“I see.” Taking care to weigh her words and measure his response, Isavor ultimately gave an ever-so-slightly sardonic gesture of consent, as if dealing with a rebellious youth who would do as she pleased. “Well then. I shall not withhold from you a legal aide. He can assist you in this matter straightaway. And…I suppose…I look forward to meeting this fresh young face at court.”
Aware that she was probably treading on thin ice with her presumptuous attitude and multiplying requests, Despiris made a mental note to balance the scales imminently, lest she sabotage her precarious position at court.
She would do well not to forget that privileges like the ones she currently demanded came at a price.
But that was a balancing act for the afternoon. She would not spend a single moment of her day on anything else until Po was safe and sound in her custody.
All but storming into Saint Vlad’s, she stated her business to the matron, and the legal aide escorting her presented the necessary documents. Hastening to comply with a royal order, the matron had Po retrieved and brought down.
He ran to Despiris when he saw her, and she folded him with relief into her arms. “Come on, Po,” she said. “Let’s go home.”
*
In spite of the royal healers’ best efforts, Po’s mother soon lost her feeble grip on life. Despiris took Po to say his goodbyes, and then that was it. She was gone.
Po spent the rest of the day inconsolable. Heartbroken tears turned to gut-wrenching sobs turned to hysterical tantrums, and then deescalated to a sort of paralyzed, wheezing breathlessness, as if he were being slowly crushed by the cruel, cruel weight of the world.
Eventually he cried himself to sleep on the chaise lounge in the sitting area of Despiris’s chambers, and she breathed a sigh of relief that he would at least find a few hours’ peace.
Shortly thereafter, a soft knock sounded at her door. Despiris padded quietly across the room to answer it, careful not to wake Po. Pulling open the door, she was surprised, given the late hour, to find the king himself in the hall.
The king and no one else. No guards or escorts or clingy advisors or noblewomen.
Well, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t visited him in his private chamber at an ungodly hour of night. It would seem they had simply reached that level of familiarity.
Holding a finger to her lips to indicate Po was sleeping, she drew open the door to admit the king, gesturing that he follow her to the separate area where she slept so they wouldn’t disturb the boy.
“Forgive me for the inappropriate hour,” Isavor murmured as they settled in front of her window. “Propriety would frown upon this meeting, but I get the impression there is not much I could do to threaten you.”
“Please. Don’t ever feel as though you must stand on ceremony for me. What one considers an inappropriate hour, I consider regular hours of operation.”
Pursing his lips, the king nodded, his gaze cheating back through the doorway toward the sleeping boy. “I am sorry about the boy’s mother. How is he?”
“Resting, at least.”
“That’s something.”
Despiris nodded in solemn agreement, a lump never far from her throat.
“The healers tell me they are not certain what it was that killed the woman. But they will conduct a full autopsy.”
“Thank you. For letting me bring her here. For letting me bring both of them.”
“I assume you will wish to make further arrangements for him?”
“I intend to become his permanent guardian,” Despiris replied without hesitation. It had not taken more than the afternoon to conclude it was the only course of action she could take.
It took the king only a moment to conclude that she was serious. “I suppose I should not be surprised.” While he seemed to see the pointlessness of debating the matter with her, he did have questions. He hesitated a few moments more, but ultimately aired the curiosity. “Who is he to you?”
“A student of mine.”
“I didn’t realize you had…students.”
Although she cherished her privacy, she decided there was no harm in revealing this particular pastime she’d devised to occupy her time. “I hold weekly sessions for the children of the slums. I tutor them in…whatever they wish to learn.”
Understanding lit the king’s eyes. “Ah – the reason for the instruments and art supplies going missing.”
“Yes.”
The smallest flicker of a smile crooked his lips, but it gave way to the seriousness of their conversation. “Yet you must know you can’t singlehandedly adopt every destitute child who loses a mother.”
Despiris drew a composing breath, trying to keep perspective. “Yes. I do know.”
“This one is special,” the king divined.
“They are all special. This is merely the one I have an opportunity to help.”
The king searched her gaze, just intently enough that Despiris began to wonder what he was looking for. What he had come for. At last he let slip a morsel of what occupied his mind. “You have a bleeding heart, my lady. Which, although a redeeming quality if ever there was one, I must admit leaves me troubled.”
Despiris frowned. Troubled? What could possibly be troubling about–
“But I digress,” Isavor interrupted himself, shaking the nagging from his mind. “Forgive me, this is not the time.”
“No, please,” Despiris insisted, for now she was curious. “As I said – do not stand on ceremony for my benefit. Speak freely.”
“Very well. It troubles me because at times I cannot help the sneaking suspicion that I am being played. That you have set your sights on the resources available to you here and have realized how effortlessly you might exploit them. That you have promised to catch me a criminal just so that I might cater to your every whim and desire. That you pretend to fight for my cause so that I might fund yours. Because before me I have a contradiction of a woman who has betrayed her master…yet I don’t believe that she would.”
What had she just been telling herself about rebalancing the scales? He is beginning to question your agenda. Your value. She was going to have to tread carefully indeed to maintain her position here.
