Ombria In Shadow

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “I’ll look there for him,” Mag said. She slid the ring off her finger and dropped it into an empty cup. The shoe she slipped from beneath her veil into Lydea’s apron pocket so quickly that only a single jewel flared before it vanished. She would have risen then, but Lydea had shifted closer to her, perplexed again, uneasy at what she might have loosed into Ducon’s life.

  “Please,” she begged. “Let me see your face. You chose to save me; now you have put Ducon in your balance. You’re someone dealing with life and death, and I need to put a face to that, or I’ll see you as you are, all in black with your face invisible, in my nightmares.”

  Mag, mute at the unexpected image of herself as someone’s bad dream, pulled the pin out of her hat. The tavern had all but emptied for the funeral; those left had forgotten their interest in her. The veils parted easily at the back. She sat blinking at the sudden light, gazing back at Lydea while she straightened the pins in the improbable golden stork’s nest of her hair.

  Lydea, astonished again, touched a tendril of the wild hair. She breathed, “You’re so young. Was it you I saw in the lamplight that night? Who told me where to find the Rose and Thorn?”

  Mag nodded. “You seemed a little lost, then.”

  “I was very lost, then. What is your name?”

  “Mag.”

  “Just Mag?”

  “It’s what the sorceress named me.” She tucked her hair back into her enormous hat, adjusted the veils and rose. Lydea watched her, brows puckered worriedly, but at what, Mag was uncertain.

  “If I wanted to find you, ask you about Ducon—”

  “Don’t look for me,” Mag advised. “I’ll come to you, whatever happens to him.”

  “Maybe,” Lydea said somberly, “but if you keep passing the Black Pearl’s name around in broad daylight, I’ll be waiting here until I’ve paid off the entire city’s transgressions. You be careful of that woman.”

  Once warned, no fool, Mag thought. Twice warned, once a fool. And so on. She stepped outside the tavern and stopped, oddly disoriented, as if the sky had turned grass-green, or the sun had taken to changing phases, like the moon. Then she realized that the city’s noises had become familiar once again.

  The bells of Ombria were silent.

  FIVE

  The King of Flounders

  Ducon Greve stood in front of the mausoleum of the House of Greve. The bald dome and the squat pillars holding it up enclosed the lichen-stained central cube, whose ponderous doors were open to accept yet another ruler of Ombria. The white marble had darkened, weathered through centuries. The mausoleum sat on a broad green knoll overlooking, between neat rows of cypress, a swath of glittering sea. The iron fence beyond the trees held back a black tide of mourners from the city. Courtiers from the palace, nobles, and relatives of the family were scattered in a crescent moon before the face of the mausoleum. All were silent, motionless, spellbound, it seemed, by the constant, jarring clamor of bells.

  The child-heir of Ombria stood beside the Black Pearl. Both were surrounded by an escort of guards. Ducon was never far from Kyel, though the guards were so thick around the boy that he could barely be seen. As if, Ducon thought, Domina Pearl feared some bloody rebellion to be instigated by red-eyed great-aunts and their elderly consorts. He had chosen a place within a cluster of minor cousins and relatives whose names dangled like spiders along the edges of the family tree. He could see Kyel most clearly among them. The boy looked for him once, his eyes widening suddenly at all the strangers around him, his face flushing as it he were close to tears. Ducon shifted a little and Kyel found him. Ducon smiled; the panic receded from Kyel’s eyes. Domina Pearl moved between them.

  Then Kyel’s father was carried into the candlelit dark within the mausoleum. The courtiers came back out; the dead prince did not. After what seemed a long time, during which nothing moved but the wind, and the long banners flowing and coiling like black flame, and the distant, frothing sea, Ducon realized that the bells had finally stopped tolling.

  “The prince is dead,” someone said softly behind him. “Long live the prince.”

