Still, His Highness prates on about new eras and enlightenment and the beneficent role of government, and all I can wonder is, where did he learn those words? Grimm is a good man, or at least a man who aspires to be good, but he’s never been one for political theory and a life of the mind. I suspect Queen Perrault has been reading him books again, and talking up the future of Talos that they will leave for their son.
Even to that matter, what will happen if the queen bears a girl? This I worry about as well, for matters of the royal succession are my purview. The question of inheritance has dogged our politics this last decade and more. Grimm seems certain his sweet wife is bringing a son into the world. I would not wager more than even odds that this will be true, royal seed being no more or less prone than any other to defining the gender of the offspring in advance.
And it is not as if the ordinary affairs of the kingdom have taken some sort of departure from their fractious norms during this period of royal pregnancy. As ever our neighboring kingdoms bear their weight down upon Talos’s diminutive borders. Mountebanks come to town to swindle, beaten wives set fire to their husbands, horses are stolen, marriageable daughters elope with unsuitable sons, and all the petty, sordid dreams of people find their outlets in matters that ever seem to need my attention in order to be resolved.
All of this passes below King Grimm’s notice like pond muck beneath the rounded bottom of a swan. He abides only on the surface of all things, pleasantly thoughtless and small of mind, though he cuts a fine figure parading through the streets of Talos City on his pale charger, gleaming in bright armor and waving to the cheering crowds.
Perhaps it is enough for a kingdom to have such a king. Queen Perrault certainly fills in some of his deficiencies, but in her condition she seems to spend far more time closeted with that infernal, clanking priest, and the only doctor she will trust, Dr. M. T. Scholes. That strange red-bearded man from the Nordic countries claims learnings beyond our poor Sorbonne-and Heidelberg-educated physicians who serve the court and country of Talos as ably as they might and perhaps no better than they should.
In all of this, there is a wrongness. My bones tell me so, and I have been Lord High Counselor all these years since I helped Godfrey the Shrewd choke on a peach pit. My bones are smarter than my thoughts, but they do not communicate so clearly as to put those intelligences to use.
So I badger my informants and walk the halls in slippers and scent the winds as best I can. A plot is afoot, and I do not know its name or nature, but I will discover it. And when I do, I will act in the best interests of king and country.
That is who I am. The best interests, walking on two feet and talking in a voice like a rusty hinge, but always watching, listening, scenting for trouble.
And trouble there is to come.
NARRATIVE INTERLUDE THE SECOND: CHRISTENING BEAUTY
The Royal Palace of Talos was bedecked with even more finery than had graced the wedding of Grimm and Perrault. Strings of spark-lights had been run along the gutters and the ridgepoles of every roof from the stable privy to the King’s Tower. The mechanical roof over the Great Hall was repaired and lubricated so that it could be opened to the sky for the first time in two generations. Every flower bed on the grounds was fresh and beautiful. Every vase within the palace halls nodded with fresh blossoms.
Talos City was hardly any less beautiful. The meanest drudges in their hovels had scrubbed and whitewashed their tiny, grubby doorsteps. The Brass Quarter turned out their own hand-cast finery upon lintels and window boxes and eaves.
Father Brassbound watched over the little princess. Zellandyne was only a week old and, as the maids said, still warm from her mother’s womb. Somehow he and Queen Perrault had kept the truth of her pregnancy secret, relying on only one more conspirator, Dr. M. T. Scholes. A foreigner overflowing with scientific charm, the doctor’s trust could be assured under the veil of medical discretion and a goodly sum transferred in payment. Even better, much like the priest himself, Scholes had no familial or political loyalties in Talos to tempt him to betray his well-bought confidences.
Zellandyne was an unquiet child. Even now, she fussed in the priest’s arms. Of course his brass limbs were not the soft warmth of her mother’s breast, but Father Brassbound privately thought that the girl somehow intuited the lie of her birth and was struggling to force the secret out.
