by David Hair
Both women had looked away, embarrassed.
I wonder why being forbidden something only makes the desire for it grow stronger? Because right now, the warm perfumed air had her feeling quite . . . amorous.
‘I need a cold drink,’ she decided, her skin tingling with want, and with shame for that want. She looked about guiltily, then took off her dressing gown. Clad in just the sweat-dampened nightdress, she followed the trickling sound of the fountain that fed the roots of her very own Winter Tree. She passed through the double row of old oaks to the pond where she’d planted the sapling from the shrine of Saint Eloy and knelt, careless of the dirt and leaf mould. She drank from her hands, feeling like a Fey Waif from the Fables: above her, the sapling spread its branches; it was several feet tall already, and covered in deep green thorny leaves and tart red berries, radiating an end-of-summer glow. Birds and insects trilled and thrummed about her.
She liked that she wasn’t queen here, but she served one who was . . . She glanced around again, checking she really was alone, before holding out a hand and making a wish.
Aradea, she whispered with her mind, show me Saint Balphus Abbey.
A Blue Spindle butterfly fluttered about her and landed on her hand, then fluttered off as an eel rose from the bottom of the pool then wriggled away, leaving a vision forming in the swirling water: a tawny-skinned face with tresses of blackberry vines, teeth like a pike and moon-crater eyes. Lyra whispered a greeting and they stared at each other, then the face was gone, in its place a burnt-out, desolate building overgrown with vines.
The place where she’d grown up had been abandoned by the Church after she was taken. The ruins saddened her, to see her old cell smashed open to the sky. You can never go back to the past, the wind whispered. Look ever forward.
Then she saw a flash of something else: a black-haired man dancing with a red-clad woman. The image was too blurred to make out faces, but the sight made her feel horribly insecure. Irked by it, she splashed the vision away, the air resounding to the slap of her hand in the water.
For four years, she’d been coming to the Winter Garden and opening herself to these little miracles. As the sapling grew, the place had become more and more like the chapel garden in Coraine or the shrine in the Celestium: a place of unexplained ‘magic’. She knew the right name from a long-ago conversation with Ostevan, but whether she called it pandaemancy or dwyma was irrelevant; the power was a heresy. She could be burned for using it.
It frightened her – the Church would not lightly declare a power heretical – and she worried about what dabbling in it was doing to her soul, but she couldn’t leave it alone. Her gnosis had never come – Setallius and Domara said that could happen, that sometimes a mage-born child simply failed to gain the power that was their birthright – but it scared her to be helpless, so she’d begun to explore this other thing.
In the early days of the gnosis, according to the histories, pandaemancers had been ‘a threat to all good men’, but Saint Eloy had persuaded most to renounce their powers. The rest were given ‘the judgement of Kore’ – she’d seen a woodcut print of a women burning at the stake, the flames filled with diabolos from Hel. The depiction of her agony looked horribly realistic.
I’m not like her, she told herself fearfully. Corineus is my Saviour and Kore my Lord.
But she could do . . . this . . . now. She asked Aradea for light, and the water droplets in her hand glowed. She asked for cold, and the droplets, still glowing, froze. She cast the little diamonds of light back into the pool and watched them melt away, sensing Aradea watching through the eyes of the owls in the oaks above and the eel in the corner of the pool. Heresy or not, she felt safe here, and nowhere else.
Thank you, Father Kore, for creating such a place for me – and for the warning. She tried to recall which ladies favoured red this season. Just the thought of Ril with someone else made her stomach churn with jealousy, and anger at Domara’s restrictions. She wanted Ril to be here, now – to prove he still loved her, on her body. It wasn’t a frequent desire for her; the past few years had been an inner battle between her wish to please her husband – and her very real love of him and attraction to him – and the strictures she’d grown up with. The Book of Kore taught that pleasure was transitory, and obsession with the transitory imperilled the immortal soul. Marriage was for conception, the perpetuation of the line; the only love that mattered to true believers was the love of Kore. Ril didn’t believe that.
Only Ostevan understood her struggle, and he was much more open-minded and forgiving than other confessors. She smiled, glad to have at least one person who understood her inner heart. And that reminded her that it must be time for her morning Unburdening. Smiling, she wandered back through the garden with her head full of earthly daydreams.
*
You cannot perceive all that I am, for I am a legion embodied in one man.
The words from the Book of Kore were meant to express the feeling of power of a true believer when unifying himself with the will of his Creator, Kore. But to Ostevan, they’d come to mean completely the opposite.
I have ten thousand eyes: the eyes of Abraxas.
