But something was just wrong all the same.
Let’s go talk to Jilly, she told Florian. Or rather, let’s go talk to Caesar.
This time, passing through the village, they saw signs of life. People were coming out of their cottages to feed animals and do a few chores. They stopped to watch Anthea go by, and she raised a hand to them. She didn’t see any children, and the people she did see were thin and worn looking, even from a distance. They had clearly been ill, and she hoped that the vaccine had come in time.
Up on the hill, Anthea felt a ripple as she passed between the standing stones. There was definitely something about them. She pulled Florian to a halt as soon as they were through, and told him to send a message to Jilly via Caesar.
We’re already on our way to you, the reply came. All of us.
It seemed that Jilly had panicked when Anthea had suddenly gone silent and Caesar had been unable to get a response from Florian. She had gathered all the horses, sent a message to Caillin MacRennie, and was cautiously on her way to the village, trying to stay alert for ambush, and probably with her pistol cocked, Anthea thought with a sigh.
Tell Jilly not to shoot anyone, and to go straight to the manor, Anthea said.
She decided to head back and get something to eat with Finn, rather than wait in the cold for Jilly and the other horses. And speaking to Jilly had given her an idea about that locked room.
When Anthea had first arrived at Last Farm, she had decided to try and teach her cousin to be a proper young lady, to train her the way Anthea had been trained as a Rose Candidate. Some of this behavior had rubbed off on Jilly, it was true, but it was mostly by accident. But Anthea had learned far more from Jilly than Jilly had from her. Miss Miniver, Anthea’s former headmistress, would probably approve of some of these things, like the proper way to apply cosmetics, but would definitely not approve of some of them, like how to alter men’s trousers to fit a young lady.
And how to pick locks.
Anthea had tea with Finn and the MagTaran in the library. While they ate, Finn showed Anthea more things that he had found, and the MagTaran filled them in on other bits of the history of the village. Apparently, standing stones had been common around lords’ houses and their attendant villages, but most of the others had been pulled down and the stones used for new houses and churches by the Coronami.
“But what kind of stone is it?” Anthea asked. “It’s very slick and solid looking.”
“It’s stone,” Finn said. He laughed, but not unkindly.
Anthea flushed all the same. “Oh, you know what I mean,” she said, resisting the urge to throw a biscuit at him as she would have at home. “You can’t see any little … grains … or bits of different rocks in there. I noticed it coming back just now. It almost looks like steel.”
“We don’t know where it was quarried,” the MagTaran said. “We don’t even know if the other estates had rings made of the same stones. None of the houses here are made of it. It never chips or shows much wear, even after all these years. I can’t imagine that they could have used the same stone to build houses.”
“So perhaps the other estates didn’t block the Way?” Finn said thoughtfully. “But if it was just this one, I wonder if some property of the stone also kept you from being discovered.” He began to flip through a book at his elbow.
“Over here, I think,” the MagTaran said, and reached an old book off the shelf next to the fireplace.
“I’m just going to go freshen up,” Anthea said, standing.
Finn and the MagTaran barely spared her a glance. Anthea didn’t waste time being offended. She hurried out of the library and up the worn stairs. She opened and closed the door of the room she had been assigned, loudly, without going in, and then tiptoed on down the passage to the locked room at the end.
Jilly kept her lock-picking tools stuck inside hats or used them as hairpins, but pins always slithered out of Anthea’s hair and she didn’t like hats. Instead she kept them in a thin leather wallet she always had in a pocket, along with a small photograph of her father Uncle Andrew had given her.
She slipped the metal picks out, taking just a moment to look at the picture of her father. He would have been beside himself with joy, as Finn was, to find an entire village of Leanans. The moment they were well enough, he would have been running them all through the manor garden to see if they had the Way. She had no doubt that Uncle Andrew would soon be on his way here, to do the same.
