Again I pushed her away.
She sighed. “It’s your fault, you know.”
“It almost always is,” I agreed. “But perhaps you can tell me how I’m to blame for this particular act of treason.”
My jibe had no discernible effect on her. “After I saw you in the alley with the serving girl I didn’t know what to do. I was confused, angry. Hurt. I sought out Martius in the palace, since he’d always seemed to be friendly towards you. I hoped he could restore my faith somehow.”
“I guess that’s one thing we’ll always have in common, your ladyship; we’re both terrible judges of character.”
“Martius didn’t speak ill of you, you know. He said that Colfax had found a way to control you, and that you’d had no choice in the matter.”
“But he gave you a choice,” I said.
Her jaw set, as though this was the real conversation she’d been building up to. “Yes, he did. He told me what he’d planned, and more importantly, he told me what would happen to the country if I didn’t take the throne.”
She turned and opened her arms to the palace. “Look at the mighty fortress of the Daroman empire, Kellen. Look how tall it stands, how fierce its armies, how unassailable its traditions. And yet here we are, with a queen rendered helpless by a mere forty soldiers. The ruler of the empire without her fortress, without her armies. All that’s left is tradition.”
“You don’t think much of tradition, I suppose,” I said.
She laughed. “Tradition? No, I suppose I don’t. Tradition didn’t help me when my husband died. It didn’t help me when Leonidas was ready to force me into a marriage that would’ve been an endless series of rapes followed by a swift death the first time I defied him.”
“And now?”
Mariadne turned back to me. “She can’t hold the throne, Kellen. Don’t you understand? She’ll be dead within the year. You think Martius was the only one with a plan? Even with him gone, there will be others. Who will fight them? You? You think you can kill them all?”
“Just the first thousand. Then I’ll give the others a chance to reconsider.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way, Kellen,” she said, pleading with me. “Come with me. We’ll take Ginevra away from here. You’ll sign the abdication and I will take power. With you at my side and Ginevra under my control I can keep the empire safe. I can keep her safe too. She can lead a normal life, be a normal girl, joyful and free.”
The queen spoke up. “It is a lovely dream, cousin,” she said. “But you forget—I am not a child. I embody the memories of two thousand years of Daroman rule. My destiny is to safeguard this nation. I was not born to play with dolls.”
“Don’t listen to her, Kellen. She’s been raised her entire young life to believe in that foolishness. Once she’s with me—once she’s with us—she’ll soon learn to be a normal girl again. We can make her happy.” Mariadne leaned into me. “I can make you happy, Kellen.”
“Countess, I’ve recently come to learn that searching for happiness by trying to fulfil one’s own desires doesn’t actually work nearly as well as one might expect.”
She looked into my eyes, challenging me. “Ask me, Kellen Argos. Ask me for anything and it’s yours.”
For an instant I was back in her home, Leonidas’s blood still on me, the rush of having survived—of having won—filling me with pride. And then Mariadne, her gaze so full of wonder.… as if she were gazing upon one of the heroes of legend: “Ask me, Kellen Argos. Ask me for anything and it is yours.”
“Take your men, countess. Take them and return to Sarrix.”
She came close, wrapping her arms around me. “And would that make you happy, Kellen? Truly?”
I leaned into that embrace, feeling the warmth of her body against mine, letting the scent of her hair fill my senses so completely that the world around us began to disappear. “No,” I whispered into her ear. “But do it anyway.”
I felt, rather than heard, the heavy sigh that came from somewhere deep inside her. Then she hugged me one last time and stepped back.
In her hands she held my holsters. I had to admire her technique. If nothing else.
“I’m sorry, Kellen,” she said.
The soldiers took a step forward and raised their weapons again.
“I have a confession to make,” I said.
“What?” Mariadne asked.
“Forgive me, your ladyship, but I wasn’t talking to you.”
The queen, Ginevra, looked up at me with that impossibly trusting gaze of hers. Seemingly so young and naive, yet wise beyond anything I knew. She nodded as if giving me leave to continue.
“When we first met, that day in court when I was to be executed…?”
She nodded again.
“I was going to murder you.”
Mariadne’s eyes widened. The queen’s didn’t.
“I figured that if I could kill you before you passed sentence, I might be able to negotiate with whoever would take over. The thing about death is, someone always benefits. You just have to figure out who, and then cut a deal.”
“Yes,” the queen said drily. “It’s a wonder no one ever thought of that before.”
I smiled at that. She reminded me of Reichis sometimes. “Stupid, I know. I mean, how could I ever hope to kill you when you had all those guards around you? There must have been a dozen marshals in that room. And me? Hells, I didn’t have a sword or a knife. I didn’t even have my holsters. All I had were dirty fingers. See, they’d taken away my powders, but never bothered making me wash my hands.” I held them up in the air. “See? Positively covered in the stuff.”
Mariadne’s expression changed from surprise to a kind of disappointment. “Still a boy,” she said. “Despite the scars and the shadowblack and everything you’ve seen and done, Kellen, you still dream of being the hero—not because it’s what you want for yourself, but because you hear the voices of others whispering to you that you’re not good enough as you are. Your mentor, the Argosi. That girl Nephenia…”
“Best you not mention Nephenia,” I said, my fingers already forming the somatic shapes. “Thinking about her just reminds me of the man I’m supposed to be.”
