“Not,” he added with a wry glance, “that anyone is likely to give much thought to the ban anymore. Everything has changed too much. Still, I must be glad that my marriage has been regularized—and more so, because my wife shows signs just at the moment of becoming a Leveller.”
Lili expressed her surprise with a slight smile. They were in a tiny walled garden behind the house, where Lilliana was gathering roses which she meant to arrange in vases in the dining room and the front hall.
“Oh, yes, I assure you,” said Luke. “Her interest is quite sincere. She has always admired Raith, and the congregation here has most favorably impressed her! One of them even told her that this God of theirs can forgive anything—supposing that is, one truly repents. I can’t begin to tell you how truly taken she was with the notion that all of her sins might be washed away, with a single, heartfelt declaration.
“And really,” he added with a shrug, “they are the most extraordinary people. They’ve taken this whole disaster in stride, and have done more than anyone to relieve the general suffering. So it seems I must make up my mind to being married to—to an exceptionally virtuous woman, and eventually raising a family of exceptionally well-behaved children.”
Lili was restless. Her cough had ceased to trouble her, and she was feeling stronger. Will and Blaise, too, though far from recovered, were beginning to complain after nearly a fortnight of inactivity. The only thing that prevented them all from packing up immediately, and setting off in search of the Chaos Machine, was the fact that they had no clear idea where to begin looking. As one day followed the next, Lili continued to hope that some message would arrive from Doctor Wildebaden, but still there was no news, and still she lacked any sense of direction to send her on her way.
She was engaged, one day, in a listless attempt to mend one of her petticoats, in the tiny second-floor parlor which the bachelor physician had turned over to the ladies, when Tremeur came in with a look of intense excitement on her face and a slender parcel wrapped up in brown paper in one small hand.
“Only look how mysterious! A package has arrived with your name on it—but no indication at all where it might come from.”
Lili was naturally intrigued. Putting aside her mending, she quickly unwrapped the parcel, uncovering a slender marquetry box made with decorative woods—ebony, she guessed, and palisander. On opening the lid and lifting out the very frivolous object that she found inside, Lili turned to Tremeur with a bewildered smile.
“Now who on earth would want to send me a puzzle fan? It is extremely pretty, of course, but—Oh, I see—there is a message after all.” She took out a folded slip of paper from the bottom of the box, and read the note out loud: “‘Mrs. Blackheart. This should aid you in finding what you seek.’ Now how am I to interpret that?”
“Perhaps we should bring in Luke,” Tremeur suggested, taking the fan and spreading out the sticks, the better to observe the paintings. “He has a positive genius for deciphering things.”
So Luke was sent for and arrived soon after, accompanied by Blaise and Wilrowan. He examined the fan for several minutes, turning it over and over in the process. At last the light of comprehension dawned in his eyes. “It is very simple. On the one side you will find a series of rebuses drawn on the individual sticks, each one translating to the name of a city: as Tronstadt, Vallerhoven, Dahlmark, and so forth. The list itself is highly instructive, if you’ll look at that map that you and Raith spent so much time poring over during our journey.” He turned the fan over again. “Then, on the reverse side, as you can see—where the pattern has not been completed—most of the sticks have been deeply engraved with a series of ancient characters. They appear—indeed, I am fairly certain—they look to be a series of street names and house numbers.” He paused dramatically before going on. “I would say, Lilliana, that someone has very kindly provided you with a key to finding all the missing Jewels.”
There were gasps of surprise and delight from the others. “But who has sent this—and can we trust them?” Trefallon asked, with a lift of his well-shaped eyebrows.
Luke passed Blaise the fan and took up the note; he stood looking down at the message it contained, with a smile beginning to form on his face. “It’s impossible to be certain, but I think that we may. The writing here, while unfamiliar, should strike a chord with every one of us, so round as it is, so smooth and so legible. It is a pedagogue’s hand, a schoolmaster’s writing.
“Unless I am very much mistaken, the fan and the accompanying note come from—Raith.”
There were nine houses on nine streets in nine cities—houses of brick, and stone, and timber—all of them plain and unprepossessing, yet each of them held a hidden treasure.
Three long weeks after the arrival of the puzzle fan, Lili stood in a tiny entry hall inside the ninth house, with the crystal-tipped wand in her hand. The Jewels from Tholia, Nordfjall, Finghyll, Lichtenwald, and the rest had all been recovered; only the Mountfalcon Jewel was still missing.
It has to be here, Lili told herself, I am weary of travelling, weary of searching. I want to go home.
With that thought, the wand turned in her hand. “This way,” she said to Wilrowan and Blaise, the only two who had come this far with her. Doctor Wildebaden and his Specularii friends had each claimed responsibility for returning one of the other Jewels to its rightful place, and all had departed before reaching this red brick house in Starkhavn.
