The Alcazar

by Amy Ewing

  “She was fine when she arrived,” Matthias said wearily, as if they’d had this conversation before. “The doctor said twins presented more danger than a typical pregnancy.”

  “The question is, what do we do with him now?” Hektor asked.

  “He must be punished,” Ambrosine said. “Both of them must be punished. A night in the wailing caverns should be a good start.”

  “Please,” Agnes said. “He was never a good father to us, but we don’t want him hurt.” She glanced at Leo as if to confirm this.

  “We don’t,” Leo said, and his sister looked relieved.

  “He should not have said what he said to you,” she whispered.

  “Yeah. But was it really all that surprising?” Leo muttered back.

  “He stays in the wailing caves tonight,” Ambrosine said. “How did you find him?” she asked Matthias.

  “I heard he was in Ithilia,” he said. “I figured he was staying at the same inn he stayed at when he met Alethea. Didn’t realize Ezra was with him.”

  “Now we know who stole the Arboreal and the mertag,” Hektor growled.

  Ambrosine rolled her eyes. “Please, Hektor, I suspected that ever since Ezra disappeared.” She turned back to her youngest son. “Why bring Xavier here, if you have no taste for revenge?”

  Matthias gestured to Agnes and Leo. “He’s their father. I was unable to convince the Lekke to vote against war with Kaolin. The streets were getting dangerous. I didn’t want Xavier to end up murdered or locked away in Banrissa. He’s a Kaolin and was married to a Byrne to boot.”

  “How did you get him on the ship?” Hektor asked.

  “The Lekke graced me with a small crew as well,” Matthias said. “They aren’t Misarros but they are still a force to be reckoned with. Besides, Ezra didn’t put up much of a fight.”

  Hektor snorted. “No, I wouldn’t expect him to.”

  “Mother, please,” Matthias said. “I beg you, don’t do this thing. Don’t challenge the Triumvirate. I know the Renalt is after you. Her warships could be here any day now. Culinnon is well guarded, but can the mertags take on an entire fleet? Have they ever been tested that way?”

  “You think it is only mertags I have protecting us?” Ambrosine said. “You’re supposed to be the smart one, Matthias. The northern islands have joined our cause now that Agnes has arrived. We can finally break away from Triumvirate rule. With Agnes by my side, we will start a new nation, one that is loyal to us.”

  For a second, Matthias just stared at her. Then he gripped the couch cushions as if needing them to anchor him.

  “She’s only just come to Pelago,” he said. “You can’t expect her to acquiesce happily to your plans. She barely knows the country at all!”

  “Agnes can make her own decisions,” Ambrosine snapped.

  “And what about Leo?” Matthias demanded. “What are your plans for him?”

  “You saw the silver girl, didn’t you?” Hektor said. “She and Leo are . . . very close.”

  Matthias was on his feet in an instant. “They’re children,” he hissed at his mother. “Goddesses be damned, you haven’t changed one bit since she died, have you?”

  Ambrosine sneered. “It is my duty to preserve this family for—”

  “Yes, the family, the family, all my life I’ve heard about how important this family is,” Matthias said, his jaw tight. “As if that’s all we are, Byrnes and no more. Alethea couldn’t stand it—you suffocated her with your talk of continuing the line, of changing the world. What’s so wrong with the world the way it is, Mother?”

  “For someone so well learned, Matthias, you can be blindingly stupid,” Ambrosine said. “So obsessed with your individual life when there is history to consider.”

  “Do not speak to me of history,” Matthias said, his pale eyes flashing. “The dead are dead and the past cannot be changed. Leo and Agnes deserve to live their own lives. I don’t want to see them break under the weight of your expectations like Hektor.”

  “I haven’t broken under anything,” Hektor said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Matthias said, turning on him. “Does Bellamy have a child I’m unaware of?” Pain spasmed across Hektor’s face and Matthias looked contrite. “I apologize,” he said. “That was cruel.”

  “It was the truth, Matthias,” Ambrosine said. “Don’t lose your spine now that you just seem to have grown one.” She nodded to Agnes. “Your visit with him must have been inspiring. I’ve never seen him so . . .” She looked her son up and down. “Bold.”

