Ombria In Shadow

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  He looked down, watched the last of the fading sun gild the water through the ragged holes in the pier and slowly fade, leaving them in shadow. “Go home,” he told them. “Forget everything that you’ve said to me. When I need you, I’ll find you. I have drawn all your faces.”

  He left them edgy, unsatisfied, he knew, but there was nothing anyone could do then, and they were facing Ombria’s night. He followed them off the pier. An odd drift of black stopped him briefly, a windblown shadow he glimpsed through a hole as the pier passed over the shore. But it was gone before he saw it clearly, and, glancing over the side of the pier, he saw no footprints in the sand.

  SIX

  Dancing Shoes

  Lydea, hearing the bells of Ombria stop tolling, burst into tears.

  She was carrying a tray of ale and mutton for a table full of mourners who hadn’t managed to find their way out of the tavern to the funeral. They were making elaborate, lugubrious speeches to one another about the dead prince when her tray crashed down on the table among them and she wept suddenly, wildly, inconsolably. She wept for Royce’s touch and his smile, for Kyel’s soft hair under her hand and his eyes when she told him stories; she wept for her lost love, for her dead mother, for her father who could not seem to remember one tender word, for her throbbing, bleeding feet. She pulled the cap off her head and wiped her face with it; the stunned mourners watched her hair tumble to her knees. She wept for the child-prince of Ombria, lonely and in danger, for Ombria itself, for the Black Pearl’s cruelty, for the shoes she would never wear again, for her lost innocence. She did not see the ale she had spilled in the mutton, or the aghast and speculative faces around the table. She felt someone’s hand on her arm, pulling her. She stumbled on her poor, minced feet as far as the bar, and then sank behind it into the shadowy corner where her father piled dirty aprons and towels, and she cried for her lost years, all the years she had left behind her in the palace when Domina Pearl cast her out and slammed the iron gate.

  She felt her heart empty finally, a limp nothing with no more glittering, hard-edged diamonds cutting their way out, no enormous pearls that ached through her throat before they spilled out of her. She leaned back against the scarred wood, letting a grain of sand fall, now and then, out of her swollen, gritty eyes. The tavern was unusually silent, but she had not emptied the place out entirely. She heard her father exchanging morose complaints with someone between swallows and thumps of pewter.

  “I don’t know what to do with her,” he said. “She’s neither fish nor fowl. She’s not what she was, neither here nor there.”

  There was a hiccup; a burly voice that belonged to the butcher across the street suggested roundly, “Marry her. That’ll put her in her place.”

  “Marry her to who? To what? She’s lived for five years as the prince’s mistress, and now she’s back here washing beer mugs. There she was a tavern-wench dressed like a princess; here she’s a princess dressed like a tavern-wench. Once she knew her job here. Now she can barely keep an order in her head. She serves beef instead of beer, and takes away half-full mugs from under the drinkers’ noses. Look at this place. Echoing, on the afternoon of the Prince of Ombria’s wake.”

  “Marry her,” the butcher said with annoying persistence.

  “To who?”

  “Anyone. It doesn’t matter. The coffin-maker over on Plank Street just lost his wife. And him with five, the smallest barely cutting teeth.”

  “Who? That scrawny little bantam with a nose like a pug? He has five?”

  “And no wife.”

  Lydea picked up a soiled apron, wiped her eyes with it wearily. She remembered the coffin-maker, who barely came up to her chin, and whose upturned nostrils were uncannily expressive: they followed her like eyes, and leered when she looked at him. The butcher’s notion was ludicrous, but her father had a point. She was floundering in the tavern just as she would have been floundering at the palace, if she had been permitted to stay.

  She slipped her clogs off to ease her feet, and remembered what she was sitting on. She groped through the pile of aprons and towels until she felt the sapphire-crusted heels where she had hidden them.

  “You could marry,” the butcher told her father. “Someone who could work with you, take care of the place.”

  “I’m no good company,” her father said shortly. “I should know. I’ve had to live with myself these past years, after they both left me.”

