by A. F. Dery
The servant shrieked, trying to pull her foot away as her arms flailed. Margaret pushed herself upright, releasing Nora’s foot just long enough to strike the back of one of her knees with all her strength.
But that strength was still meager and it did not succeed in knocking down the maidservant as Margaret had hoped. She desperately tried to scramble to her feet, but she was just big enough now to be clumsy, and as she pulled desperately on the bench to help her up, it cost her precious seconds as Nora recovered herself. Margaret had only just made it to her feet, albeit winded from the effort, when the maidservant came at her in a rush, the bloodied knife still managing to catch the weak sunlight with a flash. Margaret dropped back to her knees and threw herself as low down as she could, her arms covering the back of her head. Nora tried to stop to accommodate her lady’s change in position, but she had no time in the short space between them and stumbled, falling forwards over Margaret, who heard a loud crack as some part of Nora struck the stone bench.
Only hoping it was the woman’s head, Margaret pulled herself up, shoving Nora off herself with whatever was left of her strength before breaking into a run towards the castle.
She only made it three steps down the corridor before she saw her husband turning the corner, his face going suddenly pale at the sight of her.
“Margaret!” he cried. She ran into his arms, too winded to speak. “Good gods, what happened to you? You’re bleeding!”
“Nora!” she panted. “She tried to stab me!”
“What?” Aghast, Malachi signaled for the sentries. Margaret received the steady clanging of their approach with the same warm welcome in her heart as she would have the sweetest of music as she buried her face against her husband’s shirt and finally let herself sob as the horror of the past few minutes sank in.
“You will tell me what happened,” Malachi said sharply. Margaret stiffened at the cold edge in his voice, pulling away from him in alarm, but when she saw him looking steadily over her, she half turned and saw the Mirror, also breathless, standing in the doorway, a hand clutching her shoulder for no apparent reason.
“My lord, the maidservant attacked my lady with a knife,” she said unsteadily.
“And you did not defend her? Where was the blasted midwife? Why did no one send for help?” Malachi barked. He glanced down at Margaret again, no doubt because she had started to tremble against her volition. He went to put a protective arm around her shoulders when suddenly he froze.
“Gods,” he whispered, his eyes wide, his arm falling away.
Margaret frowned at him tearfully. “It’s just a scratch,” she murmured, gingerly touching her injured arm. “I don’t even feel it.”
But then she noticed his gaze was higher up. She tried to turn her head but he put up a hand to stop her.
“Just hold still, love,” he said quietly. “Where is the midwife?”
“I don’t know! I asked her to bring out a blanket and she never came back,” Margaret said. “Oh no...what if she ran into Nora?”
“I wonder if any of those wretches can be trusted, or if they are all in league with one another,” Malachi muttered darkly, never taking his eyes off Margaret. She realized he must mean the newly hired servants. She didn’t even know how many there were, if there were only three as before, or more; she had only met Nora.
Malachi turned then to one of the sentries who had come up behind him, issuing an order through the panel in its side with skillful fingers. Margaret felt increasingly weak, beginning to sway on her feet.
“My lord,” the Mirror said weakly.
Malachi looked up and immediately wrapped a careful arm around Margaret’s waist to steady her, although the effort required him to stoop.
“Do you know where the maidservant is?” Malachi asked.
Margaret said “by the bench” at the same time as Elsbeth answered, “I think she may be dead.” Margaret’s eyes went wide.
“Dead?”
“She hit her head on the bench very hard, my lady. There was a lot of blood,” Elsbeth explained. “Even if she’s alive, I don’t think she’d be in any condition to come after you.” The Mirror looked startled and quickly moved to the side as the sentries began to march past her in single file, responding to their lord’s orders.
“They will hunt down and imprison anyone in a servant’s uniform, using force if necessary, except for their side guard. They’ve gone to retrieve the healer,” Malachi said quietly to Margaret.
