Sister Sable (The Mad Queen Book 1)

by T. Mountebank

  “Excuse me, Mother Maisa.” The General forced himself between. Turning Sable with him to the side, he heard Maisa’s mumblings rattle through his bones and had to physically shrug off the desire to fade into a daze.

  “Help me to the balcony.” Sable’s voice could hardly be heard.

  He walked her forward, more to get distance from Maisa and the nuns than bring her to the open doors that showed the plaza in part shadow. The Basilica’s high pinnacle blocked the sun as it began to leave the sky, and with the light radiating around the stone work, no one could see into the darkness that laid beyond the terrace.

  “I’m going to have you sit down,” the General said.

  On the edge of obscurity, Sable pulled against the General’s direction to gaze out on the crowd. She was a silhouette that was not a nun, which made the silence roll. The sound of people hushing set Maisa into action.

  “I am here to give you guidance,” but Maisa’s tone did not agree.

  Sable turned with righteous anger, thrusting the palms she always kept hidden in the mother’s face. “You can give me nothing.” Her bitter hatred made Maisa look away.

  Then, from all the mothers, came murmuring vibrations that grabbed Sable’s attention.

  They were on holy ground, but the General no longer cared. To his troops, he pointed at the mothers and commanded, “Move them out.”

  While his attention was diverted, Maisa seized Sable’s outstretched hand. She was already insisting, “You will receive my instructions.”

  But the instant Maisa touched her, Sable pulled the hair sticks from her head and was snarling, “Neither to give nor receive,” as she plunged them at Maisa’s heart.

  “Damn it and hell,” and more cursing in the General’s head because he had moved too late to stop her.

  Sable had the Mother wrapped in her left arm, pulled close with an expression much like she would kiss, in her right she held the sticks inside Maisa’s chest and threatened to twist. “Tell me what you would have me say.” Sable seemed insanely interested, but Mother Maisa could utter nothing but silent protests.

  When Sable thought Berringer would stop her, she moved them into the light. She stepped out of her shoes as an act of habit before a fight.

  The crowd saw Sable’s back, that she was holding something black, and at her side was the outline of a man.

  She looked completely savage, from the disheveled hair to the blood-covered hand and now bare feet. Berringer had to stop her from turning around.

  While Sable’s focus was on the offending mother, the General signaled for the soldiers to shut the doors, but Sable made Maisa squeak by turning the sticks, telling her, “If they close them, you will die.” She pulled the mother tightly to her chest, dripping poison in her ear, “Now you may use your influence on them instead of me.”

  Berringer stopped the soldiers. He sounded calm, “Sable, you are burning down the house.”

  The simple statement struck her still. It came from someplace far beyond the Basilica, from someplace safe.

  While he had her attention, the General asked the question that could most easily diffuse: “Tell me what you want so we can end this.”

  Sable met his eyes sincerely, nearly begging, “I want them out of my head.”

  She was turning her focus again to Maisa, but Berringer called her back. “Done. It’s done, Sable. They are out of your head.” He tried to make it sound like magic.

  She regarded him as though he were mad. “No, they are not. They are definitely still here.” Her eyes went accusingly to the group of murmuring mothers the soldiers were forcing toward the stairs.

  “Give me a minute and they’ll be gone.”

  She shook her head; he didn’t understand.

  “Sable, we can fix this,” he was thinking of the present, but she was answering for the past, “I can’t see how.”

  “Just give me your hand and nothing will have happened.” Confused about his meaning, she squinted now to see him. It was the same expression he had seen when she had been too lost for words, searching for meaning in the shattered place the Cloitare had left her. When she found him, she appeared baffled to see him, so the General said again, “Just let go with your hand.” She was drifting to see what he meant, so again, he demanded her attention, “Sable, no, give me your hand.”

  And she thought she might, but when she relaxed her grip, Maisa pushed for freedom.

