by E. J. Beaton
Charice looked up from the fruit. “I made my terms. As did you.”
“I hear we are to work together,” Lysande said. “Did he win you over to the cause? Or did you make the link yourself: the defeat of the White Queen and, in time, with it, a shift to elemental rights?”
“In time. Yes, I can imagine that suits you. You’ve always had time, inside those palace walls. Perhaps I don’t want to wait my turn, though.”
Lysande saw the clenching of Charice’s jaw, a tiny movement, but significant if you knew how well Charice could dissemble. “Do I have to get on my knees and beg you to stay?”
“I was always the one on my knees. Or have you forgotten?”
“I’m not good at forgetting. There’s a talent to it. Sarelin said I was born with a different set of skills, you see.” Lysande paused, for just a second. “There must be a way to tackle elemental rights. A strategy. I intend to plan it thoroughly, and to act.”
“I suppose I should wrap myself in your promise, for now, and use it as armor?”
Lysande held her gaze. “Will you leave the Shadows as soon as you have joined, then?”
“Not when I’m so looking forward to our next adventure.” Charice took a bite of her orange and rose, walking toward Lysande, the fruit still cupped in her palm. Lysande walked to meet her. The two columns of trees cast shadows over them, the light that passed through the gap in the branches throwing Charice’s mouth into relief.
“You should understand something,” Charice said. “I am bound by no one, and I give myself to no one. Perhaps the Shadows deserve all the medicines and poisons and other things I can bestow, and perhaps you deserve to shape the realm in your own way . . . with all the time you need. But perhaps there is not so much time to spare.” She tossed the orange onto the ground. “Perhaps the realm is a garden whose fruit trees droop, and if you do not pluck the fruit now, it will fall, and land where it may.”
Lysande took her hand very slowly, folded it, and kissed the fingers. Moving around in a circle, she lifted Charice’s hair and kissed her friend on the nape of the neck, the same place she had kissed many times while they lay talking or listening to each other’s breathing, their chests rising and falling with the same rhythm. Charice’s breathing quickened, but when Lysande came back around to face her, Charice’s mouth was a tight seam, offering no entry.
“Are you with me?” Lysande said, offering her arm.
“I see no better option. For now.”
“Sometimes I think you will slip into Severelle’s middle space, where things are never certain, and stay there forever.”
“It sounds tempting. I’ll give you that.” Charice did not take her arm. “But we can only dream of such places. In life, we must choose.”
And bear our choices, Lysande thought, turning slowly and walking away.
* * *
• • •
Roses lay piled at the fence for Raden, and green ribbons fluttered on the posts, farewelling all the dead. It was a struggle to keep from speaking, and Lysande almost succeeded at hiding her grief as she brought Litany around to the eastern gate of Axium Palace. No sooner had she slipped through than she was shown to the Great Hall, where the ladies and lords formed legions in jewels, armed with questions: Had she a mind to put the court in mourning, or throw a banquet to celebrate the victory? How would Elira defend itself against the White Queen? Were they equipped for the other chimera’s return? The advisors did not speak, but their glares did the talking for them. Only Lady Bowbray congratulated Lysande on her “expert management of castles she had never been invited to enter,” her lips twisting into a smile. Lysande did not reply.
Hallways hurt, and paths curving through the grounds tugged at her sinews; it was not truly a physical pain but the response of her body to something much deeper than battle-aches. With no foreign places to distract her, no Rhimese castles or Lyrian hills to draw her mind from the hollow inside her, she felt her loss anew. Grief had been waiting, all the time that she had been fighting off a threat. Now it leaped from its corner in her consciousness and sought to push its way out, through her organs, through her very pores. She stopped by the royal suite and felt her body buckle.
It was supposed to be easier. To seal itself with time, until the rawness of bereavement was gone. Even if the damage was still there somewhere deep down, you were meant to feel the softness of a little healing; but if anything, the pain felt sharper upon coming back.
