“You’re lying,” she croaked. But even as she said it, she vividly recalled the conversation she and Fransis had had with Maxen, trying to make him go to the Summer Palace where they believed he would be out of harm’s way. The same place, in fact, where little Averill Howard had been sent. But no 3-year-old had ever been so stubborn as Maxen, so they had let him stay at Wealdan Castle the night of the feast when they intended to take Ethelred’s throne and his life.
“Believe whatever you want,” whispered Edgar, “but your boy saved his father, got your lover killed, and put you in a tower for seventeen years. Pleasant dreams.”
Chapter 31
THE SERVANTS HAD ARRANGED Hildred on a long table in the center of the room, and at Caedmon’s direction, they brought over a pair of big, brass lamps for better light. Brandon sat at her side, holding her hand in spite of the blood. Her skin was pale gray, and against it, the blood seemed almost black. He didn’t want to move; he didn’t want to leave her, even though he knew there was nothing he could do here.
At the near end of the table, Faustinus had opened his handkerchief and was examining the pistachios. Daryna Olekovna came over, too, and he held them out for her to smell. She recoiled, and he put the handkerchief back on the table.
“Your grace, I apologize for intruding,” said Caedmon.
Brandon turned, startled. He hadn’t even noticed the hillichmagnar standing unobtrusively at his elbow. “There’s no need to apologize.” His voice was hoarse and thick. “Do you need something?”
“We should determine who could have poisoned the pistachios. Which servants were assigned to bring food to the high table? Who would have been in charge of preparing the bowls of nuts in the kitchens?”
Brandon looked back at his sister and the long splatter of dark blood down the front of her gown. “I...I think....” He couldn’t focus his mind on the question. He couldn’t think of a single member of the kitchen staff. The image of his head cook’s face flitted through his thoughts and disappeared. He’d known the woman for twenty years and he couldn’t remember her name. “I’m sorry, Caedmon. I just....” A tiny sob escaped his lips, and he clenched his jaw, trying not to start crying again.
“Do not trouble yourself,” said Caedmon soothingly. “I will send the guard captain to speak with the servants.”
Brandon ran a thumb over the back of Hildred’s hand. The blood was thicker now and starting to stick.
“Who would do this?” he said, half to himself. “Who would kill her?”
He knew there were plenty of people at court who had disliked his sister—people who were jealous, people who felt they had been unjustly excluded from court positions. Some people found her personality annoying. Earstien, even he had found her annoying, much of the time, and he felt a stab of guilt when he remembered how exasperated he had been with her over the past few weeks. But who would actually want her dead?
“If you’ll pardon me, your grace,” said Faustinus, “we don’t know that Lady Hildred was the intended victim.”
Brandon looked up, shaking his head. “What? What do you mean?”
“Perhaps we should speak of this later,” said Caedmon softly.
Faustinus ignored him. “There is no particular reason to think that the assassin who put the poison on the bowl of nuts intended for Lady Hildred to eat them. He could have been targeting anyone at the high table: King Ethelred or Queen Merewyn or Prince Maxen. Or the Loshadnarodski royals.”
“Much though I hate to say it,” said another voice, “anyone at the high table could have been the perpetrator, as well.”
Brandon looked around and saw Bishop Robertson approaching, his head bowed and his hands clasped in an attitude of prayer.
“Did you have someone in particular in mind?” said Daryna Olekovna, crossing her arms.
The bishop shrugged. “Far be it from me to make accusations.” Bowing to Brandon, he went on. “Did your sister have any particular enemies here tonight, your grace?”
“Who do you mean?” Brandon asked.
“Was there someone who, perhaps, resented her presence at the feast?”
Brandon couldn’t answer. He just sat there, stroking Hildred’s hand, as the bishop moved to her other side and began reading over her from the Halig Leoth. It was a passage about the dead rising into Earstien’s Light. Brandon vaguely recognized the words—he remembered the verses being read at his wife’s funeral. He couldn’t for the life of him remember which Epistle of Valamir it was from, though. Or was it one of the Epistles of Ovida?