But first she had to find out if her suspicions were true. She had been relieved to hear that the MagTaran’s “great lady” was named Vivian. But at the same time … the queen herself did not dare to come and go from this village. So who was this Lady Vivian who was so free about it?
Anthea slipped the first pick into the lock and felt for it to catch. Then the next, then she twisted. The door swung open, creaking a little, and Anthea froze. When there was no sound from downstairs, she tucked her picks away and slipped into the room.
It was beautifully furnished and felt lived in, unlike the rest of the house. But there was nothing that Anthea could see that marked it as particularly distinct. The paintings, the linens, the furniture, were all the same as the rest of the house, though better arranged and not half as cramped. The desk was clear of any papers, the only book a Kronenhofer novel that had been all the rage two years ago.
Anthea went to the dressing table. There was face powder, but nothing fancy, and a crystal bottle of perfume with a gold stopper. Anthea picked it up to sniff it.
It smelled like roses. It was the signature scent of Rose Maidens and Matrons. Anthea put it down so fast that she almost tipped it over and only caught it at the last second. The stopper flew out and rolled across the table, falling to the floor with a small chime.
Anthea knelt down, the scent of the rose perfume filling her nostrils and making her feel strange. It reminded her both of her mother and of Queen Josephine, and brought a sudden sting of tears to her eyes. She groped under the table and found the stopper, causing something else to roll away. She picked them both up and put the stopper in the bottle before getting stiffly to her feet, still sore from her uncomfortable night in the hut.
She looked down at her hand. She was holding a narrow glass tube, exactly like the ones favored by Dr. Rosemary for her samples. This one was empty, and a bit dusty on the outside, with a dried streak of something yellow in the bottom.
Anthea’s heart shot into her throat. She dropped the tube, not caring when it broke on the tabletop, and began scrubbing her hand against her trousers as she backed away. Something touched her shoulder, and she spun around and let out a little scream, thinking there was someone in the room with her, but it was a wooden bust with a hat on it on a table by the wardrobe. Anthea’s heart didn’t stop racing, though. Instead it sped up.
The hat was as large as a cart wheel, with cream-colored veils draped artfully around it. And beneath the veiling the brim of the hat was thickly decorated with dozens of red silk roses.
Anthea knew that hat. She would never forget the first time she had seen that hat, terrified and wounded as she had been at the time.
Anthea slammed the door shut behind her and ran down the stairs, not even caring about the clatter she made. In the library, Finn and the MagTaran looked at her strangely when she came racketing in, panting and clutching her side as though to protect the long-healed wound.
“We have to go,” she said to Finn. “Right now. We have to get out of here.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Is it the horses?” the MagTaran asked with concern. “Did something happen to them?”
Anthea looked at Finn, trying to convey that she needed to speak to him privately, but he just blinked at her while the MagTaran asked again what was wrong.
“Lady Vivian is a lie,” Anthea announced. “Their great benefactress is my mother!”
18
FLEEING
“I’m not staying here,” Anthea said.
“I won’t stay here. None of us should,” she said in a clearer voice.
They were standing in the front garden of the manor, a cluster of riders and horses. Jilly and Caillin MacRennie had arrived just in time to hear the horrified Anthea pleading with Finn to saddle up Constantine and leave with her.
“I’m with Anthea,” Jilly said. “We are not staying here to let her mother the spy wander up and shoot us all.”
“Anthea’s mother isn’t the one who shot her,” Finn said reasonably.
Anthea nearly snatched off his hat—the one she had knitted! How dare he stand there wearing a hat she had knitted and act so superior? He didn’t know her mother!
Of course, she herself barely knew her mother, a little niggling voice cut into her brain. And there were no witnesses. She might have been overreacting. She had been feverish, injured, tired. But she would never forget her mother’s voice calmly discussing getting rid of all the horses but Florian. That had been no fever dream. And then there was what else Dr. Rosemary had told Anthea, when she had said that she knew Genevia Cross-Thornley.
