Then why had she kissed him?
“Good morning cousin.” The duke had made an especial effort to not sneak up on him, using the door like everyone else. Rize half-smiled at the act of kindness. He could use all the kindness he could get.
“Morning cousin.”
“What an evening!” The duke breezed in, in a spotless white outfit, for some reason carrying a drab travelling cloak on his arm. “To do the Cinderella, of all things! It’s a good thing that there are only about ten ladies still alive in this place, or it might start a trend or something. The tradition was stupid and this was ten times more stupid.”
When this got no response, the duke carried on talking in a gentler tone. “So, I see we are moving on to option B for marriage?” He gestured at Mouse, who tossed her head noddingly. Rize smiled. “Would that I could. But Mouse would not make a very patient monarch.”
The duke smiled wryly, looking him up and down. “And the girl was picked for her… monarching skills? As evidenced by the way she filled out that dress?”
“Actually, yes,” Rize answered, surprising himself. “I didn’t realise it at the time, but when I was with her I did think that she would be an excellent ruler – you know, for these times. She was just, different, like this –” he puffed out his chest theatrically and exhaled with puffed cheeks under the sceptical gaze of the duke. “Fresh air. You know? I feel this simmering panic in people, mixed with the whole prince thing, all the time. And I have to be calm for them, I have to be strong for them. But her… I didn’t need to be strong for her.”
This did seem to make an impression on the duke and something changed behind his eyes. He leaned forward, suddenly serious.
“So, what are we still doing here?”
“What do you mean? She didn’t want the… me.”
“Rize, I was kidding earlier, about the Cinderella thing. Their coach was formed and ordered by a Pathfinder because they had no horses left, Vanita told me on the first night. She ordered it to leave for home at a certain time. Their carriage left at midnight because that was when the clock chimed the hour. As soon as the clock chimed, she ran.”
Rize turned and looked at him full in the face, searching for the joke and finding none. “Really?”
“Really.”
As Rize digested this, his cousin moved over to Mouse and led her gently from her stall, looking her up and down. “Mouse looks ready for a spin… how about you? I made a point of checking where the Rhodopalais estate was after the first night. It’s my custom, how I often get new girls. I listen to when they’re announced and go and ask the footmen which direction their coach came in. Then I go and look it up on one of the maps. And that Vanita did look a delectable thing to me, so I did the same with her.”
He came over to Rize’s side. “I know how to get there, get your girl. Aren’t you tired of sitting in this stuffy palace, waiting to be rescued? How about we go. Leave. Right now, just you and me.” Rize found himself nodding as he looked into the duke’s eyes. “Let’s do it. Let’s do something.”
Chapter Twenty
Door to Door
Ash had tried to wallow in the hearth again, she really had, but Vanita kept waking her up.
Finally, when it seemed late enough and the kitchens deserted enough, she snuck upstairs to check on her.
When she opened Vanita’s door, the still form in the bed was so similar to every other normal day she had woken her stepsister, that Ash almost felt she should have a tray of breakfast in hand. She was still asleep and so Ash snuck closer to check on her late-night handiwork.
Vanita’s hair had been chopped off at the scalp in patches where Ash had had to get to gashes and cuts. The rest was matted with dried blood. Angry red lines of sewn up skin ranged all around her shoulders. The face was remarkably unscathed apart from the eye, looking like porcelain next to the murderous red marks surrounding it. It made the bloody silken rag tied diagonally around her eye look like a masquerade, a game. Ash looked as much as she dared, trying not to sigh loudly and wake Vanita up. Then, checking that no one was coming first, she sat down to do some embroidery.
Perhaps it was the dream with her mother, but her hands and mind itched for something to do that was mechanical and dreamlike, a safe enough pen for her ragged thoughts to wander a bit but not too far. Making arrow heads was too new, but embroidery had been forced on her from the age of nine when her new stepmother had pronounced her “boyish”. She would rather have been eaten by a carrior than admit it to anyone, but she found the mindless dancing of hands soothing.
As she began on the battered old embroidery ring, a slight wheeze emanated from the bed. Ash turned her head. Vanita’s eye open and looking at her.
“Vee… are you awake?” Whatever had been in that Pathfinder’s solution must truly have been magic. With the amount of blood lost, the trauma of being stitched up, she should by rights be unconscious for a day or more, yet here was her sister looking at her silently. “Vee… how are you?”
Vanita nodded carefully, a small dip of her head that seemed to bring a wave of pain, for she lay back again.
“Are you hungry? Thirsty?”
Silence.
“Well, nevertheless, you must eat and take a lot of water in. You lost so much blood last night.”
The chapped bloody lips opened and closed, testing. “Mo-mother”
“Something happened last night. Stepmother is in her room, she won’t come out. She has locked herself in.”
This news did not seem to surprise Vanita. She looked down, seeming so small without her cloud of hair, so pale and so young.
“Thank,” she whispered, as Ash left the room to get her food.
While Ash was spooning pumpkin broth into Vanita’s mouth, it started. A whining, off-kilter, keening noise was seeping through the walls and Ash realised that it was Stepmother singing to herself, then muttering.
