It had been a year since he had any word from the boy. Meanwhile, he was left with Yorne’s distraught fiancé, and that infuriated Joseph, but the boy was young, and distracted by what he hoped would be grand discoveries. Thus a father’s anger fizzled away, forgotten.
Joseph often pondered what the boy would see. Tried to picture the sights in his mind—and most of all, to see Yorne standing there with him, his eyes alight with the joy of his discoveries. His son’s face often eluded him, however, and he feared that he might one day wake to find it had left him entirely.
He was still trying to picture it when he felt a sudden, wracking pain seize him by the chest. He clutched at it, sharply, struggling for a breath. Molin looked at him, clearly alarmed, and he started to turn to say something to him when the pain surged through his veins and spread itself so utterly through him, as a great unbearable heat, that he thought for sure he was to lose himself—and then, as he opened his mouth, whether to speak or to retch, he felt the heat rise and burst itself up through his lungs and his throat and his teeth, and all at once, he was aflame.
Every inch of his body was wreathed in broiling hellfire. He sprang without thinking, beating at himself and throwing himself against the carriage, heedless of his brother’s cries. The carriage rocked around him, but all he could think of was the fire, and the feeling of flesh and bone searing away, cloth melting and sinking into the putrid mass of it. It wouldn’t go out. He heard Molin shouting, felt the blows from his brother’s hand and reeled from them, screeching, for he could feel his flesh crumble beneath the blows and he flung himself at the door, trying to free himself, thinking of the snow and the chill and sweet salvation, but the door held.
Everything was burning, then. The carriage had caught the flames. Screams rose and died in his throat, and all that poured out was ash and scorching air. Again and again he sprang at the door, until at last the thin veneer snapped and gave way, and even as Bidderick rode up beside the door, he fell flailing from it into the snow, heaving himself into the cold and rolling in it. The snow felt like someone was raking him with the edge of a knife, but still he rolled through it, desperate for release.
Agony surrounded him, and madness took him. He clawed at his clothes with his peeled fingers and crumbled nails. He screamed without sound and kicked at the earth as though these things would save him, but the fire would not die. He kicked until he was but a spasming, jerking mess, and the snow around him ran red and black with the imprint of his being. Sound died as his lungs collapsed beneath the heat of his own combustion. None of his knights ran to him. He could not hear them screaming. He was melting down, like so much smelted gold, but for the Crown Prince of Idasia, no one ran.
The last sight to reach his searing eyes was of his brother plummeting from the carriage, clutching at his throat. Molin’s eyes were wide as a child in fright, his face purple with lack. Others shouted, circling Molin, springing for him. No one came for Joseph. Everyone ran to Molin, weeping and crying out, but for Joseph there was but the anguish of annihilation. Even his final breaths were torches pressed deep into his lungs, and for all the fields of salvation powdering him, he died writhing in flames.
* *
Charlotte looked on in horror as the still-flaming doll fell limp from Usuri’s hand. The witch’s once flawless digits had blackened and charred. What flesh remained clung in tattered, blistered strips. The witch did not seem to notice, though. All her rage was focused on a single point—that creature at her feet—and as Charlotte looked on it, as absurd as it seemed, in those gathering ashes she knew another man had died. The pristine hairs the witch had threaded into the head of the effigy had long ago gone to cinders, but she knew. How quickly logic died in the face of such insurmountable fury. It had not even taken a torch. The woman had simply enfolded her hand around that distant soul and willed his body to burst. To burn alive. Charlotte felt the contents of her stomach lurch disagreeably.
“Ye who cast the fire shall ye burn, if neither sin nor scorn be thy victim’s light,” Usuri calmly intoned the words of the Vorges, the flames caught madly in her eyes.
Maynard put himself between Usuri and her, Charlotte noted. Dartrek stood back, but not far, waiting for a cue from her father. Walthere gave none, watching instead the witch or her doll, in wordless admiration.
A second doll already lay at the witch’s bare feet. Its throat was crushed and lay sodden by its brother’s ashes, seemingly forgotten at his side. Molin’s ring still lay upon its ragged straw arm, the gold as yet unmarred. His blood was smeared across its head, like a death mask. His death was an afterthought, a thing of mere convenience, and in his end Charlotte almost felt a pang of sympathy, for he had done nothing to bring such wrath about his head. Yet he had gone, and she might as well give thanks to the timing, for he at least went more quickly than he might have if he had the witch’s full attention.
Even as the flames withered into wisps, Usuri pressed a foot down into the ashes, and began to smear them around. She smiled from a distant place, and once her foot had blackened as her hand had, she began to dance upon the ashes. Charlotte looked to her uncle, whose disgust was kept locked behind his clenched jaw. The witch was dancing on a grave. It was not vengeance, nor justice, it was a mockery, a blatant disregard for even the most basic of sacred sensibilities. Worse, she flung herself into it with vigor, at first content to smile as she swayed, but shortly flailing her colored skirts wildly as she kicked and spun and laughed her way about the remains of her victim. They clung to her, hot and black and wet, but she flung them wantonly about her.