  Trumpets flashed then, a shout of gold before they spoke. Ducon turned. Camas Erl, who had in earlier years been his tutor, was watching Domina Pearl, a mordant light in his yellow eyes. Long, sonorous cadences from the trumpets moved the groups of mourners down the hill toward the line of carriages. Camas, a tall, lean man with a dry voice and chestnut hair lightly threaded with silver, had been at the palace since Ducan was five. He had been unfailingly even-tempered and kind to the fatherless boy, and he seemed to know everything worth knowing, from the names of moths to the history of Ombria and the House of Greve, even, Ducon discovered eventually, how to make paints.

  “Be careful,” Ducon advised him. “She is culling her court. None of us is safe.”

  “I am,” Camas said. “She has asked me to stay and tutor the prince, as Royce Greve wished.”

  “You’ll stay?”

  “Oddly enough, for such an indolent court, the palace has an extraordinary library. I would hate to leave it. I am still working on my history of Ombria.” He paused then, studying Ducon. “I trust,” he said slowly, “that you are not contemplating anything stupid?”

  “Not at the moment. The Black Pearl and I have reached a compromise of sorts. I won’t fight her, and she won’t kill me.”

  “I see,” Camas said aridly. Domina Pearl passed them then, and he said nothing more. The Black Pearl walked beside Kyel, one hand on his shoulder. Ducon watched his stiff back, his small, clenched fists. He would not cry and he would not look at her. Once he turned to give an incredulous glance back at the mausoleum. Ducon saw his face clearly then, bewildered, colorless. The boy stumbled a little; Domina’s fingers tightened on his shoulder. He stared ahead, trudging wearily down the hill. He would return to the palace to rehearse for his coronation the next morning.

  Ducon’s own hands had closed. He watched the child blindly, shaken by ideas, impulses he did not dare put into words, even in the privacy of his own head. Camas’s long hand on his shoulder, a light, familiar touch, conveyed both sympathy and warning.

  “You must give her no excuse,” the tutor murmured.

  “I know.”

  “The boy needs you.”

  He drew breath, his hands opening. “I know.”

  “Promise me something.” Camas waited, until Ducon met his eyes. His voice was very soft. “If you decide to act, tell me first. Before you make a move, or say a word to anyone else. That way, if anything does happen to you, I’ll know why. I have known you nearly all your life. It would be hard for me to have you disappear and not to know why.”

  Ducon shook his head a little, touched. “I don’t have a coherent idea in my head,” he assured Camas. “Except to take the paper and charcoal out of the carriage and join the rest of Ombria for my uncle’s wake.” He paused briefly, remembering, his mouth tight. “He was good to me. And to my mother. I’ll miss him.” Another figure formed in memory, with impossibly long, autumn-leaf hair, and perpetually chewed fingers. She might have died as well, so quickly and utterly had she vanished into the night of Ombria. “Poor Kyel,” he whispered.

  “Pity us all.”

  “Come with me?”

  “I haven’t your fondness for the stinking back streets and churning taverns,” the tutor said mildly. “I prefer to spend the afternoon in the library, contemplating history and your uncle’s place in it. But at Domina Pearl’s command, I will spend it gutting the traditional coronation ceremony and filleting it into something more suitable for a five-year old. Be careful.”

  “I will,” Ducon promised absently, and went to join the crowd beyond the fence, which was dispersing through the streets of Ombria in search of a suitable place to mourn.

  Some of the younger nobles and courtiers shared his taste for the unseemly side of Ombria. They had no idea why Ducon would stop to sketch a window whose small, thick, cracked panes of glass made the world beyond it undefined, elusive.
They would criticize his drawings, follow him into taverns and drink with him, until they recognized what they wanted at the bottom of a bottle or in a face. Then they would let him drift away to find other windows, other doors and passageways that seemed haunting in their ambiguity, as if they led both out and in at once, and to the same place.

  This time, a small group of nobles clung to his side all afternoon, made uneasy by death, he thought, and irritatingly noisy. They would not let him wander off pursuing shadows. They pulled him ruthlessly into taverns and inns, where they bought him fine wine or ale, depending on the place, and stood around him, laughing and drinking, while he picked out faces in the blur of black shoulders and veils, and sketched them. Every face that emerged on his paper seemed not so much in mourning for one ineffectual ruler as in fear of the next. He wondered, at one point, if he were simply shadowing every expression he drew with his own thoughts.

