The Forgotten Sisters
Page 15
Felissa had stopped and was doubled over, clutching at her middle.
“Are you sick?” Miri asked. “What’s the matter?”
Felissa did not answer, her breathing tight.
Sus looked down the hall. “Someone is sad …”
Felissa covered her face with her hands and wept. The emotion must have been very intense, so much so that even Miri could detect it.
“Sus, stay with Felissa,” said Miri.
Miri jogged ahead to see what Astrid had found in the next room.
Queen Sabet was standing in front of a chair, as if the sight of Astrid had brought her to her feet. She clutched her hands. Her mouth was open, her eyes wide, almost terrified. Again Miri detected a faint wave of sorrow rolling away from the queen.
“Your Majesty?” Miri said, but the queen did not tear her eyes away from Astrid. “It’s me, Miri. You remember? Miri of Mount Eskel? We’ve just come from Lesser Alva. I’ve brought the king’s cousins. Where is everyone?”
The queen still took no notice of Miri.
“Your … name?” the queen asked.
Astrid spoke her name like a question, her eyes narrowing.
“Astrid,” said the queen, nodding. “You look … you look healthy. Are you healthy?”
Healthy? Had Queen Sabet’s mind cracked under the pressure of the besieged palace? Miri took the queen’s arm, speaking her name till she finally broke eye contact with Astrid.
“Queen Sabet, we sneaked into the palace. If we can manage it, then so can the Storans. Where’s the king? And Britta and Steffan? We need to get his cousins to safety and make a plan—”
“Cousins?” the queen said. Her gaze returned to Astrid. She blinked. A tear shook from her eyelashes and dropped to her cheek, but she did not seem to notice. “Astrid. You look healthy. And beautiful. So beautiful.”
Miri choked. Like Miri’s, Astrid’s hair was wild and her dress torn and filthy from their swim and escape.
“I know who you are,” Astrid said.
“Yes, this is Queen Sabet,” said Miri. “We should—”
“The painting,” Astrid said, her eyes still on the queen. “Before the heat ruined it. That was your face. Why did we have a painting of your face?”
“I thought—” The queen shrugged, a motion as pathetic as the limp of a shot deer. “I hoped that … I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
She turned as if she would walk away.
“No,” Astrid said. A command. And the queen stopped, her back still turned. Astrid’s voice hardened. “I know who you are.”
The queen nodded. “I don’t feel hatred yet from you. But I know it’s coming. And I can’t bear—”
“You threw us away—”
“No, please,” the queen turned back.
“You never—”
“I had to pretend to myself that you didn’t exist,” the queen said with a painfully sad shrug again. “My heart tore in half when I let them take you away. And the half I kept never stopped hurting. But I pretended that was normal. I told myself everyone lives with a throbbing scrap of a heart. Don’t they? Do you? But I hope you don’t. I hope—”
“You could have visited.”
The queen nodded, almost eager. “I did at first. When you were little. You seemed happy. Carefree out there with Elin and the wide world to run in. But I was a stranger to you, and it hurt me so much … I stopped coming.”
“That was selfish of you.”
“Was it?” Queen Sabet asked with absolute sincerity. “But why would you want me? A woman who bears a perfect, perfect little baby and wants her and kisses her head, but lets a chief delegate pull her from her arms and just take her away? What daughter would willingly claim such a … such a thing as a mother?”
Miri sat down without meaning to. Her head felt light and the room was wobbling. She suspected she had not taken a decent breath in a couple of minutes. Everything seemed tilted and wrong, as if the ceiling had suddenly become the floor.
“Did she love you?” the queen was asking Astrid, her eyes yearning. “Did Elin love you as a mother would?”
Astrid flinched.
“She was a good servant to me,” the queen went on. “And she loved babies so. I believed she would love you. Did she?”
Astrid squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them again, she was all cool indifference. “You had years to ask that question, but this is the first time you bothered.”
“I asked it.” The queen’s voice was barely a whisper. “I asked it every day. Just not out loud.”
Miri could not seem to stop shaking her head, as if it would force her thoughts to work. She concentrated on breathing.
“I don’t expect you to forgive me,” the queen was saying. “I deserve contempt and hatred. I hate myself. From the moment I let them take you, my arms have felt empty. I have been holding emptiness for so many years.” Her arms hung at her sides, and she tried to lift them as if she could barely remember the purpose for such limbs.
Astrid looked at the queen for several moments before she said, “Yes. Ma loved us. And we loved her.”
“I’m so glad,” said the queen. She covered her face with her empty hands and cried.
Astrid watched her cry. Surely she must be feeling the same sorrow that had knocked Felissa to her knees and that even Miri could sense in curdling waves, but Astrid just stood like a stone column.
“I was afraid … to love Steffan,” said Queen Sabet through sobs. “To hold him. If they could take away my baby girl, just take her, then they could take my son too. I don’t know. How could I bear anything? I don’t know, I don’t know …”
“Stop thinking about yourself,” Astrid said. “Stop it!”
