Ombria In Shadow

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Mag had come to explore the palace, to find its disused passageways, its hiding places, the secrets known to harried servants and mice that everyone else had forgotten. She wanted to know the palace as she knew the streets of Ombria. She wanted to be able to disappear into it, to disguise herself so well that she might appear, to the most acute eye, of no more interest than a noon shadow or a fire iron.

  She wanted to spy on Domina Pearl.

  What she told herself was that she needed to know more about Ducon Greve, so that if Faey was requested to become his undoing, Mag would know if she should bother meddling to protect him. The bits and pieces of plotting she had heard in the King of Flounders and under the old pier made meddling seem moot: the conspirators had made it quite clear that a dead Kyel would be far more convenient to Ducon. Mag had never seen the child, but she had an idea that killing the rightful heir of Ombria and usurping his crown might be the last nail hammered into the coffin of the city’s fading hope. She did not want to help Faey kill, if it came to that; neither did she want Ombria to die. On the other hand of this many-handed dilemma, if a crown were at stake, Ducon might actually be inspired to find a way to stop Domina Pearl. In that case, Mag should find a way to help him before Faey killed him.

  So she told herself. But while Ducon Greve was her excuse, Domina Pearl was her quarry, and she moved as if every subsequent step might bring her under the Black Pearl’s eye.

  Did the she-spider sleep? Mag wondered. Or was she too old to need to dream? Who would likely be awake? Guards, bootblacks, pages, perhaps some in the kitchens preparing for tomorrow’s coronation feast. Perhaps others decorating a ballroom, though Mag doubted that anyone would feel like dancing at the Black Pearl’s ascent to power.

  Her taper was burning low. She slipped out of the carriage and went to find the bottles: the great racks and casks of wine that a prince might demand with his dinner, causing the household to find the quickest way down to them.

  She found the wine cellar, and the nearest stairs. She went up, listening at every step. At the top of the narrow stairs, she heard voices. She blew out her taper, then leaped adroitly into the corner behind the door as it swung suddenly open. It swung back, revealing a round woman in black, weighted and clinking with dozens of keys swinging on ribbons at her side. She muttered to herself as she descended into her small pool of light. Mag followed the door as it fanned on its hinges, and found herself among long racks of sweetmeats and confections so beautifully crafted they might have been worn as easily as eaten. A small boy lying beside the glowing coals in the vast hearth looked at her, yawned, and closed his eyes again.

  She found another door, interrupted a man in black, surrounded by hanging cheeses and haunches of meat, polishing his eyepiece.

  He put it on, but she gave him no chance to see her. When he came out a moment later to look for her, she was under a table, the last place he would expect to find her. He disappeared back into the pantry. She tried another door.

  The kitchen, like the cellar, was a warren of rooms, but she found her way beyond it finally into a vast room where more yawning servants were laying cloths as broad as sails onto tables. She kept to the shadows, moving quickly and purposefully to the opposite door. They only glanced her way as the door closed behind her. The palace, it seemed, was as restless as the streets at night, and possibly as hazardous. The armed guards she found standing on both sides of the hall beyond the door looked, with their blank, cold, mindless eyes, as if they did not recognize her as human. She felt their eyes on her back all the way down the endless hall. The Black Pearl’s many eyes, she realized suddenly, and disappeared down a narrow marble stairway to get away from them.

  At the bottom of the stairs, she saw a man appear out of a wall.

  She flattened herself against the stairwell, became a shadow clinging to the flickering web of shadows just beyond the spray of tapers in their sconces around the corner. He did not notice her peering eyes behind the flames. He glanced swiftly up and down the hallway. The doors and walls were of polished oak, plainly adorned; the sconces, few and far between, were equally simple. Servants’ quarters, perhaps, quiet and sparsely lit, a safe place, Mag thought curiously, to emerge from a wall in the middle of the night. But for what?

