Ombria In Shadow

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  They might have been waiting for him, though they looked as surprised as he. But they wasted no time; they took him lightly in hand and drew him back into the empty conservatory to a circle of marble benches within a ring of potted palms.

  “My lord Ducon,” Marin Sozon said, his pale blue eyes no longer genial but very cold. “The House of Greve will not survive Kyel’s rule. Domina Pearl will destroy him, the family, and Ombria. It will be years, if ever, before Kyel produces an heir, and his consort will be chosen by his regent. The House of Greve is dead. I warned your uncle repeatedly about her; he did nothing. What will you do?”

  Ducon sat down. The half-dozen courtiers closed around him, their aging faces grim. They had watched Domina Pearl for decades longer than the younger conspirators; they would be, despite their years, more cunning and more ruthless. He was, he realized, crumpling the scroll he had made of Kyel’s drawings. He unrolled them, smoothed them against his knee and told the truth. “Paint.”

  He heard a breath. Greye Kestevan’s hand rose swiftly to intercept what might have been a furiously aimed blow. “Then,” Kestevan said, meeting eyes around the circle, “he will not interfere with us.”

  “He will betray us,” Hilil Gamelyn protested, wrenching his arm out of Kestevan’s grip.

  “I can do nothing for you,” Ducon said precisely. “I will do nothing against you.”

  “Paint.” Gamelyn struck finally, at the drawings on Ducon’s knee. They scattered. “Bastard. You have no name, no true place; you owe loyalty to no one. You will betray us, if you are forced, to save yourself.”

  Ducon stared at him, his face rigid. He said, when the veined eyes finally flickered, “My loyalty lies exactly where I pledged it: with the Prince of Ombria. You were there. You heard me. And I heard you.”

  “Loyalty to the prince is loyalty to the regent,” Kestevan said softly, carefully. “You know that.”

  “I know what I said.” He rose, pushed through the circle to pick up the drawings. No one stopped him. Half a head taller than the tallest, and possessing whatever it took to wander alone in the perilous streets, he made them wary. He added, retrieving a drawing out of a palm pot, “You are right about one thing: I am a nameless bastard without power. Why come to me?”

  They watched him silently, until he picked up the last drawing and straightened. Sozon said bluntly, “Because no one knows you. What you want. What you might take, if you decided to take a risk.”

  “Ombria is a tree with fruit of gold,” Kestevan said very softly, “guarded by a dragon. Whoever kills the dragon takes the gold. You don’t need a name for that. Only the courage, the wit and the strength.”

  “Which is why I paint. I know the dragon too well. You must do what you must. But remember that the House of Greve is still very much alive and I have given my pledge to it. If you strike at Kyel, I will do what I must.”

  He walked out, leaving them to unravel whatever ambiguities they found in that. As he crossed the threshold, he felt himself breathe again. But for how long? he wondered. He was still shaken, torn between anger and fear, and seeing nothing very clearly. Moving quickly toward stairs leading to the upper chambers, he bumped into someone, and Kyel’s drawings scattered again all over the floor.

  Camas Erl, most likely on his way to find peace and quiet in the library, murmured an apology and bent to gather the drawings. He turned one over and then did not move, gazing at it. He did not speak. One by one, Ducon turned them all over on the floor and let them lie there; he knelt silently beside the tutor, studying them.

  Each page held random impressions of the past days. A small white house with no windows and a black square for a door. A strange, limbless, shrouded figure like a cocoon; its human eyes were closed. A scattering of dark circles: pearls or eyes that did not close. The charcoal had pressed hard into the paper to render such black. A small crowned stick figure, whose face had huge eyes and no mouth. Other figures, one with hair falling to the hem of her skirt: Lydea. Another carrying a square and a twig: paper and charcoal. Black circles loomed over both their heads. In a final drawing, the black circle filled the paper, which was torn here and there with the pressure of the charcoal. At one lower corner outside the perimeter of the circle floated another shrouded figure, a little grub with a crown on its head, its face drawn and then smudged, eyes and mouth blurring into yet another pearl of black.

