Love and Sacrifice: Book Two of the Prophecy Series

by Tove Foss Ford

“If I did, she could send for more and she would. She’s the Queen, my darling. I can’t tell her what to do. Sometimes I manage to convince her of something for her own good. Because she loves me, she’ll do it, but I can’t move her on the drinking. She says it’s just a little to calm her nerves – and then she finishes off a bottle of wine before bedtime. I can’t even get her to paint or play the spinet any more. She’s gotten on a hobby horse of building a new suite up in the Tower and since it’s the only thing she shows interest in, I encourage it. Anything she shows interest in…”

  Eiren, hearing the frustration and pain in his voice, put her arms around his neck and kissed him.

  “Now, I have myself collected, so let’s go in,” she said firmly, smiling up at him. Then she rubbed a hand over his short-cropped hair. “Mister Bristles,” she teased, making him smile broadly for the first time in a long while.

  ***

  Darling,

  I’m back home and in one piece. The Rollig device is being set up as I write. Haakel is beside himself, as you can well imagine. Keeps trying to send messages even though it isn’t entirely installed. He’s driving the poor military fellows mad. Kaymar is here and he’s wild to have a go at it as well. I just stay away and enjoy listening to the arguments and general rumpussing.

  It was so wonderful to be with you, to sleep with you all night and wake up with you in the morning. You are right. For as long as it’s possible, I am coming to Erdahn for at least a week per month, possibly more. It was also good to see how Katrin perked up a bit with me there and didn’t drink much. We can see if having me around helps her, and adjust schedules accordingly. Like you, I’m willing to do anything if it would help her, even if it means dancing around naked as a newborn babe while painted green.

  Mama weathered my absence well and is enthusiastic about me going again. She feels a great deal of guilt about us being separated. Thankfully she still continues comfortable.

  There is great shouting down the hall, I think the Rollig might just be fixed up. I shall saunter down and see.

  It is! Instant communication! Haakel is being very stern about it being used only for official purposes, during which lecture Kaymar went behind his back and tapped out a love note to Ifor, which will doubtless amaze some poor person receiving it there at the Palace. I could tell it was rather naughty from his expression. A very interesting initial communication from The Shadows!

  I shall close now, and see if there is a way I can send you a kiss by the wire!

  Your loving Eiren

  TO: MENDERS

  FROM: MISTRESS MENDERS

  KISS!

  TO: MISTRESS MENDERS

  FROM: MENDERS

  THREE KISSES. FIVE HUGS. I WILL BE THERE DAY AFTER TOMORROW TO RECEIVE KISS IN PERSON. DANCING NAKED AS NEWBORN BABE PAINTED GREEN REQUESTED. LOVE LOVE LOVE!

  TO: MENDERS

  FROM: HAAKEL

  UNAUTHORISED USE OF ROLLIG IS PUNISHABLE BY FINE. KINDLY RESERVE ROLLIG COMMUNICATION FOR OFFICIAL BUSINESS. THANK YOU.

  TO: HAAKEL

  FROM: YOUR SUPERIOR OFFICER

  SHUT UP YOU OLD GRANNY.

  ***

  Katrin took a long look around the new suite she’d had built in the Tower. Since she’d become Queen, she, Menders and Hemmett had made do with a temporary refurbishment of the suite she’d been assigned by Aidelia. She’d wanted something permanent, something of her own, a sanctuary that no other Queen of Mordania had lived in. Something like The Shadows, restful and pleasant in the Samorsan style she’d fallen in love with when she’d toured the Middle Continent.

  The Palace itself was incredibly outmoded, drafty, parts of it ancient. There was no indoor plumbing. Katrin, after years of living with no indoor plumbing at The Shadows until Menders had it modernized, was one of Eirdon’s greatest proponents of the flush water closet. When she’d found some of the rooms on the upper floors of the Palace actually had drop privies, she’d nearly fainted. She insisted that the new suite be modern, with the help of a water tank on the roof. It rained very frequently in Erdahn, so keeping a supply of fresh water was not difficult.

