Tournament of Ruses

by Kate Stradling

  “So before, it was unofficial?”

  “Charlie, don’t be mean, to Will or to Flora. If this goes as the book describes, it’s going to get really messy. You can’t be mean to her. She’s going to be a wreck as it is.”

  “I understand. Just work the seal already. Weren’t you the ones who said we shouldn’t delay?”

  Flora continued to pull against her restraints, as though they might suddenly give way if she kept tugging. She did not take note of the figures that stood between her and the door, of their practiced movements and the hushed, foreign words that one of them spoke. Her thoughts remained fixed upon getting to the well. She cared for nothing else.

  “Here. Take a good, long swig of the stuff. You’re going to need every last bit.”

  “I’ll take it. You get out.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t think I’m doing this with an audience, do you? Both of you get out. I’ll come and get you if anything goes wrong.”

  “It’s going to get really messy, Charlie.”

  “I’ll handle it.”

  “Be nice about it.”

  “I’ll handle it, Viola! Get out!”

  Two figures left the room. Flora cringed away from the light beyond the door, but she resumed her listless tugging after it closed again. She knew there was someone else with her, but that was not her concern. When he sat down on the bed, she ignored him to continue pulling. Only when he cupped her face in both his hands and forced her to look up did her eyes inspect his features.

  Did she know him? She didn’t care. It wasn’t important. Her gaze flitted back down to her wrists.

  “Flora,” he said, “look at me.”

  Perhaps he was going to set her free. She stared expressionlessly and waited.

  “You’re allowed to hate me,” he told her. “In fact, I expect you to hate me. I’m really sorry, but this is the only cure we have. The only other choice is to let you die, and we can’t do that. I really am sorry.”

  She had no clue what he was talking about, nor would she have cared except that the next moment he suddenly kissed her full on the mouth. Shock jarred her from head to toe. The smell of roses infused her senses and the nearness of his body shattered her overwhelming apathy as her every nerve stood on end. In the wake of that shattered stupor came not euphoria or fluttering joy, but a despair so crushing that it pierced her to her very core.

  She had utterly failed.

  She had murdered the hopes of dozens, hundreds.

  She had devastated, had destroyed her precious family!

  Tears spilled from her eyes as her heart smashed into a million tiny pieces.

  “Charlie!” she sobbed, for of course she knew the man who cupped her face in his hands. “Everything is wrong, Charlie! It’s all wrong!”

  He nodded. “I know it is. It’s all wrong.” He picked up a cloth from the bedside table. Gently he wiped the tears from her face. The cloth was stained black as he drew it away again.

  Flora recoiled from the sight. Her attention jerked to a mirror on the wall, where she could see her own face, ghostly white and streaked with the inky black tears that spilled from her black, black eyes. Terror clenched her in a stranglehold. Her arms pulled against the restraints. The skin on her wrists and hands was the same paper-white as her face, but solid black coursed through her veins. “It’s all wrong!” she cried in rising panic.

  “I know,” said Charlie, and he wiped her face again. “I’m sorry, Flora, but I need you to cry it all out, every last drop.” Then he kissed her a second time.

  She didn’t want his pity. That was worse than the despair that already possessed her. As he kissed her she felt like he was grinding the pieces of her broken heart to dust beneath his heel. Everything was wrong. Flora succumbed to her wretched agony. Inky black drops stained the bed sheets and the handkerchief alike as she poured out her grief with untempered abandon.

  Through the whole ordeal, Charlie remained at her side. He agreed with her babbling words and offered comfort to her raving hysterics.

  In Flora’s overwhelming anguish, though, it was no comfort at all.

  Chapter Twenty-Four: The Stark Light of Day

  I’ve had a rude awakening. I don’t think I want to talk about it beyond that.

