It was difficult to appreciate, as he hurried down the narrow streets and cramped alleys, just how tremendous the royal city really was. Castle Wulfyddia was anchored to a small, rocky peninsula known as Castle Point. Bordered on the east by the icy Veiderling Sea and on the west by the black expanse of the Chronyddia Ocean, there were only two ways to reach Castle Wulfyddia by land. The less favored path was to ascend the Black Cliffs. The Black Cliffs were a mass of jagged volcanic rock, left over from some long ago eruption. Castle Wulfyddia was carved from the black rock of the highest peak, while the Haligorn clung to the dark rock of its sister cliff. The cliffs were difficult to navigate and nearly impossible to grow anything on, which meant that Castle Wulfyddia was largely dependent upon fish and meat for sustenance. Fruit and vegetables were a luxury made doubly rare by both the rocky terrain and the harsh winters.
The second, and generally the preferred route to Castle Wulfyddia, was to follow the black cliffs to the east, where the cliffs suddenly plunged downwards into a forested valley, where the royal family hunted and fey folk were said to wander, searching for unwary humans to snare in unearthly enchantments. Even from the Royal Forest, the road to Castle Wulfyddia was not easy, though it was not nearly as steep as the path across the Black Cliffs. The castle’s inaccessibility was a large part of its defensibility, and so none of the royals had ever seen fit to build a wider road from the valley, or to carve a less treacherous path through the cliffs. Thanks to the difficult terrain, when the castle was besieged, it was usually by sea.
To the north and the west of Castle Wulfyddia the cliffs met the sea in a sheer drop that made it a favorite spot for suicides, and the site of many a shipwreck. At some point some monarch had decided to combat the problem of shipwrecks by commissioning an enormous lighthouse, carved of dark granite, which loomed atop the cliffs and sent piercing beams of light into the night, warning away those who otherwise might have dashed their ships on the rocks.
To the east, the shore was gentler, and the cliffs were reduced to rolling hills, and then to a mild slope which stretched down to the beach. That was where the ancient port of Castle Wulfyddia lay. Reportedly the first area settled in the earliest days of the Castle, long before the Lucretius family ruled the country, or even before Wulfyddia was called Wulfyddia, it was also the most frequently rebuilt, since constant naval battles throughout much of Wulfyddia’s history had seen the port razed many times.
The keep, the innermost fortress, was where the royal family lived. The keep benefited from many additional defenses, including the moat, a deep and wide body of dull green water. The moat was ancient, one of the first defenses to have been put in place, and it was at the center of much local mythology. In addition to the many ghost stories concerning the moat, an entire cohort of dark beasts were said to reside under the noxious water. There were even some who claimed that the moat had its own spirit, though usually it was only natural bodies of water which could claim the protection of a water spirit. Personally, Spencer had never seen anything particularly remarkable on his walks past the moat, and the only moat-creatures whose existence he had ever heard confirmed with absolute certainty were leeches.
The keep itself was an ugly thing, at least to Spencer’s eyes. It was uniformly black, largely undecorated, and quite squat, save for a number of spindly towers that poked up towards the sky like spikes. The interior of the castle was not particularly aesthetic, either. Many of the royal chambers were quite lavishly decorated, and the largest chambers, such as the great hall where court was held, had a certain eye-popping grandeur, but the architecture itself was rather hideous. Windows were few and far between, since the castle was built first and foremost to withstand a siege. Instead, there were arrow slits everywhere, which let in very little light and often leaked when it rained.
The sprawl of the city spilled from the keep in every direction except the north, in which direction the keep was so close to the sea that on stormy nights the spray of the ocean kissed the stone of the keep. Beyond the keep there were a series of walls, some in better states of repair than others, most sporting battlements and guard towers. Each wall dated to a different year, and often to a different century, and many of them had entire stretches of masonry which were either crumbling, or missing entirely. It looked as if after each devastating battle, the ruling monarch had simply put up a new wall rather than repair the old one. The result was a rather patchwork mismatching of walls. There seemed little rhyme or reason to their construction, save for a vague pattern which seemed to spiral inward. The people who lived among the outermost walls were the poorest, many of them refugees from provinces stricken by famine, disease or flooding. Closer to the keep, the roads improved, the stench of sewage and rot faded, and the buildings transitioned from shacks to cottages to large houses with multiple chimneys. The chasm cut across it all, isolating the Haligorn from the rest of the city.
