“Running away. He can’t say it was Renn for sure, but he’ll confirm someone was there. Maybe I should just go rouse Abramm and tell him myself.” Carissa sagged back in the chair, winding a ringlet of golden hair around her index finger.
It was at that point a messenger from Carissa’s apartments arrived with a large hand-inked invitation card for the princess. She untied the lacing and opened the flaps to scan the contents. Her expression soured. “Oh, mercy,” she murmured. “A breakfast invitation from Oswain Nott. What a way to start one’s day.”
“He certainly does have his eye on you.”
“I don’t want to offend him—especially not on the heels of Abramm passing him over for First Minister. . . . You want to come?”
“I very much doubt Nott would appreciate my presence. Besides, I’m about to leave for a morning ride out to Treasure Cove.”
Carissa’s eyes brightened. “What a splendid idea! I’ll come with you.”
Not exactly what Maddie’d intended, but how could she refuse the crown princess?
Thus she now found herself riding in the early morning beside the king’s sister—across the southeastern leg of the royal preserve, then along the eastern headland toward the cove—heading in a direction directly opposite Graymeer’s. Hogart and several of Abramm’s armsmen attended them.
At first Carissa was driven to talk out her anxieties, speculating as to how Rennalf had gotten to Springerlan with the passes still snowed in, why he’d come at all, and what he’d been doing in Mataian robes at the coronation yesterday. Of the three, only the first had a likely answer: Rennalf had reopened the etherworld corridor Abramm had shut down in Graymeer’s six months ago.
The more she talked, the more certain she became this was the case. But when she suggested they return to the palace to insist Abramm go up to Graymeer’s and make sure, Maddie pointed out that Abramm was certainly already up there.
“Already up there?” Carissa protested. “But he has that foreign dignitaries’ tribute—”
“Not until two. Plenty of time to ride out and back, especially if he set out early.”
Carissa’s eyes narrowed. “Is this what you two talked about in the garden last night?”
“No.”
“Then how did you—”
“I know him, Carissa. So do you. After what happened yesterday, is there any doubt he would go out there first chance he got?” Especially having seen those galleys moored at the base of the Graymeer’s outcropping in his vision. . . .
Her thoughts caught on the realization that he’d seen them in actual time. Maybe it hadn’t been a vision at all. Leyton’s tales of the regalia claimed the crown gave a man the ability to see for leagues. Abramm had claimed no unusual ability to see a long way, but what if it wasn’t straight distance? What if, like the corridors that took you to distant places in the blink of an eye, it enabled him to see places that were leagues away as if they were right in front of him?
Her heart constricted. He’d also seen Esurhite galleys streaming out of a bank of fog he thought might hide the Gull Islands. If that was present time, too, it would not only support Leyton’s story about the dire situation in Chesedh but give weight to his theories about the regalia, as well. And reinforce the need to unlock their secrets as soon as possible.
Oh, Father Eidon! I don’t want to stay here. Surely it would be better for everyone if I left.
Carissa had fallen into her own musings, and now, inevitably, thoughts of Abramm’s coronation triggered memories of what Maddie herself had seen. A vision sufficiently similar to what Abramm had described that she couldn’t think she had made it up wholly.
She had soared on the winds above a fortress by the sea where a wedding ceremony was being performed on the uppermost ramparts. Spectators filled the tops of the wallwalks as well as both inner and outer wards: men and women dressed in silken finery, yet bearing with them the banners and weapons of war.
She’d spiraled downward toward the bridal couple, who faced one another with joined hands. The groom was tall and blond, his face marred by two red scars, and the bride seemed inexplicably unfamiliar, though it had to be Briellen. Maddie had circled closer as Kesrin looped the long white ribbon of Chesedhan wedding tradition around the couple’s joined hands. The bride’s veil lifted from her face, and she still did not look like Briellen for all Maddie tried to make it so. Then, as she passed behind Abramm’s broadshouldered form, she realized it was not her sister at all, but Maddie herself.