Mariadne held her arms out wide. “Go on then. Try your magic. I’ve made a number of inquiries about that spell of yours. The mages here explained how you use Jan’Tep breath magic to make that blast spell of yours work. When I asked why you mixed a dead man’s tongue in one of the powders, the mages had a theory about that as well. But Erras loved me, Kellen. Loved me for who I am, not who I ought to be. Loved me so completely that he would never bring me harm, not in this life or any other.”
“Even if he knew what you had become?”
She smiled sadly. “Even if he knew that, Kellen.”
“I guess you’re probably right. The old man adored you. His spirit would never let the powders do their work against you.”
I brought my hands up and made the somatic form with each hand: bottom two fingers pressed into the palm, for restraint; fore and middle fingers pointed straight out, the sign of flight; and thumb pointing to the heavens. “But I ran out of that powder earlier tonight, and had to brew a replacement.”
There was barely enough time for Mariadne’s eyes to widen before I flicked the powders from my fingertips into the air betwen us. “Carath Colfax,” I whispered, the invocation coming out colder than the north wind. It blew a hole through her chest just big enough to let the breeze pass through.
61
Mercy
Sergeant Tarius and the rest of his soldiers stared at Mariadne’s corpse, momentarily paralysed with shock. Then the sergeant brought his sword up high in preparation to cleave my head from my shoulders. “And then what?” I asked, as calmly as I could manage.
He froze. Smart man, I thought.
“You kill us and it’s over for everyone,” I explained. “No Martius to take power. No Leonidas to command the armies.” I looked down at Mariadne’s body. “No countess to p
rotect you.”
The soldiers were looking to their leader, and at each other.
“Do you want to know what I see?” I asked. “I see forty dead men running across the country looking for a place to hide. Forty corpses wondering what happens when one of them decides to sell his comrades to the marshals for a pardon. You all remember the marshals service, right? ‘Trajedam necri sodastium frigida.’ The trail never runs cold. With no Mariadne on the throne, who’s going to stop them from coming for you? You’ve got no deals left to make. Whoever takes the throne is going to want to reassure the country that they’re safe, that their queen has been avenged and, most of all, that the men who killed her have suffered like no one else in Daroman history.”
Sergeant Tarius took a step back from us. “If we stand down…?” he asked.
The queen stepped forward. “No deals. I will not pardon you. There is no punishment save death for men who betray their country.”
“Then…”
Tarius looked to me as if I might give him some consolation, so I did. “You’ll have to run,” I said. “Get your families, if you have any, and go. Get out of the country. I’ve heard Tristia is nice in the autumn, if you can find a ship.”
“But the marshals—”
“They’ll be busy, for a while,” I said. “The queen plans to order them to find every noble involved in the conspiracy. Every noble,” I repeated for emphasis.
The sergeant looked at the queen. She looked at me, one eyebrow raised. “Still boxing me into corners, master card player?”
“That’s right, Your Majesty. Perhaps next time you’ll think twice about hiring a convicted felon.”
She looked back to the leader of the soldiers and nodded once. “Very well. I will instruct the marshals service to focus on bringing every noble involved in the conspiracy to justice. This should take some time, I imagine.”
Almost in unison the soldiers breathed a sigh of relief. I wondered how long that would last. I’d spent two years as an outlaw and that had been two years too long. I suspected a lifetime of it wouldn’t agree with these men. One of the soldiers, a young man probably no older than I was, called out. “We were only following orders,” he said. “It all made sense. The queen being too young, the need for strength—for stability? What happens to the country if everything they told us is true? We didn’t know what the right thing to do was.”
“You almost never do,” I said. Then I took the queen’s little hand in mine, stepped over the dead guardsmen and walked her into the palace.
62
A Shadowblack Mark
Three weeks later, Reichis and I stood in the throne room before the queen. The squirrel cat’s legs had mended nicely, thanks to the army of healers and a fortune’s worth of aquae sulfex the marshals service had graciously paid for. It’s funny how things turn around sometimes.
“Would you like to sit in my lap, master squirrel cat?” the queen asked. She looked much as she had the first day I met her—a full dress of embroidered gold with rose-coloured trim covering her body from the top of her neck to the bottom of her ankles. Martius and his wife had not been kind to her.
Reichis looked up at me. “Ah, what the hell,” he said. He ambled over and climbed up her leg to her lap, causing her to giggle. She motioned to one of her guards, who produced a small wooden box, opened the lid and held it out for her. The queen reached inside and took out a butter biscuit, which she offered to Reichis. Within moments a fairly efficient routine of biscuit feeding was in place and the squirrel cat was making reasonably disgusting and self-satisfied moans of pleasure. In short order he finished them off and fell into a doze.
“You’re going soft,” I said to him. I couldn’t help but notice there were no butter biscuits for me.
The queen turned to the two guards standing behind her throne and nodded to them. They left us alone in the room. “The servants tell me you’ve packed your bags.”
