“Are you so blinded by your hatred of Jilseponie?” Kalas asked, leaning forward. “For if Jilseponie is tried and hanged, as she surely must be, then the King will likely deny your precious Aydrian his rights of ascension.”
“So be it, if that is the consequence,” De’Unnero answered without hesitation. “I believe Aydrian prepared to properly lead Honce-the-Bear, but I am far more concerned with the health of the kingdom than with his personal gain. The kingdom will survive this. King Danube will find his strength in Duke Kalas and in the others who have been his supporters since before Jilseponie, since before the demon dactyl and the misery that has festered in the kingdom and in the Abellican Church.”
“And what of Marcalo De’Unnero?”
“I will trust in Duke Kalas to aid my reinstatement in the Church, and the return of the Church to its previous Godly ways,” the former monk answered.
“You believe that the King will involve himself in the affairs of the Church?” Kalas asked skeptically. “Or that I will?”
“He will leave the Bishop in place in Palmaris?” the former monk asked bluntly, and doubtfully; and the question made Duke Kalas sit up a bit straighter in his chair.
De’Unnero knew that he had made his point.
“Press forward the charges, the trial, and the execution,” he said to Kalas. “Rid the world of the scourge that is Jilseponie once and for all time. Young Aydrian will find his way, as will Marcalo De’Unnero, do not doubt, but in the end we—both of us—desire only that which is best for Honce-the-Bear.”
Kalas stared at De’Unnero for a short while, offering no confirmation that he intended to do just that.
But De’Unnero didn’t need any confirmation. He knew that this seed needed no watering. In his heart, he understood that Duke Kalas would do everything in his power to see Queen Jilseponie utterly destroyed.
De’Unnero still wasn’t sure how Aydrian planned to play this out to their ultimate advantage, but he was learning quickly to trust the young warrior.
After all, had Aydrian not just destroyed the woman who had haunted De’Unnero for more than a decade?
And with so little effort.
Jilseponie awakened before dawn and had sat for many hours, again pondering the shocking events, when the door swung open and King Danube and Duke Kalas entered, the Duke striding toward her, as if he meant to throttle her on the spot.
“Murderess!” he said, his tone low and even, though he was surely fighting to control his trembling rage.
“Enough, Duke Kalas,” King Danube said, and he put a hand on Kalas’ shoulder and held him back.
“I did nothing,” Jilseponie remarked.
Kalas growled at her and held up the vial. “Jo’santha root,” he said, “from Behren. A common item in the apothecary of St. Honce, to which you had complete access!”
“I know nothing of it,” the Queen protested, “unless Constance slipped it under my sash when she fell against me.”
Kalas leaped forward and raised his arm as if to strike her, but Danube grabbed him and held him. Jilseponie was up in an instant anyway, ready to dodge, to block, and to counter.
“Why would I kill her?” Jilseponie demanded, finding some strength in the simple logic of that statement.
“Why would you invite her to tea?” Duke Kalas countered. “What might Queen Jilseponie desire from the company of Constance Pemblebury.”
“I accepted her invitation!” Jilseponie protested, but her bluster was lost as she looked at her husband, who winced and looked away, as if he had solid evidence to the contrary.
Jilseponie thought on that for a moment, considered the lady-in-waiting who had brought her the invitation from Constance. “What did she say?” she asked the pair.
No answer.
“I demand to see her,” Jilseponie declared. “The lady-in-waiting—Mame Tonnebruk. Bring her to me and I will pry the truth from her.”
“You will get your chance to answer the charges!” Duke Kalas interrupted. “Out there,” he said, pointing to the window, “on the public gallows that are even now being constructed. Oh, yes, you will answer the charges of murder, and then you will hang by your pretty neck—”
“Enough!” roared Danube, and he shoved Kalas aside, then moved to the bed and took Jilseponie’s hands in his own. He kissed her hands gently, one at a time, then looked up into her blue eyes.
“Forgive me,” he said.
“Forgive?” Jilseponie echoed, her voice barely a whisper, for she could hardly believe what she was hearing. Would Danube allow this?