  Burglary or an assignation suggested themselves promptly. The man was dressed in black like everyone else that day; nothing immediately indicated his place along the social strata. He carried some papers in one hand, which seemed inappropriate for a lover or a thief. The one on top, covered in a chaos of thick black lines, looked like a child’s drawing. In the other hand he carried a candle, which he raised to his lips to extinguish. Mag saw his face then, suddenly and dramatically, glowing with light, young despite his white hair. The flame in his pale eyes and the planes of shadow shifted across his face as the candle moved, giving him a masked, enigmatic look. He blew out the flame. As he put the candle back in the empty sconce from which, she noted, he might have taken it, she saw his face through a different shadow: her black veil. She had watched him in the King of Flounders, and he had watched her, his questing charcoal trying to search out her face beneath the mourning veil.

  Ducon Greve.

  She followed him at a distance down the dim lower corridors, which remained silent and unguarded. Beside a great marble urn placed in the narrow hall for no apparent reason except that no one wanted it anywhere else, he vanished again. She saw the small door open in the wall on the other side of the urn, but she couldn’t tell how it opened. It had closed by the time she reached it. Nothing she did to the urn had any effect on the door. She heard a murmuring within the wall, and put her ear against it. Somewhere within the secret walls a woman laughed lightly. Mag’s mouth crooked. He might be there until dawn.

  She retraced her steps to the marble stairway and spent some time trying to turn sconces, pry open grooved slats of oak, and feel, along the center molding on the wall, the lines where that door cut through it. She was so occupied that she did not notice the man at the top of the stairs until he spoke.

  “You, down there. Come with me.”

  She froze for a breath. Then she forced herself to move, bob her body into some kind of stiff curtsey before she was able to see past the sudden flare of fear behind her eyes. But it was not one of Domina Pearl’s guards challenging her. It was a plump, hastily dressed man with a black bag in one hand and a small, laden tray in the other. As she stared at him, he motioned impatiently with the tray. Something sloshed out of a glass and he cursed.

  “Come and carry this for me.”

  She nodded wordlessly and went up to take the tray.

  She followed him into the upper halls, which were heavily guarded and well lit. The walls and ceilings turned into subtle, ornate sculptures of whipped cream and meringue, white birds flying overhead, white roses opening as they passed. The heavy double doors grew gardens on them also, in dark, glossy wood. Sobbing, rhythmic and hopeless, came from behind one door: a high-pitched child’s voice. The man with the bag stopped in front of it and knocked. It opened abruptly to a scene of domestic chaos: two servants trying gently to remove the satin sheets from an enormous bed upon which a small boy, his nightshirt soiled with what looked like supper, wept inconsolably. The servant who opened the door, holding a clean nightshirt, looked harried.

  So did Domina Pearl, whose brow had cracked like fine porcelain beneath its glaze. She said to the physician, while she tried to coax the prince off the sheets, “He had a nightmare about his father. I think he is fretting about the ceremony tomorrow.”

  “This will make him sleep,” the physician answered. He gestured to Mag, who was frozen again on the threshold. “Come, girl, gather your wits.”

  She did, as she trailed after the servant with the nightshirt. The physician and the Black Pearl bent over Kyel. The sheets, freed finally, floated gracefully down into a heap in a corner. Kyel took a sip from the glass and promptly spat it out. The physician put the glass back onto the tray, which the servant car
rying the clean nightshirt discovered in her other hand.

  Kyel demanded shrilly of Domina Pearl, “Where is Ducon? What did you do to him? Did you send him away like you sent Jacinth and Lydea?”

  “Find him!” the Black Pearl snapped at the servants. “Leave those. Go and search for Ducon Greve.”

  “Let me try something else,” the physician said worriedly, opening his bag. “You, girl! Move the prince into the next room. Where is the girl? Did she—Ah, well.” He gathered the noisily weeping child up and headed into the adjoining chamber. “Mind like an empty casket,” Mag, shrouded in stained satin, heard him mutter.

  The Black Pearl answered acidly, “Let us hope there is something more in yours.”

  The prince did not quiet, and Mag, blind and motionless beneath the sheets, did not dare move until Ducon Greve finally entered. She wondered how the servants had managed to get his attention. Guards followed him in, apparently; she heard Domina Pearl order them,

  “Two guards watching the prince at this door, and two outside in the hall. Leave the doors open at all times. Stay with him, my lord Ducon, until morning.”

  He murmured something; the young prince was finally quiet. Mag held her breath and listened. But even with her acute ears, which noticed a crumb of dirt dislodged from the streets when she prowled below, she did not hear the sound of the Black Pearl’s steps when she left.