If she was trying to make me feel guilty, it was working. I’d as much as sworn to stay by her side, to let her be the goodness that seemed to be missing from me. But on that ride back to the palace I’d had to kill for her, and when we’d arrived, I’d as good as murdered a woman who, for a very brief moment, had let me feel what it would be like to love someone who could love me back as I was, not as I should’ve been. None of that had been the queen’s fault of course. Such things never are. “Reichis is doing better,” I said. “I’ve recovered—mostly. The marshals seem to have things under control and now it’s just a matter of parading nobles through court and up the gallows. It’s time for me to go.”
The queen looked at me with those mysteriously wise eyes of hers. “You blame me,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
I couldn’t deny it. Despite my own failures, despite everything, I did blame her, at least a little. “This place has been nothing but pain and guilt, enemies and obligations,” I said. “There’s nothing here for me.”
“And what is it you want?” she asked.
“I think you know,” I said.
“The shadowblack. The white binder.”
I nodded. Even now, weeks after it happened, the feeling of being so completely under another man’s control haunted me. I woke up at night struggling for air, dreaming that the binder had forgotten to make me breathe. The thought that there were others, that it could happen again, was too much for me.
“What if I told you…?” the queen began hesitantly. “What if I promised that I would help you? Stay with me, work with me, and I will devote the resources of the empire to finding a way to cure the shadowblack. There are passages in books here in the library telling of men who could remove it.”
“With all due respect, Your Majesty, you used that line on me once already. I don’t believe you would devote all your resources to curing one itinerant card player of the shadowblack. You’ve got an empire to run. You might want to keep your promise, but eventually expediency would outweigh optimism. I’d rather get a head start while I have the chance.”
“Why do you think I chose you, Kellen, that day when they brought you to me for execution?”
I smiled. “You said I had a kind face.”
The queen smiled back at me. “Yes, there was that. Did you really believe that was enough to make me trust my life to you? That I had no other choices?”
I’d wondered precisely that every day since I’d arrived. In the end, I’d had to conclude that she was simply desperate for someone who had no connections to the Daroman system of nobility and patronage and had gambled on me.
The queen gently picked up Reichis and set him down on the arm of her throne. She stood up and took a step towards me. She lifted one arm and reached around with her other hand to pull at the clasps of her dress.
Horrified, I spun away from her. “What are you—”
“Do you know the Daroman ritual enacted when a ruler turns thirteen years of age, as I will in two years’ time?”
I heard the faint click of another clasp coming apart. “No, and I don’t want to know, Your Majesty.” I couldn’t imagine what she was thinking. I started to walk to the door.
“Stop,” she commanded.
“Whatever you think you’re doing, I beg you, don’t,” I said.
The click of another clasp opening echoed eerily across the marble chamber. “When a Daroman ruler comes of age, there is a celebration in the capital. The people feast while dignitaries and diplomats of other nations come to witness the ceremony.”
Another clasp.
“It’s a peculiar tradition, you see. The king or queen, in a show of profound humility, must stand before the Daroman people without their crown, without their royal vestments, without any clothes at all.”
“Your Majesty…”
“Naked,” she said.
I heard the light swoosh of fabric from the top of her dress slipping away.
“In two years, the people of Darome—the nobility, friend and foe alike, and even rulers of other nations—will see me a
s you are about to.”
“I will not,” I said.
“Turn around, Kellen,” she said.
I shook my head and prepared to walk away.
“Unholy squirrel cat gods, Kellen!” I heard Reichis chitter. “She’s—”
“No, master squirrel cat. Let him see for himself. Turn, Kellen Argos,” she repeated. Her command was so clear, so final, my head turned of its own accord.
The queen was standing with the top of her dress hanging down like a drunken barmaid prompted by a patron’s largess. She held her arms across her chest, covering herself but revealing the bare skin of her left side. There, just below her shoulder, was a winding blackness. Too detailed and fine to be a bruise, too familiar to be anything but what it was.
“Shadowblack,” I whispered.
She nodded. “In two years time, Kellen, I will stand naked before the world, and they will see me. They will see this.”
Suddenly it all made sense. The tutors, their power—their utter lack of fear that she would turn on them. They knew, and kept that knowledge to themselves as leverage so they would have free rein to hurt her anytime they wanted to. That was why the queen had picked me. Not because I was a spellslinger, not because I was an Argosi and certainly not because I had a “kind face”. She’d picked me for the same reason that no one else in the world would have. I was shadow-black. Like her.
Martius must have known. He’d had her under his control for days. Why not use Sophistus to force her to do his bidding? Because he couldn’t, I realised then. She’s devoted her soul to her people. Still, Martius could’ve made her shadowblack public. And yet he’d said nothing of it. Maybe it was true, what he’d sworn so passionately—that despite everything, he was a patriot. If his plan failed, he didn’t want to launch the empire into chaos.
And chaos it would have been.
Even in a place like Darome, a queen with the shadowblack could never sit on the throne. A shadowblack is always an exile, always potential prey for those who think they can benefit. That’s why a shadowblack is alone. Always.
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