by Dave Duncan
Although the horses tried to balk at the first bridge, they were too tired to make a real fight of it. Audley coaxed his to go ahead, then Malinda’s and the rest followed. Looking pleased with himself, he said, “There’s no other way across?”
“I said there’s no other road across,” Malinda corrected him. “I also told you that there’s no path down the cliffs.”
He raised a shapely eyebrow at her. “So this bridge is the only way to reach or leave the island?”
She was amused, wondering whether it was him or his Blade instincts that detected her equivocation. “The south end of the Bathtub is shallow. At the time of spring tides—that’s new moon or full moon, when the range is greatest—an active man can scramble across the rocks at low water, if the sea is calm. Boys do it on dares, of course, and don’t always make it. The only way down to it is through the caves. Ness Royal is riddled with caves.”
There was hardly a flat inch on the island. The trail led between rocky spines and grassy mounds, through twisting canyons and bowl-like hollows. Whitewashed thatched cottages crouched in sheltered nooks, showing no inclination to get together to form a village. Drystone walls kept cattle out of vegetable gardens and children out of sinkholes, of which there were at least a dozen. Many of those led down to water—fresh in some that served as wells, salt in others, while a few opened directly to sea caves and made good fishing holes.
The first stop had to be at Dian’s mother’s cottage, which was larger than most, with glazed windows and separate outbuildings for livestock. Dogs and geese put up a cacophony of warning as the visitors rode in; chickens and children screamed and fled. Widow de Fait came plodding out to investigate. Since her husband’s death, she had remarried and begun rearing a second family, but in spite of all the mouths she fed with her superb cooking, the money her daughter sent from court made her the richest person on the island after the seneschal himself. She uttered an earsplitting shriek of joy at Dian’s unexpected return and rushed forward, arms wide. Fortunately Dian was able to dismount in time, or her mother might have embraced the horse instead—they were a very cuddly family.
Children flocked around to squeak and squeal and jump up and down. Even Malinda had to be hugged and the Blades barely escaped. Weeping copiously, Mistress de Fait marveled at seeing the tiny princess she had once known now grown to (enormous, although she did not say so) womanhood. She seemed much shorter than she had nine years ago, grayer and more breathless, probably even fatter. Dian met her youngest brother and sister for the first time and embraced six other siblings she had not seen for years. Her stepfather appeared and was presented to Malinda, who remembered him as a gangly page. Now he was a tall man, as thin as ever but pleasant enough and still known just by the name of Pinkie. His wife seemed to have remained Widow de Fait, perhaps because she was so much older than he was.
Kingstead was a jumble of originally separate buildings now linked by covered corridors, mismatched additions, and poorly judged afterthoughts. Most of it clung like a frozen rockslide to the side of a sheltered hollow, which contained the only trees on the island, but Upper House stood on the cliff top, overlooking the sea. Although Upper House tended to be drafty, with gales wailing in chimneys and casements, Malinda had already decided that she would occupy her mother’s old bedroom with the fine view of the coast to the south, even if she had to evict Sir Thierry himself to do so. That chamber had a secret door in one corner, and she had worked out how she would allocate adjoining rooms so that no one except the Blades could know if Dog came to her. At Ness Royal, without the snoopy Royal Guard around, she need not fear scandal even if he spent all night every night guarding her at the closest of close quarters.
Dian’s mother had predicted that the seneschal would be indisposed by that time of day, but he was able to totter forward to greet his visitors, wobbling dangerously on his crutch. The miasma of wine around him caused Sir Audley to take a hasty step backward as soon as he had presented the Council’s warrant. Sir Thierry examined it at arm’s length, moving his lips. Eventually it occurred to him that no one argued with four Blades, so he mumbled a welcome to Her Grace, breathed fumes over her fingers, and told his steward to make all necessary arrangements. He asked leave to keep the warrant overnight so he could copy out the financial details, of which it contained none.
While Audley was demanding food, linen, hot water, and other comforts for Her Highness, Her Highness gazed around her with much more nostalgia than she had expected. How small and old and shabby the place seemed now! It should be filled with unhappy memories and the ghosts of pined-away ancestors, but she was glad to have arrived. Her banishment could not last long. In a month or so Granville would summon her back to court and hand her over to her future husband. Whether she submitted or resisted at that point, her love affair with Dog would inevitably end. She must snatch every moment of happiness she could find.
27
Stories are truths in party clothes.
FONATELLES
The Queen’s Room had not changed. Indeed Malinda was shocked to find her mother’s toiletries lying on the dresser under nine years’ dust and many of her garments moldering in the clothes chest. Worse, she now realized that it was from the terrace outside this window that Godeleva had leaped to her death.
“On second thought, I know a better place,” she said and stalked out. Dog and Audley followed at her heels. Dian was giving Abel and Winter a tour of the lower buildings.
Her second choice was a much smaller chamber, the one that had been hers. It was barely large enough for the bed, which would itself be extremely snug when it had Dog in it. Wind moaned through gaps in the ill-fitting windows, whose tiny panes looked out on two sides over the reefs and the coastal cliffs beyond. The walls were of solid gray marl and the door of ancient oak. She would order a fire lit right away and heated bricks to air the mattress.
