by Susann Cokal
The crowds make a stew of murmurous anticipation. On foot and in boats, they cheer when the nobles cheer. I reach back among Midi’s soft skirts and clasp her arm. Not merely so we won’t be pulled apart amid the shifting and the bumping; she also seems to need it. She wears her noble pattens for walking on muddy footpaths and stony squares, but she’s clumsy as a pig in a ditch and almost stumbles into one. She’s tired and unwell; her fingers are like ice. No cloak, because she hasn’t needed one in the Queen’s chambers, and she’s unused to cold.
Yes, this version of Elinor Parfis, Countess of Belnát, needs me to hold her up. She needs me to find her way. She has not been among common Skyggehavners in years, if she ever did walk through them; more likely, she took a boat with the real Elinor everywhere the Countess went. She recoils from trolls who beg for money, even from sellers of nuts and ribbons who call out that some color would enliven her gown.
“Nej, nej, nej,” I say, arm out to ward them off. No, no, no.
In time, the people start to fall away. They dip knees to Midi’s strangeness, to her silks and glittering paillettes. They speculate.
Must be an entertainment from the palace.
Look again. Entertainment don’t wear silk.
I’ve heard of this one. She’s the Dark Countess who waits on the Queen.
She’s Queen of Night herself.
My father’s star, once brighter than the sun, has paled to the light of an ordinary torch. Night is growing nightlier.
So Midi and I stumble on together, beside the great canal, toward the house with the stone head. Following my plot.
At first, I could not think of a how. The how was too hard to imagine. I knew only that I had to speak and please the others.
So I began to gibber another fairy story, one I made up as I spoke. About an evil king with a bloody crown, two little princesses he demanded to take as brides, a mother who saved them by casting a spell.
And as I spoke, an idea grew in me, so when I stopped the story (with what some would call a bad end), I was ready. I had a plan.
As I should have expected, Midi and Queen Isabel found my scheme as difficult to believe in as the magical tale I had just told them. But perhaps the tale prepared the way for action, because here we are embarked upon what I suggested. My scheme. My madness.
In Isabel’s chamber, I pointed at Midi. “She’s the only one of us who can pass the gates unchallenged. You can’t, Your Highness, because you’re the Queen; and I can’t because I’m a servant. But that one can go wherever she likes, as long as she’s dressed as the Countess and is known to have your favor.”
Midi looked down at her once-glorious gown, streaked now from Isabel’s miscarriage. I could tell it had never occurred to her, this idea that she might simply walk out and thereby escape her bonds. She is so accustomed to being a slave that she would never think of running away.
“No one will see the blood on your skirt, now there’s no sun,” I assured her, even as I remembered uncomfortably that I had to change my soggy monthly cloths for clean ones. “You’ll pass the guards as a countess. They’ll let you do anything you want tonight.”
I could see Midi wavering, almost daring to believe, but Isabel fretted. “I cannot lose my Elinor again!” she wailed — though she retained enough sense to hold her wailing to a whisper, so only Midi and I heard.
At that, Midi touched her gently on the shoulder. I realized then that some change had come over her, as if she’d developed a true friendship for Isabel, and one more tender than the real Elinor’s ever was.
“Midi — Elinor — will come back,” I said, somewhat uncertainly; for why would she, once having tasted freedom? “If perhaps . . . Your Highness might offer her some reward?”
Of course, I was seeking a reward for myself as well. I held my request ready. But Isabel focused on Midi, brown eyes on brown eyes.
“Elinor, if you do this, I will grant your heart’s desire.” The words from a fairy tale.
In reply, Midi spread her hands. What would anyone want in her position? What would anyone dare to want? Even when told she could do it for herself, she sought permission to go.
