Guardian of the Crown

by Melissa McShane

  When the door closed behind them, Caira began picking up the sofa cushions and restoring them to their places. “You alive, he not. Is good is.”

  “I’m trying to keep that in mind,” Willow said.

  Felix said, “Posea didn’t really like Amberesh. He used to tease her, and not in a funny way. But he was still her brother.”

  Willow sat down on one of the cushions on the floor and buried her face in her hands. “I wish I could leave this place. I’m a constant reminder of what happened.”

  “We could go to Mister Rafferty.”

  “We could. But if we did, we’d be giving up any chance of regaining the Crown.”

  “Oh.” Ernest came over to Willow and licked her hands, inviting her to pet him. “Is that still going to happen?”

  “I don’t know. I found out more about who hired the second assassin, so that should help.” She almost said Unless there’s more than one and decided against scaring Felix any more that day. “Were you worried when I didn’t come back?”

  Felix sat down on Willow’s lap and put his arms around her. “I was, but Hilarion says worry is a waste of imagination, so I tried not to.”

  “I’ve heard that one before. I’m not sure I believe it.”

  “I think you should take a bath now. You smell like the horse stalls.”

  “Thank you, Felix, for that lovely compliment.”

  “I’m supposed to be truthful. Besides, I think you already know.”

  “I do. I’m just not sure I need a reminder.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Willow shut the door to her rooms behind her, took a deep breath, and descended the stairs. They’d never felt so much like a gallows march as they did just then. She hadn’t been down them in three days, the whole time the Serjian Principality mourned Amberesh. It hadn’t taken Janida’s command to keep her there; she didn’t want to encounter anyone for whom she’d be a living reminder of why they mourned. So she’d stayed inside, and eaten off trays Kerish brought for her and Felix, and went slowly mad with captivity.

  Now it was time to face her victim.

  The funeral had been held at dawn, the family had returned well before noon, but Willow had delayed, pretending she was giving Catrela time to recover from the funeral. It was a lie. She’d just been too cowardly to approach her. But it was drawing close to suppertime, and Willow had run out of time and excuses.

  The hallway below her rooms was empty and silent as usual. Janida and Catrela’s apartments both opened off this hall, and neither woman spent much time there during the day. But Willow knew Catrela had confined herself to her rooms during the days of mourning, and hoped the woman wasn’t quite fully recovered, because she wanted privacy for what she had in mind. Then she felt guilty, all over again, at intruding on Catrela’s grief, for imposing herself on her, for making demands…

  She stopped in front of the apartment door and knocked. Felix’s safety was at stake. She could endure embarrassment and guilt for his sake.

  The door opened. A young woman dressed in the shift of a zetesha stood there. Her inquiring expression became flat and cold when she saw Willow. “Yes?” she said in Eskandelic.

  “I need to speak to Catrela.”

  The woman’s lips were tight with anger. She said something in Eskandelic Willow couldn’t understand, but her tone of voice clearly said Willow wasn’t welcome.

  “This isn’t about me, it’s about Felix. Please tell her I’m here.”

  “I know you are here, Willow North,” Catrela said from farther inside the apartment. “I have no interest in speaking with you.”

  “It’s about Felix,” Willow repeated. “Please. Just five minutes. I don’t want to intrude.”

  “Too late for that, it is,” Catrela said, then spoke in Eskandelic. The unfriendly zetesha stepped aside and held the door open for Willow. She didn’t bow even a little bit.

  The room resembled the harem chamber, though it was square instead of round. It had the same low sofas cushioned in green and blue and violet, the same floor pillows scattered throughout the room, and a small multi-sectioned table beneath a stained glass lantern. The smell of sandalwood came from somewhere, and Willow had to stifle the urge to sneeze, it was so strong. She held her breath until the urge passed, then walked forward onto a carpet so plush she was sure she was leaving footprints in it.

  Catrela sat on a floor cushion next to the table. She held something in her hand that sparkled with dizzying bronze, from which dangled a gold chain. She played with the chain, running it through her fingers, tangling it into a web. Willow kept walking until she stood about five feet from the woman. “Catrela,” she said, then couldn’t think how to continue.