  Leo and Agnes had been mostly bystanders throughout this conversation, but Leo felt now was the time to speak up.

  “We came here to get Sera to Braxos,” he said. “Not to torture our father or turn Agnes into a princess or . . .” He swallowed. “Or anything else. She doesn’t belong here.”

  “Oh, but doesn’t she?” Ambrosine said. “I know she has been speaking with my mertags in the mornings. And my Arboreals. Did she think she can go anywhere on this estate without being watched?”

  Leo’s neck grew hot.

  “She has a connection with Culinnon the same as you two,” Ambrosine continued. “Why you both are so insistent to get her to this tether, I can’t understand.”

  “So she can go home!” Agnes cried.

  “Yes, I know, my dear,” Ambrosine said. “And I said I would help get Sera to Braxos. I will not break my word.”

  Matthias opened his mouth but Ambrosine stood. “We will leave for Braxos in two days’ time. I have called the Malleys and the Callases to Culinnon. If the Renalt arrives, we will be ready for her.”

  “And what about our father?” Leo asked.

  “One night in the caves won’t kill him,” Ambrosine said. “Hektor, make sure Xavier and Ezra have water, and food if they want it, though I doubt they will. Matthias, come with me.”

  Hektor strode out of the room, Ambrosine on his heels. Matthias paused and bent down to whisper to Leo and Agnes, “There’s a surprise for you on my ship. Wait until dark, when everyone’s asleep.”

  Then he was gone.

  Agnes wrung her hands. “What do we do, Leo?”

  Leo felt as helpless as she looked. “I don’t know,” he said. He wasn’t particularly surprised that Ambrosine was reluctant to let Sera go—but the fact that she had imprisoned his father in a horrible-sounding place left a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. “I think for now, all we can do is get on that ship and see what Matthias brought us.”

  The night was cloudy as Leo met Agnes in a little copse of trees near her room. Both of them dressed in black, and they took a roundabout route to the dock, avoiding the front door to the estate.

  The clipper was like a skeleton in the night, its sails furled, its masts spindly. The ship itself was empty, the sailors all being housed in a separate part of the mansion. Leo and Agnes used the ropes tying it up to climb on board, Agnes pitching over the rail with a thud and causing them both to freeze. Leo’s heart pounded in his ears as they waited to see if anyone would come running, but the only sound was the water lapping against the hull. The deck was so dark Leo had to hold his hands out in front of him to make sure he didn’t walk into anything. Matthias hadn’t said where exactly this gift would be found.

  Agnes bumped into him with a muffled “Oof,” and Leo shushed her just as a lantern appeared from the steps to the hold.

  “Matthias?” a voice called softly. The lantern was raised and it took all of Leo’s self-control not to shout.

  It was Eneas.

  He caught sight of them and his face broke into a wide smile. “Children!” he whispered joyfully. “Come, quick.”

  They hurried toward him and down into the hold, following the light of the lantern. Eneas led them to a small cabin with a hammock hanging in one corner and a low table with three stools around it. He placed the lantern on the table and Agnes flung her arms around him. Leo felt a pinch of shame. He’d never been particularly nice to Eneas, something he regretted now.


  “What are you doing here?” Agnes asked as he released her.

  “Once I arrived in Ithilia and heard what your grandmother had done, I knew I had to come find you. Both of you,” he said, nodding toward Leo. “I went straight to Matthias. Caught him just in time. He’d already locked up your father and Ezra. I believe we got out of Ithilia just before the Kaolin navy arrived.” He shook his head. “What a foolish war. It would have been better if Braxos had never been found.”

  “Ambrosine locked Father away in something called the wailing caves,” Agnes said. “Will they hurt him?”

  Eneas touched her cheek. “He does not deserve you. No, the caves will not hurt him. Their walls shriek. He will have an unpleasant, sleepless night, that’s all.”

  “We met Phebe in Arbaz,” Agnes said. “She lent us her ship so we could follow Leo and Sera here.”

  Eneas smiled again. “I am glad she got to meet you. She has heard much about you over the years.”

  “She showed us that letter you wrote,” Leo said. “About a deal made and broken.”

