by Carol Berg
Eugenie had joined me at the window. “Your father didn’t lie about this, Anne,” she said, gently chiding. “He wept when Desmond died. More than Philippe, I think.” Her hands closed my fingers about the little bracelet. “He said he’d worn this in his foundling basket, and for the required year thereafter, and had emerged from every battle with life and honor intact. What does that say about the shield magic? And what does that say about your father?”
Eugenie’s jeweled finger raised my chin so I could not avoid meeting her gaze. “Michel and I were never friends. Our opinions diverged on almost everything. He pitied Philippe for finding it politically expedient to wed a girl of twelve. He considered me spoilt and ignorant, which I am, and unworthy of an incomparable king, which is likely true, as well. But I saw him look on his own daughters, Anne—on you, especially, his firstborn, his soul’s child—and he could never in this life have hurt that poor Ophelie.”
Her warmth drew out my own declaration. “I doubted my father for a long while, lady. But now I believe, as firmly as I believe in anything, he is a victim of these evildoers, not one of them.”
Lady Antonia’s clarion tones echoed in the passage, along with other women’s voices.
The dark eyes that met my own displayed no frailty, no doubt, no fear. “Then I’ll believe it, too.” Eugenie’s conspiratorial smile transformed her into a lady of mischief. “Now, we’d best be ready.”
In a rustle of satin, she returned to Lord Ilario’s divan and shoved his feet aside to take a seat beside him. “I hate when duty takes us out these days,” she said, loud enough the approaching company could hear her. “The city is so strange. People tell me it is some ordinary shifting of the ground that settles abandoned tunnels and drives birds and beasts from their usual lairs. I don’t believe it. My driver never explains why he chooses one route over another anymore. Someday we’re going to roll straight into one of these pits of Dimios.”
“Not while I am with you, Geni fair,” said the chevalier, sitting straight up as if someone had stuck him with a pin. He yawned prodigiously. “I shall spread my cloak across every pit and pothole, and you shall not topple. I had Jacard charm it just a few days since.” He slapped one gloved hand to his mouth. “You don’t suppose the charm will fail or reverse itself now he’s been sacked?”
I left them to a discussion of what charms and wards they should take with them, and returned quickly to the medicine chest. As I reassembled it, I bumped the case and the lid fell, landing on my left arm. The pain nearly shot the top of my head off. I had the case only half reassembled when the ladies entered the bedchamber.
Lady Patrice accompanied Antonia, as did tall, bony Marie-Claire de Tallement, the exceedingly aloof maid of honor I’d seen at cards with Eugenie and Lord Ilario. Was she Eugenie’s choice or Antonia’s or Ilario’s? The chevalier held her chair and gallantly offered her wine, sweets, and unstoppable conversation, while Antonia and Patrice fussed over Eugenie. Though almost as tall as Eugenie the girl never looked at his face, but she bit her lip as if a smile might be struggling to get through. Perhaps she was only reserved, not proud.
I was most pleased to note that the gouty Lady Eleanor was not in the party.
After much fussing and kissing and talk of shoes, charms, smelling salts, pastilles for nausea, and the possibility of rain, the lord and ladies departed. Hard on their heels, I abandoned my post. Cradling my throbbing arm, clutching the copper circlet and a growing excitement that gave my feet wings, I hurried off to find Lady Eleanor. She had bored me to distraction with endless exposition on Sabria’s family heritage, but if anyone in Sabria might recognize this device, she would.
THE DUCESSA ELEANOR SAT IN the Rose Room, writing out the queen’s schedule for the following day. Her heavy jowls and wattled chin sagged as she wiped her pen and sat back to rest her full glare on me. “What kind of question, damoselle?”
“As you know, Lady Antonia has taken upon herself the difficult duty of soliciting offers for my hand, a service for which, naturally, I am most grateful. As it happened, a gentleman approached me yesterday and asked if he might present his credentials to my goodfather’s representative. He was a well-spoken gentleman and immaculately turned out, which—please excuse my frankness, my lady—the Barone Gurmeddion is not.”
Eleanor’s eyebrows twitched and nostrils flared in just such fashion that I could see she agreed with my assessment of the Honorable Derwin.
