“Assuredly,” the Empress said, and stood, and took his arm. “Prince Prospero, best wait in your quarters, do you not think? She may go there. Would she not seek you?”
He shook his head wearily. “Nay, was not there a moment past.”
“Let us go there and wait. And the Emperor will find her and send to us when he does, and Golias, and the guards, and we shall all unravel it. It is terrible. Well knows, it is terrible. Have you been in her own chamber? Perhaps she’s there. Let us look.” Soothing, warm-voiced, the Empress coaxed Prospero out of the room, throwing a sharp look at the Emperor. “There’s none but would agree with you, Prospero,” he heard her say as the door closed.
Freia’s rooms were out-of-the-way. Prospero, after a gloomy moment’s reflection, decided that indeed, she might have run there, if anywhere in the Palace she hated; it was her own turf, such as it was, and Freia was ever one to run to earth when hurt. So he led Glencora and two of the Empress’s women there, the women and Empress almost trotting to keep up with his long-legged strides.
No guards stood at the door. Prospero growled something uncomplimentary about Herne and lifted the handle; it was locked—no, jammed.
He stood, his blood going cold. “So ’twas at the library—” he whispered to himself, not to the ladies with him, and called “Freia!” at the crack of the door.
Silence met his ear pressed to the wood.
“Stand back,” he ordered the ladies, eyed the handle, and kicked it so that the door danced and something snapped. The door had been wedged with a chair; it clattered down, broken-backed, as the door swung inward. The sitting-room was dark, faintly flower-scented from a large bouquet on a console-table before the door.
“Freia?”
The Empress came up beside him, offered him a lit candle from a sconce.
“Back,” he told her and her women curtly.
The light was small. It lit him through the sitting-room to the bedchamber.
“By the dark Moon, ’tis hellish frigid here,” he muttered. He lit more candles, light touches to wicks. “Freia?” he called softly, persuasively. “Puss, ’tis Papa. Where art thou hid?”
“Papa?” he heard, a tiny mouse-noise.
Prospero could not discern whence it came. “Aye,” he said. “Puss, I’m not wroth with thee. By the Four Winds, nay. Where art thou?” He turned around, seeking, perplexed; the three women at the door peered into the dimness of the sitting-room.
“Papa,” Freia said, the same tiny, brittle sound, and he whirled; she stood in the middle of the chamber, weeping, hugging some dark thing like a blanket round herself.
“Freia!” and Prospero clasped her to him, absurdly grateful and glad to have her. All his anger at her Court tantrum had gone. She could not dissemble, he reminded himself, she had never done; her surface showed her depths transparently, and she acted as her heart prompted her.
“You came, you came,” Freia whispered again and again through her sobs.
“Aye, aye,” he repeated, “aye, dear heart, aye, child …”
The Empress stayed in the doorway, watching. She turned and gave a soft order to one of her women, who left.
“Did he hurt thee, Freia,” Prospero murmured.
“Not—” She gulped. “You came, you stopped him, O Papa—”
“Hush, hush, child—thy gown!”
“He t-t-tore it—Papa, O Papa—” Freia hugged him again. “You were there,” she whispered.
“Hush. Shhh.” Prospero stroked her undone hair, kissed her forehead and pressed her to his chest. “There. There. Fear naught, child, fear naught. I’ll see him tree-tied and gutted for this, the bastard cur.”
Prince Herne stood hard-faced before the Emperor and Count Pallgrave; the diligent pen of Cremmin awaited his answer to the Emperor’s query.
“Is she gone?” Herne demanded.
“We asked you whether you had removed the guard from her,” the Emperor said.
“Remove it? I’d double it. She’s sly as her sire. Has she escaped?”
“So you did not remove the guard from her.”
“Hell, no!” Herne, arms folded, waited for Avril to explain himself.
“You have a roster of the guard, I presume, Prince Herne?” Pallgrave asked.
“The captain does. You think I assign them myself?” The Prince looked down on the gaunt Count.
“Send for the captain,” the Emperor commanded. “Now.”
Herne stared at him a moment, then opened the door. “You,” he said to one of the Emperor’s guard outside. “Go get Captain Horun, and tell him bring his duty roster with him.”