  Reflexively, Sable yanked her close. Then looking the nun over, she saw the scene for what she’d done. She shut her eyes and silently denied it had happened, but tight in her embrace, Maisa was spilling the truth across her hand. Releasing the mother, Sable told the General, “I have to make him forgive me,” and turned into the light.

  ~~~~~~

  Across Erria’s screens, Sable appeared gloriously unkempt. Hair tumbled down, eyes manic, and behind the balcony’s iron bars, the public could see the Queen did not wear shoes. But the worst of it was her red hand, which she smeared dry on her hip and thigh.

  Catherine’s face fell. She turned to the King and watched him sink into his chair with dismay. Catherine called the General.

  Sable took the microphone from the podium, clipped it to her dress, and stepped close to the railing to gaze over the people with rapt adoration. “Hello, my children.”

  The plaza was stilled. “It feels as though I have been away from you for a very long time.” She breathed deep to pull them in, “But it has only been a year since I saw you last.”

  Sable was completely off script when the General answered his phone.

  “I will never lie to you,” Sable said. The air in the plaza rippled with meaning. She let the words settle before confessing, “My meditations were not in a convent. I was among you all the time.”

  “General, the King wants to know what is happening.” Girard heard him organizing movement. Behind Sable in the shadows, a line of his men could be discerned blocking access to the balcony.

  Berringer had more immediate concerns than discussing what had brought them to this. “Ask the King if he wants me to cut power.”

  Remy watched Sable control the plaza. “I was with you to know you. I know you as a mother knows her child, and I love you as only a mother can. I give to you a mother’s love.”

  An unexpected emotion choked the crowd.

  “I am your Queen Mother.” She held them in a tense mental embrace and then smiled. The release broke through the crowd as relief turned into joyous spoken affirmation.

  “Let her go,” but Remy knew it was perilous.

  “I was seven years with you in Erentrude, Alena, and Sierra,” Sable said each name slowly, distinctly. “You accepted me as your sister. You sheltered me. You fed me. You taught me and protected me. I return as your mother to provide the same.” She wiped her hand again on her hip, making her look like she’d been baking in the kitchen.

  “It saddens me to see there is conflict. Our time together is to be prosperous and happy. We are meant to create and unite. But our family is troubled. There is separation. You are all my children. You are all welcome at my table. You are all expected to come.” Sable was the benevolent provider that had called them to dinner.

  “But understand a mother’s love is blind. She sees only her children.” The threat changed her face.

  Remy sat forward with tension.

  “If you cry, I will cry with you. If someone threatens you, I will defend you. If they dare to hurt you, they will know my wrath. If you are lost, I will tear down the forests to find you. I will not allow you to suffer. You are under the protection of your mother.”

  Her words forced some to tears, but for others it ran as a shiver of warning.

  “And your mother is under the protection of King Remius.” She let the warning unsettle before pulling them back into her embrace. “You give me your love and your loyalty, and I take it to defend it. I give it all and myself to the King. Hear me, my children, I am your Queen Mother and I am calling you home.”

&
nbsp; ~~~~~~

  In the King’s rooms, Girard saw Laudin’s pale face turn queasy. “Well, that just undid every promise I made.”

  The King nodded. “It was an escalation.” He considered the threat of Sierra and the loss of the embassy. “But now was not the time for subtleties.”

  Laudin had a hint of hysteria in his voice, “She just laid claim to three countries and called the religious into action.”

  Remy smiled. “She did indeed, and in my name.”

  Catherine smiled with him. Things were going to get interesting. She didn’t want to tell Remy what Sable had done, why she had appeared unannounced and untamed before the public with soldiers at her back. By the end, Sable had them so enthralled it was hardly noticeable, but it was going to be questioned all over Erria, highlighted by Sable’s critics, and parodied by the skeptics. The clergy and the army were working together to keep Mother Maisa alive and deliver her to a military hospital, the hair sticks still lodged in her chest, stabbing her heart with every angry beat.

  “We will of course shield her,” Maisa had frankly dismissed the General’s vaguely spoken suggestions for discretion. “We have never betrayed one of our own.”

  Catherine need only think of a good reason why Sable was speaking with blood on her hand, and she might very well turn that over to her Propaganda and Information Team as well. Known as the PIT, they had the world abuzz today with conspiracies showing President Pavlović’s administration had organized the beating of the religious that had gathered outside the Erentrude Embassy. Catherine would never have let her agents get caught out by something so obvious and simple. She stressed the details. Her agents and agitators would blend all the way down to the litter in their pockets, or their station chiefs would be entering data in a cubicle for the rest of their lives. Had fifty of her agents shown up with matching black boots, cudgels, and haircuts, she’d have killed them all herself. It was going to be the undoing of Pavlović that she could prove ten of them were retired military and three of them worked for government contract security; and if she could prove the three today, she’d have all fifty within the week.

  But the crew of the PIT didn’t have to prove a thing. They could say whatever unfounded, outrageous thing they liked. They turned the whole of their considerable focus to the issue. They bantered in live chats, forums, games, and even dating sites about the heinous, underhanded act of President Pavlović. If someone tried to defend the administration, the PIT would swarm and burn the defender to the ground with scorn, irony, and abuse. When the landscape was blackened, a reasonable voice would emerge to extinguish the smoldering remains with a rational conclusion, designed to align judgment with the realm. Their presence online was intended to dominate, and to set public opinion was played like a game.

  Catherine was thinking they would not yet address Sable’s bloody hand. She would let the PIT start the rumor it was a secret Cloitare ritual—blood of the mother or some such occult-sounding nonsense—and Sable certainly had the scars for it. The goriness of it would further undermine the accessibility of the Cloitare, and Catherine would use it, and anything else she could manipulate, to make a deep division between the public and the clergy.