The realization had catapulted her into the very body she had just recognized, so that now she stood looking up into Abramm’s smiling blue eyes as the ribbon twirled round and round their joined hands, binding them in law and custom and fact for the rest of their lives. . . . It was then, as comprehension dawned and disbelief was chased by sudden, howling protest, that all grew hazy, colors and shadows bleaching out into a strong white light.
The next thing she knew she was pushing herself off Leyton’s shoulder, aware of his arm pressed against her back, his hand gripping her waist as he held her upright on wobbly knees. She remembered Simon coming around him, the old duke’s hawkish features narrowed into a frown, his blue eyes fixing upon her sharply as she strove to regain her senses and her poise.
A terrible fear had gripped her as she realized what she’d seen. Such a thing could only come to pass if Briellen had died, for she was First Daughter and given already to the king in treaty. For a moment her agitation grew so intense she thought she might become ill. Then rationality reasserted itself. No sense leaping to horrid conclusions with so little real evidence. Indeed, her own vision might even be the proof of Briellen’s survival. Since Maddie had served as stand-in for her sister in the coronation ceremony, the vision could simply have been a reflection of that role. Her middle had finally unclenched, and her breathing eased as the fear fell away . . . leaving sorrow of a different stripe in its wake. . . .
“Are you all right, Mad?” Carissa’s low query now broke into her thoughts. “You look even wearier than you did yesterday.”
“I’m fine.” They were coming down over the eastern headland, heading for the beach, a great column of gulls circling ahead of them against a sky of tattered clouds.
“I noticed you didn’t eat much this morning, either,” Carissa persisted.
Maddie exhaled a long breath and looked at her companion evenly. “But not because I’m sick.” She snorted, recalling Leyton’s suggestion. “Or with child.”
“Of course I know you’re not with child!” Carissa frowned at her. “Plagues, Mad! I nearly came to blows with Leona last night defending you! You weren’t the only one to faint during that ceremony, after all.”
“Well, for that I thank you.”
They rode on in silence, watching the gulls dive and circle up ahead. Then Carissa said, “You didn’t answer my question. And ever since your brother arrived with that treaty, you’ve been particularly out of sorts.”
“Leyton has a way of doing that.”
“I was thinking more of the treaty.”
Suddenly Maddie could hardly breathe. She kept her gaze fixed upon the rutted road before them but felt Carissa’s eyes upon her.
“You’re not jealous, are you?” the princess asked.
Madeleine barked a short laugh and spoke in words that sounded strained even to her own ears. “Jealous? Why would you think that?”
Carissa held silence for a long moment as the horses’ plodding hoofbeats rose up around them and the distant squawks of the gulls drifted to them on the wind. Finally she said quietly, “You’ve fallen for him, haven’t you?”
Surprise and renewed alarm whipped Maddie’s head around, denial poised on the tip of her tongue. But the moment she saw her companion’s grave and vaguely sympathetic expression, she knew it would be pointless. She looked away, catching her lower lip between her teeth as she found herself fighting back tears, and disgusted anew by the emotional wreck she had become these last few days. “Is it that
obvious?”
Carissa chuckled softly. “The way you look at him? I’m afraid so.”
Maddie winced and turned her eyes to a pair of long-winged kytes floating among the gulls over the green slope ahead. A puff of gullberry-scented breeze caressed her face. Then she groaned. “I can’t believe I’m humiliating myself like this. Especially knowing he doesn’t care a whit.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. . . . He’s just worked harder at not seeing it than you have.”
It took a moment for Carissa’s words to register. Then Maddie looked around at her in surprise, and the princess met her gaze with a rueful smile.
“I want you!” Abramm’s words rang in her memory as vividly as when he had spoken them, and they still had the power to make her hope that somehow, some way, he had meant more by them than just his concern for her research. She quashed it grimly. “That is not a possibility I have any business considering, Riss.”
“Why not? You’d rather let him lock himself into a loveless marriage? To your own sister?”
“It has to be this way. Our countries need this treaty.” Especially if things are as bad as Leyton says.
“We may need the treaty, but we don’t need it to be sealed with a marriage.”
