by Carol Berg
Duplais pointed a finger at a shabby tenement, painted all over with witch signs. A burning torch had been mounted in a bracket beside the door, yet the stoop, the door itself, and the lintel, carved with the open hand sign of a moneylender, remained indistinguishable in the gloom. In fact . . .
“The light seems bent,” I said. The fire glow curled around the left side of the house and illumined naught but an alley choked with smoke. The smoke itself streamed round the corner in a direction directly opposite the wind.
“Moneylenders throughout the city are particularly beset with such strangeness. Pawners, too. Did your father have difficulty with his debts?”
“I’ve told you repeatedly, I know nothing of my father.”
In the next street, he pointed out a cracked signboard painted with three gold balls, dangling by one corner over the door of another house. The windows and door gaped black like empty eye sockets. Air rushed into them as if they were sucking every breath out of the world.
“You’re going to tell me this is sorcery.” Worms riddled my stomach.
“Give me a scientific explanation for such unnatural spectacles. They’ve spread throughout Merona like plague. There are streets in Riverside where fire does not heat food or melt iron. Others where wild pigs have taken up residence. Sorcerers have repaired some, only to see other disturbances break out. Just this past tenday, I’ve heard report of an incident in Sessaline—a village fifteen kilometres north. Here, this is interesting, too . . .”
He led me past a small district that had been leveled by fire—recently, from the rising trails of smoke and the heavy stink of char and refuse. The area was an exact square, the bordering houses lacking even a trace of soot. “This was a street of solicitors and small banking houses. It burnt three years ago.”
No response came to mind. I was, after all, plain, plodding Anne de Vernase, who could speak seven languages but could not come up with a witty retort until a day late, who preferred a book to any adventure, who believed that everything in the world had a rational explanation, save my father’s great betrayal.
Duplais urged his skittish mare closer to Ladyslipper. “Keep moving, damoselle. Sunset is the riskiest time.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to make straight for the palace if we’re in such a hurry?” I said as Duplais detoured through yet another narrow lane, behind Merona’s Temple Major.
“There is no straight in Merona just now. Damnation . . .”
Duplais’ mount shied, dodging sideways and forward all at once, near unseating the man. Only my most insistent persuasion kept Ladyslipper from doing the same. A soft hissing, as of spewing steam, swelled into a pulsing, whining, scratchy rush of sound from every side. Rats flooded the alley before and behind us. Pouring from the shadowed verges as if birthed by the brick walls, they surged toward the temple’s back steps and its servitors’ entry as if summoned to the god’s service.
A bolt of violet light shot from Duplais’ raised palm, halting the squirming, screeching vermin before they started climbing our horses’ legs. A second bolt parted the flood in front of us. We kicked the horses onward, bursting from the alley in disarray. Sweat dripped down my back and from my brow, the air suddenly a furnace. Appalled, disgusted, it was all I could do to maintain any sort of calm instruction for the quivering Ladyslipper. Duplais mumbled epithets and wrestled his mount into nervous compliance. “Saints and spirits, should have known he’d not exempt the Temple . . .”
Which comment I understood not at all. But I needed no urging to stay close and move faster. We turned onto a wide, paved boulevard, divided by a row of spreading plane trees—the Plas Royale. Duplais glanced up at the deepening sky, now the hue of charcoal, then released an unhappy exhale. “Watch your step, damoselle.”
Duplais reined in to a slow walk, picking the way up the broad street as carefully as he’d done on the narrowest hillside track. Grand stone buildings with sculpted facades and fluted columns lined the Plas Royale: the Academie Musica and the Collegia Medica, and merchant halls such as the Vintners’ Consortium and the Wool Guildhall. Farther ahead of us stood a striking edifice of deep green granite, the Bastionne Camarilla. I could just make out the sculpted figures that stood atop its facade—a pair of robed male and female mages, each with one hand upraised to Heaven and one opened in generous provision to the onlookers below.
