I said, “What’s a ballista?”
“Like a catapult, but it flings spears. But this one flings … what is that?”
It looked like a harpoon with a bladder full of something unspecified. “I don’t think I want to know,” I said. It looked like a giant clyster pipe, for delivering a dragon’s colonic, but I didn’t care to say that aloud before a prince of the realm, bastard or no.
“Stow it in here,” he said, handing me a saddle pack, which appeared to contain our lunch. “You’re dressed warmly enough to ride?”
I hoped so. I’d never actually ridden a horse, being a city girl, but I’d scrounged up a pair of Porphyrian trousers and wore my usual overabundance of layers.
I had Orma’s earring fastened by a cord around my neck. I could feel the cold lump of it if I put my hand to my heart.
We set off through the palace, down corridors, through a door concealed behind a tapestry, and down into a series of passages I’d never seen. Stairs took us below the level of the basements, through a rough tunnel. We passed three locked doors, which Kiggs conscientiously relocked behind us while I held the lantern. We were going roughly west, according to my internal compass. Past a pair of enormous stone doors, the tunnel broadened into a natural cave system; Kiggs avoided the smaller branches, taking the widest, flattest route each time, until we reached the mouth of a cave in the hillside below the western wall of the castle.
The broad valley of the Mews River spread before us, cloaked in morning mist. Thick clouds hid the face of the sky. Kiggs paused, arms akimbo, taking in the vista. “This was a sally port in war times, invisible from below. We saved ourselves a trip through the city, see? There’s a stable at the base of the hill; we’ve horses waiting there.”
The dusty cave floor had been recently disturbed. “Who uses these caves now?”
“Uncle Rufus, rest he in the bosom of Allsaints, used this route to go hunting. I thought it couldn’t hurt to retrace his steps. No one else uses it that I’m aware of.” He looked at me; I gestured toward some discarded clothing behind a rock. “Hm! Shepherds taking shelter from a storm?” He lifted one item, a well-made but simple gown. Every woman in the palace owned a couple like it; I know I did. “Serving girls meeting their lovers? But how would they get through three locked doors, and why would they leave clothing behind?”
“It is peculiar.”
He grinned. “If this is the biggest mystery we encounter today, I’ll call us lucky.” He refolded the gown and placed it back behind the rock. “You’re perceptive. You may wish to keep that skill at the ready: the slope is rocky, and it’s likely to be wet.”
As we picked our way downhill, I found myself breathing easier. The air was clean and empty; the atmosphere of city and court seemed dense by comparison, saturated with troubles and heavy with worries. There were only two of us out here under the weightless, unbounded sky, and I sighed with relief, noticing for the first time how claustrophobic I had been.
Horses were, indeed, waiting for us. Kiggs had apparently sent word that he was riding with a woman, because my horse was fitted with a little sideways basket seat, complete with footrest. This struck me as far more sensible than the usual setup. Kiggs, however, was unhappy with it. “John!” he cried. “This won’t do! We need proper tack!”
The old ostler frowned. “Sharpey told me you was riding out with the princess.”
“No, Sharpey did not tell you that! You assumed that. Maid Dombegh expects to control her own horse, not be led around on a pony!” He turned to me apologetically, but something in my face stopped him short. “You do intend to ride?”
“Oh yes,” I said, resigned to it now. I hoisted the hem of my skirts to show how I was ready with the Porphyrian trousers and all. He blinked at me, and I realized that had been a most unladylike action—but wasn’t he setting me up to ride in an unladylike way? I couldn’t seem to behave properly, no matter what I did.
Maybe that meant I could stop fretting about it so much.
They brought out my refitted horse; I hitched up my skirts and mounted on the first try, not wanting anyone grabbing me around the waist to help me up. The horse turned in a circle. I’d never done this, but I knew the theory, and it wasn’t long before I had her moving in a straight line, in almost the correct direction.
Kiggs caught me up. “Eager to get going? You left without your saddle pack.”