  The Palace was made largely of stone and had never been intended for comfort. The walls were sixteen feet thick, making it cavelike in many places. There was little natural light and it felt dank and cold at the best of times. The furniture was minimal and what there was seemed to be extremely antique or made of stone.

  Upon becoming Queen, Katrin insisted the Palace be completely cleaned and aired, particularly the quarters Aidelia had used, which she had ordered cleared and scrubbed. She would never be able to bear to live in them, Royal Suite or no. That’s when she gave orders that a new suite would be built.

  Now the suite was finished, with quarters for Menders and Hemmett as well as for herself, with additional rooms for guests. It accessed the roof of the Tower, where a garden would be laid out. The ocean shore could be reached by a private hidden staircase. The rooms were large, modern and comfortable and were easy to heat with stoves and efficient fireplaces. Katrin had decorated her rooms with beautiful silken fabric from Surelia, draping off the private part of her bedroom with an exquisite curtain. This was to prevent interruptions on the part of the Palace staff at the times when she was not wearing her vampire Queen guise.

  Katrin had found the traditional appearance of the Queen of Mordania a useful thing. The costume fed the rumors that the Queen was a two-hundred-year-old vampire, thanks to the teeth and the fact that all Queens within living memory had presented the same face to the world, always using the same name, Morghenna. Her appearance kept the Palace staff and the Council at a distance.

  At this point, Katrin didn’t care much about matters of policy. She’d struggled for over two years to make headway with the Council members. Essentially, the Council did as the Council wanted to do and even if they told her one thing when she signed a document and then did exactly the opposite, they seemed to have no fear of her. Menders told her this constituted treason and that she would be within the law to have those who deceived her summarily executed, but Katrin did not want any more deaths on her hands. She gave up and decided the Council could be buggered.

  She went through the motions of attending meetings – sometimes. Other times, she signed what they sent her and didn’t bother to get into the heavy dress and clip the disgusting teeth into her mouth. It didn’t make a difference. She’d found when she refused to sign something, her signature turned up on it anyway. She left the day to day running of the staff and the Council to Menders, who excelled at it. It kept him busy and it kept him from nagging at her.

  She was tired of being chastised for having a drink to calm her nerves. Menders kept after her about it for months before she finally told him to leave her alone.

  “Who cares?” she asked him. “It isn’t as if I have to go and do anything, so why can’t I have a drink of an evening?”

  “Because drinking a bottle or two of wine every night is not having a drink of an evening,” Menders countered.

  “Leave me alone about it,” Katrin answered. That was the end of it. She was twenty-seven now and certainly didn’t need to be told what to do. It was bad enough there was no way out of being Queen without endangering Tharak Karak and the Thrun. If she had to be Queen, at least she could have a few drinks once in a while to ease the tedium.

  The first two years had been worst. There had been endless fights with Menders, the Council, Kaymar, sometimes even Hemmett. To her relief, Kaymar had gone hareing off on a bunch of missions for Menders, taking Ifor with him. That had eased things considerably. Hemmett gave up early and readjusted to the way life was now. He went to see Luntigré and Flori regularly.

  Menders had held on the longest and said the sharpest things. He tried to force her into regular risings and bedtimes, as if she was a child. He also tried to keep her from having wine with dinner and he’d thrown a fit when she’d tried some Samorsan black hargweed, which she’d read about and sent for.

  “It helps
me feel calm!” she’d snapped when Menders caught her with a pipeful. “Maybe you should try it.”

  “I’ve never needed anything to calm me. I’m capable of self-discipline,” Menders snapped in return.

  “Try being Queen for a few days,” she’d returned.

  “As if you do anything? Who do you think is having to be Queen?” Menders shot back. Then he saw that he’d hurt her and regret showed in his face.

  “Princess – my little princess, you can be any kind of Queen you want,” he’d said, sitting opposite her, his nose pinched in distaste at the smell of the hargweed. “You don’t have to stay in the Palace. You can rule from anywhere, from The Shadows if you want. You could go to the old Winter Palace in Erdstrom, or build a Palace elsewhere. I can’t believe it’s good for you to be here. You don’t exercise. You don’t seem happy. Poor Taffy is getting absolutely fat, and I can’t give her enough exercise. Why don’t you try riding again?”

