by Bell, Hilari
“I heard someone’s come about Meg.”
Master Merkle had already dressed for dinner; his coat wasn’t crusted with gold, but the weave of the cloth was finer than the Heir’s. His wife, crowding in behind him, was plump and pretty, with soft brown hair and a comfortably worn face filled with anxiety. Her silk gown was almost fancy enough to match Rupert’s garb.
“There’s something odd going on, Pa.” Mistress Agnes handed him the note. “This was sent to Meg yesterday, but I didn’t write it.”
Meg’s mother pushed under her husband’s arm to read along with him — she evidently didn’t read as fast as he did, for she squeaked in protest when the paper crumpled in his clenched fist.
“This is what brought her out of the palace?” The question was aimed at Rupert, and Master Merkle’s broad shoulders seemed to swell with anger.
“So we believe. We found it hidden in—”
“Then you’d best find out what kind of court chicanery you got my daughter involved in and fetch her back. Her and her babe, unharmed. And when you do they can come to us, and not mess with crazy dangerous experiments, turning them into—”
His wife had been prying the note out of his fist. Now he broke off, glancing at his hand — probably looking to see if her nails had left marks.
“I’m sure Rupert is doing his best to find her.” Mistress Merkle spoke absently, her gaze on the note. “Though this does look like someone plotted to lure her out, and there’s no one we know with reason to do such a thing.”
Court chicanery. The words hung in the air like smoke, and Rupert shriveled under Master Merkle’s furious gaze. But he spoke with surprising dignity.
“Since we’ve now confirmed that Mistress Agnes didn’t write it, I shall try to find out who did. If you’ll excuse me.”
Master Merkle had to step aside to clear the door, and he loomed as poor Rupert brushed by him. We listened to the Heir’s footsteps as he went rapidly down the hall — ’twas a wonder he wasn’t running. But the farther away his daughter’s lover got, the more Master Merkle’s shoulders deflated. By the time we heard the front door open and close his anger had drained away, leaving only a worried father.
“You can’t keep chasing him off,” Mistress Merkle said. “Like it or not, our Meg’s fallen for him. I grant that it’s a waste of her training, but she’ll have the Heir’s ear. Someday the Liege’s ear, and that’s worth something. Besides ... he loves her, too.”
“He’s in love with her now,” Master Merkle said. “Who’s to say how he’ll feel in a year, or five, or twenty. That’s what marriage is for, curse it.”
I thought that marriage should be more than a shackle to bind people who might fall out of love. If it wasn’t for Michael’s insistence on secrecy I could have put my arm around Kathy, and told her about the loving partnership my parents had. But she was already speaking to the Merkles, her voice soft with compassion.
“We can’t find any reason for someone at court to lure her out either, and I wondered ... do you think Meg could have written it herself? If she wanted to hide somewhere, mayhap till after the child is born, where would she go?”
Master Merkle growled under his breath. “Curse the lot of them, thinking to force their magica potions on my daughter. There’s plenty of gifts that have nothing to do with magic.”
He didn’t need to look at the riches with which he’d surrounded his family — his determination, and the business it had created, were as much a part of the people in this room as their bones.
“You must have made some enemies, coming up like you did.” I spoke for the first time, and everyone looked as startled as if a chair had asked them to shed a pound or two.
“Not as many as you’d think.”
Mistress Merkle nodded agreement as her husband spoke.
“I try to treat folk fairly. It makes for better business, in the long run. There’s a few who don’t like me, I can’t deny, but none of them would try to hurt my family. No, it’s from the court this is coming, from the life he dragged her into. I didn’t even want her to go to university!”
“You know perfectly well,” said Agnes, “that nobody drags Meg into anything. You didn’t want her to go to university — said it wasn’t a proper pursuit for a lady — but you ended up paying for a full four years and a Master of Law degree.”
“For all the good it’ll do us, wasting her sharp mind as that young ... man’s leman.”
