He blew a rude disparagement. “The cursed librarian knows naught of what I do. Or, rather, he put me here and goaded me to do it, but he has no understanding. He would not approve my course, and I don’t care a whit what he would approve. But he is naive, like you. He wanted the scheme unraveled with clean hands; then he arranged for inquisitors to haul me to the Bastionne, where I learned that such was impossible. A price must be paid for knowledge. I’ve done so many—But those things don’t matter. Do not expect me to apologize. Yet if any value is to come from all this, if you want the truth, if you want this stopped . . .”
His hand flew to his hair, yanking on his queue as if to wake himself, yet succeeding only in pulling more wild strands loose. “Gods, I’ve not actually talked with anyone in four years, so I’m prattling nonsense like the popinjay, and you’re sure I am the Souleater’s minion . . . or a murderous lunatic . . . which I surely am. But the world teeters at the brink of a chasm from which it will not recover, and I don’t give a horse’s ass about the world, but they’re going to make me kill the self-righteous little prick to accomplish this rite, and I’m already mad, as I’ve told you, so I’ve this notion that you’re the only person in the world who can help me stop it . . . and save his annoying, godforsaken, priggish balls.”
The summerhouse trembled as he stomped down the steps and into the spattering rain. He didn’t go far. As my knees had turned to wet cotton with this vehement outpouring of arrogance and grief, that was just as well. It meant I didn’t have to chase after him to confirm that Duplais was the self-righteous little prick he wanted to save. He stopped a few paces from the steps, letting the rain hammer on his head and sluice over his shoulders and back, while the silks of this malevolent tapestry, animated like his black snaketethers, wove their murderous story.
A man with no family, no connections, no friends. Even Duplais, who had brought Dante here, who had formed some sort of bond with the prickly sorcerer, had come to believe him corrupt and vicious. Yet Dante had taken exactly the path Duplais propounded. Keep your secrets. Let events unfold. Do the hard things that are necessary. Duplais had said the sorcery the mage pursued drove him deeper into the dark, ravaging him body and soul. And then came this night, when his masters told him he must murder the man he believed the one honest man in the world.
Anguish at what his course demanded—and fear at the price he would pay for it—had sparked his tirade this hour past. Chains, knife, Duplais’ journal . . . so cruel a death . . . uncanonical spellwork. Necessity will leave me a husk . . . feeling it will leave me dead. . . .
The rain should be stirring the scents of the dying garden: lingering flowers, drying leaves, hardy green grass. Instead it reeked of sulfur. A world teetering at the brink of a chasm.
I crossed to the door. The gray raindrops spattered in unnatural patterns, some leaping high like balls of hard rubber, some looping, some not rebounding at all, but chasing other droplets across the step. Chaos.
“What do you mean by undoing what you do in the day? The queen lies ill and despairing. My mother remains confined. Father Creator, did you send my sister to her death?”
He faced neither toward me nor away, but exactly at right angles. His arms were folded across his chest, empty without the staff. Different. Less formidable, his frantic energies spent.
“I did not kill the girl, nor did I advise it, drive her to it, or ignore its prospect,” he said in his more customary even measure. “It happened very suddenly. But certainly I bear responsibility. I have consorted with those involved. I made sure it was not investigated. As with all this, you must believe as you please.”
I could not answer. What use a list of crimes, when he had already conceded guilt?
“As to the undoing . . . The Aspirant’s objective—this mag
ic I help them work—is no less than the permanent overturn of natural law. Portier saw a hint of it at Eltevire, but he had no idea of the scale. The Aspirant believes that if we penetrate the Veil sufficiently, create a big enough hole and seal it open, we will invert the order of nature entire—the laws of physics and alchemistry, the behavior of weather, of oceans, the instincts of animals. It will be madness. With the natural world no longer predictable, a terrified populace will turn back to mysticism. To sorcery. But, in truth, I don’t think the Aspirant cares about the result so much as the doing.”
Hand of Heaven . . . to hear it stated so bluntly . . . Reason called his claim absurd, and yet the things I had seen in the city . . . in the Rotunda . . . in Dante’s own chamber . . . whispered that reason no longer held sway.
“The efficacy of this rite, the mystery, is founded in the nature of the realm beyond the Veil.”
“Ixtador,” I offered.
“Aye. The Aspirant withholds what he knows of Ixtador’s history, teasing as he does. But I’ve gleaned it is neither a divine state—else why am I not seven times god-struck for breaching its boundaries?—nor is it some common aspect of the universe that we’ve only discovered in these hundred years since the Wars. I’ve never believed in gods or angels or Heaven, not since the day I first told someone I could hear voices in my head, but whenever I reach beyond life with this work I do”—his neck twisted and his shoulders hunched, as if to fend off a blow—“what I perceive is perverse, aberrant, a festering wound hidden deep inside the body of the natural world. Even if we halt this rite and defeat the Aspirant and his minions, we cannot simply close the Book of Greater Rites and walk away. Which means—”
“We have to let events unfold. Learn more. Know what we are dealing with.”
He jerked his head in assent. “Exactly so. Do you know much about the Mondragon codices?”
“Duplais told me their history.”
“The Aspirant keeps the index volume. I decipher what I can from the other three, practice and perfect what I learn, then formulate the spells in a more traditional way and teach them to the Aspirant. The magic is”—he closed his eyes for that moment, not to summon a word, but as if to recapture something treasured—“magnificent. Also complex and difficult. But alongside this work—unshared with my colleagues—I’ve developed a skill at visualizing spellwork, the patterns and shapes of it, as you might see the hidden structure of a leaf beneath an opticum lens. I can then translate my understanding into simple forms that can be manipulated.”