King Grimm had been taken aback when his beloved child turned out not to be a son, but he quickly recovered and swore love eternal to his surprising little daughter.
Now, this day, they would be christening Zellandyne, welcoming her into the protection of the Church and the arms of society. She was bound for greatness, indubitably so being born to the throne, or at least being born to be marriageable for the throne. All the nobility and wealth of Talos was gathering even now in the Great Hall along with assorted dignitaries and nominal allies from the surrounding kingdoms and farther afield.
They had even invited the Court of Seasons. That had disturbed Father Brassbound a bit—the Church did not enjoy warm relations with the fae, to put the matter mildly—but Queen Perrault had assured him there was little chance of the king and queen attending, let alone their obnoxious swarm of children. Still, the Talosoise Mistress of Protocol had invited all twelve of the unholy brood by name. They were familial relations to the queen, after all.
A knock echoed from the door of the little tiring room where Father Brassbound currently awaited events in the Great Hall. “Come in,” he called.
The king slipped in, the anxious face of a guard close behind. He smiled and pushed it shut, leaving privacy for himself, his daughter, and the priest.
“How is she?” Grimm’s great, noble face with its aquiline nose and glittering eyes was as paternal and wise as ever.
Father Brassbound sometimes thought Grimm and Talos both were quite fortunate that the face did not match the mind behind those eyes. “Fussing, as you can see.” The priest hitched his arms a bit and elevated Zellandyne so the king could examine his daughter. “She is as ready as a child her age can be, however.”
Grimm thought this over for a moment, his lips moving as he worked through some difficulty with Father Brassbound’s statement. “And the queen?” the king finally ventured.
“I would not know, Your Highness,” the priest replied truthfully. “I have been here with the baby this past half hour, and the princess was brought to me by Dr. Scholes. The queen has been about her own affairs this morning, preparing for the christening.” All their plotting was long since done, the main point of it already come and gone with the birth and presentation of the princess.
“Oh,” the king said. He paused again, lost in the very short train of his thoughts. Then he visibly brightened. “Oh, yes, I just saw her.” He looked around a moment, as if expecting to discover someone new in the small tiring room. “I need to tell you, Father…” Grimm’s voice trailed off.
“Yes?” the priest asked patiently, jiggling the child who was beginning to whine. He was quite used to the king’s ways.
“Winter and Summer did not come.” Grimm’s lips moved silently a moment. “But their children have.”
Father Brassbound sighed. The Coven of the Seasons. A swarm of difficult children ranging in age from eighteen to six. Witches. Fae. Magical people of some sort, though opinions differed. And they were said to be hellions, setting fire to cottages and souring milk across the provinces of their parents’ demesne.
“Thank you, sire,” he said to the king. “I trust they will not disrupt the ceremony.”
The actual baptism itself would be brief enough, a mercy for all concerned but especially priest and child. However, there was to be a lengthy presentation of gifts, a demonstration of goodwill, and—for some, at least—loyalty to the new princess who would someday sit on the throne of Talos. Plenty of opportunity for mischief.
“Who won’t?” the king asked brightly. He smiled with regal dignity at the priest. “I believe I am supposed to be at the queen
’s side now.”
“Of course, Your Highness.” Father Brassbound watched his monarch slip back out the door, leaving behind the usual cloud of vagueness and confusion that he seemed to spread like some magical aura.
He looked down at the princess. Little Zellandyne was fussing, but her eyes were heavy. “Let’s hope you take after your mother,” the priest whispered with a mix of kindness and frustration in his voice.
Father Brassbound entered the Great Hall with the princess still in his arms. The roof was open, starlings circling overhead under a clear, blue spring sky. There were more people gathered here than he’d ever seen in the palace. Their breath was like the sound of a distant ocean, a great tide of open mouths and wide eyes, heads bobbing as people craned for a glimpse of the princess in his arms. All around the audience, lights glittered and bunting hung, while banners depended rippling and bright from beams and buttresses.