The queen choked, trying to control her crying. She held out her hands. “What do you want me to do? What can I do? I can’t undo anything … I hoped that Miri—she’s like a candle that never burns down—and I imagined … I could imagine her out there with you, bringing you life. And she has a gift, you see, she makes things better, and—I didn’t know how—but I hoped she could, she would make things better, and I …”
Her eyes lit up as if with a wonderful thought. She rushed over to a window. “Look! When I was pregnant with you, I had these window seats made. I thought, well, perhaps my child must grow up in a sprawling, unfriendly palace, but at least she’ll have window seats to curl up in and watch the rain outside. A place to read a book or just be alone if you liked. See? I added cushions. I picked the yellow myself—it’s such a happy color. You could come sit here any time you like. It would … it would make me happy to see you here. I know that’s not … there’s nothing that I could … I wish sometimes Bjorn had warned me when I was making these cushions. He didn’t tell me at the time that … that I couldn’t keep you. If you were a girl. Not until after you were born. He didn’t want worry to harm my pregnancy … but of course you weren’t the only … he couldn’t save me from worry for long … I couldn’t save you … and I’ve never sat in these window seats, never once—”
The queen gasped, her eyes wide. She began shivering, as if fighting sobs that were pushing back, threatening to overtake her. Miri turned to see what she was looking at.
Felissa and Sus had come in from the corridor and stood now in the threshold, holding each other’s hands.
“All three of you?” The queen’s voice was a squeak. “You look … healthy. I … I … I’m so …”
Felissa let go of Sus and walked steadily forward. She lifted her arms and put them around the queen.
The touch seemed to be more than the queen could bear. She sank to her knees, collapsing into violent sobs. Felissa sat on the window seat, the queen’s head on her lap, and leaned over her, rubbing her back, shushing her as if soothing a child.
Astrid and Sus watched.
“But … what about Ma?” Sus said to Astrid.
“Elin,” Astrid replied in a harsh whisper. “She was Elin.”
“She was Ma,” Sus insisted.
Miri …
Not Peder. A sense of Katar in that familiar vibration behind her eyes, and a memory: Miri and Katar in the king’s advising chamber.
The confusion and sadness twisted together inside Miri, snapping at her heart, and as she took a deep breath, something that had been stopped up suddenly released. Rage flooded her limbs.
She ran down the hall, opening the door with her shoulder, letting it slam against the wall. King Bjorn sat at the head of a round table with the chief delegate and several other delegates and advisers. Katar stood with a handful of commoner delegates to the side of the room.
“Miri!” Katar said. “You’re—”
“It was Queen Katarina, wasn’t it?” Miri shouted to the room. “King Klas’s twin, who claimed the throne and started the civil war. Queen Katarina put the fear in you—ugly, blind fear that brought you to this.” She glared at King Bjorn. “How could you? How can you?”
The king flinched.
“You are not privy to the particulars,” said the chief delegate, rubbing his chin as if making sure his tiny beard stayed oiled to a point. “You are in no position to—”
“She wanted her babies, but you forced her to give them away,” Miri interrupted. “Shame on you. SHAME ON YOU!”
Her voice was not loud enough to please her. She picked up an empty vase and flung it at the wall, shattering the glass.
The king did not even flinch. His head bowed, and he mumbled down into his beard. “A girl child was born first—”
“Your Highness!” the chief delegate shouted. Clearly the fact that Astrid was older than Steffan was a secret he’d meant to keep.
The king looked too tired to care as he went on. “Since Katarina, only a man can rule. We couldn’t allow the chance that the girl would one day challenge her brother for the throne. We couldn’t risk another civil war. The kingdom needs stability.”
“The kingdom is people, Your Highness. People like a baby girl and people like her mother and people like me. And you. And your ridiculous crew of advisers. You don’t even make sense! Queens since Katarina have raised girls in this palace who managed not to start bloody wars—oh! Astrid and Steffan are twins, aren’t they?”
No one answered.
“And a girl twin was so frightening that she had to be cast far away and her younger sisters too for good measure? The princesses. They are the princesses. I probably should have guessed months ago, but I never knew that people such as you truly existed, like the horrid villains in old tales, willing to destroy whatever they—”
“Enough,” said the chief delegate. “We have more important matters—”
“Are you so afraid of a baby girl?” Miri said, leaning toward him across the table. “How about me? Do I terrify you too? Watch out, I wear a dress and don’t grow a beard, and if you don’t keep me in check, I’ll steal all your power!”
One of the ministers laughed. Others glared at him.
“Sorry,” he said, pressing the smile out of his mouth. “It’s kind of funny when you think about it.”
“Leave,” said the chief delegate.
Miri straightened. “You are afraid of me.”
The chief delegate grabbed Miri by her wrist and twisted his hand. “You think we have time to indulge your little tantrum? By the creator god, this palace is under siege! If you won’t leave, I’ll throw you out.”
His hand against her wrist seemed to burn, that pressure spreading through her, anger boiling. She pressed her feet against the linder floor and let out a silent quarry-shout: No!
The ground beneath them vibrated. The chief delegate took a step back but did not let go.
Miri could shout again, her quarry-speech ripping through the linder stone, up the wall, cracking the stones in the ceiling, pulling them down over his head. Crushing him beneath the weight of a palace once cut from Mount Eskel.