  ~~~~~~

  “I am a god,” Max announced. He kicked back from the desk with his hands over his head to accept the adulation of his invisible devotees.

  “You glorious son of a bitch.” Enzo knew exactly what it meant. He left Nika watching the televised presentation of the Queen Mother to come behind Max and see the folders he’d recovered from Marlow’s second memory drive.

  “Alright, Marlow, what were you up to?” The first document they opened was from Erentrude’s Ministry of Science and was filled with technical descriptions, percentages, and graphs that neither of them understood. They skipped to the end to read the conclusion clearly stating Ulphia did not have enough concentrated minerals of value to justify mining.

  Max frowned at Enzo. “Yeah, that’s what you think it is.”

  The data was destroyed in another folder, but two images remained. Max drew close to the screen to study a schematic, reading within the cross work of connecting lines the details of sensors, switches, speakers, heat sinks, and master alarm. “Security blueprint,” he confirmed. He opened the next image revealing the street view of a townhouse they both recognized as being in Sierra. For a week, you couldn’t see past the online conspiracies that said it was a Sierran safe house. The theorists claimed an Erentrude intelligence defector had been killed there and showed photos of the man with the King’s flag knotted around his neck and his mouth stuffed with Sierran money. It had come across as so extravagantly sinister, it had to be faked. Most people laughed to think anyone would believe it was real, especially with both countries denying it. Erentrude did not have defectors and Sierra would not lose one if they did.

  Max yanked an imaginary knot around his neck. “You think Marlow?”

  Enzo did. “She was gone that whole month.”

  In a second folder, Marlow’s phone had dumped messages. They read Enzo’s message back to Marlow, “On my way. Are you Ok?”

  “I sent that right after she asked for help.”

  Of the other messages, only one was important: I need you at the train wreck in Eudokia. You will find an injured woman; her picture is attached.

  “Oh, fuck no,” Enzo said when the photo of the Bound Bride opened next. “Fucking fuck no.” He spun around in a fit of frustration and then looked again. “That explains the army and the clergy at the hospital.”