“He won’t be happy about that,” she murmured, feeling suddenly more exhausted than she had in her life.
“I would have sent one of the flesh servants, but who knows if there are more traitors among them,” Malachi said sensibly. “In any event, we need to get you settled somewhere. Then I must deploy the dragons.”
“Dragons?” Yes, she was definitely feeling woozy now.
Malachi scooped her up, staggering a bit under her unexpected weight. “You’ve been putting on a bit of weight there, wife,” he said dryly. She was too weary even to dignify that with a response. She could not help but notice, though, that he was holding her rather awkwardly. She tried to move her left arm to wrap it around him, but it felt...strange.
“Don’t,” he said quickly. “Just hold still. Trust me, Maggie.”
She did, but trust did not stop her from craning her head to view her arm. It looked fine...until her eyes spotted small drips of red leading upwards to her shoulder, where a knife’s handle jutted out from a slowly seeping pool of crimson.
“OH!” she gasped, and turned her face back to her husband’s chest, shaking so hard with her sobs that her teeth chattered.
“Hold still, it’s going to be all right, Maggie, I promise,” Malachi murmured, starting off down the corridor.
The healer arrived about an hour later, still surrounded on all sides by his unwanted mechanical escort and red-faced and out of breath from his involuntary march to the castle. He was a tall, stout man named Byron with a long, graying beard, and he wore long gray robes that were as like unto a monk’s as his colorful and continuous litany of swearing was unlike. He did not even slow in the curses of his lord, his country, and all “walking rubbish made of tin” upon reaching the threshold of his lady’s bedchamber, even though the words were being wheezed out by that time.
Malachi nodded impatiently without listening and gestured meaningfully towards his wife, who was laying carefully on her side in her bed, cushioned front and back with pillows, with her wounded shoulder already bared for the healer’s attention. The knife still jutted from it. Had it been Malachi’s own shoulder thus impaled, he would have removed the knife himself without a second thought, albeit with a great deal of nausea. But he would not risk doing further damage to Margaret’s arm; the very thought turned his stomach more than removing the knife from himself would have.
“What the hell?” Byron exclaimed, brought up short as he took in Margaret’s shoulder, but his eyes lit up with interest as he approached her bedside. “Oh, I beg your pardon, my lady,” he added on his next breath.
Margaret gave no sign of hearing him, her eyes tightly squeezed shut. The healer carefully examined her shoulder, cautiously prodding around the wound. The Mirror in the corner laid back suddenly on the chaise, her own eyes shut like Margaret’s and her face white. Malachi tried to summon up some pity for her, but all he could feel was relief that it was trepidation about having a knife stuck in her shoulder that had Margaret looking like she was rather than the pain of the experience.
“Yes, sir, that knife’s stuck in there, indeed it is,” the healer declared after a few more moments of prodding.
Malachi sighed and rubbed his temples wearily with his fingertips. “No, please, phrase her condition in simple words for me, healer, for I am but a simple man.”
Byron ignored him. “I think her odds are not bad, but we’ll have to go carefully, won’t we?”
“Will we?” Malachi echoed.
“We’ll have to keep it very clean, yo
u understand. I’ll be needing some water boiled.” Byron turned and peered at him. “Surely you have a midwife around, with the lady being in breeding?”
“We did have, but we seem to have misplaced her,” Malachi answered, with a tone of regret he was not sure he actually felt.
“Pity,” Byron grunted. “I’ll need someone else to help me, then. Have you any other servants? By which I mean, REAL servants?”
Malachi bristled. “The sentries are real enough. Try to poke one and see for yourself, healer.”
Byron just stared at him expectantly until he finally said, glowering, “My human servants are otherwise engaged and quite possibly dead, if they resisted their...engagement. As it turns out, good servants are hard to find. That is why I sent the sentries for you in the first place.”
“Oh, of course, my lord would consider my preferences,” Byron said solemnly, but his eyes twinkled damnably, deepening Malachi’s glower.
