Beneath the Keep

by Erika Johansen

  Now there was a shuffling and murmuring at the far end of the room. The crowd of nobles parted to admit the old woman, who walked with one hand on a cane and the other wrapped around Lord Williams’s arm. As she came closer, Miles saw that she was blind, both of her eyes milky with cataracts. As her sightless gaze passed over him, he shuddered.

  “Ellens!” Williams deposited the old woman gently into a chair that had been placed beside the six-foot slab of stone in the center of the room. “You have the girl?”

  Ellens came forward, leading a slight figure in a hood and cloak. When Ellens pulled back her hood, Miles saw that she was very young, surely no more than fourteen. She had a peasant’s simple face, her nose dotted with freckles. Her eyes rolled vacantly toward the ceiling.

  Drugged, Miles realized.

  “Well, let’s get on with it!” someone barked from the back. Miles thought it was Lord Tare. “I don’t want to spend a moment more in this shithole than I have to!”

  “No one begged you to come, Tare!” Williams snapped back. “In fact, I seem to recall lifting a hundred pounds from you for the privilege.”

  Tare muttered something inaudible but venomous. Ellens removed the girl’s cloak and helped her to lie down on the stone slab. Now that Miles’s eyes had adjusted to the light, he saw that the slab itself was covered with odd symbols that had been etched into the stone: sun and moon, the crude rendering of a ship, even a five-pointed star. That last was a pagan symbol, Miles knew, and he wondered—not for the first time—what Bishop Wallace would say if he could see Miles here, in the Creche. In this room.

  Best not to think about it. Best to just get it done.

  “Light,” the old woman croaked, froglike. She wasn’t really so old, Miles saw now; it was only her sight and the cane that gave the illusion of age. She might be as young as fifty. She stood patiently, waiting, while three of Williams’s men brought torches and stationed them in the stands around the slab, creating a bright circle of light around the young girl in the center of the shadowy room. The girl wore a thin white dress, little more than a shift, and Miles had the unwilling thought that she must be cold, drugs or no. It was early April, warming outside, but in this dank, mold-dripping hell, there was no warmth.

  “Go ahead, Orra,” Williams told the old woman, his voice deep and solicitous, and Miles felt a sudden, poisonous envy. Williams wasn’t even a good Christian; he went to church, certainly, as they all did, but that didn’t stop him from keeping two mistresses in his manse. Rumor said that Williams was so brazen about it that the mistresses slept on the same floor as his wife.

  He will get his reward in the hereafter, Miles thought, feeling a grim satisfaction at the idea. And there won’t be any seers to grease the skids there.

  The old woman had bent over the younger one now, pulling her arms from her dress. She rolled the bodice of the dress down to the girl’s waist, revealing her breasts and the milk-white skin of her torso. Miles crossed himself and looked away, but a moment later his eyes had gone back, almost unwilling.

  The old woman began murmuring, low words that Miles could not hear, and the young woman began to writhe. As she twisted on the slab, her eyes rolled up into her head, showing the whites. Miles was growing more uncomfortable by the second, and he didn’t think he was the only one; there was an almost imperceptible movement in the crowd of nobles, shifting and fidgeting, as though they all wished they were anywhere else. When Miles first heard about Williams’s offer, it had seemed a downright bargain: one hundred pounds to find out the year’s forecast! His acres had been devastated in the drought, and the hundred pounds would bring the family treasury down to its last thousand, but a man who knew the year’s weather could make ten times that much, not only by planting the right crops but by hoarding his own long-term stores to create a shortage. Paying Williams had been the easiest decision that Miles had ever made; only now, in this dank room, did he understand that there might be an additional price. His fellow nobles knew it too; they shifted uncomfortably, none of them willing to look at each other, all of them trying not to look at the girl. She had arched her back now, lifting her torso off the table, and her eyes continued to gaze whitely at the ceiling, almost as whitely as those of the old woman who stared down at her, her palm placed flat between the girl’s breasts. The woman’s other hand emerged from the shadows, and Miles saw that she held a dagger.

  “God save us,” someone muttered nearby, and several of the lords who stood opposite Miles crossed themselves. But none of them moved to interfere, not even when the old woman made a shallow vertical cut along the line of the girl’s breastbone. Blood welled immediately, a red river cutting a ravine between mountains, almost shockingly scarlet in contrast to the girl’s white skin. Several of the lords in the audience cursed, and behind Miles, someone drew a shaking, hissing breath. As the old woman removed the dagger, the girl stopped writhing and lay still, so still that Miles could not even see her breathe.

  “Is she dead?” Lord March asked timidly.

  “Shut up, March!” Lord Williams hissed, his eyes focused on the old woman.

  My God, Miles thought, he has seen all of this before. How many times?

  “I come to speak before you now,” the old woman said, and her voice made Miles jump. It was not the voice of an old woman, or even of a woman at all. The words were hollow and cold, less than human. That night, and for many months afterward, Miles would wake gasping from dreams he could barely remember, dreams in which that voice spoke to him, taunted him, stalked him, coming closer and closer in the dark.

