“The smoke from my stepfather’s funeral still hangs in the air. This morning you attended his Eating at our sides. This afternoon, you lie with your guard in the castle where I grieve,” he says quietly. “You are charged with treason against the throne of Lormere.” He repeats his mother’s words. “There can be no mercy. That is the price of what you’ve done to me.” He turns on his heel and leaves the room, not fast enough to prevent me seeing the shaking of his shoulders as he goes.
“Do you know what astounds me the most, Twylla?” the queen says. She lowers her voice to a whisper, her tone intimate, almost maternal. I tear my eyes from the doorway to look at her. “It’s that you did this to yourself. You’ve lost him and given me what I wanted all along, and I barely had to do a thing. It couldn’t be any neater. That calls for a celebration, don’t you think?”
I say nothing, watching her.
“Ah, I have it,” she says. “We won’t hang you for your crimes. We’ll hunt you. I’ll take you to the forest myself.”
“No—”
“Yes. I’ll have the whole court follow.” She nods to herself. “I have a mind to make you watch the dogs eat your lover first. Perhaps I’ll put you both there and we’ll see how much he loves you then. Do you think he’ll try to shield you from their jaws when they tear your heart out?” She laughs as I shiver. “We should make a wager. Wouldn’t that be amusing? How far will you get before they bring you down? How long before you’re on your knees? Wait, I have an idea … Do you know what my father used to do? He used to slice across the ankles of the wretches we were hunting. He’d cut them and leave them in the trees. He’d give them an hour to try to escape. Rohese abolished it, saying it gave the dogs an unfair advantage, but it might be time to bring it back.”
She bends over, her Tallithi medallion falling into my face, the piper and the three stars above him all I can see as she whispers her next threat in my ear.
“I look forward to watching you both crawl.”
She stands and wheels from the room. “Take her down,” she calls behind her.
I cry out, my voice strangled, as the guards step forward and lift me roughly to my feet, their thick gloves chafing my skin. My legs are too weak to hold me and they have to half carry, half drag me out of the room and down the stairs.
The hallways are lined with courtiers, lords and ladies and even pages and servants, all witness to my fall. They say nothing, no jeers or recriminations; no one spits at me. They simply watch like silent sentinels as I am taken down into the lower level, through the barracks, to the dungeons.
The guards push me inside a small, dank cell, and I fall against the rotten rushes that coat the ground. As the door clangs shut behind me and the key turns with finality in the lock, my mouth falls open and I scream silently; my breath leaves my body with force as I clutch at the straw and pound at the floor beneath it. There is nothing but fear and pain and loss as I fall apart in the darkness.
* * *
There is little light in the dungeon; the only source is the weak glare from a torch in the passageway. And it is silent, save for the occasional drip of water from the vaulted ceiling. There are no screams, not even my own; I sit with my fist in my mouth to stop myself from crying out.
I can’t see a guard posted, so I call softly through the iron bars of the door. “Lief? Lief, are you here?”
I smell it a second before it moves, the cell filling with the odor of the grave as instinct drives me back against the wall. Silhouetted between the bars, a shape appears: long muscled legs, a flat head that turns toward me, too many teeth gleaming as a mouth opens. As I press against the cold stone, bathed in my own sweat, it lunges toward the bars and I can’t help the harsh scream I make. A metallic clang resonates around the cell as the creature hits the door; it whimpers, straining briefly against the chain I can now see around its neck. It stares at me through the bars with those soulless and empty eyes before it turns and slinks away. It can afford to be patient. I am captive prey. I listen over the sound of my blood rushing in my ears as it settles back down in some dank corner, and I bunch my fist back into my mouth to stop from screaming again.
I stare into the darkness, my ears straining for movement. As quietly as I can, I brush my other hand through the damp rushes, my skin crawling at the feeling of their putrid stickiness against my skin. When a piece breaks off and embeds itself under my thumbnail, I nearly cry out again; only a timely grunt from the hound silences me. I remain frozen for what feels like an age before I pull the piece out and begin to search again through handful after handful of rotten rushes, trying to find something I can use as a weapon. As panic threatens to overtake me again, I force myself to be calm. It cannot get to me through the bars; though that doesn’t quell the fear that someone could let it in, if they chose to.