“Before my mother broke with the queen completely,” Anthea said icily, “she toured the scientific college where Dr. Rosemary and her colleagues were just beginning their studies. A week later, the king tried to shut them down, saying that they were building bombs and fomenting treason. It was all Queen Josephine could do to convince her husband that they were innocent.”
“Well,” Finn said uneasily, “I just—”
“And …,” Anthea said, and was surprised at the catch in her voice, the prickle in her nose, “and when I went to Parsiny with that little boy, Tim? His grandfather … his grandfather told me that my mother had gotten him exiled. And I think that someone else was executed because of her.”
“Oh no,” Jilly whispered. She put a hand on Anthea’s arm. “Is that why you were so upset when you came back?”
Anthea could only nod. Jilly leaned closer and stroked her hair. Anthea could still hear Tim’s chipper little voice in her head, saying that the men had found books in Camryn that the king didn’t like. Camryn, just up the road from Upper Stonesraugh. Had Genevia stopped there to tour the castle on one of her wonderful trips to her home village? And what was it that Sir Timothy and his friend had confided to her, this beautiful Rose Maiden who had gotten one of them killed and the other exiled?
“And now,” Anthea plowed on, forcing her voice to be steady, “I found a tube of something nasty in her room. She opened a sample of the Dag here, she made these people sick somehow! I know she did!”
“Finn, lad,” Caillin MacRennie said. “It’s a terrible enough thing to bring the herd stallion this far south. Whether or not it’s Anthea’s mother who is their great benefactress, the medicine’s been delivered, and we should get Con back to the farm.”
“But these books, Caillin MacRennie!” Finn sounded desperate. “We have to study them!”
“We also need to test these folks for the Way,” Caillin MacRennie agreed. “And collect the samples that Dr. Rosemary has her heart set on.
“But I won’t stand for having that awful—I mean, well, Anthea’s mother,” he amended hastily. “I won’t stand for having her and the herd stallion in the same country!”
“Didn’t she use to live at the farm?”
Anthea asked the question before she could stop herself. She wanted to get them out of there, not drag on the conversation. But she couldn’t resist asking. She knew so little about either of her parents. And how they had ended up together.
“Aye,” Caillin MacRennie said. “Off and on. Played it like she was just a blushing bride, frightened o’ the horses, without a friend or relation in the world, doing the bidding of her dear, dear queen.”
“Without a relation?” Jilly gave Anthea a puzzled look. “Don’t you have roughly a thousand aunts and uncles?”
“Uncle Daniel and Aunt Anne are my mother’s half brother and sister,” Anthea clarified. “And they made sure that I knew they were only half. Their father had been married before, and she died after having my mother, and then he married their mother. And there are a lot of great-aunts and -uncles, and cousins twice removed,” Anthea said. “They were the ones passing me around all those years. Some of them aren’t really related to me, which they also made sure I knew.” She couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice, but when Jilly started to say something supportive, Anthea held up a hand.
“Vivian,” she said. “My mother’s mother’s name was Vivian.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “We have to leave,” she said.
“Are you sure you’re not grasping at straws?” Finn demanded.
“Why would I want this to be true?” Anthea said hotly, opening her eyes to glare at him. “You think that I don’t want to read all these books, too? But I know that’s her hat. I know that’s her perfume—”
“All Rose Maidens wear that perfume,” Finn argued. “Or so you’ve told me. And a lot of them wear hats and things with roses on them.”
“Even Florian knows that hat,” Anthea insisted. “And the fact that they didn’t have the illness until a few weeks ago—I think she brought it here on purpose!”
“I still don’t understand,” Jilly wailed. “When did Anthea’s mother turn evil? I mean, yes, the train, horrible,” she said, seeing Anthea’s face. “But they love her here, don’t they?” Jilly clutched at her curls. “What is happening?”