  The servants came for the laundry at dawn. The sheets, which had crept inch by inch under the bed when the rooms had finally darkened, emerged in the arms of a rather oddly-dressed servant, who might have borrowed her grandmother’s uniform and most certainly never combed her hair. But no one spoke, for the prince still slept and the handsome bastard, dressed and sleepless, cast them a glance out of his silvery eyes to quiet them. The sheets followed the servants out and vanished for days, until someone found them in a kitchen cupboard stuffed into a silver soup tureen.

  EIGHT

  Masquerade

  The coronation ceremony, though mercifully brief by ordinary standards of time in Ombria, seemed endless to Ducon Greve. In view of the young prince’s age and bereavement, Camas Erl had cut short much ritual fanfare, including the traditional parade of the newly crowned ruler through his city. Given the cynical and desperate mood of the city, Ducon thought it a prudent decision. As he stood in the great hall watching the nobles file slowly toward Kyel to put their trust in him and pledge their fidelity, he heard the words, repeated again and again, tossed like false coin into the shadow cast by the Black Pearl. No one trusted in anything but a savage and uncertain future, and the only fidelity pledged with any degree of truth sprang out of terror. The numb, weary expression on the child’s face changed only once, when Ducon knelt before him. Then, a spark of recognition, hope, had struggled into Kyel’s eyes. He seemed to listen carefully to Ducon’s pledge, as if he believed the promise within the ritual words, and would hold Ducon to it. The spider binding Kyel carefully day by day into her threads stood beside the throne, paying no attention to words, Ducon guessed, but to every expression and intonation behind them, and putting to memory every face that pledged her anything but fear.

  The tense coronation was followed by a feast and a truly lugubrious ball. Everyone ate and danced dutifully to uphold the illusion of continuity and hope; no one, however inclined, flung a plate of pastries on the floor and demanded to know what, exactly, they were celebrating. Ducon hovered where Kyel could see him, at a table near the throne. Camas Erl, his long chestnut hair rumpled as though he had tried to pull it out of its tie while he pared the ceremony down to its core, drifted up to him.

  “It was still too long,” Camas murmured flatly, an eye on his new pupil. Kyel sat on a throne covered with flowers and cloth-of-gold, his feet dangling, a makeshift crown hastily sized to fit sitting precariously on his head, his eyes still swollen from the previous night’s tempest. The Black Pearl kept her place beside him. There was a bright, ominous glitter in the child’s eyes. “I amputated speeches by ministers and city officials; I threw out the entire ritual surrounding the regent’s coronation. Except that one sentence. I looked as far back as I could go into Ombria’s history; this was about as barbaric as anything early rulers sat through. And look at him. You can almost smell the lightning.”

  Ducon took a sip of-wine. “It was an impossible task,” he said softly, “given the circumstances. He is simply inconsolable.”

  “Go to him.”

  He shrugged slightly. “She won’t be pleased.”

  The tutor turned a fretful eye at him. “Would you rather see him in hysterics?”

  “Maybe,” Ducon said recklessly. “No one else here can afford to be honest.”

  But he set his cup down and went to Kyel’s side. He sensed the Black Pearl bristle at his company, her hair and back growing stiffer, even her shadow elongating. He bent, his hand on Kyel’s shoulder, his face close to the boy’s. “Be patient. It will be over very soon.”

  Neither Domina nor the prince spoke. The Black Pearl, her face arranging itself in what she thought was a smile, warned with her eyes: He is mine now, in this public place. He must look to me. Kyel’s eyes warned him of what no one else dared: an incipient, passionate attack of truth, impelled by too much loss, too much change, and accompanied by a battery of furious tears.

  Ducon’s hand tightened on Kyel’s shoulder; he breathed quickly, “Draw it for me. You promised.”

  Kyel swallowed, his face rigid as he stared at the listless dancers. Domina Pearl gestured imprudently at a passing tray of sweetmeats. The prince, presented with them, gave her an astonished, contemptuous glance but refrained from kicking them all over the floor.