I managed to stop my horse and hold her almost still while he secured my bags, and then we were off. My horse had definite ideas about where we should go; she liked the look of the water meadows ahead and thought we couldn’t get there fast enough. I tried to hold her back and let Kiggs lead, but she was quite determined. “What’s beyond that leat?” I called back to him, as if I had some notion where we were going.
“The fens where Uncle Rufus was found,” he said, craning his neck to look. “We can stop there, although I doubt the Guard missed much.”
My horse slowed as we approached the little canal; she wanted the water meadow, not the brambly bog. I gestured to the prince to take the lead, as if I were slowing on purpose. My horse tried to turn away from the bridge. “No you don’t,” I muttered to her. “Why should you play the coward? You outweigh all of us.”
Kiggs trotted ahead, his dun cloak flapping behind him. He sat lightly in the saddle, and his horse seemed to respond to his very thoughts; there was none of this unseemly yanking of reins that I was forced to do. He led us off the road almost immediately on the other side of the leat. The fen was relatively dry this time of year; what standing water there was had frozen into a glassy crust that crunched underhoof. I still managed to find a muddy patch where my horse’s hooves skidded and sucked. “Steer her toward the grasses,” Kiggs advised, but my horse, smarter than me, was already headed that way.
Kiggs paused beside some barren shrubbery and pointed to the hills north of us, black with winter trees. “They were hunting in the Queenswood, there. His courtiers claim the hounds scattered—”
“And the hunters scattered after them?”
“No, no, that’s not how it works. The hounds are supposed to investigate all leads; they’re bred for independence. They follow a scent to the end, and if it doesn’t lead to anything useful, they return to the pack. That’s what they’re for, so the hunters don’t have to follow every dead end in the forest.”
“But the Earl of Apsig said Prince Rufus had followed his hounds.”
Kiggs stared at me. “You questioned him about that day?”
The earl had required no interrogation; he’d been bragging to the ladies-in-waiting at the Blue Salon. Kiggs had walked in on that conversation, in fact, but apparently he had missed the discussion of hounds. It seemed I had a reputation as a shrewd investigator to uphold, however, so I said, “Of course.”
Kiggs shook his head in wonderment, and I felt immediately guilty. “They’re supposing that my uncle took off after his prize hound, Una, because he got separated from the group and nobody saw where he went. But he had no reason to do that. She knows what she’s doing.”
“Then why did he leave the group?”
“We may never know,” said Kiggs, spurring his horse a little further along. “Here’s where they found him—with Una’s help—the next morning, beside this rivulet.”
There was little to see, no blood, no sign of struggle. Even the hoofprints of the Guard had been obscured by rain and filled in with seeping fen water. There was a rather deep water-filled crater, and I wondered whether that was where the prince had lain. It was not dramatically Rufus-shaped.
Kiggs dismounted and reached into the pouch at his belt, drawing out a Saint’s medallion, tarnished with use and age. Disregarding the mud, he knelt by the water and held the medallion reverently to his lips, muttering as if to fill it with prayers. He squeezed his eyes shut, praying fervently but also trying to stave off tears. I felt for him; I loved my uncle too. What would I do if he were gone? I was a poor excuse for pious, but I cast a prayer up anyway, to a
ny Saint who might catch it: Hold Rufus in your arms. Watch over all uncles. Bless this prince.
Kiggs rose, surreptitiously wiping his eyes, and cast the medallion into the pool. The cold wind tossed his hair the wrong way across his head; the medallion’s ripples disappeared among choppy little waves.
It suddenly occurred to me to think like a dragon. Could a dragon have sat right here in broad daylight, killing someone without being seen? Absolutely not. I could see the road and the city in the distance. Nothing obscured that view at all.
I turned to Kiggs, who was already looking at me, and said, “If a dragon did it, your uncle must have been killed somewhere else and moved here.”
“That’s exactly what I think.” He glanced up at the sky, which was beginning to spit drizzle at us. “We need to get moving, or we’re going to get drenched.”
He mounted his horse and led us out of the fen, back to the high, dry road. He took the north fork, toward the rolling hills of the Queenswood; we passed through just the southern corner of that vast forest. It had a reputation for being dark, but we saw daylight the entire time, black branches dividing the gray sky into panes, like the lead cames of a cathedral window. It began to drizzle harder and colder.