  Ducon heard a sound. He didn’t realize he had made it until he felt Camas’s fingers on his arm. The tutor was sweeping the drawings together with his other hand.

  “Not here,” he said briefly. “The library. Nobody ever uses it.”

  Ducon rose, followed him wordlessly. Camas was right; the library, with its high, elegant shelves of rosewood and glass, was empty. The open books and paper on one table belonged to Camas; Ducon recognized the indecipherable scribblings. The tutor laid the drawings on the table. Ducon’s hands closed hard on the back of a chair.

  He said, “If I fight her, I die and Kyel is left with her. If I conspire with them, I will endanger Kyel. He is too young and vulnerable, they’ll find a way to get rid of him—”

  “Who?” The tutor’s startled yellow eyes were close to his; his grip was bruising. “Ducon—Who?”

  “You saw them,” Ducon said very softly. “One group of them.” He reached down, touched the little stick-figure prince who could not speak. His hand shook. “I thought the only danger was from her.”

  “Who? Who are the others? Ducon?”

  “I have to think about what to do.”

  “But—”

  “I have to think,” he insisted. Camas let go of him finally, gazed down at the drawings. His eyes were still wide, owl-like; he seemed to be listening to Kyel’s voice within the wordless drawings.

  “Did you see the prince this morning?” he asked Ducon. “Is that when he gave them to you?”

  “No. We have a secret place; I found them there. I think it’s secret. That may be a delusion, too.”

  “I wish you would explain,” Camas pleaded. “Who threatens Kyel? Who approached you?”

  “If I don’t act, I won’t harm Kyel. If I don’t speak, I will betray no one.” He began to gather the drawings together again. Camas watched him, a line between his brows.

  “Then what will you do?”

  “Draw.”

  He left the tutor there, and went to his chambers. He made a rough sketch of their faces close together, his and the crowned prince’s, like a promise. He made no reference to the Black Pearl in the drawing, in case she found it. He left it behind the mirror for Kyel. And then he left the palace to roam the streets of Ombria, where he painted shadows as he searched for light within them, painted thick, barred doors, as he searched in their hewn, scarred grains for what it was they hid, painted high windowless walls as if, rebuilding them stone by stone on paper, he could dismantle them and finally see the secret life behind the real.

  He came back late, dishevelled and slightly drunk, his hands shadowy with charcoal and vague pastels. He went down to the servants’ hall, where there were few guards, to open a door within the walls, then made his way to the mirror to see if Kyel had found his drawing.

  The drawing was gone. But he stumbled over the message Domina Pearl had left for him: a man’s body, his face covered with a palm leaf. Ducon, his own breath as still, his throat as dry as if he had swallowed his charcoal, lifted the palm leaf reluctantly.

  Hilil Gamelyn stared at him, his eyes as furious in death, it seemed, as they had been in life. His lips were black. Ducon rose, took a lurching step back from him, swallowed an acid rush of wine. The paintings slid from under his arm, spilled like leaves over the dead: crazed images of Ombria, in silence and shadow, locked, barred, hidden from the eye.

  He gathered them finally, knowing what he must do before Kyel opened the mirror again. He tucked the paintings in his belt, grasped Gamelyn’s arms and pulled him, inch by inch, step by stealthy step, for seasons and years, until he finally reached the conser
vatory. He left the dead man there, hidden behind the giant fern for the gardeners, to find, and for the conspirators to riddle over until they laid betrayal, if not death itself, on the bastard’s head.