It was a surreal morning, long planned. They might have killed the royals in their own castle days before, but such a gesture would have only wrought suspicion. They might have ended as the Veldharts had, merely for the inconvenience of time and place. Though Charlotte herself was much anxious to see the deed done, her father had waited as patiently as any man might, going though his daily routines as though nothing unusual were afoot.
She had asked him why they took so long. They might have killed them anywhere along the road to Anscharde. Her father had shaken his head at her and bade her sit. “Time and place,” he said, “it is all in time and place. So as suspicion would have me if they were to die within my home, so to would it fall anywhere within my land. Think. True or no, the whispers would come for us. Our failure to protect. Our lack of foresight. And their knights would support it, for men are ever eager to shift the blame of their failures.” They waited until they were certain the caravan would be winding through Corvaden. There, the entourage had no one to blame but themselves, or any of the countless other nobles departing from Vissering Castle in their wake.
“And what of the Empress?” Charlotte still pondered the depths of her father’s hate.
He smiled and patted her leg. His other hand had wound about a thick-backed copy of La Femme Triste, a narrative of a once lonely queen of Asantil. Alone, adrift, she sought salvation in the arms of a childhood friend, and made to flee from one and all. It was born of another age, but its lessons still had meaning, and its sympathetic view of the monarchy made it much adored in higher circles.
“I will bring no harm to your great cousin. It is the children pose us trouble. Not her.”
“Will she?”
At that, her father grew very still. “There are great things ahead for you, my child. Do not trouble yourself over what you cannot change.” He drummed his fingers on the cover of his book, then confidently added, “She will do as I tell her. As should you.”
In the end of La Femme Triste, the queen’s lover turned out to be as cruel as the rest of her family, and when she would not give him her crown, he killed the queen and took it, and the whole of his country was thrust into a civil war.
Charlotte did not believe him. Nor did her uncle.
It was some time after the burning when she heard them speaking in raised voices. Her uncle told him he was being careless. Told him he did not trust the witch, and nor should he. In al
l her years, Charlotte had never heard Maynard speak to her father as such. They were always of one mind, in public, if not in private. Her father put him off, unbidden, telling him to leave the politicking alone. Her uncle tried to press the issue, but her father blew him off. Maynard left the room in a thinly-restrained fury, slamming the door behind him.
Charlotte caught him by the stairs, and begged a moment of his time. There was something there, in his eyes—some spark of rebellion that gave her hope. Though she could still see the anger welling in his fist, he let it go with a long, studied breath, and nodded acquiescence. Rebellion died with it.
Then he asked her to follow him, and they went to one of the studies, locking the door behind them as they went. Maynard waved the guards and made a show of checking every nook of the room, and then the sitting room beyond. Only when he was satisfied they were alone did he come to her, and only then with a warning that they had best be brief.
There was no toeing around it. She took a seat by the fireplace and asked, “You do not like this business with the Many-Starred, do you?”
“It is not my place to disagree with your father,” Maynard replied in a tone that suggested the opposite.
“I heard you shouting, uncle. Quite unlike you.”
For a long moment her uncle watched her in the guarded way of old soldiers, without saying anything. Then, apparently agreeing that she was old enough to earn such things, he leaned upon a table, and sighed out his frustrations.
“None of this leaves this room,” Maynard said forcefully. Charlotte waited for him to continue, but he merely stared, and she realized he was honestly waiting for a reply. She nodded her head, adding “of course,” and he seemed wary, but placated.
“Your father has ever kept us afloat on the graces of others. The Emperor’s, and the people’s. He has the Empress, but the people are fickle creatures, Charlotte. For the moment, they see what he has made for them. Nobles, honestly pressing for reform.”
Her father had always been one of art’s great patrons. Painters and sculptors had always been commonplace among the halls of their keep, and Charlotte had long ago found she preferred their company to the tedium of the nobility. They often let her watch as they worked, and praised her beauty all the while. Her first love—or dreams of love—had been of a young painter named Initrieri, who had devoted a great deal of time to decorating the walls of her father’s study and, in his spare hours, in capturing her on canvas, in a set of portraits she still kept to her room. Initrieri had died, long ago, another victim of the Red Plague, but others filled his shoes, and in every work they wrought, the Cullick name grew, for it was their coin that funded their inspiration, both here, and abroad.
They also funded writers, scholars, and poets. Reformers as far west as Asantil received stipends from her father’s hand, and in some cases, it was these alone that kept their printing works alive, and their provocative literature afloat.
Yet Cullick money also went to more practical uses. Walthere was one of the largest backers of the military’s engineering corps, and kept men close to his brother on the Imperial Engineering Academy’s board of administrators. Her father lauded innovation and scorned talk of tradition. Whereas some men saw clinging to the past as clinging to their own identities, he saw the past as nothing more than a stepping stone to the future. It was his funding that had paid for and vindicated Admiral Turselt’s innovations in the cannon—innovations that extended the range of Imperial artillery by many leagues, and gave them great range over their Effisian counterparts. It had been the decisive factor in a number of their early victories in the war, and remained one of the Empire’s most jealously guarded secrets.
These were things that the rabble loved, and they were not soon to forget it.
