by Carol Berg
Dante stepped forward, formidable in his shrouded mystery. He extended his hand—his healthy left—palm up, asking for a trust bond, an obsolete custom foreswearing use of magical coercion. “I swear to truth, lady. Will you?”
She did not quail at his forbidding appearance or at the unusual request, delivered as it was without shred of warmth or emotion, but readily laid her slender hand atop his wide, rough one. “That you would ask tells me that lies fester in your heart,” she said. “No finding of yours will alter my beliefs.”
Startled at Dante’s gesture, it took me a moment to register the surge of enchantment at the moment of their touch. By their very nature, trust bonds rarely involved magic, and never of a quality that left an observer’s fingers tingling. Yet I had felt this before, whenever Dante took the measure of something new—be it human, stone, or magical spyglass.
The contessa did not seem to notice. Her expression was all contempt as Dante departed the terrace in a swirl of robes, Jacard trailing behind. The lady’s fearless candor gave me heart in a way. I felt no need to soften what I’d come to say. She needed to comprehend the danger she faced.
“Madame, please believe that concern for the safety of one of your own children has brought me here. Your daughter Lianelle lives in mortal danger.”
“Lianelle? At school? What danger?” Her guards fell away instantly, to reveal a mother’s dismay.
“Reliable evidence has convinced me that the Conte Ruggiere has allied himself with a conspiracy of sorcerers who threaten to renew the Blood Wars. However impossible this alliance seems, you have already witnessed a measure of its gravity. Its merest suggestion has persuaded King Philippe, who staunchly refuses to believe his friend a betrayer, to send these soldiers to detain and question him. I believe your husband delved into this conspiracy in pursuit of knowledge and became enamored of immense and unholy magic.”
I ordered my phrases particularly, and observed her expression as I spoke. Curiously, it was not the mention of conspiracy, war, danger, betrayal, or even the king that transformed her yet again. It was instead the words unholy magic that caused her eyes to darken and her lips to compress hard enough to stifle an oath.
I held that recognition close, to use when the time seemed right. “Your dilemma, lady, is as difficult as the king’s.”
“What dilemma? What choice am I given?” Her zahkri could be no better honed than her scorn.
“Last year, near the time of the assassination attempt on the king, your younger daughter learned a terrible secret. These conspirators, who have left a trail of torture and murder across this kingdom, have every cause to silence her. One student from Seravain already lies dead, as does her family. If Michel de Vernase is innocent, then your daughter lives only at a villain’s whim. In order to protect her, we must discover what your husband learned of this plot before he vanished. On the other hand, if the conte works in concert with these people, then only his care for Lianelle keeps her safe—and you, of all people, must judge if that is enough. I have not come here seeking confirmation of your husband’s guilt, but evidence that can lead us to the truth. I ask you, in all sincerity, to assist me.”
Her lips parted, but, for a moment, no sound emerged.
I gestured to a wrought-iron bench. “Shall we sit?”
She shook her head. “We walk. I cannot take tea and chat about high treason and my child’s danger as if they were Pollamai’s new musicale. Explain to me what sorcerer could have lured my husband, who has deemed every collared mage either fool or fraud, to endanger his child and conspire against a friend he pledged to die for.” She struck out across the terrace, and I hurried after. Only when we left the paving for a well-worn footpath did I notice she wore no shoes.
The contessa’s every word rang like steel on bronze. Where was the weakness, the bruise I could pressure to break through her armor, the keystone to remove that the structure of her belief would fall open to me? Families were not impregnable fortresses, but human constructs riddled with grievance and secrets. Perhaps I’d caught a hint of one already—sorcery.
“I have no idea who did the luring,” I said. “Perhaps this unholy alliance grew out of some advance on the conte’s own part. Best we—”
“You think Michel approached a sorcerer to do what . . . work a spell to give him more than this?” She waved at the glorious prospect. “To give him fairer, cleverer children than these he dotes on, or a younger wife to dance with? Or do you suppose it was the hunger for greatness, the driver of all men, that urged him to make his life forfeit and his family outcast?”