  He didn’t notice the painted flounder dancing improbably on the crest of a wave, its gold crown sliding rakishly toward eyes protruding like carbuncles, one above the other on its flat body. He had seen the tavern sign many times. This time, near that nebulous edge of day between light and night, all the inns and taverns were blurring into one, and he had no idea where he was in Ombria. He floated on the will and fumes of the young nobles, some the sons of dissipated courtiers, others cousins of confusing degree, who rarely appeared at court except for coronations and funerals. He had spent some time in one inn, he remembered vaguely, trying to chart their relation to him, at their insistence. It occurred to him then that their true interest lay in Kyel, and the likelihood that the young prince might not survive his bleak-eyed regent to rule Ombria himself. Where, they might wonder, did that put them along the line of power? A dangerous and compelling question, but not, in the end, what they asked him.

  He recognized the tavern when he walked in: the painted plaster above the mantelpiece depicted a line of flounders swimming sedately behind one another, blowing bubbles in strands of graduated pearls. There was the familiar crush of black, ribbons streaming from hats and sleeves, a funeral dirge sung in too many parts, and as tongues loosened recklessly toward the end of the long day, the unexpected barb of politics.

  It was a laugh into the dragon’s maw, he heard someone say of the rousing dirge, because that’s what Royce Greve’s death had brought Ombria up against: the twin-headed dragon of a child-ruler and Domina Pearl.

  “Not that Royce Greve had much of Ombria at heart, not like his father did, but at least he kept the Black Pearl pretending to be honest while she ran her pirate ring and dabbled in sorcery. Now she won’t have to pretend.” The speaker held up his glass. Ducon recognized, him, despite his patched black: he had owned a fleet of ships and been extremely wealthy until Domina Pearl turned her eye toward him. “To her,” he offered. “The Black Pearl and her sea scum that closed the ports of Ombria.”

  Ducon sank into a chair at the only empty table. “There,” he commented, “is a dead man.”

  Wine appeared before him magically, as it had done all afternoon. He drank half of it before he noticed that none of the courtiers’ sons or cousins were drinking with him. They were not even talking. They ringed the table, gazing down at him, their eyes narrowed, speculative, their faces no longer bland and foolish with drink, but hungry, he thought, and wondering how he might do stuffed and served on a platter.

  A third or fourth cousin pulled a chair back abruptly, dropped into it. Ducon tried to remember his name. The cousins all looked alike by then, dark-haired, dark-eyed, vaguely resembling the dead prince. Protective coloring, he guessed.

  And then the seated cousin said very softly, “You could rule, Ducon. You could be regent instead of Domina Pearl.”

  His head cleared very quickly. He glanced past them at the crush, shifting paper, raising charcoal, as if he were seeking inspiration. Everyone near their table was talking at once, passionately and obliviously. Nobody appeared to be listening to anyone, except perhaps the slender woman clad in outdated black brocade and an enormous hat like a mushroom shot through with jewelled pins, whose veil totally obscured her face. She leaned against the wall near him, languidly fanning the air with a hand enclosed in black lace. In front of her, two men with red faces and black rosettes on their sleeves were speaking to one another, loudly and earnestly, about two entirely different subjects. She seemed to be brushing their words away from her like gnats.

  Ducon said, sketching her absently, dark graceful lines with little more than an upraised hand to render them human, “You don’t know Domina Pearl. She is a crafty old spider and she has woven her web through Ombria longer than anyone can remember.”

  “She can’t live forever.”

  He raised a brow, working on a hatpin. “I think she died a century ago. She found some way to outwit death and make her bones do her bidding.”

  A hand came down over his wrist, stilling the charcoal. “Ducon.” The cousin leaned closer, his fingers tight, his bloodshot eyes burning blue and cold, somehow at the same time. “How long will she let Kyel Greve live? Who inherits after him? Some doddering, snail-eyed great-uncle of Kyel’s, who would fall to pieces if Domina Pearl crossed her eyes at him. What good is that for Ombria? You may be of dubious pedigree, but you have brains, you know Ombria, and you know Domina Pearl’s ways. Strip her of her power. We’ll help you. You find a way; you tell us how, and we will do whatever you say.”