“But that girl,” her uncle continued, “jeopardizes it all. We are many things, but if the people knew that we lent credence to a witch, it would do much to harm our name. The Church would press it, as would our enemies. Put a finger to it and cry Farrens and pagans, as one. It may not be so, but it would still demean us both.
“And I fear your father cannot see how great a threat she is. She is not right. Her mind is broke, of crimes borne of many men’s hands. She does not think of herself, or of your father and his schemes. She thinks only of revenge, and I fear it will consume us, as well as her, before she is done. Do not mistake me, Charlotte. I do feel sympathy, when I look on her; not for what she is, but for what the world has made her. Yet there is nothing for it now, and your father treats her as he would any other. But she is not another girl in a pretty dress. She screams, in the night. I know you’ve heard her. She does not seem to feel pain, as we do, and yet, I think, she suffers of it always. Her body wastes away to join her mind, and she acts even without your father’s word.
“Tell me, did you ever hear your father instruct her to kill Molin?” Charlotte shook her head. She had not, though when she had spied him afoot in their keep, she did not doubt how it would end. “She found him wandering our home and took matters into her own hands. If he had recognized her, or if she had done him within these walls…I need not say how that would have ended. Much is staked on an unreliable creature, and my advice goes unheeded.
“There are soldiers on the move. The Emperor’s own brother, Mauritz, makes haste for Anscharde, with an army at his back. I fear what Portir will do to greet him. Four sons still remain there, guarded by walls of stones and swords. Four sons, and two daughters. And all will be sniffing at the crown, now. Joseph is dead. Matthias is abroad. Your father seeks a great deal, but in the meanwhile, there will be chaos.”
“Six children…” Charlotte murmured. “And what of the Empress’s children? Of Rosamine and Lothen?”
“They are at the bottom of the succession, child, and if it comes to steel, their supposed brothers will turn on them before they turn upon themselves. Lothen lies with his mother, of the moment, and that may spare him for a time.” He sucked in a deep breath, and shook it out distastefully. “If Rosamine remains in the capital, then I fear she will not be long for this world.”
Maynard summed the matter up so succinctly she felt herself at a loss for words. Chaos, he said. Her father knew that, of course. Would plan on it in his greedy gaze. The extent of his wanting remained aloof, but she did not like where it seemed to go. As her uncle said, there were many yet between the throne and them, and many more that would come after, and while she trusted her father’s judgment, she feared he might not see the whole picture, so consumed was he by his petty discourses with his witch. He sought to keep the blood from his own hands, but that was not how the world worked. The blood always led back to the hands that spilled it.
Charlotte’s thoughts reached out, suddenly, to Sara, and she wondered if she might yet live. If she had ridden with Joseph when Usuri worked her magic…a pang of guilt shot through her, at that, and would not loose its grip on her heart. She had liked Sara. The woman had seemed no threat. Like them, she was a Farren, and seemed to get on with the Empress in ways her siblings could not. Surely her father would not wish her dead…but she knew it was not the case, even as the thought entered her mind. There might have been many good things to say of pretty Sara, but the woman was still a name between the throne and her father, and he would do to her as he had done to Kasimir, and Joseph, and all the rest. So long as there was Durvalle blood, there was a threat to their home.
And Usuri…Usuri would kill Sara without a second thought, simply for the blood. She would dance in her ashes and rejoice at her passing, as though the crushing of that smile might bring her father back from death’s cavernous realm. Poor, mistaken creature. With every ending, she would waste away a little more. She could only be happy when she wasted away entirely.
“You put things much as I might have, uncle. It is good to see, at the least, that we are of a mind.” She smiled up at him, and he smiled wearily back. Such unity, she knew, would never proceed beyond the secrecy of this room, though. One did not betray kin.
“I would try.”
Her uncle laid a heavy hand upon her shoulder then, and though his lips curled, she saw no mirth in them. “I fear for us all, if you cannot.” She did not doubt him, but nor did she believe that she could reach the hollow holds his voice could not.
* *
The slow, rhythmic pattern of Rurik’s heartbeats followed the seconds like a steady drum. He could feel them in his throat, listen to the way they paused, as if uncertain, with every wary breath.
When he was scarcely four years old, his mother had died giving life to little Anelie. That same year, an outbreak of Red Plague struck Verdan. It claimed many that year, and his father’s barracks had been especially hard hit, but at the time, his child mind could not process that. All he had seen was his mother’s face, choking as she died. After that, he had sat in her room for many hours, after he was supposed to be in bed. His father never came but once. Kasimir held her hand, and stood there for what seemed an impossibly short time, then he let it fall, and he went away. He never came back to her that day.
All the while, Rurik looked at the sheets and he wondered how easy it might be to join her. She would be sad there, in the afterlife. Lonely. No children to look after her. He had thought he might stop his heartbeat, if only he tried hard enough. Again and again he had tried to hold his breath until he would surely be dead beside her, but he had always breathed before the darkness could claim him.
Rurik had not thought of that day in a long time. Now, he wondered if he might be able to do what he never could then. If only stubbornness and willpower were as one.
The Hollow March Page 47