by E. J. Beaton
By accepting Three’s offer, she had put herself in the palm of a man who might close it and crush her with ease. The rush of the wind knocking into her and those papers leaping into the air were all too vivid.
I may not have an elemental power, she thought, yet I have my wits about me.
Her head was assaulted by the same pain she had been fighting for days, now coming in spurts and bursts. Every so often, it seemed to move to her throat; the same crushing force squeezed her windpipe, until she almost could not swallow. Lysande forced the ache to retreat. She could already picture herself with a spoon and a goblet and blue flakes, in a chamber that night, although she wanted to believe that she was not compelled to heat the mixture; that she might push the scale away, calming her mind with gentler pursuits. Although she tried to focus on the route ahead, her gaze roved over Luca’s figure several times, and she told herself that it was at least a distraction from the pain.
“You seem troubled, my lady,” Derset said, when they had passed out of the town’s southern arch.
There was nothing sharply elegant in Derset’s manner—it was like soft cotton, where Luca’s was dark silk. That was not to say that it lacked appeal.
“A panther, poison, a silent sword, a wolf, and now a bear. It would be strange if I were not troubled, my lord.”
“That bear looked monstrously fierce. I am only glad you were taking the air when the animal came upon us—though you must not wander off like that again.” He glanced at her. “There are queer and dangerous folk afoot after dark.”
More dangerous than you know, and more queer than you imagine. “How did the guards trap the bear, in the end?”
“They chased it into the trees, but they couldn’t get a clear shot. The animal moved deeper and deeper. I saw Prince Fontaine lay out all the fruit in his supplies in a trail and leave a starfruit at the end. The bear took so long trying to open the prickled skin of the fruit that the archers managed to sneak up behind it and get a clear shot. It was busy clawing.”
Lysande shook her head. “He is a clever man, Prince Fontaine.”
“Cleverness, my sister once said, is a good quality in a banker, a merchant, or a captain. Not a rival.” Derset smiled.
Are Fontaine and I rivals? It was a curious thought. To be a rival, one had to be a contender for something. Her eye fell on Luca’s tightly laced doublet and took in the sleek fit of his riding trousers, which scarcely creased as he rose, surveying the land from his horse.
The fields had opened up to broad expanses of grass and meadows of pink-and-purple flowers, which the Rhimese used to make perfume, and Lysande caught sight of a group of red deer standing on a hillock amongst the blooms. She recognized the rare breed of Rhimese hinds that Haxley had written of. At night, she sketched a picture of them, making notes on hoof shape and coat splotching, distracting herself from the thought of a certain city-ruler’s profile.
Another day at good pace; another night with plenty of wine and song, and thankfully, no bears. By the time they began to slow on the third day, the rolling fields of the Rhimese countryside had given way to a group of gentle ridges. The riders stopped on the last one.
Straddling the banks of a river—the same thread of blue that had run through Castelaggio—a city of white stone sprawled before them, all the way to a pair of hills. White buildings jostled with more white buildings: so many dwellings sat side by side that they seemed to be looking at a carpet of ivory. Rhime offered none of the capital’s broad roads forming intersections with ruler-sharp lanes; its streets wound and wove across each other, disappearing suddenly into cul-de-sacs or forking out into paths that divided again and again. Lysande felt the presence of concealed things, a city within a city, as she looked out.
“A domain with a black flag, built of white stone,” She halted her mare on the edge of the grass, examining the straggling buildings. “I suppose that’s the castle?”
“Where?”
“The hump on the skyline—the round building by the river?”
Derset followed her finger. “No, my lady. That is the Academy. The best minds of Rhime work under that domed roof.” He pointed. “Go higher still.”
Tilting her head, she saw it, then: a cluster of white towers perched on the very top of the left peak, surrounded by a moat and grounds. The fortress rose in solid stone, its buildings jutting, a garden of white teeth above the city. Even from many miles away, she could see that someone had sculpted two cobras onto the front wall, so that the snakes loomed over the doors, their ruby eyes staring down. The enormity of the statues and the vivid hue of the jewels made Lysande feel that they were alive.