  The sunlight hurt her eyes. Flora blinked in a futile attempt to adjust her vision to the brightness that spilled through the window across from her bed. But it wasn’t her bed, she suddenly realized. It wasn’t even her room. She didn’t recognize the wallpaper or the furniture. What’s more, a young man was sitting in the window sill, looking down at the world beyond. That was so far out of the ordinary that she thought she must be dreaming.

  She had been dreaming moments ago. A strange, fleeting mish-mash of images tumbled through her mind. She groaned and painstakingly sat up.

  The figure in the window instantly uncurled from his perch and bounded to her side. “How do you feel, Flora?” he asked.

  “What are you doing here?” she mumbled in response, too lethargic still.

  Will Aureus, the Eternal Prince of Lenore, shoved his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels like a child. “Well, we certainly weren’t going to leave you alone. Viola and Charlie had assignments this morning with the exhibition, and your father’s carrying out his parliamentary duties under the Prince’s direct orders—he’s been clamoring to see you, but we needed to be sure you were back to yourself before we let him come.”

  She squinted against the light. “Why? What’s happened? Where am I?” Her voice sounded breathy, tired.

  “This is the infirmary next to Dr. Grayson’s house—you remember Dr. Grayson, don’t you? We needed somewhere private to take you, of course, and he kindly obliged.”

  An infirmary meant illness, but Flora could remember no such thing. Her heart beat a quickening rhythm in her chest. “What’s wrong with me?”

  Will’s mouth thinned into a frown. He studied her for a moment before he reluctantly inquired, “What do you remember?”

  “I—” she began, but her voice caught in her throat. Her mind was completely blank. With growing alarm she cast around her thoughts to orient herself. The exhibition had begun, she recalled. There had been crowds of people…

  The strange, disturbing images from her dream flashed before her again. She shook her head to clear it. “I don’t remember anything. Nothing but a very odd dream I had.”

  “Did it involve Charlie kissing you back to your senses?” Will asked bluntly.

  Flora froze as several of the images suddenly attached to one another. Her eyes grew wide in mortification.

  An awkward laugh escaped Will’s lips. “Viola would be jabbing me in the ribs right now if she were here. Charlie would probably throttle me. But, well, neither of them is here and I’m of the opinion that you should know the particulars of what happened.”

  Gingerly he perched on the edge of the mattress. Sympathy shone in his eyes as he grasped one of her hands between his own. “Can you really remember nothing? Do you remember the shadow-shifters at all? Last night, they attacked you and Viola separately. I’m sorry, but I was nearer to her. I would’ve gone to her regardless,” he admitted in his next breath. “I think they knew that, too, for you were certainly their goal.”

  “How did they get in the city?” Flora inquired, her voice hollow.

  “They must’ve persuaded people to carry them past the wards one at a time, dozens upon dozens of them over the past few weeks. As for who would be so foolish, we already have a whole list of suspects, plus their scheming parents and relatives, all of them desperate for any advantage they could get over each other. There may well be as many culprits as there were shadow-shifters.”

  Her shoulders sagged under the weight of possibilities.

  Will dipped his head to catch her eye and gently said, “We may never know the full extent of it, but I don’t believe the carriers were malicious.”

  No, Flora silently agreed. Ambition was a much more
likely motivation than malice, but it was just as foolish, if not more so.

  He continued. “Once within the city, they orchestrated their movements quite carefully to stay in hiding. They must have watched you, waiting for when you would be most vulnerable, waiting for a time of darkness when you were isolated from other magicians.”

  “Waiting for last night,” Flora surmised, though she could still recall only scant details.

  “Yes,” said Will. “Luckily, Charlie had gone to find you, to make sure you got home safe, and he happened on the scene just after they took you away. He tracked you down, and then he brought you here and sent us word.”

  She tried to wrap her brain around the frayed memories. A disturbing image, her own face in a mirror, flashed into her mind. “I was crying tears of ink,” she said in a strangled voice, “and my eyes were large, and black as night.”

  He squeezed her hand. “That wasn’t ink. They forced a bond on you. Have I ever told you about magical bonds? We usually divide them into two types: companion bonds and enslavement bonds.”