“She always was horrifying,” Caillin MacRennie said. “She was just very good at hiding it. Always off on a shopping spree in the south, or going to wait upon the queen, even though she was just the lowliest of lowly Rose Matrons, or so she said.” He was shaking his head. “Charles wasn’t a fool. He put it all together. Some big to-do with the Kronenhofer ambassador, or the Kadiji princes, was always happening right when she got a hankering to buy some new gowns.” He rubbed a rough hand over his face. “People died when Genevia Cross-Thornley was around. Important people. Deals were made, governments made deals that benefited the Coronami and not their own people. And then she’d come sailing back, shopping bags in tow and butter not melting in her mouth.
“Charles just loved her too much to try and stop her.”
“But she never told Gareth about the horses,” Finn said, sounding hopeful.
“That I can’t reckon,” Caillin MacRennie said. “Either she did love Charles, or she was waiting to use the horses as bait in her plot when the time was right.”
“She also never told this village that horses still survived,” Anthea countered.
“So is she working for herself now?” Jilly said. “I thought King Gareth hated her. For not telling him about Last Farm.”
“I don’t know,” Anthea said. “I wish I did—no, that’s not true. I wish I’d never met her. I wish I’d been born in a stable, and didn’t have a mother!”
They all looked at her, Finn and Caillin MacRennie uncomfortable, Jilly sympathetic. She patted Anthea’s shoulder.
“Mothers are horrible,” she said with feeling.
“The MagTaran won’t let these books out of his sight,” Finn said, changing the subject. “And I need to read them!”
“Fine,” Anthea said shrilly, throwing her hands up. “Stay! But I am taking Florian and Leonidas, and I am leaving this place!”
Anthea had both her horses ready to go. She wanted Finn to come with her, to tell the queen in person about everything they had discovered and what they suspected about the Dag, but if he wouldn’t come, then she and Jilly would go on their own. She mounted Florian and turned him around, taking up Leonidas’s lead. Jilly was on Caesar in an instant, with Buttercup at her heel. They looked at Finn, at his desperate face.
“I have to stay,” he said. “I’m trying to help all of us.”
“Very well, lad, very well,” Caillin MacRennie said. He paused. “I can’t stay, because M
istress Cross-Thornley knows me all too well. Are you all right on your own?”
“Of course!”
Finn’s face was alight, and Anthea tried not to feel too angry about it. They really could use the information Finn found here.
“Do you think you can send Con with me?” Caillin MacRennie said doubtfully.
They all paused.
“Er, no, I’d better not,” Finn said. “I don’t think he would like that at all.”
Caillin MacRennie sighed. “Aye, probably not. But you’d best find a better, more discreet place for him,” he admonished Finn. “Come back to the farm as soon as you can. And test the villagers for the Way.”
“I will,” Finn said. He lowered his voice. “I’ll see if I can’t convince the MagTaran to let me take some of the books to show Andrew.”
“This is a terrible idea,” Jilly announced.
Anthea didn’t bother to reply. She was hurt by Finn’s refusal to listen to her, and very, very scared. Lady Vivian, Genevia Cross-Thornley, her mother, was dangerous. Anthea knew this deep in her bones. She couldn’t begin to understand what her mother had done, let alone why. Leaving Finn here, with the herd stallion, was indeed a terrible idea.
They crossed out of the standing stones, and Anthea felt a sudden blankness in her mind. It was a relief to no longer be able to feel Constantine’s tangle of emotions, rage always at the forefront. He was so angry all the time, and Anthea could not understand it. He was a king, his every whim catered to … it was just never enough for the big stallion.
The next day, Anthea and Jilly left Caillin MacRennie at the abandoned tower where Jilly had been waiting before. It was getting dark already, but they pressed on, wanting to go as far as they could before they needed to stop.
“It’s nice to be able to use the main road, like a decent human being,” Jilly offered after they had been riding in silence for an hour.
“Why is Con always so angry?”
“What? Is he?” Jilly looked at Anthea in astonishment.
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