He walked with measured tread to the altar that had been laid on a dais at the head of the Great Hall. A baptismal font was set before it, already filled with water that had been boiled on orders of Dr. Scholes and blessed prior to the ceremony by Father Brassbound himself. He trusted the water had been kept warm as he’d requested, as that made matters with the child much less difficult.
At the altar, facing the audience, he took a deep breath. The king and queen stood before him, just below the font, their backs to the mass filling the Great Hall.
“We are gathered here,” Father Brassbound began, feeling the tremolos and imperfections in his voice box as strongly as ever, “to celebrate the birth of the princess Zellandyne Olivia Rosebriar de Talos, and to welcome her into the embrace of the Holy Mother Church.”
The crowd sighed, as if the distant surf of their breathing had decided to sweep across the intervening landscape in a tidal surge.
“Let all who stand witness before the altar this day, flesh and brass alike, know that the princess Zellandyne is offered to the Lord by her parents, the good King Grimm and his wife, Queen Perrault.”
He held the child high so that everyone could see her in her white christening gown, itself a fall of lace and silk and fine-grained lawn that made her look like a small, squirming confection. Zellandyne woke up at the motion and opened her mouth wide in preparation for belting forth an outraged squall.
Father Brassbound swooped the child down to the font. “I enjoin you now and commit your soul to the Holy Mother Church,” he said swiftly, settling Zellandyne into the water, which was thankfully—and as ordered—warm. “As we are so told in holy scripture, therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
The princess was so surprised by the water that her own impending scream was interrupted. He traced the chrism on her forehead, then lifted her up again, dripping water down his own vestments and onto the platform. “I now call forth King Grimm and Queen Perrault,” he said, anxious to hand off the child before she summoned a new burst of infant outrage.
The royal couple ascended to the altar, the queen taking her child from Father Brassbound’s hands. He glanced up at the open sky, wondering for a moment whether God might reach down with lightning or some other sign of divine disfavor at the deception he had assisted the queen in maintaining regarding the gestation and birth of the princess.
The heavens remained stubbornly placid, while the assembled multitudes in the Great Hall began to cheer.
Then came the presentation of the gifts.
It was a ceremony of some hours, even though only those of the highest station were permitted to bring forth their gifts personally. Many more people had been asked to leave their offerings on tables in the courtyard, where the Mistress of Protocol and her aides had bustled about making notes of who, what, and when for the inevitable flood of royal thank-you missives that would follow in response over the weeks to come. Still, members of the court, heads of the guilds, senior leaders of Talos City, foreign dignitaries—there were dozens upon dozens of persons whose rank required they make their presentations in the hall.
And the gifts were wondrous. Cunning little clockwork toys from the workshops of Venice and Trondheim and even distant Kwangchow. An entire steam railroad, with little cars the princess could ride in, or, when a bit older, upon, large enough to fill one of the palace’s courtyards. Bolt upon bolt of the finest Eastern silks. A trunk filled with ornate silver canisters holding spices from all the warm islands of the southern sun. An ocelot with a jeweled harness that had been trained to fetch and carry. Vases and statues and paintings enough to fill a summer house.
The stream of presents was a panoply of wealth and beauty and exotic curiosities that would amuse and delight Zellandyne through much of her childhood. Father Brassbound wondered how much of the glittering pile a child would trade for a stick horse or a sweet little poppet, but he supposed the king and queen were well positioned to provide a stable full of stick horses and a houseful of poppets should the little princess so desire. These gifts, he knew, were more about the giver. Many contained messages to the royal court in that strange sort of encoding that the wealthy and the powerful used between and among themselves.
The long line of gift bearers eventually shrank to a little cluster of well-dressed children of various ages. Father Brassbound realized these must be the coven from the Court of Seasons.
