The Sword-Edged blonde elm-1

by Alex Bledsoe

  “At ease, sergeant,” I said. “I’m a civilian.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, and clasped his hands behind him in military at-ease. He was about as relaxed as the bars over the window.

  “Come in and close the door,” I said, and he did so, standing in front of it. I sat on the window ledge. “Your report was very thorough. I didn’t ask you here because I found any fault in it, I just wanted to walk through the scene with you. Does anything look like it’s different now?”

  He took a slow look around, moving his head from left to right. “The cauldron and brazier are gone. The linen on the crib’s been changed. The cushion on the rocker is different. And one of the pictograms is smeared.”

  I smiled. I’d deliberately smudged the corner of one drawing with my boot to see if he’d notice. “Damn,” I said softly, “why are you just a sergeant?”

  “I notice things,” he said flatly.

  I nodded. “Okay, help me out now. Where was the queen, exactly, when you came in?”

  He stepped forward and pointed. “Kneeling here, in the middle of the circle. She was facing the door. The cauldron was in front of her.”

  “And she was naked?”

  He actually blushed a little. “Yes, sir, she was.”

  “Where were her clothes?”

  “In a pile right there. As if she just undid them and let them fall.”

  “Including her shoes?”

  He squinted with thought. “Yes, sir, her shoes were under the pile.”

  I nodded. That was odd; a formal gown around your knees would make it hard to then step out of the kind of shoes a queen would wear. I hadn’t yet met her, but the Rhiannon I’d heard described seemed far more graceful than that. “What did she do the moment you opened the door?”

  “She looked up and gasped.”

  “In surprise?”

  “No, sir. More in satisfaction.” He took a deep breath and went “ Ahhhhh, ” imitating her response.

  “Did she protest the interruption?”

  “No, sir, she seemed intoxicated.”

  “How long did that last?”

  “Until the king arrived. Then she seemed to sober up.”

  “He does have that effect on people.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I walked around the circle. “Did you find the chalk she used to draw this?”

  “No, sir, we did not.”

  “How do you explain that?”

  “Two possible explanations, sir. One, she used all the chalk she had for the designs. Two, she threw the chalk out the window, and it shattered below. I found no fragments, but the courtyard has a lot of traffic. They could have been thoroughly crushed before I was able to search.”

  I nodded again and returned to the window. “Sergeant, is there anything, any detail, that was left out of your report? I know it might seem inconsequential, but you never know what might be crucial.”

  He stared straight ahead, resolutely formal. “I’m aware of that, sir. My report is as thorough as I can make it. I wrote down everything I observed. The questions you’ve asked me here are more matters of interpretation.”

  “True. And you’ve been invaluable, thank you.”

  “Will that be all, sir?”

  “Mostly. Except… do you think the queen did it?”

  “ ‘Think,’ sir? I’m a soldier. I don’t think.”

  “You must have an opinion.”

  “As do we all, along with a certain orifice.”

  Vogel clearly was not going to commit himself; perhaps he had done just that at some point in the past, which explained why he was still a mere sergeant. “Yes. Well. Thank you again. And please keep this conversation just between us for the time being.”

  “Of course, sir.” He bowed and left with the same precision he’d arrived.

  I looked down at the bloodstain on the stone. I knelt and ran my finger across it, then smelled my fingertips. It was blood, all right. Something had died in this room. But that was the only thing that might truly be what it seemed.

  Nursemaid Beth Maxwell was a cheery, round young woman who would no doubt make a good mother herself, should she ever run across a man whose tastes ran to acres of rolling white flesh. She wore a neat, spotless uniform and a little cap over her tight brown curls, and looked up at me with guileless eyes. Phil let me use his office for these interviews, which conveyed a lot more authority than I’d command on my own.

  “I appreciate you seein’ me on such short notice,” I said, exaggerating my country accent so she’d feel less threatened. “Just want to ask you a coupla things ’bout that night in the nursery.”

