Cinder-Ugly

by Laura Strickland

  When a fist pounded on my door, I thought it might be news about the progress of the contagion. I hauled it open immediately.

  Mother stood there, head held at a haughty angle, swathed like everyone else in a blanket against the cold. Most folks wore their own bedding.

  I moved instinctively to bar her from entering the room, but she pushed her way in, actually brushing my arm, from which she then recoiled fastidiously.

  “You’ll not keep me out,” she said.

  I stood and contemplated my options. I could use this as an excuse to leave the tower, shut her in, and go below. I could find Rupert and complain of her. I could stay and listen to yet another of her harangues filled with demand. I could think of no other reason she’d come to me.

  Despite her haughtiness, she looked unwell, pale and sickly with something still very much wrong with her face, which had once contained so much beauty. Now it seemed to have sagged like putty, come a little bit apart at the seams as if the surgery she’d endured had not held.

  Perhaps, then, pity made me come back into the room and close the door behind me.

  “Madame Bulgar, what do you want?”

  “ ‘Madame Bulgar,’ ” she mocked, her lips pursing in a cruel parody of mine. “You truly should call me Mother.”

  “I will not. I think you should go.”

  Instead she glanced around the room. “No fire? I thought you’d be all warm and cozy here.”

  “There’s not enough fuel, Madame.”

  “At least you can’t hear the bombardment so loudly here.” Her ruined face twisted. “The constant banging, banging is driving me mad. All of it’s driving me mad. You have to do something.”

  I drew my blanket closer around my shoulders. “What can I do? I told you before, we all must share in this misery; we all must endure.”

  She turned burning eyes on me; at that moment she did indeed appear mad. “You know, you look little different than you did back in my house, standing there in your ragged coverings. Even your slippers are the same. I asked you before and you would not say: how did you do it? How did you entrap him when my beautiful daughters could not?”

  “Your beautiful daughters, Madame, are selfish and mean, with small, petty spirits that make them ugly.” I used the word deliberately. This confrontation had been some twenty years in the making. And—so I thought—I had little left to lose. “They have, in fact, taken after you.”

  It cost me to say that. I still feared her, deep down inside—still shrank from her cruelty and hate. Yet Rupert’s love wrapped around me like the blanket on my shoulders. She was, I told myself, nothing but a nasty, broken woman.

  I thought the denouncement would send her into one of her rages. Instead she smiled at me. “You think yourself so high and mighty. We are still your family—all you have left.”

  “You’re wrong: I have Robin—the grandson you rejected.”

  “He will surely die, locked in that ballroom, the very heart of the fever. Cindra, you owe us. Get us out of that cesspool down there. I bid you again, bring us up here to live with you before we all fall ill.”

  For an instant I considered it—contemplated trading places with them, giving them this aerie. I even, heaven help me, thought about imprisoning them here, boarding up the door and leaving them with one another. Given all the noise below, no one would hear their screams.

  But this place, these few square feet of space, represented our garden, my and Rupert’s only opportunity to snatch a moment of rest and rejuvenation here and there. I knew he needed that even more than I did.

  So I shook my head. “Go back to your assigned place and be grateful for it.”

  “Bitch.” She narrowed her eyes. For an instant I felt sure she would attack me—I should have taken warning. “You selfish, selfish wretch. I fed you; I housed you all those years. Is this how you repay me?”

  “Yes.” Food had been all she offered me, and others’ leavings, at that.

  “At least think of your sisters, if you detest me so much.”

  “My sisters? And all the loving kindness they showed me?”

  “So this is your revenge? Ugly does as ugly is.”

  “You should know, Madame. It seems I learned from the best.” I stepped to the door and hauled it open. “Now please leave.”

  She eyed me speculatively. “When are you due?”

  “Any day.”

  “Aren’t you afraid it will be born like Robin’s child? Like you?”

  I shook my head. “Please go.”

  She took a step to pass me, and I felt a rush of relief; it was over. She would go—as a thousand times before, I could set about repairing myself.

  In a low, vicious voice she said, “You won’t know what it’s like till something so ugly issues from your womb. Better it’s born dead.”

  I stiffened. “Leave. If you won’t, I will.” I’d go straight to Rupert, have him imprison her. The woman represented a danger.

  Her gaze narrowed with spite. “Go ahead.”

  I took one step, two before I felt her palms at my back. The tower stairs lay right outside the door—narrow and treacherous—and she shoved me straight down them with no time to catch myself or break the fall.

  I remember catapulting down the flight like a pea down a chute, panic seizing my mind. And following that came only darkness.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Cindra, Cindra!” A voice called my name, snared my consciousness, and drew me out of the darkness.

  Rupert’s voice.

  Memory returned to me in pieces. The darkness first, the steepness and violence of the descent down the staircase, the cruelty in my mother’s eyes.

  My child.

  I moaned and folded my arms across my belly. Every separate part of me hurt. I could not assess the damage, but I did know I could no longer feel the child.

  I screamed.

  Rupert picked me up from the pallet where I lay and into his arms. “All right, love. It’s all right.”

