Palace of Silver

by Hannah West

  At first, we journeyed through the woods on foot, leading Orfeo behind us, snapping to attention at every creak of lofty branches swaying in the wind. At one point, I heard a twig break and reached for my knife, but it was only a mother doe and her fawn.

  When we neared the road to Enturra, Navara rearranged my veil and donned her own. Sev patted Orfeo’s storm-colored withers and waved me over.

  I hiked up my skirt and set my foot in the stirrup, but soon realized the impossibility of mounting a horse in a dress. I’d always worn riding clothes. Today, I would have to ride sidesaddle. Watching me struggle, Sev offered his hand.

  “Oh, all right,” I said, and he gripped either side of my waist, settling me into the dip of the saddle.

  “Anything for my bride,” he said with a playful smile as he grabbed the lead rope and started toward the road. Navara crossed her hands primly and followed us.

  My eyes began to ache from straining to see the forest through the lace pattern of my veil. I settled for staring at Orfeo’s dappled neck and dark mane until Sev stopped suddenly, on high alert. I looked up and saw two figures.

  “Foresters,” Sev whispered over his shoulder. “Stay calm.”

  As the men drew closer, I could make out their brown livery with the purple tree of Perispos on their chests. They carried bows and full quivers.

  One of the foresters hailed us. Sev waved at him.

  “Happy Benediction,” the stranger said, observing my bridal garb. “We don’t want to delay you on this blessed day, but we must stop everyone we see. Have you crossed paths with two young women in the woods? One blonde?”

  The other man peered through our veils, but lost interest after registering our peasant’s clothing.

  “No, but we’ve been watching for them,” Sev answered. “We’ve been praying for the princess’s safety since we heard, Holies keep her.”

  “Yes, Holies keep her,” the first man replied gravely.

  “If you see anything suspicious, let the royal guards know,” the other said. “There are four stationed in every village.”

  Sev nodded dutifully.

  “Blessings,” the first forester said with a wave at me. I waved daintily back with a gloved hand, holding my breath until they disappeared.

  We journeyed on. Before long, Enturra appeared at the horizon. Though hardly bigger than Sev’s village, it seemed more affluent, with newer buildings and broader streets. I tensed on the saddle as we crossed a river bridge and passed royal guards stationed at the other end.

  The atmosphere of festivity felt unmistakable, yet subdued. A few girls wore coronets like mine, sadly deprived of flowers, and vendors flaunted discounts on vegetables whose limp leaves had browned in the frost.

  We passed another bride and groom escorted by a whole wedding party that smiled and waved at us. “May Orico bless you with many children!” a drunken member of their party yelled our way.

  As in Sev’s village, the domed edifice was at the center of the square, but this one had a courtyard with rows of towering hedges and cypress trees. A crowd had gathered to watch a priest pray in monotone over a couple at the altar.

  Sev clenched my waist to help me dismount. I felt unsteady and surrendered my weight to his sturdy grip, relishing the momentary relief of trusting someone besides myself to be strong.

  “I’m going to see if Father Frangos is in the parish,” Navara whispered, standing on tiptoe to point to a stone outbuilding covered in ivy. Before I could hiss a warning to be cautious, she had slipped through the crowd and hurried off.

  “I don’t like this,” I whispered to Sev as he passed off Orfeo’s lead to an altar attendant in gray.

  “It will be fine,” the huntsman said near my ear. He caught my hand and brushed a kiss on the back of my glove. This affection came mysteriously naturally to someone whose behavior ranged from surly and wry. “Everyone adores Navara, especially the clergy. They’ll do whatever she asks.”

  I nodded and watched the other couple leave the edifice to cheers from the crowd. It was strange, not knowing whether the bride was grinning beneath that veil or mourning her former life.

  The crowd shifted. Newcomers arrived to watch the next modest spectacle while others wandered off. The priest waved us inside with a liver-spotted hand. If he was the young one, Father Frangos must have been a true antique.

  When I reached the threshold, I couldn’t force myself to go any farther.

  Suddenly, it felt like midnight again. Shadows filled the sacred place. The carvings of the Holies, removed and cold and unhelpful, made me want to smash the chipped marble altar.