He felt the daemon avidly peering through his eyes as he slipped into the queen’s suite, greeting that naïve cowpat Geni with a smooth smile that made the maid’s heart palpably pound. Ugly lump. He sent an impulse into the girl’s brain, that she should be elsewhere, and glided into the queen’s boudoir.
The bed was still unmade and he sniffed it, letting the fading aroma of Lyra’s body tease his suppressed lusts. He collected hairs from her sheets, long strands from her scalp and shorter curling ones from her nethers, and swallowed them, then he licked the rim of her cup, tasting her dried spittle, imprinting her unique taste and feel in his memories, so that he could more precisely target her soul when the time came.
Then he joined Basia de Sirou on the balcony overlooking the Lyra’s private garden. The Queen’s Guardian was sitting on a stone seat, wincing in discomfort: she had unstrapped her artifice-legs and was massaging the stumps through her leggings. She sensed his presence and looked up, her narrow face going red. ‘Ring before you enter, Comfateri,’ she snapped, tugging at the harness until the stumps and artificial knee-joints were aligned. She tightened them and stood. ‘What do you want?’
She’d be dead by now if I were an assassin. Which I will be one day. ‘It’s time for the Queen’s Unburdening,’ he reminded her. ‘Why don’t you go and relieve your bladder,’ he added, his voice so bland only a master could have detected the indiscernible gnostic impulse implanted in the words. It was far beyond Basia de Sirou to resist; she rose obediently and teetered away.
He smiled, then peered down into the Winter Garden. The queen spent a lot of time down there, hidden from sight. Only with a personal invitation could anyone else enter, and despite the closeness he’d forged with her these past months, he’d not been invited – but no one had, he’d come to realise. This was her sanctuary, where she went to escape other people.
I must investigate, he told himself. What’s so fascinating in there?
Abraxas was curious and unusually cautious, as if the daemon sensed something here that threatened it. Intriguing. Then another presence joined him in silent aetheric communion and he greeted the Puppeteer, Ervyn Naxius.
The Master inclined his masked face.
Naxius gave him an approving glance.
Ostevan bowed and Naxius started to withdraw from the link, then paused.
Ostevan indicated the garden below.
Naxius replied.
Naxius’ mask twisted into a thoughtful expression.
With a swirl in the aether, the Master was gone.
His final words echoed in Ostevan’s head. He looked about him: Geni and Basia were still absent, befuddled by his mental manipulations, and it was time for the queen’s morning Unburdening: a perfect excuse to unlatch the gate and descend the spiral stairs into her Winter Garden. He banished Abraxas’ presence to a low murmur at the back of his mind and extended his gnostic awareness, probing ahead as he stepped onto the green grass. Something stirred, a shadow at the edge of his perceptions, an echo just outside hearing. Wind rustled the leaves, here, where the air was sheltered from the outside breezes. The birds fell silent, but he could feel them watching him.
The sense of another power was elusive: unprovable – but it wouldn’t leave him.
Then the queen stepped through the rose bushes, only a dozen feet ahead, wearing just a loose white nightgown stained by grass and dirt and unbuttoned below her creamy cleavage. Her fully erect nipples were barely covered, her hair was dishevelled and she looked flushed and dreamy. He stifled a growl in his throat as his member stiffened.
They stared at each other, her eyes going wide in panic – and, for the briefest instant, desire; he was utterly sure of it. Then he remembered himself and spun, exclaiming apologies and keeping his back turned as she threw on the dressing gown she carried under one arm.
‘Ostevan, what are you doing here?’ she demanded, her voice throaty and alarmed.
‘I came for our Unburdening session and found your rooms empty,’ he lied. ‘I was concerned . . . I’m sorry if I’ve done wrong?’
She looked at him with big eyes, breathing hard. Despite the Master’s admonishments about waiting still ringing in his ears, the desire to hurl her onto her back and possess her – as she so clearly wants – was almost irresistible. But his discipline held. ‘Milady, I’ll leave you at once.’
‘No, wait,’ she said. ‘Just let me . . . prepare. We’ll talk in the parlour.’
She’s got no more defences than a child. I’m sure she doesn’t have the gnosis at all . . .
In theory, that lack rendered her defenceless, but Naxius was right: she was the most scrutinised woman in Yuros. She must remain inviolate, lest Setallius or someone of his ilk perceive the threat. The Corani spymaster might be ageing, but he wasn’t blind. She couldn’t be touched . . . not yet. But that time would come.
So they returned to her parlour and he waited, as Lyra, Basia and Geni fussed over clothing her properly. The murmur of their voices through the door was followed by splashing water in a bowl and a quick-fire discussion about clothing and hair. When Lyra finally emerged, there was a hastiness to her appearance, a few loose tresses and an absence of powders and paints. To him that only added to her natural, unspoiled beauty.