“I’ll just call for Tansy, to take this bowl down to the kitchens,” Ash said quickly and a little too loudly, trying to drown out the sounds of Vanita’s mother going insane. “I’ll be right back, okay?”
Ash could not have been on the landing for long when she heard a thin, strangled scream coming from the room she had just left.
She ran into the room but couldn’t see Vanita anywhere. But then there she was in the corner, peering into the cracked mirror there and just screaming.
“Vee! Vee, what? What? Is there pain? Talk to me!”
“My m-my eye!”
Ash sank down on the bed, her chest like lead. Vanita didn’t remember, of course not. And now she had found out in the most brutal way that she was disfigured forever. It was too much. Ash just shook her head and cried with her sister.
Eventually, sanity returned, and Ash spoke soft words she would not remember later as she bundled her Vanita back into bed. As if punctuating the moment, dull thuds echoed from the other side of the wall. Stepmother, it seemed, had begun running around in her closed-off room.
“Why…”
“I think your mother has gone into shock and is in some way reliving last night. That is my best guess. I told you, something happened last night.”
“No. Why things… fall apart. Ash?”
It was a good question and it must have taken a lot of energy to voice it. Ash looked out the dirty window as if for help, but there was nothing.
“Get some rest, Vanita.” She did not know what else to say. She got up to leave for her own grief, downstairs and closed the door behind her, imagining Vanita lying there listening helplessly to the sounds of her mother falling apart.
Derrick was in the kitchens when she returned. Whether to eat something or to block her way so she could not crawl back into the fireplace, Ash could not say. But instead of making his intentions clear, he gestured towards an insultingly pristine missive on the table.
“That came from the palace.”
“What?”
“It says that the prince is venturing out of the palace to ‘find his bride’.”
/> “The prince?”
“That’s what I said.”
Ash snorted. “That’s ridiculous. He is the only heir to the throne; do you really expect me to believe he would just ride around from door to door with carriors about? What’s he going to do, take my shoe and try it on all twelve of us maidens? And if we all happen to be a size five? And how did a magicked missive come here anyway – just how many bleeding Pathfinders does that palace have anyway?”
“Ash? I don’t think he’s going from door to door.”
Derrick picked up the paper and held its reverse side up to her. It had the address of Rhodopalais on it and no other.
He knew where she lived. He was coming straight here.
***
The air felt fantastic – clear and bright and cold as it rushed past Rize’s face. Just being out of the palace grounds felt like flying and Rize could not remember the last time he had galloped. He thought his heart would burst in his chest: for the sun, for the wind on his face, for Ash.
“Take it easy Rize, she hasn’t been out in quite a while,” said the Duke, pulling up next to him. Mouse certainly didn’t seem to share his sentiments, she was tossing her head ecstatically as she went.
But his cousin wasn’t finished. “Are you sure it was a good idea to send that missive?”
“Why would it not be? You said yourself that she left because of the magicked carriage, not because she did not want to be proposed to.”
“Well, with my not inconsiderable experience with women, I have learnt that it tends to be dangerous to assume you know what a woman is feeling. They seem to not like the idea of feeling only one thing at once.”
Rize shook his head and focussed on the riding. He did not know what his cousin was talking about, but his heart was sure. He wanted to be around that person, Ash, for her to breathe life into the stale palace with her muddy boots beneath ballgowns and her sharp eyes and fearlessness. If he had to marry her to have that, so what? There were worse things – like each and every day continuing to be the same.
“Why did you bring that thing?”
Rize blushed, knowing exactly what the duke was referring to. The shoe sitting inside the satchel strapped to Mouse’s flank, the shoe that Ash had fallen out of and left lying there in the corridors. Left for him to find? Who knows.
“Are you planning on trying it on her foot?”
Rize blushed hotter. “Of course not. I just – I just wanted it with me.” How could he explain to his cousin that wild, raw panic had flared in his chest when he had seen her running and had run after her in a very unprincely fashion, all seeming to be chaos, when he came across this shoe in the corridors? And when he had looked at it, it had had a small, perfect phrase inside: ‘from ashes to beauty’. Those words had struck him straight to the heart. There was little enough beauty left in the world.
“I just wanted to give it back to her, it looked expensive, that’s all.”
The duke nodded, not saying anything. Rize felt the need to fill the silence, so he did.
“We’re doing the right thing. You’ll see.”
The pair rode on.
***
Ash stared at the page Derrick was holding as if trying to fathom a hidden code. Then her eyes widened and she walked swiftly out the door.
Derrick stopped her in less than ten paces.
“Why is he coming here?” Derrick all but shouted. Ash turned and faced hum, raising her chin. “Why do you think?”
“How does he know where we live?”
“That I don’t know. I never mentioned it to him and as I am no longer a lady I have no rights to property so he – oh. Vanita. Vanita was announced at the ball.”
Ash tried to carry on walking, but Derrick placed a hand flat on her chest. “Don’t go talk to your God. Talk to me. Do you have feelings for this prince?”
“I – I don’t know.”
“That’s a yes.”
