by Grace Draven
Shaking his head in sorrow, he said, “Alas, that aged worthy survived Uorsin by only two days. She died in her bed and received a fine funeral, despite everything.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” I murmured, wishing her safely to Glorianna’s arms. Typical of the stubborn old lady, to have survived Illyria’s rampages and take death in her own way. I turned my mind back to the business of the living. “They’ll start whispering that Ursula is a pretender to the throne.”
“They already are. That started up almost immediately—and not in whispers. Some are quite loud in their objections.”
“Of course.” I wanted to bang my forehead on the book I carried, but it might startle my horse. “What is she waiting for?”
“She says she’s too busy.” He phrased it neutrally, but gave me a wry glance, waiting for my reaction.
Which was to groan and roll my eyes. Banging my head on the book might be a good idea after all. “She’s too busy. Can’t you sic Andi and Ami on her?”
He shook his head. “They’ve tried talking to her. She won’t even discuss it.”
Uh-oh. Not a good sign at all. “Does she not want the throne now, after all that’s happened?” I asked it carefully, making sure no one could overhear.
“It’s not that. You know her as well as anyone. She could never not take the throne. The responsibility for the Twelve is the fabric of her being. They could ship her overseas and she’d keep trying to do her job.”
All true. “Then what do you think is stopping her?”
“My Essla is...” He frowned. Reconsidered. “She’s suffering considerable guilt over killing her father. I suspect she’s resisting because she feels she doesn’t deserve the throne. When she recovered from...whatever it was those three did, practically the first words out of her mouth upon regaining consciousness was a demand for her own execution.”
CHAPTER FOUR
I closed my eyes against that image—and against the plaguing sense that I should have been there. Of course she had felt that way. “Wait. Back up. Regaining consciousness—what happened?”
Harlan squinted up at the brilliant blue that only autumn seems to bring to the sky. “I don’t know that I can explain and I stood as close as anyone. You heard that when we retook Ordnung, Ursula killed Illyria?”
“Yes.” That much news had filtered over the pass. “Is it true your Mistress of Deyrr converted half the population of the castle and township into the walking dead?”
“She may have been Dasnarian, but she was never mine.” He went on before I could apologize for misspeaking. “We don’t have good numbers as yet. It seems she used recruits and others brought in from impoundment gangs. But yes, we have burned a great many.”
I must have made a face, imagining that, because he gave me a sympathetic glance. “I agree. All that gives them true death is dismemberment, then burning. You’ve escaped seeing the worst of it. Count yourself lucky.”
I did, though the unsettling thought pricked at me that these undead might only appear to have found true death because ashes cannot move. What if their spirits remained trapped in some way? I didn’t quite believe in the rose-covered bower of Glorianna’s arms that some saw as what awaited them, returning to the mother’s love beyond death. I’d told Ami once after she buried her husband, the good and noble Prince Hugh that I believed we move on to other lives, much as ashes become soil that grows into trees again. I hadn’t been mouthing comforting platitudes—I truly believed that.
Ashes kept somehow eternally suspended between life and death could never do that.
“Ursula did not dispatch Illyria entirely on her own,” Harlan was saying. “Queen Andromeda used magic against the priestess while King Rayfe brought his shapeshifters in by breaking the Rose Window.”
“Oh no, not again.”
“Yes.” Harlan chuckled. “Rayfe seemed most pleased with himself.”
“I can just imagine. What kind of magic did Andi use?”
“Some sort of blue lightning.”
Why had I even asked?
Harlan acknowledged the unhelpfulness of his answer with a fatalistic shrug. “Then Queen Amelia called on Glorianna to dissolve the protective barrier Illyria had placed around herself—one much like the Annfwn barrier.”
“Interesting.”
“Yes. I tell you this because it has bearing on the final confrontation. Uorsin emerged from his rooms where he’d been barricaded.”
I’d heard that part, but groaned in frustration at his cowardice regardless.