Lili threw open a door and stepped through to the very odd room on the other side. It had been furnished as a bedchamber, but there were no less than seven great glasses in ornate frames arranged on the walls. Overcome by a wave of dizziness, she put the tips of her fingers to the side of her head. “It almost seems as though there must be more than one of the Jewels here—they seem to be on every side of us at once.”
Trefallon and Will began a swift but thorough search of the room: pulling out drawers, tapping on wall panels, rummaging through the clothes-press. But Lili stood staring down at her hands, which were inexplicably shaking, and wondered what had happened to make her feel so ill and disoriented.
She heard Will catch his breath sharply. “No one move. There is a trap here somewhere, I’m sure of it.”
Blaise froze in place. Lili swallowed her rising nausea and glanced around her. What could Will mean? If he had actually seen something, then why not say so? Then, all in an instant, she knew the source of the danger. “The mirrors. Break all of the mirrors!”
There was a crashing and a tinkling of broken glass as Will and Trefallon each took up something heavy and struck at the mirrors again and again. As the last silvery shards fell to the floor, Lili realized that the pain in her head had vanished, her sickness had passed. “In another five minutes, we would have been mad—or dead.”
Now the wand pointed unerringly toward a cupboard near the fireplace. Will crossed the room in two long strides, opened the cupboard, and drew out a small rosewood box that he found inside. Then he opened the lid so that Lili and Blaise could see what the casket contained. All three gave a deep sigh of relief at once.
“But how did you know the room was trapped?” Lili asked, fifteen minutes later, when she, Wilrowan, and Blaise had returned to their coach. “There was nothing like that before, when we found the other Jewels.”
The driver spoke to the horses and the coach began to move. “Queen Ys is either dead or the Leveller’s prisoner,” said Will. “But our own nemesis, Lady Sophronispa, is still at large. I think she arranged that trap as a parting gift—though perhaps not her last.”
Lili regarded him with a puzzled frown. “Why should you think so? The plot to steal the Jewels has not only been exposed but foiled. I should think she would want nothing so much, right now, as a safe place to hide herself.”
“For all that,” said Will, raising his voice as the coach began to rattle over a series of bumps, “she remained one step ahead of us every inch of the way. She eluded us again and again—and only consider how many, many deaths s
he caused in Mountfalcon and elsewhere.” He gave a rueful shake of the head. “I can’t help thinking that she was the most dangerous of all the conspirators.”
“She might well consider you dangerous, and elusive, too,” suggested Blaise from the opposite seat. “And therefore to be avoided. How many times did she try to kill? And yet you survived.”
Lili reached out with one hand and gave her husband a reassuring touch on the shoulder. “More than that, the Maglore waited for fifteen hundred years to make an attempt to win back their Empire. Who knows how long it may be before they feel ready to try again? And really, why should this Sophronispa be in any hurry? She can expect to live two hundred, three hundred years. She can afford to wait until people like you and I are dead, and nobody else remembers anything about her.”
Wilrowan nodded thoughtfully. How could he ever hope to comprehend the motives of this creature who might live for centuries? He had certainly failed to guess what she might do every single time that he had tried it before.
Nevertheless, he had an uneasy suspicion they had not heard the last of Lady Sophronispa.
Epilogue
It was a sad homecoming on a bleak autumn day. The city of Hawkesbridge looked more battered and ugly than ever. Wilrowan wondered if she had slipped further into dissolution during his absence, or whether he was returning with newly sharpened vision after his long absence. The streets were filled with beggars, ragged and weary-looking, and that was one certain difference—but was that all?
“They come, I suppose, from the mining towns,” he said to Lili. “Let us hope that as soon as we turn the Chaos Machine over to Rodaric he can begin to set things right again.”
As they approached the Volary, Will was struck by the absence of guards at the outer gate, and while there appeared to be the usual number of men on duty at the palace itself, the rambling structure was strangely silent. A lieutenant directed Lili and Will to one of the gardens where the king had developed a habit of walking alone in the afternoons. “I am afraid you will find him changed—almost beyond recognition.”
And indeed, it was a sad, weary, and very much diminished Rodaric they discovered wandering amidst the rank, uncontained growth in one of the untended greenhouses. Yet his eyes kindled and his face momentarily brightened when Will placed in his hands the small rosewood box banded in iron, and he opened the lid and saw inside the gold-and-crystal orrery nestled against a green silk lining.
Lili had done what she could, and so had the other magicians, but the tiny spheres and figures were scarcely moving. One of the guards was dispatched to Malachim with a message for Doctor Fox and Sir Frederic Marlowe. Between the three of them, Rodaric and the two professors would make the necessary adjustments.