“This will be my room,” she announced.
Audley looked surprised and Dog pouted, even surlier than usual.
“I can post a man right outside, I suppose,” Audley remarked tactfully. “The door is very visible from the stair and the passage.”
“Good solid stone,” Malinda said, thumping a wall and secretly teasing. “It’s very secure. The only thing I must watch is that rug in front of the fireplace. If it got moved, then candlelight shining down through the cracks might be mistaken for a signal.”
Dog brightened. Audley whipped back the rug and knelt to inspect the trapdoor beneath. “Wasn’t there a rug like this in that room you said would be the Guard Room?”
“Very likely.” She poked Dog hard in the ribs. “Why don’t you ever smile?”
“Like this?” He drew back his lips to expose the awful gap and the fangs flanking it.
“It’s a start,” she said and took the chance to tickle him while Audley wasn’t looking.
She followed the two Blades down the stone stair into chill dimness and a stale reek of rot. It was half cellar and half cave, lit by a reluctant glow trickling through slits in the foundations. Audley muttered angrily as he registered all the potential hiding places among the discarded furniture, barrels, and piled crates.
“Rats, bats, and cats!” he snarled. “Do you have to sleep in this wing, my lady? There must be somewhere easier to guard. Where do those go?” He pointed to two other staircases.
“You have nothing else to do, and you haven’t seen the worst yet. One goes up to your Guard Room and the other to a nook off the Queen’s Room. That one can be bolted shut, I think. Come here.” She picked her way through the clutter to a masonry wall, which had been left suspiciously accessible.
Audley frowned. “What of it? Looks solid enough.”
“It’s not.” It was, in fact, an enchanted curtain concealing a wooden door. Malinda just reached out and pulled it aside. Then she heaved the door open to reveal steps spiraling down into bedrock. A dim light from below showed chisel marks on the wall of the stairwell. “Take care,” she said. “The riser
s are uneven.”
Again Audley led the way, but his angry muttering gave way to sounds of wonder when he reached the bottom and found himself in a chamber much larger and brighter than the dingy cellar they had just left. Once it had been a natural sea cave, formed when the sea was higher or the island lower, but now a glass screen closed off the original opening in the cliff, leaving it dry and bright. Its floor had been smoothed and leveled. It was furnished with rugs, chairs, tables, and as many shelves of dusty books as any sage’s study. The two Blades looked all around, gaping, and then strode together over to the great window to stare down at the rocks and foam far below. Probably no one had set foot here since the day Queen Godeleva floated past the window in her death leap.
Dog looked around angrily at Malinda. “What is this place?” The beat of the surf was unending, felt through the feet as much as heard, but he seemed much less distressed than before.
“My mother called it Adela’s Room, but she may have invented the name.” Malinda turned her back on him and pulled up a corner of the largest rug, peeling it back. “That’s one of the finest libraries on conjuration in all Eurania.” In her last months on Ness Royal she had purloined some of its volumes and tried to read them, but they had all been far beyond the understanding of a nine-year-old. Wrong rug—she replaced it and tried another. Dog had never commented on the Veriano volume he had left in her room. On his next visit he had removed it without a word. She knew now that he was no scholar; if the others ever saw him with a book they would guffaw and mock him. Ah! She had found what she was looking for—a series of very scuffed lines drawn on the rock floor in ochre.
“An octogram?” Audley exclaimed, coming to see what she was doing. “Could you conjure in a cave like this?”
“Of course not. Only earth elementals would answer your call, maybe some water spirits. My mother was crazy, Commander. She hoped to use enchantment to win back my father’s love. She spent an enormous fortune collecting those books and trying to bribe scholars to come and aid her, but if the King had ever learned what she was up to, he would have thrown her in the Bastion or chopped off her head. So her Blades followed her around, frustrating her efforts, sending away the experts she had summoned, rubbing out her octograms, forbidding the locals to help her.”
Poor, abandoned, crazy Godeleva! Malinda had never spared much sympathy for her mother before, but now she knew what exile to Ness Royal felt like. Yet she had her lover with her and was confident her term there would be short. Her mother had known she would never be allowed to leave.
Audley sighed. “Just wait until Winter sets eyes on those books!”
“Winter is interested in conjuration?” She did not look at Dog. “He’ll certainly never find a more complete collection.”
“Winter is interested in anything. Are there other secret passages we have to see?”
“Not near here,” she said. “Some down in the lower buildings. Under one of these rugs there’s a trapdoor leading down into the caves. Go down far enough and you’ll come to a great sea cavern, with surf rushing in and out and sometimes seals basking on the rocks. Leave it for another day. No one’s going to be coming up that way.”
Audley headed for the stair. “Then let’s go back in case anyone’s looking for us. We’ll explore this when we have more time.”
Malinda and Dog followed, holding hands.