Over the third ridge, the forest turned into coppice, the rolling hills into sinkholes and ravines. Kiggs slowed his horse. “This seems a more likely area for a dragon to kill someone. Coppice is thinner than forest, so it could maneuver adequately, if not well. It’d be concealed down one of the hollows, unseen until one was right on top of it.”
“You think Prince Rufus stumbled upon the rogue dragon by accident?”
Kiggs shrugged. “If a dragon really killed him, that seems likely. Any dragon intending to assassinate Prince Rufus could find a hundred easier ways to do it without raising suspicions against dragons. If it were me, I’d infiltrate the court, gain the prince’s trust, lure him into the forest, and put an arrow through the back of his skull. Call it a hunting accident—or disappear. None of this messy biting off of heads.”
Kiggs sighed. “I was convinced it was the Sons of St. Ogdo before the knights came to us. Now I don’t know what to think.”
A noise had been growing at the edge of my perception, a chittering like locusts in summer. It grew loud enough now that I noticed it. “What’s that sound?”
Kiggs paused to listen. “That would be the column of rooks, I assume. There’s an immense rookery in a ravine north of here. The birds are so numerous there’s always a flight of them above the place, visible from miles away. Here, I’ll show you.”
He steered his horse off the path, through the coppice, up the ridge; I followed. From the top we saw, half a mile off, a lazy cloud of black birds, hovering, swooping all together. There must have been thousands for us to hear their cries this far away.
“Why do they gather right there?”
“Why do birds do anything? I don’t think anyone has ever bothered to find out.”
I chewed my lip, knowing something he didn’t and trying to work out how best to tell him. “What if the dragon was there? Maybe it left some, uh, carrion,” I said, wincing at my own feebleness. Sure, rooks liked carrion; that wasn’t the only thing a dragon ever left behind.
“Phina, that rookery has been there for years,” he said.
“Imlann has been banished for sixteen.”
Kiggs looked skeptical. “You can’t believe he would camp out in the exact same spot for sixteen years! It’s coppice. Woodcutters tend it. Someone would have noticed.”
Bah. I had to try a different tack. “Have you read Belondweg?”
“I couldn’t call myself much of a scholar if I hadn’t,” he said.
He was adorable and he made me smile, but I couldn’t let him see. “Do you remember how the Mad Bun, Pau-Henoa, tricked the Mordondey into thinking Belondweg’s army was mightier than it really was?”
“He made a fake battlefield. The Mordondey believed they’d stumbled across the site of a terrible slaughter.”
Why did I have to spell everything out for everyone? Honestly. He was as bad as my uncle. “And how did Pau-Henoa counterfeit that kind of carnage?”
“He scattered dragon dung all over a field, attracting millions of carrion crows, and … oh!” He looked back toward the column. “You don’t think—”
“That might be a dragon’s cesspit over there, yes. They don’t leave it scattered about; they’re fastidious. In the mountains, there are ‘vulture valleys.’ Same thing.”
I glanced at him, embarrassed to be having this discussion, embarrassed still more that Orma had told me these kinds of things—in response to my inquiries, of course. I tried to gauge how mortified the prince was. He looked at me wide-eyed, not disgusted, not laughing, but genuinely intrigued. “All right,” he said. “Let’s have a look.”
“That’s way out of our way, Kiggs. It’s just a hunch—”
“And I have a hunch about your hunches,” he said, kicking his horse gently in the ribs. “This won’t take long.”
The raucous cawing grew louder at our approach. When we’d crossed half the distance, Kiggs raised a gloved hand and motioned me to stop. “I don’t want to stumble across this fellow by accident. If that’s what happened to Uncle Rufus—”
“The dragon isn’t here,” I said. “Surely the rooks would be alarmed, or silent. These look unconcerned to me.”
His face brightened as an idea hit him. “Maybe that drew Uncle Rufus here: the birds were acting strangely.”
