Echo in Onyx

by Sharon Shinn

  At that exact moment, the footman arrived to summon Marguerite to the throne. She nodded a quick farewell to Cali, then followed the footman with her usual grace, not displaying any nervousness at all. Purpose was right behind her, and Patience and I a half step behind. My hands were both cold and sweating; I was as anxious as I’d been since we arrived at the palace. This was the one time I had to play my role perfectly. To be caught out in a deception right in front of the king …

  I kept my eyes fiercely focused on Marguerite’s back and dropped into my curtsey right along with her. The king extended his hand so Marguerite could kiss his ring; Patience and Purpose and I all leaned forward, pursing our lips, before settling back on our heels and tilting our heads up to gaze at him with reverence.

  “Marguerite Andolin of Orenza,” Harold said in a rumbling voice. “It is good to finally meet you. Your father and I have been having some very profitable conversations lately.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Marguerite said.

  “He seems most eager to develop a warm relationship with the crown.”

  “I don’t doubt it. I would think all your subjects desire such a thing.”

  “Indeed, I would welcome closer ties between Sammerly and the western provinces. Perhaps you will help me work toward that goal.”

  “Happily, sire.”

  The queen leaned forward. Her eyes were almost as green as the emeralds she wore around her wrist, a reminder that her earliest loyalty was to Empara. Her expression was one of intensity as she surveyed Marguerite, but her words were conventional, even a little banal. “You reside in the city of Oberton, do you not?” she asked. “I have never been there. What is it like?”

  “In terms of landscape, its most striking feature is the mountain range to the north, where the onyx is mined. The mountains are particularly beautiful at sunset, when they look purple against the evening sky.”

  “You can hardly go wrong when there are mountains on the horizon,” the king answered.

  “I was born in Empara, where the lands are mostly forest,” Tabitha said. “I confess I never find the prairies and flatlands to be very interesting.”

  “I agree,” said Marguerite. “Give me mountains or woodlands any day over fields and farming.”

  Just as the inanity of the conversation was starting to make me relax, Harold spoke again. “I wonder how my son Jamison enjoyed his recent trip to your city. He had never been there, either, and was quite looking forward to visiting.”

  Marguerite hesitated just an instant too long before replying in a voice that was almost steady. “We didn’t have many opportunities to talk, but he did seem to enjoy himself.”

  Perhaps I was wrong, but I thought the queen sent her husband a look of pure loathing when he introduced Jamison’s name to the conversation. Her tone was exceedingly dry. “Yes, Jamison always seems to—enjoy himself—wherever he goes,” she said. “Court has seemed so quiet with him gone. But we expect him back any minute now to liven our days.”

  Now Harold returned Tabitha’s venomous look with a measured stare in her direction. “And we are, as always, happy to have him in our midst—because we love him a great deal.”

  “Despite his flaws,” Tabitha added icily.

  “I suppose we all have plenty of those,” Marguerite said.

  Unexpectedly, Harold laughed. “I suppose we do. It was good to talk with you, Lady Marguerite. I will let your father know that I have met you and found you most charming.”

  “Thank you, sire,” she murmured, curtseying again. We all curtseyed behind her as a footman appeared to lead us to the other side of the room.

  As we walked, I fixed my eyes on Marguerite’s back. I was sure she was trembling. Once we were far enough from the thrones, I brushed past Purpose so I could hiss encouragement through my veil. “You handled that very well. Don’t be so worried.”

  She couldn’t answer because we were suddenly enveloped by the Banchura triplets. They surged around us in a wave of foaming blue, all friendly smiles and reassuring pats on the arm.

  “See? It wasn’t so bad, was it?” said the one I decided to consider Leonora for the evening.

  “But isn’t the king the dullest man you’ve ever talked to?” demanded the one I took for Lavinia. “I realize it’s impossible to have an interesting conversation at a formal audience, but he takes boring to a whole new level.”