  Catrela just looked at her. Her lips thinned into a taut line.

  “I’m sorry,” Willow said. She felt as if the words were boiling out of her. “I never wanted to cause you pain, and I didn’t want to…and I don’t want to make excuses, as if that will make it all right that your son is dead, but he would—”

  “You correct are, that it not all right is,” Catrela said. Her voice sounded distant. “I would have seen you dead in his place. But that a mother’s right is.”

  “I can see how you’d feel that way. I’m not sorry I’m alive. He attacked me.”

  Catrela tangled the chain around her fingers again. “You think he deserved death for that?”

  “No. I’m sorry he’s dead.” A tiny lie. “But I won’t apologize for being alive.”

  Catrela sighed. She put the chain around her neck, and Willow could see the sparkling bronze was a pendant, fat enough that it was probably a locket. “I cannot forgive you his death,” she said, “but I am not a fool. Amberesh made many bad choices, and I blame myself for his behavior. I indulged him far too greatly, my oldest child, my only son. How he treated Alondra…” She shook her head, then stood up, leaning heavily on the table as if she were an ancient crone. “I can forgive you for having survived when he did not.”

  “Thank you,” Willow said. “I wish I’d told someone he was following me. Maybe this would have turned out differently.”

  “Secrets necessary are but not safe, to ones such as we are.” Catrela took a seat on one of the sofas and waved in the direction of the other. Willow sat. “But there another secret is, and I think it your purpose in coming is.”

  “I need to know who’s trying to kill Felix. And I need your help to do it.”

  “It a difficult prospect still is. Your information good is, but not enough.”

  “I don’t know. Kerish said it was a large organization—the one Amberesh belonged to—but he couldn’t have been close to many of the members.” Willow watched Catrela carefully for some reaction to her using Amberesh’s name, but Catrela just had her thin eyebrows narrowed in thought.

  “I know the names of his friends, and can discover which of them belong to that organization,” she said, “but determining which of them has lost his pendant, more difficult is.”

  “If you can tell me who to investigate, I can find that out.”

  Catrela raised an eyebrow. “You confident are.”

  “I have a plan. It might not be a good plan, but I think it will work. Do they have a…a house or a building or somewhere they all meet?”

  Catrela shook her head. “But there are other events, other locations. What do you intend?”

  Willow smiled. “I intend to be bait.”

  ***

  The morning light struck the pool surrounding the Varisi Palace and turned it into a brass mirror, reflecting not the palace but the sky, high above. A brisk, warm wind blew, surprisingly, from inland, bringing with it the scents of exotic trees and flowers Willow couldn’t begin to picture. The carriage was approaching the palace along a causeway whose surface was about a foot above the water. Willow looked over the edge and saw her own reflection, yellow and wobbly. Probably not a good idea to take its imperfect image seriously, because the giorjanesh she wore was outlandish even by Eskandelic standards,
but it was also beautiful, and its night-blue satin suited her coloring. The fitted bodice and narrow skirt slit to the knee were actually comfortable, even if the cropped bodice did expose several inches of her midsection to view.

  It was the drape, three feet wide and six or more feet long and embroidered with silver stars, that made the whole thing awkward. It wrapped around her in a complicated fashion, and Caira had cautioned her about standing from a sitting position. Willow hitched it up and flexed her feet again. She definitely missed her own shoes.

  The palace looked more like a collection of warehouses than a palace, and she only called it that because Kerish had. It didn’t even have a domed roof, or a series of domed roofs. The stone was dark yellow, stained green at the bottom where the water level had changed over the years. At present, the water in the pool was low enough to reveal that the palace stood on enormous pillars like the causeway, the gaps between them coming to pointed arches through which little boats floated, propelled by men wielding long poles. Willow watched one of them glide through and disappear into the darkness beneath the arches. The boat had passengers. Was that something anyone might do?

