Echo in Onyx

by Sharon Shinn

  I risked one look at Nico but he was still staring at the water below. “We first realized Prudence was dead, and we were devastated. It was a few minutes later that we realized Jamison was dead, too. And then we were terrified.”

  “And this scheme—this insane notion to dress you up as Marguerite’s dead echo—how did she convince you to agree?”

  I lifted my chin. “It was my idea. I had to convince her. And it seems to have answered very well. No one else has guessed, at any rate.”

  “How long did you intend to try to carry it off? Forever?” Now he turned to me, but he didn’t reach for me. There was anger in his voice and in the taut set of his shoulders. “You would be willing to sacrifice the rest of your life to play at being a noblewoman’s shadow?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know,” I answered quietly. “My only thought was to get us through this visit. And then perhaps we could have concocted some tale of disaster that befell us on the road home.”

  “Most disasters still yield a body. How did you propose to get around that inconvenience?”

  “I don’t know,” I said again. “We were desperate, don’t you understand that? We still are.”

  Now he was glaring at me. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Really? Tell you? That Marguerite and her echoes had killed the king’s son? Marguerite was convinced that, even if she told the story exactly as it happened, she would be shown no leniency, and nothing you’ve told me about your uncle’s investigation has led me to think otherwise. But you think she could confess the whole and emerge unscathed?”

  “No,” he snapped. “I think very likely she will be tried for murder, if she is ever discovered, and the consequences will be dire. But you could have told me. If you trusted me enough. Which you obviously do not.”

  “How could I put you in such a position?” I demanded. “You are bound by duty and honor and family ties to tell your uncle everything you know! How could I ask you to lie for Marguerite?”

  “You could have asked me to lie for you!”

  There was a long moment of silence as we studied each other in the dark. I could see so little of his face, but his voice was threaded with anger—and a great deal of hurt.

  “I have been lying this whole time, and it makes me hate myself,” I said quietly. “I did not want you to have to make the same choice.”

  “You didn’t trust me,” he said again.

  “With my own life? I think I would have risked it. With Marguerite’s life? No!” My own voice was starting to rise. I gestured toward the palace. “How do I know you won’t go straight to your uncle tonight and tell him everything you’ve learned from me? How do I know you haven’t done so already?”

  “I won’t. I haven’t.”

  “But you should. And if he discovers you have been lying to him—” I shut my mouth and pressed my lips together and shook my head. Turning to stare down at the garden again, I slipped my hands around the rail and gripped as tightly as I could. “There is no end to the number of people I care about who will be hurt by this,” I said.

  “That is the way of murder,” he said shortly.

  I gave him one quick, bitter glance. “So you blame her? Think she was at fault—think she deserves to die for protecting herself from assault? If that’s so, you have a terrible notion of justice.”

  He sighed and squeezed his palms briefly against his temples. “Maybe if it had been some random lord who attacked her—some low noble with no direct connection to the crown—there would have been room for clemency. But the king will not be able to forgive anyone for killing his son.”

  “Then Marguerite has no choice but to pretend that nothing happened. And pray to the goddess that your uncle never discovers the truth.” I silently added, And that you never betray us.

  “He will discover it, though,” Nico said in an urgent voice. “Malachi will keep looking and digging and prying—he will not rest until he is able to prove that the queen had no involvement in Jamison’s murder.”

  I didn’t answer, and Nico laid a rough hand on my shoulder, forcing me around to face him. I shook him off and demanded, “What do you expect me to do? Should we run? Where should we go? I cannot imagine a place of safety.”

  “Not for Marguerite, perhaps. For you.”

  I gaped at him in the dark. “You want me to abandon her—”

  “I could get you out of the city—there are a couple of places you could go—”

  I shoved him in the chest. “I won’t! I can’t believe you would ask it of me! To leave Marguerite when she needs me most—”

  He grabbed my shoulders again and gave me a hard shake. “There is no hope for you otherwise, Brianna, do you understand?” I heard anguish in his voice. “If you were present, if you assisted at the murder—all of you could be put to death, Marguerite, the echoes, you. They will make no distinction between mistress and maid. But if you’re gone—if Malachi’s eye doesn’t fall on you—”

  Now I put both hands against his chest and pushed hard. It rocked him briefly off-balance, but not enough to make him release me. “I am not leaving her. I was present at the murder! I did assist, and I’m glad he’s dead! And I see no choice but to play this charade out till the end.”

  “You’re an idiot,” he said.

  “Just because I’m loyal? I thought that was one of the things you liked about me.”

  “I’d like you a lot better disloyal and alive than faithful and dead,” he shot back.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know what else to do.”

  Again, he stared down at me in the dark, so long and so silently that I started to get nervous. “All right,” he said finally. “Here’s what we’ll do. Marguerite will announce that she’s received bad news from home and she’ll ask permission to return to Oberton, which the king will regretfully refuse. She will fail to come to the breakfast table one morning and everyone will assume she has returned home, so the search parties will be sent off along the Charamon Road.” He drew a deep breath. “But she’ll have headed east instead. Toward Banchura. There will be ships at Banch Harbor that can take her to a hundred destinations.”