“Yes,” Isabel resolved. “If you do this for me, I’ll give you . . . complete liberty.” She seemed to understand in that moment that Midi is a slave — though in some sense we are all slaves to our sovereigns. “Then you may do exactly as you please. You may join Count Belnát on the green islands or go wherever else you like.” Then again, it was as if she didn’t understand after all who Midi is. “Or” (wistfully) “you could remain with me . . . If you would like to, I would like you to. And you” — she turned to me at last —“what do you want?”
For a moment, with the words heart’s desire echoing in the anxious bell of my brain, I saw Jacob Lille’s face and the legendary solid streets of Copenhagen into which he’s vanished. But I say instead, “I want freedom too. For Klaus Bingen, who has been unfairly imprisoned.”
I still have some doubts as to whether Isabel can really grant this wish, given Nicolas’s tight hold on the present government; but a mad queen seemed more likely to keep a promise than a cruel regent, and so I decided.
I never wanted to kill her, anyway. I prefer not to be a murderess. It is a relief to shake off that role — one impossible task I need not complete.
“He’ll go free,” Queen Isabel vowed. Her lips were white from the effort of speaking and plotting and trying to remain un-mad. “My daughter will do it. My son. Bring me a baby and you’ll have what you wish for, and money besides. But here . . .” Her right hand struggled with her left, tugging at the little finger until she pulled something off. “Take this. A baby cannot come cheap.”
I dared step to her loose-clasped fingers and dig into their nest. I emerged with a most precious egg: the famous ruby ring of the Bullen family.
I carry the ring in my pocket now.
It is surprisingly heavy, the first real jewel I’ve held without a backing of cloth or a casing of skin. No, not surprising; a jewel should have a certain heft. Especially a ruby. And one of such importance.
At first, I took pleasure at feeling this weight upon my hand, rubbing against my fingers. Then Isabel, for what seemed like the last time possible, called me away from pleasure and back to duty. “Go quickly, both of you.”
And when we looked at each other, uncertain — for accompanying Midi was not part of my plan — Isabel added, “She’ll never find the way on her own.”
Midi pointed to the chest where the miscarriage was stored. But I thought, with that selfish scheming part of me, that it was better to leave the demon there for now; because the demon keeps pressure on Isabel to honor her promises. While I mouthed something about it being easier to dispose of after the new baby is in place, Isabel interrupted impatiently:
“Then go on, go quickly, together. You can leave me alone for once in my life. Everyone considers me dead, anyway.”
So here we walk on the other side of the gates, among crowds who treat Midi as noble; on an errand for a dead Queen, to save a man who may be dead already himself. It is the one constant of our lives: We push against Fate, driven forward by the limpest of hopes, that Chance will intervene and save us.
There was once a princess whose portrait so enchanted a foreign king that he sailed across the sea to behold her beauty for himself. When he arrived, he found her every bit as lovely as her painted version, and as a result he ran her father through with a sword and swallowed every ornament on the dead king’s body.
Fed by those treasures, a magnificent golden crown grew from the bones of the wicked king’s skull. That crown was so sharply tined that the birds who attempted to alight and feed upon its bright jewels were instantly speared, and blood ran down into the evil king’s eyes. He left it there, for it made him ever more fierce and terrifying. And now he announced that he would marry the princess immediately.
If the girl did not agree, he said, he would murder her and marry her sister, who was nearly as fair
; and if neither of them did as he required, he would murder them both in the most horrible way and then kill their mother, who was already ill with grief at what had happened.
Under this threat, the queen discovered a strength in herself and resolved to save the two girls. Sick as she was, she marched them to the docks and tied a rock around each one’s neck and pushed them into the sea, where they drowned. Or rather, they appeared to drown, because the rocks were in fact magic stones that put the girls to sleep.
The two princesses were caressed by feathery seaweeds and tended by creatures of the sea, while, above water, the evil king conducted a campaign of vengeful destruction. The land was laid waste, its riches gathered in the hull of his great black-sailed ship, which bobbed at anchor above the sleeping objects of his rough courtship. Golden statues, bushels of wheat, paintings of saints, clocks that chimed for the passing minutes: All went to this evil king, whose crown was now so bloody that even the jewels did not shine anymore; it was instead the skulls of dead songbirds that glowed red in testimony to his power.