“I agree. Ursula took the cabochon topaz from her sword, which is truly a perfect sphere that her mother gave her, called the Star of Annfwn.”
“She did know where it was all along.”
“Indeed. She swallowed it and—”
“Swallowed it, as in down her throat?”
“To her stomach where it has apparently remained. After coating it with her blood and that of her sisters.” He nodded at my incredulous look. “I witnessed it myself. She then fought Uorsin, challenging him to abdicate. The Star somehow allowed her to channel Salena’s magic.”
“Salena, who is dead.” As in eighteen years dead, not freshly undead. What a world we’d entered, that we’d have to specify the difference.
“The very one. I told you it’s not easily explained. The Star also... aligned the three sisters, is the only way I can describe it. They invoked their goddesses and when Ursula ran Uorsin through with her sword, the moment his blood hit the earth, it was as if I stood inside an enormous temple bell that had been struck.”
“Whoa.”
“Yes.” His voice held the softness of wonder at it, then he gave me a wry glance. “I am a practical man, but something ... huge happened.”
“The barrier fell.”
“That and it felt like...something released. A great wave of magic crashing through a cracked dam. All three sisters collapsed. Rayfe, Ash, and I all feared at first they’d died.”
“They were there, too?”
“Yes. Amelia and Andromeda awoke within the hour. Ursula...not for some time and only after Ash used his healing powers on her.”
“So you were all a part of it—this spell, or what have you—and Ursula the focus.”
“That seems to be the case. Amelia says that the land accepted the sacrifice and Andromeda says that something called the Heart of Annfwn is connected to the Star in Ursula. That’s privileged information, by the way.”
I arched a brow at him, surprised. “If it’s privileged, am I meant to know it?”
“Yes. Ursula told me to make sure you knew everything you need to.” He gave me a canny smile. “As we all know you do regardless, whether you admit to it or not.”
“I understand now why the news was chary of details,” I finally said, thoughts whirling as I assembled it all. “Though it makes more sense if Ursula has been reluctant to take the crown.”
“Among other things,” Harlan agreed. “Uorsin also admitted to murdering Salena. Bragged of it, in truth. That went hard on all of them.” He studied my face. “But you are not surprised.”
No, I wasn’t. Though I’d never wanted to say as much. Especially for someone in my tenuous position in the royal household—not exactly a prisoner of war, not officially a ward of the Crown—survival depended on tact and political acumen. Which did not mean sharing my suspicions that the High King had deliberately murdered his queen. “I liked Salena. She was kind to me when she didn’t need to be. We’d both lost our families and I think... we recognized that in each other.”
“How old were you when Castle Columba fell?”
“Six. Nearly seven. I don’t remember very much except the awfulness of the siege, how afraid and angry everyone was. Boredom and moments of stark terror. Being hungry.” Other, darker things that I didn’t care to examine.
“Difficult, especially for a small child. Not understanding fully, knowing only that the adults, the bedrock of your world, were coming apart.”
Oh
yes. The weeping and the shouts. People disappearing, never to return. The wounded, screaming in the night, and the silence after somehow worse.
“You were the only survivor?”
“Of my family, yes. The story is that a healer dug me out of a hidey-hole buried under rubble. Four days after the siege ended.”
“Ah.” His face creased with sorrow. “How terrible that must have been.”
“It rained, so they think I lived on the rainwater that leaked through a crack. I don’t remember it.” Except in sharp-edged fragments here and there. I shook it off. “I begin to see how you manage Ursula so well. You draw confessions out of people.”
“It’s better, so teaches the tradition I follow, for warriors to air the old traumas. Open the wounds to let them heal.”
“I am no warrior.” The thought made me smile at the absurdity. “Only a librarian.”
“We are all warriors in our own lives—fighting the battle to become who we most long to be.”