  “And Ambrosine told me she wants to found her own country, of just the northern islands,” Agnes said. “And declare herself queen and me princess.” Her nose wrinkled. Even after several days to get used to it, Leo still found the idea strange and ridiculous.

  Eneas sighed and sank onto one of the stools. “I’m so sorry, Agnes,” he said. “It is the exact fate your mother wished to avoid for you. Alethea felt trapped by her mother’s expectations, the idea of becoming royalty, of being who Ambrosine wanted her to be instead of just herself. Don’t we have enough? she used to say. Isn’t Culinnon enough? But even Culinnon frustrated her. Why was all this power kept in one place?”

  “We’ve seen the Arboreal groves,” Leo said, sitting down at another stool.

  “And all the mertags, of course,” Agnes added, following his example.

  “Culinnon is a special island,” Eneas said. “But to your mother, it was a prison. Ambrosine never appreciated Alethea’s thirst to be different, to explore, to create. She wanted to be an artist, she wanted to travel and experience new things and meet new people. And once she met Xavier, she thought she had figured out exactly how to slip from her mother’s grasp. Who would follow a matriarch whose daughter married a man from Kaolin?”

  “So that’s why she married him?” Agnes asked.

  “It was,” Eneas said. “At first. But she underestimated Ambrosine’s ambition. And her patience. Ambrosine is not one to scrap a plan because there are a few bumps along the way. I didn’t know it at the time, but she had already approached Xavier herself, already made a deal with him. She very likely contacted him the minute she heard he was sniffing around her daughter.”

  “What was the deal?” Leo asked.

  Eneas leaned forward, the light of the lantern casting shadows on his face. “He would be required to have all of his children born on Culinnon. That way she could make the claim they were truly Pelagan, truly Byrnes. If you had been born in Kaolin, no one in Pelago would have accepted you as her heir. And in exchange, she would give him something more powerful than money or jewels—she would give him an Arboreal and a mertag. One for each child born on the estate. It was a fantastic price that would keep him wealthy for generations. It would make him special. Different. The envy of Old Port City—and that was all your father ever wanted.” He smiled sadly. “Well, until he fell in love with your mother.”

  Leo made a confused huffing sound and Agnes sucked in a breath.

  “Until he what?” Leo asked. He couldn’t imagine his father being in love with anyone, least of all his own wife. That had been the one thing about their relationship Leo had felt certain of.

  “Yes,” Eneas said. “He fell in love with her. And she with him. Not at first—oh no, they would have fights that you could hear from five streets away in the beginning. And she hated Old Port and all the smoke and smog and factories and uptight women and starched dresses.” He shifted on his stool and his face softened. “But then it all changed. It was Alethea who introduced him to people who actually knew theater—she used to spend time in the East Village, meet the artists and dancers and actors, learn which producers were looking for what shows or what the next big thing was going to be. They came to respect each other, your mother and father, and out of that respect grew a fierce love.” Eneas gazed up at the ceiling. “Oh, how I wish you could have known him in those days. He was so quick to smile, to laugh even. She brought out the best in him. She brought out the best in everyone.” He rubbed his eyes. “I miss her so much.”

  “Were you . . . in love with her?” Agnes asked.

  Eneas chuckled. “No, no, my dear, I am not attracted to women like that. Your mother was simply a beautiful soul. I was not the ideal choice of companion for her, a lowly merchant’s son from Arbaz. But she would visit every summer and she did not care about my pedigree. We were so close, almost as close as she was to Matthias.” He looked at Leo, his expression tender. “It must have been quite a moment for Matthias when he first laid eyes on you. Alethea reborn.”

  Leo didn’t know what to say to that. He wished he could have known the woman whose face he bore.

  “But I digress,” Eneas said. “Xavier managed to convince Alethea to have her children born on Culinnon. I remember myself thinking it was strange at the time—Alethea had vowed never to return to the island lest her mother not let her leave. And Xavier did not tell her of the deal he had struck with Ambrosine. How he got her to go, I still do not know. But we went, very close to her due date, on a secret ship in the middle of the night. Swansea was tasked with telling anyone who asked that they had left Old Port to have you delivered in a specialized facility.