In those days, every baby born in the land was a monster, for the evil king had corrupted its wombs. Their skins were like lizards’; their eyes were like goats’. Infanticide became common.
The queen wept, and the princesses kept sleeping.
I am Elinor.
After every thing that have happen in my life, here be the first thought that cause me deep upset. I am Elinor.
When I crack the door and leave the inner chamber and pass through the rooms and nooks and down the stair . . . all the palace see me as she. They let me pass, they bow to my skirts. And though they might stare, they require no thing of me — no paper or permission — be cause while I be Elinor, I am one who give such permission, not get it. And Ava is the one who knew it could be so. Why did I never think it? Why did n’t Arthur say so? If he ever had a kind feeling for me . . .
Outside where the night smell too sweet and feel too cold, I nod at guards and hoist my bosoms. They bow and dip they halberds. So they also let me pass, and Ava with me. To the gate, and then they ope the gate. And at last I am Outside.
I am Elinor.
I walk in the city.
It is a terrible place.
Three steps beyond the palace, on the square of the cathedral, filth begin. Heaps of trash and dirt and cats crawling every where, eating trash. Dogs snapping at the cats. They eat trash, too, and fight each other.
Some thing catch my skirt with it jaws. I fall, Ava catch me. From then after she hold my arm while our breath make snow in the air and broken people ask for money. One balance a knife upon his nose and then push it down his throat to ask that people pay. I refuse, though he speak around the knife and call me a grande dame and say that I be beautiful.
We have no money any way. We have just a ring to buy a baby. A tiny child who have no opinion for his own price and who will become a coin-purse for the Lunedies.
Ava have said may be we will not need to pay, a baby with such a future may come free. If he even exist. But I know she will make sure to use the ring some way and mold me to her plan, and so she grip my arm so tight as an eel she’ll eat for her dinner.
We trace the canal they call Beautiful, and though I see great houses that I know belong to some of the court, I see also more filth heaps between them, streams of garbage leak to the big water. The canal is choked of boats, and in between there swim rats who seek out trash and careless skirts to nibble. The tall, cold people of this place point to me and stare as we pass by, while rats tear shreds from off they clothes to make their beds.
They speak. They talk some stories, they think they know me. Outside the palace, even.
So here is what I think as Ava Bingen pull me down an alley that end with a bridge: There can be no more freedom Outside than in the palace.
SOLITUDE
FOR the first time in her life, Isabel experiences solitude. Savors it, rolls it over her senses, and gets its flavor. Sweet, bitter, slightly charred, with the metallic tang of sacrifice . . . She is alone, without a lady-in-waiting or a maidservant, a fellow regent or a husband or a physician or a sister or a friend: she is alone.
Isabel Lunedie, formerly Isabelle des Rayaux.
It is a strange sensation to be by herself, and Isabel feels the rush of heat and color returning to her fingers and face while she considers how to put it into words. Funny how she can name flavors but not feelings. To be alone today is to be weak, certainly, but that is because of the — No, she will not think about whatever-it-is she glimpsed before dark Elinor tucked it away.
Instead, she studies the glob of wax that Elinor finally returned to her, once they agreed to the plan put forth by that sharp-faced maid. The wax has gone soft in her clasp, easy to reshape. She works on it earnestly for a while. First she gives it a pointy fish-nose, then rubs that down to almost nothing. With the nose flattened, the cheeks become wider, giving the little thing the appearance of a sheep. That cannot be allowed either, so she works on the cheekbones, giving them more definition, making them look less like a baby’s and more like Grand-mère’s when she gave young Isabelle the sapphire ring that vanished when her fingers swelled for this last child.
Nothing has value, said Grand-mère, until it is given away or stolen. Isabel does not know what’s become of the ring since then.