I knew several of the words he’d chosen not to use, and I thought Michael quite courageous when he spoke up.
“Yet if she fled, as Kathy seems to think, she didn’t come to you. I understand why you might want to conceal her, but Rupert loves her. To leave him so frightened would be terribly cruel.”
“Which is why Meg wouldn’t do it,” Agnes said. “She might want to run away from court — she did want to! But she’d never leave Rupert, not like this, without a word of explanation.”
“And she’d no need to run farther than this house,” her father said. “I don’t have to conceal my daughter in order to protect her. From anyone.”
My father hadn’t been strong enough to protect his family — but if he’d been able to, he would have.
Michael looked envious, Kathy looked wistful, and I resolved to become a father who both could and would protect his children from everything.
But as the crest over Master Merkle’s door reminded me, that took money, and I hadn’t yet figured out how to get it.
Unless, of course, someone was willing to offer a reward for Mistress Margaret’s safe return?
Before I floated that idea, it might be a good idea to make sure she was still alive to be returned. If she wasn’t, asking for money would make me look like a total cur. And while I didn’t mind showing Michael that side of me — he’s seen it often enough — it wasn’t something I wanted to display to Kathy.
“We should go on to the Pig, and see if Mistress Margaret turned up there,” I said.
Polite protestations would have been ridiculous, so no one asked us to stay. We went back out to the street, where we found Rupert pacing as he waited for us.
“That man intimidates me,” he said. “Did you learn anything?”
“The Merkles have no enemy who’d seek to harm their daughter,” Michael told him.
“So ’tis court chicanery after all.” Rupert sighed. “But except for Father, I can’t think of anyone at court who’d do this.”
“No woman who’d have a chance at you if Margaret was out of the way?” I kept my voice light, but the question was serious. Kathy wasn’t the only eligible girl who’d been summoned to court to woo the Heir, once his father realized he was serious about the Giftless girl he’d picked up at the university.
Rupert shook his head. “I made it perfectly clear I was committed to Meg.”
I looked at Kathy, who shrugged agreement.
“I like your notion,” Michael put in. “Let us go to the Pig in a Basket, and see if Mistress Meg went there yesterday.”
So we did, and for once our destination was only a short walk from the Merkles’ mansion. The innkeeper, the tapster and the serving maids all knew Meg by sight, and none of them had seen her in the last week.
“She never even made it to the inn.” Rupert’s voice held a quiet menace that reminded you just who he really was. “At nine in the morning, on busy streets, there’s no place between here and the palace that she could have suffered an accident without it being reported to the town guard. Someone... I’m going to have a talk with my father.”
He turned and strode off, and I found myself feeling an incongruous sympathy for the High Liege of all the United Realm.
By the time we reached the palace ’twas near dark. Lighted windows glowed throughout the sprawling pile, but in one wing the whole lower floor was alight, and a carriage was pulling up to the door with a late arrival — clearly some court function was in progress.
Except for Rupert, we still weren’t dressed for court. Kat
hy came closest, but even her well-cut habit was more suitable for a morning ride than palace ballrooms. As for Fisk and me...
The front door opened when Rupert approached — with a party going on, the servants would be alert to admit visitors. But when Fisk and I stepped across the threshold a manservant came from behind one door to block me, and another popped out and seized Fisk’s elbow. The master of household was speaking to Rupert, and the footman before me murmured, “You want to go round back, to the stables. Grooms don’t—”
“They’re with me,” Kathy said. “And they’re coming in.”
Kathy had lived in this palace as a guest of the High Liege for almost a year, and the servants were accustomed to taking her orders. But not orders as odd as this. The man’s mouth opened to protest ... and then closed.
“Yes, Mistress Katherine.”
I was sorry when he stepped aside to let me pass — I’d rather have gone back to the stables than witness what looked to be an ugly family fight. And having that fight here and now was probably a bad idea.