  It was clear this Banchura noblewoman had never had a conversation with the king that included guarded allusions to her possible marriage to his oldest legitimate son as well as protestations of affection for his bastard child—whom she had murdered. Boring didn’t seem like the right word.

  But Marguerite played right along. “That was fine by me,” she answered. “I was so overwhelmed that I would have been incapable of witty remarks. I’m still probably incapable of rational speech.”

  Leonora patted her arm again. “That’s fine, we’ll just rattle on with silly gossip.”

  Jordan approached us just then, making a big show of pushing through the triplets’ nine echoes to join the originals in the center of the group. “Gossip? Oh, please, do share,” he said. “Standing around watching my father make labored conversation with noble guests is not my idea of entertainment. I need a distraction.”

  Lavinia jerked her head in the direction of Lady Elyssa, who had fallen into conversation with an older man who had been seated near Harold at the dinner table this evening. I pegged him for a high-ranking councilor or confidante of the king, though he only had a single echo. And I didn’t see a woman nearby who might be his wife. He didn’t seem to share the general dislike of Elyssa; at any rate, he was smiling somewhat fatuously at whatever she was saying. I had to fight to keep a sardonic expression off my face. A beautiful young schemer and a powerful old man. It was the oldest story in the history of relationships.

  “Notice anything odd about the hateful Elyssa?” Lavinia asked.

  Jordan glanced quickly her way and back at Lavinia. “Someone appears to be enjoying a conversation with her?”

  “That is remarkable,” Leonora agreed. “But something else.”

  Jordan turned to study her more closely. “She’s missing an echo!”

  “Precisely,” Lavinia said.

  “And she was missing the echo last night, too. Though almost nobody noticed because the room was so crowded,” Letitia added.

  “What happened to her?” Marguerite wanted to know.

  Leonora spread her hands. “She says the echo tripped over a shoe left lying in the middle of the room. Twisted her ankle, and won’t be able to walk for a few days.”

  “You don’t believe her?” Marguerite asked.

  “It’s just so odd,” Lavinia said. “Are there ever any shoes lying around in your room? Is your maid that careless?”

  “No.”

  “And then, when I said something nice, like, ‘You poor thing! You must miss your echo so much,’ she said the most awful thing,” Letitia went on.

  “Just dreadful,” Leonora confirmed.

  “She said, ‘It’s actually been something of a relief not to have three of them dragging behind me the last couple of days,’” Lavinia told us. “‘I feel ten pounds lighter,’ she said.”

  “‘Twenty pounds’ is what she said,” Letitia corrected.

  “Well, ten or twenty, it’s still unfathomable,” Leonora said.

  Jordan was still studying Elyssa. “She said that?” he demanded. “And she meant it?”

  “She certainly sounded like she meant it!”

  He shook his head. “It’s unbelievable. There was this time—we’d been out hunting, and one of my echoes took a spill when his horse shied at a snake. He broke his leg in three places and had to stay in bed for four weeks. And that whole time—” He shook his head again, as if he knew he could not possibly put his emotions into words. “For every minute of those four weeks, I felt like my arm had been amputated. I felt like my lungs wouldn’t fill up with air. And my leg wouldn�
�t stop aching. I knew exactly where every fracture was in his bones—I actually walked with a cane for the first week, and I limped for the next three. Being without my echo hurt me.”

  The triplets were all nodding. “When we were younger, there was some expedition, I can’t even remember where—” Leonora began.

  “The old mill,” Letitia interjected.

  “That’s right, the mill. For some reason, there was limited space in the carriages, and our mother decided each of us would only get to bring two echoes.”

  “We screamed and sobbed and threw such tantrums that she had to turn around and take us home,” Lavinia finished up.

  “It’s not that we were trying to be difficult,” Letitia said earnestly. “In general, we were very happy and well-behaved children.”

  “We were just so miserable,” Lavinia said.

  “It was painful,” Leonora added.

  “It was wrong,” Letitia said.