A bloated moon in an indigo sky was painting silver ladders on the sea when Malinda said good night to Dian and bolted the door. She rolled back the rug so Dog would know the coast was clear. Dropping her nightgown, she wrapped herself in an ermine cloak of her mother’s that she had found in a closet—it must have survived when things of much lesser value had been stolen simply because no one on the island knew where to sell such a luxury or dared be seen with it. She continued to admire the view, listening to the soughing of the wind and the untiring boom of breakers below the cliff. Dog could move astonishingly quietly—she did not hear him open or close the trap, although she felt the floor quiver under his weight. A quick glance confirmed that it was he, and he was wearing even less than she was. Though she was sore and bone weary from the long journey, she yet felt like a coiled spring that would lash out in frenzy the moment he touched her. Love denied was torment unendurable. It had been three whole nights! She could not understand how she had ever survived without Dog in her life.
“Come and see!” She gazed again at that impossible moon. She imagined him coming to stand behind her and running his hands inside the cloak—
“No.” The bed creaked as he climbed in. He pulled the quilt up to his chin.
“All right, don’t.” She went to join him, but there was so little Dog-free space left that she stretched out on top of him, body on body, and hauled the covers right over them both. She kissed the end of his nose. “Say those three words.”
“I love you.”
“Hmm. You need to practice putting passion in them. Never mind. You’ve told me, now show me. Begin soft as the spider spinning and work up to paroxysms of earthquake devastation.”
He crushed her in his best bear hug, kissed her, stroked, kneaded…. She had just realized that he was faking when he tried to break free. She could not have restrained him had he used his true strength, of course, but he let her force him back down.
“Let me go. I’m no good tonight.”
“I won’t abandon a man who loves me.”
“I’m not a man tonight. You know.” In the moonlight his ugly face was distorted with shame.
“Poor darling! You’ve had three days on a horse, that’s all.” She had no idea whether that was relevant, but it sounded plausible. “Or is it the surf? I’d take you where we couldn’t hear it if there were any such place on Ness Royal. Don’t worry. We have all night. I’m happy like this.”
“I’m not.” Was he ever happy as other people were happy? Never laughing, never smiling. Now he just lay uncomplaining, neither speaking nor moving. She set to work, trying all the little wiles that she had learned to rouse him—Dian’s technique with hair was normally one of the best—but tonight none of them worked. Eventually she stretched out on top of him again, resting her head on his chest, tracing fingers over the swells and hollows of his body, listening to the steady thump of his heart.
“I’ll tell you a story.”
“No. Let me go.”
“Listen. Once there was a child who lived on an island much like this one. She was allowed to run free with her friends, exploring its hills and valleys, even its caves and secret places. She belonged to a most peculiar family, for although she had a mother of her own, she had no real father. She had been sired by a monster she was expected to remember but could not, a hateful despot. Her mother spent all her time in a cave, studying secret books, and was too busy ever to love the girl. Fortunately she had two lesser mothers and two substitute fathers, the parents of her best friends, who let her share them. One day she saw her mother fly away. She was wearing red, and when she flew from the top of the cliff, her gown flapped and fluttered like wings and her hat blew off, so that her hair streamed above her in a silver banner, but mostly it was the fluttering red wings that the girl remembered—fluttering all the way down until the woman vanished into the white surf below. And then, for a moment, the sea itself was red, like berry juice.”
Dog grunted, and she laid a finger on his lips.
“Her two substitute fathers fell to fighting over who should have guarded her mother better, and they killed each other. The girl wept much harder for them than she had for her mother, so she knew she was wicked and unnatural.
“She was carted off to her monster father’s lair, away from all her friends, to a hateful prison of a palace. Years later he gave her away to his worst enemy as the price of his shame—as a token that the enemy was a better fighter and could take whatever the father monster possessed, even his only daughter. The enemy laughed and spurned her as of no worth and sent her back. She had not been a prize at all, only bait in a trap,
but she did not call out to warn her father, and the enemy slew him.”
Again Dog drew breath to speak, and this time she kissed his lips to catch the words before they could emerge.
“Listen, it is not over! She had not mourned her mother, and she did not mourn her father, so she was doubly wicked. Just today she came and saw the place where her mother had jumped; she heard the voice of the surf that had eaten her mother; but she did not weep. She is a monster, that girl, and daughter of a monster. She does not deserve a real man to love her.”
“Princess—”
“Silence!” She punched him, hard enough to hurt her knuckles on his barrel ribs. “You are not to comment on my story. It is mine. You may tell me a story instead. If you know of anyone so wicked that he should be punished by being made to love that terrible monster girl I told you of, then I will hear that story. If you do not, then you may not speak at all.”
The wind wailed in the casement and chimney. Faint smoke writhed in the moonlight and she feared it was not going to work. Minutes crept by.
“Once upon a time there was a giant,” Dog growled in her ear. “He was a smith. He could bend iron bars with his bare hands. He could lift his anvil off the ground, which no two other men could. He had a wife, very young, very beautiful, very dainty. He loved his wife so much that if any other man looked bad at her, he beat him almost to death with his fists. She gave him two sons. The second son killed her. He was too big and would not come out of her. She screamed for three days until she died, and then the barber was called to cut her open, because the murderer was still in there and still alive. Often the blacksmith would tell the murderer how he had killed his mother.”
Malinda tried to speak and a horny hand closed over her mouth. With a huge lurch Dog rolled them both over so they were side by side.