Isavor must have noticed the guarded look seeping into her eyes. “As I said,” he repeated, not totally devoid of compassion. “Not the time. I came to offer my condolences. To see how the two of you were holding up. It is still my hope and intention that you and I are friends. That we can request things of one another. That we can trust one another. And I shall continue operating in good faith.”
Relief and gratitude moved through her – but a tinge of caution remained. After all, he could say as much, and yet, in the way of manipulative politicians, it could still be to remind her that he did, on some level, expect it to be a two-way relationship.
For the first time, the changing stakes made her consider the very real possibility that catching Clevwrith might have to become more than a game.
*
They buried Po’s mother in the royal cemetery, gifting her a respectable resting place. Despiris hoped in some small way it would bring Po peace, knowing she would be remembered alongside royalty, her plot luxurious and well-tended.
Despiris dressed up for the occasion, donning an obsidian gown of mourning and matching cloak, and Po, well-groomed for probably the first time in his life, stood bravely under her arm for the ceremony.
Lady Verrikose and even the king himself attended, an honor that the boy would remember. Even if he didn’t fully understand such things at his tender age, or in the blinding throes of grief, such a thing would stick with him. It would come to mean something, as he looked back on the day.
A smattering of healers and nursemaids had appeared to pay their respects as well – figures who had either tended to Evelette’s illness or kept an eye on Po while Despiris had seen to other matters. It was a small but intimate gathering, each solemn face a caring soul.
Even Lady Verrikose, Desipris had to admit, wore an air of genuine melancholy.
Po made it halfway through the ceremony before the tears returned, and Despiris tucked him against her inside the shelter of her cloak. The bitter winter sun failed to provide an ounce of warmth, and they shivered together under its harsh chill.
It was days like these that Despiris wondered if the sun would ever warm her again.
When the priest was done with his speech, everyone took turns placing white roses upon the woman’s grave, and then trickled solemnly away.
Pausing at the edge of the cemetery, Lady Verrikose peered back over her shoulder through her black-net veil. Despiris followed her gaze to the dormant bows of the dogwood trees, wondering what had stayed her.
A white dove took flight from the branches, fluttering down to alight upon Evelette’s headstone. An angelic omen. Her way of sending comfort to a grieving child.
Despiris nodded her thanks for the compassionate gesture, and Lady Verrikose departed.
Giving Po a squeeze of encouragement, Despiris approached the grave with him so they might lay their last roses atop the plot. The dove remained, shifting on its stony perch but unbothered by their nearness. Clinging to his rose, Po stared as if transfixed by the bird, clearly looking for meaning in its appearance.
“She’s here with us, Po,” Despiris murmured. “She’ll always be with you.”
Lip trembling, Po treaded forward to kneel before the headstone. Instead of placing his rose with the others on the soft, fresh earth, he laid it carefully atop the headstone beside the dove.
And so he didn’t notice the rogue token that was not like the others – the black rose in a sea of snow-white petals.
But Despiris did. It stood out like spilled ink on blank parchment, and the V of raven feathers tied to the stem with a black ribbon made no secret of who had bestowed it.
Despiris wondered which of the black-robed figures, eyes downcast in sorrow at the funeral so their faces couldn’t be seen, Clevwrith had been. She also wondered what Po would think of the fact that the Master of the Shadows had attended his mother’s funeral. Would he be touched, or outraged?
Debating whether or not to draw attention to the token, she decided to let Po keep his focus on the pure symbol of the dove. It seemed to be what he needed, in that moment. Better to let him discover a criminal’s mark on his mother’s grave when he was in a less raw state of mind, and more receptive to the possibility that it was kind gesture, rather than an ominous one.
She might recognize the heart behind such omens, but she knew all too well others did not always see the beauty in darkness.
For once, she chose the dove over the raven.
12
Contagion and Comradery
“It is circumstances, not character, which creates friends.” – Cerf Dainean proverb.
*
Two days later, a physician who had tended to Po’s mother fell ill. He presented with the same symptoms as both now-deceased family members. Given the strict sanitation protocols already in place in the medical ward, it was a matter of some alarm that the illness had been so easily transmitted to a healer.
All the more so when a second physician showed symptoms the following day.
At these indicators of rampant contagion, new precautions were implemented in the healing ward. Layers were added to protective clothing, masks and suits becoming cloistering. Sanitization regimens before and after entering the ward became obsessive, rather than merely tedious. To contain the spread, visitors were limited to only necessary personnel.
Alas, in a week’s time the first physician to fall ill was dead.
The second physician was isolated and given an extensive, aggressive array of treatments, and carefully monitored over the days to come. All to no avail; her condition steadily worsened, no method or medicine seeming to make even the smallest difference.
They burned her body at the end of another week.