  Ducon rejoined the desultory company. He made polite conversation, danced with a couple of his great-aunts, returned them to his melancholy uncles, and eluded trouble in the form of the young conspirators, who, fierce and anxious, stalked him from group to group but never managed to speak to him alone.

  He had rescued himself for the third time, leaving the conspirators abruptly as a group of young women adroitly plucked them away from one another to dance. Ducon joined what looked like a harmless cluster of aging courtiers, the brilliance of their dress and medals of rank drawing attention, so they must hope, from the expressions in their eyes.

  They were of the oldest and wealthiest of the families connected to the court of Ombria; most had been councillors and ministers of the dead prince. They had reason to be bitter, Ducon knew. Domina Pearl, reducing Kyel to a puppet-prince, would make puppets of them all. But they chatted idly as Ducon joined them of what was farthest from their minds: hunting lodges, favorite dogs, farms their tenants worked in the country around Ombria. A tray of wine and pastries, following Ducon, passed among them.

  One, Greye Kestevan, asked, brushing a speck of cream from his mustache, “Do you still paint, my lord Ducon?”

  “I have little enough to do,” Ducon answered mildly. “It passes the time.”

  “Still haunting taverns and odd corners of Ombria?”

  “Still.”

  The man, his hair as white as Ducon’s around a perfect bald circle, his dark eyes bland within their hooded pouches, glanced at his companions and replaced his empty glass with another. His hand closed lightly above Ducon’s elbow as a young woman with a sweet and determined smile stopped to cajole a dance.

  “No, leave him to us a moment; we’ve scarcely seen him since the—Since. So. My lord Ducon. You must see and hear things in odd corners of Ombria that the rest of us miss.”

  Ducon shrugged; the hand did not loose him. “I wander everywhere. As I said, it—”

  “Passes the time,” another man, Marin Sozon, interrupted genially. He had little enough to be pleasant about. The crazed human face of the manticore rampant across his tunic seemed to display his true feelings. He had been one of the dead prince’s ministers, and occasionally Royce’s sharpest critic. The Black Pearl had already stripped him of all power. Ducon, feeling her eyes on his back, paid caref
ul attention to a quail egg stuffed with roe. “Perhaps now, though,” Sozon continued, “with the prince fatherless, you might spend more time with him?”

  “I spent half the night with him,” Ducon said. “He was having nightmares.”

  “Domina Pearl summoned you?”

  “No. Kyel did. The prince,” he amended, “I should say now.” He gave them a thin smile. “It is still hard to believe that my uncle is dead and my very small cousin rules Ombria.”

  “It is indeed,” a third, Hilil Gamelyn said with a glance over his wine toward the prince on his throne and the regent standing beside him, a ring of gold and onyx and diamonds circling the base of her domed hair. The dome looked higher than ever; Ducon wondered what she was hiding in it. Gamelyn added casually, startling him, “Since it is not true.”

  “No,” Ducon said equably after a moment, aware of the hand still closed above his elbow. “But for the sake of the occasion it is polite to pretend.” He finished his own wine, turned abruptly to leave the glass on a tray, freeing himself. “And safer,” he breathed. For an instant their masks dissolved; he saw the questions, the urgent, dangerous calculations in their eyes as they looked at him. He stepped away; they turned to one another, voices bland again, expressions hidden. But they had given him too much, he understood. They had no idea where his loyalty lay, and if it ended where ambition began.

  He went within the walls the next morning to gather whatever comments on the ceremony Kyel might have left for him behind the mirror. There were several drawings, as confused and poignant as dreams. Ducon did not linger there to study them. He had no idea what the mirror was reflecting at that moment. If it was Domina Pearl’s eyes, turning at a mouse-rustle of paper behind the mirror, she might remember where she had found him the night he had spirited Kyel away. He took a turning in the rambling, secret corridors that brought him to a hidden door behind a fan of giant fern leaves in a small conservatory. The walls there were inlaid with stained glass depicting a graceful bower of ivy and flowing vines blossoming frozen sprays of white and lavender flowers amid perfect clusters of grapes. The conservatory was rarely occupied, though the living plants were scrupulously tended. Ducon crossed a marble floor patterned with more flowers, rolling Kyel’s drawings absently into a scroll, and passed through the open doors into the very company of men whose grasp he had eluded the evening before.