  NINE

  The Sorceress’s Apprentice

  If Faey noticed her waxling missing overnight and swallowing yawns through the day in an unusually ladylike fashion, she said nothing. Mag felt her eyes once or twice, and met a look as dusky and opaque as an old raven’s back. But wherever Faey might imagine Mag had spent the night, it would sooner be in the pallid arms of the brewer’s son than under the bed of the Prince of Ombria. So Mag thought, and let some days pass in the safety of the undercity while she pondered what she had glimpsed in the palace. Requests still made their way to Faey from the frightened courtiers, all for protective spells and wards, which kept Mag mindlessly busy and freed her thoughts for occasional conjecture. The palace itself had its secrets, its hidden doors and rooms. What, she wondered, did it hold at the heart of itself? Its past, most likely: ghosts, memories and dreams, guarded against time within passages as unnoticed as the silent, busy veins in the wrist. Then something more than past occurred to her one morning as she stirred a loathsome stew of dried, scaly creatures who were beginning to shift a wing, open an eye while Faey murmured over them. A place within those invisible passages, Mag saw suddenly, where Domina Pearl kept her books and objects of power, and did her spells. Entranced by the vision, she let her paddle idle. An ominous bubbling sigh from the cauldron and a baleful glare from the perspiring sorceress brought her attention sharply to the task at hand. They were making a potion, a distillation of the various venoms and excretions of the small, rare reptiles, which exuded such things each time Faey brought them back to life. The potion, glowing and stinking at the moment, would become imperceptible to the eye until, brushed on something of value or on a likely weapon, it adhered to human skin. Then it would glow for days, even in the dark, iridescent patches of guilt which spread as the thief or assassin tried to wipe it away.

  The making was tiresome and difficult. At the end, after the liquid essence had been decanted into a small bottle and the creatures hung up to dry, Faey seemed to have forgotten her waxling’s lapse. She sank onto a faded love seat, closed her eyes with a sigh, then opened them again and sniffed at herself disgustedly. Too tired to change her clothes, she changed her entire body. Mag, washing the cauldron, watched a blue-eyed, porcelain-cheeked lady in a wig like sculpted cream that was melting down around her haughty face transformed into a black-eyed, barefoot gypsy whose gaudy clothes seemed about to drop off her like petals off a blown rose.

  Faey sighed again. “That’s better. One more and then that’s an end to it for the moment.”

  Mag was examining the residue in her mind of a third image that had formed, just for a blink, as the highborn lady faded and the gypsy began to emerge. There, within that blink, she thought she had glimpsed Faey’s true form. But Faey’s words startled her and the image vanished.

  “Another? I thought we were finished.”

  “One more came, while you were above buying death’s-head moths and lamb chops.”

  “From the palace?”

  “Where else, these days?” Faey was frowning at something in the moist, shadowy air that even the scented candles Mag had lit couldn’t clear. The narrow, focused stare Faey was giving the air seemed at odds with her blowzy body and her generous, painted mouth. Mag finished cleaning the cauldron silently. She knew that expression on any face Faey wore; it boded no good.

  She put the cauldron away and waited. Faey spoke again finally, forgetting to move her mouth. “Go and change; I don’t want to be distracted by that spell.”

  She was gathering her forces, Mag realized, preparing her mind for the place she needed to go to make death. “Yes, Faey.”

  “Bring the toad back with you, the one I keep in the cedar box. And all the ashes in the house.”

  “Yes, Faey,” Mag said again, mystified. Faey, stirring, spared her waxling an absent glance and found her lips again.

  “You see, I was right.” She rose, to study the dying coals in her fire ring. “The bastard does go next. But I was wrong about who wants him dead.”

  Mag, collecting ashes before she washed, puzzled them and the toad together. The toad meant poison, but what did Faey intend with all the ashes from their morning fires? She pondered Ducon in memory, watched him draw the long line of her black veil. She drew in a sudden breath of ash and coughed a small flurry above the hearthstones in the breakfast room. Ash could be made into charcoal. In her mind’s eye, she saw him smudge other lines lightly with his fingertips or the side of his hand. Poison from the plump, lethal toad mingled with the ashes on his skin. He leaned his forehead against his fingers, studying his sketch, leaving shadows of Faey’s spell above his brow.

  She swallowed drily, seeing with cold clarity the path that forked suddenly ahead of her. Along one road Ducon stood alive. Across the other, Ducon lay dead. Which? she wondered without answer. Which?

  His life, it seemed, was a masterpiece of ambiguity. He was no one’s son, therefore anyone could be his father. He had said neither yes nor no to the young conspirators who wanted to put him on the throne. They, suddenly wary, might have requested the poison themselves. He had spent a night beside Kyel without harming the child, but he had been watched at every moment by the Black Pearl’s guards. Kyel had demanded his presence, the one person apparently whom Domina Pearl could not send away. Was that to Kyel’s advantage? Or hers?

