by Carol Berg
I’d no illusion that it could be so. I wasn’t even sure if the words I heard were voiced in actuality or in thought, or if somehow they were shaped solely from the very stuff of life.
The game room door swung open again. The lamp boy jumped to his feet. I forced the dizzying cacophony aside, blinked until the smearing colors of the scene settled into shapes, and stepped out from behind the hibiscus. Better to test my state of visibility with the boy.
I stomped my foot. Alerted, he squinted straight through me into the dark. Picked up a lamp and turned it brighter. And vouched no sign of noticing a woman standing five metres from his nose. I breathed again.
Lady Antonia soon emerged. “Her Majesty wishes to linger for a while,” she said to the boy, as she took the proffered lamp. “Fetch a flask of oil from the guard post and return here to await her pleasure. I’ll snip your ears tomorrow if I hear her lamp was dry when she was ready to go down.”
“Aye, Your Grace.” The boy snapped a bow, hung the sole remaining lamp on a hook beside the door, and raced up the steep stair toward the tower.
Antonia raised her lamp high and examined the atrium. “Where are you?”
I froze. Her inspection passed over me three times. Holding my breath, I peered over my shoulders to make sure I wasn’t jostling a branch or otherwise signaling my presence.
But she paid me no mind. After a moment, she lowered her lamp and threw back her head. With a low, throaty laugh that unnerved me soundly, she spun in place until her silk skirts billowed and the lamplight scribed a circle of fire around her. “So near! So near! I do feel you close, dearest, as if you breathed on my cheek. I cannot wait for you tonight. But soon, love.”
Still chuckling, she headed down the stair, her steps as light as a girl in her teens.
I’d never have picked Lady Antonia as a woman for romantic passion. But then, I’d never have picked her as a murderess, either. Who was she expecting?
My slippers scarce whispered as I slipped down the stair after her. Movement blurred the silver-blue wash of light before my eyes, forcing me to follow more slowly than I liked. But that was the only thing saved me from careening headlong into the man who rounded the corner on his way up.
I hugged the wall.
Ruddy-skinned and compactly muscled, he was the kind of man who, while not exceptionally large or exceptionally beautiful of feature, exudes a confidence that demands admiration. His thick brown beard, longer and fuller than most courtiers wore, imparted a strength to his jawline that might or might not be accurate. Though he seemed familiar, I could not place him in my recollection of the king’s household lords, nor in the once-rich stream of Montclaire visitors. He was not a man one would fail to notice.
Dressed in fur-lined cloak, puffed satin breeches long out of fashion, and a rakish, feathered bonnet that shadowed his face, he sped past me, his long stride devouring the stair. Perhaps it was my gasp of surprise or my heart’s pounding that alerted him, but he peered over his shoulder straight in my direction. But he said nothing and did not slow. He could as easily have been examining the rustling bougainvillea that draped the wall behind me. So I told myself, as the mellow breeze sent shivers chasing up and down my back.
Antonia’s footsteps clattered on the lower stair. She had not challenged the man, so she must know him. Yet I could not but think of the queen left alone, without even a lamp boy within hail.
Damn and blast. I reversed direction, reaching the atrium just in time to see Eugenie de Sylvae standing in the open doorway, hand pressed to her mouth as if to suppress a cry. The wind swirled through the open arches, rattling the hibiscus leaves, lifting the queen’s loosened hair into a dark tangle around her flushed, lovely face, painted tonight with butterfly wings beside her eyes.
The man had dropped to one knee in front of her and spread his arms wide, the perfect image of a lovesick chevalier, his cloak draped gracefully behind him, revealing the hilt of his sword—a coiled dragon studded with rubies. He reached for her hand and leaned forward to kiss it.
Another gust rattled the lamp and set it swaying on its hook. The gold flame flared inside the glass chimney and winked out.
In a rustle of silk the man rose, and the two shadowed forms retired together. The door closed softly. Eugenie knew her visitor and was not afraid of him. No help was needed.
I knew how things worked in courtly circles. Certainly no one in the household pretended the royal marriage thrived. Yet I felt disgust as I retraced my steps in pursuit of Lady Antonia. For certain she knew the visitor. She had facilitated the assignation, getting rid of the boy long enough for the man to arrive unobserved. That alone was enough to set my back up.