My father once told me that calling the court that surrounded the High Liege a nest of vipers was an insult to snakes. He went on to claim that most of those who populated the place were leeches, only with a ferret’s viciousness. He’d capped it by saying that this wasn’t really an adequate description, because no animal but man had so much capacity to spy and lie.
So ’twas with a sinking heart that I followed Kathy, who caught up with Rupert just as he reached another set of double doors, beyond which the wailing cry of viols sounded faintly. Two more servants stood ready to open these doors, clad in an elegant blue and silver livery that was doubtless better suited for the event transpiring within than Fisk’s and my traveling clothes.
Fisk, standing a pace or so behind Kathy, had assumed a stance of respectful servitude, and his clothing, always neater than mine, might let him pass as her footman, or even a clerk, and thus become almost invisible in that gathering.
There was no excuse for a groom — which I evidently looked like — to follow the Heir into a ballroom. Worrying about being underdressed should be beneath a knight errant, but I was still relieved when Kathy caught Rupert’s arm and dragged him aside, planting her heels and pulling with all her slight weight. She may have been aided by the fact that the footmen, after a glance at Fisk and me, had not opened the doors.
“Are you out of your mind?” she demanded. “You can’t talk to him about Meg in there. Go to his study and have someone send for him.”
“Everyone at court already knows about Meg and me.” Rupert might have walked off his anger ... but what remained was the determination of fear. “And I want the rest of you there as witnesses. We forgot the note, but Father knows you well enough to take your word for it.”
“That doesn’t mean he’ll accept my conclusions,” Kathy said. “We should— Curse it!”
The doors swung open and a man and woman, sparkling with gems and flushed with heat or drink, started out of the room. They stopped abruptly when they saw the Heir. The man began to bow, and the woman to curtsey, but Rupert was already brushing past them.
With another oath, one so pungent it made Fisk blink, Kathy shot into the crowd after him. I met my partner’s gaze and he shrugged.
“We shouldn’t let her go it alone.”
I wasn’t so sure of that. ’Twas Kathy’s choice to involve herself, after all. But I had agreed to let Fisk make some of the decisions, so he could also lead the way. I gestured for him to proceed, and he cast me an irked look, but he squared his shoulders valiantly and plunged after Katherine.
I could see why he might be intimidated. Silken skirts swayed like flowers in a stiff breeze, and some of the younger men wore dress swords with jeweled hilts, suspended from bright sashes. The whole room gleamed, candlelight and phosperlight reflecting from crystal chandeliers, mirrors on the walls, and gold and silver frogging on the gentlemen’s coats. In this crowd, Rupert might be modestly dressed. A tall chair stood, empty, on a dais at the far end of the vast parquet floor, and we worked our way toward it through a mass of sweating, perfumed bodies.
The High Liege stood in a cooler corner, near the open terrace doors. He wasn’t dressed any more richly than his son, but there was no mistaking him: the attention of everyone nearby was centered on him.
He broke off his quiet conversation, and all but one of the men he’d been speaking with moved aside as Rupert strode up to him. The man who remained was middle-aged and portly, with the flat calculating eyes of a hungry lizard. He nodded courteously to the Heir, his bland expression unchanging.
The Liege’s gaze flickered past his son to Kathy. He started to smile, but then his gaze moved on to Fisk and me and his brows shot up instead.
“They’re helping me look for Meg,” Rupert said. “And we’ve discovered that she was lured out of the palace by a note, forged in her sister’s hand. She’s been taken.”
He’d sense enough, barely, not to accuse his father outright of having done the deed. But the thought was in his face, his voice. The eyes of the courtiers around us glittered with interest, even as they politely turned their backs, to give the Liege some privacy. They didn’t move very far away.
“Your Highnesses,” the man who had stayed said precisely, “this probably isn’t the best place to discuss—”
I thought he had a point, but the Liege didn’t seem to care about the listening courtiers any more than Rupert did.