He closed the box, passed a thin, unsteady hand over his face, where many deep lines had appeared since the last time Will saw him. “Wilrowan—Lilliana—I wish I could find the words to express my gratitude. I did promise you, Will, almost any reward you might care to name—”
“But that was under very different circumstances,” Will interrupted, remembering—as no doubt Rodaric remembered also—that the reward had been partly contingent on the queen’s safety and the birth of a healthy heir. “If you please, sir, I had rather not speak of it now.”
They spent a quiet hour with the king, walking through the gardens and then up to the giddy wall-walks, during which time he described to them the events of Dionee’s last days. “She felt no physical pain, of that I am certain. It was just that delivering her child took the last of her strength—all that remained to her after all those months of anxiety—and the next morning she drifted off into a deep sleep from which, apparently, she had no desire to waken.”
“And the child?” said Will. “I have heard so many conflicting stories. That it was born dead, or died soon after, or that—”
A brief smile crossed Rodaric’s gaunt face. “My daughter is alive and well, Wilrowan. She was born so weak and small, for a time we feared she would never survive. But she has rallied in the last few weeks and is actually thriving. Indeed, little Cleone is my one joy, my one reason for continuing on. There will be no remarriage, no son of mine to supplant her—Dionee’s last precious gift to me—and I mean to put this kingdom in order again, for her sake alone.” He heaved a weary, weary sigh. “When my strength comes back to me. When I recover some sense of purpose—I hope it may not take very long.”
Will and Lili took their leave of him soon after that, but not before Will had requested a private audience for the next day. They spent the night in his quarters at the barracks. In the morning, he put on his green uniform for the last time and went to speak with the king.
“Well,” said Lili, starting up from her seat when Wilrowan finally returned, several hours later. “Did you resign your commission, as you intended?”
Will removed his tricorn hat with its gay cockade, and stood looking down at it with a puzzled frown, as though he were somehow uncertain what he was expected to do with it. “I did resign it, yes,” he said at last. “And naturally Rodaric said it must be as I wished, understanding as he did that there was nothing for me to do here now, with Dionee gone. But he—he offered me something else.”
Lili raised an inquiring eyebrow.
“You have seen to what a state our country has come.” Will made a broad gesture with both hands. “It has all changed, and Rodaric believes, as I do, that there is no going back to the way things were. But he does feel it is both necessary and possible to reclaim something. He wants to send out a company of men to do all that is needful, to settle disputes, to restore order—a sort of army, constabulary, and magistracy combined. This morning, he actually found the energy to make up a list of several good men, but he still needs someone to command them. He has offered me the commission, which carries with it the rank of colonel.”
Will tossed the hat into a chair. “I told him I had made other plans for our future, but he insisted that I spend a day or two thinking it over, and discussing the matter with you.”
Lili shook her head wonderingly. “But don’t you want to do this? I understand that you don’t wish to live at the Volary or stay in Hawkesbridge where there are so many painful memories, but what Rodaric is offering you—I think it would suit you perfectly.”
He made an airy gesture, affecting to make little of it, though Lili could see very well how strongly the idea appealed to him. “Whether I like what he is offering me or not, I had already made other plans. I want to take you home with me to my father’s house, as I should have done years ago. I owe you that much at least.”
But now Lili laughed. “If you have refused the king on my account, then I am very glad he had the good sense to ask you to reconsider. Oh, Wilrowan, do you really think it would please me to sit back and watch you grow more and more restless at your father’s house in the country? Or that I, for that matter, after so much excitement, would welcome a return to such a quiet life?”
He crossed the room in two steps, took one of her hands between both of his. “But what is the alternative? Not another parting between us?”
“I hope not,” Lili answered emphatically. “Accept the commission that Rodaric has offered you and go wherever it takes you. I will go, too. No doubt there will be a crying need for physicians everywhere you go, and there will be plenty of work for both of us.”
A brighter look came into Will’s eyes. “But what of the family we meant to start?”
“A family may come in time. Yes, Wilrowan, I really mean it. No doubt you will make an admirable father, but in the meantime I don’t want to see you so bored that you get yourself into all sorts of absurd scrapes—nor do I wish to be bored, either, waiting to become a mother.”
Will laughed, took her by the shoulders, and kissed her on the forehead. “Then if you really are very, very certain—I think I will go and speak to Rodaric again, before he has the chance to change his mind and withdraw the offer.”
“Yes,” said Lili, “that strikes me a
s a very good idea.”
He gave her a blinding smile, swept up his hat, and headed for the door. She could hear the light, quick fall of his booted feet as he moved down the corridor to the stairs.
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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THE QUEEN’S NECKLACE. Copyright © 2001 by Teresa Edgerton. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Edgerton, Teresa.
The queen’s necklace / Teresa Edgerton.
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ISBN 0-380-78911-6
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