  She shuddered at the memory. “I’ll never forget a thing from that night.”

  “That’s what I’m hopin’. When the queen came in from the dinner party, did she seem upset or anything?”

  “No, just the opposite. She seemed almost silly. I assumed she’d overindulged a bit on wine during dinner, although that wasn’t like her, especially since Diri was born-that was our nickname for the prince, you know. The king called him P.D., but he was our little Diri.” She sniffled and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “But she certainly didn’t seem depressed.”

  “Did you say anything to her?”

  “Just reported that Diri had spent a quiet evening, and had only just begun to fuss because he was hungry.”

  “Fuss?”

  “Yes, you know how babies are.”

  “Not really.”

  “Oh. Well, their little tummies know when things are supposed to happen, and if they don’t get fed right on time, they let you know they’re not happy about it.”

  “So she was late, then?”

  She thought for a moment. “A bit, I guess. No more than a few minutes.”

  I thanked her and showed her out. I was starting to get an idea, but I tried not to dwell on it until I had more information. I wanted the theory to fit the facts, not the other way around. I made some quick notes and stared at the battle scene painted on the ceiling until the next timid knock on the door.

  The maid Sally Sween was way too pretty to work in a bachelor household. Had she been in service back when Phil and I were teenagers, I shudder to think of the lengths to which we’d have gone to win her favors. As it was, her exquisite face was puffy with fear-spawned tears, since being summoned to the king’s office was almost never a good thing.

  “Would you like a drink?” I asked. Her uniform worked hard to control her decolletage, which distracted me more than I wanted to admit. She shook her head. I poured myself one. She crossed enviable legs as she waited.

  Finally I said, “You stated that when you first checked on the queen and the baby, she was asleep in the rocking chair, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Was the baby asleep?”

  She blinked. “Well… I assume so. He wasn’t crying or anything.”

  I nodded. “Now I need you to think real hard on this one. Did you actually see the baby in the queen’s arms?”

  She thought so hard I was afraid her eyes would pop from her face. “She had a bundle in her arms that I thought was her son, but… I can’t swear to actually seeing him. Is that important?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. But inside I felt another click as more things aligned.

  I kept my gaze as even as I could. What I’d asked was horrendous even to me, but I couldn’t let Phil know that, or I knew he’d talk me out of it. He stared at me over his desk, speechless.

  Wentrobe finally spoke. “Baron LaCrosse, are you sure that’s needed?”

  The use of the title made me grit my teeth. “Pretty sure,” I said, although I kept my eyes on Phil.

  “Well, I don’t know if I can condone this,” Wentrobe said. “It’s… it’s sacrilegious.”

  “It’s necessary,” I said. “I just need one workman to help me. No one else has to know.”

  Phil looked down for a minute. “Okay,” he said at last. “I did ask for your help, so I have
to let you do your job.” Then he looked up and added, “But no workman. You and I’ll do it.”

  Wentrobe looked stricken. “Your Majesty, I don’t think-”

  “No one is going to desecrate my son’s tomb,” he snapped. “If I do it, then I know it’ll be done with respect.” He stood up and took a deep breath. “Exactly what do you think you’ll find?”

  “The last piece of the frame,” I said. I didn’t want to give him my entire theory just yet. “Then maybe I can see the whole picture.”

  EIGHT

  The tombs for Arentia’s royal family were in a crypt deep beneath the castle. We waited until night to make our descent, when theoretically no one would notice that the king was up to anything so screwy. The air grew cooler and damper as we wound our way down the spiral stone steps, and my nascent discomfort at closed spaces began to flare. Despite the chill air, I was sweating like a pig.

  Phil noticed and grinned at me. “Not scared of the dark, are you?” he teased, using any excuse to avoid expressing the feelings I knew churned within him.

  “No, scared this half-assed castle might fall on my head,” I said. “Some kings build brand new ones, you know.”

