Shadows of Ivory

by T L Greylock

“Everything hurts.”

  The horse didn’t seem overly concerned but it did stand still as Eska draped her arms over the saddle and sank against it, her face buried in its warm black coat.

  The journey back across the extensive Varadome gardens had been a painful one and Eska was sure every limping step would be her last. Surely dark figures were about to hurtle out the night and tackle her to the ground. Surely Alexandre was about to emerge from behind every hedge, every statue, every fountain and arrest her. But her progress was unimpeded, save for the ankle that threatened to collapse underneath her.

  She didn’t regret jumping. And in the grand scheme of things, the look of shock on Alexandre de Minos’s face as she vaulted off the roof was worth the painful landing—though she suspected she might feel differently by the time she made it home. The horse flicked its ears, reminding Eska not to linger, and she pulled herself up into the saddle.

  They took the long way home, keeping to the outskirts of the city, and the eastern horizon was a pleasant shade of pink by the time she guided the horse up the de Caraval drive. By then, the harrow root was keeping her upright in the saddle and Eska wanted nothing more than to crawl into her bed—no, a bath. No, food. She settled on the idea of food in the bath—and mint tea to help the inflammation burgeoning in her ankle—and dismounted outside the stable. Despite her best efforts, her ankle jarred painfully against the ground, and Eska’s fingers wrapped into the horse’s mane were all that kept her from crumpling. She closed her eyes and swallowed down the pain as best she could.

  “Rough night?”

  The harrow root reacted and Eska whirled on her injured foot, pulling the handle free from the walking stick once more.

  Eden San-Germain slid free from the shadow of a flowering tree and stepped into the grey light, concern spreading on his face as he moved. “Eska?”

  “What are you doing here?” Eska tried to hold herself up right. At least the dagger was steady in her hand.

  “Are you all right?”

  Eska took a halting step forward, her face twisting with pain. “Answer me,” she hissed through a locked jaw.

  “Eska, you’re hurt. Let me help you.” He had the sense to stay where he was.

  Eska shook her head. “No.” A humorless laugh escaped her lips. “Do you know, you’re the second man I’ve pointed this at tonight. Did you think to ambush me? Take me back to your Tribune? You might think again if you knew what I did this morning.” The faces of the Iron Baron’s dead men swam suddenly before her, surging back into her mind.

  “By all the gods, Eska, I am not your enemy.”

  “I’ve already found enemies where I would not have expected them today. And you need something I have no intention of giving you. Walk away, Eden.”

  He did as she said, though only after a long silence, his eyes never wavering from hers. When he turned his back to her at last, Eska gasped in a breath, her ankle screaming at the weight it was being asked to bear. But she didn’t move until he passed through the arched gate of the de Caraval complex and was out of sight. Only then did she drop the handle of the walking stick and sink to the ground, fighting back tears, willing the harrow root to take away her pain.

  How long she remained there, she could not have said. But her cheeks were dry when she rose and both the house and stables were stirring with the first signs of morning activity. Steeling herself, Eska raised her voice and called for one of the grooms. A boy hurried out, tugging a cap over his hair as he went, and took the borrowed horse from Eska, leading it into the stable.

  She limped into the house, using the glass-walled garden entrance and taking the spiral staircase to her chambers. She made it within an arm’s length of her door before she vomited and collapsed.

  ***

  Eska was desperately thirsty. The rain on the windowpanes wasn’t helping.

  She opened her eyes and turned on her side to reach for the glass of water she always kept by her bed. She found her father instead.

  He was asleep, his chin hovering over his chest, a book splayed across one knee. Eska sank back against her pillows, her memories rushing back to her. With them came awareness of a stiffness in her limbs. It wasn’t just the stiffness that sometimes lingers after a long period of heavy sleep. Eska stretched and curled her fingers against the blankets, but they remained heavy and cumbersome, as though they weren’t quite connected to her body.