***
Black hair drifted in the cold water like seaweed. The hands were white, chilled, slack. The woman was suspended in the green water of the lake like a specimen in a jar, and she was just as still. Then one finger uncurled, fernlike, and the eyes opened, wide and livid, staring at Melisande. The lips, the awful pale lips, stretched into a grin. The hands flailed wildly, churning the frothing water as the woman thrashed through the lake, coming for Melisande, who was frozen, suspended just as still as the woman had once been.
With a soft cry Melisande jerked awake. Her eyelashes fluttered rapidly as she took in her surroundings, haunted by some lingering fear which had followed her from her dream. She was safe, sequestered in Felunhala’s study with only her mistress’s polished skull for company. There was no floating woman. Melisande shifted in her chair, wearily rubbing her face as her eyes went to the grandfather clock that loomed against the far wall. It was already mid-morning. Felunhala and the Fool had to be sleeping in; otherwise her mistress would certainly have come for her. Felunhala did not approve of sleeping late, even if Melisande had been awake and working into the early morning.
She stared down at the mess of papers that had served as a pillow while she dozed, willing herself to remember which project she had been working on when she drifted off. She glanced at a sketch of a lake, and some of her confusion faded. Of course. She was working on the Lady’s Lake. It was called that thanks to a Queen of several centuries ago, interred at the bottom of it after her reign came to an end. Why royalty would be buried at the bottom of a lake it was hard to say, but it was many centuries ago, after all, and things had been quite strange back then.
The current trouble with the Lake had nothing to do with its long-ago brush with royalty. The issue was far less sensational, though deeply troubling. The water was rising. Inexplicably, after years of maintaining the same level, the water was creeping higher with every passing day. Delwyn, son of Tryphena, who had been tasked with handling this matter by his mother, had immediately come to Felunhala hoping for some magic. Felunhala had summoned Melisande, and turned the project over to her, with instructions that no one was to know that Melisande, and not Felunhala, was handling the task.
It had been that way ever since Melisande was first brought to the castle. Those were the terms under which she had become Felunhala’s apprentice. The witch had discovered Melisande when she was just a child, still recovering from the death of her parents, casualties of a royal rebellion.
Delwyn, Tryphena’s son and heir, had a bastard brother, Blaxton, fathered by King Malachai Lucretius years before he had plucked Tryphena of Wollstonely from relative obscurity, married her and made her Queen of Wulfyddia. The rumors were that Tryphena had hated Blaxton from the day Malachai first brought her to the castle, though the Queen publicly claimed that she had never been anything but kind to her husband’s bastard. Whatever the case, though Blaxton was the eldest son of the late King Malachai, he was not legitimate, and thus the crown had passed to the King’s widow, Tryphena, and was destined for their son Delwyn upon Tryphena’s death. The Princess Anise
would rule after Delwyn, and Blaxton and his children were cut out of the inheritance entirely. After Malachai’s death, Blaxton had rebelled and attempted a coup, which was hardly an unusual move for an illegitimate son. He had been routed, and his last stand before he fled for the border was made in the hilly province of Arkestra, Melisande’s birthplace.