“If this note was in the sister’s hand,” he said reasonably, “then mayhap the sister wrote...” Kathy was already shaking her head. “Indeed. Well, if this note — conveniently left behind by Mistress Margaret, I take it? If this note was forged, have you considered that Margaret herself might have written it?”
Rupert was fathoms deep in love. This thought had never so much as crossed his mind, and he stared at his father in astonishment. “Why would she do that?”
“Oh for pity’s sake! If half the alchemists in the Realm were about to start testing magica potions on me, I’d run for the hills. I know one of your professors said that Gifts could be triggered if the forming child received the right stimulus at the right time, but that sounds cracked to me. And you were supposed to be studying history and law, not taking classes in biology and this new-fangled chemistry.”
’Twas clearly an old argument, and Rupert brushed it aside. “Meg didn’t have to lie if she wanted to leave me, and she knew it. Someone took her.”
Once more the accusation was clear. A slender man, sporting fewer jewels than most, stood not far off staring at a painting. Another couple faced each other as if in conversion, but neither of them said a word. It looked like my father was right about the court.
“Your Highness.” The portly man’s voice was firmer now. “This really isn’t the place for a personal discussion. Mayhap the Liege could retire to his study, when the late supper is served, and you can deal with this matter then?”
The Liege looked around, as if noticing his audience for the first time. “Arnold’s right,” he said. “I can get away in a few hours, and we’ll—”
“A few hours?” Rupert’s voice was now loud enough that the ears around us no longer had to strain. “I just told you Meg’s been kidnapped! Every hour we waste, she gets farther away and the trail gets colder. But that’s fine with you, isn’t it? You never wanted me to marry her, and now she’s pregnant you’ve done something about it!”
The individual gasps were so soft I couldn’t say that any one person had done it — but because everyone did it at the same moment the sound was perfectly clear. The slim man left the painting and hurried off toward a knot of well-dressed women.
Arnold, who I thought must be one of the Liege’s advisors, winced.
The ruler of the United Realm rolled his eyes, and gave up any hope of keeping his family quarrels private.
“Why under two moons would I kidnap the girl? You’re not the first Heir to take a mistress, or get children on her either. Pleas
e, credit me with a little sense. If I wanted you to lose interest in her — which I do — kidnapping her is the worst way to accomplish it. You’re going to be obsessed with this until the chit turns up, probably hale and hearty, having taken a notion to visit the seaside or some such thing.”
“You took her.” Rupert’s voice was low only because he was speaking through clenched teeth. He drew breath and unlocked his jaw before going on. “You took her to keep her from me, to make me forget her, but I never will. Father, I beg you. Where is she?”
“I didn’t take her.” The Liege’s voice was almost gentle, despite the exasperation in it. “And I’ve no idea where she is.”
“You’re lying.”
The Liege’s face hardened, but he made a visible effort and held onto his temper. “Why does love make ordinarily sensible people into idiots? You can run your personal life however you see fit, but your child — at least, your first legitimate child — must be born Gifted. So if the girl has run off, for her own sake you should let her—”
“My dear, keep your voice down.” A dark-haired woman rustled up and put a gentle hand on the Liege’s arm. Judging by the richness of her dress and the concern on her face, this was probably the Liege Lady. I had heard she was beautiful ... but that didn’t do her justice. She was so stunning, I almost forgot to pay attention as she went on. “You know you don’t mean that. No matter what the future holds, she’s carrying his child. She must be—”
“I do mean it,” said the High Liege. “If he married the wench, I’d have to find some way to dissolve it. That, or disinherit him for Liam, who probably wouldn’t give me half this much—”
“Fine,” said Rupert. “Do whatever you have to. You always do. But I’m going to find Meg. And then, you and I will have a reckoning!”
“You don’t mean that, either,” the Liege Lady said.
But Rupert had already turned away, moving toward the open terrace doors. A hum of conversation started up behind him.
Advisor Arnold’s mouth looked like he’d bitten into a lemon, but the damage had been done.