  My head was spinning. I had never been past the borders of Orenza until we left for Camarria, and now I was to sail away from the Seven Jewels entirely? “And once we get to Banch Harbor?” I asked. “What country should we book passage to?”

  Nico shook his head. “I’ve never left the kingdom myself. But my mother had a cousin who visited a dozen countries, and he always spoke highly of Ferrenlea. It would be a place to start.”

  “We’ll need—money—a carriage, or at least horses—”

  “You should pawn whatever jewels you can before you leave Camarria,” he said. “You won’t get as good a rate anywhere else along the road. I’ll hire a conveyance for you. And a driver.”

  “You can’t,” I said. “Because once your uncle discovers that Marguerite is missing, he will investigate her disappearance, and if he finds that you helped her—”

  Nico was almost laughing. “I have a bit more discretion than that! I will make the arrangements through another party. The trail will be very cold.”

  I took a deep breath. “How soon should we leave?”

  “As quickly as possible. If not tomorrow, the day after. I can arrange to have the carriage meet you somewhere. You will not be able to bring any baggage with you, I’m afraid.”

  “Maybe Taeline will be able to gather some things for us—”

  “Taeline— Oh, Marguerite’s priestess friend?” I could hardly be surprised that he knew her name. “No. Marguerite can’t tell her. She can’t tell anyone.”

  I held my peace. There was no possibility that Marguerite would leave the city, leave the kingdom, without letting Taeline know she was going. “And then—? For the rest of our lives, we will live in some foreign place, surrounded by strangers?”

  “Maybe only a year or two. If Malachi believes Marguerite to be the murderer, and he believes her to be out of his reach,
he will eventually stop looking for her. You’ll let me know where you are, and I’ll write to let you know when the situation here changes. You’d never be able to return to Oberton, but you could live in Empara or Thelleron. It could be a good life.”

  It sounded impossible. I wasn’t sure we could assemble the cash to pay for four tickets to a foreign destination, and I wasn’t sure Marguerite could summon the energy to attempt the flight. How would we live once we were in Ferrenlea? Could I get employment? Could I learn to speak the language? Would I be able to understand the local customs?

  Could I leave my family behind, with only a scribbled word of explanation—explanation that would, perforce, be yet another lie? Could Marguerite leave hers?

  Could we do it if it was our only hope of survival?

  “I’ll ask her,” I said, my voice very soft. “But I’m not sure she’ll agree to go.”

  “But then … Brianna—”

  “I know,” I said. All the fight was gone out of me; all the anger had drained from him. I leaned in, lifting my head up, and for the first time this evening he drew me into his arms, though his hold was loose as if wasn’t sure he really wanted to cradle me to his heart. Still, I snuggled against him, inhaling the scent of his clothes and skin, wishing I could curl up in his embrace and stay under his protection forever.

  “So,” he said at last, speaking over the top of my head. “Was any of it real?”

  I knew what he meant, but I pretended I didn’t. “Any of what?”

  “Us. The talk. The kisses. The … everything. Did it matter, or were you just trying to find out what I knew?”

  “I didn’t want it to matter,” I told him honestly. “I wasn’t sure that I could trust you. I remembered how we met in Oberton—when you were spying on me for the crown—”

  “Just that once,” he interrupted. “Just that first day.”

  “I thought maybe you already knew what had happened to Jamison. That you were laying a trap for me. And that you were only pretending to care.”

  “I wasn’t. Not a minute of it.” I felt his chest expand as he took a deep breath. “But all this time. When I told you about the investigation. When I repeated everything my uncle said. Is that all you wanted from me? Information?”

  I pulled back just enough to scowl up at him. “I tried to keep away from you,” I said sharply. “At the beginning. Remember? The first time I saw you in Camarria, I told you to stay away from me. At first I was afraid of what you might find out from me. Then I was afraid—afraid of this very thing! That you would discover I’d been lying to you, and you’d hate me forever.”

  “I don’t hate you” was his instant reply.

  “Well, I wouldn’t blame you if you did,” I said, my voice muffled as I looked down toward his shoes.

  He lifted my head with a hand under my chin. “You didn’t answer me,” he said. “Was it real?”

  “Will you believe me if I say it was?”

  The slightest note of laughter in his voice. “You might have to convince me.”

  I lifted my arms to wrap around his neck and he drew me close for the first time this evening. “So real,” I whispered. “So impossibly good. Now you understand why I can’t leave Marguerite—but you made me want to. I never thought I would have any desire to move from Orenza, to live far from the people and places I know, but I started imagining a life in Camarria with you. I will never stop wishing it was possible.”

  Now his grip tightened so abruptly I could barely breathe. “It might be possible.”

  “I can’t abandon her. Don’t ask me to.”

  “No. But you’ll come back someday. I have to believe that. This won’t be a permanent exile.”

  “You’d wait for me?” I breathed.

  The answer to that was a hard kiss and an embrace that lifted me off my feet. “Brianna,” he groaned against my mouth. “As long as you’re alive in this world I don’t think I’ll have a choice.”