Up at the head of the table, he heard Faustinus mutter, “Is that how you would translate the Old Trahernian there? Sounds a bit off to me.”
Daryna shushed him. Caedmon glowered and said, under his breath, “Honestly, Faustinus, this is hardly the time.”
Then Robertson recited a long, droning prayer, but Brandon barely understood a word. He kept thinking, over and over, about the bishop’s question: was there someone who had reason to resent Hildred’s presence? Was there anyone like that at the feast? Anyone at all?
With a sudden start that made him drop Hildred’s hand, Brandon realized that Robertson had been referring to Merewyn. But just as the bishop finished his prayer, the door to the great hall flew open.
It was the captain general, of all people, looking appropriately commanding—jaw set, fists clenched, dark hair outlined in the blazing candles of the hall. At some point in the last few minutes, he had put on a mail shirt over his party clothes, as well as a set of steel pauldrons. He looked as if he was about to go into battle. Brandon groaned and turned away; he didn’t have it in him to accept condolences already. Especially not from people like Broderick.
“I do apologize, your graces,” said Broderick. “My lords and my lady, I would not dream of intruding on such a sacred moment, but I fear I must trespass on the duke’s time.”
A second later, Broderick was kneeling there, right at Brandon’s side, and Brandon was forced to look at him.
“What do you want?”
“As I say, I would not be here, except for the fact that we—that is to say, the king and I—believe that security measures should be taken. I have placed troops around the Bocburg and in the streets, and I would like to be able to use your knights and men-at-arms, as well. However, your guard captain reminds me that I need your seal in order to do so.”
A slender, heavily-mustached sergeant appeared at Broderick’s side, holding out a small writing desk. An order was clipped to it, already written up, already bearing the signatures of the captain general and the king.
Brandon sighed. “Of course. That’s...very sensible.”
“I would have simply asked Mr. Kemp,” Broderick said, with a heave of his big shoulders, “but I couldn’t seem to find him around.”
“Presley?” Brandon looked around in confusion, then remembered that he had sent the boy off with that handsome Loshadnarodski fellow. “Er...yes, Mr. Kemp is on an errand for me. Here, someone bring me wax, will you?”
His hands were crusted with blood, but he took the quill the sergeant offered and signed his name. Then Faustinus glided up with a stick of blue wax, which he melted into a neat little circle with a tap of his index finger. Brandon took his ring—the magysk ring of his ancestors—and pressed it into the wax.
For a few seconds, he sat looking at the ring, remembering decades ago as children, when Hildred had discovered that Brandon would inherit the ring and she wouldn’t. “Why should he have a magysk ring and I can’t?” she had said, chin jutting out fiercely at their father.
Oh, Hildred, I might as well have let you have it, for all the good it’s ever done me.
Broderick put a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry, your grace. I will find the person responsible for this wicked crime. I will not let anyone harm my family.”
“Your family?” asked Brandon.
“Well, Prince Maxen, of course, was the target of this foul deed.”
“Maxen?” Brandon repea
ted. And then again, even more incredulously, “Maxen?”
“Why would you say the target was the prince?” Caedmon asked.
Broderick frowned and shook his head. “I thought it was obvious. Who else would be a target? Surely not Lady Hildred. It’s well known, at least among the inner members of the court, that my brother loves pistachios.”
“A fair point,” said Faustinus, dropping a slight bow. “No doubt that explains everything.”
With a quick nod, Broderick and his sergeant marched away, and Robertson excused himself, saying that he needed to “go minister to others left shocked and bereaved by this tragedy.”
Even as he left, the door from the council chamber opened, and Presley appeared with Grigory. They were standing quite close, with their fingers interlaced between them. Probably only Brandon saw the gesture or noticed how Presley squeezed Grigory’s hand before letting go.
“Sir, I’m so sorry I wasn’t here,” said Presley, hurrying over to join Brandon.
“Don’t trouble yourself,” said Faustinus, looking at one of the pistachios again. “There is very little anyone could have done for Lady Hildred.”