It was at that point that Blaxton, otherwise a faintly sympathetic character, lost Melisande’s support entirely. In a moment of vicious spite which Melisande would never understand, Blaxton had burned Melisande’s village to the ground and killed every occupant. Melisande was the only survivor of his brutality, simply because she had been visiting her sickly grandmother when the massacre occurred. She still remembered her return home to a field of ash and blackened bones, where her parents’ remains were indistinguishable from those of the soldiers who had fallen around them. She had vowed then to make Blaxton suffer for the atrocities committed against her family, but had been too much of a child to have any clue how to go about seeking revenge. She had lived with her grandmother until the old woman died, and soon after, Felunhala had appeared, as if summoned by the force of Melisande’s thirst for vengeance. The witch had brought Melisande to the castle, to work for the one family in Wulfyddia that hated Blaxton as much as Melisande did.
But there had been conditions, and Melisande still wore two of them circled about her wrists like shackles. As it turned out, the crown had many uses for Melisande’s power, not just to defeat Blaxton, but to protect the realm, to run the Castle, even to keep the royal family healthy. The two black rings that encircled her wrists were not ornamentation, but rather the means by which Felunhala helped herself to Melisande’s power. The witch relied on the force of Melisande’s magic when her own was not quite sufficient to complete a ritual or cast some spell ordered by the crown. It was worth it; anything was worth the opportunity to strike back at the man who had taken everything from her, even the mornings when she woke crying from the pain of having Felunhala constantly plucking at her power, stripping away Melisande’s life force whenever and wherever it pleased her.
Melisande could not keep a grimace from overtaking her face, and she rested her forehead in her hand for a moment before forcing herself to straighten up. As she stood, a book that had been open on her lap fell to the floor, the sound muffled by the luxuriously thick furs that cushioned its fall. Melisande slipped on her slippers and reached for the book, handling it gently for there was no knowing how old it was. She couldn’t remember which book it was, until she flipped it over to examine the cover. The lines on her brow eased. Ah, she recalled it now. It was one of Felunhala’s bestiaries. Melisande had been searching for an answer to the origin of those little creatures that had sprung so suddenly from the flame.
She stared down at the page, at the intricacies of the beautifully inked illustrations. The information it provided was rather less beautiful. The creatures she’d created were Salamanders, not those of rivers or lakes, but those of fire. They could only be conjured, not born, and somehow, in some moment of power burning over bright, she had accidentally summoned a clutch of them into being.
She was disturbed by her lack of control, by the evidence that she had not mastered herself quite as well as she would like. She tried to separate herself from the sorrows of her past, from the occasional anguish of her current existence, but it was hard, and sometimes her emotions trampled her constraints. But all of this was irrelevant. It was late in the morning, and there were a slew of tasks that needed doing. Salamanders or not, nightmare or not, there was a long day ahead of her, and a temperamental witch to appease. But, before she started on the day’s tasks, she wanted to test the cabinet.
Given Melisande’s vital importance to the Castle Witch, she had free reign throughout most of the witch’s chambers. She was permitted to browse Felunahala’s entire library, including the oldest and the most delicate of the books. She had access to most of her mistress’s equipment, from the most powerful of the wands to the most fragile of the crystals. Felunhala’s dependence on Melisande’s skill had forced her to share much with her apprentice. There was, however, one cabinet standing in the corner of the witch’s study which was entirely off-limits to her apprentice. It was rather unassuming in appearance, a simple gray cabinet with a single lock which was always fastened. Melisande knew because she tried the handle on a regular basis. It had become a regular part of her morning routine, on the days when Felunhala wasn’t hovering over her shoulder. In the morning, Melisande washed her hair, lit the hearth, and tested the cabinet to see if it was unlocked. So far, Felunhala had not slipped up once.
Melisande wasn’t sure what she expected to find in the cabinet. She hadn’t the faintest idea what she hoped to find. Yet, as vague as her suspicions were, she could not help but test the lock every morning. Lately she had begun having nightmares about that small wooden cabinet and the contents within. Last time she’d dreamt of a deathly pale hand, fingers bony, nails sharp, which reached out of the cabinet and straight for her throat. The memory still gave her chills, and it was almost enough to keep her from testing the lock this morning. But somehow, despite her trepidation, she found herself drawn to the cabinet. Her fingers closed over the handle, and she twisted her wrist to turn it but it would not budge. The lock was engaged.
