Ombria In Shadow

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She gave it to Mag, then shifted a sagging cheekbone into place and stifled a ladylike yawn.

  “I’m going to bed,” she said. “I must be up at moonset.”

  Mag lifted her eyes from the locket, looked a question. Faey shook her head, patting Mag’s shoulder, turning her adroitly out the door to avoid her gaze. “Nothing I need help with. You should rest; you’re beginning to look like one of the household ghosts.”

  But I’m not, Mag thought with a fierce, burning triumph, as she lay in her own bed with the locket in her hands. Neither ghost nor wax… My bones belong to me.

  The locket, carved of ivory and rimmed with gold, was rectangular and thick, like a tiny book. She pressed the catch; it opened easily. She held it flat, scarcely breathing lest she disturb what lay inside. Three minute pearls of red as dark as dried roses lay on a tiny piece of parchment cut to fit one side. The other side held a faded white rose petal behind the thinnest oblong of glass. She gazed at both sides, her lips parted. Whose blood? she wondered. Whose rose? His blood, she guessed, and the rose that he had given her. It seemed as likely as any other tale, and more comforting than most.

  Then she saw the third side of the locket, another page in the book, outlined in gold behind the petal. She pressed the latch again, very gently, and it flicked open.

  She stared at the darkness for a very long time before she touched it. Still potent, a little cloud clung to her fingertip. Absently, she rested her head on her hand, studying the locket, and transferred a streak of ashy black along one raised eyebrow.

  Charcoal.

  EIGHTEEN

  What the Manticore Said

  Ducon, reappearing after days of mysterious absence, produced, in various circles, such a confusion of responses that he thought he might as well have come back from the dead. Marin Sozon, who had spent a small fortune trying to kill him, greeted him easily enough, but turned so white he seemed to be trying to fade away completely under Ducon’s eyes. The Black Pearl, whom he thought would be unmoved, actually produced an expression beneath the brittle lacquer that held her face together. He had fallen ill, he explained smoothly, and had been recovering in the house of some friends.

  “I searched for you,” she said, perplexed and suspicious. “I have my ways, and even they could not find you. You must tell me who these friends are so that they may be properly thanked.”

  “I’ll thank them very properly,” he answered, managing a hint of private amusement, “when I see them again.”

  She had no blood left in her to produce a flush, but even her hair seemed to stiffen. “They might have sent a message,” she complained. “We have all been very worried.”

  “I should have thought. Perhaps I should reassure my cousin.”

  Her hesitation, the flicker of an eye, was so subtle that in anyone else he would never have noticed it. “Yes. He has been asking for you. You might find him somewhat subdued. Melancholy. The physician assures us that it is a natural response to the great changes in his life.”

  Ducon felt a familiar, tangled knot of dread and anger tighten in him; for a moment he could not speak. Domina Pearl didn’t wait for a response. Moving past him, she added, “He has begun his studies with Camas Erl. They will be busy all morning. You may see the prince for a moment or two when they finish.”

  He didn’t wait.

  He found Camas Erl and Kyel in the library, where the prince was staring listlessly at a chart Camas had hung from a cabinet knob. The massive family tree of the House of Greve dangled names as thick as crabapples from its branches; Kyel’s name on its trunk seemed a lonely, insubstantial support for it. The prince turned his head as Ducon entered. For a moment the wide, indifferent gaze encompassed even Ducon, and transfixed him with its apathy. Then the prince rose wordlessly, went to him.

  Ducon knelt, held him closely. He felt Kyel’s arms finally, closing limply, hesitantly, around him as though he had forgotten how to touch. Ducon stared over his shoulder at Camas Erl, who was still holding a pointer on a contentious bit of history: the twin heirs born to Kasia Greve a couple of centuries before. Camas, staring wordlessly back at Ducon, finally put the pointer down.

  “Welcome home.”

  Ducon nodded, and drew Kyel back to look at him. His face was very pale; there were shadows like bruises beneath his eyes. He blinked under Ducon’s scrutiny as though he had just wakened.

  “Ducon.” His voice sounded strengthless, fragile. “Where were you?”

  “I was taken ill; I couldn’t come home for a while. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to tell you.”