The copper bracelet remained in my pocket, lest she ask how I had come by it. I called upon every maidenly matchmaking discussion I had heard from my fellow maids of honor. “As I am anxious to satisfy my goodfather, the king, with the best match possible, I must not fail to present this other gentleman. Only with my sudden summoning after Her Majesty’s fainting spell that night, I never got his name. I do recall the outline of the crest he wore on his tabard. Cloth of gold it was, my lady!”
Though her impressive bosom heaved an equally impressive sigh, Lady Eleanor did not hesitate to reach for the book I had never seen more than twelve centimetres from her hand. At the same time, she nodded at the stack of paper and the pen she had just abandoned. “Sketch what you recall of the device. We shall see if he has the quality of a good match or merely a good tailor.”
She removed the dark leather volume of The Grande Historie of the Sabrian Peerage and Families of Lesser Note from its blue velvet wrappings as reverently as if it were Philippe’s own crown, while I drew a reasonable approximation of the beast and bird from the bracelet. I blotted the page and turned it around to show her.
The ducessa pulled it close, squinting. She slammed her book shut, her complexion taking on the color of the age-mottled leather. “What insolence is this, girl?”
“My artwork is crude, I know. Perhaps it is not very like—”
“None wore that crest in this house,” she snapped. “None wears it in any house, nor does it appear in my book. Even to draw it is to cross the law.”
The room grew cold as a daemon’s heart. But I had to hear it. “What did I draw, lady? I’ll search out the man and discover the correct device, as I’d never wish to slander such a gentleman. But tell me, please.”
She snatched up the pen and dipped it again, and with the magic of an artist born she lengthened the stretched-out bird, rounded the crocodile’s snout and the bird’s beak into similar heads . . . added two crescent arms and the suggestion of legs until each had the same number . . . and spun the paper to face me. “No other mark bears this exact configuration. Nose to nose. Bird and beast. Crocodile and crocodile bird. This reconstruction is all that’s been seen for more than a century, and that’s rare enough, bless the Pantokrator’s mercy.”
I had seen her “reconstruction”—two eight-legged beasts entwining deadly pincers in an unending battle. Dueling scorpions. The mark of Mondragon.
CHAPTER 29
23 OCET, MIDDAY
Throughout history artists had reused canvases, slathering paint over older works they disdained as out of style. But now restorers at the great schools of art spent years delicately cleaning away the newer, mundane work to uncloak the glories of Sabria’s ancient cultures. What if one didn’t like the work uncovered? What if you realized the portrait you had just washed away was the image you loved?
“Divine grace, damoselle. Are you well?” The man stepped from a side passage.
As fate had mandated since our first encounter, my path had crossed with Physician Roussel’s yet again in the morning flow of householders.
“Yes. Certainly. Very well.” I shaped a smile and folded my arms gingerly, hoping to disguise any telltale bloodstains on my sleeve. The blow from the queen’s medicine box must have started it bleeding again.
A door slammed from the direction I had just come.
“Your color seems high.” Brow wrinkled, he glanced up and down the corridor. From around the corner came the unmistakable thump of Lady Eleanor’s cane. “If I could offer assistance . . .”
“Hones
tly, it is nothing. Please excuse me. I’ve duties.” My tumultuous emotions left me nothing to offer.
“Forgive my presumption.” He backed away and bowed briskly.
“Divine grace, sonjeur.”
Numb feet sped me to my hidden balcony, where I huddled amid the rubble of plaster, stone, and every belief about my family’s place—my place—in the world.
Long fingers of mist twined through the east gardens, teasing the eye with glimpses of color—here green leaves limned with autumn gold, there a red tile roof or a gold-tipped spire. Glimpses of truth. But not the whole of it. The trees might grow within a courtyard garden or a cultivated orchard or a lingering grove of the wildwood. The roof might cover snug rooms or open colonnades.
In the same way, these glimpses of conspiracy and murder and family and ancient evils might tell a thousand different stories. Seven-and-forty years ago, a newborn male child wearing the device of an extinct Sabrian blood family had been abandoned on a knight’s doorstep. What did that mean? My left arm pained me worse by the moment, a reminder of the cost of probing deeper.
