Percy Ayren, Death’s Champion and now Kingmaker, watched the old Queen Andrelise Osenni of Lethe sink into oblivion.
When it was over, for the first time in days, the new King of Lethe heard only the crackle of the fireplace, and the perfect relief of winter silence.
Chapter 9
The bells rang all over Letheburg, echoing and reverberating in the cold somnolence of the morning and then day. They had started ringing early, just a few hours after dawn, the majestic sound coming from every church and cathedral, in the solemn bittersweet tradition of the passing of kings.
Queen Andrelise was dead.
The Kingdom of Lethe now had a new King and Queen.
“The Queen is dead, long live the King!” spoke the courtiers solemnly all over the Winter Palace. And those who bore witness to the passing in the Queen’s quarters spoke the ancient words while bowing before the former Crown Prince of Lethe.
In the dark royal boudoir that was now a funereal wake, Percy received curt but sincere words of gratitude from both Their Majesties. After he was done speaking, King Roland Osenni again wept, with his whole body shaking, at the bedside of his mother’s blessedly lifeless, frail corpse.
“You have done a true and loyal service to your Queen and country, child,” Queen Lucia whispered. “You will be rewarded. But for now, you must wait outside, and come when called only. And you too, Grial.” The Queen motioned to servants hovering nearby, continuing to speak in a soft voice so as not to impose upon the grief of the King. “Take them back, provide refreshments, rooms, give them whatever they like. Have them wait. Meanwhile, bring the Archbishop and—ring the bells.”
And thus, Grial took the somewhat stunned Percy by the arm, and led her quickly out of the chamber of death, while Percy’s head continued to be thick with residual power and darkness, and the cathedral tolling that she heard was now both inside her mind and all around the Palace and the city of Letheburg.
“Well done, pumpkin, well done!” said Grial as they walked, squeezing her hand, and glancing at her warmly.
“Grial . . .” Percy said tiredly. “Do you know what it is that I do? Am I a monster? How is it that I do this thing?’
“Come now, dearie, do you really think a monster would grant much needed relief to those in mortal pain?”
“No. . . .”
“Then you’ve answered your own ridiculous question. Death gave you a gift. But it’s not the silly kind of gift you put on a shelf to admire, or box it up and take out once a year on holidays. No, what you have here is a gift of action. So, use it! But do it wisely, girlie, because now that more and more people learn that you have this gift, they will want to use you.”
Percy nodded. “I have a feeling,” she said, lowering her voice so that the servants walking before them in the corridor would not hear, “that now that the King and Queen have me here, they might—they might not want to let me go.”
Grial, pacing at her side, lowered her face to her ear. “Smart girl! Your feeling is exactly right!”
A few paces later, Grial whispered again. “Now that the deed is done—mind you, it was a very important and necessary deed, and Her Majesty is at peace, and the power of the land has been transferred properly—now we need to get you out of here, and back on your way. But for now—hush!”
Moments later they were led into a mid-sized parlor which was not the same chamber where they had met the Royals earlier. It was decorated with gilded wallpaper and cornices, and there were several divans and sofas and settees, covered in pale chartreuse brocade, and lacquered side-tables along the walls underneath chandelier sconces. Upon one sofa sat the Infanta, ivory hands folded in her lap. Her dark grey death-shadow billowed at her side and immediately regarded Percy.
Percy tried very hard not to look at it.
The Marquis Fiomarre stood a few steps away, with his back turned, gazing into the bright window and the pallid winter city beyond.
Lord Beltain Chidair paced the length of the chamber, his chain mail ringing softly.
As soon as they entered, everyone turned to Percy. Beltain immediately approached her with a sharp movement and, glancing from her to Grial with unusual intensity, said: “So, it is done. . . . The bells started tolling a few minutes ago.”
“Yes,” said Grial, “as you can hear, Her Majesty has been laid to rest, all thanks to our Percy.”
Percy stood saying nothing, her hands at her sides, clenching the rough burlap fabric of her skirt.