“Are you going to get the damned knife out of her or not?” Malachi snapped.
“Language, my lord. There is a lady present,” Byron said with mock dismay. “Of course I will assist, I am honor bound to attend to my lady in her time of need. But I will still need a servant. If you can’t come up with one, then wash the blood off your hands, my lord, and lend them to me. There’s nothing served by dawdling, now is there?”
“Only if it came to extending your life, in which case, I’d have to agree, there is nothing served,” Malachi muttered darkly. Byron cocked an eyebrow inquisitively and Malachi said in a louder tone, “I’ll find someone. Somewhere. Right now.” He went to Margaret’s side, the healer stepping out of the way just before he could have had a foot trod on.
“I’ll be back quickly, Maggie. Mind the healer,” he said gently to her. He saw her give a slight nod of her head against the pillow. He brushed a quick kiss to her brow and moved to the door, pausing by it to turn to the Mirror.
“If anything happens to my lady in my absence this time, we shall what kind of glass you are made of,” he said coldly. Her eyes fluttered open in response, but she said nothing, her face a blank as he left the room.
As Malachi hastened to the dungeon- a vastly underused part of his castle, in his own mind- he felt a terrible pang of regret that he had not heeded some advice he’d received once from some ugly bastard he didn’t want to think about. He had to admit, silently and even so, grudgingly, to himself in the privacy of his thoughts, that perhaps the fiend in question had had a good point about employing more servants- servants who could be trained to manage the sentries in his place. Perhaps what had happened to Margaret would not have happened, if security had been better and if he’d taken the time to employ servants he could actually trust.
Of course, he’d believed the three he’d only just exiled to be trustworthy as well. That was one thing he had to admit he envied his former friend: Eladrians on the whole were every bit as glassy-eyed with mindless loyalty as his sentries were, but they were usually able to show enough initiative that even common folk weren’t generally assaulted and stabbed in public places, and certainly not on Keep grounds. That much would be unthinkable to their rigorously indoctrinated little minds. If the rotten blighter were capable of obtaining a wife of his own- and the very thought elicited a dry chuckle from Malachi- that woman would have the blood of every Eladrian watering the earth on her behalf before a blade could be raised in her presence. He couldn’t say the same of his own people, certainly. He ruled them from a far greater distance than Eladria did his own countrymen, with a council between him and they and no love lost between any of them. They were loyal because he did his duty by them and never failed to come through when it was necessary, and he otherwise left them alone. There was no zealous foaming at the mouth about Malachaians, and though he had always derided it in his neighbors before, he found no humor left in the thought now. Not with a knife sticking out of his Maggie, put there by a servant he had been too careless in hiring.
The thought made him feel as sick and dark as the atmosphere of the dungeon itself. It was only partially underground, technically speaking: a narrow, iron barred grate peeked out at intervals along the ceiling in places, letting in weak shafts of famished gray light during the day that barely managed to pierce the gloom. It was all made of stone, cold, dirty stuff perpetually damp with condensation and reeking of mold. The narrow bars on the cells were mottled orange with patches of rust; the straw that had long ago been supplied for beds within looked like nothing at all that could identified as such if he had not already known what it was supposed to be, so filthy and moldy it had become in its old age. Every now and then, a lantern hung from a hook on iron stands out of reach of the cells, but none were lit: the sentries did not need much light to “see.”
And indeed, they stood in perfect formation outside the cells now, one on each side of each door, motionless. Their eyes glowed eerily red in the darkness, shining dots that no doubt unnerved the new occupants of the cells but were oddly comforting to their master. He reflected, not for the first time, that although the sentries were not what he considered the best of his creations by any stretch, they were still quite competent at the tasks they had been made for, and easily ranked among his favorites. They were so simple, so straightforward. There was something to be said for complicated contraptions, and they certainly had their place, but to Malachi, there was really nothing like a mechanical man with a bludgeon for one hand and a double-edged claw for another to make a fellow feel like he could breathe a little easier, even in a filthy, moldy shambles of a dungeon like his.