Defeated, I lean against the wall and my thoughts turn back to Lief, held somewhere, my heart stuttering again when I realize he may be unconscious or dying from the blows the guards dealt him. I hope he is, if they do the things to prisoners that my guard told me they did. I couldn’t bear to hear him make that sound. I don’t want him to become a scream. He’d be better off dead.
Which he might already be, I realize. Because of me.
Choice. For years I’ve craved it, idealized it as a dream I can never have and, though it pains me to admit it, the queen is right. I have had choices, but because I didn’t like them I didn’t acknowledge them. I’ve been the agent of my own misery, time and again. And now I’ve dragged Lief down with me. I replay the queen leaning over me, the image of the piper on her medallion seared on my brain as she tells me she looks forward to watching us both crawl.
Left with my thoughts in the dark, a strange calm fills me, despite the musk of the hound. My tears dry and my heart slows to a steady pace. This time tomorrow I will be no more. All that I am and ever have been will be gone. Will Lief’s wraith and mine meet in the West Woods and drift together through the trees? Will there be enough of us left to know each other? I wonder if my mother will be sad to hear I am gone. I wonder how much it will hurt to die. Lief’s tale of the Sleeping Prince plays through my mind. The queen’s dogs will tear out my heart like the Sleeping Prince supposedly does. I don’t blame Lief’s mother at all for not telling him the whole sorry tale.
The Sleeping Prince. For some reason I keep coming back to the tale, to the Bringer and his calling away of a girl for his father, and I think of the girls who have died so he might wake. Girls like me, called from their homes and taken to a ruined castle to feed a monster. I was called from my home to a beautiful castle to be a puppet for a monster. And even though I don’t believe in the Gods anymore, I find myself praying to them.
* * *
Slumped on the floor, I begin to doze, my thoughts becoming muddled as Sleeping Princes and hounds and Gods all take turns laughing at me in my dreams. I see a white-haired man wearing a crown bowing to a Goddess shrouded in black, I see a God with a pipe at his lips, playing as dogs snap at his heels and shooting stars fall above him. Then I am wide-awake, sitting bolt upright and staring at the walls of my cell.
At the first hunt after Merek’s return he asked his mother about the medallion she wore, the coin he’d brought her from Tallith. He said it had a piper on it and she told him she’d filed the image away to make it Lormerian. But I saw the piper on her medallion. Not filed away, but there in my face: a piper, with three shooting stars in the sky above him. What was it Lief said about the solaris in the sky? What are the solaris? I never thought to ask. Is it possible they’re shooting stars?
Then my blood turns to ice.
Not shooting stars. Comets. I saw comets the night Dorin died, three of them burning in the dark skies. Three comets. Three stars on the medallion.
The next day, the day of the hunt, Dimia and I heard music in the courtyard, music Lief couldn’t hear. Music from a pipe.
The last time we saw Dimia before she left.
Did Dimia leave because of the music
? Did she follow the Bringer?
Lief told me that one of the old versions of the story said the Sleeping Prince could be awoken forever if the Bringer brought him a girl while the solaris were in the sky. And that the Bringer could be summoned by the totem, if someone had it and knew what it was. The queen has a pendant with a piper on it, a piper who wasn’t there before but is most definitely there now, with his halo of comets.
The pendant is the totem, it has to be.
The queen summoned the Bringer.
I rise, pacing the cell, my gown trailing through the dried rushes and making an eerie rustling. The hound strains at its chain when it hears the movement, but I can’t bring myself to care about it, not in the face of this.
Certainty settles in my stomach, the weight of it comforting, even as my skin prickles. She summoned the Bringer and he came. That is why she had the castle emptied; she thought I was still banished to my tower, out of the way. She summoned him when she knew the comets would be in the sky; she has people who track celestial events, people who track Næht’s and Dæg’s paths across the skies. So she arranged a hunt to get the men away and took her ladies to safety, leaving only the servants at the Bringer’s mercy.