Despite the benevolent images and the elegance of its carvings and polished granite, the headquarters of the Camarilla Magica had always made my skin creep. Its lack of windows brought to mind an eyeless face. And that was before I had learned that inside those impenetrable walls, magical practitioners who violated Camarilla strictures were routinely whipped or branded in the name of preserving magical purity, even if they were naught but ignorant countryfolk. In its deepest bowels, so it was said, the prefects executed the most serious violators, as they had my father’s magical accomplices.
“Great Heavens!” I said. As we closed on the Bastionne, it became clear disaster had struck. Two of the fortress’s walls and a third of its slate roof had collapsed, exposing the blackened skeleton of its interior. Floors hung at rakish angles, and massive columns leaned like felled trees, supported by the piled rubble that shifted . . .
I blinked.
A few faint lights—pale green and yellow—flickered through the dark interior. Their pulsing movement must have fooled my eyes into seeing the rubble expand and contract as if it were a wounded man’s chest instead of crumbled stone.
“A moment.” I halted Ladyslipper and squinted into the deepening gloom. Shadows had pooled just at the spot where the two collapsed walls would have joined. And like a pond, the blackness had swelled and shifted when a carved capital tumbled much too slowly from an upper floor and penetrated its boundary. I squinted, my eyes refusing to accept what they encompassed. The scene was entirely wrong.
“Sonjeur de Duplais, what’s happened here?” I whispered. My heart, still racing from the encounter with the rats, rattled my ribs. “That hole . . .”
“An unfortunate shifting of the earth,” he said. “The collapse occurred a year ago. The Camarilla announced that some natural cavern in the rock beneath the fortress gave way—perhaps an instability caused by excessive rain. The prefects are weaving spells to ensure the integrity of the remaining foundation before they rebuild.”
“Who would risk going in there to work with the structure in such a precarious state?” I said, watching the colored lights multiply like gleaming fireflies in the deepest corners of the ruin.
Without shifting his gaze from the pavement in front of us, Duplais urged his mount forward. “No one goes inside the collapsed wing. It is forbidden.”
“But . . .” Green sparks drifted across an open span where the great rib of a vaulted ceiling lay below. The livid glow reflected on a bulbous metal object—a lamp or an urn or a cooking pot—that chose that moment to slide off the edge of a raked floor and drop . . . no, settle slowly, like an autumn leaf, and vanish into the pooled night.
My head, already aching, rattled like a tin drum full of squirrels.
Impossible. I didn’t believe in sorcery, certainly not sorcery that could collapse walls or cause . . . whatever I had seen. Yet as I followed Duplais up the road to Castelle Escalon, I kept my eyes on the pavement lest nature open an abyss under our feet, and all my strident intellectual protests produced not a single principle to explain why metal pots and blocks of granite might fall so much more slowly than physical laws predicted, or why their landings might cause ripples in the dark. When Duplais nodded to the palace guards and ushered me into my new home, I blessed my priggish escort and welcomed the closing gates behind me as I never imagined I could.
CHAPTER 6
4 OCET, EVENING
“I’m to provide chamber service for you, damoselle, as I do for the queen’s other young ladies. As you’ve brought no personal maid, I’ve been told to attend to your dressing and hair, as well. I’ll bring your supper here when you’ve no
other engagements.”
The queen, dressing, hair. The topics were so at odds with my current preoccupations, they might have been foreign words. The venture through the city had left my head like porridge.
“I’ll come back tonight once I’ve finished my other ladies, and see to the unpacking. Here’s your bedchamber.” The round-cheeked girl, lugging my heavy book satchel, opened the door at the end of the wide passage and allowed me to enter first.
The small, tiredly elegant room was possessed of a single casement, no hearth, and a clutter of furnishings. It was also occupied.
The woman inspecting my piled luggage whirled about. “Well, here you are!”
Did I not know Eugenie de Sylvae nearer five-and-thirty than five-and-sixty, I might have assumed that the woman extending her arms in welcome was the Queen of Sabria. A trim woman of mature age, she had gowned herself in purple velvet heavily embroidered in gold. A stiff ruffled collar rose to the crown of her pyramid of black and gray curls—an ancient style seen on ruined Fassid temples or potsherds.