THE DOWAGER QUEEN WAS HURRYING past the royal apartments when I caught up to her. She did not acknowledge the bobbed knees or inclined backs of servants, nor even the greetings of what few courtiers passed so late of an evening. Her pace changed noticeably as she descended the stair into the window gallery. She might have been out for a leisurely, late-evening stroll. Pausing in one window niche after another, she gazed on the middle-night view of the city.
I loitered a few metres away, the certainty of my invisibility assured when a footman ducked into the window niche beside me and relieved himself. If the blood rushing to my cheeks did not expose me, naught was going to do it.
Only when the gallery was entirely deserted did Antonia resume her determined path, reversing course and scooting into a wide passage that ended in a tall window bay. I slipped along behind her as she hurried past two doors, chained shut, to the far end of the passage. Just outside the last door sat a writing table covered with untidy stacks of books, grimy canvas bags, and innumerable ink bottles. A large ledger book sat atop all.
Antonia rapped sharply on this door, retracting her hand just as quickly. When no one answered, she used a book from the desk to depress the latch and nudge the door open. She poked her head in. “Are you here?”
Recognizing that I had only moments to act, I slipped off my shoes, stuck them in my belt, and pelted down the passage, slipping through the doorway just behind her. It was all I could do to keep from bumping into her. Only after I was inside did I have time to call myself an idiot. Sorcerers claimed they could detect spellwork, and this was assuredly a sorcerer’s den.
To my left the apartment nearly sagged under the clutter—two tall cupboards, doors open to expose haphazard stacks of papers, books, and instruments I could not identify in the dark. Bottles, jars, and tins burdened shelves mounted on the walls. Three long tables and the floor were piled with everything from baskets of sticks to rolls of linen to entire plants uprooted.
Lady Antonia betook herself to my right, a neat and pleasant space, where a single long divan fronted by a low table faced an entire wall of windows, unmasked by any shred of drapery. Were it daytime, the room would be flooded with sunlight.
The lady set her lamp next an unlit one sitting atop a tall stool. The stool was a type tutors favored. Its lid, raised, would reveal a boxlike cavity where the tutor could tuck away papers or maps—or the mechanical toys sneaked into lessons by annoying little brothers. The wall where I stood, adjacent to the door, supported the only other furnishing, a set of whitewashed bookshelves crammed with books.
Antonia flopped on the couch for a time, then bounced up again and paced in circles. Agitated. Waiting.
I remained beside the door, lest I need a quick escape. A marble hearth gaped dark and cold on the wall opposite me. A great ring of amber or glass was embedded in the bare wood floor just in front of the hearth. A subtle gleam, as if the great ring had captured stray beams of Antonia’s lamplight, sketched out its dimension—perhaps twice the diameter of the one in Eugenie’s bedchamber.
Uneasy, I shoved the muted voices deeper behind a wall of silence. A withering quiet engulfed me, a weight upon my spirit as ominous as the fiercest thunderstorm of summer in the hour before its breaking, a wrongness that crept through my soul like settling frost.
I bli
nked and shuddered, welcoming the starry expanse visible beyond the wall of windows.
Blowing sighs of exasperation, the lady snatched up her lamp and strolled past the cluttered tables and shelves. She touched nothing. All her actions shouted caution. Before very long, she picked up her lamp, moved past me to the bookshelf, and began reading the titles. On the stretch of bare wall beside the bookshelves, just next my shoulder, hung the room’s sole decorative item: a small, exquisite painting of a lighthouse standing sentinel on a rocky headland, sending its beams into a stormy sky.
The tower bells tolled first hour of the night watch. I fingered the vial in my pocket. By half past second hour, I’d need to drink more of the potion.
“Where are you, fool?” Antonia muttered, slamming her lamp on the schoolmaster’s stool. “Who knows how long we have?” Her fingers tapped rapidly on the table, diamonds and sapphires sparkling in the light beams. Of a sudden she leapt up and charged straight toward me, wrenching the door open to peer into the passageway. Did she raise her elbow, she would plant it in my chest. Her abrasive scent tickled my throat. I shrank to the wall and tried not to breathe.