This last sounded like old argument, not prompted by my presence. Perhaps Michel’s ambition was the bruise on this family’s body.
The path descended into a red-painted pergola, twined with blooming roses. “I would rather learn than speculate, Contessa, and I needs must learn one step at a time. Let me begin simply. When was the last time you saw your husband?”
She strolled a few steps, riffling the last year’s leaves with her toes, her arms folded tightly. “On the thirty-second day of Siece last, Michel received a letter from Lianelle, a letter he claimed private, though what business could be so private a child’s mother could not see? Within the hour he rode out without naming his destination or estimating his return. I’ve not seen him since.”
A bitter, angry parting, I judged, leaving resentments so deep that faith, fear, and anguish had not vanquished them after almost a year. The letter would have been Lianelle’s report that Ophelie had obtained the name Michel sought—the place where it all began. Eltevire.
“What does your daughter say of this letter and the circumstances that led to it?”
“She’s told me nothing, sonjeur. She does not write. She refuses to come home, as she knows I would not permit her to go back to that place. My daughter is . . . uncompromising.” The contessa’s odd display of conjoined exasperation and pride struck me as a marvel. My own parents had reacted quite differently to bald defiance.
“So, tell me your theory, lady. Surely in all these months you have put together some chain of events to explain your husband’s disappearance.”
She peered at me through leafy shadows, curious, as if of all questions in the world, she had not expected that one. “I’ve given it thought,” she said. “But I’ve no supporting evidence a royal investigator would approve.”
“My mind is ever open to change.”
She dipped her head. “I know Michel was investigating the attempt on Philippe’s life. I saw little of him in those two months. That was nothing extraordinary. We chose to raise our children in the countryside rather than in Merona. Thus his duties often kept him away. But for all these years, he has written faithfully—to me and to one of the children in turn almost every day. Rarely did he write of business. He was a diplomat, negotiating border agreements, modifications to treaties, property encroachments, agreements on trade, ports, and marriages, all manner of things, much of it private. This case was no different. But the world is filled with interesting topics, especially for a mind like his.” And hers, I thought, and those of three talented children.
We emerged from the pergola into a grassy bowl dotted with willows. Old stone walls followed the contours of the hillside, harboring rock roses, yellow flax, and stonecrop. A small lake, afloat with ducks and swans, graced the heart of the meadow. Lady Madeleine paused and inhaled deeply, like a prisoner newly released, then continued on the path of brown earth and wood chips that wound down to the lake. I followed. Silent. Listening.
“From the day he took on this task for Philippe, Michel’s letters changed in character,” said the lady after we’d hiked twenty or thirty metres. “You would say he became secretive. I would say he was consumed, preoccupied. His mind had engaged with something extraordinary—something that intrigued as well as absorbed. My husband does nothing by halves. Since the evening he rode out—”
“Mama! Don’t speak to him!” A young man burst from the end of the pergola and cut st
raight down the hillside, a blur of gangling limbs, red-brown hair, and a voice not yet certain of its timbre. He slid to a breathless halt three metres from us, rapier in one hand, poniard in the other. “Greville de Grouenn says he’s but a sniveling poor relation of the king who spreads lies about Papa to gain royal favor. He’s brought a mage to spy on us.”
The youth, a reflection of his mother’s beauty on a frame that promised a warrior’s stature, quivered in all the righteous fury of fifteen summers.
“Put away your weapons, Ambrose, and behave as a civilized man. Sonjeur de Duplais is here at your goodfather’s behest, inquiring into your father’s fate. We shall judge his motives for ourselves, not heed soldiers’ gossip.” The lady glanced back to me, her brows raised, and the sunlight probing her eyes to reveal a hint of lavender in their depths. “Are you indeed Philippe’s kinsman? You don’t resemble him.”
“Fifteenth cousin. Scrawny, yes, and poor, as librarians are wont to be, but I snivel only rarely. My beliefs have granted me no favor with my liege.” I swiveled crisply and bowed to the flustered youth as his rapier wavered between sheath and ready. “Divine grace, young sir.”