The guard saluted and left at once.
“What’s afoot?” Herne demanded, closing the door.
“There has been a lapse,” the Emperor said.
“Did the vixen run?” Herne demanded, a note of annoyance coming into his voice. “I’ll ride her down.”
“That will probably not be necessary,” the Emperor said.
There came a tap at the door; it opened and a footman announced the Countess of Orasch with a message from the Empress. The Emperor nodded. The lady entered, curtseyed.
“Her Majesty desired me to inform Your Majesty that the girl is found,” the Countess said.
The Emperor laughed, a short bark. “Where?”
“In her apartment, Your Majesty.”
Count Pallgrave coughed lightly; the Emperor nodded. “In what condition?” inquired Pallgrave.
“Dishevelled,” said the Countess, “discomposed, gibbering and weeping, wearing an antimacassar for a stole. Her father attends her.”
“Doctor Hem shall go to them immediately and examine her himself. Inform him. Let him report to us when he has so done.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” the Countess said, and she curtseyed again and left. As she did, the Fireduke entered, and she bowed to him as well.
“Ah, our Marshal,” said the Emperor. “About this quarrel between Prince Golias and Prospero, which you disrupted and then reported to us.”
Gaston lifted his eyebrows and waited to hear what the Emperor would ask him.
“Prospero,” the Emperor went on when he was forced to recognize that Gaston was being unhelpful, “accuses Prince Golias of attempting his daughter’s virtue.”
Herne snorted, the query clarifying much to him. Gaston nodded and waited to be asked a question, thinking, guessing, planning.
The Emperor glared at him. “We know Prospero has old quarrels with Prince Golias. Might you have heard anything supporting this new allegation when you halted their duel?”
Gaston frowned, considered, answered carefully. “ ’Tis as I first told you. I heard their weapons. ’Twas in the old library. The doors being locked, I went to the little smoking-room door that does not lock; indeed it swung free as ever, and I entered, drew, and beat down their swords, enjoining them to leave the fight. I thought it must be from some ill-feeling from the war or Prospero’s fresh slander, and ’twere best, meseemed, that they not draw blood without formalities.”
“Ah, the war,” the Emperor murmured. “Prospero has a grudge against him for the war, we have had some inkling of this before. Prince Golias was in Prospero’s hire awhiles.”
“That’s so,” Herne said. “Golias spoke of it to me, and Prospero has needled him as an oath-breaker often since.”
The Emperor’s face gave no sign of what he thought behind it.
Gaston said nothing.
“You may leave us, Marshal; this is a domestic matter and beyond your authority,” the Emperor said smoothly.
Gaston bowed and left, still silent. Herne and the Emperor both hated Prospero, and the Fireduke misliked to leave them together sitting on this business. It would be easy for the Emperor to claim the charge of attempted rape was trumpery, to smear the girl’s character, perhaps to claim she’d played coquette with now-Prince Golias, and to accuse Prospero of thereby ensnaring Golias as vengeance for the ex-mercenary’s treachery. It was plausible only if
one believed Prospero had no feeling for the girl. The Emperor was not beneath such rearrangements of truth, Gaston knew.
Yet if the Marshal reported what the girl had told him, it would go worse still for her: this he also knew. In the current political and social milieu, she would be dishonored; out of favor and powerless, she would suffer reprisals, her marriage to Prince Josquin surely cancelled, no scrap of dignity nor defense left to her nor Prospero. Gaston thought of Lady Miranda’s body. Though named now Prince, Golias had no part of nobility. Truly Gaston had been an idiot not to suspect that it had gone worse for both of them than the visible wounds showed. He skewered his past self mercilessly: he had not wanted to suspect, had been blind to the truth of Golias’s viciousness.
The Marshal, disdaining niceties of the scope of his authority, had already inquired quietly among the guards. His most trusted captain, a Landuc man named Jolly who served Gaston now in his Montgard army, had spoken with the two men who had been assigned to watch Lady Freia that evening.