  The butcher swallowed beer audibly. “That’s a lot to lose at once.”

  “Neither of them gave me a choice. One walked out the door into a fine carriage, the other out of life into—Well, it wasn’t fine at all. Nothing like what’s being buried today in that marble house overlooking the sea.”

  Lydea’s face pulled against itself. The men, hearing a sound like torn cloth from behind the bar, went silent. She. quieted, fighting sorrow; they spoke again, cautiously, their voices lower.

  “I never thought I’d see her again. I thought she’d do anything to keep from coming back here.”

  “She should have married.”

  “She should have thought. She should have managed more cleverly and got something for herself. But no; she did all for love and wound up with nothing.”

  She turned a shoe in a stray beam of light from high, grimy panes, watched it spark and flare in the jewels.

  I have something, she thought. I have dancing shoes.

  She burrowed beneath her until she found the other one. Then she crawled out from behind the bar, her feet bare, her hair hanging limply, her eyes, she knew, a terrifying red in a face like a stiff white mask.

  Even the butcher in his blood-streaked apron looked uneasy at the sight of her. Then their lowered eyes found the shoes in her hand, the sapphires catching light and casting quivering rays of blue everywhere, as if a star had fallen into the tavern.

  Her father spoke finally. “Is that—What—”

  “Sapphires,” Lydea said. “The prince gave them to me. I doubt that I’ll be dancing in them ever again, so I’ll sell them. They’ll pay for my keep while I look for other work. That way you won’t be burdened by me.”

  His face, hard and furrowed like a walnut shell since she had returned, slackened suddenly as if she had hurt him. Then the shell formed again.

  “You weren’t wearing them the night you came back,” he commented gruffly. “How did they walk their way across the city?”

  “I threw them away at the palace gate,” she answered steadily, “so I could run better. Someone found them and brought them back to me.”

  “Who?” her father demanded. “Who in this city can afford to be so honest?”

  “And why?” the butcher asked bewilderedly.

  She remembered the young, composed face hiding secrets the way her hair hid its barbed, jewelled weapons. “I don’t know why,” she answered slowly. “To make me trust her, maybe.”

  The butcher extended a filthy finger to the fine cloth covering the shoes, dyed the color of the stones. “What’s that?”

  “Silk.”

  “Did you really dance in them?” her father asked, looking torn between wonder and suspicion, as if, like her life, he could not quite bring himself to believe in them.

  “Once.” She set them on the table in front of him. “So, you see, I’m not entirely helpless. I’ll be out of your way as soon as I can sell them.”

  “You could marry, with those,” the butcher suggested, still staring at them, his round eyes as blue as the stones. “Find yourself a husband instead of a prince, give your father some grandchildren.”

  “I’ll never marry,” Lydea said shortly. “Anyway, why would I want someone who’d marry me for my shoes? I’m no good here in the tavern anymore, but there must be something I can do to take care of myself.”

  Her father picked up a shoe, turned it to watch the light. “You used to know what you were doing in here.” Then he looked at her, absently scratching the frown between his brows with the tip of a silk toe. “This is no li
fe for you, once you’ve danced in these.”

  “Maybe not. But I was also thrown out into the streets for wearing them. They could have been the death of me. This place saved me. It was my only hope.”

  He loosed a short, harsh breath at the idea. But the frown was only skin deep now; it had left his eyes. “Why did you stay, if they treated you like that?”

  She had to swallow hard before she could speak. “Royce was good to me. But he was all I had. Nothing else, no one, no true place. You said it. I was a tavern-wench dressed like a princess. That’s how they all saw me. Except for the prince. And his son. They saw someone they loved.”

  They were both gazing at her now, with the same expression they had worn for her shoes.

  “They wouldn’t let you stay even for the boy’s sake?” her father asked.

  “He didn’t want me to go.” Her throat ached again. “But she even sent his nurse away. She was busy cleaning house, the night the prince died.”

  “She?” the butcher prompted.

  “Domina Pearl.”

