A Song for Orphans

by Morgan Rice

  Siobhan cocked her head to one side. “Yes, I suppose I owe you that now that you have shown that you will do what I command.”

  She hopped down from the fountain, waving her hand across it in a move that made it ripple as though some hidden current were working within it.

  “What are you doing?” Kate asked.

  “Watch,” Siobhan said.

  The waters shifted, and now they showed Gertrude Illiard’s face, as it had been when Kate had been following her. It looked pristine, untouched by worry or by cruelty, not knowing the violence that would come to her soon at Kate’s hands.

  “She was innocent,” Kate repeated.

  “She was,” Siobhan agreed. “For now. I told you before about the price of having power. Do you remember?”

  Kate struggled to push her anger and impatience back long enough to remember.

  “You said that if you know something is going to happen and you have the power to change it, then doing nothing is a choice.”

  “A choice with consequences,” Siobhan said. She waved her hand over the fountain, and now it seemed that it shone with golden and silver strands. “Consequences I can see, if I focus.”

  “You can see the future,” Kate said.

  Siobhan smiled in a way that made it seem like a child’s question.

  “I can pick apart the chains of consequence,” Siobhan said. “I can see some of what might be. Is it so hard for you to believe, apprentice, with all you have seen?”

  Kate found herself thinking of the visions she’d seen. Of men in the uniforms of the New Army charging through the streets of Ashton. Of people dying while she tried to save them.

  “Can things be changed?” Kate asked.

  Siobhan nodded. “That is the question, isn’t it? Yes, things can be changed, but every change has consequences, every touch on the balance setting the weight of lives into new configurations.”

  “And where does Gertrude Illiard fit into this?” Kate asked. “Are you telling me that you had me kill an innocent person just to change things in the future?”

  Siobhan paused. “Perhaps I should have had you do that. Perhaps you needed to learn that lesson too: that one person is not worth the whole of a war. But no, that is not what I was doing here.”

  “Then what?” Kate demanded. She was getting sick of the way Siobhan was dancing around this. Her would-be teacher never seemed to be willing to give out a straight answer. She wanted Kate to be no more than a cog in her schemes, and Kate wasn’t prepared to do that, whatever promises she’d made.

  “You saw Gertrude Illiard as she was this morning,” Siobhan said. “But I saw all the versions of her. I saw the girl who took on her father’s business when he died of a heart attack a year from now. I saw the girl who found that he had debts and enemies. Who tried to do good, but found that the only way to maintain it all was to do worse and worse.”

  She waved a hand, and now there was another image of Gertrude in the water, looking older and less carefree. She was talking to someone Kate couldn’t see.

  “Tell the Far Colonies traders that we will agree to their terms,” she said.

  “But Madam Illiard, that will mean we will become slave traders in all but name. We will open up whole sections of the South to them.”

  “I know what it will mean,” Gertrude said. “Tell them anyway.”

  There was the sound of a door shutting, and Gertrude looked into another corner of the room.

  “When it is done, Poull will have to die,” she said. “His heart is too soft for this, and he knows too much of our business.”

  Kate watched it, not wanting to believe any of it. Siobhan could be making this up. It could be an illusion projected onto the water.

  “You know that it is true though, don’t you?” Siobhan said. “You have a measure of talent for it, and you can feel that it is real. If I hadn’t need of a warrior, I could have trained you as a seer.”

  Kate wanted to believe that it was a lie, but honestly, why would Siobhan lie about this? She didn’t have to give Kate a reason for the things she’d ordered her to do. She didn’t have to pretend that Gertrude would have turned out like this.

  “She takes up her father’s business,” Siobhan says. “And in his memory, she discovers a determination to succeed, whatever it takes.”

  “And so she becomes something evil?” Kate said.

  “I told you before that the world is rarely so simple,” Siobhan said. “But yes, she becomes cruel. She causes more harm than good in the world. Not all at once, of course. It starts with a letter that must be forged first to keep control of the business, then men who must be blackmailed or bribed. A rival must be murdered, because the alternative is being condemned for all she has done already. It happens step by step, until a monster hurts thousands, tens of thousands, for her profits.”

  Kate could imagine it happening. She’d seen how easily people could be enticed to do cruel or evil things, simply because it was in their interest to do it. Even so, it was hard to know what to think.

  “She was still innocent now,” Kate said.

  “She was,” Siobhan agreed. “But how many people should we wait for her to hurt before we act? Should we wait until she ruins her first life? Until she kills her first foe? Doing it now means that her father is heartbroken. He still dies, but he breaks up his business first, trying to do the good that he thinks she would have wanted him to do. Wait a while, and even that will not happen.”

  Siobhan made it all seem so logical and so straightforward. Kill Gertrude, and her evil did not happen, while good happened instead. Kill her, and Kate made the world a better place.

  “And you still threatened to kill my sister,” Kate pointed out. She couldn’t forgive that. She wouldn’t.

  “Did I?” Siobhan said. “I said that she would die. I said that you could make the choice. Did it not occur to you that if Gertrude Illiard had lived, her affairs might brush up against someone like Sophia, roll over her, crush her?”