She moved away, only to circle back before I dared shift my position. A low bench, cluttered with empty cups and pitchers, prevented me sliding farther from the door.
I swallowed a cough and pressed my hand to my nose. Ludicrous. By the miracle of Lianelle’s potion, I lurked unseen, poised on the verge of uncovering a murderous conspiracy. Yet at any moment I could be exposed because of this woman’s proclivity for foul perfume!
My eyes watered. Throat clogged with phlegm, I buried my mouth in my sleeve, but soon felt the onslaught of an uncontrollable spasm. I had to get out or be discovered.
On the lady’s next approach I gathered my skirt and sleeves into the slimmest possible profile. In the moment she yanked open the door, I squeezed through, nudging it only slightly as I passed. Before reaching the end of the passage, I sneezed three times over and began coughing as if my lungs would burst.
Any hope of returning to the mage’s chamber or lurking in the passage to see who arrived was quickly overthrown. The vile scent lingered in my very pores, and the coughing spasm simply would not stop. The door opened and Antonia stepped out. . . .
Furious and frustrated, I fled, speeding through the windings of galleries and stairs in search of a remedy, moving fast enough the lonely footmen or light boys could not remark a disembodied sneeze. Common sense took me to a buttery that served the deserted reception rooms on the ground floor. Not only did I find stiff, bitter brandy amid the wine and ale casks, but also honey and spices.
I threw together a pale imitation of Melusina’s favorite nostrum, sipped my crude concoction, coughed, sputtered, and sipped again. By the time the syrupy elixir had done its work, I sagged, on the verge of tears, against an ale barrel. My head throbbed, chaos battering at my feeble control, my morning’s fierce optimism blighted by the knowledge that my father’s agony had stretched one more sun’s turning, and I’d come not one step closer to easing it.
The tower bells struck a quarter past second hour. I’d be visible soon, and I had no wish to prolong this exhausting state. I dragged myself to my feet.
A blinding concussion staggered me. Back to the stone wall, I raised my arms in feeble defense. No assailant stood within the silver-washed shadows, yet the hammer blows continued. A brutal, merciless barrage. Anger. Malevolent fury. Murderous indignation. Inside me. Filling me like a poisonous flood. Drowning me in feelings that were not mine.
I crumpled, hands clutching my head. Stop! I screamed it. In voiced word or in mind only, I could not have said. Please, stop! Have mercy!
Abruptly as it had begun, the noise stopped. Or so it seemed for one brief, blessed instant. But perhaps the source was only drowned in turn, for my discipline collapsed, unleashing the flood.
For some incomprehensible time, I huddled in the corner, arms thrown over my head as my mind ached with unknown joys, raged with unknown anger, sobbed with unknown anguish. Burying my own cries in my arms, I wept for the sorrows and fears of thousands.
Only as the voices faded and silence crept across the dusty flagstones did I hear an echo of the previous night. Not my father’s voice, but the other. The quiet, curious one.
Who? As a silken sheet it floated over my knotted limbs. As a pallet of eiderdown it cradled my hurts. Are you injured? In danger? Is this new to you?
Naught had been so terrifying as this. These words were not random passions, not a collection of scraps, but the communication of a single mind purposefully directed at me. Impossible. Madness. As if one could hold a conversation wholly without speech.
Have you any idea what you’ve done? Just speak clearly, focused on my voice, and I’ll hear. Gods, there has been no one . . . ever. . . . Not even my father’s pain had spoken such loneliness. Trust me.
Even were the speaker real, how could I trust? No face to read. No background, no reputation, no identity, no consequence for falsity. This overwhelming mystery that he—for of all things, I understood the speaker was a man—seemed to comprehend, but I did not. Madness, waiting to ensnare me.
One word . . .
But I did not, could not, answer. And when true silence enveloped me, thick and safe as a winter cloak, I crept back to my bed and let sleep hush my weeping.
