by K.M. Weiland
Chapter Eighteen
Sleep had abandoned Allara halfway through the night.
For as long as she could remember, Réon Couteau had been the prison of her soul. Even back in the days when she had been young enough to be a friend to hope, when she had believed being a Searcher was an honor and not a curse, even then she had escaped the shadows of this ancient fortress whenever she could. An oppressive force clung to the very walls here, a sense of history incarnate perhaps. It was a constant presence, an invisible gaze watching over her shoulder, observing her every decision, her every action—and judging her.
She blinked and focused on the half-written papers strewn across her desk. Red dawnlight bled through the curtains on the far side of the room and reflected in the mirror above her head.
Around midnight, she had risen, lit the candle globes, and gotten to work. Time was too short to waste on sleep. But concentration had eluded her as well. She had written and rewritten the letter to her father, only to cast all her attempts aside.
She scanned the last sentence she had written, but she couldn’t quite get her mind around it. How was she supposed to drop a fireball like this in his lap? He wasn’t likely to understand or care about the whys, and the first thing he would see was that she had once again let a Gifted act outside her control.
Frustrated, she stabbed a period into the paper with the detachable pen nib that slid on and off her fingertip, like a metal fingernail. What was there to say except the truth? She couldn’t change it and she couldn’t polish it.
Mactalde had returned.
She had only met the man once. He had passed her in a hallway and recognized her. Back then, he had been the Sovereign of Koraud, handsome and young, with his tawny hair and his chiseled chin. But even then, she had seen the crinkled edges of the mortal illness that clawed at the edges of his body.
Standing there in the hallway, he had tilted her nine-year-old chin up, as if trying to figure out the cogs in her machine, perhaps searching for weaknesses.
“Bad time to be a Searcher, little one.” That’s all he had said.
After that, when she saw him again, for the last time, as the executioner’s axe descended toward his bowed neck, he had raised his eyes to her, and he had smiled. He didn’t look afraid. He had known he was coming back. He had believed it with all his heart. And now, twenty years later, here he was.
Someone knocked on the door. The hour was too early to break fast, but whatever new catastrophe had brought the maids to her chambers couldn’t be worse than what had already happened.
“Come in.”
She slapped the paper down flat on the desk and scribbled just two more lines, “The Gifted has come. So has Mactalde.” Before she could change her mind, she folded it up, curled her finger to stamp the paper with the seal on the front side of the pen nib, then pulled the nib from her finger and cast it into its bronze leak pit.
The door opened, and footsteps pattered into the room. Esta, of course. For a tall woman, taller even than Allara herself, she moved with the tiny mincing strides of someone half her size.
“My lady, forgive me, I thought you might be awake.”
“I’m awake.” She turned around in her chair and draped the long sleeve of her nightgown over its back. “What is it?”
Esta tsked. “Sitting up all night without a robe or a shawl. What are you thinking? Are you hungry?” She was already dressed in a high-waisted gown of dark green with a heavily embroidered brocade underlay showing through the triangular slit up the front of the skirt. Instead of the fashionable blonde wig she usually wore, her dark hair was done up and topped with a crescent headdress.
She didn’t wait for Allara to answer before snapping her fingers at the open door and signaling the maids to bring in the breakfast tray and its matching knee table.
Two girls in their early twenties hurried in.
The servants were all schooled by the steward, the housemistress, Esta, Quinnon, and Allara didn’t know who else, to keep their eyes respectfully averted in the presence of the royal family. But today they glanced at her not just once, but at least three times before leaving. Their expressions held questions . . . and something else. Anticipation, perhaps.
So every pantry maid knew the Gifted had arrived. Of course it wouldn’t have taken long. News flew nowhere faster than downstairs amongst servants. How much longer before the whole city knew? She realized her teeth were clenched and forced them to loosen.
The girls each bobbed an awkward curtsy, finally dropped their eyes, then fled.
“They know,” Allara said.
“Of course they know.” Esta lifted silver lids to reveal the steam curling from a white fillet of summerton and a peeled sopple floating in its bowl of sweet craniss wine. “To begin with, there’s a handsome guest in the western wing. Second, laundry took away a pile of clothes the like of which none of us has ever seen. Third, you come back alone without any of your Guard except Captain Quinnon. Fourth, the Garowai himself flies over our wall. And, fifth, you’re up all night in a dither.”