  “So it just doesn’t make sense that Elyssa would be happy to leave an echo behind,” Leonora finished up.

  “I agree,” Marguerite said. “It does make you wonder about her—her sympathetic tendencies.”

  Letitia turned to Jordan. “So you see,” she said, “you can’t marry her.”

  He smiled in a somewhat guarded fashion. I supposed that if the king really wanted the marriage to go forward, Jordan wouldn’t have much choice in the matter. “Nothing has been settled yet,” was all he said.

  Lavinia was looking off in the direction of the thrones. “Thank the goddess!” she exclaimed. “The last poor soul has had the last uncomfortable conversation with the king and now this interminable evening can finally be over.”

  She was right—the whole mass of people had started to drift toward the door and those who were farthest toward the back had already made their escape. We allowed the motion of the crowd to edge us closer and closer to the exit, until we were finally in the hallway and headed toward some of the smaller and more intimate spaces of the palace.

  “What now?” Marguerite asked.

  “Bed for me!” Leonora exclaimed, and her sisters and all of their echoes nodded in vehement agreement.

  “There will be cards, conversation and cognac in the small parlor where we were last night,” Jordan said. “But it is an entirely optional gathering.”

  “Then I think it will be bed for me as well,” Marguerite said. She put a hand to the back of her skull, and Purpose and Patience and I did the same. “I am starting to get one of my headaches and I don’t want it to get worse.”

  “Oh, you poor thing,” Letitia said. “We’ll hope you’re feeling completely recovered in the morning.”

  Jordan peeled off once we reached the foyer, while the triplets and Marguerite climbed the stairs to the third level. Another round of goodbyes and then the triplets continued on down the hallway while the four of us ducked quickly inside Marguerite’s rooms.

  I had barely locked the door behind us when Marguerite doubled over as if in agony. She had not released the echoes yet, so they too were bent in half, their heads practically touching their knees, their hands lifted to cover their eyes.

  “My lady!” I exclaimed, hurrying over to put my arm around her shoulder and pull her upright.

  She was almost gasping for air. “Sweet goddess! To hear a man talking about how much he loves his son—when I know his son is dead! When I know I killed him!”

  “You didn’t kill him,” I began, but she flung her hand in the air to stop me.

  “My echo is the one who beat him to death, but I am my echoes! My echoes are me! It is my fault he is dead. And there is no chance that his murder will go unpunished!”

  “They might note his absence and they might even find his body, but that doesn’t mean they’ll figure out how he died,” I said, urging her over to a sofa and sitting beside her. Patience and Purpose followed us, still mimicking Marguerite’s every move.

  “But they will! They’ll keep looking and looking—they’ll keep asking and asking—”

  “And they’ll find a corpse in a lake and think he must have tumbled in the water after he drank too much wine,” I said firmly.

  “Brianna, I’m so afraid,” she moaned.

  I put my arms around her again and pulled her into a reassuring embrace. “I know. I am, too. But we don’t have any choice. Unless you want to confess now, tell Cormac or his father exactly what happened—”

  She jolted away from me. “No!”

  “Then you have to keep playing the game.”

  She was still for a moment, then took a long, shuddering breath. She nodded. The echoes nodded, too, and then slouched back against their cushions as she finally thought to release them. “Then I’ll keep playing the game,” she said.

  I folded my hands in my lap and gave her a searching look. “Those things the triplets were saying tonight—and Prince Jordan—about losing an echo. Were they right? Is that how it feels?”

  She nodded again, wearily this time, and slumped against the back of the sofa. “Worse. It’s there all the time, this—this hole in my life. As if part of me is missing. As if someone has put a hand over my eye and I can’t see clearly out of the other one. I don’t know how to explain it.”

  “It’s grief. You don’t have to explain it. Everyone who’s ever felt it knows what it feels like,” I said softly.

  “Does it ever get better? Does it ever go away?”

  “It gets better. It doesn’t go away, not entirely,” I said. “You just get used to it.”