  The name cast a pall over them; they seemed to see past the death of the prince to what Ombria truly mourned. “Domina Pearl,” the butcher echoed glumly. “She rules us now.” He drank deeply, then wondered: “What’s she made of? I heard she’s been alive for centuries. That dust comes out of her when she sneezes.”

  “She’s good for another century,” Lydea said, “if no one challenges her. And she’ll have no more mercy for this city than she did for me.”

  “What about the bastard?” her father asked. “Ducon. Will he fight her?”

  “I don’t know. Mostly he just draws.”

  They were silent again, bleakly contemplating the star-shot air in front of them. Her father placed the shoe he held precisely beside the other on the table. He said to the shoes, “You never gave me a chance to be angry with you before you left.”

  “I know.”

  “So I’ve had to wait all this time.” He pushed the shoes an inch toward her. “Find other work if you want. But don’t go. It’ll come back to me, how to live with someone besides myself.”

  She felt the tears sting her eyes again. “For a while, then,” she said stiffly, to keep her voice from shaking.

  “You’re not going to cry again, are you?” he asked warily.

  “Well, not this minute.”

  A group in solemn black splintered away from the crowded streets, opened the door abruptly and staggered in. “Where is the keeper of this tavern?” a young man demanded. “We are in mourning and we need spirits.”

  Lydea rolled the shoes into her apron as her father rose. She went back behind the bar to hide them again. Kneeling in the laundry, she watched blue fires leap from jewel to jewel and thought with wonder: Where was the young woman who had danced in them somewhere on the other side of the chasm of memory and death? Her hair had been scalloped and scrolled into a rich, coppery crown festooned with strands of sapphire. She had worn pale blue silk to match her eyes; lace the darker blue of her jewels spiralled around the skirt. The prince dancing with her had eyes of the same dark blue. No matter who distracted him, those eyes always returned to her face. Their smiles reflected one another, all evening. No one else smiled at her like that, with eyes and mind. The courtiers stretched their lips and considered that a smile. Their eyes saw the tavern-wench. Or worse: they calculated methodically, as if they were listing household expenses, what about her had captivated Royce. Only he had seen beyond that, into her mind and heart. He and Kyel.

  She remembered the vast bed where she had last seen Kyel, talked to him, touched him. She felt his soft cheek against her fingers, and pushed her empty hand against her mouth. “I wish…” she whispered, scarcely knowing for what. “I wish…”

  But Kyel had vanished along with that beautiful young woman in sapphire heels who had danced with a prince. She was as dead as Royce was, she knew. That’s what the courtiers would think, having seen her abandoned in Ombria at midnight. Murdered, or locked in some dingy room above a tavern on the water where the Black Pearl’s ships docked. Either way, dead to their world.

  They would never recognize me now, she thought dispassionately. Not even the ones who took me apart with their eyes and put me back together. I don’t exist beyond the palace walls.

  “Lydea,” her father said, with less bark in his voice than usual. She could hear the place beginning to fill again, now that the funeral was over. She pushed the heels back among the soiled linens. And then she sat frozen, staring at them, her mind seeing something in the wrinkled aprons and stained towels that she could not yet put to words.

  She forced herself to rise, find her tavern clogs and step into them, ignoring the splinters of pain in her feet. She pushed her hair back into her cap, and what was forming in her mind became a little clearer, something seen by first dawn light, rather than in the black hour after moonset.

  She pieced the idea together, winding endless circles among the tables, setting down ale and bread and cold beef, picking up empty mugs. She never met eyes, and so no one looked directly at her; she kept her hair hidden, her voice toneless. She never smiled, which was easy. Her scratched, chewed hands, blistered lately by broom and scrub brush, were all that most ever noticed of her. Even the ones with straying hands who got the smack of her tray against their heads never really looked at her.

