by Greg Keyes
“Where were you from, Starqin?” Stephen wondered aloud. “What town?”
“Colbaely in the Greffy of Holtmarh.”
A little chill went up his spine. “I have a friend from there,” he said. “Winna Rufoote.”
Starqin nodded. “Winna was nice. She used to play the holly pole with us and give us the barley rusk after her father made beer. She was too old, though. Not one of us.”
“She had a father—”
“He owned the Sow’s Teat.”
“Is he a wothen?”
She shook her head. “He left when we started burning the town.”
“You burned your own town?”
She nodded. “It had to be done. It wasn’t supposed to be there.”
“Because the Briar King said so.”
“Because it wasn’t supposed to be. We children always knew that. We had to convince the adults. Some weren’t convinced, but they left. Fralet Rufoote was one of them.”
They continued on in silence; Stephen wasn’t sure what else to say, and in the absence of questions, Starqin didn’t seem inclined to pursue conversation.
The ceiling rose again until it vanished from the faint glow of the witchlights. After a time, another illumination arose, a distant, slanting shaft of radiance that turned out to be sunlight descending through a hole high up in the roof of the cavern.
Starqin brought the craft to rest at another stone quay.
“There are steps carved in the stone,” she said. “They lead up to the exit.”
“You’re not going with me?”
“I have other things to do.”
Stephen regarded the girl’s eyes, now jade in the sunfall from above.
“This can’t be right,” he told her. “All of this death, all of this killing—it can’t be right.”
Her features shifted briefly through something he didn’t understand, but it was a glimmer of a silvery fish in a deep pool. Then the water was again empty and calm.
“Life is always coming and going,” she said, “if you watch. Always something being born, always something dying. In the spring more is being born; in late autumn more is dying. Death is more natural than life. The bones of the world are death.”
Stephen’s throat tightened. “Children shouldn’t talk like that,” he said.
“Children know these things,” she said. “It’s only adults that teach us that a flower is more beautiful than a rotting dog. He just helped us keep what we were born knowing, what every beast that doesn’t know how to lie to itself understands in its marrow.”
Stephen’s sorrow and sympathy suddenly twisted, and for an instant he was so angry at the girl, he wanted to strangle her. In the midst of his doubts and uncertainty the sheer satisfaction of that absolute feeling was so wonderful and terrible that it left him gasping, and when it passed, as it did seconds later, he was actually shaking.
Starquin hadn’t missed it.
“Besides,” she said softly, “you have whole seasons of death in you.”
“What do you mean?”
But she just pushed off and did not answer, and soon the skiff was lost from view.
Stephen began to climb.
The stone steps switched their way back and forth up the stone wall until at last they brought him to a small landing. The cave opening was quite small, and beyond it he could see little more than a screen of cane. A narrow path led through the stiff vegetation, however, and he picked his way along it until suddenly the hillside opened up.
He found himself gazing down upon pasture, and beyond that the orderly rows of apple trees. Across the little valley, above the trees, a stone building rose. He gasped involuntarily as emotions rushed up to him like old acquaintances: anticipation, boyish excitement, pain, disillusionment, rank terror.
Anger.
It was the monastery d’Ef, where he first had learned how corrupt the Church of his childhood had become, where he had met and been tortured by Desmond Spendlove. Where he had been forced to decipher the scrifti that had perhaps doomed the world.
“Wilhuman, werliha. Wilhuman hemz,” a voice scratched behind him.
“Welcome, traitor. Welcome home.”
“YOU’RE SUPPOSED to kill me?” Anne asked, fixing Elyoner with her gaze.
The duchess of Loiyes smiled lazily back at her.
Anne could almost feel Neil MeqVren tightening next to her, like the string of a lute.
She waited until I sent Aspar away, she thought. Not that he and Winna would have made a difference against this many…
She lifted a hand to rub her forehead but let it drop. It would only make her look weak.
Too much had happened, and far too quickly. She’d still been blurry with alcohol when she’d met Elyoner and her men on the road. And then the relief of seeing a familiar face—the face of family, even—had been so intense that she hadn’t allowed herself to entertain the most obvious thoughts.
That Elyoner had sent her attackers.
Elyoner Dare had always been a mystery to Anne, albeit a pleasant one. She was Anne’s father’s sister, older than Lesbeth and Robert, but she had always seemed much younger than Anne’s father. Anne guessed her to be around thirty.
Family trips to Glenchest had always been a treat; there was even a sense among the children that the adults were having more fun than they were, though it wasn’t until much later that she had begun to understand what sort of fun it was.
That impression had grown as Anne got older. Elyoner always appeared to do pretty much as she pleased. Though she had a husband somewhere, he was never really in evidence, and Elyoner was well known for taking young and highly temporary lovers. Muriele—Anne’s mother—had always seemed to disapprove of Elyoner, which for Anne was another thing that recommended her aunt. Though a great gossip, she had never seemed in the least political, or even particularly aware of what went on beyond the who-was-sleeping-with-whom.
Now Anne was suddenly, acutely conscious that she did not really know her aunt at all.
