by Vela Roth
It was unlikely the conspiracy reached far. The king would never risk word getting out that he had welcomed Cordium into Tenebra with open arms and lied about it. The Tenebran mages, the free lords, the people, everyone would be up in arms.
The prison guards of the western wing would dispose of the burnt corpses of the mage’s victims. They didn’t ask questions when the king ordered them to clean up a mess. The only ones who bore witness to Amachos’s real power were men deemed already dead. Callen alone had lived to tell the tale.
The plot Cassia and Lio must thwart surely began and ended with the mage and the king. Amachos had been conspiring with Lucis each day during their private audiences.
The answers Cassia now sought could be in only one place. The one unbreachable fortress in the kingdom. The king’s solar.
The only way to know what he was planning was to get an ear behind that door.
Cassia had never been in that room except on her knees. The king had never said anything she could use against him, only words he used against her.
What could she possibly do?
The secrets she knew were not enough. Real answers…real weapons…lay out of her reach.
Cassia realized she had closed her hands around the edges of her chair. She felt immobile. As if she must make herself a part of that chair. She was the one who must sit. Who must try to be still. Who must not cry out or wail or weep.
She who moved too much was pushed to her knees. She who spoke too loud was silenced.
She was pushed and silenced until she sat and watched and choked her own grief back down inside herself.
Cassia uncurled her hands.
She would not stay on her knees. She would not be silent. By all the uncaring gods of Tenebra, by the goddess no one in Tenebra listened to anymore, she would not sit in this chair and watch the king be the death of another person she loved.
Cassia got to her feet.
Perita’s gaze met hers. Cassia held a finger to her lips. Her companion nodded once. Then Cassia escaped the quiet, ordered residence.
A single afternoon. That was how much time Cassia had for her first attempt to get behind the solar door.
Her only attempt.
Now was not the time to shy away from the truth. The last woman who had learned the secrets the king kept in that room had paid for them with her life.
How had Solia known so much? She had certainly never explained such a dangerous secret to her seven-year-old Pup. But Cassia had heard the conversations between her sister and Lady Iris. The details had made little sense to her as a child, but now she recalled them with the understanding of a woman. She could appreciate the breadth of the information her sister had possessed and, she hoped, draw some conclusions about how Solia might have obtained it.
Solia had known things the king would only discuss with the highest ranking and most obedient. In a secret conversation between the king and one of his loyalists, there was no one to report their words to the princess. She had surely relied upon a most sophisticated web of informants, but even that could not sufficiently explain how she had always known what the king’s next move would be.
Could it be she had relied on the same tactics Cassia employed—her own eyes and ears?
Could it be that Solia herself had been the spy in the solar?
If the answer could be found, it would be here at Solorum. Cassia had access to Solia’s old rooms and any clues that might remain there. This was perhaps the best, the only chance Cassia had ever had. She would not squander it.
The king was in his solar even now. Amachos might be joining him for their afternoon conference any moment. Cassia knew what she had to do. There was little time for preparation and no room for caution or self-defense. She must discover for herself what the king was planning, in the way only one of his daughters could.
When she got back to her rooms, she began to collect everything that might assist her. Knight paced back and forth across her chambers with her. She wasn’t certain what she would need, but more scent oils might prove necessary casualties if a door threatened to squeal. She would need a tool if she were called upon to coax a loose stone out of the masonry to reveal a hidden compartment or passageway. She put several vials and her spade into her gardening satchel.
Cassia hesitated, fingering Solia’s pendant. She drew the talisman out and lifted it over her head.
For the first time, the ribbon hung about Cassia’s neck, and she saw the ivy symbol upon her own breast. It was not as heavy as she had expected. As she tucked the secret out of sight under her tunica, the wood felt strangely warm on her skin. A shiver went through her.
She pushed herself out the door of her chambers and set her course for Solia’s rooms. Her hands shook. The sweating had started. She tangled one hand in Knight’s ruff and tried to distance herself from the nausea rising in her.
This was the route she traversed to get to Lio each night. Today it was the route that would take her to the information she needed to keep him safe.
He seemed invincible. But he wasn’t. Amachos had the power to harm Lio. He was the kind of mage who hated everything Lio was. He must only be waiting for an excuse—or a cue from the king.
In broad daylight, it took thrice as long to make her way to Solia’s rooms without being seen. The pace of her progress made Cassia begin to sweat with frustration instead of fear. Her nausea receded and left in its wake the pure tension of urgency. She shook with something more powerful even than the anger that had become her strength in recent days. More compelling than the fear that had always governed her life.
She refused to be afraid. She refused to lose. Amachos would not harm one hair on Lio’s head, nor put a single one of his people in danger. Cassia would not allow it.
She would give her own life instead, if that’s what it took.
She hovered at the edges of the royal wings for a quarter of an hour, waiting for a break in the traffic of soldiers and officials to and from the king’s solar. The break never came, and her sense of urgency became too great. She spent another quarter of an hour backtracking and leaving the palace by a side gate. To exercise Knight between the palace and the temple, she told the guards.