“What now?” the Infanta looked up at Grial.
Grial turned to the impassive servant who brought them here and still lingered in the room. “Would you be a dear man and bring us some tea? Oh, and a bit of pastries and rose petal jam would be lovely too, if that’s not too much trouble.”
The servant bowed and exited. As soon as the door closed behind him, Grial spoke in an excited whisper: “What comes next is, you all must go! And quickly!”
“What do you mean?”
“What Grial means,” Percy said, her hands still gripping the fabric at her sides, “is that because of me, you may all be held here. Or at least, delayed—Your Imperial Highness.”
“Why so?” It was Vlau Fiomarre speaking now, looking with concern.
“I see. . . .” The black knight regarded Percy with an unblinking gaze of his slate-blue eyes. “Having control of Death’s Champion is a high-level military advantage for the new King, in these complicated times. To have her at his disposal could mean a great deal. And to keep Her Imperial Highness here a bit longer, no matter how briefly, would provide additional grounding in his newly acquired power.”
“But—” said Claere Liguon. “How is it that you come to this mistrustful conclusion? The Crown Prince, who is now King of Lethe, is an honorable man of his word and a loyal vassal of my father. And he has just promised to support me and to do whatever he must to aid me, and help me return home! Are you saying he will go back on his word?”
“Your Imperial Highness,” said the knight. “When a Prince becomes King, he becomes someone else. It is a necessary evil, and no, I do not presume to say he is forsworn, merely that now things have changed.”
“It is so,” Percy said. And at the sound of her voice everyone again turned to her. They all look at me so closely now, she thought. Every time I open my mouth, they expect something impossible, some new strangeness. . . .
However Beltain just as quickly looked away from Percy, seeming, in that quick movement, to dismiss her. He again addressed the Infanta, with a tone of courtly responsibility. “Regretfully it has been my own mistake to bring Your Imperial Highness here to the Palace, even though this entire consequence having to do with the Queen was unprecedented. I did not think it through. But I intend to remedy it.”
Percy glanced at him, frowning without knowing why. There was something in his superior tone, in the subtle way he assumed control of the situation—even though he had every right—that grated at her. She knew there was no good reason for it, but it did. “What else did My Lord think would happen?” she said with a slight edge, wanting to add: You had to know the King would want me to attend his dying mother.
Beltain turned again to look at her, and this time his glance was searing, in the probing way he seemed to see her, almost see right through her to her insecurity. “Whatever I’d thought, Percy, I should have taken into account—you.”
“What exactly happened in there?” Vlau Fiomarre asked in turn, his own dark gaze piercing her with worry.
“Nothing. Same thing you’ve seen before. I put the dead to rest,” Percy replied grimly. “The only difference is, this time I also made a King. And he will not let me go, I could see it in the new Queen’s eyes, and in his own, in that first instant, right after. . . .”
She had been clenching her skirts so hard, she could no longer feel her knuckles. Percy let go, then smoothed her palms against the front of her poor dress, and said: “But I am Death’s Champion, not the King’s Champion. And there is something I pro
mised to do. I’ve yet to find the Cobweb Bride. So I may not stay.”
“And you shall not,” the Infanta said. “No one will stop you from leaving, for I will insist that you come with me. And no mere vassal king may stop me.”
“Ah, Your Imperial Highness,” Grial said. “Your confidence is commendable, and in any better days it would be a thing without dispute. However, my dearie, things are about to get very difficult indeed, for so many of us—listen!”
Grial raised her finger up, and in that moment of silence they could hear the bells outside still tolling in grand harmonies. Only—there was something different now. Their rhythm and cadence had changed.
“Can you hear that?” Grial spoke again. “It’s no longer bah-dah-DUM-bah-bah! It is now Bah-DUM! Bah-DUM! Bah-DUM!”
“Yes,” the black knight said. “The cadence has switched from funeral to military.”
And Vlau Fiomare nodded grimly. “Yes! How well I know that sound, from the Styx and Balmue border! Those are the bells of war!”