“Kill you and bury the body where it will not be found,” Elyoner amplified. “Those were the instructions. In return, Robert tells me my life at Glenchest will go on much as it always has.” She sighed wistfully. “Such a comforting thought.”
“But you aren’t,” Anne said. “You aren’t going to have me killed…are you?”
Elyoner’s cerulean eyes focused sharply on her.
“No,” she said. “No, of course not. My brother doesn’t know me quite as well as he thinks he does, which is a bit disheartening.” Her face grew more serious, and she leveled an accusing finger at Anne. “But you should never have trusted me, for I might have,” she said. “Consider that if your dear uncle Robert has ordered your murder, no other relative of yours is trustworthy, with the likely exception of your mother. Taking your side makes my life very difficult and could in fact end it. That’s not an easy choice to make, even for you, my sweet.”
“But you made it.”
Elyoner nodded. “After what happened to Fastia and Elseny, practically in my very own parlor—no, not you, too. I loved William above all my siblings. I could never betray his last daughter that way.”
“Do you think Uncle Robert has gone mad?” Anne asked.
“I think he was born mad,” Elyoner said. “It happens with twins, you know. Lesbeth got everything that was good from their parents’ union, and Robert was left with the dregs.” Her gaze cut aside to Sir Neil.
“You may relax now, sweet knight,” she said. “To repeat myself in plain words, I’m here to help Anne, not to harm her. If I wanted her dead, I should have accomplished that long before finding you and then used your grief to make you my lover. Or some other wicked and delightful thing.”
“You always speak such comforting words,” Neil replied.
Anne thought that the familiar response seemed to confirm what Elyoner had implied earlier, that Sir Neil and her sister Fastia had had some sort of affair.
On the surface that
seemed impossible. Fastia had been ludicrously dutiful, and so was Neil. One would think they would have reinforced those qualities in each other rather than abrogating them. But Anne was quickly learning that nothing about the heart was simple or, rather, that it was very simple, but the consequences were baroque.
In any event, she didn’t have time to consider what her sister had or hadn’t done with this young knight. She had other priorities.
“Now that you mention her, has there been any word at all from Lesbeth?” Anne asked.
“No,” Elyoner replied. “The rumor is that she was betrayed by her betrothed, Prince Cheiso of Safnia, that he gave her over to some ally of Hansa so they could blackmail William. That was the reason your father went to the headland of Aenah: to negotiate her release.
“I suppose only Robert knows what really happened there.”
“Then you think Uncle Robert had something to do with my father’s death?”
“Of course,” Elyoner said.
“And Lesbeth? What do you think really happened to her?”
“I do not—” Elyoner’s voice caught for an instant. “I would not imagine that she still lives.”
Anne took a few breaths to try to absorb that.
The snow had begun again, and she hated it. She felt as if a bone had broken in her someplace. A small one, but one that would never quite heal.
“You really think Uncle Robert would kill his own twin sister?” she finally posed. “He loved her more than he loved anyone. He doted on her. He was silly about it.”
“Nothing can bring down bloody murder more readily than true love,” Elyoner said. “As I said, Robert was never made of the finest stuff.”
Anne opened her mouth to reply but found she had nothing to say. The snow came a bit harder, numbing her nose with cold and wet.
Where have I been? she wondered. Where was all of this when I was growing up?
But she knew the answer to that. She’d been racing horses to spite the guards, stealing wine and drinking it in the west tower, sneaking off to play kiss-and-feel with Roderick in Eslen-of-Shadows.
Fastia had tried to tell her. And her mother. To prepare her for all of this.
Mother.
She suddenly remembered her mother’s face, sad and stern, the night she’d sent her off to the Coven Saint Cer. Anne had told her she hated her…
Her cheeks were wet now. Quite without knowing it, she had begun crying.
Realizing that only made matters worse, and great sobs began to choke up from her belly. She felt exposed, like the time all her hair had been shorn from her head, like the time as a little girl she’d been caught naked out in the hall.
How could she be queen? How could she even have imagined it? She didn’t understand anything, couldn’t control anything—not even her own tears. All she had learned in the last year was that the world was huge and cruel and beyond her comprehension. The rest of it—the illusion of destiny and power, the determination that had seemed real only a few days ago—now seemed stupid, a pose everyone could see through but she.
A hand fell on her thigh, and she started at the warmth of it.
It was Austra, her own eyes brimming. The other riders had cleared a bit of a space, probably so they could pretend they didn’t see her pain. Neil rode just behind her, but out of whispering earshot. Cazio was up with Elyoner.
“I’m so glad you’re alive,” Anne told her friend. “I tried not to think about it, to keep my mind on other things, but if you were dead…”
“You’d go on; that’s what you’d do,” Austra said. “Because you have to.”
“Do I?” Anne asked, hearing the rancor in her voice, knowing it was petty and not caring.
“Yes. If only you could have seen what I saw from the forest, back in Dunmrogh. When you stepped out, bold as a bull, and told those murderers who you were—if you had seen that, you would know what you were meant to do.”
“Have the saints touched you?” Anne asked softly. “Can you hear my thoughts?”
Austra shook her head. “I’ll never know anyone better than I know you, Anne. I never know exactly what you’re thinking, but usually I can see the general way the wind is blowing.”