  “Yeah, it does, but it raises more questions than it answers.”

  Enzo was having trouble making it all fit too. “Assuming those are contracts to kill, Marlow was already on the train with the Bound Bride when that job was sent. She asked for help because she was afraid of arrest, but then half a year later, her prints link her to Nika’s escape.” Enzo glanced over the desk to Nika, staring at the screen. “We think Marlow was trying to kill the Bound Bride.”

  “She’s the Queen Mother now.” Nika could not take her eyes off the screen. “Says she’s been living with the people the last seven years. She sounds like …” Nika could not place it, but there was something familiar in the genteel accent. “She sounds …” the voice took her back, and also the face, “She looks …”

  “A bit too zealous,” Max said when he glanced at the screen.

  “Fuck her,” Enzo said. “We need to find Marlow.”

  ~~~~~~

  Roused into righteous action by the Queen Mother’s call to come home, and outraged by the violence inflicted on the family of her followers by President Pavlović’s supporters, the religious took back the Erentrude Embassy in Sierra by midnight. The ceremonial spilling of blood within the Basilica had set the mood, and the Queen Mother’s bloody hand became the symbol for revenge with her followers dyeing their right hands red to surround Pavlović’s home with menacing intentions. The military fired tear gas to disperse them, but when evidence proved the embassy attackers were employed by a security firm with government contracts, the protesters regrouped in larger, more determined numbers. Within days, they forced Pavlović to openly condemn the protests in Alena, and to further distance himself from the scandal, he came just short of supporting King Remius’s presence in Ulphia, saying for their mutual benefit, “For the preservation of peace and order, great leaders call upon the military with a heavy heart.”

  Sable had delivered, but the King had also handed Berringer his ass for letting her go heart-stabbing crazy. The General had argued only once through the whole damning tirade, demanding, “Are you making me responsible for her actions?”

  And when Remy said he was, Berringer was insolent with the presumption, “Then you will allow me free reign to ensure it doesn’t happen again?”

  The issue found the two men standing in silent confrontation. The King felt challenged, knowing whatever Lucas was suggesting would oppose royal rights and would ultimately find Sable at fault. It had taken Remy great eff
ort to be fair while the General refused to back down, but such a conflict between them was so unheard of, he braced himself to be wrong and reluctantly agreed.

  The General went directly to Sable’s rooms to search for weapons. There were several things Remy might consider vague, but not among them were multiple sets of sharpened hair sticks. He found a long, stylish chain belt she had filed at one end to a cutting edge—and could no doubt swing with deadly effect—and finally, beside a sharpening stone was a combat knife. The General offered it all wordlessly to the King.

  Remy flicked his thumb over the cutting edges. He considered the most deliberate alterations for a lengthy time before evenly telling Lucas, “Ensure she does not kill again.”

  On the ride back to the palace, Sable had apologized to the General for the attack in the Basilica, but she looked more humbled to find the table arrangements changed to seat the General to her right at dinner. It was only because Berringer thought it would be pushing Remy too far that he didn’t have all the knives removed from the settings.

  When she tried to leave the private halls, she was respectfully stopped by guards and asked to wait for General Berringer. It quickly became obvious that wherever she went, he intended to walk by her side, but neither would openly acknowledge it. She made only one attempt to end it, telling him when he arrived, “I am just going to the sisters’ room,” and he had responded simply, “Then I will escort you.” Understanding the change was permanent, she had backed away in abashed horror and made no further attempts to leave her rooms, calling instead for the four sisters to join her.

  Because he was going to be responsible for her for the rest of his castrated life, Berringer started training six of his soldiers to counter her flipping monkey moves, but with none of them able to bend backward to play the role of the wind, it wasn’t going well. Lucas knew he needed to talk to his father and have another of his pets sent to teach them, but he constantly worried about revealing his father’s location, and the arrival of a new cartwheeling assassin would overly excite Catherine.