  The sensation was consistent throughout her torso, hips, and legs, but Eska managed to push herself into a seated position. From there she surveyed the room. She had been dressed in a nightgown. A cup of tea sat on a tray at her father’s feet. Judging by the lack of steam and the way the flecks of tealeaves were clustered at the bottom of the cup, it had been there for some time. Rain spattered against the tall windows of her bedchamber in fat drops. The sky beyond was dark with mottled grey clouds.

  Eska shifted to the edge of her bed and swung her legs over. She came to her feet unsteadily and was immediately scolded by her ankle for her efforts. Grimacing, she limped her way to the bath chamber and relieved herself, then splashed water from the washbasin onto her face.

  When she limped back to her bed, her father stirred, the book tumbling from his knee and landing with a loud thud on the floor.

  “Eska!” He burst from the chair and took her hand. “You’re awake.” The tone of his voice gave Eska pause and she began to understand that she had been asleep for longer than a single night. Maximilian de Caraval helped her back under the blankets, his gaze flickering anxiously over her.

  “Papa,” Eska said, her voice dry and quiet, “you haven’t sat at my bedside since I was a child.” She reached for the glass of water and Maximilian held it out for her. Eska took a long drink. “Was it bad?” she asked at last.

  Her father was trying, she could see, to answer her question as though she had asked after the weather. He didn’t quite manage it. “Alize found you. Outside your door. You were unresponsive.” He glanced away from Eska for a moment. “We put you to bed. The doctors didn’t know what was wrong.” She reached for his hand and squeezed it. “You slept for two days.”

  “A friend was ill recently,” Eska said, thinking of Perrin. “Perhaps I was struck by the same thing he had.” But that was a lie. She knew what had caused her collapse, what was still causing her muscles and tendons to function as though caught in molasses. But telling her father she had taken four spoonfuls of harrow root powder—four, when two was considered a strong dose—was out of the question. Sorina and Maximilian de Caraval had no knowledge of her occasional use of the powder.

  Part of Eska’s mind, the analytical part, was already cataloging the experience, her symptoms, the time it had taken the powder to act and then cause her to crash, the time it had taken her to recover—not to mention the way it had released her inhibitions. She could still feel the gaze of the stars and the rush of air as she leaped from the roof of the Varadome.

  The other part of Eska was still very tired. She squeezed her father’s hand again and then let go. “I’m sorry to have worried you, Papa. Mama, too.”

  “Your mother doesn’t know. She was sent to Rhia.”

  Eska smiled. “Then maybe we don’t have to tell her.”

  Maximilian didn’t answer her smile. “There’s something else, Eska.” He sat on the edge of the bed. “Alexandre de Minos came. The first day of your illness. He said the matter was urgent. Naturally, I told him you were gravely ill and that speaking to you was impossible.” Her father hesitated for a moment. “He’s very good at not revealing his thoughts. You know that. But I had the impression that he didn’t believe me.”

  “I may have given him a reason to doubt anything you chose to say in that moment.”

  Maximilian studied Eska, his expression hovering somewhere between absolution and censure, his indecision a product of her illness. She would, she knew, have to explain herself eventually.

  Her father stood. “Two more things. I don’t suppose you know what happened
in the east guest room?”

  Eska sighed. “Not exactly.” She told him of Perrin, the strange illness, and his subsequent disappearance—taking care not to identify him by his family name, though her father was not likely to be as reactionary to the name Barca as her uncle. “I alerted Roscoe, but I didn’t know what else to do.” She glanced out the window. “I fear he has come to harm while I slept.”

  “You can hardly be faulted for your own illness,” Maximilian said. False, but a necessary deception. “If he’s truly missing, I can arrange a search using the Varadome’s authority and resources.”

  He wasn’t wrong. But Eska did not think she ought to get within sighting distance of the Varadome. “And the second?”

  He withdrew a letter from his waistcoat pocket. “This arrived this morning.” Eska reached for it, but Maximilian frowned and held it just beyond her reach. “If you’re sure you’re well enough.”

  “I’m well enough to read a letter. Perhaps it’s from Perrin.”