The hatch on the grounds was harder to get open from the outside. Pain shot down her back as she hurled it open, and the same spot twinged again when she pulled it shut over her and Knight.
She raced down the tunnel. In the garden, a careful glance reassured her this was still an empty, forgotten place. She slipped into Solia’s rooms, thankful she had been trespassing here and leaving the lock undone. Quickly and quietly, she shut the garden door behind her.
It was dark as night until her eyes adjusted from the sunlit outdoors. Even then, the heavy drapes left the room too dim to see. Cassia could not search for answers like this.
She took a deep breath, then went from one window to the other, throwing back the curtains. Swarms of motes hovered in the bands of sunlight that flooded in, and she blinked away the sting of the dust.
She turned to face the room. For the first time in fourteen years, she saw Solia’s sanctuary.
The vacant crypt in the temple received attention every day, but this memorial to Soli’s kindness went untended. Everything here did look smaller, except for the big fireplace. The curtains that had been so elegant were now dull. Carpets and side tables, padded chairs and an embroidery frame slept under a gray shroud. Beneath the dust, Cassia glimpsed a threaded needle and a note in her sister’s writing, which lay just where Soli had left them upon her departure for Desidia.
The little dressing table near the fireplace still held the princess’s collection of delicate glass vials. The oil within them gleamed at Cassia.
In three steps she crossed the room. In one motion, she brought her hand down.
She stopped herself just in time, before the back of her hand swept them off to shatter on the hearthstones.
That smell. That faint acrid note under the fragrances. What was it?
&
nbsp; Cassia bent nearer, waving her hand above the vials to bring their fumes to her nose. A chaos assailed her. Sickly sweet florals and cloying fruits, even more pungent after fourteen years of aging. But the bitter smell was there. She had not imagined it.
The odor was familiar. One that teased her memory…old memories? Recent ones? If only she could place it.
She braced herself and inhaled deeply again. Behind her, Knight sneezed. Cassia had to pause and bury her nose in her sleeve to ward off a sneeze of her own before she sniffed again. One of the many memories she had buried rose to life.
She was seven again. She hugged Knight in one arm and a doll in the other, tucking her knobby knees closer so none of her stuck out from under the dressing table. The hem of Solia’s tunica brushed against her as her elder sister sat down on the stool before the table. Cassia and Knight both sneezed. What an awful smell. Solia did not seem bothered by it, though. She was sliding on the gloves her handmaidens told her she must wear to bed to preserve her delicate complexion. Next she would wrap her long, beautiful hair under her sleeping net to protect it, too.
What was that smell?
Cassia was fourteen. Flattery won her an hour in the royal apothecary’s storeroom. He bragged her ear off about the rare concoctions he kept for the king, stroking his own pride while he unwittingly gave her an education. At the very last, the bony man adjusted his skullcap and leaned close. From a bronze lockbox, he withdrew his greatest treasure: a magically potent botanical oil His Majesty had purchased from the Cordian Order of Anthros for an undisclosed sum, which the royal armorers would soon use to treat a new suit of mail for the king.
The apothecary had visited the Order’s gardens in Cordium personally and seen the herb, which had seven-fingered leaves that looked like tongues of flame. A temple’s entire annual crop produced enough oil to cover only one suit of armor, but the warrior who wore it could walk under a rain of fire arrows without fear. It would do nothing to stop magefire, but against mundane flames, there was no more powerful protection. No wonder the Order of Anthros maintained their mages’ exclusive right to grow the herb and guarded the magical secret of how to prepare its oil.
Although the apothecary did not allow Cassia to touch the elegant cut glass bottle, he let her smell its viscous golden contents. A bitter odor burned her nose and made her chest feel tight. It reminded her of something. But no, that could not be. The likes of her had never come so near the rare, prized oil before.
Flametongue.
Cassia opened her eyes and rifled through the dusty bottles on Solia’s dressing table, bringing each one to her nose in turn. When tears came to her eyes, she knew she had found it. It was a slender vial of pink glass with a tassel about its neck and a little fabric label bearing an embroidered lily. But the cork had shrunk in the intervening years, and the seal was no longer enough to hide the odor.
How had Solia gained possession of such a thing? More importantly, why would a princess need to protect herself from fire?
A lady can walk through fire.
Solia had told Pup her dangerous secret. She had taught it to her little sister until Cassia could recite it in her sleep.
Solia had hidden her best secrets in plain sight. She had not taken the vial of flametongue with her for safekeeping on that final journey. She had left it behind for a reason.
For Cassia.
Cassia’s gaze went to the fireplace. The enormous fireplace that was large enough for a grown man to stand in without hunching over.
The hearth had been cold a long time now, but all those years ago, it had never been without a merry fire…just like the hearth in the solar, which even now the servants kept hot at all hours of the day and night to accommodate the king’s ceaseless schedule.
Only inner walls separated Solia’s fireplace from the king’s. A person could literally walk to the solar from here, assuming she could walk through fire…and stone.
Cradling the vial of flametongue oil in one hand, Cassia stepped near the hearth and peered inside. Just dust, ashes and cobwebs. She leaned in and gazed upward. Not even she could fit up there, and she was smaller than Solia had been. Cassia studied the blackened back wall of the fireplace, scanning the uneven rows of stones and the seams between them. She could see no gaps or loose mortar, although it was hard to tell under the coat of soot. Perhaps it was time to begin tapping stones.