  “Who cares? If I wanted to go riding, I would,” Katrin answered.

  “What about Taffy?” Menders asked in astonishment. “She needs your care.”

  “Sell her. I don’t give a damn,” Katrin returned levelly.

  Menders looked stunned, got up and went away, which was what Katrin had wanted.

  Now he seldom protested, though he wouldn’t bring her any wine and certainly would never have so much as handed her the pouch of hargweed. That wasn’t a problem, because the Palace had plenty of staff who would bring wine up. She could manage the hargweed herself.

  Katrin moved into the suite and spent most of her time there. She and Menders came to a sort of truce. She managed not to blame him openly for her predicament and he didn’t nag at her about her habits. If she told him to drop a subject, he did. He no longer chivvied and nagged her if she decided to stay in bed all day. After all, what difference did it make if she didn’t get up? He no longer nagged her to read over the documents sent up by the Council before signing them. He spent a lot of time with the Menders’ Men who were posted at the Palace, doing gods knew what – as if it mattered.

  A lot of the time, Katrin felt as if she lived inside a glass room. She could see everyone else going around, enjoying themselves and living full lives, while she was muted and at a distance. Things didn’t upset her or sadden her any more – they didn’t make her happy either. It was a bit like being underwater. That had its advantages, because she was free of the extremes of sadness and fear that had plagued the first two years of her reign. Being numb was nice, in a way.

  And after all, who cared? She certainly didn’t.

  The Shadows, Mordania

  The Palace, Erdahn, Mordania

  7

  Descent

  E

  iren opened a drawer of Menders’ desk at The Shadows, in search of a pamphlet, and saw the pistol.

  She had seen it hundreds of times of course. It had been there since Katrin and Hemmett were old enough to be trusted not to take it out and play with it. Menders always had plenty of weaponry on his person, so this pistol was strictly backup, but it was loaded and ready to fire.

  It beckoned to her.

  Her mother was suffering horribly. Ramplane couldn’t help much now, unless it was given in near-lethal quantities. The pain was always there and the most her mother could manage in the way of sleep was a near-stupor, induced by ramplane. The rest of the time she tossed, chewed what remained of her lips, moaned, screamed and writhed.

  She was unrecognizable, her hair gone, her lips largely chewed away, her face like a skull. Her abdomen was bloated by the rot slowly eating her internal organs. Her skin was yellow and spotted with dark lesions. She could not eat, could barely drink and her body reeked between her loss of bowel and bladder control and the stench of the illness itself.

  She barely registered the presence of anyone at her bedside. If she did, she continually begged them to help her. Franz was keeping her dosed into a near coma most of the time, and said there was no way to predict how much longer this could go on, as her body was remarkably strong.

  Worst yet, the rot had reached Marjana Spaltz’s brain and she was now mad. She said terrible things during her lucid spells, things Eiren knew were not true. Nonetheless, it hurt to be cursed or vilified by the mother she was giving up so much to nurse and care for.

  Marjana’s madness completely demoralized Eiren’s father, who had been a rock until the first time his wife hissed that she hated him and always had. He’d shrunk back in horror and had been a shell of himself ever since, despite Franz’s reassurances that the desperately ill woman did not mean what she said and wasn’t even aware of what she was saying.

  Marjana’s illness was rapidly eating away a lifetime of happy memories just as it was eating away at her body. Eiren was terrified that if it went on much longer, she would have no recollection of her loving and happy mother and all the years they had spent together in harmony.

  Now the pistol was there, under her hand.

  I could end this all now, Eiren thought. I could put pillows around her head to muffle the shot and hold in any blood or brains. She would never know I’d done it. I could burn the bloody pillows and put a nightcap on her to cover the bullet hole. It would release her. It would release all of us. She would be out of pain. Papa would be free of seeing her turning into this hateful demon who accuses him of things he would never have thought of.