“Did you know all this? About Robert?”
Austra hesitated.
“Please,” Anne said.
“There are things we never talked about,” Austra said reluctantly. “You always pretended I was just like a sister, and that was nice, but I could never forget the truth, never allow myself to forget the truth.”
“That you are a servant,” Anne said.
“Yes.” Austra nodded. “I know you love me, but even you’ve come to face the facts of the matter.”
Anne nodded. “Yes,” she admitted.
“In Eslen, in the castle, servants have their own world. It’s right next to yours—below it, around it—but it’s separate. Servants know a lot about your world, Anne, because they have to survive in it, but you don’t know much about theirs.”
“Don’t forget, I’ve worked as a servant, too,” Anne said. “In the house of Filialofia.”
Austra smiled and tried not to appear condescending.
“For just under twice nineday,” her maid qualified. “But see here, did you learn anything in that time that the lady of the house did not know?”
Anne thought about that for a moment. “I learned that her husband philandered with the housemaids, but I think she knew that, almost expected it,” she said. “But what she didn’t know was that he was also involved with her friend dat Ospellina.”
“And you discovered that by observation.”
“Yes.”
“And the other servants—did they talk to you?”
“Not much.”
“Right. Because you were new, you were a foreigner. They didn’t trust you.”
“I’ll grant you that,” Anne said.
“And yet the lord and lady of the house didn’t make that distinction, I’ll wager. To them you were a servant, and when you were doing your job as you were supposed to, you were invisible, as much a part of the house as the banisters or the windows. They only noticed you—”
“When I did something wrong,” Anne said. She was starting to understand.
How many servants were there in Eslen. Hundreds? Thousands? Around all the time but scarcely existing so far as the nobles were concerned.
“Go on,” Anne said. “Tell me something about the servants in Eslen. Something small.”
Austra shrugged. “Did you know that the stablejack, the one we called Gimlet, was the son of Demile, the seamstress?”
“No.”
“Do you remember who I’m talking about?”
“Gimlet? Of course.” I just never wondered who his mother was.
“But he isn’t the son of Armier, Demile’s husband. His real father is Cullen, from the kitchen staff. And because Cullen’s wife, Helen, was so angry over that, Gimlet—his real name is Amleth, by the way—was never allowed a position within the castle, because Helen’s mother is the Boar, old lady Golskuft—”
“—the mistress of the household servants.”
Austra nodded. “Who in turn is the illegitimate daughter of the late Lord Raethvess and a landwaerd girl.”
“So you’re telling me that the servants do more sleeping about than they do work?”
“When a turtle takes a breath in a pond, you only see the tip of his nose. And all you know of the servants in Eslen is what they allow you to see. Most of their lives—their interests, passions, connections—are kept from you.”
“Yet you seem to know quite a lot.”
“Only enough to understand what I don’t know,” Austra said. “Because I was so close to you, because I was treated with the appearance of gentle birth, I was not well trusted—or well liked.”
“And what has all of this to do with my uncle Robert?”
“The servants have very dark rumors of him. The say that when he was a boy, he was exceedingly cruel
, and unnatural.”
“Unnatural?”
“One of the housemaids, when she was a girl—she said Prince Robert made her wear Lesbeth’s gown and demanded that she answer to that name. And then he—”
“Stop,” Anne said. “I think I can imagine.”
“I think you can’t,” Austra said. “They did that, yes, but his desires were perverse in more than one way. And then there is the story of Rose.”
“Rose?”
“That one they are very quiet about. Rose was the daughter of Emme Starte, who was in the laundry. Robert and Lesbeth made a playmate out of her, dressed her in fine clothes, took her on walks, rides, and picnics. Treated her as if she were gentle.”
“As you were treated,” Anne said, feeling something twinge in her breast.
“Yes.”
“How old were they?”
“Ten years old. And here’s the thing, Anne—the thing they say, but it’s so hard to believe.”
“I think I would believe anything at this moment,” Anne said. She felt blunted, a knife used too often to cut bone.
Austra lowered her voice further. “They say that when they were young, Lesbeth was like Robert: cruel and jealous.”
“Lesbeth? Lesbeth is the sweetest, most gentle woman I have ever known.”
“And so she became, they say, after Rose vanished.”
“Vanished?”
“Never to be seen again. No one knows what happened. But Lesbeth cried for days on end, and Robert seemed more agitated than usual. And after that, Robert and Lesbeth were not seen together as much. Lesbeth was like a new person, seeking always to do good, to live like a saint.”
“I don’t understand. Are you saying that Robert and Lesbeth killed Rose?”
“As I said, no one knows. Her family prayed, and wept, and made petition. Soon after, her mother and closest relatives were lent to the household of the Greft of Brogswell, a hundred leagues away, and there they remain.”
“That’s horrible. I can’t—are you saying that my father never made any investigation of this?”
“I doubt very much it ever reached the ears of your father. It was settled within the world of the servants. If the rumor had gotten to your family, it might as easily have come to the attention of your father’s political enemies. In that case, any servant who knew anything might have vanished quite as suddenly—and without explanation—as Rose.