  “I thought you died,” Kyel said with chilling calm. Then expression stirred in his eyes; he found the past again, remembered what death was. He looked at Ducon almost accusingly, found him still alive, and a little color rose in his face. “I thought you went where Lydea and Jacinth went, and my father—”

  “No.”

  “I thought Domina Pearl—” The prince stopped abruptly, his eyes widening, and swallowed the name. He turned his head slowly, as if he expected to see her looming behind him, summoned out of his thoughts. Ducon’s jaw clenched. He stood up so that Kyel would not see his face, and took the prince’s hand, led him back to the table.

  “Tell me what Camas Erl is teaching you.”

  “He is teaching me the history of the House of Greve,” Kyel answered without inflection and without interest. He sat down again; his eyes went to Camas with perfunctory attention. But he still clung without realizing it to Ducon’s hand.

  Ducon freed himself gently; Kyel did not seem to notice. Camas went to the boy, gave him paper and a pen.

  “Practice your letters, my lord,” he said. Kyel dipped the pen obediently, without answer, and bent over his work. Ducon lingered, watched him a moment longer. Then he took Camas’s arm so forcibly the tutor winced, and strolled with him to the far end of the room.

  “What has she done to him?”

  Camas shook his head, answered softly, “Some potion or another, to make him passive. I don’t know how or when she gives it to him. Ducon, where have you been? I’ve searched everywhere—”

  “You missed a place. Listen to me. I have found an assistant for you.”

  “For what?”

  “To assist you while you tutor Kyel.”

  The tutor gestured incredulously. “Look at him! He’s barely conscious of me. The only thing that holds his attention is making letters, and I think that’s only because he remembers the drawings he did for you. I don’t need an assistant; I need a pupil.”

  “You will need this one.”

  “Ducon, you’re making no sense. I’ve never had—” He stopped then, hearing something in Ducon’s inflexible argument. “Why? Who is he?”

  “She.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind who. Unless you take her, I will go to Domina Pearl and demand to know what she is poisoning Kyel with—”

  “All right,” Camas breathed, patting Ducon’s shoulder anxiously. “All right. You’d disappear so fast no one would know you ever came back.”

  “What you yourself don’t know, you can’t be held accountable for.”

  “That’s reassuring,” the tutor said drily. “And in this place, hardly true. Ducon. Just tell me what you want.”

  “I want her to watch over Kyel. Domina Pearl wouldn’t permit me to, you are in no position to, and this is—this is someone whom Kyel will trust.”

  The owl’s eyes, wide and watchful, glimpsed the trembling in the grass, the secret glide of some living thing through the world. Camas ran splayed fingers through his tidy hair, pulling tendrils loose. “Not—”

  “You won’t recognize her. No one will but Kyel.”

  “But how will I explain to—”

  “Think of something.”

  “But how can she—Ducon, where have you been?”

  “In the underworld,” Ducon answered. Camas was suddenly, oddly, without questions.

  Ducon went to speak to Lydea, whom he had plac
ed in the discreet care of the prince’s pretty chambermaid in the silent, unguarded lower floors of the palace. The chambermaid, having other arrangements, had offered Lydea her own bed for the night. Ducon tapped lightly on one of the indistinguishable closed doors lining the hall, and hoped he had remembered the right one. It was opened by a prim, elegant stranger; he stepped back, murmuring an apology.

  “Ducon,” she said. He took a closer look at her face, and remembered that he had last glimpsed it within the folds and shadows of a deep hood on the voluminous silk cloak which the sorceress had pulled out of some forgotten century to protect her spell.

  “It’s not,” he commented slowly, walking a circle around her, “so much that your face has changed. It’s what meets the eye in that first glance at you. Someone poised and very proper, sure of her place in the world, calm and unassailable. Whatever you gave the sorceress for this was worth it.”

  “That doesn’t sound like me at all,” Lydea said shakily.

  “But it’s what you seem.”

  “I can’t even bite my nails.” She showed him long, graceful fingers tapering into perfect ovals. “I don’t know what she made them out of. Old boot soles, maybe.”