  Certainly she had scarcely noticed the shadows that came and went in the palace, carrying trays, changing linen, dusting, polishing, picking up broken pieces of this or that, making fires, taking soiled garments away to be cleaned, and bringing them back. Kyel’s nurse, Jacinth, had supervised much of that for him. But Domini Pearl had sent her away. He would have other attendants now, chosen by the Black Pearl to give orders to the faceless company, numerous and quiet as mice, that flitted through the halls of the palace.

  No one, she thought, cold with wonder at the idea, would recognize me among them. Not even Domina Pearl.

  But what exactly could she do that would bring her most consistently into Kyel’s presence? She tried to remember her previous life, while responding to the details and demands of the present. The crowd, trying to drink its way past the uncertainty and peril of the changing rule, kept her working long past midnight. With some regard for her poor feet, her father put her behind the bar to wash mugs for a while. She gave that idea scant thought: stuck in the palace kitchens, she would never see the child-prince. She wouldn’t dare wear the starched aprons and caps of those who carried trays here and there, even if she could talk her way into such a position. One hard-eyed glance from Domina Pearl, and she would find herself among the crabs at the bottom of the harbor. She had to attract no attention, no interest from anyone.

  Laundry?

  She could not remember, she had never noticed, who took the bed linens, the towels, her clothes. A haughty attendant pointed to something soiled, and it vanished. Someone like that, she thought, as the sweat from the steaming water rolled down from her hairline into the suds. Someone without a name, without a face, only a pair of hands to carry with and a pair of feet to move her.

  But carry what? What would move her in and out of Kyel’s life with no one, not even Domina Pearl, thinking twice about her?

  The tavern finally quieted. Her father took the broom in hand before she could reach for it. She sank gratefully back down in the laundry pile, too tired to wonder what she was doing there. A shoe heel nudged her hip. She pulled it out and remembered the sunflowers shivering after she had flung the shoes into them.

  I must have hit Mag, she thought surprisedly, and found her answer there, glittering in her hand.

  Mag.

  SEVEN

  Sleight of Hand

  Mag stood beneath the palace of the rulers of Ombria. She had taken a turn underground past the sunflowers and the great, crumbled hearth with the chimney beneath them. Water from rain and drainage had eaten away at the face of the mansion containing the chimney. It stood very near what turned out to be the palace’
s cellars. Mag had wandered through them curiously, a taper in one hand, for what seemed hours. The outer rooms were ancient, ornate, as if they might have once existed above the earth as part of the early palace, and had gradually sunk to resume life in the maze of cellar rooms. Spiralling stone arches framed doorways; gargoyles depended from kitchen pipes, mouths open to issue rainwater, but only managing, at best, a suspended spider. Others, froglike chins in hand, contemplated centuries of boredom atop an archway, guarding the room within from nothing.

  There were no ghosts. Mag, moving as quietly as one toward the busier inner cellars, wondered if Faey’s peculiar existence, half-alive, half-past, had wakened the memories in the ghosts who lived with her. She heard voices now and then, abrupt, echoing distortions of sound that might have lost coherent shape passing between now and then. For a long time, she found no way up.

  She began to smell things besides stone and standing water. Tapers lit here and there showed her enormous urns, barrels, little pools of carelessly decanted liquid. One unlit room smelled of vinegar, another of leather, another of lamp oil. She passed into a vast holding place for ancient carriages. They were lined against the walls, ranked by age and ornateness. On impulse, she climbed into one, sat regally on moth-eaten velvet, one hand out the window, lightly stroking the gaudy bauble of gold on wheels that might have carried a princess to her coronation.

  She hardly looked the part. She wore black again, borrowed from a servant’s chest she had found in Faey’s attic. She might pass, she hoped, for a housekeeper or some such, if anyone glimpsed her through a closing door, or disappearing down a staircase. She had not come on any errand of Faey’s. It was the middle of the night, and Faey, trailing smells and colors of spells like rotting silk, had tumbled so deeply into sleep that her face, slipping free from its own spell, bulged oddly here and there like a sack of potatoes. Her snores, reverberating through the undercity, had followed Mag for an astonishing distance. Had she known where Mag was going, she would have taken her waxling promptly in hand for repairs.