My hand rises to my mouth to trap my moan inside. Dimia is dead. Poor, harmless Dimia. But worse than that, if the version that says the Sleeping Prince can be awakened when the solaris ride the skies is true, then the Sleeping Prince is awake for good. But why? Why would she want him? It’s Merek she wants, not the heir to the Tallithi throne.
I cross the cell, ignoring the dog as it almost strangles itself in a bid to get at me. “Merek!” I scream, pounding the iron bars with my fists and, when that hurts too much to bear, the flat of my palms. “Merek! Fetch the prince—the king! Please! Hello? Merek?” I call and call until my throat is hoarse and my hands throb with pain. No one answers me. I don’t know if anyone is even down here with me. The dog has long since abandoned its attempts at attack; instead it watches me with eyes that tell me it’s too late. In despair I sink back to the floor, curling in on myself, shivering, though not from the cold.
* * *
I must have slept, because when I open my eyes, Merek stands before me, alone, watching me through the bars. The hound sits quietly by his side, its chain now held loosely in Merek’s hand. I didn’t hear either of them moving, and that chills me more than Merek’s blank gaze. We remain in silence, my mouth dry with terror that he might open the door and let the beast in. When he walks out of my sight, my stomach drops, before he reappears without the dog.
“You were calling for me,” he says flatly.
I stand, my limbs cramped and tight from the stone floor. “Merek—Your Majesty—the queen has summoned the Bringer.” I’m surprised by how calm my voice sounds.
He raises one eyebrow. “Pardon?”
“The queen has summoned the Bringer, from Tallith. The son of the Sleeping Prince. She summoned him and he took one of the maids—Dimia—the maid you sent to find me the day Dorin died. She’s been taken by the Bringer. It means the Sleeping Prince is awake.”
“I never had you down as the type to make a plea of insanity,” he says sadly.
“I’m not! You have to listen to me—the medallion you gave the queen, the Tallithi coin, it was blank at the hunt, you remember? You asked whether she’d filed the piper and the stars away and she said she had. But it’s not blank anymore; the image is there now. I saw it when she found me, and the piper is on it.”
Merek looks away, his expression disgusted. “What is this, Twylla?”
“She summoned the piper! The night before the last hunt, there were comets in the sky. The solaris. The story says that if the Bringer is summoned when they are in the sky, then the heart the Sleeping Prince eats will awaken him. She summoned him, emptied all of the castle, and he came and took Dimia away. She’s woken the prince.”
“And you summoned me for that? To tell me a children’s story is coming true? For the love of the Gods, Twylla, have you not done enough? Am I not suffering enough? I have lost my stepfather to poison and my bride-to-be has—was … I did not come down here for this.”
“Then why did you come?” I say hotly.
“I thought you … I thought you had an explanation. I thought you wanted to help me understand.”
Unexpectedly I feel my eyes sting with tears. When I look at him closely, I can see how much older he looks, how tired. And I realize he came here because he wanted an explanation he could believe. He wants to forgive me, even now.
“Mer—Your Majesty, I am sorry. Of all the things I wanted, hurting you was never amongst them,” I say softly.
He dips his head in acknowledgment. “I want to know when it started.”
“The day before the last Telling,” I say softly. “On the day of the hunt.”
“Do you love him?”
“Yes,” I whisper.
He blinks, his lips pursed. Slowly, he sinks to the floor, sitting in front of my cell, his legs crossed before him like a boy. For a moment I feel as though I am the one granting him forgiveness. I can feel the weight of my old life around me, the Sin Eater’s daughter, the granter of peace and absolution.
“I would still marry you.” He cannot look at me as he says it, staring instead at his ankles. “If we say that he forced you, that he made you—” He stops.
I sit down, too, and reach between the bars to take his hand, again feeling as though it is him atoning, not me. When he doesn’t flinch or pull away, I begin to speak. “Merek, he didn’t,” I say as gently as I can.