They were two of Golias’s mercenaries who had taken the Emperor’s gold and enlisted under Herne, who’d needed men badly to fill out the ranks thinned by Prospero’s war. They had guarded Lady Freia when Lord Dewar led her from her chamber to the Coronation Hall, guarded her thence when she fled her betrothal, and guarded her to the old library, where she had gone in and sat by one of the low fires that burned there to drive damp from the books.
The guards were careful; they had stood within the door, which had remained open, but had not approached nor spoken to the lady, as they were under orders not to do so unless she made some effort to escape. They had kept her under constant watch until their former captain, Golias, had come to them, beckoned them out, said they were relieved for a couple of hours to drink the betrothed lady’s health below and that he’d cover her until they returned.
He had been their commander and was now a Prince. They had obeyed cheerfully, promising to drink his own as well in honor of his access of nobility.
Gaston’s captain had had this from their own mouths, before they’d had any word of what had followed from their dereliction. He’d asked them amiably what they did, and they had told him, and he had said nothing to them of the result of their celebratory pot-tossing. Jolly had drunk a cup with them and returned to his commander to report.
No matter what the Emperor and Herne decided, the guards would be dead at dawn for disobeying orders and abandoning their post. Gaston himself had ordered hangings for such. A soldier who could not obey an order was useless, and Herne would watch them drop without pity.
The question must be, what would become of Golias?
10
FREIA COULDN’T STOP SOBBING, THOUGH IT made her sicken and vomit. Prospero had asked her what had passed before he came to her, and she became hysterical and incomprehensible, raving and clinging to him, not permitting him to leave her, terrified that Golias would appear again. Prospero sent one of the waiting-women to get a fire laid in both rooms (and that yesterday, wench), and when Doctor Hem arrived, sent by the Empress or the Emperor or both, Prospero would not allow him to examine Freia; instead, Hem was sent away again to find Dewar.
“Don’t go … don’t go … don’t go …” Freia was half-wailing into Prospero’s shoulder when the sorcerer arrived.
“What in all the devils’ names is toward?” Dewar asked as politely as he could manage. It had been a good card game; Fortuna had stood by his shoulder and he’d relieved Fulgens of much of the weight of his purse already. But it seemed that Dewar was destined to complete nothing he began, this cursed evening.
“I trust thee and no other for this,” Prospero said. “Hie thou, find that charlatan Hem and oblige him to open to thee his pharmacy. (Hush, Puss, none shall harm thee, none shall harm thee.) There fill thy hands from this list—” he handed it to Dewar, short and scrawled, blotted and jarred “—and bring the things back. She cannot be calmed.”
“Why?” Dewar asked, in a tone of great reasonableness.
“I’d brew a draught, and I trust not Hem nor any of the creatures here!” snapped Prospero. “Do thou make haste ere she rave her way to utter distraction, and me with her.”
“What—” Dewar stopped himself at Prospero’s glare. He bowed. He left, passing a surly chambermaid kneeling at the fireplace where a sharp-faced lady-in-waiting stood over her, taking a crumpled piece of paper from the maid and stuffing it into her pocket.
Luneté, Countess of Lys, clenched her fists and inhaled carefully. Her dress was too tight, there was no pretending otherwise; or, more accurately, her dress was too narrow and her corset too tight. It could not be the heavy-sauced Palace food, the opulent banquets and fantastical dinners. Luneté knew she couldn’t have eaten so much in so few days as to put her new-fashioned Court gowns all out of size. Laudine had made a mistake when she had altered the dress from the high-waisted (and, Luneté thought wistfully, more comfortable) old style of Sithe of Lys’s Court years with Queen Anemone to the narrow, long-waisted newer style preferred by the slender Madanese Empress.
Though Laudine had hotly denied erring, she was now picking and restitching seams, letting fullness back into the bodices and waists of three gowns. But Luneté must be dressed, and so she suffered now in a room that seemed oppressively warm, wishing she had thought to persuade Ottaviano to crave this audience on the morrow, when the gowns would be ready.
Dewar stood gazing out a window to one side, meticulously whetting the red-handled knife he had lately obtained from Ottaviano, a small smile slipping onto his lips from time to time as his thoughts amused him. A covered table waited in the center of the room, before the small dais and throne on which the Emperor would sit; irregularities in its draping suggested a candle, a bowl, and hid the rest.