“You’re the librarian from Seravain,” said the lady, some understanding awaked in her mind. Perhaps I’d been correct in my guess that her husband had acted as Philippe’s eyes on me these several years. “So you do know Lianelle.”
“Indeed, my lady. Three years I lived subject to your daughter’s intellectual whims and frank assessments.”
Amusement glanced across the contessa’s sorrows like a beam of sunlight on storm water.
Young Ambrose scowled, fiercer than ever. “Mama, how can you tolerate him? He’s persuaded the king that Papa’s a traitor. All these months we’ve waited for someone to give a rat’s ear that Papa’s gone missing, and all we’ve got for it is house arrest and this liar, worming scraps from you to twist into a hangman’s noose. He likely wants Montclaire for himself. I’ll see him—”
“Ambrose!” snapped the contessa. “Your insults demean me, not Sonjeur de Duplais. Heed my word: Take yourself away from here. Now!”
The lad glared at his mother in disbelief. But he slammed his weapons into enfolding leather and raced up the path. Only then did I notice a young woman standing at the mouth of the pergola, watching this display. At such a distance I could judge naught but an unremarkable stature and a fairer complexion than the contessa or her son. Yet the rare shade of indigo that colored her skirt hinted she was no servant.
“Though I may reprimand my son, I will not apologize for him,” said Lady Madeleine, following the direction of my gaze. “He but expresses the frustration we’ve felt these months. Ambrose was squired to an honorable knight, but gave up his place to companion Anne and me. Yet every morn I must apply a mighty tether of duty and guilt to prevent his setting out to search for his father on his own. For my elder daughter, the ordeal has perhaps been worse. Waiting is the slimmest of stilettos, Sonjeur de Duplais, tormenting with wounds that cannot be seen, save in the blood that flows after.”
“Indeed so, my lady.” So the watcher at the top of the hill was Damoselle Anne, at seventeen the eldest of Michel de Vernase’s children, a young woman who could argue the movement of the planets with her father in three languages at once, according to the admiring Edmond de Roble. “I am not alone in sympathy for these months you have endured. All the more reason to seek the truth, be it good or ill.”
When young Ambrose passed by her, the girl remonstrated with him. The brother forcefully removed her hand from his back. No family could be so congenial as Edmond and the taverner described.
“You were speaking of the morning the conte left . . .” In search of something extraordinary. Her words had come right off the paper tucked in my shirt: Something extraordinary happened when your servant went searching for your enemies. He found them. And then he discovered things . . . What had Michel discovered about himself, and magic, and the truth of the world? About unholy magic?
The contessa’s vision melted from her children into a deep and somber reach. “I’ve received no letter since that day. Not a word. Not a scrap. I have walked this land, touched its living bones, felt the sunlight that clothes it, listened to the music of wind, star, and beast song. But the universe no longer speaks love’s name to me. I believe Michel found the answer to his great mystery and it killed him.”
She left the path and strode through the mead to the marshy borders of the lake, where her zahkri made short, vicious work of cutting an armful of reeds. As I yet stepped gingerly from one tussock to the next, she was already climbing the terraced slopes again, the muddy hem of her gauze skirts slapping wetly against her bare ankles.
Such certainty. Did it derive from her blood-born magic or from some aspect of her marriage, convincing her of that which caused her mortal grief? I was tempted to believe her. Yet logic and evidence declared Michel de Vernase and the Aspirant to be one and the same. And I did not wish him dead, but rather in my clutches, that I might call him to account for the horrors he had caused.
One thing was clear: Madeleine’s conviction explained both her willingness to entertain my questions and her lack of interest in pursuing Lianelle’s secrets. Her children’s future drove her. Forcing Lianelle to speak would not bring Michel de Vernase back to life, and antagonizing Philippe could make her children’s lives infinitely worse. Should treason be proved, Montclaire would surely be granted elsewhere, as Ambrose had guessed. And Philippe, as king, judge, and goodfather, would determine their very freedom, as well as marriage, occupation, and sustenance. Only Lianelle, if she remained subject to the Camarilla, might retain some choice in her fate, assuming she survived the Aspirant’s plots. This recalled a jarring note in the lady’s explanations.