  “They enslaved me?” Flora asked, stricken.

  “No,” said Will. “That is, they did in a way, but not with an enslavement bond. If they’d attempted something like that, the well would’ve called upon everything in its power to destroy them. No, what they performed was a companion bond. Instead of taking from you, they gave their essence to you—similar to your original bond with the well, the bond that was only half complete.”

  Vaguely she recalled the bowl forced to her lips, and the acrid taste as its blackness slid down her throat.

  “Some creatures, such as humans and shadow-shifters, are completely incompatible when it comes to magic,” Will explained. “The substance they gave you was toxic to your body, but it effectively bonded you to them. You became what we call a revenant, a human possessed by the darkest magic. If we had let things be, your body would’ve deteriorated until it wasted away into smoke and shadow. You’d already lost your mind when Charlie found you.

  “Luckily, after their first attack, Viola had researched the creatures. She’d found an account of those poisoned bonds and the remedy to reclaim a revenant. It was the only remedy we had—rather ingenious too, all things considered. You were still in there somewhere, but the bond had taken control of you. Its hold had to be broken, and the only way to do that was to reawaken you to your senses.”

  “By having Charlie kiss me?” she asked sourly. Of course she’d read fairy tales about curses broken by a lover’s kiss, but that was hardly the case here, at least for Charlie’s side of the transaction.

  “It didn’t have to be Charlie,” Will replied. “It could’ve been any one of us, but we thought Charlie was the best choice, given the circumstances. Does it bother you?”

  She snatched her hand away. “Of course it bothers me! It’s mortifying!”

  “Would it be any less mortifying if I had done it? Or Viola, or Edmund, or the Prime Minister? We’re limited in our selection of magicians in these parts, you know.”

  She considered that list of possibilities and rethought her opinion. She didn’t know what she would have done if she had phantom memories of Prime Minister Moreland kissing her.

  “Anyway,” said Will tactfully, “the treatment involved branding Charlie with a purification seal. The kiss triggered your body to purge the toxic essence by any means possible. Because that toxic essence bound you to the shadow-shifters—that is, it was comprised of their desires rather than yours—once its hold was broken you had their mountain of despair swimming within you. The book warned us it would be a messy business purging it out. Charlie said—well, never mind that. He encouraged you to cry until your tears ran clear.

  “It’s not entirely gone, though,” he added gently.

  Flora’s eyes had wandered down to her hands as he spoke, but this statement caused her to look up in alarm. “What do you mean?”

  “It would be impossible to purge every last particle,” he told her apologetically. “A slim amount still lingers within you. But that’s not entirely a bad thing,” he continued as her expression turned to dismay. “You’ll have some side effects—a higher sensitivity to light, lethargy during the daytime and energy at night—but those will ebb with time. The really important thing is that, as it’s essentially a poison within you, your body has adjusted to its presence.”

  “And that’s a good thing?” Flora asked.

  He smiled. “Yes. It means that you’re immune from this ever happening to you again. That’s why the despair within you was so acute. This was a desperate attempt, a last resort. If the book’s account is correct, the shadow-shifters create this sort of bond on only the rarest occasions, for it drains their magic and puts their collective at risk. They wanted control of that well quite badly, I’m afraid.”

  “And what’s to stop them from trying something else?” Flora asked. His suddenly reluctant expression set her nerves on edge. “What?” she prompted him.

  He kept wary eyes upon her as he answered. “Well, for one thing, with that wisp of their essence in you, you’re still one of them insofar as their magic is concerned. They don’t attack their own. They’d also have me to worry about now. When you went missing, I had to take a primary bond with your well to ensure its protection. You’re still a primary guardian, though,” he added quickly.

  The news of being replaced didn’t stab her as deeply as she thought it should. Instead, it was a dull ache. She was no longer needed, but she had brought more trouble than help since bonding with the well anyway.