Best to solve one problem at a time. Cassia glanced at the vial, then at her clothes. Even if she stripped, it would take forever to rub it over every inch of her, and then the irreplaceable oil would be spent.
A lady always dresses correctly.
Cassia whispered the words to herself now as she glanced around the deserted chambers. No solution would have been practical for Solia except keeping a treated garment on hand to slip into whenever she went spying. She would naturally keep the remainder of the oil in reserve in case she had to mend a tear and treat that bit of the fabric again. Just like a knight with his suit of armor, who must get it repaired and re-oiled whenever a mace dented it.
Might the garment still be here? Solia would have hidden it well. Even so, it must have been something that would not look out of the ordinary in her possession, if its hiding place was discovered or she was caught wearing it. No handmaiden who got a whiff of it would know enough about flametongue to identify the scent. Unless that handmaiden was Lady Iris, whom Solia had trusted with her secrets. Cassia could only hope no one else had found the priceless garment and, mistaking it for odorous laundry that could not be rescued, disposed of it.
Cassia got to her feet and went into the next room, Solia’s dressing room, to commence a search. She went through the ranks of wardrobes and dug through the heirloom chests, only to discover many of them empty. A princess’s finery cost a king’s ransom, and unlike drapery and furniture, it was not an ancestral fixture of these chambers. Caelum’s mother had sported a wardrobe in the latest fashion, but Cassia had recognized the colors and patterns of the costly fabrics. She had hated Lucis a little more each time she saw his poor young bride wear a gown made of scraps of Solia’s. The late queen really had been laid to rest in the royal crypt. They were all gone now, Solia and both queens and Cassia’s mother, too.
She would be the next to join them. But she would not go to her grave in submission. She would take the king’s plans with her.
Cassia found no false bottoms in the clothing chests or hidden compartments in the backs of the wardrobes. She sniffed every scrap the magpies had left in the dressing room, from Solia’s simpler work gowns to her tunicae to her sleeping gloves. Even a handful of feathers that had shed from one of her elegant hats, which was long gone. None bore the telltale scent of flametongue.
Cassia searched her way back to the bedroom. She studied the items that sat on the little tables and opened drawers to go through their contents. A wooden hairbrush. One of her own dolls. A few books that had been favorites of Solia’s, which Cassia had as a child aspired to read, once she got better at it.
Cassia focused on her quest, on analyzing each thing she found for its usefulness. Everywhere she disturbed the dust, she ran the feathers in her wake to scatter the grime and hide any prints that matched the size of her hands. If she thought beyond usefulness, if she contemplated what these objects meant beyond expediency, emotion would cripple her, and she would not succeed. When the lump in her throat became too painful, she thought of Lio instead.
Cassia knelt beside the bed’s carved oak platform and held her breath to search the musty mattress for a tear. That was where Solia had always hidden the books she didn’t want anyone to know she was reading. She had never permitted her little sister to read them, either.
Cassia flipped through them now, looking for more secrets, and she had to cover her mouth to stifle a surprised laugh. She couldn’t follow the text very well, but the images were lavish. One volume on warfare, one on statecraft, and another on matters every woman wished to understand before she went to her marriage bed. Or the
arms of her lover.
Cassia must not let her train of thought go in that direction, not to what marriage prospects had brought on her sister. Nor to the new question that now burdened her. Had Solia ever in her short life had the opportunity to know tenderness or pleasure with a partner she did not fear? Cassia was sure her sister would be glad for her now.
But that wasn’t enough. She wanted to know her sister would be proud of her. Not only because of what she had done the night of the siege, but because of what she would do today.
There must be somewhere else she could look. Something she had missed. In her mind she ran through the hazy images of her childhood, everything she had seen Solia wear, searching for that smell. All she came up with was that same memory of her own favorite hiding place under the dressing table, of the clink of bottles, of the whisper of Solia’s tunica against her shins…
Cassia returned to the dressing table and sat on the floor. She wrestled her full-grown self into the tight space underneath the table.
The smell seemed stronger under here. Was it just the vial she still carried? She tucked it away with her other oils and closed her satchel tightly. No, the smell was just as strong. She sniffed the air, following her nose.
It brought her to the dressing stool and a latch in the wood under the seat. It was stiff with disuse, but Cassia managed to pull it, and the upholstered top of the stool popped up. She opened it and found a heap of delicate golden fabric. The very tunica Solia had been wearing in Cassia’s memory. It was all here. A pair of sleeping gloves, matching slippers, and the hair net with a veil. Not a bit of soot stained them, and not an inch showed signs of having been charred.
No time to waste. Cassia tore out of her plain, modest, oh-so-acceptable brown dress and all the trappings she wore underneath.
She donned Solia’s armor.
Letting the veil down over her face, she discovered it was sheer enough to see and breathe through, but the odor of flametongue was suffocating. No wonder Solia had used scent oils rather heavily. This smell must have lingered on her skin.