  She turned to ask Kerish about it and was interrupted by Felix, saying, “Do you think Nanitan will win?”

  “She’s been best in her class twice now, though not last year. I think she has a good chance.” Kerish pointed. “That’s where the dog owners enter, there at the top. We’ll go in below, straight to the competition floor.”

  A round courtyard large enough to fit a dozen carriages stood in front of the main palace entrance, a ten-foot-tall pair of doors made of beaten brass that had Willow’s skin vibrating when she were within twenty feet of them. It would be a pleasant buzz so long as she got away from it soon. One nice thing Aurilien had over Umberan—no solid metal doors to make her tingle or itch.

  They waited in line for a few minutes—Kerish was apparently less willing than his mother to trade on the family name—until their carriage arrived at the door. Willow stood, gingerly, certain the giorjanesh drape was going to collapse in a pile of fabric around her, and with Kerish’s help managed to wobble out of the carriage. She kept a grateful grip on his hand when she was on solid ground and adjusted the gold pendant that burned a little patch of skin just above her breastbone. “Now what?”

  “Now we walk around and let people get a good look at us,” Kerish said. He was worth looking at in his trousers that bloused at the ankle, a fine linen shirt with full sleeves, and a vest heavily embroidered with an abstract pattern. “And see if we can find our suspects.”

  “I don’t like being looked at,” Felix said. He was dressed in the same kind of clothes Kerish wore, but he’d managed to rumple himself in the ten-minute drive from the Residence. His bodyguards hovered nearby, sweating in their armor.

  “They’ll probably be looking at Willow, because she’s so beautiful,” Kerish said.

  “Kerish,” Willow said, blushing at the look he gave her, intimate and knowing.

  “That’s all right, then,” Felix said. “Can we go see the dogs now?”

  Willow held her breath as they passed through the doors, which at that proximity gave her a full-body tingle too intense to be pleasant. Gooseflesh rose up on her arms, and she clutched Kerish’s hand more tightly. “I forgot about the doors,” Kerish murmured in her ear. “They must be a misery.”

  “I can endure.” Willow rubbed one arm and ran her tongue over her teeth, stilling the vibration the brass had sent up inside her mouth. “Not that it’s enjoyable. Besides, it’s passing. And this place is beautiful.”

  The interior of the palace was comfortably cool, and looked cooler thanks to the blue mosaics covering the walls and ceiling, laced with yellow tiles that picked out a lovely floral pattern. Willow’s shoes were thin enough that she could feel the ripple of the stone tiles underfoot. They might be more like her own shoes than she realized.

  The hallway was full, but not crowded, and no one seemed inclined to speak to them. Willow kept a tight grip on Kerish’s hand and clutched Felix’s with her other hand. Crowded or not, the last thing she needed was to lose the boy in these halls.

  Ahead, she heard the murmur of many voices in a large space, and sharp echoing sounds that she realized were dogs barking. Then they came out of the hall, and Willow stopped, momentarily overwhelmed by all the metal. It wasn’t so much that there was a lot of it as that it was everywhere, in dog collars and lead chains and knives and cages. The room was as large as the Conclave chamber in the Jauderish, but where that was a vast open bowl, this was a flat plain, studded with pillars holding up the ceiling. A draft from somewhere carried the faint smell of hundreds of dogs. That it wasn’t stronger, Willow put down to a miracle of engineering.

  Felix grabbed her hand and tugged her along. “Come on, Willow, let’s get closer.”

  “Slow down, Felix. The dogs aren’t going anywhere.” Though they did seem to be in motion, dogs going from marked areas on the floor to an oval near the center, where boxes and hoops and tiny fences were set up. A black dog that looked like Maresh was trotting around the oval, leaping over the fences and through the hoops with no apparent instruction from its owner. Other dogs milled about nearby, ignoring each other, which to Willow seemed like a greater feat of training.