“Sir, what do you need?” asked Presley.
“There is...,” Brandon took a deep breath and ran his fingers through his hair, only remembering after he did so that there was still dried blood all over his hands. “There is so much to do. I should.... I should....” Earstien, where to even begin?
Presley put out a hand as if to pat Brandon on the back, but then seemed to think better of the gesture. Brandon wished he had done it, but if he had, Brandon knew he would have started crying again.
Instead, Presley straightened up and looked around the room. “Someone will need to send word to Lady Hildred’s husband and children. I can do that. And I see the captain general has moved more troops into the castle. I’ll set up tents for them in the courtyard if we can’t find room in the barracks. Don’t worry, sir. I’ll take care of everything.”
“Thank you, Presley,” whispered Brandon.
“Think nothing of it, sir. Perhaps you’d like to go to your rooms. I can send Lady Margaret and your sons up to sit with you, if you’d like.”
“Yes.... No, not right now. Maybe in a little while.” He didn’t particularly want his children to see him like this. Brandon reached out and took Presley’s arm for support, and he rose unsteadily to his feet. “Let me get myself cleaned up a bit first.”
“Of course, sir.”
Brandon left Hildred in the care of the hillichmagnars and walked slowly to his study. He had intended to go through to the privy, but he stopped at his desk, looking down at the little diagrams of decorations and guest lists that were still piled neatly there. Much of it was written in Hildred’s handwriting, except the parts that had been written by Presley, and even those had little notations added by Hildred.
He smiled at that, but then his chest constricted, and he bent over, gasping for breath. Out in the hallway, he heard someone’s footsteps falter—some servant, perhaps, or a guard. Any second, and they would be in here asking if he was all right, wondering if there was something they could get him. He couldn’t stand that anymore. He just wanted to be alone.
He pressed the magysk ring to the wood panel behind his desk, slipped through into the darkened, secret stairwell, and sat down on the well-worn steps. He rested his head in his blood-covered hands and let himself cry.
Chapter 32
A FEW MINUTES AFTER Brandon left, Presley returned to the council chamber with a number of nuns from a convent supported by Duke Brandon. They had come to start laying out the body. Faustinus asked for a few more minutes to examine Lady Hildred, and the prioress in charge of the nuns curtsied graciously and said they would wait there in the council chamber “for as long as your lordships and your ladyship wish.”
“Very well,” said Presley. He cast a parting glance in Grigory’s direction and said, “I’m afraid I have other things to look into. I’ll be back as soon as I can, though.”
“Shouldn’t be too long now,” said Faustinus, holding up a small vial of blue-green liquid, which had one of the pistachios sloshing about at the bottom. After a few more gentle shakes, he nodded his head. “Just as we suspected,” he said to Daryna. “It’s half arsenic, a quarter blue velox, and a quarter knivrensa. What people used to call ‘La Domina Grisea.’ Precisely what was used at Rawdon.”
“Does that mean something?” Grigory asked. “Is there some connection to an earlier crime?”
Faustinus chuckled. “Probably not. This was a hundred and sixty-two years ago.” He waved a hand at Daryna. “You can tell him about it, if he’s curious.” Then he wandered back into the parlor to continue examining Hildred.
“So...what did happen at Rawdon?” asked Grigory.
In her memory, the most important thing that happened at that long-ago peace conference was that she and Faustinus had slept together for the first time. But Grigory didn’t need to know about that. Or anyone else in the room. Several of the nuns were listening in, too, though they were trying to look as if they weren’t.
“This was before the Sigor dynasty inherited the throne of Myrcia, back when they ruled the independent Principality of Rawdon. The Myrcian king at the time—”
“Osrick Ealdor,” Faustinus called from the parlor.
“Yes, Osrick,” she said, shaking her head. “He wanted to annex Rawdon, and the Sigors didn’t want to be annexed. So there was a peace conference. I was there, as were Faustinus and Caedmon.” She sighed as she remembered all the parades and pageantry—the knights in their armor, all the pennants of the marching troops. She remembered, too, the sense of palpable tension, like there was a storm ready to burst at any moment.