  Mag found the other hearths clean and tracked the rest of the morning ashes to the bucket in the kitchen. She added what she found and left them there while she went to wash and change. Clean again, redolent of lavender instead of reptile, she made her way to the rooms at the top of the house where Faey kept her menagerie, living and dead. Most of them, being cold-blooded and scaly, were slumbering. She opened the cedar casket cautiously, for the toad, which hibernated in the dark, ejected poison if startled. It only looked at her out of the moonless night of its eyes and asked her, Which?

  She looked back at it, her own eyes as still, and knew, for no clear reason she could give herself, that she would not let Faey succeed with this one. She had no good reasons to trust Ducon Greve’s motives, only disjointed, meaningless ones: the way he moved so fearlessly between the court and the city, the way he could draw a face, that he had watched the long, dark hours while Kyel slept, guarding the boy from nightmares. She closed the box gently, returned the toad to the dark. There would be some moment when Faey, trusting her waxling, turned her back; Mag would drop something into the spell to thwart it, or, if asked, accidently substitute one thing for another. And if subterfuge failed, one piece of charcoal looked very much like another… When Ducon refused to die, she could suggest that perhaps the Black Pearl, for her own reasons, had produced an antidote.

  “Who wants him dead?” she asked Faey when she returned to the chamber, toad in one hand, bucket in the other. The gypsy combing the ash in the fire circle for bits of unburned wood, shrugged a shoulder; the loose neckline of her bright silky blouse slid precariously down one arm.

  “Some noble with a manticore on his seal. Or her seal. The note was unsigned. The servant will return tomorrow for the making, and with the rest of the gold. Take these up, too, my waxling, and pour them all into that great cauldron.”

  Shovelling ashes out of the fire bed, Mag asked curiously, “Why do you need so much for something so small?” She wanted to snatch the words out of the air like butterflies and cram them back into her mouth as soon as she spoke. Faey gave her a look like the toad had, a fathomless, unblinking scrutiny.

  “Thinking, are we?”

  “It’s a great deal of ash,” Mag answered meekly. “It made me wonder.”

  “And where did your wondering bring you?”

  “To charcoal.”

  “And how would you know that Ducon Greve draws?”

  “I’ve seen him. Everyone has. He roams through O
mbria, sketching or painting whatever catches his eye. I was trying to put the toad and the ash and Ducon together.”

  Faey made a sound through her nostrils like a restless horse and got up off her haunches. “I suppose I did encourage you to learn,” she admitted. “Thinking becomes a habit. But be careful. It’s a dangerous habit and I would not like to see it get in my way.”

  “No, Faey,” Mag breathed, rolling the great cauldron across the flagstones. “Neither would I. Do you want this on the fire stones?”

  “Yes.” Faey opened the cedar box and stroked the toad lightly. It spoke a deep, organ-drone of a word and waddled onto her hand. “That’s my beauty,” she told it fondly. “You will have pearls and flies with jewelled wings to eat when we are finished. It’s like the last spell,” she added to Mag. “A distillation, a concentration. The charcoal must be fine enough for an artist to use, with no distracting hint of the poison in it.” She paused a moment, gazing at the ashes, then snapped a fire alive beneath the cauldron with her fingers. She spat into the cauldron and liquid formed around the hillock of ash. “Now, we must give him a powerful incentive to use this particular charcoal… Bring me a dozen or so drawings off the walls, paintings if the sketches are not good enough. Only the best, my waxling. We’ll add some magic to his charcoal; he’ll draw himself to death.”

  Mag hurried breathlessly through the house, trying to choose with an artist’s eye since Faey would only send her back if she brought the mediocre work that should have been burned. She could not guess what Faey might be doing while she was gone. Nothing more dangerous, she hoped, than stirring wet ashes. But the toad was on the windowsill when she returned, unrolling its long tongue at a glittering swarm of insects. Faey was so deeply immersed in her spell that the gypsy’s face had smudged slightly. One eye was higher than the other; her nose had slid askew.