“We’ve never seen anything like it,” reported the head physician to the king. While she’d had limited contact with those affected, taking reports from other medics, studying the matter from afar and prescribing treatments from her private wing in the medical ward, no one was willing to take any chances at this point – and so she made her report from behind a mask, in the center of the courtyard in the open air, projecting her voice to the balcony where the king received her. “The symptoms don’t follow a pattern we would expect, and our efforts are entirely in vain. Every obvious course of treatment has made little to no difference in each patient’s condition. We’re lucky if we can make them comfortable as the sickness runs its course.”
“There have been three cases, thus far?” the king asked. He and Lord Mosscrow occupied the small balcony space, but Despiris skulked just inside to eavesdrop on the report.
“Another one this morning,” said the physician regretfully, and the pit in Despiris’s stomach grew. “Whatever this is, it is rampantly contagious. I would guess there are many more cases, undocumented in the streets where our first victim was retrieved.”
The king ordered a search of the city, wanting an accurate count of victims and active cases.
The results were not comforting. Lord Mosscrow received the account, and brought it to the throne room. “Unfortunately, your Majesty…we have an epidemic on our hands.”
*
Fairoway shut its gates, and a strict phase of quarantine began. Empty warehouses and abandoned buildings became infirmaries throughout the city. Medical personnel were dispersed to do what they could for the sick, even if all that meant was studying the disease and experimenting with treatments – or burning the dead. Anyone in the palace who had come in contact with a victim or the sick ward was ordered into isolation.
Even though it had been weeks since Po’s mother died, he and Despiris shut themselves away in her chambers for another week, just to be certain neither of them had caught the illness.
Every physician in the king’s employ and many others throughout Fairoway worked night and day in search of a cure. Despiris and Po were among a number of unaffected citizens asked to donate a vial of blood so potential antibodies might be harnessed. It was at this stage that gifted individuals began to creep out of the woodwork, volunteering an array of special abilities that might aid in the process. Those who had been courting the edge of the shadows since Isavor presented a more open attitude toward the supernatural came into the light protected by the fact that they were desperately needed, that no potential alleviation would be turned away.
Mystical healers were welcomed alongside traditional medics. Spectacular abilities came to light – abilities to numb pain, sedate, diagnose, and dissect matter on a miniscule scale beyond what was tangible.
In light of the crisis, the matter of the Master of the Shadows was put on hold.
After her stint of isolation, Despiris used her time loitering about the palace grounds to practice her own abilities. Restless and prone to the heavy presence of despair hanging like a dark cloud over the kingdom, she found it cathartic to immerse herself in something that required so much concentration.
She would sit by the frozen lotus pools in the garden, trying to crack the ice with her mind. It was always in subconscious moments, when her mind half-wandered and fractured with grief for Po, or the rising death toll, or missing Clevwrith amidst a time of crisis, that she tapped into the necessary channel and the ice fractured in tandem.
From there, she gradually identified how to hone in on that state of mind, dissecting that moment of success until she could recreate it.
Once she could crack the ice at will, she made a game of it, etching fissures like brush strokes to create patterns and shapes. Soon every frozen surface in the garden became a canvas, carved into decorative emblems and motifs.
While at first she had little intention of leaving her work on display for anyone to discover, she decided, what could it hurt? She never performed the act with witnesses. Let them come across the carved ice and wonder.
It had been too long since she’d got
ten up to any mischief. And once she got a taste for it again, she couldn’t stop. Morale had been such a drag of late – she just couldn’t resist the delight of causing Lord Mosscrow to spill his orange juice all down his front at breakfast, or constantly reheating Lady Verrikose’s tea so it was too hot to drink. Never anything too obvious, but always with enough impact to cause annoyance or embarrassment.
In the evenings, it became somewhat of a tradition for the king to invite her to the Huntsman’s Lounge, alongside Lady Verrikose and Lord Mosscrow. With the kingdom on lockdown, tentative friendships inevitably became more tight-knit circles, quarantine an incubator for intimacy.
For instance, during a moment of cordiality, Despiris considered a certain furry resident dangling from its post and inquired of the noblewoman, “Why the sloth?” An utterance of pure curiosity, for once engaging the beastress without motive or disdain.
To which Lady Verrikose granted a courteous, conversational response, across the chessboard she studied between them. “After spending all day immersed in the chaos of a thousand minds, it is easy to forget myself. To lose myself in the noise, in the revolving ocean of identities. I require a catalyst to recenter myself. So I immerse myself in his languidness. His tranquility. It is soothing. Meditative.”
Hm.
Similar exchanges unfolded between her and the men in the room, peppering the evenings with uncharacteristic, casual dialogue. A short sequence with the Lord Advisor regarding whether or not he wore the same black robe seven days a week or had a whole closet of them; a bit with the king about how his favorite color was in fact not purple as the palace décor might suggest, but green.
Thus, even an unlikely crowd such as theirs settled into a strange rhythm of enjoying one another’s company. It was as if the world paused, erstwhile agendas and rivalries becoming temporarily obsolete.
13
Rogue Beast
“That one’s dangerous,” the Master of the Shadows had deemed Lady Verrikose upon the noblewoman’s first appearance. And it had proved an astute assessment.
Game of Towers and Treachery (The Shadow's Apprentice Book 2) Page 11