Beside Luneté, Ottaviano fidgeted with his pockets, doubtless missing the folding knife now in Dewar’s hands. It had been his favorite pocket-piece ever since Luneté had known him. She would have to find him something as interesting to occupy his hands in idle or anxious moments, but the curious knife would be difficult to replace.
Dewar admired the thing exceedingly. At their meeting two nights previous, after a long wrangle in which the Countess of Lys and the Baron of Ascolet had proposed payment after payment to the sorcerer, who had shrugged off gems, money, land, a small manor-house, everything offered to him—Luneté had begun to fear he would accept nothing less than herself—after two hours of this, Otto had taken out the folding knife and cleaned his clogged pipe. Dewar had watched, and Ottaviano had expanded happily on the ten thousand uses and virtues of the thing. Dewar had tinkered with it, peering at his fingertip through its useless little burning-glass, testing the point of the awl, counting the blades, hooks, files, and incomprehensible implements. He particularly admired the corkscrew. Ottaviano had jestingly offered the knife as payment for the sorcery he needed from Dewar, and Dewar had haughtily replied that he did not sell his sorcery.
Later, after they collapsed with relief into their bed, Ottaviano had told his wife that he had recognized in that instant that they had approached Dewar incorrectly. For Ottaviano had next said, “Would you accept it as a gift, then?,” and Dewar had smiled, asked whether Otto could live without such a marvellously useful thing, and Otto had replied that there were things he’d rather have that might be of more use, such as his blood-father’s name. And that was that: Dewar had said he would unravel Otto’s paternity, there was no further talk of jewels and money, and the sorcerer had taken the folding knife and left them to stare at one another.
“An expensive gift,” Ottaviano had said, as Luneté was falling asleep. “But about the right value.”
“What?” Luneté had come awake with a start.
“I’ve had that knife for years,” Otto had said in the darkness. “It’s part of me. He has me now.”
“Has you?”
“Things that are intimately associated with a person can be used by a sorcerer to work on them,” Otto had said. “That’
s why we burn hair clippings and nail parings—you know. But anything can be used if it’s been near the body.”
“Work on them?” Luneté had repeated apprehensively.
“Enthrall, influence, ensorcel—”
“How did you learn so much about sorcery?” his wife asked, interrupting.
“The hard way. —I wish he’d settled for a house and some land. Or the sapphires. I know he likes sapphires. He was holding out for something good. This had better be worth it.”
“Dewar’s our friend. He wouldn’t do that.”
“He’s a sorcerer.”
And shortly afterward, Otto had snored into a bolster while Luneté stared at the darkness, afraid of nameless things, until the great Palace clock rang the ninth hour of the night.
This afternoon the Emperor had consented to give them a few moments’ relatively private audience. Luneté had arranged it through the Empress, though she had felt uncomfortable about trading so quickly on the royal favor shown her. But Otto had insisted; and the Empress had said that she would attend also and advised Luneté to find another witness. A man versed in law would be best, said the Empress, someone to counsel the Baron on what steps he might take when his father’s name was revealed. Luneté knew no lawyers and few of the nobility, and so the Empress had sent to her the Lord of Valgalant: the same elderly nobleman who had stood beside Luneté in Court.
The door opened without warning and that Lord Gonzalo of Valgalant entered, garbed as before in unrelieved mourning. He bowed over Luneté’s hand, greeted Ottaviano, nodded courteously to Dewar, and stood beside the Countess and Baron to wait for the others. Luneté gnawed her lip unbecomingly.
After another quarter of an hour, the door opened, the Empress and Emperor were announced, and those two individuals entered, followed by the Prince Heir, the Prince Marshal Gaston, Princes Herne and Fulgens, the Princesses Viola and Evote, Count Pallgrave, and the Emperor’s secretary Cremmin.
Luneté curtseyed and stayed down, a Court curtsey; Otto bowed, and they covertly glanced at one another with some dismay. The entire royal family, excepting Prince Prospero and his daughter, were there, a far larger audience than either of them had anticipated.
The Price of Blood and Honor Page 17