  “Best not to move her, Your Highness,” said another voice. “Her head…”

  Rupert, bless him, did not release me. For several precious moments he held me to him and I felt the pounding of his heart.

  Then he breathed, “Yes, your head.” He laid me back down with infinite care.

  I searched his face—pale, pinched, worn. “Our child?”

  A smile broke across his countenance like sunshine. “Fine, he is fine. Born—”

  “A son?”

  “A fine son. Healthy, perfect.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  The physician stepped forward. “Forgive me, Majesty, you were unconscious. We delivered the child, as we were not at all certain you would live.”

  “A boy.”

  “A Prince,” the physician corrected softly.

  Rupert said, “I thought I was going to lose you.” He lowered his forehead to my hands. “I could not bear it.”

  “She pushed me. My mother—”

  “What?” He raised a face transformed by rage. “What!”

  “You did not know? She came to the tower. When I refused to do as she asked, she shoved me down the stairs.” And then she must have gone, left me lying there. Her daughter and her grandchild. She stepped over me and told no one.

  “She did not bring help?” I asked.

  Rupert shook his head. “I came up to see you. I had a feeling…I found you lying in a heap where the stairs make that tight turn. If not for that, you would have tumbled all the way down.”

  I shuddered. “What have I broken?”

  Rupert and the physician exchanged glances. But Rupert said, “Nothing save your head. There are scrapes and bruises aplenty.”

  “Your waters broke, Majesty, in the fall,” the physician told me.

  “I must go and deal with your mother,” Rupert said. “See to it she is arrested and punished.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Not before I see our son and hold h
im. Where is he? I want him in my arms.”

  They both helped me to sit up, my head going around in slow circles. The physician in attendance summoned another, who came with a small bundle in his arms.

  Tiny—he was so tiny when I held him, so small to make up a large part of my world. He had but a fuzz of fair hair and grave, dark eyes.

  “You are certain he’s all right?”

  Rupert smiled. “He came into the world hollering, and look—he’s perfectly made.” Rupert gently unfolded the swaddling to reveal our son’s limbs. I wrapped him again and cuddled him to my breast.

  The physicians having melted away, we sat so for an instant—two become three. And nothing else mattered, not the continuing bombardment nor the fact we were trapped like rats in a hole. My life became beautiful and complete.

  Then Rupert said softly, “You realize she will have to pay for this. I do not understand, Cindra—she must have known you would be able to tell what she’d done to you.”

  Our eyes met. Reluctantly, I admitted, “I do not suppose she expected me to survive the fall. I saw the expression on her face, Rupert, just before she shoved me—one of pure hate.”

  “Did she care nothing for the welfare of her grandchild?”

  “I believe she cares for no one but herself. She uses others to get what she wants. She came saying my sisters needed refuge from the fever, but there’s no real concern for them behind it.”

  Rupert drew himself up. Ragged, worn, and bone-thin, at that instant he nevertheless looked every inch the King.

  “She will pay this time for the crime she has committed—treason—and all the other times she’s hurt you. I will see her hang. From the battlements.”

  I closed my eyes on a wave of pain. “Rupert—”

  “No, love. I would acquiesce to you in almost anything. Not this.”

  ****

  The north wall fell the next day while Rupert pronounced sentencing on my mother in the confines of the council chamber, there being nowhere else to stage a hearing. She’d been taken into custody the night before and held in the depths of the castle all night. Rupert told me, as I did not attend, that she screamed threats and hollered abuse the whole time, claiming my accusation against her was a lie—she had never been to our chamber in the tower, never spoken with me, let alone pushed me.

  “My daughter the Queen wishes to destroy me! She is envious and has always hated me.”

  Rupert, so he told me, informed her she had committed high treason against me and the Crown Prince. He passed sentence of hanging, and our world came apart.

  Yes, to be sure it had been crumbling by pieces all the winter long, since last fall, truly, when war broke out. But now it happened quite literally, a well-placed series of missiles collapsing the whole stone face on one side, leaving us as good as defenseless.

  Though I had not attended Mother’s trial, I insisted I should be at her sentencing even though Rupert objected. I felt I needed to face her, especially given her claims made during her arrest. So sore I could barely stand, and limping badly, I left my new child in the midwife’s care and entered the council chamber, the jailer and all Rupert’s advisors, including Rellison, standing by.

  Mother looked like a madwoman, an animal. Fresh from the depths of the castle, she wore only the garments in which she’d been clothed at the time of her arrest, now rent and marked by patches of damp.

  Her face frightened me. Often in the past that had been so. In truth, I’d feared her all my life but never so much as now. Eyes stretched wide and mouth open in a rictus, she was barely recognizable.

  She focused on me only briefly before looking away again, completely absorbed in herself. Except for one flash of hate, I am not sure she actually acknowledged my presence, the only of her daughters to attend her in her extremity. For neither Bethessa nor Nelissa showed. Perhaps fear kept them away. Certainly, respect did not bring them.

  Nor did love. I stood there listening to Rupert pronounce death on this woman who had been so hateful to me and realized she went to her death with no one—absolutely no one—caring for her.