“I am Tertia,” announced one of the oldest girls in the group. She was almost plump, with long chestnut hair and piercing gray eyes. Not beautiful, perhaps, but comely and with a certain sly charm about her. “We come to offer our kindest regards and blessings to the princess Zellandyne, as well as the goodwill of our parents, the King of Winter and the Queen of Summer.”
“Our most humble thanks, Cousin,” said Queen Perrault in a loud, clear voice. The priest could hear her anxiety to have done with this. These children made even her nervous. He couldn’t see King Grimm’s face from where he was standing, but he figured on the king smiling in that fixed fashion he assumed whenever matters at court diverged from the agenda in some unaccountable fashion.
“To display our regards and blessings,” Tertia continued, “we offer the young princess three gifts.”
One of her siblings, an older boy, spoke up. “She will always have friends.”
The youngest girl added, in a slight lisp, “Music will follow her wherever she goes.”
A middle girl offered the last gift. “Her heart’s choices will not trouble her unduly.”
“I thank you,” the queen began, but she was interrupted by a shattering of one of the large stained-glass windows lining the Great Hall. Color sprayed everywhere in deadly splinters, as if a rainbow had been murdered. A girl rode in on an iron-winged bird that spewed steam like a laundry tub. She was smaller than any of the coven before the altar.
People screamed, stumbling away from the broken window and the hovering witch—for surely that’s what she was.
“I am Triskaidecalia,” the girl announced in a firm, piercing voice as her bird alit atop a statue of King Ferd the Munificent. “You did not invite me with my siblings. Why didn’t I get an invitation?”
Queen Perrault tried to answer. “We did not know….”
Triskaidecalia glared at her. “Just because I’m young doesn’t mean I don’t count.”
“Be welcome here now,” the queen said in a conciliatory tone, opening one hand wide even as the other cradled little Zellandyne.
The fae girl’s face clouded. “It’s too late,” she called. “You can’t welcome me now. And my siblings gave their gifts, didn’t they?”
“Sister,” another of the fae began, but Triskaidecalia was working herself up to a full tantrum and ignored the entreaty. “I will be remembered.” She waved her hands in a tight circle, the air growing hot and close as she did so. “Your Princess Zellandyne will never know love. Her first love’s kiss will be her last breath!”
The crowd of well-wishers moaned, the wounded and the hale alike, at suc
h a curse.
One of the fae siblings stepped forward. “Begone, Trisk,” she shouted, “or you will be whipped round the court when we are returned!”
“Never,” shouted the child, before she flew out the shattered window.
The girl who’d stepped forward turned to the king and queen. “I am Octavia, and Triskaidecalia has long been my charge. She is our thirteenth, and in truth you did not name her on your invitation. I cannot undo her curse, for her power is her own, but I can change it thusly—when Zellandyne knows love’s first kiss, she will only sleep until that first lover has passed himself into oblivion. She will be denied only love, not life.”
“You call this a blessing?” roared King Grimm, who seemed to almost have kept up with events.
“It is what I can do for her,” Octavia said sadly.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE III
Otho, Lord Chamberlain of Talos
Oh, the childhood of this princess. Such a mess we had, after the christening. The court in a panic over that awful girl’s curse, then King Grimm summoning mages and artificers and soothsayers from every corner of the civilized world to try to lift the spell.
The queen tried to calm him, to stop him from his rising panic, but the king wanted, if not a son, a son-in-law. He saw the girl Trisk’s curse as meaning he could never have even that small consolation.
The story went round the world, of course. Too many had been present at the event to keep the curse a secret. Telegraph wires carried it, and family gossip, and the intelligences of foreign powers. People can’t get enough of love and death. A doomed romance is just the topic over mulled wine and roast capon.
Queen Perrault was more practical. She had all books about romance removed from the palace libraries, from the simplest happily-ever-after fairy tales to all those awful true-love books the maids so love to giggle over on their evenings off. This child was going to be raised only on notions of chivalry and service, of quest and sacrifice.
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