Apparently, his original three servants had not thought much of maintaining this part of the castle. He was suddenly a little relieved he’d chosen to detain them in his workshop, instead, even though his motives at the time had been less than conducive to their continued well being. He could not help but think that his lady would have been most put out if they’d been crushed by a rotting ceiling beam or something before he could safely exile them.
With any luck, they went Eladria’s way, Malachi thought with a bit more cheer, though he couldn’t help but doubt it. There had been no love lost in that direction, either, back in the day when the giant would visit him.
“Please, whoever is out there, let us out!” wailed a thin female voice from inside one of the cells.
“It is your lord and master who is out here,” Malachi said curtly. “And you will stay there as long as it pleases me. One of your companions attempted to murder your lady mere hours ago.”
“Please, my lord, we had naught to do with it!” a male voice cried. The other servants- there were four in total, now that the murderous one had cracked her own head open- joined this protest with alacrity, insisting their innocence in one mingled, incoherent plea. Malachi sighed.
“Of course you didn’t,” Malachi said when they had begun to wear themselves out. “None of you had a thing to do with it, none of you knew a thing about it, and for all I know, each of you will make another attempt on my wife’s life the moment I let you out of there. How am I to know that any of you are speaking the truth? You were all hired at the same time and by all appearances were acquainted with one another. How many chances am I expected to take, when the one I already took in hiring you lot has already paid its bloody dividends? Even now, my wife awaits the extraction of a knife from her person. Please let’s do apply some common sense here, my servants. The only persons who will be leaving this dungeon alive are those who contribute some useful information about the traitor who was in your midst. Those who ‘don’t know anything’ won’t be knowing anything else, either. Ever.”
The servants quietened in their cells.
“The traitor was Nora, wasn’t it?” one of the men said. “She’s the only one I didn’t see get taken in. I barely knew her, my lord, and that’s the truth. I’d seen her a few times in the market, in passing, but she wasn’t from the village.”
There was a murmur of agreement from the others. Malachi considered this thoughtfully
.
“Not from the village, you say? Where was she staying, then?”
One of the women spoke up. “I think she said something about a farmer-”
“No, no, a miner,” one of the men interrupted. “She said she came by way of Eladria.”
Malachi frowned. That was strange. She had not appeared Eladrian to him, but then, he had not paid her all that much attention. He would have to look again.
“Yes, yes, the more I think of it, she must have been of them,” one of the servants was saying. “She was a big girl, wasn’t she?”
Eladria, Malachi thought. It keeps coming back to him. First the cider, now a maidservant...
But it made no sense to him. As much as he wanted to blame that bastard for all this mayhem, he really couldn’t. Eladria would have had no way of knowing that he, Malachi, would be needing or hiring servants, and every reason to believe, given his past stance on the subject, that he would not be doing any such thing. Moreover, Eladria was not the assassination type- hell, the more Malachi thought of it, the more bizarre the very idea of Eladria sending him poisoned cider sounded. Poison? Eladria? That barbarian would merrily walk through his front door and take an ax to his neck, but sending poisoned cider from afar would be extremely unlike him. He dabbled in alchemy, it was true, but his poisons were the kind that laced weapons, not unsuspecting beverages. And on the whole, as much as women in general hated Eladria, he himself seemed to treat them with peculiar respect. He had disliked Malachi’s decision to marry Margaret and had thought her a highly inappropriate choice, and had been an appalling jackass about it all, but Malachi could not plausibly read into that a desire to murder his wife. He felt almost embarrassed for not realizing all of this before. He had been so angry, so quick to swallow the theory he’d been fed. And now he had gone and written the High Lord about it! He must look such a fool! What a laugh that man would have over Malachi’s irrational ravings!