  “The night before she went into labor, we were alone in her favorite room in the estate, a solarium high up in one of the sequoias that looked out over the Arboreal grove. And she said, ‘Eneas, if anything happens to me, keep my children away from this place, away from my mother. Don’t let her try to do to them what she did to me, or to Matthias, or to Hektor. I want them to live their own lives, the way they wish to. Make sure they know they are loved. Don’t tell them about any of this.’ Of course, at the time it was an easy promise to make. ‘Nothing is going to happen to you,’ I reassured her. ‘You will raise your children and love them for who they are.’ She patted my hand and said, ‘Xavier will take care of them. He’ll be a good father. That’s where they belong. Not here.’”

  Silence filled the cabin. Leo’s heart felt like sludge in his chest, his throat painfully tight. Agnes’s eyes glittered with tears.

  “And then she died,” Eneas said, staring at the flickering light of the lantern. “That night was one of the worst of my life. I found myself wandering the glass halls of the estate, not caring where I was going, not thinking about anything except loss. I came upon a study I was unfamiliar with—the door was ajar and there was a light shining from within. I pushed the door open, not really curious but more for something to do. The room was empty, the desk covered in papers—some were correspondence, others looked like property deeds, or legalese, or invoices. But one name caught my eye. Agnes. The name Alethea had chosen for you.”

  “She chose it?” Agnes asked.

  Eneas nodded. “Xavier chose yours,” he said to Leo. He felt as if he had become glued to his stool. The thought of his father picking out his name was too foreign a concept for his brain to fully comprehend.

  Eneas turned back to Agnes. “Ambrosine was going to keep you,” he said, the barest hint of a growl in his voice. “She was never going to let you return to Kaolin with Xavier and your brother. She was going to keep you here and use you as she had wanted to use Alethea. To make your life about power and Culinnon and a new nation to control. She wields this island as a weapon and you were the magic bullet. An heir, at last.

  “And she was never going to hold up her end of the bargain. She had never intended to let Xavier have so much as an olive branch from Culinnon, never mind a mertag an
d Arboreal.”

  He pressed his hands against the table, fingers splayed.

  “I took the papers and went to your father at once. He was still with Alethea, still cradling her on her deathbed as if she might yet wake.” He swallowed, and it was loud in the utter silence. “I told him we have to leave, now. I told him what I’d seen, what Ambrosine was planning. ‘She killed her,’ he said. He kept saying it over and over again. He blamed Ambrosine for her death, for making him bring Alethea to Culinnon, though he had made that decision as much as Ambrosine had. As much as Alethea had. I shook him then, hard, and made him look at the papers. ‘This is not what Alethea would have wanted,’ I told him. ‘Will you let her dying wish go unanswered? Will you leave her daughter with this woman?’

  “That seemed to rouse him. We went to the nursery and got the two of you. I carried Agnes and he took you, Leo. He could barely look at either of you. But when we approached the dock where our ship was anchored, we discovered Misarros swarming it. We were trapped.”

  “How did you escape?” Agnes asked.

  “Ezra,” Eneas said, pursing his lips. “He wanted Xavier to take him to Kaolin, to get him as far from Culinnon as possible. She hates him, but he is technically a Byrne, so she couldn’t let him go. He led us to a small ship that I was able to sail by myself. I told Xavier, we cannot take Ezra with us. It wasn’t worth the risk. She would be furious enough when she discovered we had gone with the children; why add insult to injury. And personally, I had never liked Ezra, never trusted him. Xavier promised him, though—he promised him that once his children were safe, he would find a way to get Ezra out from under his mother’s thumb. And he did. It only took eighteen years.

  “The mertags knew me and let our ship pass. We made it to a port where we could purchase berths on a larger ship that took us to Ithilia and from there back to Old Port City. It was a long, dark journey, but your father grew even darker over the course of it. The change in him was startling. He never held either of you again after that first night. I never heard him laugh the way he used to. He threatened me never to tell the two of you about Alethea or what life was like before you were born. And I knew his threats were real—he could send me back to Pelago without a second thought, and then I would never be able to see either of you again. I would have broken my promise to your mother, to make sure you both knew you were loved.”