But when she looked more deeply into her husband’s sad eyes, she understood that he had to allow it, that he could not prevent it.
Jilseponie took a deep, deep breath and closed her eyes.
“You will have your trial,” Duke Kalas said, breaking the silence a moment later. Jilseponie glared at him, recognizing that he simply could not hold back these too sweet words. “At the public gallows, as is decreed by law. You will have your trial, though I see no escape from the obvious.”
“I did nothing,” said Jilseponie.
“You will need more than a heartfelt denial to deter the hangman,” Kalas retorted. Before King Danube could even turn and yell at him, the Duke gave a curt bow and stormed away, slamming the door behind him.
“This is insanity,” King Danube said to his wife when they were alone.
“Constance killed herself,” Jilseponie remarked, and Danube’s eyes widened. “She did this to me, at that cost, with purpose and malice.”
Danube was shaking his head, his face locked in an expression of the purest confusion.
“She gave up,” Jilseponie tried to explain, though in truth, the Queen could hardly fathom the perversion of reality that had led Constance to so brutal and costly an act. “She knew that she would never gain back your favor, and certainly would never gain the throne, and so she did this to destroy me as she destroyed herself.”
King Danube knelt there before her, staring up at her.
Jilseponie almost smiled at the ridiculousness of it all, then lifted her poor, confused husband’s hands to her lips and gently kissed them.
Soon after, Danube stumbled out of the room, his face streaked with tears, his eyes full of rage and confusion.
“She did not do this,” King Danube said to Kalas, the two of them standing outside the castle’s front gates, watching the construction of the high wooden platform and the trapdoor that would spring open to drop a convicted murderess to her death. Though the trial was still days away, many vendors arrived staking their claim to positions from which to sell their wares to the throngs that were expected at the spectacle that would be the trial of Queen Jilseponie.
Danube looked at them with disgust, but said nothing. He knew that the peasants would crowd the area and that most of them would arrive hoping to see a conviction and an execution. For that was their way. It wasn’t even about Jilseponie, though it did a common man’s heart good to see one of high rank fall to the swift hand of justice. It wasn’t about Jilseponie, but was about the show, the spectacle, the execution that would lodge in the memories of all in attendance forever and ever.
“She had no reason.…”
“When Constance left Ursal, it was because your wife, the Queen, banished her,” Duke Kalas replied. “Did you know that?”
Danube’s expression turned curious as he looked at the Duke.
“Jilseponie learned that Constance was secretly feeding her the herbs the courtesans use to prevent pregnancy,” Kalas explained. “Thus, she chased Constance away. And you brought her back. That was more than your wife could tolerate, it would seem.”
He had rattled Danube, to be sure, but while the King swayed, he did not waver in his conviction. “She did not do this,” he said again, more forcefully. “She could not, would not! This is insanity, and I’ll allow no such trial. Stand down the hangman, Duke Kalas!” As he finished, he turned to leave, but Kalas grabbed him hard by the arm and would not let go.
> “You cannot do this,” the Duke said.
“I know my wife to be innocent,” Danube said.
“What you know means nothing against the weight of the law,” Kalas retorted, not backing down an inch from Danube’s icy stare, “the laws of your forefathers that you swore to uphold when you took your coronation oath to the people of Honce-the-Bear.”
“I am the King,” Danube said slowly and deliberately. “I’ll not have this.”
“And what will Danube the King tell the next farmer’s wife who comes to trial protesting her husband’s innocence, claiming that she knows that her husband could not have committed the crime of which he was accused? Will King Danube the Fair similarly stop the trial of the farmer?”
“You should beware your words,” Danube warned.
“And you should beware your kingdom,” said Kalas, still holding his ground. “The Queen is charged—the evidence seems damning. You cannot undo that by decree, not unless you wish to destroy the loyalty of your subjects, not unless you wish to invite open rebellion! And will your wife ever be accepted again, by nobleman or peasant, when it is known that the only thing that kept her neck from the hangman’s noose was her husband’s royal hand?”