I scrambled up a rock-walled terrace. “Why would you keep Lianelle from Seravain, lady? She is intelligent and gifted. As the daughter of a blood family, I would expect you to encourage her to develop her talents.”
“After the Blood Wars, my family renounced magic,” she said, snapping off leaves of thyme and rosemary as if they were an enemy’s limbs. “Sorcery and overreaching had driven many of our kinsmen to depravity, and my grandsires and grandmeres declared it would never happen again. They deliberately sapped the power in our blood and vowed our future generations to uphold their binding. Cazars do not train. We do not explore our talents. We do not use spellwork produced by others. Our abilities have dwindled near to extinction—except, as it happens, for Lianelle.”
I blinked in astonishment. “Then how in the name of Heaven did Lianelle end up at a collegia magica? A father who disdains magic. A mother who denies it, and whose family forbids even the use of it.”
She grimaced. “My daughter refuses to be bound by anyone’s vows. And you must understand, my husband did not so much despise the possibilities of magic as its current practice and its importance in a world ‘awakening to its own true nature,’ as he said it. But when Lianelle woke us one morning with light streaming from her fingertips and fifty of Aubine’s most beautiful moths captured in the beams, even Michel could not deny her. Nor could I. Her raw talent surpasses any in my family’s remembrance. Michel encouraged her desire to go to Seravain and explore it. But if your warnings are true, if the least harm comes to my child at that place”—she raised her arms skyward, and the breeze swirled her skirts as if her weakened blood called out with one last gasp—“by the blades of my ancestors, I will call down such a curse on his name that a thousand mil lennia will not see his shade at peace.”
Her cry of anguish echoed from lake and rock and hillside, and she threw down the green mass of herbs that her fist had crushed into a shapeless, scented glob. Clutching her bundle of reeds to her middle, she stormed straight up the hill.
The girl flew down to meet the distraught contessa. “I heard you cry out. What did he say?”
Lady Madeleine, her lips pressed tight, tried to wave off her concern, but the lady’s hand was trembling and her complex
ion flushed.
“Mama, did he hurt you?”
The contessa shook her head.
“At least come inside where it’s cooler.” The young woman’s voice was quiet without being whispery, and her demeanor seemed plain and un-elaborated, much like the rest of her. Her eyes darted only briefly my way, as she took the bundle of reeds under one arm and wrapped the other round her mother’s shaking shoulders. “Come along if you must.”
I almost missed the quiet invitation, and only after a moment did I realize it was addressed to me. “Damoselle,” I said. My quick bow was roundly ignored as the two ascended the path.
Though small and slender, like her mother, Anne de Vernase lacked her mother’s and brother’s earthy beauty, as well as their resonant energies. Curling wisps of straw-colored hair escaped a single tight braid. Pale skin freckled from the sun, eyes too large, and mouth too wide for a narrow face, she appeared unripe for seventeen, like a plum fallen too early from the tree. Walking any street or corridor in Sabria, she would never draw a second glance.
When we reached the terrace, the contessa shook off her daughter’s supportive arm. Anne tossed the reeds onto the bench. Interested in watching as much as hearing, I held back as the two spoke quietly, the girl in an earnest, persuasive posture, yet, in the end, disappointed. The contessa laid her hand on her daughter’s shoulder, then walked into the house.
Anne called to me across the terrace. “Come inside and finish your interrogation, sonjeur. But please, make it brief. My mother is feeling unwell, but refuses to retire until you and your companions have left Montclaire.”
I bowed again and followed her through a breezy arcade into an octagonal entry hall. Pale yellow walls rose three stories from the blue slate floor, framing open arches that led deeper into the expansive house. The curved arms of a great staircase embraced a gilt-edged mirror taller than two men. The mirror splashed color and sunlight on the unlikeliest of art-works below—a brass telescope with a barrel twice the length of my arm, and an exquisite planetary of silver-inlaid brass. In an odd, lively contrast, earthenware pots and copper urns of fresh flowers had been tucked into every nook and corner. Dante and Jacard were nowhere in sight.