When the time comes, I’m going to rukk her until she’s a husk, he promised himself. Abraxas growled, a soul-shuddering sound that trembled through him. But Ostevan rose, bowed, and began the sacred blessings. She confessed to sins of impatience and short dealings with her attendants. He didn’t press her deeply, skirting her obvious loneliness, which allayed her discomfort entirely, so that afterwards, she shyly bade him stay and take tea.
‘I’m so sorry about earlier,’ she babbled, ‘I love to walk in the Winter Garden and I lost track of time.’ She blushed again. ‘I’m usually better dressed.’
‘You gave body to the beauty of nature, my Queen,’ he said with just enough lightness to ensure she wouldn’t perceive him forward. ‘A sylph of Lantris, come to life.’
She liked that, as he knew she would. ‘I’m nothing special,’ she insisted. ‘There are many lovelier than I.’ Then she asked, ‘What do you know of the Winter Tree, Ostevan?’
Ahh . . . ‘When Saint Eloy made the cave at the heart of the Celestium his home, the tree came to exhibit unusual traits, blooming in winter, withering in summer. And the sap turns to amber unusually swiftly. It’s said that holding a piece of amber from the Winter Tree eases the coming of death. There is a small order of mage-healers, monks called the Eloysians, dedicated to travelling from village to village to bring succour to the dying, especially those in great pain. No one survives their ministry, as they call only upon those dying who have no chance of surviving.’
‘What an awful thing.’
‘Aye. What healer loses all their patients? And the amber does nothing the gnosis could not – but of course assisted suicide is a sin, while touching a sacred piece of amber is not. It fulfils a need in society, perhaps.’ He met her eyes. ‘There are hidden powers in this world, my Queen. The gnosis does not explain all.’
Her curiosity about the matter was changing his mind; maybe she had gained some kind of link to the dwyma. Is our little Queen Lyra a heretic? And Naxius wants her enslaved . . . What he knew of it suggested that an enslaved mind would be unable to reach the dwyma. So Naxius wants her neutralised: is dwyma the one thing our Master fears? Intriguing. Maybe this is the weapon I can use against that old snake, if worst comes to worst . . .
With that thought in mind, he turned the conversation back to her, seeking ways to increase her emotional dependence on him. ‘My dear Queen, I have to ask,’ he said, ‘confinement can place strains on a marriage, for both husband and wife. How are you both bearing up?’
She dropped her eyes to her lap. ‘It’s hard. Why must we be kept so apart?’
‘To protect the unborn: you know this. And you see Lord Ril every day – you don’t lack his company—’
‘Yes, but . . .’ She wrung her hands unhappily. ‘Some days we don’t even talk.’
‘That’s not ide
al,’ Ostevan said cautiously. ‘Communication is vital, Milady. And laughter. “Laughter is the heart of love”, as the Book of Kore says.’
She looked up, eyes wide. ‘You do understand – I knew you would. No one else sees it.’
Her dream life is unravelling . . . perfect. ‘You fear he’s bored?’ Ostevan asked, in a ‘you-can-tell-me-anything’ voice, and when she nodded, asked, ‘And yourself?’
Tears started in her eyes. ‘I feel like I’m under siege. If this pregnancy goes wrong, I’ll lose him, and he’s the only one who makes me feel safe. I couldn’t have endured these past four years without him!’
‘Endured’, he sneered inwardly. Given every privilege and power, and you act as if you were made to swallow poison. I sacrificed everything for you, and you cannot even appreciate it! Outwardly though, he was all calm and sympathy. ‘Do you still love him?’
‘I do!’ she insisted, bunching her fists in her lap. ‘I still do!’
‘Still’. Methinks you protest too much, dear Lyra.
‘But sometimes he wants more than I have,’ she blurted, then flinched, pleading with her eyes that he understand. ‘I don’t know how to be everything he needs.’
Oh, this is better than I could have hoped, he mused, while giving her the sympathy she craved. ‘A married couple are not always matched in all matters,’ he told her. ‘You blame yourself, but perhaps he’s also not meeting your needs?’
Her eyes went round and she tried and failed to speak. That thought planted, he went on, ‘I’m sure his heart remains true. These days, he’s nothing like he used to be.’
There, Lyra . . . muse on what Ril used to be.
He left her trembling with fear for her marriage yet grateful for his comfort. She surrounded herself with much older men – surrogate fathers? – but spoke of intimate matters only to him, as confessor, and that was ideal. ‘Until next time,’ he said, kissing her hands and thinking how easy – and intoxicating – getting inside her defences would be when the time came.