  “No,” I whispered aloud, struggling to breathe, ready to rip apart at the seams.

  Sev smoothly turned my Nisseran protest into a Perispi explanation for the priest: “Nontrus eggigaris ta incini tis nedo, pre ti vitero,” he said. We wanted her mother to be here, but she died recently.

  Only Sev’s firm grip kept me from remembering Perennia’s weight in my arms, rocking her while the Holies slept through a violent starlit night.

  I forced myself to enter the edifice by imagining that those marble faces were hers, at least the soft ones: Lovingkindness, Honesty, Generosity, Humility. If anyone lived as a deity of virtues in the heavens, it was Perennia. If anyone could brighten that velvet-black expanse, it was she. People had tended to lump Perennia in with the rest of us Lorenthi siblings—scathing-witted and spoiled. But there hadn’t been a haughty bone in that girl’s body. She had deserved more, deserved better. She had deserved happiness we could never attain, malcontent as we were. She had been like Mother, someone who grew and helped things; if Mother ever restricted us, it was for the hope of trying to steer us true, like training wild ivy to climb a trellis. Perennia had been the same way, always drawing out the best of us.

  Both of them were gone.

  As Sev and I stepped before the altar and faced each other, a raw, bitter wind arose from nowhere, swirling through the edifice. It tugged at my veil, but Sev caught it between two fingers and stared intently into my eyes.

  “This again!” the priest cried as the crowd gasped in dismay.

  The huntsman interlaced the fingers of his other hand with mine, and even through the leather glove, I felt warmth to counter my cold.

  Perennia would want me to protect Navara as I had tried to protect her. If I ruined this now, the guards might drag the princess back to her doom at Ambrosine’s hand.

  Sunshine poured through stained-glass windows, and I imagined that it was Perennia offering her encouragement to do what needed to be done.

  I squeezed Sev’s hand. He gave me a nod.

  The priest opened his book and began a prayer.

  TWENTY-NINE

  KADRI

  AFTER my escape I trudged through muck and melted snow, hoping to see the shadowy outline of a village against the clear night. Now that I was free, I knew I would be remiss to risk my safety materializing. But the tenderness of my injury, exacerbated by fighting Orturio, slowed me down and exhausted me. Without the tincture, the pain grew worse. I gave up for the night, veering off road to shelter under an oak tree.

  When morning came I awoke to the ruckus of a rickety wagon rolling by. The driver appeared to be a farmer, so I flagged him down. The amiable man offered to take me to Givita, which he explained was on my way to Enturra—the village where Viteus and the priest would be looking for the huntsman. The name Givita bumped around my foggy, pain-addled mind until I recognized it as the huntsman’s village, the one he fled with Glisette and Princess Navara only yesterday morning.

  Now that they were gone, this fact was of little use, but the farmer said there was a folk healer there who could help me. Then he spent the remainder of the journey lamenting the terrible weather and blaming elicromancers for dragging Perispos into their personal conflicts.

  My elicrin stone stayed snug beneath the neckline of my dress.

  We bumped along for about half an hour before we reached Givita. The farmer pointed
me to the folk healer’s cottage and went on to sell what was left of his healthy spring crop. I thanked him and winced as I limped to the healer’s door and knocked.

  After some shuffling and inquisitive back-and-forth, a middle-aged woman opened one shutter to the breezy day.

  She observed my expensive, dirtied gown and my crooked stance. Her keen eyes narrowed to survey the damage. “Can you pay?”

  “Yes.”

  She slammed the shutter, unlocked the door, and grudgingly admitted me to her cottage, where dried herbs and copper pots hung from the low ceiling. A curtain partitioned off the far end of the room. “Go sit on the empty cot,” she said, salty, and shut the door.

  I hobbled across the room and pulled aside the curtain, withholding a gasp. On one of the two cots lay a gray-haired man who had been beaten to death’s doorstep. His face was a purplish knot of cuts and bruises, and magenta splotches covered his ribs and stomach. A boy who shared features with the woman dabbed at his wounds with a cool compress.