“Anyway,” she went on, “there was a knight in the king’s service who thought Osrick would reward him if the prince or his ministers were killed. So he poisoned some food. As it turned out, the only person killed was one of the princess’s ladies-in-waiting, who sneaked a little taste of the feast before anyone else. The knight was found and tried and executed...,” she shuddered, “in a very unpleasant way. So the treaty was signed, and everyone went home happy. More or less.”
Faustinus peeked back into the council chamber. He now had a different bottle in his hands, one that appeared to have a swirling sample of Hildred’s blood. “The great irony,” he said, “is that thirty years later, Osrick’s granddaughter married the Prince of Rawdon, so that when the Ealdor dynasty died out, the Sigors became the Kings of Myrcia, and Rawdon was annexed to the kingdom, anyway. I suppose it just goes to show that some things,” he winked at Daryna, “are fated to happen, one way or another.”
Grigory frowned deeply and said, “I suppose that’s true.” A few moments later, when Faustinus had returned to the parlor, Grigory asked Daryna for “a private word,” and they walked to the other side of the huge, ancient council table, where the waiting nuns could not hear them.
“My lady, have you spoken to Queen Nina since...,” he waved a hand in the direction of Hildred’s body. “Since this happened?”
“Only briefly. Why?”
“She intends to go home. Or at least Prince Vadik does, and I think she will follow his lead.”
“I imagine so.” Daryna felt suddenly deflated. If they left now, then this whole journey was for nothing. They might as well have stayed in Loshadnarod.
“My lady....” Grigory took a deep breath. “My lady, what would you think about leaving someone here to continue negotiating for help with the mines?”
As he spoke, he kept looking toward the outer passageway, in the same direction, in fact, that Presley had gone a few minutes earlier.
“I think that is something we might want to consider, Grigory.”
Caedmon appeared at the parlor door and beckoned her. “Faustinus wishes to have a word,” he said. Then, with a polite nod at Grigory, and another at the nuns, he added, “A private word, if I may beg your pardon.”
Daryna left Gri
gory and went back into the parlor, where Faustinus now had quite a collection of little glass vials and bottles. Caedmon closed the door behind her, and she felt him place a muffling spell over it, so that no one could overhear them.
“The cause of death is fairly straightforward,” said Faustinus, gesturing to a set of three bottles. “La Domina Grisea killed her, and as we all know, that poison degrades rather quickly, so it had to have been put on the nuts just a few minutes before she ate them. Unfortunately, that means almost anyone in the Bocburg could have done it. Well, except for the three of us, because we were all together for our little magy show.”
“I suppose the question,” said Caedmon gravely, “is who had a reason to kill someone at the high table.”
“Precisely,” said Faustinus, picking up one of the little glass vials and spinning it over the knuckles of his right hand. “Who had a motive?”
“Well, I gather there was no love lost between Queen Merewyn and Lady Hildred,” suggested Daryna.
“I doubt the queen would have dared take out a bottle of poison while sitting at the high table, in full view of everyone,” said Caedmon.
“True, but....” Daryna thought carefully about the events of the feast. “The queen wouldn’t have had to poison the nuts herself. She could have had a servant do it. In fact, her lady-in-waiting, Haley Randal, was helping to serve the food and drinks, I believe.”
“I thought we all agreed that we can’t assume Hildred was the target,” said Faustinus, still spinning the little bottle.
“Very well,” said Daryna. “What about the captain general’s idea that the target was Prince Maxen?”
“Ah, yes. That.” Faustinus let out a low, mirthless chuckle and tossed the vial up before catching it in his other hand. “Sir Broderick came to that conclusion rather quickly, don’t you think? With immodest and unseemly haste, one might almost say.”
“What do you mean, precisely?” said Caedmon, his thick brows contracting.
“You think Sir Broderick meant to kill his half-brother, the prince,” guessed Daryna.
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