She rounds down the cheekbones again.
The sorrow-child’s waxen face is getting grubby, gray and pink. And yet it also grows translucent, glowing like amber, hinting at what’s underneath — nubbins of bone, fine strands of hair twining around themselves in order to grow.
Isabel’s breasts ache. She feels a burning itch and a trickle in the part of her that just split open. She remembers that she is diseased. She thinks, also, that there is something wrong with that sharp-faced maid, something familiar — if only she can name it.
When Lady Isabelle des Rayaux arrived in Skyggehavn, she was fourteen years old: fresh, beautiful. Excited.
Already she felt it. From the moment that the lips of the bay closed around the French ship’s hull, as she passed rocky islets too inhospitable for even a clump of moss or a stray ant, she knew this place was her destiny in a way that she hadn’t imagined back at her father’s sun-drenched court. Gulls swooped around the ship and left their pearly droppings as the palace materialized through wisps of mist. It was a dragon crouching, kneeling (she thought) in submission. The spires were elbows, spine, and head. Then came the towers and the long, low body of walls. The gates gaping like an open mouth. Skyggehavn was taking her in, and she realized she needed to be swallowed, wanted, courted, and coveted in just this way.
Her long dark hair whipped in the sea wind. Her soft red heart fluttered in her chest. She knew that, in surrendering herself, she would conquer.
“My lady.” Attendants brought Isabelle below deck to braid her hair. She gazed into a mirror and knew that she looked lovely.
She went up on deck again when her ship anchored in the bay. The royal barge glided out to meet her. She was helped on board and presented to her almost-husband, a thin and sallow lad with sad eyes. Curtsied to his stout mother, exchanged pretty speeches in French as the barge maneuvered around to the long pier.
“Merci,” she said several times. “Grâce à vous et au bon Dieu . . . J’admire votre beau paysage et votre belle ville principale . . .”
(God, she thought, for I am such a young thing! . . .)
In the middle of such a sentence, Isabelle’s father-in-law-to-be — much taken with her, some said to an unseemly degree — swept her into his arms and leaped from the barge onto the pier, where she sank very properly to her knees and thanked him for arranging her marriage.
He bent down and whispered in her ear, tickling words incomprehensible in the accent of this place although they came in her native tongue.
The courtiers applauded.
She will have the most beautiful children, they agreed.
Isabel, alone, is growing weaker. She has some no
tion that she should heave herself out of bed and hide this heavy sorrow-child, but she cannot.
She hears cheering outside.
Her last moments, and she is not so alone after all. The court, at least; that vague glistening thing — it will always be with her.
Ava explain that this city be all ways in change, that she have not stepped out in it for months and so it be a-stranged to her. A bridge have fallen here and a new house were built there. Much of our walking is returning to a place where Ava knows some other way to go. Untangling also the moon which move her self in journey over the roofs.
After some time we come up on a long stone bridge that lead to a church. There the walls moan No Hope and wind turn to whistles in the spire. Filths fall from Elinor’s shoes while we cross toward it, garbage drop to the water and feed the rats that swim.
No body share the footpath here. They all may be in the palace crowd or in the moaning tower and this be ever a dark place. Ava know her way now.
The moaning grow stronger, then it fade.
We walk through filth again to the house that Ava have sought, tall but not taller than the neighbors, dark and with a tear of black cloth that blow from a high window. A head of stone hangs sculptured by the door, with yellow wires twisted round the neck and bits of glass in shatters on the ground.
This be Ava Bingen’s home.
She tries the door and it is locked. Ava look up at that black cloth and breathe quick in greater fear, but she make a fist and pound upon the door.
“Gerda!” she shout. “Sabine!” Though I should guess that persons with a house marked out by broken glass will not come for shouting.
When Ava knock the door, the head shake as if it warning go away. There come more shouting too, from the place of howls that we just passed; so all the neighborhood does caution us.