Many women of little taste and enormous wealth might have adorned themselves so, but one glance at her face warned that this particular lady must be approached with certain caution. Her eyes were very like olive pits, small and hard-edged. And in the style of Fassid empresses, she had completely plucked her eyebrows, an artifice that gave her an expression of either permanent surprise or permanent disdain.
“Dear, dear Anne, I do hope the wretched journey has not pummeled you into dust! Knowing how difficult this time must be for you, I simply had to welcome you right away.”
The serving girl gave me no clue as to the woman’s identity, save confirming her rank. She dropped instantly into a low curtsy, pasting her gaze to the floor. Her “Your Grace” was so faint as to approach a sigh. The lady tapped her elegant toe on the floor thrice, and the girl dropped my satchel and scuttered away, closing my door without so much as a click. I hadn’t thanked her, nor so much as asked her name. Had I forgotten every trace of civilized behavior?
I followed the girl’s lead and dipped my knee, laying my left hand on my right shoulder to expose the Cazar family blood mark as the law required. The woman clucked and patted my cheek, reminiscent of Mistress Constanza at the Cask. Then her jeweled fingers encircled my wrist and drew me up and around my heaped baggage to sit beside her on the bed.
“When I heard Duplais had brought you on horseback—astride, for love of Heaven, like some wild, immodest Kadr girl—when you have such obstacles before you already, I told my daughter we should string him up for the whipsman. We shall convict him of criminal obtuseness . . . obtusity . . . obtusativity. . . .”
Her words flowed like honey, embracing, enveloping, mind clogging. It likely wasn’t useful to protest that my mother had insisted that no true horsewoman would ride sidesaddle. But, of course, my mother was mad.
“You will have to correct me, caeri, as I understand you have a stellar intelligence. Such a blessing”—she swept me with such a comprehensive gaze, I’d no doubt she could recite the number of my hairs out of place— “in a—now, let us be honest, as I prize honesty above all things—a plain girl. Really, the three of us must see to the dullard’s punishment. I’ve never quite understood what quality Eugenie sees in Duplais—a failed sorcerer, so dull and craven even Philippe cannot tolerate him.”
Despite her prattle, her eyes had not softened so much. But I could now guess who she was. Queen, indeed. Wife of a king, now dead, and mother of a king, also dead—the dowager Queen of Sabria.
My mother had long maintained that Antonia de Foucal was the most powerful person in Sabria. She had actually ruled as Queen Regent in the first few months after her husband died, leaving only their son, Soren, a boy of thirteen. At one-and-twenty, Soren had married Eugenie de Sylvae, a child of eight years, and Lady Antonia had adopted her son’s child wife.
Soren had fallen in battle before Eugenie was old enough to consummate the marriage, and his heir, my goodfather Philippe de Savin-Journia, had ended up marrying the widowed Eugenie to consolidate his claim to the throne. Mama had always said that Philippe and Eugenie had grown into love in spite of their marriage, and in spite of Lady Antonia.
“Sonjeur de Duplais got me here safely, Your Grace. Now I’m eager to learn my duties.”
She tutted and creased her browless forehead. “Of course you are, caeri. And we must give that some careful thought. Interesting that Philippe’s brought you here. Clever. Of course, he leaves such women’s matters as noble marriages to Eugenie, but I do my best to relieve her of tiresome burdens. Well, we shall do what we can. You must improve your dress and hair.” She pinched my cheeks. “And so pale. You’re not ill?”
“No, my lady.”
My cheeks surely took on a more fashionable blush as she inspected me. My mother and brother were dark-haired, physically strong, and graceful, with rich-hued skin and luminous eyes. Lianelle had taken the best of my father’s fairer coloring and gold-flecked brown hair, and had surpassed me in height by the age of fourteen. Yet despite my dull complexion and plain features, I despised face painting, rejecting the world’s consuming passion to look like something one was not. I certainly didn’t care what these people thought of me. Humiliating, nonetheless, to hear my lacks laid out so baldly.
Lady Antonia squeezed my shoulder. “Good health is assuredly a blessing. But, of course, the family connection is the great difficulty here. How are we ever to match a woman whose father’s name is so reviled, the king will not have it spoken in his presence? Or convince a suitor that lunacy will not taint his children? I shall have to apply my best wiles! A modest presence in the palace will enhance your prospects.”