She’d done that before. Confronted with an assassin who had shot Peder, who tried to kill Britta, Miri’s quarry-shout had shaken loose the very stones holding up the palace. At the time, she had not known what would happen, only that she needed to stop him. And she had.
This time, she knew. She would be choosing to crush this man to death. She wanted to do it, and the want made her afraid.
“Miri … ,” Katar said with warning.
Miri gritted her teeth and said as calmly as she could, “Let go of me.”
“Leave her alone,” the king said wearily. “I rather think this is something worth shouting about.”
The chief delegate’s grip squeezed momentarily harder before he released her.
“The queen has met them,” Miri said, rubbing her wrist.
“Met whom?” the king asked, but he straightened in his chair, his eyes wide with comprehension.
“They’re here,” said Miri. “And she’s … she’s weeping like she’ll fall apart. Maybe Danland deserves to be torn to pieces by Stora, I don’t know. But I do know that even ill and dying, my mother wouldn’t have let you take me. And that’s the kind of person I want to be, the one who’s holding on, fierce, fighting for life. You ripped out your own hearts the first time you stole a baby from her weeping mother’s arms. You’ve been living heartless ever since. I should have noticed before. I don’t know how any of you are still left breathing.”
Miri left and slammed the door behind her. Maybe they’d throw her in a dungeon for a tirade like that. Just then she did not care.
When the door opened, only Katar came out into the hall.
“Are they throwing me in the dungeon?” Miri asked, pacing, the fire in her burning too hot to stand still.
Katar shrugged. She folded her arms, the usual light in her eyes dim.
“My ma died having me too,” she said. “But I don’t know if she wanted me or not. My pa never said anything.”
“I bet she did,” said Miri. “And what if the chief delegate came and took you out of her arms?”
Katar was not listening. “A ma would have been a nice thing to have. Or any parent who loves you something fierce. But that idea always seemed like true love or magic fish—something caught only in tales.” Katar was facing the wall, staring at a painting. “I figured out who the princesses were, not till after you left for Lesser Alva. Once I realized I wrote to you, but I didn’t yell at anyone. I just thought, well, that’s how things go, don’t they?”
“But they shouldn’t.”
“I don’t know, Miri. Maybe the princesses were better off in Lesser Alva with a woman they thought was their mother, if she loved them.”
“Maybe they were,” said Miri. She was still trembling, her body tight, as if retching against the injustice of it all, but she stopped pacing and joined Katar to see what she was staring at.
A painting of a red-haired woman in a heavy gold collar and green brocade gown.
“Queen Radisha,” said Katar. “She was always my favorite because we have the same color hair. She was luckier than Queen Sabet. Radisha only bore sons.”
Or so the history books record, Miri thought. But the linder house in the swamp carried the memory of twin girls with the same red hair and intense eyes. She shivered. Radisha had married King Klas’s son. She would have been the first queen after the civil war. If she birthed daughters—twins even—the reminder of Katarina would have still been fresh. Likely it’d been for her daughters that a chief delegate first ordered a linder house built in Lesser Alva.
“You know, I thought you were here when you weren’t,” Katar said suddenly.
“What?”
“This winter,” said Katar. “Twice I heard you quarry-speak to me. The first time I decided it had been a daydream. The second time was harder to dismiss. It was as if you were quarry-speaking, ‘Hello!’ Or at least, the memory it nudged in me was the time we returned from the princess ac
ademy and ran into the village and everyone came out running and shouting. It made me certain you were all right, even when we hadn’t received letters from you for ages.”
“But I only arrived in Asland yesterday,” said Miri, “and entered the palace early this morning.”
“I know. It was silly, never mind,” said Katar. “I’ll go find Britta. She’ll want to see you.”
Katar left. Miri turned back the other way and nearly ran into the queen. Again Miri sensed that faint sorrow, heaving and giddy like a memory of seasickness.
The queen was nearly void of expression. “I don’t blame you,” the queen said.
“For what?”
“For hating me. I’ve hated myself for a long time.”
Did she hate the queen? Anger and sorrow beat at each other inside Miri till her heart felt bruised. She had to clench her fists to keep from shouting again.
“I know they’re a bunch of bullies and ignorant tyrants,” said Miri, “but couldn’t you have stopped them? If you wanted your daughters, couldn’t you have just refused to give them up? And then you stayed away. You stopped caring.”
The queen shook her head. “Numbness comes after caring too much.”
Miri’s voice softened to a hush. “You said I make things better. How am I supposed to fix this?”
“You can’t.”
The queen continued down the hall, running her hand against the stones as if fearing she would fall over.
Miri leaned against the wall herself and shut her eyes. It took effort to slow the angry beats of her heart and remember how to listen to the linder. She exhaled the struggle and allowed herself to open and flow into the images. So few people had lived in the little linder house, but the palace stone was crowded with memories. Guards and servants and people hurrying, up and down the corridors, up and down. Like a gray shadow in the midst of it all, year after year an image of the queen walked, shimmering in solitude, slow with pain.
Chapter Twenty-two
A castle of defense, a bastion of might
A fort where the wise teach the young to fight
An armory of weapons, sharp as hooks