We rode closer, slowly, through the coppice. Ahead of us yawned a wide sinkhole; we stopped our horses at the edge and looked in. The bottom was rocky where an underground cavern had collapsed. The few existing trees were tall, spindly, and black with quarrelling birds. There was ample room here for a dragon to maneuver, and unambiguous evidence that one had.
“Are dragons sulfuric through and through?” muttered Kiggs, pulling the edge of his cloak up over his face. I followed suit. We could handle the stench of sewage—we were city dwellers, after all—but this reek of rotten eggs turned the stomach.
“All right,” he said. “Light a fire under that keen brain of yours, please. That looks fairly fresh, there, would you agree?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the only one I see.”
“He wouldn’t have to come here more than once a month. Dragons digest slowly, and if he were becoming a saarantras regularly, I understand that makes them …” No. No, I was not going into more detail than that. “The rooks would have finished off anything older, perhaps,” I offered limply.
Only his eyes were visible above his cloak, but they’d crinkled into a smile at my discomfiture. “Or the rain would have dissolved it, I suppose. Fair enough. But we can’t confirm that the rooks live here because a dragon habitually uses this space.”
“We don’t have to confirm that. A dragon was here recently, without question.”
Kiggs narrowed his eyes, thinking. “Say the rooks were acting strangely. My uncle came to see what was happening. He stumbled upon a dragon. It killed him and carried his headless body back to the fen under cover of night.”
“Why move the body?” I mused aloud. “Why not eat all the evidence?”
“The Guard would have kept scouring the wood for Uncle Rufus’s body. That would lead us here, eventually, to unambiguous proof of a dragon.” Kiggs darted his gaze back toward me. “But then, why did it eat his head?”
“It’s hard for a dragon to make it look like something else killed you. Biting off the head is fairly ambiguous. And maybe it knew people would blame the Sons of St. Ogdo,” I said. “You did, didn’t you?”
He shook his head, not exactly conceding the point. “So why did it reveal itself to the knights? Surely it knew we would connect the two!”
“Maybe it didn’t expect the knights to risk imprisonment by reporting to the Queen. Or maybe it assumed the Queen would never believe their story—which also happened, didn’t it?” I hesitated, because it fe
lt like giving away something personal, but finally added: “Sometimes the truth has difficulty breaching the city walls of our beliefs. A lie, dressed in the correct livery, passes through more easily.”
He wasn’t listening, however; he stared at a second object of intense rookish interest on the floor of the hollow. “What’s that?”
“A dead cow?” I said, wincing.
“Hold my horse.” He handed me his reins, dismounted, and was scrambling down into the stony sinkhole before I could express surprise. The rooks startled, exploding noisily into the air, obscuring my view of him. If he’d been in uniform, I could have made out the scarlet through all that black, but he might have been a mossy rock for all that I could see.
The rooks swirled and dove in unison, screaming, then scattered into the trees. Kiggs, his arms wrapped protectively around his head, had nearly reached the bottom.
My horse shifted uneasily. Kiggs’s horse pulled at the reins and whickered. The rooks had all but disappeared, leaving the coppice and hollow eerily silent. I didn’t like this one bit. I considered shouting down to Kiggs, but his horse gave a violent tug, and I had to focus all my attention on not falling off my own mare.
The cold drizzle had continued to fall, and I now saw, to the north of us, a cloud of vapor rising out of the coppice. Maybe it was fog; the mountains further north were nicknamed Mother of Mists. But this seemed too localized to me. This seemed like what you might see if cold drizzle were falling on something warm.
I put a hand to my heart, to Orma’s earring, although I did not pull it out just yet. Orma would be in so much trouble for transforming and coming to my rescue that I couldn’t afford to call him if I wasn’t completely sure.
The mist was spreading, or its source moved. How much surer did I need to be? It would take time for Orma to get here; he would not be able to fly for several minutes after he transformed, and we were miles away. The wisps moved west, then curled toward the sinkhole. There was no sound in the coppice. I listened hard for the telltale rasp of branches on hide, for footsteps, for the hot rush of breath, but heard nothing.
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