By the lake in the grounds, sitting on the verge of grass, she blinked back a few tears, transported to the morning of her nineteenth gift-day when she had knelt by a tactos-board beside the water and pretended to struggle with Sarelin’s queen. I’ll never go a day without missing you, she thought. Even after a thousand days have passed. Even though you wrote your name across the realm in magical blood.
On the two Sarelins, woman and state, she had clearer opinions now. They had separated with greater precision.
She waited until Litany had left her for the evening before taking out the chest, turning the key in the lock. She stood there for a minute, the sound of her own breath amplified. The sight of all the jars side by side, uniformly shining, filled with the shade of blue she had imagined so many times since her maturation, sent a shudder through her as she opened the lid. She picked up the first jar. The more she tried to slow her impulse, the more it gathered speed, the desire gyrating inside her.
How many times had Charice warned her, with that pinched look, you don’t know what it’s doing to you?
It had been an age since the last dose. That meant she was imbibing a lot less, really.
She held up the long silver shape of the spoon to the light and measured two spoonfuls of flakes into the vial. Sipping every drop slowly from her goblet would help her endurance, surely. She had not forgotten what it felt like to drink scale; how her heart threatened to drum itself out of existence, while the pain melted and ceded to the golden glow, the physical stimulus and mental calm combining; yet the imprint in her mind gave way now to the real thing, and she reached for the spoon again. One more.
No question of using night-quartz now. She saw the stone, wrapped and swaddled in the corner of the chest, and seemed to hear a whisper of salvation. She ignored it.
Gold raced through the room, just as her heartbeat reached an angry pace. It swelled and spread, flowing into every corner. Her fingers tensed on the goblet. Speeding glow: that had never happened with two spoonfuls. Every space was infused with goldenness, every surface glossed with it, and the feeling of gold was not only in every mote of dust but in her veins. She could feel her stomach twisting and contorting with the same fury that drove her heart to race, but she ignored it. She held on to the sensation for as long as she could, leaning against her desk.
Her breath pounded in her ears as she entered Sarelin’s chambers, and in the garden, she lay down upon the grass and looked up, exhaling slowly. Sarelin had looked up at the same sky before her eyes closed for the last time. There was no voice to respond to her, yet it felt good to put the truth about the bone people directly to Sarelin . . . if she could not demand an explanation, she could challenge her closest friend. She raised the matter of the childhood that Mea Brey had spent serving Sarelin, too: Why had she not been informed? Had the Iron Queen who had carved her way through seven battlefields felt so guilty about her cousin’s treatment? What did Sarelin think of Lysande, now, an elemental? Did she approve, or did she recoil? For a dead woman and a live one, they had much to discuss.
Litany found her in the suite, on the second morning, touching the dent in Sarelin’s armor where the White Queen’s sword had made its mark. It still shocked her, how stealthily Litany could enter a room, leaving even the dust unscattered.
“Twenty-three years.”
“I’m sorry?” Lysande said.
“That’s how many Queen Sarelin lived before she took the throne.” Litan
y nodded to the dent. “She was barely past youth when the White Army bled the realm. My mother taught me that, before she taught me my prayers.”
“Sarelin always said war was what made her a woman.” Lysande glanced at the box in the girl’s hands. “Have you brought me a gift, Litany?”
“Of a sort. I wanted to return this to you.”
Inside, a gold stem shone against the wood. The feather attached to it was spattered with blood, and the writing-tip had been coated until it was entirely covered in crimson; yet it was her quill, undoubtedly, the one Sarelin had given her. Lysande placed it in her palm.
What were the chances? She had given up hope of ever finding it again after it had tumbled from her pocket during her capture. She felt a rush of joy, bolstered by the swirling of gold within her.
“I had the staff of Rayonnant Palace out searching for it as soon as I knew you’d lost it. The dove came this morning.”
“A happy answer, and most unlooked-for.” Had she imagined Litany’s smile?