I let that go, though it sounded like an overly grand way to view my small existence. “I think of my experiences more as formative. They shaped me, but are long scabbed over. As for Salena’s death, I was a teenager then. They put about that she died of childbirth sickness, but . . . she wasn’t ill. Not that way. So no, I’m not surprised. But I can see that Ursula, in particular, would have taken that news hard. She wanted to believe her father better than that.”
“In many ways, she still struggles with that old faith she had in him.”
“He had a deep hold on her, but it’s good she has you to help her with it.”
“And you. We were all relieved that she sent us to retrieve you. She will heed your good counsel.”
I nearly snorted at him this time, relieved to be on the firmer ground of managing a mercurial ruler. “Her Highness does not listen to my advice all the time. Not even most of the time.”
“She will. You will simply have to make the case to her for the coronation to happen immediately. We will all back you.”
“You’ve discussed it amongst yourselves?”
He narrowed his eyes, face going neutral. “I will deny it if you say so.”
I laughed; half amused, half frustrated. “So you’re all just throwing me at the dragon to save yourselves.”
“We will help you. Out of range of her fiery breath,” he added with a grin, then sobered. “The situation is tense, Lady Mailloux. Magic has gone wild, causing pandemonium everywhere. The more aggressive of the Twelve pursue cases of patricide and treachery against Ursula. They whisper for her execution, call her right to rule into question at court, and she cannot bring herself to deny their claims, overtly or to herself.”
“Hypocrites. Them, not her,” I hastily added.
“Indeed. Queen Andromeda is feeling the strain of the barrier, which seems to pull at her still, though in a way she can’t explain. Rayfe anticipates that Annfwn will be pillaged, fears for his wife, and wishes to return home as soon as possible.”
“But Andi won’t leave Ursula with the situation so unstable.”
“And Amelia won’t leave her either, nor go to Windroven without the babies, although there are disturbing reports of strange phenomena in that region.”
“Such as?”
“I’ll let you hear them for yourself, lest I color your perceptions with a misunderstanding of your Common Tongue.” A sly deflection on his part. He understood our language better than some native speakers. But I had no grounds to press him to share what he did not wish to. “Never fear, Lady Mailloux.” Harlan grinned at me in his genial way. “We shall not grow bored any time soon.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The first thing that hit me as we rode up to the great gates of Castle Ordnung was the absence of the pennants that had always, always flown from the towers, since the first and tallest had been raised.
I hadn’t expected to feel the lack, to have any sense of nostalgia for the missing banners. But even before he’d finished razing Castle Columba and building Ordnung on its bones, Uorsin’s flag had hung over the camp where we’d all lived after Columba fell and the Great War ended. I didn’t remember everything about those days, but some memories persisted with an almost fever-dream intensity to them. The armies, tearing down the ruins of my family home, using ropes and teams of men to pull down the few walls that remained, while others beat on stone with hammers and other tools. The air had been gray with dust and stank of burning bodies.
Then the first shining white tower had grown like a stem sprouting from the soil, shooting up, then blossoming with Uorsin’s bear running against the sky, alive and ravenous. For a while, I’d dreamed of that bear every night. Crimson as fresh blood, it chased and caught me, no matter where I ran. Through forests, through the tent camp, through battlefields littered with the dead, through the halls of Columba, though I knew they no longer existed.
Once I’d awakened to Queen Salena’s hand on my brow. A blue light spun in her palm making her eyes glow with silver. She hadn’t spoken, only smiled and stroked my forehead. I’d fallen asleep with a sense of cool sweetness that calmed and sated me. Always after, when she spoke of the loveliness of Annfwn, I’d imagined that feeling came from there. That had been one reason I’d determined to convince Ursula to let me go there, much as she tried to prevent me, to keep me safe. A piece of my younger self had demanded to know, a far stronger pull than safe practicality. Rare for me.
Once Ordnung had been finished, banners for all the Twelve joined their conqueror’s, flying from the many towers, the bear topping them all. To my bemusement, they had gone from being a sign of defeat to a symbol of continuity, that my life had not shattered again.