  I sat on the empty cot. “What happened?” I asked the boy.

  But I already knew. The Uprising had happened to him. This must be the neighbor whom they had questioned, the one Viteus had nearly beaten to death.

  “Mind your business and we’ll mind ours,” the woman chided before the boy could answer, appearing with a tray of bottles and bandages, but the old man spoke over her.

  “I knew that beautiful girl was trouble,” he muttered feverishly. He turned his head to look at me, his swollen eyes probing my face. “Taking advantage of a good family’s kindness. Winning them over with sweets and visits. Leading bad men to their door.”

  My hands clenched into fists. He didn’t know that Lucrez had lied to save the huntsman’s family—and lost her life for it. But just in case Viteus returned to inflict more abuse on this poor man, I couldn’t risk telling him what I knew.

  Grief pierced through my anger, and I sank onto the cot.

  “You just rest, Yannis, you old troublemaker,” the woman teased fondly, though when she turned away, the impish smile she’d donned for his benefit fell into a frown of deep worry.

  She knelt next to me and clucked over my swollen ankle.

  “This needs rest,” she said in a strident tone after a quick examination. “For twelve diromi I can treat you here for three days, meals included.”

  Hissing against the pain, I dug out two of the gold coins from Orturio’s treasure room.

  “Those are a century old,” she marveled. “They have King Coriander’s face instead of King Myron’s. Where did you find them?”

  “Mind your business and I’ll mind mine,” I replied.

  She narrowed her eyes. “Fair enough.”

  “I want treatment through tomorrow morning, fresh clothes, supplies for a letter that you will deliver to the dispatcher, a map, and enough meals and pain tinctures for three days on the road.”

  “At your service,” she said, plucking the coins from my hand and tucking them into her apron pocket.

  She offered to help me change out of my filthy dress and into a gown, but I asked for privacy in order to keep my elicrin stone hidden. I tucked the pack with the scroll case and coins under my pillow. After all I’d endured, I wouldn’t let anyone thieve anything from me ever again—not my spoils, not my freedom, not Rynna, if she survived.

  After I changed, the healer bandaged my ankle and offered me cabbage bean soup. I ate it with haste and slid under the blanket, waiting for her to close the curtain. When she did, I looked at the old man’s battered face.

  Satisfied that he was sleeping deeply, I slipped the scroll case from the satchel under my pillow. My hope was that this would be the sealed scroll Orturio had mentioned, and that it could tell me more about the scourges from the Book of Belief. Perhaps the Uprising had stolen the scroll to keep it safe from Ambrosine, or maybe they had wanted it for their own nefarious purposes. Either way, it was mine now.

  The case was intricately stylized with foliage motifs. Most that I had seen contained a thin pull-tab that would unroll the retractable parchment within, but this one didn’t. I pressed on the gold ram emblem and nothing happened. Scowling, I turned it this way and that, attempting to unscrew both the top and bottom. I supposed it made sense for such a purportedly precious scroll to be difficult to open.

  After giving it a good shake to make sure it even held a scroll, I huffed, stuffed it back under my pillow, and started my letter to Rynna.

  My words emerged more frantic than I’d intended. I wanted to soothe her worries, but my fear and fury seeped into the ink. When I reread the message, my request for her to hastily send whomever the Realm Alliance could spare sounded deeply alarming.

  I co-addressed it to Mercer, admitting that a dark corner of my heart wasn’t sure Rynna had survived the Jav Darhu attack.

  After giving the folk healer the letter to bring to the dispatcher, I decided to do as she instructed. Though it was not even midday, I would rest—rest without hearing locks turning in my dreams, rest so I could be of sound mind to find my friend, rest knowing that I would never let anyone take my freedom again.

  The folk healer clearly found my charity suspicious, but still accepted two more gold coins to cover Yannis’s treatment. She wished me a blessed Sun’s Benediction as I departed from her home before sunrise. It struck me that this was the holiday King Myron had invited Fabian and me to attend. We had discussed it a lifetime ago and a world away.