“It is not. I don’t… I don’t know what to do, alright? And I have to think of everyone here. If it would help Rhodopalais –”
“You sound like your stepmother.”
Ash placed her hands on his chest this time and pushed with all her strength, sending Derrick stumbling back. She walked past him to go and sit beneath her hazelnut tree and try to be alone.
“Are you really going to marry someone you’re not sure you love?” he called after her. “Are you really going to tie yourself to this kingdom for the rest of your life when it might be the biggest mistake of your life?”
***
As the riding wore on and they passed the wasteland plains without incident, some exhilaration of the novelty wore off. Finally, they entered the rocky country that came just before the open plains that housed Rhodopalais, according to the duke. It was a deathly quiet place, grey as a tombstone with its rocky hillsides laid bare by lack of grass, riddled with holes as though giant worms had made their way through. Some of the caves were too small for a child to enter, some large enough for a man – or a carrior? – to pass through. Rize had often wondered where such massive birds slept. Apparently, someone had had the idea of these caves as a refuge, for there was the hacked-off remains of a gate flung to one side of an especially large cave. Clearly, it hadn’t worked out in their favour. The prince rode on.
Rize and the duke fell into the old ways of hard riding, sparing thoughts only for the gait of the horse, the position of the sun in the sky and safety. Even less for conversation. So Rize was slightly startled when his cousin spoke:
“So, what is the plan when we get there?”
“Ask her to marry me.”
‘And you’re sure that’s what you want to do?”
“Why wouldn’t I? It would be good for the kingdom.”
“Yes, but you’re used to thinking about the good of the kingdom and just doing things ‘for the kingdom’. She is not. You may need to explain it to her. So, why exactly would she be good for the kingdom? In what way?”
Rize turned in his saddle to look at his cousin. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. “She would… inspire me, make me a better leader, I suppose. Bring fresh life and new ways of doing things in to the palace.”
The duke stared hard at him.
“She also knows how to kill carriors,” Rize finished lamely.
The duke looked politely away, focussing on his reins and bridle for a moment. “Hmm, not the most romantic proposal I’ve ever heard, but desperate times I suppose…”
They both looked at each other, neither one wanting to break eye contact first and lose.
“I know it’s not the most romantic but well –”
“Rize look out!”
The duke pulled on his reins hard and Rize whipped his head around to face forward again, doing the same.
There was a giant black crow sitting on the path in front of them.
***
Ash was not sure how long she had been sitting under the hazelnut tree when he came back. She was so lost in thought that Derrick sneaked up on her completely, forcing a gasp of surprise out of her as he bodily hauled her up by the arms into a standing position. If he had been a carrior, she’d be dead.
‘Right, he said menacingly, “there’s something we need to talk about.”
Without another word, he stalked off towards the back of the house. Ash stood there, annoyed and stupefied, for less than a minute before his voice rang out from behind the wall as he came back towards her.
“What’s our promise Ash? That only one of us is allowed to die. That I will take care of Vanita and Her Highness and all the house if you’re gone. Right?”
“What does this have to do with anything?”
Derrick came back into view, this time walking slowly, almost shyly, holding a burlap sack. Silently, he handed it to her.
Ash felt something papery inside and pulled her hand out of the sack with its precious cargo. Her breath caught in her throat and she looked up at Derrick’s face. They were lilac roses from the old garde
n, lovingly dried so that they had maintained their original shape and hue, only the tiniest veins of brown discolouration on the edges of the petals. She could not guess at how long ago he must have done this, how he had planned to give them to her.
“Derrick…”
“Just listen, Ash. I know that things have changed a lot over the past week, but there has been something I have wanted to ask you for a while. For years.”
All this time, rising at dawn and hunting carriors together, going to balls together, facing starvation and mobs and death, these lilac roses were sitting in a sack right here, waiting for her.
“When we were children, I knew you were a lady and there was no hope. I knew that… But then you renounced your title. It was like a miracle. That was when I started saving. I thought that we could have a farm and, well, it’s not a palace but…”
Ash stared at Derrick, her hands dropping to her sides, nearly crushing the flowers.
“Ash, will you marry me?”
***
The massive, ink-black bird cocked its head to the side as it studied them.
Rize had seen many carriors. He had tracked them, hunted them, shot arrows at them from a distance and even a few times at close range, with the backing of a select armed guard, of course. But he had never been attacked by carrior, that just happened to be a crow and he found it quite, quite different.
The bird watched them without moving a muscle and Rize was almost scared to break eye contact. He looked ahead of them for an escape, but the only thing in front of them was the tall, thick skeleton of a tree, bare branches like bones in the sunlight. As if it had heard his thoughts, the crow launched off the ground, cawing and alighted on one of the sturdier branches. It looked unblinkingly down at its prey and they looked back. Time passed and still the crow kept on staring. Rize tried to keep his thoughts on Rhodopalais and on her, so close now, to try and keep away the feeling of numb dread sinking in and stared back.
After minutes of silence, Mouse seemed to get restless. She pawed the ground, then tossed her head and neighed. That seemed to be all the invitation the carrior needed. It dived.
Ash Rising Page 15