The emptiness of the towers hit me with that old dizzying sense of loss, and I groped through it to find words to ask Harlan about it. “You took down all the pennants?”
Harlan frowned, following my gaze. “Illyria must have. They weren’t flying when we took the castle.” He seemed to search his memory. “I’m sure they weren’t. And you’re the first to mention the lack.”
“I imagine it didn’t feel like the highest priority, but as with the coronation, these things must be addressed. The key to an even transfer of regimes is making it seem as if nothing has really changed.”
“Except for the tyrannical abuse of power.”
Well, yes. “For external presentation, to prevent anyone from thinking to take advantage, there can be no apparent cracks. It must seem as if Ursula is simply continuing what Uorsin started.”
“You can explain that to Her Majesty. I look forward to it, in fact.”
I glared at him and he grinned down at Astar, riding wide-eyed in his carry, strapped to Harlan’s broad chest. “Lady Mailloux has a fierce mien,” he said to the baby prince, “but never fear. She is a softie inside. Just don’t get fingerprints on her books or not even your mother will be able to protect you.”
As if on cue, Amelia, looking more like a girl dressed to dance at a Feast of Glorianna than a queen, squeezed impatiently through the opening gates. Her red-gold curls shimmered and the intense violet blue of her eyes shone through her tears. “Oh, thank Glorianna!” she cried in her musical voice as she ran up to Harlan’s stirrup, jumping up and down with her arms outstretched for Astar. “Give me my baby. Where is Stella?”
“Let the man get off his horse, brat.” Ash followed behind her, his scarred mouth twisted by a wide, pleased smile. “And if you took a moment to look, you’d see your cousin Zynda has Stella. How you could miss the head of hair on that child I don’t know.”
“Or the shrieking,” I added.
As soon as Stella, whose black curls indeed sprang wildly round her head, heard her mother’s voice, she’d started fussing and now ramped up to a full-throated wail that demanded instant satisfaction.
“Sounds just like her mother,” Ash commented in his raspy, damaged voice, as Zynda, with her liquid Tala grace, uncoiled from the saddle, leapt down, and handed him the indignant princess. Harlan had al
ready lowered a much-calmer Astar to his mother’s impatient arms, so Ash held out Stella close enough for Ami to rain kisses and coos on her also. Already the twins had grown enough to make it unwieldy to hold both at once. Ash surveyed me with his bright green gaze, so clear and cool in his craggy face. “Good to see you again, Lady Mailloux. We’ve need of your level head and extensive learning.”
“So I’ve been told.” I flicked a glance at Harlan, who’d dismounted and held up a hand to help me down, his expression studiously bland.
Neither did Ash take the bait. “Any trouble?” he asked Harlan.
“More on the way there. A few skirmishes on the way back.” Harlan took note of my surprise. “Our advance teams handled them. I didn’t mention to you as I didn’t want you to worry.”
“I’m perfectly fine with not worrying,” I assured him. Another reason I could never trade places with Ursula—or Andi or Ami, even—as I didn’t have a bold or heroic bone in my body. Give me a quiet room full of books over adventure every time. Maybe seeing the pennants gone and remembering those early days of Uorsin’s triumph, the old memories of Salena and the nightmares, had left a chill over me, but I wanted nothing more at that moment than to find a safe cubby and curl up in it.
Not unlike my six-year-old self, first hiding, then trapped for days in the darkness of that hole while my family, all my people, burned and died. Harlan and his interest in airing old traumas had done nothing more than dig up things best left lying quiet.
He and Ash were discussing the various groups that had attacked—or needed to be chased off—and I made myself focus on that instead.
“The organized group of ‘merchants’ headed for Annfwn sounds like the greatest concern,” Ash mused.
“Yes,” Harlan replied, gesturing us through the gates. “Though that particular set won’t be bothering anyone again, we can certainly expect more of the same. Honestly, that strange monster my patrol put down concerns me most.”