As if I wished to be here! I crushed a rising heat. “Certainly, Your Grace. As you say.”
She fixed her great surprised eyes on my face, as if she could read my heart. “And one more thing. As your devoted well-wisher, I must advise you: You must not practice even a tat of sorcery. With your father’s history—his collusion with such disgusting, unholy practices—everyone will be watching. Do you understand me, caeri?”
I bit my tongue yet again. “Such would be impossible, my lady. I possess no power for sorcery.”
“But, Anne, your sister studied at Seravain! And your mother’s family . . .”
“It is long proven that neither my brother nor I carry the Cazar factor in the blood. Only my late sister.”
She took up my left hand and with a dry finger ringed in emeralds, traced the Cazar zahkri imprinted there when I was born. “Even those ungifted use magical artifacts, spells purchased at the market or given them by others. Her Majesty’s mage advises you refrain from that, as well—even the seeming. You understand.”
“Certainly, my lady.” Though I didn’t, really. Happily, my inclinations favored her advice.
“Now, caeri, you’d best get settled in. Tomorrow you must work with all diligence. You’re far behind the other girls.”
In flurry of kisses and pats, she was gone. Angry, humiliated, and entirely flustered, I could not think what to do next.
A sneezing fit broke my paralysis. A combination of the lady’s abrasive perfume and the scent of the dried rosemary and lavender sprinkled over bedclothes and floor set my nose dripping and eyes itching.
Squeezing past the luggage and the table, I wrestled with the heavy iron window latch and shoved open the casement. The heavy air scarce moved, the night swollen and inflamed like a septic wound. Floating lights, bent shadows, pits and pools of blackness, impregnable fortresses in ruins . . . Perhaps it was not so surprising to find people installing quartieres near their homes.
The formidable Lady Antonia had left me feeling as if I’d been trampled by horses. Instead of unpacking, I unbuckled my little traveling case and installed my two tessilae on a small stone altar table set beside the bed, calling up fond remembrances of my grandmother and my cousin Raynald. Little Raynald’s death of summer fever had fed my doubts about Ixtador Beyond the Veil
. What god worthy of honoring would be so cruel as to set children wandering alone in a barren wasteland? My mother’s belief, unsanctioned by the Temple, insisted that children could find their friends and family in Ixtador. At least that way Lianelle might have Grandmama and Raynald to companion her.
Settling on my bed, I pulled out Lianelle’s letter. Her exuberant voice was so clear in those pages, as if she sat in her room at Seravain, awaiting my answer.
As I completed a third rereading, someone tapped on the door. “Come,” I said, stuffing the packet back in my case, blotting away tears so as not to make a spectacle of myself.
“A bit of supper, damoselle.” The chambermaid carried in a lighted candle and a tray draped with white linen serviettes. She looked about in dismay, first at the luggage blocking her way, and then at me, stumbling to my feet, red-eyed and sniffling. Lianelle was entirely wrong about me being strong.
“Here,” I said, “let me move this.” I shoved my clothes bag into the corner beside a blanket chest and threw the book satchel onto the bed. As the girl squeezed through and set the tray on the table, I rescued the wobbling candle. “Tell me, what’s your name?”
Eyes averted, she dipped her knee. “Ella, if you please.”
Though a handspan taller than I, she could be no more than fifteen. Freckles sprinkled her face, and the wisps of hair that peeked out from under her ruffled white cap were orange-red. In the past hour she had inked a green witchknot below one ear. Perhaps she thought it might protect her from the Great Traitor’s daughter.
On our way up from the steward’s office, I’d noted several other people wearing witchknots or chevrons on temples or cheeks—warding sigils one saw among country people from time to time. The practice was akin to burying a lock of a rival’s hair under a thorn tree to afflict her with pustules, or kissing your altar stone whenever you had a wicked thought about a dead relative, lest the kinsman’s shade send a daemon to make you soil the bed. To see servants in a royal residence displaying such open superstition was astonishing.