  “Hey, remember when you snuck down here thinking Tasha Ghent was waiting for you?”

  “Oh, yeah, I remember. I still owe you for that one.” Phil had told me Tasha, a buxom young brunette who worked in the kingdom’s taxation office, had developed a crush on me even though I was six years younger. I received a note telling me she’d wait for me in the catacombs, along with a map showing me exactly where. At the time, my little head exerted more influence than my big one, so I followed the map and ended up in a disused, dead-end corridor; when I tried to backtrack my way out, I discovered that Phil had blocked me in with a fake wall. I didn’t know it was fake, of course, and to this day I swear I got my first gray hair screaming like a girl until he let me out.

  We reached the final door. It was a huge iron-barred affair, ten feet high and locked at the center. Beyond it, our torches illuminated the first of many rows of sealed royal crypts.

  Phil slipped the key into the lock, but paused a minute before he turned it. “You have any kids, Eddie?” he asked softly.

  “No.”

  “It changes the way you look at things. You completely stop living for yourself; you live for them.” He took a deep breath. “I can’t tell this to anybody else. I don’t know how to be a father who’s outlived his son. Not like this.”

  “I wish I could help,” I mumbled. I didn’t want to let on what I suspected; even though it might have eased his mind a bit for the moment, it would be even worse if I turned out to be wrong.

  “I completely trusted my wife,” he continued. “With everything-state secrets, personal secrets, even things I’ve never told anyone else. She was the mother of my child. If I could be that wrong about her… how can I ever trust my judgment again? How can I expect anyone else to trust it?”

  “Things aren’t always what they seem,” I said as reassuringly as I dared. “C’mon, let’s go do this and then we can go get drunk.”

  The gate creaked the way a mausoleum door should. I followed him past the bones of his ancestors, until we reached the most recent additions. He stopped before one whose capstone was still white with its newness. It bore his son’s name, and the beginning and end dates of a criminally short life. We placed our torches in holders on the wall behind us.

  I opened the canvas bag and pulled out a hammer and chisel. Phil ran his finger down the line of fresh cement that sealed the tomb.

  “Really have to do this?” he asked one last time.

  “Really do.”

  “I’m sorry, P.D.,” he said softly, and stepped back.

  Removing the seal was a one-person job, so I didn’t begrudge Phil not helping. It took awhile to chip the cement away; it was still fresh and solid, unlike the crumbly stuff around older tombs. By the time I finished, my shoulders were in knots and I was drenched with sweat.

  I dropped the tools back in the bag and pulled out two crowbars. We wedged them on either side of the stone and, accompanied by a great grinding sound, pulled it out and carefully lowered it to the floor.

  Phil drew out the heartbreakingly tiny coffin. He placed it on the floor, took a deep breath and then lifted the lid. I leaned down to examine the contents.

  I knew within moments that I’d been right. “I’ve got good news and bad news,” I said as I scrutinized the scattered, fleshless bones retrieved from the cauldron. “The good news is, this ain’t your boy.”

  Instantly Phil was on his knees next to me. “What are you talking about?” he demanded.

  I picked up one of the skeletal arms, intact from the elbow down. “Look at the hand bones. Baby bones are short and round, because they’re not fully formed yet. These are the finger bones of an adult. But here’s the clincher.” I picked up the skull, which was conveniently missing its lower jaw. “Look. Somebody was in a hurry, and they got a little sloppy. That look like a baby tooth to you?” I pointed at the single molar at the back of the jaw that had been missed when the gum was altered to look more infant-like.

  “What is this?” Phil whispered, astounded.

  “It might be a dwarf, but I’m betting it’s a monkey. Changed around a little so it would pass the kind of inspection it would get in a crisis. It wouldn’t occur to anyone that these bones wouldn’t be your son, especially since he was gone.” I dropped the skull into the coffin, where it landed with a dry clatter.