They came over a gentle rise, hearing the sound of the breakers now as they got their first glimpse of the sea, visible beyond the grass-covered rise ahead of them. Out beyond the surf line, vegetation-crowned sentinel rocks stood amidst pulsing fountains of white spray, encircled by rafts of squawking gulls.
“I don’t think it’s a wonderful idea,” Maddie said. “But it is what it is. No matter how much you rail against it, they’re still going to do it. And frankly, I doubt Abramm will mind at all. My sister is everything I’m not: beautiful, charming, stylish. Men fall in love with her the moment they meet her. You’ll see.”
“If he’s already attracted to you, Mad, it’s highly unlikely he’ll be interested in a woman who’s everything you’re not.”
Maddie frowned at her, suddenly exasperated. “Why are you doing this, Carissa? It can’t work between us. Even if Bree wasn’t part of the picture—I don’t want to be a queen. And even if I did, I’m not at all suited to it.”
“Nonsense.”
“You said it yourself yesterday.”
“Before I realized how truly brilliant it was for you to have readied Warbanner. Before the ceremony unfolded and the Light came on him and you fainted in the middle of it all. I remembered the day he faced the morwhol and how weird you were when we were fleeing down the Bright Falls canyon. All blank-faced and deaf, like you were somewhere else. And then after that boom, suddenly you were back and certain he was alive.” She paused, pulling a strand of windblown hair from across her face as she looked intently at Maddie. “I know you share his dreams. But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? You saw something yesterday during that ceremony. While he saw the Esurhites breaking into Graymeer’s, you were seeing something, too.”
Maddie fixed her gaze on the road again, now a sandy track through thick patches of wind-stirred beach grass. Her heart beat rapidly as the sudden desire to spill it all welled up in her. She was so sick of bearing this alone, having no one to share her heartache with, no one to seek for counsel. Carissa had become a good friend these last six months, and Maddie knew her to be a devoted student of Eidon and his Words. Why not tell her? She’d already guessed the worst and hadn’t laughed. If nothing else, just hearing herself tell it would give Maddie new perspective.
She glanced over her shoulder. The men followed at a respectful distance but were still too close to risk speaking.
Coming over the second rise, they found the beach stretched out beside white ranks of breakers. Wreckage strewed the shore, remnants still floating in from the ferocious storm two weeks ago—bits of wooden planking, scraps of canvas and rope, lanterns, flags, what looked to be part of the ship’s hull, and possibly even a piece of mast—lay scattered up the sand before them, festooned with mounds and ribbons of seaweed. Out beyond the surf line, the great cloud of gulls soared and dipped in a great writhing mass that was focused on one spot in the water—apparently the birds were feeding on a school of fish that had risen to the surface.
As they rode down the rocky bluff to the beach, Maddie suggested they go beachcombing. When Carissa frowned at her, she smiled and glanced meaningfully at the men now clustering around them. “I love walking the beach barefoot—feeling the sand beneath my feet, the surf on my legs.”
Carissa regarded her for a long moment, her expression as inscrutable as any of Abramm’s. Then she, too, glanced back at the men and finally agreed.
They dismounted, stripped off shoes and stockings, and left their horses in the care of one of the men as they set off together, skirts tied up at their waists. As one of the men rode along the bluff to keep a watch, Hogart and another followed out of earshot behind them.
They walked silently for a bit, stopping to examine the shard of hull that jutted up out of the sand, picking up a few shells and a small carved box. Then, as they left the ship’s hull and started toward the mast, Maddie spoke: “I saw Abramm’s wedding.”
Carissa drew closer, watching her intently.
“It was held on the wallwalk at Graymeer’s.” She swallowed. “Except his bride wasn’t Briellen.” She stopped again, and Carissa guessed the rest:
“It was you.”
Maddie flushed and fixed her gaze on the sand before them as she nodded. “The dream I had the night before the coronation wasn’t the same as yours. Or his, I think.” She flushed again at the memory.
Again Carissa picked up the part she hadn’t shared: “So that’s why you turned so red when I mentioned it.”