“I hope it is not the only happy answer I can deliver.”
Lysande started. She caught Litany’s eye, and the girl smiled openly this time.
“I will be your Mistress of Defense. But on the condition that I may do my work in secret. Some plants only grow in the shadows, while others thrive in the sun: I was not born to be a creature of the light.”
Slipping the quill into her pocket, Lysande extended a hand, and they shook, Lysande’s grip matching Litany’s for firmness, the two of them grinning unashamedly now. They moved in and held each other for far longer than the usual Axiumite embrace. Lysande did not mind at all that she was still beaming when Litany let go.
“Of course, an appointment of such importance should be marked with a gift.”
She led the girl to her chamber, smiling at Litany’s curiosity, and did not say a word. Once inside, she reached for the object that was resting on the desk and handed it over. A silver dagger sparkled, engraved with the name LITANY. “You have beaten me to the giving, it seems,” she said. “After all I put you through, from the battle to what happened with Derset. . . . you still find time to salvage my possessions. You really are the only gem I cherish in this glittering world, Litany.”
Litany was prevented from being swallowed up entirely by embarrassment by her desire to whip the dagger around. Lysande watched her swinging it. She let Litany sputter out her thanks, only half-listening.
At last, she pulled the quill out of her pocket again, turning it over in her palm. She ran a finger over the pointed end, where the blood was thickest, and felt the coat that had ossified. A red quill. There was something curiously fitting about it.
“I could get someone to polish it for you,” Litany said, “if you want to use it. The smith can clean it until it shines.”
“No.” She wrapped her fingers around the tip. “I think I prefer it this way.”
Litany folded her arms. It was the same pose Raden had adopted, more than once, when they were talking of pre-Conquest societies or the complexities of ancient linguistics, and she had said something he didn’t understand; the same belligerent stance, born of the fond frustration that friends harbored for each other, softened by a smile. The sight sent a stab of pain through her, but with it came a dart of pleasure, in remembrance.
“Honestly,” Litany said. “What are you going to write with a bloody quill?”
Lysande raised the quill and eyed the girl over the point.
“That remains for me to decide.”
* * *
• • •
The morning of the Councillors’ arrival came with a storm of polishing and cooking, and Lysande did not emerge from her chamber while the staff were working. By the time she left the tower, the palace was a dark doublet, slashed here and there with the brilliant silver of moonlight.
Her feet slipped over the stone floors. The attendants did not greet her and even the guards who had once jeered her did not speak; Oxbury, a woman with a thin nose who had always thrown barbs at Lysande, kept her eyes down as Lysande passed the doorway of the wing where she kept her vigil.
It’s mine, Lysande realized, as she took the stairs at a brisk stride. The palace is mine.
It was a queer thought.
The Rhimese guards on the door to Luca’s suite were conversing with Carletta Freste, but all of them looked up as she approached. One guard made to block her way.
“Let her through, Taglio. That’s Councillor Prior,” Freste said.
The woman gawked at Lysande’s ink-flecked doublet as she stepped aside.
Lysande kept her ears attuned as she entered the bedchamber. In the dim torchlight, she could make out Luca’s clothes strewn on the floor—dark fabrics, red silk, and belts of soft ox-hide, along with quills poking out of pots, and books piled on the desk. From pamphlets to thick tomes, some imprinted with seals, and others bound with string that glinted, she saw such a variety of books that she wondered how he had transported them all.
A pile on the corner of the desk offered a number of foreign books; she picked one of these up and read A Short History of Long Pleasure on the spine. Taking in the imprint on the front cover, a tripartite design of bordered scenes, she gazed at the large picture of a woman and man entwined, flanked by a scene of female lovers and another of male lovers, each couple thoroughly occupied—and she dropped the book hastily.
The sound of running water caught her attention. There were no fountains in Axium Palace’s suites, yet she could hear splashing. She knocked on the bath-chamber door, but no reply came. The handle gave way. Somehow it did not bother her that she was intruding.