In the bleak mid-afternoon sunshine, under a white winter sky streaked with charcoal and silver, Duke Hoarfrost sat atop his great warhorse before the walls and closed gates of Letheburg.
Around him was a sea of moving pole-arms—pikes, peasant billhooks, axe-headed halberds—among them ragged pennants held aloft, and cavalrymen of Chidair and others, plus innumerable infantry, men on foot bearing whatever weapons they could hold in their damaged limbs.
This was not an army of living men but the dead. . . . For hours they had marched, streaming along the wide road leading south, in a thick flow of cold broken bodies—human meat frozen to ice and clad in remnants of armor, bound with rigor mortis and then beyond it, bound with freezing temperatures and yet in motion somehow, cumbersome yet relentless. As they approached the capital city of Lethe, their ranks swelled, as more and more undead joined them from all across the countryside, while the living cringed and fled their relentless approach.
By the time they reached Letheburg, they were in the thousands. . . .
Hoarfrost had received his marching orders in the early evening of the previous day. In the twilight, a messenger of the Domain was delivered the news by carrier bird, and had come before the Duke, bearing the missive from the Sovereign. The slip of parchment said simply: “Proceed to Letheburg. Then wait for me.”
Lady Ignacia Chitain came along with the messenger to interpret the directive. Slightly shivering despite being wrapped in her new, warm, fur-lined cape that the Duke had gifted her from his long-dead wife’s own wardrobe, saying that it was “far more effective here in the cold north than any flimsy bit of nonsense from the Silver Court,” she entered his freezing quarters. Because of the broken expensive glass of the “newfangled window” through which he had put his fist earlier, the snow was beginning to pile up on the floor just underneath the opening, and the evening wind came in gusts. And he did not mind it at all, preferred it, in fact. The cold, he claimed, kept him from “rotting sooner” than if it had been spring or warm weather.
The messenger, a nondescript, wiry boy, delivered the note, then waited, holding a candle, the only illumination in the dark room.
Hoarfrost unfolded the bit of parchment, raised it close to his hairy, frightful face, grabbed the candle from the boy and drew it near. He then barked an exclamation. Ingacia could not be sure if it was a sound of acquiescence or protest, but took no chances.
“It is time, Your Grace,” she said confidently. “Gather your men and proceed. All your future success—and ours—depends upon your actions now.”
“Harrumph!” But the Duke did not appear displeased. Instead he turned full-body to face her, towering over the delicate lady like the side of a mountain.
“By Jove and the Devil, let’s do it!” he exclaimed, his voice powered by grand bellows.
There was a pause. . . .
His eyes—Lady Ignacia noticed—oh, in those moments, his eyes started bulging with effort, then slowly rolling in their frozen sockets, as he forcefully regained their motion for the first time since he’d died.
“It’s time! But first,” Duke Hoarfrost added, “first, I need to head out to the stables and personally see to my horse. . . .”
That was the previous evening. Since then, the Duke had ordered the Chidair undead to get ready to advance within the hour, regardless of time of day or night, and so they gathered by midnight, just as light snow started to fall, then spent the night on the march.
But first, as promised, Hoarfrost had gone to the stables where he took out his dagger and killed his great loyal warhorse—with a swift, neat stroke to the neck and a minimum of flesh damage. Supposedly, the beast was already very close to expiring as it was, from all the endless patrolling without rest or respite, for days on end, and living on inadequate, rationed grain. While the horse stood patiently dying, being slowly emptied of its lifeblood, the Duke patted it along the flanks, crooned in its ears, and swore to the frightened groomsmen who stood witness, with torches, that he was doing his old friend a kindness. Now the stallion would be able to “march to war properly, and match his master in every tireless stride.”
Lady Ignacia, having attached herself to this entire endeavor, was given use of a small Chidair “carriage”—indeed, a glorified covered wagon cart—and thus rode with the army, all through the night, dozing fitfully and afraid to miss a moment of import.