  Why aren’t you here, Menders, she fumed waspishly. Why is your gun here when you aren’t? Why are you so determined to stay with Katrin when it’s obvious she’s never going to do anything, that she’s determined to be as ineffectual as her mother was? Why must I always come second to someone set on destroying herself? I don’t care what you swore when you were no more than a boy. I need you here. My mother is rotting away and I’m all alone and I’m calmly thinking about shooting her to end it all. Why aren’t you here?

  “Come, my dear, I think you need to sit down,” Franz said quietly. Eiren started. She’d never heard him come in, but there he was, right in front of her. “Let’s close that drawer now. We’ll go to my office and have a cup of coffee and a talk.” He reached over the desk top and closed the drawer, then took her hand and drew her around the desk, out of Menders’ office and down the hallway to his own. He left her there long enough to get some coffee, then came back and closed the door behind him.

  “Now, you have that,” he directed. “Drink it and rest for a moment. Then we’ll talk.”

  Eiren was grateful for the hot cup in her hand, which warmed her fingers. She realized they were as cold as ice. He’d made the coffee double strength – Thrun style. After a few sips, she began to feel more like herself.

  Franz waited until they were both finished, then took the cup from her.

  “Now,” he said bluntly, “That is not a decision for you to make. That decision is for me to make, and me only. I’m the doctor. Don’t you fret about it any more.”

  “She’s in such agony! She can’t make a decision,” Eiren protested weakly. “Poor Papa is destroyed – he could never decide to end this. What is the point of keeping her alive, Franz!”

  “I know. You leave this to me,” Franz said implacably. “I’ve sent word for Menders to come and he just wired back that he’s on his way. He’ll have to go back tonight, but he will come every day until this is over.

  “Oh yes, he’ll go back every night,” Eiren snapped. The she was shocked at the bitterness in her voice.

  “He doesn’t have a choice – not with the condition Katrin is in,” Franz said quietly. “We don’t want a second death on our hands, Eiren. I know you feel abandoned and I certainly understand why, but there is grave danger to Katrin too.”

  Eiren stared at him. Katrin had stagnated for four years now.

  “She doesn’t seem particularly desperate,” Eiren said.

  “She’s stopped fighting the melancholia. That’s a very dangerous time,” Franz said. “When she was going through times of being angry or sad, when she cared enou
gh to argue with people or cry, I felt easier. This indifference – that’s when people simply don’t care to live any more. When they’re like that, ending their lives seems the only way out. If Katrin should have a spell of being more energetic, she could very well take her own life. She should not be left alone, particularly overnight.”

  Eiren closed her eyes.

  “So though Menders should be here with you during all this, he can’t be, but he’s going to do the best he can,” Franz went on. “I don’t agree with some of the choices he’s made in his life, but we don’t have the benefit of hindsight when we make our choices. He’ll be here soon, dear.”

  “Thank the gods,” Eiren wept. “These are terrible days, Franz.”

  “I know, my dear. It will be over soon.”

  Later, when Eiren went back to Menders’ office and looked in the desk drawer for the forgotten pamphlet, the gun was gone.

  ***

  TO: KATRIN

  FROM: MENDERS

  MY DEAR PLEASE COME TO THE SHADOWS. GRANDMOTHER HAS JUST DIED. GRANDDAD IS BEREFT AND WOULD LIKE TO SEE YOU. BORSEN AND STEVAHN JUST SENT WORD THAT THEY WILL BE GLAD TO COME BY FOR YOU. KAYMAR IS BRINGING THE BOAT AND WILL PROVIDE SECURITY. PLEASE KATRIN. DO THIS FOR EIREN’S SAKE.

  TO: MENDERS

  FROM: KATRIN

  I’M SORRY, I CAN’T. PLEASE TELL EIREN AND GRANDDAD I’M SORRY.

  Menders looked at the Rollig message Haakel handed him and felt his face flush with rage.

  “Thank you,” he said quietly, moving quickly toward the door, seeking refuge in his office.

  Once there, he crumpled the paper and flung it into the fire.

  ***