  “I don’t think I’ll get used to it,” she said.

  I patted her on the shoulder. “Maybe not,” I answered. “So then you’ll just have to learn to work around it.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  In the morning, it seemed best for Marguerite to suffer from one of her fictional headaches. I had errands to run and she wasn’t feeling very social, so she liked the notion of spending a few hours alone in her room. I swung by the kitchen to assemble a plate of food and grumble a little.

  “I couldn’t even go back to my own bed to sleep last night because she wanted me nearby every minute!” I exclaimed to one of the Banchura maids. “And now she’ll lock herself in her room and refuse to let anyone in till I’ve returned. I can tell you right now, this visit can’t be over fast enough to suit me.”

  I offered a much calmer version of the same story to Lourdes when I paused in the foyer to ask directions to an apothecary’s shop. She offered to send a footman to fetch anything I needed, but I shook my head.

  “I think it will do me good to walk around in the fresh air for a while,” I said, knowing the housekeeper would understand very well what I was attempting to convey. It’s my one chance to get away from this demanding monster, and I am not going to give it up. She might even have been sympathetic.

  I enjoyed my trip through the bustling city streets, which had a fresh, damp smell from a rainstorm that had moved through the night before. The apothecary’s shop was in a completely different direction from the flower market we had visited with Nico, and nowhere near the clover-leaf temple, so I had to mind my landmarks to make sure I would be able to find my way back. I ended up in a thriving commercial district with dozens of small shops crammed together on narrow, cheerful streets that were thronged with people. Working class, mostly, though I spotted a number of individuals I took to be tradesmen’s sons and merchants’ daughters—rich enough to have money to spend, but not so wealthy they could turn all of their chores over to servants.

  I spent twenty minutes in the apothecary’s place just because I liked it. It was bigger than any similar shop I’d visited in Oberton and lined from floor to ceiling with wooden shelves holding boxes of mysterious herbs and powders. The young man working behind the counter looked to be a year or two older than I was and eager to pass the time, so he opened half the containers in the store to show me the contents. I now knew where to come if I needed to cure a cough, dissolve a wart, settle my stomach, enhance my memory, impr
ove my eyesight, or stop an itch. I suspected he probably stocked darker potions, too, but I didn’t inquire about them. If any inquisitor was going to follow after me and ask what I’d wanted to buy, I didn’t want items like poison to be on the list. In the end, all I bought was a simple powder that would ease Marguerite’s supposed headache.

  Once I was back outside, I began a quick and purposeful stroll along the streets, glancing at every shop window I passed. Here was a milliner, here a boot maker, here a boutique that specialized in gloves. I had had no need of an apothecary, but I had reasoned that it was likely to be located near dozens of other enterprises that catered to the rich and the near-rich. And I definitely wanted to find—

  There it was. A wig maker’s shop. I went right in.

  I was the only customer at the moment, though the cramped space at first seemed overfull of bodies. Or rather, it was full of bodiless heads set on counters and tables and shelves and staring sightlessly toward the door. Each bust sported a carefully styled coiffure and the occasional jaunty hat besides. Through a small door I spotted a workroom where three women were bent over long tables, swatches of hair spread out before them like so many bolts of silk.

  One of them looked up, saw me, and came out into the shop to greet me. Her silver hair was so perfectly combed and curled that I had to wonder if it was real or fake. “Are you interested in buying a wig?” she asked.

  Indeed, I was.

  I’d brought a lock of Marguerite’s hair so I could match the color as closely as possible, and I knew exactly the texture and length I needed. The wig maker had three completed samples to choose from, none of them perfect, but all of them sized well enough to fit my head. She offered to make me a custom product, but I didn’t want to wait. So far I had managed to conceal my own darker hair under elaborate headpieces, but I needed to be able to expand my accessories. And I was tired of taking chances.

  Well. I would continue to take chances the whole time we were in Camarria. But at least I could minimize this hazard.