  “The stars change,” the old woman intoned hollowly. “The moon falls. The tide surges, then ebbs.”

  Miles blinked. He had expected this to be a simple business, though he didn’t know why. Just a few straightforward words: would the drought continue, or not? But this was prophecy; of course it would not be straightforward. For a moment he wondered whether the old woman were milking it, building suspense as a good carnival palmist would . . . and then he dismissed the thought as that lifeless voice spoke again.

  “Seventeen ships went over the horizon, all of them bound for the better world. One ship sank; innumerable sorrows arose. Sixteen ships landed, and the Tearling was born.”

  “The Crossing,” someone muttered behind Miles. “Who gives a toss? Just tell us about the weather.”

  “William Tear fell,” the old woman continued. For a moment her milky eyes seemed to look right at Miles, and he froze, unable even to breathe until her gaze had moved on.

  “William Tear fell,” the old woman repeated.

  “We know!” someone shouted from the back. “Just get on with it!”

  “Shut up!” Lord Williams snapped again. But he looked uncomfortable, and Miles realized uneasily that the process was not going the way it was supposed to. Something was wrong.

  “William Tear was the True King,” the old woman intoned. “The one who saved them all. He fell, and the kingdom fell with him.”

  The entire room was muttering now; even Williams could ignore it no longer. He grabbed the old woman’s shoulders, giving her a gentle shake.

  “Orra! The harvest! The drought! What of the drought?”

  In a single fluid movement the old woman whipped around, jerked the dagger upward, and sliced Williams across the face, jaw to forehead. Williams screamed, clasping his hand to the cut, and even before he fell backward the woman was up and out of the chair, leaping, almost springing, like a frog. Miles too jumped backward, knocking several men over behind him. The old woman’s milky eyes seemed not blind now, but malevolent. Her mouth was lifted in a hideous grin. She jumped again, three quick springs to the far end of the room.

  “Stop her!” Williams shouted, one hand clasped to his bleeding cheek. “Don’t let her get away!”

  “The harvest,” the old woman croaked happily, her white eyes gleaming in the dark. “Yes, you will reap. Th
e moon falls, the stars rise. They shift and change!” Her voice was rising now, almost into a scream; Miles clapped his hands over his ears, but it was no good. He could still hear her, even over the blood that thudded in his ears.

  “The True Queen comes!” the harridan shrieked. “I see her! The queen who will be! The one who saves us all!”

  “Shut her up!” Williams howled.

  But no one in the room seemed to dare. The dagger had fallen from the old woman’s hand, but now she began to twitch madly, almost to dance, her body rolling wildly against the wall, her white eyes disappearing and reappearing in the shadows, and that was so horrible that Miles shut his eyes, praying silently. But her screams went on.

  “The queen of spades! The victory of ships! She comes! I see her! I see—”

  Her voice cut off abruptly, leaving a silence so loud that at first Miles thought someone was still screaming. He drew his hands down from his eyes, but for a long moment he didn’t dare open them, not wanting to see. Someone put a hand on his shoulder, and Miles almost screamed himself, but when he looked up it was only Lord Gelland, using him as a support to get to his feet. He thought of saying something, but then a gagging sound from the corner brought him back to where he was.

  The old woman lay on the floor, bleeding to death; her throat had been cut. Lord Carvel stood over her, wiping his blade with a red cloth. Of course it would be Carvel. The old lord was well past sixty, but he was former Caden, an assassin who had attained his unlikely lordship by helping old Queen Elaine net a ring of Mort spies. Carvel wasn’t one to be frightened by an old woman, even one who spoke in the voice of the dead. For a long moment, no one said anything, and Miles had time to feel relief that—with the exception of Carvel, of course—they had all been as frightened as he was.

  “What the fuck was that?” Lady Andrews demanded, pushing her way through the crowd. She was the only woman among them, but the group of nobles parted before her like the Red Sea. Rumor said that Lord Andrews lived in mortal fear of his wife, but he was hardly alone in that; no man in the Tearling wanted Lady Andrews’s notice, let alone her enmity. She stalked toward Lord Williams and planted herself before him: a pretty woman, if no longer young, with her hands on her hips.

  “I paid good money for a read on the harvest, Williams. Is that what I paid for?”

  “I will reimburse you,” Williams said, almost humbly. Lady Andrews continued to stare at him for a long moment, and Williams added, “Plus twenty pounds for your trouble.”

  She nodded coldly and then turned to her two retainers.

  “Let’s get out of here. This place stinks.”

  They went off through the crowd. Several more nobles left in their wake, but most of the group simply stood there, staring blankly at the dead crone who lay beside the wall. Williams bent to examine the corpse, then turned to Lord Carvel, his eyes blazing.

  “I told you to grab her, not kill her! Why in God’s name did you do that?”

  “These tunnels echo. She was making too much noise.”

  “But where am I going to find another seer? She was worth her weight in gold!”

  Carvel shrugged, unmoved.

  “Perhaps all is not lost.” Lord Gosselin had moved up now, putting a soothing hand on Williams’s arm. That was not surprising, either; Gosselin was always the placator, the peacemaker.