“The court doesn’t have to know that,” he says quickly. “At the trial you could say he attacked you. If you say that, I can pardon you and we can marry and put this behind us.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then you will be tried for treason and sentenced to death.”
“Marry you or die? How I am supposed to answer that?”
“Say you’ll marry me.” The ghost of a smile haunts the corner of his mouth.
“Oh, Merek,” I say, forgetting myself. “You don’t deserve to live like that. You don’t deserve a bride who married you to save her skin after she’d wronged you.”
“I know I don’t, but that is the bride I want. You’re the bride I always wanted,” he says, and he looks so sad that the yes has formed on my tongue before he’s finished speaking.
But I can’t, and he sees it in my eyes.
“You’ll be charged with adultery, for breaking the betrothal,” he says, without looking at me. “It’s treason, because I’m a prince. The guard is to be tried for high treason, regicide.”
“Regicide? But he didn’t kill the king; you know he didn’t! It was her, you said—”
Merek shouts across me. “Do you think I care? Do you honestly think I care what reason they give for his death?”
“But she’ll get away with it. And she’ll marry you when she’s killed Lief and me. And the treaty with Tregellan—”
And that’s when the full extent of the queen’s plan hits me.
“Merek, you have to listen to me. She summoned the Bringer and poisoned the king to get to the Sleeping Prince: the last member of the Tallithi royal family. She wants her own alchemist. She means to bring him and force him to make gold for her so when she executes Lief and breaks the treaty with Tregellan, she’ll have gold to finance a war. You heard her in the solar; she said a Tregellian killing the king was an act of war, and you said Lormere could not afford one. But it can with an alchemist to finance it. Merek, she’s planned it all! She’s raised him to be her own pet alchemist. Ask Dimia’s brother—she has a brother—Taul! His name is Taul! He’ll tell you he doesn’t know where she is! Would she leave the castle without telling her brother?” As I say it I know it’s true; I feel the rightness of what I’m saying settling into my bones.
“Enough, Twylla.” He rises and turns to leave.
“Merek, please! Listen to me!”
He looks back at me, his mouth tight
with anger. “I’ve heard enough,” he says. “Your trial is at dawn tomorrow. Make your peace with whatever it is you hold dear.” He dips his head once and turns, leaving me kneeling on the floor. I wait until I’m sure he’s gone before I allow my tears to fall.
* * *
Time moves on, and without sunlight I have no idea that dawn approaches until footsteps come toward my cell. I shake myself out of my daze and stand, gripping the bars. I take a sharp breath when two guards approach the cell in uniform step, one bearing a blazing torch and the other the keys. The cell door is thrown open and one of the guards motions for me to leave.
I do, stepping forward slowly. I’ve thought all night and I know what I must do. I have to tell the court what the queen’s plan is. Even if it doesn’t save me, I have to tell them. With luck someone will listen and maybe then she can be stopped. The guards draw my arms behind my back and secure them. And before I can stop them they gag me, tying a filthy piece of fabric over my mouth. I struggle and try to scream but the gag does its job and all I can manage are muffled shrieks that no one will be able to decipher. They pull me roughly by the elbow, though they make sure to keep their hands away from my bare skin, and I wonder if the queen plans to keep up the deception about Daunen until the last.
They lead me from the cell, out of the dungeons, toward the Great Hall. The light outside is dim, dawn light, and my heart thuds violently beneath my ribs. Everything is lost.
* * *
The doors to the Great Hall are thrown open as we approach, and I’m pulled inside. As with Lady Lorelle’s trial, the benches are arranged in rows, all facing the dais, where the queen and Merek sit. The queen is doing her best to look grim, but the sparkle in her eyes gives her away. Beside her Merek looks like a man with nothing left to live for, his ceremonial sash askew on his shoulder so it sits awkwardly on his chest, his hair a manic halo around his wretched face. I wonder what he will do once Lief and I are gone and the queen’s plan is fully under way.
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