CHAPTER 13
SOLA PASSIERT, MORNING
On the morning after my frustrated spying adventure, the queen’s salon was crowded. An array of delicacies had been spread on a sideboard: peeled oranges with cinnamon, breads, sliced cheeses, sugared pastries, and baked apples sprinkled with nuts. A towering crystal sculpture was draped with fat, firm grapes. Unable to remember when I’d last eaten, I filled a plate and perched in a window seat that gave me a good view of the comings and goings.
The ladies of the queen’s household shifted about the room, murmuring and fretting in soft, quick movements, like doves in a dovecote. A few gentlemen stood here and there, sober anchors in the fluid landscape, ready to offer soft grunts of sympathy or affirmation as the ladies required.
The gentleman the queen had welcomed so late was not among them. I’d yet to recall where I’d seen him before. To my disappointment, Lord Ilario was not among the gentlemen, either.
Duplais stood diagonally across the room from me, jotting notes in his ever-present journal, as householders brought him requests or questions. As the queen’s household administrator, he dealt with accommodations and servants for her ladies and gentlemen, arrangements for entertainments, and every trivial matter from supplies of hairpins to arranging a nursemaid for Baroness Agnecy’s mother. A man of his acuity and determination could not be satisfied in such a position, something between a steward and a nursemaid for seventy women and their requisite servants, one mage, one adept, and a physician. Portier de Savin-Duplais was more than that.
Lady Antonia flitted back and forth from the inner rooms, snapping at ladies and servants equally. She dispatched messengers to fetch the royal seamstress and a ribbon merchant, as we of the household must wear black badges on our sleeves throughout the mourning period for Cecile. She organized a party of ladies to sit with Eugenie when Verger Rinaldo came from the deadhouse to discuss funeral rites, as the Ducessa de Blasencourt had no children to see to such details.
Antonia looked stretched, as if her skin could barely contain her hostility, not at all the woman who had danced like a maiden in the night air. Her meeting with her partner in murder must not have gone well, even after I’d run away.
The difficult thing on this morning was pursuing the necessities of the day rather than the experience of the night before. Who? I could ask that myself. Someone in this very room? Though the immediacy of the experience tempted me to imagine the speaker as someone nearby, it was clear that the other voices I heard came from every level of society and every possible kind of person. Some would assume the voice daemonic, but the memory bore no taint of evil. Its owner had responded to my cry o
f pain—heard me, just as I heard all the others.
Reason insisted it was but dream or madness. Yet the bits and pieces—the quality of that voice, the restrained emotion, the caution and care, curiosity and longing—felt genuine, fragments of a single whole. A person. Real. Which implied that all the voices I heard were real. Angels’ mercy, my father lived.
The sun bathed my back with warm, soothing fingers. A farewell of sorts, for this was the day out of time, Sola Passiert, the Day of the Sun’s Passing. From today until spring, night would be longer than daylight.
Oddly, on a morning of such dire certainties and pressing anxiety, the food tasted extraordinary, and not simply because I was famished. Rich, sweet, crisp, and tart, every bite exuded flavor. When a red-haired serving girl offered a tray of warm couchines, I could not resist. The sweet’s thin layers were bathed deliciously in butter, honey, and ground almonds, and I relished the first sticky bite as if I had never tasted food at all. Such pleasures seemed obscene in light of my family’s disaster, in light of Queen Eugenie’s dead children and tormented dreams.
“D-damoselle Anne de Vernase, I believe.” Physician Roussel bowed gravely as I came near choking on a flake of pastry. I’d not even noticed his approach.
I could no more than bob my head in answer as I fumbled for a serviette.
“Her M-majesty requests your attendance within.”
“Now?” I croaked, between futile attempts to clear my throat.
His gray eyes sparked, and he relieved me of the plate, which threatened to dump its sticky remnants in my lap at any moment. “Unless you lose c-c-consciousness from an overdose of c-couchine, I believe you will be summoned when she is finished with her c-current guest.” The hard c sounds creased his brow only fleetingly. Though he worked diligently to minimize his afflicted speech, he seemed at ease with it.
“With Lord Ilario, perhaps?” I said as he set the plate aside, whipped out a kerchief, and presented the spotless square of linen to me.