  Her father nodded and handed it to her. He looked as though he wanted to say something else, but after a moment he pressed his lips together, nodded, and retreated from her chambers.

  As the sound of his footsteps died away, Eska closed her eyes and let herself sink into the pillows for just a moment—a moment that turned into many. When she awoke again, the letter was still in her hand. Eska straightened, blinking away sleep. She took a drink of water and pulled the bell cord next to her bed, suddenly famished. Alize hurried into the room a moment later and Eska requested tea and a plate of bread, cheese, and fruit spreads.

  Only after the maid left did Eska open the letter. The handwriting startled her into a seated position. Albus.

  She began to devour his words eagerly, but each sentence deepened the furrow in her forehead. His words made only slightly more sense than if he had written them in another language, but taken as a whole, she would not have believed the letter a product of Albus’s mind. She turned the paper over, thinking to find a continuation or at the very least a hastily scrawled note—but there was nothing on the reverse.

  “What on earth are you going on about, Albus?” Eska murmured. She started again at the beginning.

  I am directing this letter to your family home in Arconia. I can only hope it reaches you, wherever you are, in a timely manner.

  That was simple enough. Albus had written to her weeks before in Toridium, but he couldn’t know if she was still there.

  And now I must beg pardon for my unexpected departure. I received word that my aunt had fallen ill and, as her only living family member, I have traveled to her bedside to do what I can for her.

  “Albus, you haven’t spoken to your family since you ran away from home. Forgive me if I don’t understand why a sick aunt would be asking for you.”

  Her condition is serious and I expect to be here for some time. She speaks of strange things in her sleep, most often a masked eagle, and I find I can only give her small comforts. I ask that you pray to all seven gods for her recovery, though perhaps it would be better to pray for a painless and easy death.

  Curious. Albus was politely but resolutely anti-divinity. “I refuse to believe an evangelist has swayed you from your palace of knowledge,” Eska muttered.

  Do not fear that I neglect my work. I have, however, left behind that treatise you and I spoke of, the one by the six monks of Altiere.

  “Utter nonsense. We haven’t spoken of any treatise recently, and certainly not one written by monks.”

  Perhaps you can provide a better translation of the passage about the lettering and symbols on the Ulyssian tomb.

  Eska paused after that sentence, her mind hovering over the uncanny similarity between this unfamiliar tomb Albus mentioned and the de Ulyssey family name.

  Messengers are hard to come by, as you know, in these small mountain villages, so I cannot anticipate when next I might be able to write to you. Please pass along my greetings to our friend Val. I look forward to a time when we can all be together as we once were.

  “Val?” Albus had met Eska’s uncle, but to refer to Valentin de Caraval as his friend—and by a shortened name only Maximilian used, and even then rarely—was absurd.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by Alize’s return and Eska used the distraction of cheese and tea to, well, distract her from Albus’s cryptic words—for that was what they were, she decided. Deliberately ambiguous for reasons only Albus knew. When Alize departed for the second time, Eska got out of bed, desperate to do something other than lie still.

  Her pacing was an embarrassment to the definition of the word, but Eska felt better for having her blood flowing once more, and so she limped slowly around the room, pausing at the rain-streaked windows every now and then, Albus’s words running through her mind on endless repeat.

  During one particularly painful turn on the floorboards, Eska’s ankle gave out. As she caught herself on the edge of her writing desk, her gaze landed on the ivory and gold reliquary sitting on the mantel over her dormant fireplace.

  The pieces of Albus’s letter tumbled into place.

  “Forget the aunt,” Eska said. “That was for the benefit of who ever was reading your letter, so they knew you were trying to give me an excuse for your absence.” The words flowed from her. “Six monks for six Godforged. You didn’t leave a treatise behind. You hid a god disc before leaving Arconia. There is no Ulyssian tomb, you needed to warn me that de Ulyssey is involved.” Eska laughed. “Would have saved me the need to trespass at the Varadome, but now I know without a doubt de Ulyssey is seeking the Hands of Fate—and so is our mutual friend Val, who is neither our friend nor likely to enjoy being called Val.” Eska took a breath. “Valexi Arcturos de Vauquelin-Preux, Archduke of Arconia.” Eska limped across the room and came to a halt in front of the reliquary. “But a masked eagle? Seven gods? And why a reference to Altiere, Albus? Where are you?”