  “It’s well known that the sight runs in families,” Gosselin continued. “Did your seer have any children? You might—”

  “She did,” Williams muttered. “But I sold the baby, years ago, long before I knew what Orra was. They were looking for girls, paying well—”

  “She’s gone!”

  Miles spun around with the rest. The stone slab stood empty, a bright circle of light in the middle of the room.

  “The whore!” Williams shouted. “Christ, she saw it all! Find her! Check the tunnels! Go!”

  Nobles scattered in all directions, drawing swords as they went, and Williams followed them, one hand holding a sword and the other still clasped to his bleeding face. Miles, who had no intention of charging off into that lightless labyrinth, was left behind. He thought he was the only one, but after a moment he realized that Lord Gayel had stayed as well. Gayel was a neighbor in the central Almont, owner of vast tracts of wheat. He was by no means a friend, but not an enemy either. They stared at each other across the stone slab.

  “What a cock-up,” Gayel remarked, fastening his cloak. “I should have never gotten involved with this business.”

  “Nor I,” Miles admitted.

  “Well, at least Williams will not have the advantage over us any longer.”

  They turned toward the corpse. The floors in the Creche were nowhere near level; blood had run from the seer’s cut throat to end up almost halfway across the room. Her white eyes stared at them, truly blind now, and yet Miles did not like to meet her gaze, any more than he had before.

  “Do you think they’ll find the girl?” he asked Gayel.

  “I don’t think it matters. She was poppied out of her mind, and even if she did remember anything, who would believe her? She was just a pigeon from the Alley.”

  “But surely someone will want her back.”

  “No. Ellens bought her outright.”

  Miles nodded, relieved. His only worry was that the story might get back to Queen Arla somehow, but Gayel was right; no one cared about the words of a Creche whore.

  “Come on, Marshall. Let’s get out of this place. The Andrews bitch was right about one thing: it reeks.”

  Miles nodded. But he could not resist a last look back at the body on the floor. The seer’s head was thrown backward, her eyes still seeming to stare across the room. Miles turned quickly, following Gayel into the tunnels.

  Gayel knew his way; he came down here to watch the fights, and Miles followed him confidently through the tunnels as they branched, met, and then branched again. The two of them talked of home, of the drought, of Lord Doleran’s problems with his new wife, who was known to have an eye for young servingmen. But even as he gossiped and laughed, Miles was thinking of the old woman, trying to remember exactly what she had said. She had talked about the True Queen, he knew that, and about ships, and something about the queen of spades. Miles was a good poker player, and he knew the spade queen well . . . but somehow he did not think that the crone had been talking about cards. He and Gayel climbed the great staircase and emerged into the sunshine—early-morning sunshine, bright and cheerful—but Miles did not feel it, for his entire body had gone suddenly, inexplicably cold.

  “Thunderclouds on the horizon!” his father had liked to shout toward the end of his illness. “Right there on the horizon, Miles!” And Miles could not calm him, not with whiskey or books or the foul-smelling medicine from the local apothecary. Until the day he died, Robert Marshall remained convinced that the storm was already upon them, a storm so strong that it would shatter the kingdom in two.

  Right there on the horizon, Miles repeated to himself. The familiar landscape of the Gut passed around them, pubs and card hells and brothels, but he was not comforted, for he could only think of the seer’s milky eyes, her gloating mouth. Beneath the raucous life of the Gut around him, he could still hear her voice.

  “The True Queen! She comes now! I have seen it!”

  She wasn’t talking about Arla, Miles thought. Queen Arla was a ruler like her mother, Queen Elaine, and Elaine’s mother before her, a queen who did what was expected . . . and with a sudden start, Miles wondered whether the woman might have been talking about Elyssa. The Crown Princess was already a subject of some unease among the nobility, for she did not mingle with them, not even with the noblewomen her own age, preferring instead the company of servants. Rumor said that Princess Elyssa had sympathies for the poor; Lord Dillon, who spent plenty of time at court, even claimed that she believed in redistribution of wealth. The Princess was young
, only twenty-one, but stubborn. Even Queen Arla had not been able to tame her. A collectivist on the throne would be a disaster for the Tearling.

  And for me, Miles thought. And then, looking at Gayel beside him: For all of us.

  Then he told himself not to be ridiculous. Queen Arla had many years to live yet, and the old woman had only been a village seer. Good at forecasting the weather, perhaps, but telling the weather and telling the future of a kingdom were two very different things. Miles was out a hundred pounds, but Williams had made Lady Andrews whole, and having done so publicly, he would have to reimburse everyone; in the end, Miles would have his hundred back as well. The drought would end soon, and the crops rebound, but even if not, there were still fortunes to be made in a time of need. All would surely be well, but even so, Miles could not stop thinking of stars rising and moons falling, of prophecy, and though he was a good Christian who lent no credence to such things, he could not repress a chill.

  Distantly, not with his ears but with his mind, he seemed to hear thunder.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE WOMAN IN THE CLOAK