Sir Gavril’s kitchen girl might have found the shield bracelet and put it on her child for the same simple reason she chose to leave the babe with the good-hearted knight—to protect him from harm. Yet how likely was such an artifact to be lying about? The garnet eyes were intact and valuable. And shield bracelets were passed down in families, northern families. As in Delourre, where my father had been born and abandoned. In Delourre, where the Gautieri had built their collegia and their library, part of the Grande Demesne Gautier. And Kajetan’s guest had worn the colors of Delourre.
Papa’s mother must surely have been ignorant of the symbol’s meaning and the consequences of discovery. In the decades after the Blood Wars, a hint of Mondragon blood to a magistrate had you dead at the end of a spear. Unless the Camarilla got wind of it first. That death was worse.
Papa could not have known the meaning of the device, either, else he’d never have given the bracelet to Philippe and Eugenie for their child. Yet Cecile de Blasencourt had been asking questions about my father’s birth. She’d a hint from somewhere. She had surely seen the bracelet, kept in a silk bag identical to that holding the scrap from her armoire.
And what of Duplais? He didn’t know the older mark, either. What had he said to me about Mage Kajetan’s handmark? It was not to be confused with either the scorpions of Mondragon or the three keys of Gautier.
Three keys! And so did another question resolve itself, while spawning ten more. On the morning she realized that death was inescapable, Lianelle had included a loop of three keys with her spellmaking particles. If the lock of hair aimed the death spell at herself, and Guerin’s note designated the person she wished to find her body, then what role did the symbol of Gautier play?
Revelations came tumbling. I had seen three keys in another place, too. In the Bastionne Camarilla, in the ruined chamber Dante insisted was my father’s laboratorium, the mage had shown me a topaz set in a triangle formed of three bronze keys. If a Mondragon survived two centuries after the Blood Wars, then it was possible that a Gautier had also survived. Was that what Lianelle was telling me? That the Aspirant was not a Mondragon, but a Gautier? Heaven’s creatures!
A tickling at the back of my neck and along my arms signaled another onslaught of tremors and nausea. I buried my face in my arms, trying to empty my head and scour away confusion and dread.
My friend! Gods and daemons, are you well? All morning I’ve felt these earthquakes in the aether. But when you close your mind, I cannot—I’ve not been able to reach you.
I’m well. I nearly dissolved in laughter at the thought that my uneasy conscience had somehow opened the door between us and rousted him from his work. Perfectly well.
You’re not, though. And if you believe so, then you’ve greater problems than you know.
What a priggish assessment!
You’ve no idea what my problems are. My hands trembled as they felt the zahkri grind on bone. As I imagined Guerin and his shattered shoulder trying to survive in the streets of Merona. As molten iron stirred in my belly yet again. Foul and wicked. Poison.
I’ve intruded where I should not, he said. Forgive me.
His silent withdrawal struck me like an ice bath.
Wait . . . I’m sorry. Please . . . He deserved better of me. How could I explain my state of mind without blurting out that my father’s blood—my own blood—might be so dangerous as to be unworthy of life, or that it might be the very seed sparking a revival of savagery? Or that my sister had murdered herself rather than allow someone else to do it, perhaps because of this very discovery? Or that I had spoken with a dead man, who was somehow seducing my queen and part of a plot to thrust the world into upheaval?
. . . please don’t go . . .
My friend’s solid presence, his concern, gave me an anchor in the chaos of my thoughts. I could not bear to be left alone with all this yet again.
I’m in no immediate danger. It’s just been an awful day. I walked out on an errand this morning, and a brute assaulted me. No one I knew. But I . . . struck him. Cut him. His flesh ripped and his lifeblood spilled out on my hands . . .
The words spilled as if they were my own lifeblood. I had to let them flow, lest skull and heart burst.
. . . and I know it was justified and I’m not sorry for what I did, but I feel filthy and wretched, and I keep seeing it over and over. I think I might possibly have used . . . I curled into the corner of the balcony and buried my head in my arms, holding off a redoubled onslaught of sensory memory. As some great opticum whose lenses reveal those things hidden to the naked eye, the vile insinuation of the copper bracelet magnified the morning’s events. And with the closer scrutiny arrived the truth I had never wanted.