“She is my wife, my love,” Danube protested, shaking his head.
“She is the Queen and an accused murderer,” Kalas coldly replied. “She will, she must, stand trial before the crown and castle. That is the law! Defy it at your own peril, my old friend.”
“A threat?”
“An honest warning,” said Kalas. “For if you so decree Jilseponie’s innocence and deny justice the trial it demands, then you do so at the peril of the kingdom itself!”
“And where, should such a rebellion come to pass, will Duke Kalas stand?” Danube asked, his eyes narrowing as he issued the accusatory question.
“On the side of Honce-the-Bear,” the Duke promptly answered.
Danube pulled away and left him.
The hammers sounded in the morning air.
The vendors arranged their goods.
“The King is trapped, and Jilseponie will be tried, and publicly,” De’Unnero announced to Sadye and Aydrian. “Danube has no choice, unless he wishes to throw his entire kingdom into an uproar—and one that neither he nor his doomed wife would likely survive. The nobility wants Jilseponie tried and hanged, and they would lead the cries of outrage to an explosive pitch.”
Sadye’s smile widened, and she sat there, shaking her head in disbelief at the sudden turn of events.
Aydrian, though, seemed perfectly at ease and in control.
“You did this,” De’Unnero said to Aydrian. “You led Constance to Jilseponie and to suicide.”
“You do not believe that the Queen murdered her?” Sadye asked, honestly surprised. “After all the trouble Constance has been giving Jilseponie, it does not seem so implausible.”
“Nor will it seem so to the masses at the trial,” De’Unnero agreed. “But that is the beauty, is it not?” he asked Aydrian with a sly smile.
“Did you do this?” Sadye asked the young warrior. “Did you somehow induce Constance to kill herself so that Jilseponie would be blamed?”
Aydrian sat back and chuckled.
“And do you believe this will be to our benefit?” De’Unnero added. “What gain might we find by discrediting and eliminating the Queen? By destroying your mother, perhaps our only tie to the throne? Believe me when I say that it will do my heart good to see that witch tried and executed, as I know it pleases you to pay her back for abandoning you to those wretched elves. But to what end? Have we lost sight of the goal?”
“I have not, I assure you,” Aydrian replied with confidence. “And, yes, this will work very much to our advantage, when the time comes.”
“You have already figured that out?” Sadye asked.
Again Aydrian merely sat back in his seat and smiled.
Sadye looked to De’Unnero, who was nodding as he stared at Aydrian, his confidence in the young warrior obvious.
“I care little for this mystery,” Sadye said at length. “What is the truth? And what shall we make of it? Out with it, if you know anything at all! Are we not partners? Coconspirators? But what faith might any of us hold if we do not understand the schemes of the others?”
“Whether Constance killed herself, or Jilseponie killed Constance, or even whether or not someone else might have murdered the lady is of no consequence,” Aydrian explained, seeming very much ahead of the situation. “All that matters to us is that the evidence will damn Jilseponie in the eyes of the common people and will reinforce all the animosity most of the nobles have felt toward her from the very beginning. She will be tried and, barring another surprise, she will be found guilty, and she will be hanged. King Danube will not survive the ordeal unscathed, in reputation or in heart.”
“But what does that mean for us?” Sadye pressed. “With Jilseponie gone, our—your—claim to the title diminishes greatly, perhaps completely.”
She started to elaborate, but De’Unnero’s laughter cut her short. She looked at the former monk to see him staring at Aydrian with admiration.
“He said, barring another surprise,” De’Unnero remarked. “Am I wrong in assuming that young Aydrian has another surprise in store for us?”
Aydrian didn’t blink, didn’t smile. “Nothing that has happened did so without forethought and in pursuit of our goal,” was all the answer he would give.
The three conspirators were in the crowd that morning of Jilseponie’s trial. Abbot Olin was there as well, along with many mercenaries, disguised as peasants—which, in fact, was what most of them were. They had no idea of how this might play out, but De’Unnero and Olin wanted to be prepared for anything.