  Wearing a simple woven cotton dress and carrying a pack of food and medicine, I set out toward Enturra. I needed to reach the village before the huntsman set foot in town. Viteus and the local priest might already be watching for him.

  The sun beamed bright, melting the remaining clumps of snow. The muddy road made for a wearying journey, but it heartened me to catch sight of modest bridal parties en route to the village edifices.

  I wondered if things were as bad as Orturio and Mathis had claimed. Maybe Ambrosine hadn’t been responsible for the edifice burning. Maybe she hadn’t killed the high priest. Orturio could have lied about everything. I would have had no way of knowing.

  But one thing I did not doubt: nearly every priest and altar attendant in and around Halithenica was complicit in the Uprising.

  That reminder darkened my thoughts as a domed Edifice of the Holies rose up from the hills after a long morning on the road. Unlike the ramshackle villages I’d passed between here and Givita, Enturra’s streets were paved with cobblestones, and the cozy village square was crowded with revelers.

  In spite of this, the hairs on my nape bristled when I crossed the river bridge to the village. The folk healer had given me a scarf, which I’d used to cover my head so that Viteus wouldn’t recognize me. I could only imagine what sort of torture he would inflict if he knew what I had done to Lord Orturio.

  I reached the sparse market stalls and combed the streets, mentally revisiting my final conversation with Orturio. Viteus did not know the huntsman—Severo Segona, Lucrez had called him—by appearance. But the old priest, Father Frangos, knew him. Studying the layout of the village square, the domed Edifice of the Holies, the passage that I believed led to the underground Edifice of the Fallen, the towering trees, and the changing crowd, I decided Father Frangos would need a high vantage point to have any hope of scrutinizing every face. Viteus would likely remain at street level in order to act quickly on a signal from on high.

  There was a priest performing the ceremonies at the edifice altar. Was this Father Frangos? He did not seem to be watching the crowd at all. From the edge of the courtyard, I watched him recite lengthy prayers without looking up from the couple in front of him.

  Had the plans changed? Had Viteus returned to the estate and discovered the truth of his master’s violent death? What if he was hunting me now?

  Or maybe I had been too preoccupied with serving Orturio the tincture to commit that vital conversation to memory. Maybe I’d scrambled the details. The time? The town? Or perhaps the huntsman’s
neighbor had lied to protect him, just like Lucrez.

  The thought of boarding a ship back to Nissera tempted me. I couldn’t leave Glisette, but if the huntsman didn’t show, how else was I supposed to find my friend? Barge into the forest and call her name? Follow every stray gust of cold wind? A tracking map required expertise, time, and magical resources I probably wouldn’t be able to find in Perispos even if I knew exactly what they were. Maybe the only way to rescue Glisette was to hurry home and ask the rest of the Realm Alliance for help.

  I sighed and swept my eyes around the square, studying windows, terraces, roofs, and finally, the tiny cupola perched atop the edifice’s dome. A macerated old man peered through one of the arched openings, surveying the crowd in the market.

  Ah, Father Frangos, you stealthy old bastard.

  I watched him as noon drew ever closer. Two weddings had already taken place on my watch. A large bridal party escorted the second couple, and their jubilant, rambunctious reveling staked me with sudden homesickness for my friends.

  A man in their group shouted, “May Orico bless you with many children!” at an oncoming party of three. There was only the veiled bride, the groom, and one maid.

  I remembered the Perispi ambassador’s daughter mentioning that Sun’s Benediction was her favorite holiday because she liked seeing so many joyful couples joining in matrimony. But this bride didn’t seem joyful. She looked stiff and afraid under that veil, and I found myself glaring at the handsome man accompanying her. But he gazed on her with admiration, and she seemed to take comfort in his touch.

  The veiled maid whispered to the bride and left to knock on the door of a small building between the two edifices.

  Realizing I’d let myself get distracted, I shot my gaze back to Father Frangos in the cupola. His withered hands gripped the banister as he squinted down at the courtyard. Something had caught his attention.

  Meanwhile the ceremony began, and the bride’s maid was following an altar attendant down the stairs to the underground edifice. He looked back as he went down, finding Father Frangos. The old priest gave him an unmistakable nod.