  My feet still dangling a couple of inches above the bridge, I kissed him back with a reckless passion. He set me down but only so he could use his hands for other purposes; my own hands were busy as well. It was dark, it was late, and I had contravened so many other social covenants that I discovered I didn’t have any deep-seated principles left about the proper place to make love with a man. Rash criminal wanton that I was, I stripped down, I covered his body with mine, I thrashed about with no cover but the shadows and no roof but the stars.

  And was glad to do so. And willing to do it again any chance I got.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  At first Marguerite said no. Then she said yes. Then she said she had to consult Taeline.

  “You’re not supposed to tell anyone,” I said, because I’d promised Nico I would, but she just gave me a single expressive glance.

  “I won’t tell anyone else. But I’m not leaving without talking to her.”

  It had been a difficult morning. Marguerite had sat in frozen silence as I haltingly confessed what had happened last night, at the ball and afterward. She didn’t rail at me and demand to know how I could have been so stupid, though I apologized so often during my recital that maybe she felt it would have been pointless. She just seemed to grow smaller and more brittle with every word I spoke. “Then we’re doomed,” she said quietly when I was finished, and put a hand over her eyes.

  But I shook my head. “No—listen—Nico thinks we could sail away. Live abroad for a couple of years, maybe in Ferrenlea. He’ll help us get to Banch Harbor. We could escape. We could try.”

  “I could try,” she said, dropping her hand. “You would stay here.”

  I was affronted. “I’m not leaving you!”

  “Well, you should.”

  “You couldn’t possibly make that journey by yourself,” I scoffed. “You don’t even know how to comb your own hair.”

  “No, but I can speak a few words of Ferrenlese,” she retorted.

  “Really? That will be handy!”

  “If we go. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  There wasn’t much time to discuss it because we had to dress for the prince’s expedition to the city gardens. “I could skip it. I could say I have one of my headaches,” Marguerite said, but I shook my head.

  “Maybe there will be some other outing planned for tomorrow or the day after,” I said. “That’s the one we’ll skip. We can disappear while everyone else is gone.”

  “If we decide to run away.”

  “If we do.”

  The visit to the gardens was complicated and time-consuming, involving dozens of carriages and a great deal of muttered complaining, mostly by the women. But the gardens themselves were spectacular, acres and acres of rosebushes, flowering trees, and plant beds interspersed with fountains, statuary, and reflecting pools.

  “I should have brought my sketchbook,” Letitia said.

  “Oh, too much work,” Leonora answered. “I just want to gorge myself on color, not try to reproduce it.”

  “I want to pick armloads of flowers to take home with me,” Marguerite observed. “But I feel certain the gardeners would disapprove. I would be banned from ever returning.”

  “Well, they could hardly begrudge you one little blossom,” Lavinia said, snapping off a single white rose and tucking it behind Marguerite’s ear. “You just don’t look right without flowers in your hair.” We had left the palace without creating any elaborate floral headpieces, since it seemed likely the components would wilt in the sunshine. The echoes and I were wearing our veils, but they were tacked to simple hair clips.

  The sun was relentless, my blond wig was causing my scalp to sweat, and by the time we had been in the gardens twenty minutes I was wishing Marguerite might faint from the heat so I, too, could collapse on the path. But we spent another hour soaking up the color and scent before Cormac finally turned us all back toward the street where our carriages were parked.

  “There’s a light lunch laid out in the dining hall,” he informed us once we made it back
to the palace. About half of the ladies declined the treat, saying they wanted to retreat to their rooms to freshen up. It was no surprise that Marguerite was among this number.

  “You need to take a message to Taeline,” she said as soon as we were back in her suite. “Ask her to meet me tomorrow morning—in the place you told me about.”

  “Gladly,” I said.

  “And then—and then I’ll decide.”

  I ate a quick meal in the kitchen before setting out for the temple, half-expecting Nico to appear at my side before I had gone very far. But he didn’t. He hadn’t been on the outing to the garden, either, so clearly Malachi was keeping him busy with some project. I wondered how he was strangling his conscience as he began the endless task of lying to his uncle about Marguerite. About me. I didn’t think he would have hesitated to tell Malachi the truth if I hadn’t been involved.

  I found the temple fairly empty as I stepped in through the door for mercy. I didn’t see Taeline among the white-robed priestesses and wondered if she’d given up on the notion that Marguerite might come to visit this day; usually we were there before noon if we came at all. I paused before the statue of the goddess with her arms reaching down before her as if to offer absolution to a groveling miscreant, and I said a short prayer. Goddess, have mercy on my soul.

  Then I wandered over to the circular tower set aside for justice. Each of the three supplicants in the room was deep in conversation with a priestess dressed in black, but none of them were Taeline. I paused in front of this representation of the goddess, too. She stood so calmly, so implacably, with her arms stretched out to the sides as if she fought for balance in a shifting world. Very well, then, I’ll plead for justice, I thought. Because in a just society, Marguerite would not be punished for saving herself from that terrible man. And if there is any righteousness in you, you will know that, and you will protect her. As prayers went, it was a bit accusatory, but I felt better after letting the goddess know how I felt.