The trial itself proceeded at a brisk pace, with Duke Kalas doing the honors as prosecutor, a role he obviously enjoyed. He stood up on the platform beside the Queen, who was also standing, her hands bound behind her back. While Kalas was outfitted in his regal Allheart dress, complete with the more showy pieces of his armor and his great plumed helmet, Jilseponie wore a simple brown tunic and breeches. That had been her choice, so she had come out here in the clothes in which she was most comfortable, the ones that best reflected who she truly was and had always been: a young peasant girl who grew up on the borderlands of the civilized kingdom.
How ironic it seemed to her that such a simple truth of her identity could have so brought about her fall from what was nearly the very highest station in the world.
She watched the proceedings with a strange, almost amused, detachment. Here they were, deciding upon her very life. Yet to Jilseponie, it seemed a ridiculous show, unworthy of her interest. She knew the truth and suspected that many of her accusers knew it as well. But did that matter?
Kalas paraded all the expected witnesses up on the high stage, beginning with the lady-in-waiting who had first arranged the meeting between Jilseponie and Constance.
“Queen Jilseponie insisted upon it, my lord,” the trembling woman answered to Kalas’ questions concerning the tea. “I went to Lady Pemblebury, and she agreed, though she was holding her reservations, to be sure.”
Jilseponie dropped her head, so that the closest onlookers wouldn’t see, and misinterpret, her smile at the obvious, blatant lie. So Constance had enlisted this woman beforehand, obviously, and the woman really had little to do now but continue to lie.
How she wanted to fight back at that moment! To stand tall before the lady-in-waiting and question her, to wind her in circles until she inevitably contradicted herself. And then—oh, the pleasure Jilseponie might take in destroying the story altogether, in forcing an admission that Constance, not Jilseponie, had arranged for the tea and that Constance, and not Jilseponie, had used the poison.
But she could not. The law did not allow her to speak to witnesses. Only the nobility, any of them save her husband, who sat to the side as presiding magistrate, could do that. And none of them would, she knew. None of the courtiers would de
sire to find the truth—not if that truth exonerated Jilseponie and damned Constance Pemblebury.
Kalas next paraded the woman who had found the open poison vial in Jilseponie’s sash, and then brought forth all those in attendance who had heard Constance’s cries that the Queen had poisoned her. He ended with his own recounting of Constance’s last moments, with his own testimony that the dying woman had damned Jilseponie.
Through it all, Jilseponie kept looking down or over at her husband. Danube sat on his throne at the side of the stage, flanked by stoic and disciplined Allheart knights, who seemed more like statues than living men. She could see the pain on his face, could recognize his wince with every damning word.
This was destroying him, perhaps more fully than it could ever destroy her, even if they hanged her that very morning.
When he finished his speech, Duke Kalas turned back and looked at Jilseponie and shook his head, his expression one of disgust.
He swung back and bowed to the crowd, then, as protocol demanded, his duty here finished, he started from the stage but took a route that would bring him right past the prisoner.
“I have never liked you, I admit,” he whispered to her, “but never did I imagine that you could do this to Constance. Was not destroying her hopes and dreams enough for you?”
“I did nothing,” Jilseponie answered. “And you know the truth of it.”
Kalas snorted at her, then walked off the stage and joined the ranks of nobles in the front rows of witnesses.
The cries began soon after, screams echoing throughout the crowd for the death of the Queen. It had all been so one-sided, presented by people who had no interest in even hinting that there might be another truth to this sordid tale, that Jilseponie could not rightly blame the people now calling for her death. Those cries built in magnitude and insistence as King Danube rose from his seat and moved front and center. When he got there, he held up his hands, motioning for silence, and so the cries gradually, only gradually, died away.
Danube turned and motioned for Jilseponie to join him, then motioned for the guards behind her, who began to approach her, to back off.
DemonWars Saga Volume 2: Mortalis - Ascendance - Transcendence - Immortalis (The DemonWars Saga) Page 114