  A low rope fence separated the dogs from the passersby, most of them dressed the way Willow and Kerish were. Beyond the fence were a series of bays defined by cages and more rope, some empty, but most containing dogs and their owners. Willow hitched up her giorjanesh again and held out her hand for a nearby dog to sniff. It did so without interest, and its owner whistled it away. Probably that was inappropriate behavior, interacting with the competitors.

  “Kerish,” someone said, and Willow turned to see a pair of young women dressed in giorjaneshes, one cream and rose, the other shades of green. The one in green said something in Eskandelic, then added in Tremontanese, “Please introduce us to the young King.”

  “Of course,” Kerish said. “Felix, this is Tarjian Emelda and Jamighian Ruelle. Ladies, his Majesty King Felix of Tremontane, and his guardian Willow North.”

  “I cannot believe anyone would wish his Majesty to assassinate!” Emelda said. “He sweet is.”

  “I’m not sweet,” Felix said indignantly. The two women giggled.

  “We’ll find the ones behind the assassin and stop them,” Willow said. “I won’t let it happen again.”

  The two women eyed her. “I suppose you would stop him,” Emelda said. “Permanently.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Now the two women eyed each other. “Some call you murderer,” said Ruelle, “but we think you had reason. Amberesh a…I do not know your word. A rial-shaad was.”

  “He was my fuoreno,” Kerish said tightly.

  “Then you know it true is,” Ruelle said. She touched Willow’s arm in a confiding way. “You have done us all a great favor.”

  “I was just defending myself,” Willow said.

  “Willow killed someone to protect me,” Felix said. “But that doesn’t make her a bad person.”

  “Of course not, your Majesty,” said Emelda, crouching to put herself at his eye level. “You fortunate are, to have so loyal a guardian.”

  “We have to look at the dogs now,” Kerish said, taking Willow’s arm and tugging her away.

  They walked a few paces down the row of dogs waiting their turn at the oval, followed discreetly by the bodyguards. Willow said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Is it too strange that I don’t regret Amberesh’s death, but it still makes me furious to hear others speak ill of him?”

  “I think it makes sense. What’s a rial-shaad?”

  “A word I’d rather not repeat where Felix can hear.”

  “I know all sorts of bad words,” Felix said. “Some of them I learned from Willow.”

  “Let’s not talk about that,” Willow said. “Look, there’s another dog starting the course. Do all of them have to perform?”r />
  “This is just one group. The khetashi,” Kerish said. “The stevaashi are judged on their appearance and gait, and the lehndashi did their trials last week—they’re the hunters. Those have a solo category and a pack category.”

  “Nanitan is stevaashi,” Felix said. “Jauman bred and trained her, but he’s not allowed to show her himself until he’s an adult.”

  “He must be very excited about today, then,” Willow said. She looked around, wondering if any of the young men were the one she was looking for, and instead caught the curious gazes of a dozen bystanders, all staring at her openly. “Kerish,” she said quietly.

  “What—oh,” Kerish said. “I guess you’re famous.”

  “They all look like they’re trying to decide if they want to attack.”

  “Or they could just think you’re beautiful, and can’t stop looking at you.”

  “That seems highly unlikely.”

  “It’s why I’m staring at you.” Kerish took her hand and kissed it, his lips lingering on her knuckles.

  “Kerish! We’re in public!”

  “Mother would want it to be clear that you’re under Serjian protection. And I—” he took her other hand and held it—“want it to be clear that your heart has already been given.”

  Willow gave up. “Can you help me find our suspects?”

  “Of course. Let’s walk, then.”

  Even with the bodyguards flanking them, she still felt uncomfortably exposed, and vulnerable, with Kerish holding one of her hands and Felix the other. The short sleeves of the giorjanesh made wearing the forearm knife impossible. If someone else decided assassination was a good idea, she’d be powerless to defend Felix. She listened to his chatter with half an ear and glared at anyone who met her gaze. That’s right, I’m dangerous, so don’t try anything.

  She shrugged to shift the annoying pendant to a different spot. She hated carrying gold, and if she cared about such things she’d be annoyed at having to wear something that clashed with the rest of her clothing, but her plan depended on the right person recognizing the pendant.