They had been on the move all night and all through this morning. The southern road emptied of all other traffic as rumors of their approach spread swiftly ahead like freezing vanguard gusts of wind. At the great walls of the capital city—which they approached and then surrounded not long after noon—the main gates and each of the lesser entry gates around the perimeter were drawn shut and every portcullis raised. Meanwhile, at least fifty feet above, on the battlements, bowmen and arquebus marksmen were positioned at each snow-capped crenel and merlon, and their various firearm muzzles and projectiles bristled from each embrasure slit in the parapet wall.
Duke Hoarfrost was pointed out the enemy archers and marksmen by one of his men-at-arms, and his mechanical voice bellowed in raucous disdain. “What do they think they can do to us with those puny shafts? Make pincushions out of dead men? Hah-hah-hah!” And he brandished his huge gauntleted fist and taunted the marksmen and archers of Letheburg. “Come, boys! Let us have some of your pellets or your arrows, arse-headed fools! Right here! Put one right here, directly in my stilled heart! Let your best shot make me a pincushion for your granny! Don’t worry, I’ll be over your walls soon enough, and you’ll have your arrows and your balls back!”
Lady Ignacia, having availed herself now of a horse, and fully aware that this was the second stage of the endeavor, approached the Blue Duke’s position, unceremoniously scattering his dead men-at-arms out of her way with the end of a mid-length lightweight pike that she’d borrowed from some poor infantry fellow. The thing was still infernally heavy, and she had to hold it with both hands, but it served its purpose to clear her way.
“Your Grace!” she cried. “We have arrived at Letheburg, precisely as Her Brilliance the Sovereign has instructed. But now, we must make no hasty action—we must wait.”
“Ah, it’s you, my pretty bird!” Hoarfrost turned his barrel body slightly in her direction. “Waiting is not a thing a man does willingly—not even a dead one, with all the time on his hands. Nor is it a prudent thing under the circumstances. Look, the place is ripe for the picking! We go in, and we take it all! All of it is ours!”
“Your Grace, there is wisdom in waiting, especially since you are not yet informed of the whole plan of the campaign. As soon as Her Brilliance arrives, you will be informed as to its entirety. But for now, as a man of your word, I would remind you to heed your promise.”
“Aye, I shall wait, little bird. But only for a short while. Tell your Sovereign I am not a patient man. I give her—what? A day? Two? No more. Then, I go forth and take Letheburg for myself.”
Listening to th
e non-stop tolling of the bells for over an hour, Percy grew uncomfortably aware of a new sense of which she yet had no clear grasp or explanation. It was a strange flimsy tug, a pull at her innards, coupled with a crawling sensation, as though she was being watched.
Who or what was watching her?
They were all still gathered in the same fine parlor with the chartreuse brocade decorations. Eventually an exquisite tea service was delivered, with fine baked goods, and a servant stayed to pour the rich amber tea into fragile bone china cups. This was no ordinary tea, but a royal blend prepared for Court. Percy watched the perfectly brewed treasure-drink cascade in swirling ribbons of liquid into each cup, wafting forth a complex aroma of the highest premium tea leaves from the Orient.
The servant attempted to present the first cup to Her Imperial Highness, but Vlau Fiomarre stepped forward and intercepted it with a gesture of one hand.
“I thank you, but I am not thirsty,” the Infanta added politely.
“Everyone else, eat and drink up!” Grial wiped her hands with determined enthusiasm against the front of her dress, finding no apron and apparently not caring in the least. “Be sure to have plenty, because you never know when the next opportunity to gobble will come along!”
And saying that, Grial winked at Percy.
Moments later the doors to the chamber opened unexpectedly, and two Chamberlains stepped forward to announce the King.
Roland Osenni did not look much different from earlier that morning, except his countenance was now settled into a blank tired mask, and he had put on an over-jacket of complete black without any decoration, to indicate extreme mourning, and a black unpowdered wig to cover his short graying hair in proper courtly fashion. He was followed by a minor retinue of courtiers, advisors, and royal bodyguards—who all crowded into the room a few discreet steps behind him.
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