  Ducon took the charcoal with his free hand, sketched the shadowy suggestion of a face beneath the veil. “She’d kill me,” he said briefly. “Or she would kill Kyel, if I threaten her.”

  “Then,” the cousin said, his voice a breath of air, an evanescent bubble, “Kyel would be out of your way.”

  Ducon’s charcoal stopped. He gazed back at the fierce blue eyes, his own eyes the color of the pewter wine cup and as opaque. He finished the wine in the cup abruptly and stood up.

  “This is no place to talk. She grows ears everywhere, like mushrooms.” He tucked the lady under his arm. “Come with me.”

  He led them away from the crowded streets to the sea.

  On the end of a weedy pier, where they could see the waves through rotting wood glide and curl beneath them, he let them speak again. The warehouses facing the water were empty; so was the harbor except for a few fishing boats and a black-sailed pirate ship heaving to port at one of Domina Pearl’s guarded docks. They gathered around him, a dozen or so frustrated young nobles, who looked to him, for reasons he could not fathom, to save them all from Domina Pearl.

  He asked succinctly, “Why me? I’m a bastard of the House of Greve, without a father anywhere on the horizon. Why not one of you? Or do you just want to use me to get rid of Domina Pearl, and then declare me illegitimate?”

  He saw genuine surprise in their eyes. “We all know you’re a bastard,” someone answered earnestly. “But none of us are any closer to inherit. What we want, we must take. There’s us. There’s our fathers, none of them powerful enough to fight her. And there’s the legitimate line, all of them with one foot in their graves and looking over their shoulders to see that Domina Pearl doesn’t shove them in alive. Who else could challenge her except you?”

  “How? With a paintbrush? She will kill me if she thinks I am plotting against her. I don’t know what she might do to Kyel.”

  “Kyel is hers now,” the ruthless-eyed cousin said pithily. “She’ll have a decade at least before he grows his first beard. By then, there will be nothing left of him but Domina Pearl’s will. Kyel is lost. You cannot let him matter.”

  Ducon was silent, wordless at the idea, though they assumed he was merely taking the measure of them while his eyes shifted from face to face around the circle. He said carefully, “Leaving Kyel aside, there is the matter of the Black Pearl. She has mysterious origins and powers that no one understands; she is unscrupulous, unpredictable, and she has turned Ombria into this.” He reached down, pulled a flourishing thistle out from between the planks. He tossed it down
a hole in the pier to the waves. “You want me to fight that?”

  “Yes.”

  “With what?”

  They were silent then, but not dissuaded; one shrugged after a moment. “You have mysterious origins, too, and you’re the only one living under the palace roof with her who isn’t too terrified of her to think. You find a way to rid Ombria of her, and we’ll help you. We’ll back you against our fathers, and the House of Greve. You will become Prince of Ombria; we’ll pledge you that. And then you can weed these piers to your heart’s content. Ombria was a great, thriving, beautiful city once. Not in our memories, but that’s what all our fathers say. We want that city back.”

  The black ship drew closer; Ducon thought of them all, visible and vulnerable to a peering glass eye. “Is any one of you sober?” he demanded. “You have no idea how devious she is. You may not even live long enough to find your way to your beds tonight.”

  He recognized the hand that reached out to grip his shoulder, the stark, burning vision in the eyes holding his. “Take Ombria away from the Black Pearl. Give us back our city. You would do it if you were the true heir of the House of Greve. You would do it or die trying. Find a way, Ducon Greve.”

  “Kyel—”

  The hand tightened. “Let him go,” the cousin said softly. “Just let him go. Do what you must to save Ombria. She must have no hold on you, through the boy. No power over you because of him. You act for yourself and Ombria, not for him. She’s got her hand on his heart and she’ll take root there. Fear him. He could be the death of you.”

  He stepped back out of the fervid hold, and glanced at the ship. “That could be the death of us all.”

  “You’ll give us an answer now.” There was both threat and plea in the demand.