  At that moment, the wall fell.

  The bombardment, to be sure, continued most of the time. We had become very nearly inured to it. Now the end of the world came with a great, sliding rumble like the worst thunder ever heard, shaking the castle to its foundations.

  A moment of intense silence followed. Rupert, who had just spoken the sentence of death by hanging to Mother, stopped speaking. Everyone else in the chamber froze. Rupert and Rellison stared at one another.

  Then we heard screams, cries of alarm, and a great roar from the throats of Ortis’s army outside. My heart fell so violently I swayed.

  “What was that?” Incredibly, Mother broke the silence. “What’s happened?”

  Rupert whispered, “The walls.”

  Everyone vacated the chamber—which had no windows—and ran to see. Even the jailer left Mother unattended; she must have run at that moment.

  I followed Rupert, limping painfully, to the nearest exterior windows, which happened to be in a sitting room. Windows there were already thronged, but folk made way for the King, his advisors, and me.

  I looked out and saw…

  But I have no words even now to describe it.

  Have I mentioned that the castle had once been a beautiful structure? Built of pale amber stone, it had graceful, curved battlements and curtain walls, one of which now lay crumbled like the blocks of a child’s toy.

  Dust and debris still floated in the clear morning air—no weather to defend us now. And already I saw Ortis’s soldiers scrambling over the wreckage like ants over a pile of sugar cubes, seeking entry.

  “God help us all,” Rellison breathed.

  I glanced into my husband’s face, less my husband at that moment than the King. I thought I saw our very defeat reflected in his eyes.

  “What happens now?” I whispered.

  His face twisted. “Now we fight. Hand to hand, if need be—with whatever weapons we can raise.”

  I thought of all the women in the castle, all the children and aged. The sick. How could they fight? All those people—my people—had just been doomed.

  Rupert must have reached the same conclusion, or maybe he’d always held this eventuality in the back of his mind. He turned to me and seized me by the shoulders.

  “Go get Robin and Octavius.”

  Octavius. We’d decided to name our son after Rupert’s father.

  “Yes.”

  “Quick as you can, love. Go through the tunnel.”

  “What?”

  “Swiftly, now. Wrap up warm.”

  I stared into my husband’s face, uncomprehending. “But we have not explored the tunnel. We do not know…”

  “Still.” Agony flooded his eyes. “It is your best chance. Go to King Edmund if you can. Tell him you bring the heir to my kingdom.”

  “But what of you? What of everyone here?”

  “Do this.” He captured both my hands and carried them to his lips. “Do it for me.”

  I knew it then: he meant to stay, to fight and die here. If I went through the tunnel, I would never see him again.

  He could tell the moment I comprehended the truth—he must have seen horror fill my eyes.

  “My love goes with you,” he vowed, “and I will love you forever.”

  “Promise you will follow if you can,” I begged.

  “I do so promise.” But I knew he harbored no such expectation. Not the man to flee, he would perish with the majority of his people.

  I caught my breath, turned, and ran.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I collected Markka along with Robin, Octavius, and Markka’s wee daughter, Dinnie, refusing to tell her where we were bound. I then spent precious moments attempting to persuade the Dowager Queen to accompany us.

  The castle now lay in a state of mad fear, panic, and confusion. Hand-to-hand fighting had already broken out on the north side of the building. I knew
Rupert would be bound for there—would likely die there also. I tried to close my mind to that and, with Octavius in my arms, towed my charges to the lower levels.

  Where the Dowager stuck. She refused to leave the King’s tomb and, throwing herself across it, declared she did not care where we were bound or if the castle fell around her.

  “I wish only to be with him.”

  I kissed her cheek and left her—the closest to a loving mother I had ever known.

  “Where are we bound?” Markka asked breathlessly as we continued on.

  I paused long enough to shoot her an assessing look. “I suppose I should give you a choice.”

  “Choice?” she gasped.

  “The castle is going to fall. We face capture and death. But there may be a way out.”

  “How?”

  “A tunnel. Very old and dangerous. It hasn’t been explored and may not still be intact.”

  “You mean…”

  “It might well collapse on us.” Which might just be a kinder death than what Ortis had in store. “However, Rupert thinks it’s the best chance for getting the children out—the heir to the throne.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s up to you, Markka. You can come with us or you can turn back. I beg you only to speak not of our escape.”

  Eyes wide and hair streaming, she stared. “Where is this tunnel?”

  “I will show you.”

  In truth, the black hole stretching into what seemed like infinity looked even more terrifying than I remembered. When I pulled the boards away, Markka shied.

  “That? Majesty, I don’t know that I can. I—I am afraid of the dark.”

  “We will take a torch and be able to use it most of the way, till we near the end.” Heaven help me, I did not want to enter that bolt-hole alone. Or at all.

  “But it is so narrow, and we have the children. How far does it stretch?”

  “I do not know.” The longer we stood debating it, the worse the prospect seemed. Foul air issued from the tunnel like breath from a decayed mouth.

  Yet I could hear the sounds of fighting going on far above us, and I remembered the look in Rupert’s eyes.