“The maids don’t know I was up all night.” She reached for the china stein of mulled cider and tipped back the hinged lid with her thumb. “And he’s not handsome.”
“He’s a sight better than that weasel-faced one you dragged in last time.” Esta lifted a lace handkerchief from a frosted bowl of snow oranges. “This fruit is here all the way from the Goraudian Mountains. I don’t suppose we’ll be seeing many more shipments any time soon.” She held them out. “I’ve been saving them.”
“Thank you.” She took the bowl and the offered spoon. Esta knew she had a soft spot for snow oranges. She spooned a smooth wedge into her mouth, broke the bitterness of the skin with her teeth, and bit down on the sweet beads inside. When she swallowed, it stuck in her throat.
She played with the spoon in the bowl. “Esta, I don’t know what to do.”
Esta sighed. “Seems to me, you always know what to do.” She threw back first the brocade curtains on the towering bed, then crossed the room to open the matching curtains on the narrow floor-to-ceiling windows. Sunlight streaked the room, searching out the dark corners of the paneled walls and the somber murals on the domed ceiling.
Allara tilted her head to the side and stared up at the pictures.
This room traditionally belonged to the Searcher, whether that person happened to be male or female, royalty or not. The circular ceiling mural was divided into four wedge-shaped pictures, alternating between famous Gifted and their Searchers. One wedge showed Rialla Nialle, an early female Searcher. According to legend, she had spent twenty years searching for her Gifted, Benjamin Webb, before finally finding him in the jungles of Ariad, halfway across the world.
Allara tilted her head farther, to peer into Rialla’s eyes. The artist, painting in the Radine style with its sumptuous curves, bland features, and ethereal garments, had envisioned her as an erect, fire-headed woman. Her sky-blue gown blended into the clouds behind her.
Rialla stared right past Allara, searching, still searching. She had found her Gifted. More than that, she had loved him and married him, making their story one of the most romantic and cherished among the canon of Gifted history. But even still, all these centuries after her death, she searched on.
Was that how Allara would be two hundred years from now? Living her life on the ceiling of some forgotten room, still searching for what she had never been able to find in life?
Esta pattered back across the room and rapped the fork against a plate. “The first thing you should do is eat your meal, drink your cider, and take another bath. That mob outside can wait.”
Allara sat up. “What mob?”
Esta’s rouged lips pinched. “Never mind. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
Allara set the bowl of snow oranges back onto the tray and shoved her chair back, its feet screeching against the floor’s parquetry. “Yes, you should have.” She snatched up her dressing gown and threw it on as she left the room
.
“My lady! Allara, wait!” Esta scampered behind her.
She strode down the hall, all the way across the building to the windows facing the front courtyard. Even before she could see out, she could hear the sound of people milling and the buzz of their voices.
She unlatched the window. “Who let them in here?”
“No one, my lady.” Esta puffed after her.
The liveried footman stationed on this floor hurried to take charge of opening the window.
“You can see they’re not in the courtyard,” Esta said. “No one would let them in without your or Captain Quinnon’s permission. They’re all out in the streets.”
The courtyard below was empty of anyone save stableboys and Guardsmen. With the window open, the eerie cold of the breeze carried the sound of the crowd into the hall and filled Allara’s ears.
“How many are out there?”
“Quite a lot, my lady. I didn’t count them, naturally, but if you walk onto the parapet, you can see them packing the streets all the way down into Vesper.”
So word had already spread that far. “Nateros?” She made her mouth form the word.
Esta gave a nervous laugh. “I’m sure I don’t know, my lady.”
Esta didn’t have to know. Of course Nateros was there. Headed probably by Crofton Steadman himself. The wild-eyed zealot had become the movement’s most popular spokesmen in recent years. If Nateros had learned a second Gifted had indeed arrived, they would undoubtedly be whipping themselves into a frenzy against her supposed witchcraft.
She reached past the footman and closed the window herself. Then she turned back down the hall.
Esta followed. “Just give them a glimpse of the Gifted, my lady.”
“No.”
“That’s all they want. They’ll see him, everybody will give a cheer, and they’ll leave us alone.”
“Nobody’s seeing this Gifted until he can take care of himself. He’s not leaving my sight until I’ve done every last bit of my duty to him.” She hastened through her bedchamber to the dressing room beyond. “After that, if he wants to be seen, the crowds can see all they can stand of him.”