  “I guess that absolves me from taking the Prime Minister’s exam,” she joked.

  “What? No!” cried Will. “That’s not the case at all!”

  Her lifeless smile silenced him. “You’re very kind, your Highness. I’m sure you have plenty of things to do today—the exhibition to attend and such—and I do have a lot of things to think over.” It was as unsubtle a dismissal as she dared make to the Eternal Prince of Lenore. She half worried whether he would take the hint or not, but Will was good-natured about it.

  “You need to rest up,” he said as he stood. “The Prime Minister said he would send Edmund along with your books so that you could study if you’d like. Dr. Grayson’s prescribed strict bed rest for you, and your father has absolutely agreed to it, so don’t think that you can up and wander as you please. I imagine that you’ll have plenty of visitors passing through—we’re putting out the story that you collapsed from exhaustion and that you’re convalescing here. You’ll miss the rest of the exhibition, I’m afraid, but you should be well enough by the weekend.” He winked and patted her hand in a mute goodbye.

  Flora watched him go with mixed emotions. A rebellious part of her wanted to throw off her covers and stomp around the room just to spite his instructions, but in truth she had no energy. She had been possessed with dark magic, had very nearly died, and to pretend otherwise out of pride would be utter folly.

  She settled into her pillows and pondered all the information that Will had given her. More than anything else, she wondered how she would face Charlie the next time she saw him, and whether he would be one of the prophesied visitors, or if he would simply avoid her.

  Over the next few days Flora received many people in her sickroom. Edmund and Viola came daily, several scions of the noble families passed through as though she was one of the many curious displays connected to the exhibition, and their parents made appearances to show their respect for her father (which Flora took as a very good sign of him getting well established in his seat at Parliament). Her father himself arrived each evening and spent the night on a little cot in the corner.

  Charles Moreland never appeared. As the week wore on and his absence became abundantly more obvious, Flora was both annoyed and oddly grateful.

  “Good heavens, Flora, what is this musty old volume? Why, it’s as heavy as a brick!”

  Georgiana Winthrop dropped the offending book back onto the bedside table where she had picked
it up and turned with disinterest to examine the rest of the room. As she was uninterested in an answer to her question, Flora gave none. She did, however, pick up the book and hold it protectively upon her lap to avoid any further inspection. It was a catalog of seals that Edmund had left behind for her to study, and the whole of it was written in that second language. She had no idea how Georgiana would react to such a text, and she had no desire to find out.

  The rest of her books were tucked away under the bed, out of sight for visitors. This one would be there as well, but the Frivolous Four had appeared while Flora was studying. Georgiana had entered without knocking, and Flora couldn’t very well shove the book into its proper hiding place without risk of calling attention to the whole cache.

  She was surprised that they had come as a group. Priscilla had been by earlier in the week with her brother, and Augustina had come with her parents. This was the first that Flora had seen of Georgiana and Dorothea, but that was hardly a reason to complain.

  The subordinate three lined the wall next to the door while Georgiana made her inspection. There were two empty chairs by the window, but no one dared to sit before their queen bee.

  “It’s a pretty-ish little room for an infirmary,” Georgiana remarked as she fingered the silver mirror frame. “Emphasis on little, of course. Honestly, Flora, I don’t know how you cope with such meager space. This is why Papa always insists that we are treated in the comfort of our home.”

  “I don’t really need much more space than the bed, since I’m not supposed to be moving,” Flora replied tactfully.

  “You’re not to move at all?” Georgiana asked curiously. “Are you so very weak, then?”

  “I sit by the window for half an hour at a time, and someone takes me for walks up and down the hallway at least twice a day. I’m getting stronger.”

  “Awful time to get ill on your part. You’re missing the exhibition entirely. There have been so many entertaining spectacles, and here you are, cooped up in this little room across town. But then, I suppose you’ve become something of a spectacle yourself, for everyone knows you’re ill. They’re all so concerned.”