“What do you think, my lady?”
“The castle is . . . unique.” She shook her head. “Any attacker would have to climb the slope into the arms of waiting guards. The cobras, though, are surely a little imposing . . .”
Shouts rang behind them, cutting through the morning air. Lysande turned to find the group parting and a woman in black armor pushing through, hurrying toward Luca.
“Riders, Your Highness,” she called. “Three of them.”
“Our people?” Luca said.
“I think so. It looks like Captain Targia with two of her guards.”
Luca rode after her, the sun throwing gold-dust into his black hair, illuminating his profile, and Lysande followed him through the group of riders. Three figures in the distance were galloping over the ridges. They wore the Rhimese doublet with the red cobra on black, and she made out a burly woman flanked by two smaller soldiers, all carrying bows.
Luca stared for a long moment. “That is not Targia,” he said, slowly.
“Your Highness?”
But his expression was changing quickly from curiosity to alarm. “Get down! Everybody, get down! Guards—nock your arrows! Now!”
The arrows came so swiftly that Lysande heard them before she saw them—the whizz of shafts in the air, so close that they almost grazed her ears, and the rhythm of arrow-tips landing. Horses reared and shrieked around her. Two of the Rhimese women to her right toppled from their mounts, their bodies trampled at once by panicked hooves; the riders came at them steadily, firing so fast that their bows seemed an extension of their arms.
A youth in fur fell from his horse with shafts lodged in his stomach and his head. Further along, a man slumped forward, the feathered end of an arrow protruding from his neck. A red flower sprouted from his wound, thickening by the second.
Lysande’s limbs seemed to have lost the ability to move. She forced herself to push her horse through to the Axiumites, yelling at them to take out their daggers. She saw Luca draw an arrow from his quiver and line it up in one smooth movement, his black hair splayed.
“Now!” he cried, as he let the arrow fly. “Shoot for their necks!”
The riders were keeping up a steady volley as they rode, but Luca’s arrow caught the man on the left straight in his heart. He fell, half-entangled in the saddle, his corpse dragged along the ground until his horse was stopped by a Valderran guard. Lysande threw a dagger at the nearest rider. She noticed, as if through a haze, that Litany had whipped out a dagger of her own and was throwing it, but she scarcely understood it.
“Fire, you snakes!” a Rhimese woman shouted. “They’re getting close!”
A steady rain of Rhimese arrows struck the remaining two riders, finding the arms and chests and eventually the necks—but not before the attackers had killed several guards, a Pyrrhan attendant, and a Lyrian noblewoman. Lysande felt her hands trembling. The southern woman lay on her back in the dirt, her gold cloak daubed with blood. Everywhere, people were shouting, and someone began to sob behind Lysande, a hoarse, terrible sound. She swung down from her horse and pushed her way to where the city-rulers were standing.
“Bring me the bodies,” Luca said, wiping a patch of mangled flesh on his shoulder without so much as wincing. “Freste,
Malsante—I want those dead riders over here now.”
The dark-haired lord and the blonde noblewoman lifted up the corpses of the attackers. Other guards brought their fallen to their leaders; Lysande hurried through the group, checking left and right. She was relieved to find all the Axium Guards unscathed. The friends of the Lyrian woman wept as they clustered around her body, some of them dropping to their knees, unaware of the dirt streaking their gold trousers, their cries directed to ears that no longer heard. For the first time, she saw, the northerners and southerners were not bickering—though several of them seemed to notice the hug that Dante gave Jale, an embrace infused with relief, and they exchanged dark looks.
Luca dismounted and scrutinized the faces of the dead attackers.
“Hired killers,” he said. “These dogs have seen many fights.”
All three faces were marred by old wounds, and the man who had been dragged by his horse was missing a chunk of flesh under the eyebrow. Even beneath the fresh blood, the bruises on his jaw stood out.