She hauled open the doors on an armoire and threw out a thigh-length white blouse and doeskin breeches. “Send someone to get him up. He’s slept long enough.”
_________
Something crashed. Chris opened his eyes to the darkness of his curtained bed and jerked upright. Footsteps squeaked across the carpeted floors in the distinguishable scuff of someone making more noise simply by trying not to. At the foot of the bed, they stopped, and someone cleared his throat, quietly first, then loudly enough to wake any sleeper.
“Excuse me, sir, Master Gifted.” The curtains parted, and a ray of sunlight plowed a path up the middle of the bed right into Chris’s eyes.
He raised a hand to block the light. “What time is it?”
“Not half past dawn, sir.”
The servant, Parry by name, was an ungainly adolescent with a head about half again as big as it should have been. His yellow hair was slicked back, and, above the starched collar of his tight buttoned green doublet, his face had the rawness of a furious scrubbing.
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Sorry to disturb your rest, sir.”
“That’s all right. I wanted to get up anyway.” He rubbed both hands over his face and checked his shoulder.
After his bath last night, Parry had cleaned the wound and packed it with some kind of herbal poultice. Beneath the edge of the bandage, it didn’t look inflamed, and he could raise his arm to its full range of motion with only a dull pull of pain. The rest of his body felt considerably better as well, which was nothing short of a miracle after sleeping on this ridiculously soft mattress.
“I’ll get your clothes right away, sir,” Parry said. “And Cook sent up some breakfast, but you’ll have to eat it on the way.”
“Way to where?” What memo had he missed this time?
“Her highness wishes to see you in the armory court right away. I’ll show you where it is.”
“She’s one for early starts, isn’t she?”
“Yes, sir.”
Parry disappeared into an adjoining room and came back out with a pile of clothing folded on one outstretched arm and a pair of boots in the other. “Shall I help you dress, sir?”
“Uh, no thanks. And you don’t have to call me sir.”
Parry’s eyebrow lifted. “And what’d I call you otherwise, sir?”
“Just Chris.”
The other eyebrow went up. “Ah.” His over-wide mouth hinted at a grin. “All right. I’ll just set the clothes here then.” He slid them onto a nearby chair and left through the main door.
Chris threw the covers back and wallowed out of the mattress.
The rooms he had been given—bedroom, bathroom, and dressing room—went way past the opulence of even Mactalde’s North Shore mansion in Chicago. Lush murals danced across the soaring ceilings, and velvet hangings of alternating blue and black covered the walls. Four chandeliers, each carrying twenty glass globes, hung from the corners. Two big oriel windows, boasting endless views of the lake, spilled sunlight from either end of the room’s southern wall.
He went to the straight-backed chair near his bed and started dressing.
Parry had selected a pair of black suede knee breeches and a loose white tunic with green scrollwork embroidered on the cuffs. He felt like a fool, but they were comfortable and easy to move in.
The boots were thick-soled and made of shining black leather that reached all the way to his knee. A seven-inch cuff, laced and knotted in the front, folded back over the top. He stomped his heel down and took a few experimental steps. They were considerably heavier and more cumbersome than his sneakers. Depending on what her highness had in store for the day, he’d probably end up with a nice crop of blisters.
Parry reentered with a covered tray and kicked the door shut behind him. Not that Chris was any expert on hired help, but this kid looked like he had just barely graduated from Servants University. Probably why Allara and Quinnon had assigned him to Chris.
“Here’s some zajele cheese on toast and a fresh sopple. Not fancy, I know, but you can eat it quick before her highness gets too impatient.”
At any rate, he was a sensible sort.
“What’s she want with me?” Chris asked. “The rack or the iron maiden?”
“The what?” Parry pulled the cloth from the tray.
“Never mind.” He crossed to the table and picked up a lidded stein. Its contents had a spicy sweet smell, something like cranapple cider.
“I’ll tell you something.” Parry dropped his voice to a whisper. “Her ladyship’s in a bit of a foul mood this morning.”
“You mean sometimes she isn’t?”
“Well, I’m not actually sure about that. I don’t know her, of course. But this morning she puts me in mind of my grandmother whenever she’s out to kill a hog for mussing her flower garden.”
“I see. Thanks for the warning.” He downed the cider in a few swallows and combined the two pieces of melted cheese on toast to make a sandwich. “All right. Lead the way to this hog slaughter.”