From childhood my Cazar relatives had told me I lacked the factor of the blood that sparked magic. No talent. It was a certainty as firm as Montclaire’s foundation. I had rejoiced that I would never need to experience the strangeness, the uncertainties, the sickness that accompanied any proximity to spellworking. As I grew older and scholarship—and pride—led me to worship at the altar of reason, the lack made it altogether simple to deny the truth of magic.
Yet as I had slashed at Guerin’s magical bindings, anger and hatred had raised this fiery torrent in my limbs. In a gnat’s heartbeat, the impervious cords had split. As if by magic. As if by foul, wicked Mondragon magic.
Great gods . . . Well, of course you used your talent to defend yourself. Magic is a gift you bring to any encounter. I, too, came late to magic, so I understand the confusions power can stir. But to deny it makes no more sense than the astronomer de Vouger choosing to be ignorant because his intellect might lead him to contradict the Book of Creation. Must a woman stop reading books or blind herself because some poor ignorant devil in Riverside cannot read? Must a tall man hunch his shoulders and never reach too high?
Certainly not. His logic tamed my terror, but did not quench it. It just felt—Some talent for sorcery is wicked, yes? The very nature of it . . . violence, hate, anger, a bent to evil. My stomach spasmed again as the bowman’s warm blood dribbled through my fingers.
Magic is not wicked. No more than oceans are wicked or learning or sight or weather. Certainly raw power, uncontrolled by the structure of a spell, can be dangerous, just as lightning is dangerous. And some people—some with talent; some without—have a warped, devilish spirit bent to violence. That’s why a practitioner must learn control from the first inkling of talent. Emotions that touch the innermost self can cause— A spasm of outrage cut off his thought, rumbling in my soul as distant thunder rattles windows. Did the brute injure you in such a—Is that the problem? Did he use magic to . . . gods . . . to violate you?
No, no, I’ve only a few cuts and bruises, some from a magical weapon, some not. I found myself hastening to reassure him. They ache and sting a bit. That’s all. The man didn’t get what he wanted. It’s the reliving sickens me.
/> The stretched moment eased. Have the injuries seen to, he said. By someone who’s familiar with magical injuries. Many wounds seem simple but are not. A friend taught me that, and I recall it every time I sharpen a pen. Don’t cripple yourself. Promise me.
More and more I felt certain as to my friend’s identity. Indeed, Duplais bore the scars of magical wounding—burns from the ship fire that almost killed him and the king—and he had certainly come late to magic. All right, I said. I’ll find someone to look at it.
And never feel guilty for defending yourself with whatever is at hand. If the incident has opened you to your own gifts, all the better.
Closing my eyes, I could almost see him, a shadowed form against a brilliant light. Thick walls surrounding him. Uncomfortable but safe. Solitary. Focused on this strange conversation as I was. Concerned about me.
I scrubbed my scalp as terror receded. I was still Anne. Plain, awkward Anne. I had been angry before without changing into a monster. You’re very good at calming hysterical women, I said, leaning my head against the damp balusters, letting the mist bathe my heated skin. Tell me, friend—
I hated the thought of returning to the empty world. I yet had some time.
—do your studies progress? I know nothing of night-blooming plants. They’re rare, I know. Do you find them more beautiful than day bloomers? Or perhaps you just like working in the dark?
His hesitation was as clear as my hand in front of me. Perhaps I’d made some new faux pas. If you’ve other business waiting or would rather not . . .
No, no. It’s just . . . in fact, I detest the dark. Light—seeing—that’s the finest pleasure the world offers. But, of course, some work has to be done in the dark . . . like studying night bloomers. Actually, there are a goodly number of them. Thornapple, of course, and daylilies and evening campion. There’s a rare type of vervain that bears white flowers that open in the dark. I can’t see they’re more attractive than other plants. It’s their response to the night that is their truly unique quality, though any aspect of their complex nature can be useful. Vervain is included in love potions and witch wards, while at the same time it serves as a wash for festering wounds, a remedy for gout and flux, and a hundred other medicinal tasks. The Cinnear used vervain to cleanse their temples of evil spirits. Any physical property can be useful in spellwork—a tree’s hardness or resistance to disease or an herb’s hairy stem or thick leaves—but you can also draw on the beliefs surrounding them. All these things make up the plant’s intrinsic nature, the power that it brings to magic. If you choose to pursue your talent, which you ought, you must study these things—see them for yourself. Magic is all about seeing.. . .