  The height, the coloring, the slender figure had not truly changed, he saw. Her hair was pulled back into a coiled braid. Something about the plain style seemed to diminish its brightness; its color didn’t draw the eye. Nothing about her did, except an impression of calm intelligence which, in that palace, would attract no attention whatsoever. The dark gown she wore, unadorned but for black ribbon at the wrists and neck, gave her an odd air of authority that she had never possessed in five years as his uncle’s mistress.

  “You look very scholarly.”

  “That’s fortunate,” she said grimly, “since I barely know more than how to read and write.”

  “That’s more than Kyel knows.”

  “Did you talk to Camas Erl?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “What could he say? I didn’t give him a choice.” He touched his eyes, feeling a flickering shadow of pain behind them. “The Black Pearl is giving Kyel something—some potion, Camas guessed—that leaves him passive. Spiritless.” He glimpsed her familiar face then, very clearly, vivid and flushed with passion. “Don’t do that,” he warned. “Don’t look like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Don’t feel. It’s a stronger spell than the sorceress’s. Do what you can for him. Think for him. Think for us all.”

  She looked at him closely, an unfamiliar woman who seemed to know him oddly well. “Ducon, are you all right?”

  He nodded absently. “A lingering reminder… Camas will find a way to explain you to Domina Pearl, and I’ll bring you to meet him tomorrow.” He glanced around the spare, neat room, furnished with a narrow bed, a chest, a pitcher and basin. “Where will you stay? Will they give you all you need?”

  “I am told that my status will allow me to have a private room, exactly like this, if I am accepted as assistant to the prince’s tutor.” Even her voice could sound scholarly, he thought, precise and reserved. “It’s another world down here, with its own rules and its own structure. Not unlike what goes on in the court above our heads, just not so gaudy or well fed. I don’t have to share a bed, and I may have a tray brought to my room, just like a lady-in-waiting or a nurse.” She sat down on the bed, at which Ducon gazed in appalled fascination.

  “I didn’t know they made them that small.” He turned restively. “I’m going to see if Kyel left me any drawings, and then I’ll begin to search for Mag.” He paused, his hand on the doorknob. “Straw-colored hair, you said?”

  “A lot of it.”

  “Eyes?”

  “An unusual pale brown. The color of walnut shells.”

  He grunted, struck. “I wonder why I’ve never painted them.”

  “You’ve never seen them watching you. Ducon,” she pleaded as he opened the door, “be careful.”

  “If I find her,” he said, “I’ll let you know.” The sedate, composed face he saw did not seem to need reassurance, but he smiled at it anyway. “I’ll come for you tomorrow.”

  He was walking quickly through the light and airy upper corridors when he realized suddenly that in the stretch of hallway where his chambers were he saw no guards anywhere. He froze instantly, thinking: Kyel. Something is wrong. The knife that should have struck him at his next step sailed past him and into the benign eye of his grandfather, who was hanging, as large as life, on the wall beside him.

  He heard a pithy curse and whirled. Someone drove into him from behind, pinned him to the floor, breathless and gasping. Before he could shout. A heavy boot grazed the side of his head; another slammed into the back of his knee. He went limp for a moment, dizzy with pain. His wrists were caught, his arms twisted ruthlessly behind his back. A hand pulled at his hair, wrenched his head up. He saw the manticore then, the fierce, mad human face on the lion’s body rearing above a pair of crossed swords in gold and silver thread on white livery. Beyond it, Marin Sozon stood watching, with Greye Kestevan beside him.

  Something glinted at the periphery of Ducon’s vision; he felt a cold, thin edge of metal against his throat.

  The manticore said softly, “You should have died the first time.” He nodded briefly without taking his eyes from Ducon. “End it.”

  The hand holding his hair loosed him abruptly; the floor smacked against his face and he tasted blood. Then a bulky, cumbersome darkness dropped over his head and shoulders. His arms were suddenly free; someone stumbled across him as though he were part of the carpet. He heard the chaos around him then, a tempest trying to be as quiet as possible, grunts, thuds, a hissed shout. He tried to shrug off the dead weight that had fallen on his head. His arms were caught again; exasperated, he tried to shout and breathed in a mouthful of silk. Someone rolled the darkness off him and he saw the manticore of thread again, a knife neatly severing the bloody swords where they crossed.