  Phil sat heavily against the wall. “My God. I don’t understand all this…”

  I scooted the coffin aside and sat beside him. “It’s a setup. I suspected it when I realized how long it took your wife to get from the banquet to the nursery; no way it should take thirty minutes. Something happened to her.”

  “But… what? And why?”

  “Only she can answer that.”

  He turned to me. “If this counts as good news, what’s the bad?”

  “The bad news is that someone wanted it to look like your wife killed your son so badly that they’d go to all this trouble. They were able to get into and out of this castle with no one noticing it. Even if he’s not dead, your boy’s still gone. Somewhere out there, you’ve got one hell of an enemy.”

  “ Who? Arentia hasn’t been at war for nearly fifty years. The crime rate’s lower than it ever has been. We don’t even have a death penalty anymore. And I don’t mean to sound egomaniacal, but everybody seems pretty happy with the job I’ve been doing.”

  “Maybe it’s not you, then. Maybe it’s her.”

  He nodded; I’d expected him to resist the idea. “That’s the only possible explanation. Like you said, that’s the picture inside the frame.”

  We replaced the coffin and the cover, then resealed it with some cement from my bag. I stood and stretched my back, then put my hand on the wall for balance while I pulled on my hamstring. My eyes fell on the name chiseled into the capstone next to Pridiri’s, and suddenly a razor sliced out my heart. “Shit,” I whispered.

  Phil turned. “What? Oh… damn, Eddie, I’m sorry. I didn’t think about it. I was so far into my own problems, I didn’t-”

  “It’s all right.” I turned away, shaking like I’d been drunk for weeks, and seriously considered smashing my head into the other wall just to banish the unbidden images of her laugh, her touch and, worst of all, her screams.

  Phil didn’t say anything for a long moment. Finally he said, “It’s weird to think she’d be thirty-five now.”

  “Yeah.” He was her brother, after all, he had the right to talk about her.

  He put a strong hand on my shoulder. It reminded me of the way my dad’s hand had felt there. “If you need to-”

  I cut him off. “Can we go now? I need to talk to your wife.”

  He tilted his head back against the wall and let out a long breath. “Okay, but… I don’t know how much help she’ll be.”

  “Why not?”

 
; “There’s something about her that isn’t widely known.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She doesn’t- claims she doesn’t-remember anything from before the day we met.”

  NINE

  Getting discreetly into the prison tower took some finesse. I had to dress as a guard and go through the motions with the shift change; hopefully no one watching noticed the second shift had six men instead of the usual five. Once inside and divested of my helmet and armor, I was led up the stairs and frisked very thoroughly by the matron entrusted with the imprisoned queen’s care. Since she outweighed me by a good thirty pounds, I didn’t complain.

  Then she snapped out the rules. “Sit in the chair by the door and keep its back against the wall. Don’t pass anything to the prisoner or accept anything from her. If she reaches through the bars for any reason, pull the cord by the chair. It drops an iron barrier between you and her. If you violate any of these rules, you’ll be arrested.” Despite my friendship with Phil, I had no doubt she meant it.

  Finally, weapon-bare and winded from the climb, I was let into the cell that took up the entire top of the tower. The visitor’s area was a narrow section blocked off by bars. On the other side of them, staring out the window, stood Queen Rhiannon of Arentia.

  She wore a prison tunic that was too big for her and didn’t do a damn thing to make her unattractive. Her golden hair was tied back in a ponytail, and of course she wore no make-up. Three small, shimmery birds sat on the sill as if they expected her to feed them.

  She had her back to me when I entered, then turned and gazed at me with calm eyes so blue it was like looking directly into the sea. And it was a look I knew.

  I just stared. If she’d had two heads and bat wings, I don’t think I could’ve been more surprised. The door slammed shut behind me, and the noise snapped me out of my moment of shock. The shiny birds, startled, flew away. “ Eppie,” I said, my voice flat with shock.