It wasn’t the lock itself which kept her out. It was the charm which was activated when the lock slipped into place. Despite the power of the spell, Melisande had no doubt that she was strong enough to fight her way through it, but Felunhala would know the minute that she tried, and Melisande feared the wrath of her mistress. The two witches were ill-matched as mistress and apprentice. Melisande would have thrived under a gentler hand, and Felunhala did not know how to mentor without the employment of harsh criticism and angry outbursts.
In the early days of her apprenticeship, Melisande had promised herself that as soon as she avenged her family she would free herself from Felunhala’s binding and return to the countryside where she belonged. But as the years drew on, Felunhala’s binding had taken root in her soul, coiling around her heart so tightly she found it difficult to imagine living free of it, and somehow, she still wasn’t any closer to destroying Blaxton.
It would help if he would return from exile, Melisande thought, casting an anxious glance at Felunhala’s scrying crystals. She had wasted many an evening peering into the misty depths of the largest crystal, trying to discern some image of Blaxton, some flash of his location or his plans. But he remained hidden from her, too far away for her power to be any use, and in the meantime there were a hundred demands on her time, a thousand inane tasks to finish, and always with Felunhala snapping at her heels.
Chapter 4
In the morning they came for him, soldiers with torches that gleamed off their brass buttons. The men reached for him and hauled him upright, binding him and forcing him along with them. His legs would barely hold him and he stumbled over his own feet as they led him up, and up, and up, out of the dungeons. As he realized that they were taking him out of that ninth circle of hell he began to scramble to keep up, and when the first rays of daylight touched him from a window far over his head, he began to laugh, and laugh. He was still laughing, with tears in his eyes, when he was brought before his Queen.
The wild-eyed young lunatic she saw before her was not the man Queen Tryphena had been expecting, and she felt a flutter of some foreign emotion – was it fear? Regardless, she stifled it and gave no sign of her discomfort. She was not accustomed to being discomposed and refused to appear so in front of her entire Court. Not that she was the center of attention at present. The young man in question had drawn all gazes his way with his grating laughter.
“This is the man you found beneath my tower?” When the guard answered in the affirmative a muscle in her face jumped, though she remained otherwise unmoved. The prosecutor read the charge, an accusation of Malicious Loitering. One of Tryphena’s first moves as Queen had been to make loitering both malicious and a felony. It g
ave her police cause to arrest almost anyone, and as a result her subjects had grown substantially more respectful.
When the time came for Rathbone to present his defense, the man rambled horribly, devoting much of his speech to some creature he claimed to have encountered in the dungeons. At the Queen’s side, her granddaughter Dimity raised a dainty lace handkerchief to her lips and coughed delicately. Dimity was the only one of Delwyn’s daughters that the Queen had any use for. Unlike the others, Dimity followed orders consistently and to the letter. Delwyn had once commented that she, his third daughter, was desperately lacking in spunk, but that was exactly what Tryphena appreciated about her. At the moment, Dimity looked particularly appalled by Rathbone’s graphic and nearly incoherent ranting. The beast was complete nonsense, obviously a smoke screen devised to distract them. However, what the Queen was able to discern from his the rest of his less than articulate speech was displeasing. The young man claimed to have entered the square just as an elderly man left it. He seemed to think that he had been arrested in the elder man’s place.
The Queen sniffed, a new and particularly distasteful explanation for this confusion presenting itself to her. It was possible that the revolting creature who reeked of her dungeons was actually speaking the truth. Her gaze drifted over the heads of her courtiers, fixing on the stained glass window opposite her and the delicately shaded light that filtered through, staining the air in pastels. Even Dimity, right hand of the Queen, could not tell what was running through her grandmother’s mind at that moment, and she shifted uneasily. Nine days out of ten she was secure in her place as her grandmother’s pet, but on the tenth, she trembled.
Wulfyddia (The Tattersall Trilogy Book 1) Page 4