  “You’re saying she would have killed my sister?” Kate asked.

  Siobhan laughed at that. “Oh, you’re still thinking far too simplistically. Effects are not a single set of ripples, spreading out from a rock. They are a handful of pebbles all thrown at once, the ripples bouncing from one another. But you chose, and that is all that matters.”

  “You picked this woman deliberately, didn’t you?” Kate said. “You want to use me in this game of consequences you’re playing, so you picked this to get me to trust that you would make the right choices.”

  Siobhan smiled at that. “So wise for one so young. Or so foolish. It’s hard to tell with your kind, sometimes.”

  “You’ve only made one mistake,” Kate pointed out.

  Siobhan stood there, obviously waiting for Kate to continue. She didn’t seem worried by it. She should have been.

  “You sent me to do this as my favor to you,” Kate said. She turned on her heel. “I don’t owe you anything anymore.”

  She expected Siobhan to be angry then, to try to pull her back. She almost hoped that she would attack, so that Kate had an excuse to use the blade at her hip. Siobhan might show her the place where she kept the souls of those who broke their deals, but Kate had kept her bargain.

  Instead, though, she heard Siobhan laugh.

  “Oh, do you think it’s that simple?” she asked. “Do your favor and walk away?”

  “I’ve done what you wanted,” Kate said. “I’m free.”

  Siobhan kept laughing. “Until next time, apprentice.”

  Kate could hear the claim in that last word. She set off walking. “No,” she insisted. “I’m free.”

  “You’ll never be free,” Siobhan said. “Do you think there’s any action you take I won’t influence? Do you think that the next time I ask you for something, you won’t do it? Do you think you get to walk away from me?”

  The brambles slashed at her, and Kate ran.

  She sprinted through the woods, ignoring the cuts
that appeared on her arms and legs, ducking and rolling to avoid a branch that seemed to swing toward her too fast for the wind. She sprinted through the mud and the fallen leaves of the forest floor, dodging around trees, not slowing, because it felt as though even slowing would draw her back.

  She’d done her part. She wouldn’t be Siobhan’s plaything. She wouldn’t kill and kill at the forest woman’s command. She wouldn’t be a mindless weapon to be wielded like a gardener’s shears by someone trying to shape the strands of the future.

  So she ran. When a branch came too close, Kate hacked it down with her sword and kept going. When bramble bushes filled the path ahead, Kate leapt over them, rolling as she landed. She ran until she saw the edge of the wood and sprinted out into the light.

  She’d done it. She was clear. She was free.

  Then she heard Siobhan’s voice, her laughter drifting on the wind.

  “Do you really think it’s that easy, Kate? You will never truly be free. We’re bound together now, and some things cannot be undone.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  When they reached the estate, Sophia stood staring at the great house at its heart. It was huge and crenulated, halfway to being the kind of castle that had meant something, back before cannon had been able to bring down walls and shatter fortified gateways.

  The estate looked as though it had found it out the hard way. The hills around it would have provided some protection, but even so, whole sections of it were ruined, one wing reduced to little more than rubble. There were scorch marks on the outside where fire had claimed portions of it, while the grounds were overgrown with brambles and long grass. Even so, she stared at it

  “What is it?” Cora asked.

  “It’s a long way to come for a wreck,” Emeline said.

  Sophia shook her head. “I’ve seen this before. I know this place.”

  She walked down toward it with Sienne and the others in her wake. She crossed over lawns that were little more than tangled squares of grass, sorely in need of a gardener’s scythe. Ahead, there were great, iron-bound doors that proved to be shut tight when Sophia tried them, but a window nearby was broken and empty of glass.

  “You’re just going to climb in?” Cora asked, as Sophia started to clamber through. “What if there’s someone inside?”

  “I don’t think there is,” she said. “This whole place just looks dead.”

  She couldn’t keep the disappointment out of her voice at that. When she’d set off here, she’d been hoping for a bustling home still filled with people. A part of her had even dared to hope that maybe her parents might be there, whatever everyone else had said. Even as she’d known it couldn’t be true, that they were long dead, she’d hoped.

  There was no one here for her, though, just an empty shell of a building, filled with cobwebs. Sophia brushed some aside as she climbed in through the window, hopping lightly into a room that probably had been a bright and happy place once. The furniture had the opulence of rich woods and fine silks, while the ornaments shone with flashes of gold. A chandelier above looked as though it hadn’t been lit in years, but it still shone with crystal and silver.

  Now, it seemed still and leached of all color, a layer of dust lending a corpselike pallor to wood and cloth, leather and metal alike.

  “At least we’ll be out of the cold tonight,” Emeline said, her tone obviously already dismissing the great house as anything more.

  This was Monthys House, though, and Sophia knew as the name came to her that the place had been named like that rather than with a family name because its owners had wanted to emphasize their connection to the lands around them. The very fact that she could remember that told her that she’d found the right place. She could remember how beautiful it had been, and maybe could be again. It wouldn’t take much to get a fire going in the grate, and even the cobwebs could be chased away with enough effort.