Lysande watched closely as Luca unfastened the black cloaks and checked them for hidden flaps. Thrusting his hands into the trouser-pockets, he rummaged in the first two soldiers’ without success. On reaching into the big woman’s left pocket, he smiled.
The purse that he pulled out was no cheap trinket. Even before the cadres were emptied from it, Lysande could tell that much. The stitching gleamed a rich bronze, and the leather looked soft in his hand; as he turned it over in his long fingers, she caught sight of an animal’s head with whorl-like horns, embroidered beneath a pair of blades.
“A ram under two crossed swords.” Luca’s face had settled back into a cold, unreadable façade. “Usually, Bastillonian travelers want to drink my wine, not my blood.”
The looks on the others’ faces were grave. Even Jale did not venture a remark; the death of the Lyrian woman seemed to have put a stop to his usual banter.
“See that all the wounds are bandaged, and take the group through to Rhime,” Luca told Malsante. “Ravelli,” he said to a slender lord, “with me. Bring ten of our best guards.”
“You’re riding ahead?” Jale said.
“I’m afraid so.”
You must stop the Council from doing anything hasty. Three’s words sounded in Lysande’s mind. She moved quickly to Luca’s side, not caring about blocking the others from hearing her, not caring about the stares she attracted. Her fingers took hold of his, interlacing with them. “Listen, Fontaine, you won’t do anything without the Council, will you?”
He had frozen. It took a moment to recognize this and ink it down in her mind to be analyzed later, before she let go of his hand. Luca climbed onto his horse and looked down at her, holding her gaze.
“I only mean to invite the Bastillonian ambassador to dinner this evening,” he said, with the little half-smile that made his mouth so dangerous. “We owe her a proper welcome at Castle Sapere.”
He rode on without waiting for a reply, a party of guards falling into place behind him, their doublets turning to specks of black as they flew down the slope and toward the city, moving faster and faster, until the horses entered the gates. Lysande watched them disappear into the tangle of streets, her boots mottled with red, her frown engraved.
Eight
The corridors of Castle Sapere snaked around like the emblem of their prince and disappeared into sealed wings. Arches and domed rooves curved everywhere, staircases boasted banisters shaped like cobras, and courtyards burbled with water. White ceilings glittered with onyx patterns featuring designs of a coiled adder, a bull, a double-headed wasp, and an eagle perched on a battlement, with a family name etched below each emblem.
The artistry drew Lysande’s eye as she was led through the castle, passing clusters of Rhimese nobles, yet she also spied devices among the decorations. She noted the appearance of a timepiece with eight hands, three pendulums, and a set of pipes that puffed out wisps of white smoke. In one tower she observed a water mill generating light, and in a glass case, she glimpsed an enormous bow whose placard proclaimed that it could fire arrows over a mile. The western courtyard boasted a tubular object pointed at the sky, which she deduced was for observing the stars’ paths; yet even this could not compete with the fountain that flowed without an apparent source, cascading jewel-bright water over tiers of marble.
She kneeled beside it, on the pretense of adjusting her boot. Taking a long time to examine the circulation of the water, she reflected: one had to consider the possibility, the very real possibility, of a self-enclosed system. Certainly, the lack of proximity to a spring suggested great technical skill. Yet something beyond the design of the fountain heated her imagination: a certain luster where the glare of the sun met the pearlescent sheen of the foamless water, refracting and entering her mind, setting off thoughts of ancient beasts and their scales. She had the sense that she could spend all day in this spot.
These were Luca Fontaine’s inventions, an attendant declared. She wanted to linger and write an appraisal of them, to see if she could understand the man whose eyes cut through her, and whose remarks stung in a manner that was ruthlessly precise, but on the afternoon of their arrival, the shadow of the attack hung over the Council and the castle. Whispers came to her ears from the groups of people in black and red velvet, couched in alcoves. Some were leaning against statues or sitting with their feet propped on antique chests, others leaning over their wheeled chairs, all conversing with an ease that the Axium nobility typically reserved for the most intimate of friends. The word Bastillonians drifted to her more than once.