  Altiere was a region of Sandalese far north of the Anerrean Sea. Eska turned to the closest window and pressed her forehead against the glass, trying to comb through her brain for a reason the librarian would mention a remote place known for its wine and its fruit orchards.

  She thought she might know the answer to the last question—well, not exactly. Albus had clearly been detained and prevented from contacting Eska sooner. There was no telling where he was that very moment. But perhaps he had been headed for Altiere.

  It was a logical assumption, if not for the fact that Albus preferred the known to the unknown. His world was the Lordican, not the vastness that lay outside its walls. She could not imagine him choosing to undertake such a journey.

  “What could have driven you from Arconia?” Eska whispered. The answer, she felt, lay in the missing scroll from Ardemis the Deceiver’s collection on the Hands of Fate. Something had propelled the scholar to take action. It was a more disturbing realization than knowing the Archduke was hunting for Godforged.

  Her breath fogged the glass, imitating how Eska’s mind felt. Sighing, she pushed herself off the window and turned back to the reliquary. Her fingers brushed the smooth ivory and she ran her thumb across the golden stag’s back. Her thumb slipped below the stag’s belly and she, entertaining the rather foolish notion that the markings on the god disc might at long last make sense, lifted the lid.

  It was empty.

  ***

  The conclusion—reluctantly arrived at but admittedly logical—was that Perrin had taken the disc.

  Eska no longer suspected her uncle had returned to the house and dragged Perrin from his bed. Rather she began to suspect that perhaps Valentin had not been far off the mark when he had suggested Perrin and Manon Barca had schemed against Firenzia from the start.

  And yet Eska could still hear the strain in Perrin’s voice when he had spoken of Manon, could see the pain on his face at the thought that his sister had, like the rest of his family, abandoned him. Eska did not think that an act.

  And yet—there were many and yets, she began to realize—what o
ther reason could he have to abscond with the god disc, an artifact they still did not comprehend fully. Perhaps Perrin hoped to find Manon and offer the disc to her as a token of his forgiveness. Perhaps he had discovered something of the disc’s power and had claimed it for himself. Perhaps he believed Manon and her Carrier skills could wield it. Perhaps he hoped to sell it and use the money to pull Barca Company back from the brink of collapse.

  Perhaps this, perhaps that. Eska came to a sudden halt at the foot of her bed and pulled herself out of the maze of swirling possibilities made all the more alluring by the sting of Perrin’s betrayal. She forced herself to focus on the facts, such as they were, and arrive at a course of action. And though she longed to seek out and confront Perrin, there was a larger problem.

  “The Archduke must not be allowed to collect all six discs.”

  As Eska said the words out loud, the final piece of Albus’s puzzle fell into place. Six discs. Seven gods, he’d written. Not six discs. Seven. And the seventh was in Altiere.

  Eska resumed her pacing, the pain in her ankle a dull ache she refused to acknowledge. Albus had also hidden a disc, the one Eska had discovered in the Iron Baron’s reliquary, which left Eska with a choice. Stay in Arconia, search for the hidden disc, and face the wrath of Thibault de Venescu and charges of trespassing from the Varadome and murder from Toridium. Or take inspiration from a librarian who had been frightened enough by whatever he had learned about the seventh disc to leave his beloved library, his work, and everything he knew and held dear to go in search of it.

  She didn’t expect she could do both. But then a knock on her door gave her the means and knowledge to do just that.

  “My lady? A gift has arrived from your mother.”

  “Come in, Alize,” Eska called, impatient and eager to be alone once more.

  The maid entered and presented Eska with a large, slender box tied up with black ribbon.

  Eska frowned. “From my mother?”

  Alize nodded. “She mentioned it before leaving the city. Said she’d ordered you a mask for the masquerade.”