  “I know this house,” Sophia insisted. “I’ve been here before. I’ve been in this room.”

  The memories were there, just below the surface, there every time she reached in by looking at an object or taking in the pattern of light a familiar window made on the floor. Sophia went over to a portrait of a woman in clothes that suggested it had been painted hundreds of years before. Sophia could remember looking at this painting as a small child, wondering why her mother was wearing such a funny costume.

  “She looks like you,” Emeline said, and that seemed to be enough to catch her interest. “This place really is your family’s, isn’t it?”

  “I think so,” Sophia said. “And she... I think she’s one of my ancestors.”

  “And this is your great-great-great-great-grandmother, girls,” Anora said.

  Sophia tried to repeat it back to her, but her nurse laughed.

  “Not enough greats. Still, we’ll get there. You should know your family, girls. You should know who you are.”

  “Can we play outside yet?” Kate had asked. “Can we play throwing stones?”

  The memory came back to Sophia with a sharpness that felt as though it might have happened yesterday. There were more memories as her fingers traced along a table, finding a plate Kate had almost broken jumping around, a crack in the wall that she could remember looking into when she was small, assuming that there might be whole worlds in there.

  “Come on,” she said. “I need to see this.”

  She needed it like an itch she couldn’t scratch, like a hunger that had been sitting in her belly for so long she had ceased to notice it until there was finally the opportunity for a feast. Now she was ravenous for what she might learn, the sheer need for memory overwhelming everything else as she set off out of the room, turning left, then right along corridors by instinct. The walls were familiar, paneled with woods that had been brought from all the lands their family had visited: dark ebony and blood-red satine, pale maple and deep brown oak, all exquisitely carved with scenes showing monsters and plants and foreign lands and strange figures.

  She found a low grate, and her hands moved surely to pull it out of the way, revealing a tiny space behind it that had been left by the creation of a new wing a generation before.

  “Kate and I used to hide in here from our nurse,” Sophia said. “We used to play hide and seek all over the house.”

  She could still find the spots where they’d hidden from one another, and then later from the men who’d come to the house. She could remember hiding with Anora at first, and then later the nurse’s screams when the men had nearly found them.

  “Run, girls!” she’d hissed to them. “I’ll draw them off. I… I love you both.”

  She made her way through the empty rooms of the house, looking around at so many reminders of the past that it seemed wherever she glanced there were fresh memories waiting for her. The house looked different, smaller than she remembered it, but Sophia guessed that had been because she’d been so much younger when she’d seen it last.

  She led the way into a long gallery, filled with paintings of ancestors Anora had tried to teach them, set in frames of gold and dark wood. For the moment, Sophia walked past them all, focusing on a larger painting toward the end. It drew her in, even though it was so covered in cobwebs that Sophia couldn’t see the image that lay beneath.

  Gently, using the cloth of her sleeve, she started to wipe away the patina that had built up over all of it. She didn’t want to risk disturbing the oils, but she needed to see what lay underneath the grime. It gave way reluctantly, but Sophia kept going, slowly revealing what lay beneath. When she was done, she stood back, and she could feel tears starting to sting her eyes.

  She stood there in the painting, or a younger version of her at least. Kate was with her, holding onto her hand with an expression that said she would rather have been running around the gardens than standing there being painted. Behind them stood the man and woman Sophia knew from the painting Laurette van Klet had shown her. From her dreams.

  “My parents,” Sophia said, managing to choke bac
k a sob.

  “These are your parents?” Cora said. She stepped forward to wipe away the dust from a small plaque below the painting.

  Alfred, Christina, Sophia, and Kate of the House of Danse.

  “Danse?” Emeline said, and Sophia could hear the catch in her voice. “I knew your parents were someone important when you started talking about their estates, but this? You’re one of the Danses?”

  Sophia didn’t understand the shock in her voice, but right then, she was concentrating on other things. She moved along the line of paintings in the gallery, looking at men and women whose portraits she already knew because she’d spent rainy afternoons in this room, listening to her nursemaid telling stories about them.

  This is Lady Sophia, you’re named after her. She persuaded the Mountain Lands to join themselves to the kingdom, at least in name.

  Sophia stared at a portrait of a woman who reminded her a little of Kate, with that same determination in her eyes, and a sense of the same restless energy.

  This is Lady Denana, who fought off an invasion of troll folk in the mist years.

  Every painting had a story attached to it, a moment in history, or a connection between families. Her family. That was the part that was proving hard to accept. All of these people, this endless string of paintings, represented links in a chain that led to Sophia and her sister. She didn’t know what to make of it all, even with the memories that came to her with the sight of every face there.

  “You’re really one of the Danses?” Emeline said.

  Sophia shrugged. “I… guess so?”

  “But that’s… that’s incredible.”

  Sophia frowned, looking around at her. “I don’t understand. What’s so special about it?”

  Emeline looked a little shocked by that. “You don’t know who they were? No, I guess you might not.”

  “It isn’t something they talk about openly,” Cora said. “Around the court, even mentioning them was enough to get you punished. I saw a man taken away by the guards just because he expressed sympathy for what happened to them.”