  Sozon and Kestevan had vanished; his one-eyed grandfather gazed cheerfully down at another liveried thug groaning at the foot of the painting. Ducon, pulled ungently to his feet and freed, finally saw his rescuers.

  He had last seen them on the end of a rotting pier: cousins and the sons of Sozon’s dangerous faction. Since then, the expressions on their young faces had hardened, become desperate. Four guarded the stairways at each end of the hall; the others clustered in a tight circle around him. They were scarcely bruised; they must have overwhelmed Sozon with numbers and surprise.

  “Thank you,” he said shakily. “How—where are the Black Pearl’s guards? Did she plan this?”

  The cousin he remembered most clearly, with the burning, visionary’s eyes, explained briefly. “Sozon planned a disturbance in another part of the palace. When the regent pulled the guards away from here, we guessed he might attack you here.” He gripped Ducon’s shoulders, shook him a little. “We don’t have time for this. We are supposed to be fighting the Black Pearl, not each other.”

  “I told you—”

  “You told us nothing. You told us: Wait. You told us: You’ll let us know when you need us. As what? Drinking companions? You said you would choose.”

  He tried to answer. Lightning struck behind his eyes; he staggered. They caught him, not without some frustrated cursing.

  “He’s hurt.”

  “He looks like he’s been dragged through the gutter,” someone added disgustedly. “Get him to his room before the guards return.”

  “What about the bodies?”

  “What about them? They’re Sozon’s—let him explain them to the Black Pearl.”

  “You don’t need me,” Ducon commented dazedly as they dragged him down the hall. “You’re doing fine by yourselves.”

  “We need you,” the visionary said between his teeth, “to help us destroy the Black Pearl. You see her constantly; you know her better than anyone.”

  They drew him into his chambers, dropped him ont
o the bed. Someone, with a kindness he hardly expected, pulled off his boots. They looked down at him, their blurred faces seeming alike, an endless circle of twins.

  “Should we send for the physician? We can’t just leave him like this, bleeding all over the sheets.”

  “Why not? He must be used to it, the way he lives his life. Let him sleep it off. And then—” Ducon felt fingers cup his jaw, shaking him to regain his fading attention. The blue eyes held it: his uncle’s eyes, but fierce and scalding with impatience. “Let him think. We’ll be back. You owe us your life. We’ll tell you what to do with it.”

  He opened his eyes much later to taper fire and a gentler touch. The conspirators, in the magic way of dreams, had turned into the physician and Domina Pearl. The Black Pearl, her words brusque, clipped, flames seething across the icy barrens in her eyes, seemed as furious as he had ever seen her. He wondered how many of the conspirators would be left in the palace by dawn.

  He drank what the physician gave him and slept again. He woke at dawn and saw, in the opaque grey light slowly rediscovering the world, a little scrap of cloud that had been pushed beneath his door.

  He rose slowly, stiff and aching in every muscle. He limped to the door to pick the paper up, thinking as always at any anomaly, and feeling the knot of love and fear tightening in him at the thought: Kyel.

  But Kyel could never have written, not even three short words, especially not formed as they were from dripping candle wax. He stared at them until they made sense. And then he opened the door abruptly, trying for a glimpse of her walnut eyes, but only finding guards everywhere that somehow she had eluded.

  I am safe, said the wax.

  NINETEEN

  Mistress Thorn

  Lydea, also awake at dawn in the chambermaid’s windowless room, had no idea what hour it was. Dreams had wakened her. When she closed her eyes, she saw Domina Pearl watching her; when she opened them in the dark, she heard Kyel weeping. Slowly the sound would turn into a soft, lonely sobbing that came from behind one of the endless lines of closed doors along the silent hallway. She thought of Royce Greve, and of his pampered, nervous mistress, who had chewed her nails among the satin sheets in one of the rich, high, light-filled chambers with a view of the gardens and the sea. Now she was buried beneath the palace, on a meager bed in a room like a cell in a hive and her fingernails so hard you could drive them into a plank with a hammer.