The Council delivered their wounded to a physician, and Lysande was escorted through the castle by the blonde woman from Luca’s entourage, Carletta Freste, who possessed as much warmth as one of the denser northern glaciers. Lysande attempted to dally by a cabinet full of first-century scrolls and found herself ushered into the glass dome of the Observatory.
“We can spare more Pyrrhans for the western border,” she heard Cassia say. The city-rulers stood around a table of rich night-oak, poring over a map. The Irriqi pointed her finger at a line. “And the Rhimese will send more guards to the eastern border.” Had Cassia swelled inside her armor, or was it something intangible that she gave off whenever she issued an order: the impression of an enlarged capacity, a natural skill in command? As Cassia’s finger jumped to the north, Lysande edged around to join her. “The rest of you secure the east. Each takes one segment of the border. If that’s all right with you, Councillor.”
Lysande nodded. Reinforcing the borders, she felt, would be on everyone’s mind, given what they had just endured. Yet Three’s warning still rang in her ears: they might inflame tensions with their neighbors even while protecting themselves. If any group was likely to forfeit their trade benefits out of sheer, petty anger, it was the Bastillonians; histories had furnished her with enough examples.
“Each to their own territory,” Dante said. “I like the sound of it.”
“Our enemies will like the sound of it even more.” Luca stood at the end of the table, his hands resting on the surface. He had not clenched his jaw, but everywhere a tightness manifested, from the set of his shoulders to the fault line of his smile; yet his wound, now bandaged and hidden beneath a fresh doublet, did not appear to trouble him. “The Bastillonians don’t divide their legions by weapon. Ferago’s women and men will have longswords, smallswords, bows, hook-swords and daggers, all in one force. If we don’t want to be diced like a Pyrrhan fruitcake, we’ll need the same.”
Lysande let the words wash over her. The city-rulers had all grown up commanding captains and training armies, while she had spent her days reading and writing in the royal library. Of course, she had combed through military accounts and letters to prepare for her treatise, but when it came to actually taking charge of defense . . . she could not project the confidence that Sarelin had always thrown out with a single booming word. But s
he could pretend. If you wanted to dance with rulers, you had to move like your legs could not falter, surely. She had practiced her tone and posture, nights ago, with the gold quill in her hand.
“Your Highnesses,” she said, butting in when Dante drew breath, “I think we should weigh the cultural difficulties of joining our forces, as well as the military advantages.”
All of them turned to her with surprised expressions. When the moment had passed, Cassia nodded, a fierce smile spreading on her face. “Of course, my friend.”
This was the Irriqi of Pyrrha, Lysande reminded herself: the woman who tamed leopards; the woman who took precise steps in the Arena and then flung her sword into an opponent’s thigh. There was no reason to be pleased that Cassia approved of her contribution, when a friendship with Cassia would be a risky gamble. No rational basis for it. So why did her whole body straighten when Cassia addressed her that way?
As the others debated the benefits of combining armies and the dangers of Lyrians and Valderrans working together, she studied their faces. Luca argued his case with perfect clarity, yet every so often she saw him glance away, out of the glass walls. She observed a furtive manner to his behavior as he drew something out of his pocket. A small stone, black and smooth, caught the light. He rotated it slowly, rubbing the surface.
She watched his fingers turning it over: fingers of such length and dexterity that they could play a harp or load a crossbow, their skin lacking the scars from brawls.
“Fine!” Cassia declared, throwing her hands up. “If you all refuse to give in, a combined army it is! So long as my friend does not object.”
Again, that word: the thrusting of endearment into the open, so different from a soft-voiced mark of praise; and again, she wondered what purpose Cassia had in applying it to her. Her thoughts ran to strokes of a quill, to letters composed for the White Queen.