Maddie turned her face to the sea, the wind blowing her hair back out of her eyes. “I know the rhu’ema did it—pulled out feelings I’d been denying, made them so vivid and strong I couldn’t ignore them. Or help him when they attacked. I understood all that soon enough. So when I had the vision, or whatever it was, I thought it was more of the same.”
“The Light was on you, Mad. It couldn’t have been rhu’ema.”
“No. But it could’ve been my own desires laid over what he was seeing. Anyway, after that I knew I had to leave. I told him so last night in the tea garden.” She snorted bitterly. “He lamented the loss of his prized researcher.”
“You probably shocked him silly and it was the only thing he could think to say,” Carissa said dryly. “You really have no idea how much he relies on you, do you? And I don’t mean for research.”
Maddie watched her fingers toy with the white shell she still held. Then she sighed. “I only know it seems like a death sentence never to be able to see him again. The only thing worse would be seeing him with my sister. . . .”
She fell silent, and they walked on, a particularly high wave washing around their calves, eating away the sand beneath their feet. Sea gulls flapped and squawked around them as they came even with the great feeding column out beyond the surf.
“I don’t think leaving’s the answer,” Carissa said presently.
Maddie sighed her frustration. “Maybe not. I was so sure it was the right thing to do when I told him, but then Leyton cornered me in my suite.” She paused, glanced aside at her friend. “You have to promise you’ll tell no one what I’m going to say next.”
Carissa promised.
Maddie turned her gaze forward again, toward the piece of topmast lying on the sand in a curl of canvas ahead of them. Three sea gulls stood perched upon it, pecking at seaweed. “He said things are much worse back home than he’s let on, and he thinks the regalia have special powers Abramm could use to defeat the Armies of the Black Moon. He wants me to stay and help figure out what they are and how to use them. And Abramm’s had me searching for information on the fortresses and the guardstars, and I’m just now starting to have some success, and . . . I don’t know what to do. On the one hand I want to leave, but on the other I think if I could help defe
at the southlanders I should put my personal feelings aside and stay.”
“I agree.”
“But if I stay, I’m afraid he’ll find out how I feel . . . and I can see no good coming of such a thing. Worse, I don’t know if I can bear to watch him marry my sister.”
“You don’t know it will happen that way.”
“How could it not?” Maddie looked at her soberly. “The only way to break the treaty now is if Bree were to die, and that would be hideous. Besides, your claims to the contrary, I don’t think Abramm has the slightest interest in me—at least, not like that. So the whole thing is ridiculous. Ridiculous I should feel like this and ridiculous that I should have to think of leaving at all. And yet . . .” She wrapped her hands about her chest. “I prayed all night . . . but nothing seems any clearer.”
A sea gull landed on the glistening beach ahead of them, a small red shell in its beak. It walked along before them, back and forth, studying them with its bright yellow eyes.
After a time Carissa sighed. “Well, if it’s not clear, it seems to me you must wait until it is. The only thing you know for sure is that there’s much of value to be discovered and you’ve been asked to help do so. That’s something you know you can do. So do it. One day at a time. Bury yourself in your books, and avoid him entirely if you have to.”
“Avoid him? How? I have to report whatever I find.”
“You write out your reports anyway. Just hire an assistant and let him deliver them.”
Ahead of them, the sea gull dropped its shell on the sand, bent its head to peck at it again, then ran on ahead of them, leaving its treasure behind. Maddie shook her head. “I’m not sure I can trust myself to stay away. Last night I nearly spilled it all to him. With no intent of doing so . . . yet there I was.” She stopped and closed her eyes. “I really think it would be better if I just left.”
“But if it’s Eidon’s intent that you stay . . .”
“How could it be? I’m in love with a man who’s essentially married.”
Another big wave flooded around them. Ribbons of seaweed tickled Maddie’s legs, then wrapped around them as the wave receded. She stepped free of them and walked on, noting that the gull’s bright red shell lay before her on the dark and shining sand. And now that she was closer, it did not look like a shell at all.
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