Moving in, she navigated through a wall of mist; jets of water leaped from one end to the other of the long bath, splashing down, then arcing back up again. Steam warmed her neck. Torches burned in brackets on the right wall, flickering. Their glow was not bright enough to illuminate the whole room, and it took her a moment to notice that Luca was sitting in the dry pocket at the end, wearing nothing but his ruby ring.
She froze. He did not appear to have seen her; as he bent forward to mark the parchment that rested against his knees, she examined his profile, from shoulders to toes: not thin enough to be a commoner’s, nor bulky enough to be a soldier’s. A scholar’s, perhaps. On the patch of floor beside him, the shimmering coils of Tiberus’ tail wrapped around an ink-pot. The small black stone she had seen him touching in Castle Sapere lay next to the pot.
“Don’t try to scamper off, Prior.”
The words cut through the steam. She had forgotten about the elemental senses. Putting one hand on the wall, she tiptoed over. “Writing, here?”
“We Rhimese are cold-blooded in every sense. We do our best work in the heat.”
As he rolled up the parchment, Lysande sank down onto the floor beside him. The warmth seeped into her legs. “Your family is more cold-blooded than others,” she said.
The words hung between them.
“Did you know your brother was using the bone people for target practice in his quest to ‘cleanse’ the realm? If they’d been elementals or not, it didn’t really matter, did it? They were poor enough not to matter.”
The question had not been intended, but she was glad to have asked it, all the same.
Luca put down his quill and dropped it into the pot. After a moment, he spoke, softer than before. “You’d have been surprised how Raolo could cover things up. I only found out years after I killed him what he’d been doing in the desert. But I don’t think it would have mattered to my father—Raolo shone with the light of burnished gold to the great Prince Marcio Sovrano. My father never tried to scrape the gilt back and see what was underneath. He didn’t even mind when his firstborn son decided to murder his bastard brother.” At her expression, he chuckled, still softly. “Oh, yes, Prior, Raolo planned it well. Late at night, with a pack of dogs, two guards he had
bribed, a bucket of oil, and a firebrand. I’d be cleared from the family line in the most direct way.”
“Mercy.” Lysande sucked in a breath.
“I don’t know if Raolo knew I was elemental. But I have my suspicions. I’m not one for putting trust in prayer, so I made sure Tiberus was awake to alert me—you see, I knew which night they were coming. I had spies among the guards.”
Luca picked up the little black stone and held it in his hand, turning it over, moving it from palm to fingers and back, keeping it in motion. She had seen that rotation before. Those dextrous fingers moved over and over, as smooth as the stone’s surface, dancing.
He leaned toward her, and she leaned back, averting her eyes; the next inch of skin below his hips had almost come into view.
“Do you ever stop playing with that thing?” She tried to keep her voice light. It did not seem right to acknowledge the intimacy of this conversation.
He held out his palm. “Try it.”
She curled her fingers around the stone. Heat shot through her skin. She dropped it, before it could burn her, and Luca took it back from her quickly. “Takes a while to get used to.”
“Get used to?” Was he joking?
“I don’t mean the heat.” Luca’s mouth was still curled, but his tone was not flippant. “I mean the pain.”
In the pause that followed, Lysande thought of him turning the stone over and over, rotating it between his fingers. She thought of the term proclivity for a moment. It seemed to leap out of a dictionary and into her mouth.
“Your gift,” she said.
“Oh, yes, Prior; did you bring it?”
“Only out of a desire to know how someone who observes me so closely might be so far off the mark.” She drew the black velvet bag from her pocket; the bag that she had kept aside for so long, only picking it up to feel the curves of the object through the material. Now, she pulled the drawstring and shook the rope out, watching it uncoil on the floor. “I know what a binding-rope is, Fontaine. I have seen drawings. And the giver of such a gift is the one who applies it. If you think I will be tied by you . . .”