Wulfyddia (The Tattersall Trilogy Book 1)

by Steele Alexandra

  When she unlocked her door there was only her granddaughter waiting. Dimity was standing by the window, with half her face in shadow and half illuminated by the unexpectedly bright sun. She waited silently at attention when her grandmother entered. “I have something to attend to,” Tryphena told her, taking some comfort in the fact that Dimity never asked questions or pried when it was clear that her grandmother did not wish her to. “You will remain here.”

  “Of course.” Dimity curtsied, a formality that Tryphena expected even of her relatives. She spared the girl a nod before moving to leave, but as she turned to go she realized that she was not behaving as she normally would, and that it was essential for her to behave naturally. She could not allow that dreadful man to unhinge everything.

  She turned back to her granddaughter. “Any news? Have I received any guests?”

  Dimity shook her head, eyes lowered demurely to the ground. “No madam.” She glanced up at the Queen, and today in particular she looked strikingly like a young Tryphena. “None at all.”

  Reassured by her granddaughter’s cool certainty, Queen Tryphena nodded and swept from the room.

  Chapter 17

  Daphne rejoined them in the western courtyard. The day was still quite bright, but if he breathed deeply enough Spencer could taste rain. “You gave it to her?” Spencer asked.

  “To Dimity,” Daphne confirmed. “My sister will give it to her immediately. When my grandmother realizes that this was the stolen book, she will want to know everything. She’ll summon us to speak to her, and then we can tell her everything.” Daphne brushed a piece of hair out of her face and squinted in the midmorning sunlight. She sounded confident, but he could read her nerves in the way she stood, arms crossed tensely over her chest.

  “And you’ll leave me out of it?”

  “Of course,” Daphne assured him.

  They had no way of knowing how exactly the Queen was likely to take the bad news, but since Spencer was of common birth and therefore little more than fodder for the executioner in the eyes of the Queen, the sisters had agreed to cut him out of the tale as much as possible. That way, if the Queen decided to blame them, she would be limited to her own granddaughters, whom she would be hard-pressed to hang. Not that it had stopped Cornelia’s mother, Spencer thought blackly, wondering once again how a woman famed for her benevolence could have executed her own daughter. But those were dark thoughts, ill-suited to a morning that required both hope and courage.

  “There goes Melisande,” Lorna remarked softly. The witch’s apprentice crossed the courtyard ahead of them, apparently oblivious to their scrutiny. She looked entirely preoccupied, and Daphne chewed on her lip as she watched her friend.

  “Daphne,” Lorna said warningly, but her sister had already taken a step forward and called out to the witch’s apprentice.

  Melisande spun around at the sound of her name and seemed startled to see who had called it. Her gaze flicked once, anxiously, to Spencer and Lorna, and then shifted back to Daphne. She slipped slowly into a curtsy, and it seemed automatic. She looked dazed. “You’re well, I hope,” Daphne began, and Spencer wondered if it was as painfully obvious to Melisande as it was to him that there was something on the princess’s mind. But Melisande’s eyes were dreamy, and she seemed miles away. Daphne’s eyes narrowed. “I suppose Felunhala has heard about that cook who was killed.”

  Melisande jumped at the name of her mistress. Spencer watched with some concern as she tugged anxiously at one of her long, flowing sleeves. “I suppose.” Melisande agreed.

  “How has she taken it?” Daphne asked probingly.

  Melisande glanced over her shoulder. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, she is in love with the Fool, isn’t she?”

  Melisande stared dully back at her. “The… Fool?” Words were slow on her lips today, and Spencer could not quite pinpoint why, but the unutterable emptiness of her eyes was frightening him in the same way a naked dagger or a nocked arrow might.

  “They were, ahem, seeing each other, weren’t they?” Daphne glanced back at Spencer, as though seeking his confirmation that Melisande had told them so not long ago. He nodded.

  “Before he disappeared.” Spencer clarified.

  “No.” Melisande said shortly. “No. She had stopped seeing him before that. She found out about him.” She sighed sharply and turned as if to move around them.

  Daphne stepped to cut her off, brows drawn low over her eyes. “She stopped seeing him? What did she find out about?”

  There was a kind of agony in the back of Melisande’s eyes, as though every moment she passed with them caused her pain. “He was seeing someone else. Felunhala didn’t think she could compete with royalty, so she refused to see him again. Then he disappeared.”

  “Royalty? What royalty?”

  Melisande blinked. “Your sister Dimity.”

  Silence reigned.

  This time, Melisande was able to successfully pass Daphne, who stood, stricken. Her dry lips silently mouthed something, but Spencer couldn’t tell what. His own heart was pounding in his chest. There was a vise at his elbow, and he realized that Lorna gripped his arm.

  His mind seemed unbearably slow, unable to quite catch up with his pulse, which was thundering away. Melisande’s skirt swirled in the breeze as she vanished into the castle, leaving horror in her wake. “But,” Lorna murmured, “but Dimity doesn’t like the Fool.”

  The younger sister still seemed confused, but Daphne must have leapt immediately to the same conclusion as Spencer. “No. No, no, no.” Daphne’s murmured denials were fervent and anguished. “No, no, no. Dimity, no. Please no.”

  “She has the book!” Spencer remembered suddenly, as the full extent of the disaster became apparent to him. He could only hope that Melisande was lying. If she wasn’t, and Dimity had allied herself with the Fool, then thanks to him she was currently in possession of the very book they had been trying to keep out of the wrong hands.

  “I don’t believe Melisande,” Lorna said definitively. Daphne, for once, seemed beyond words. She stood, swaying, exactly where Melisande had left her. “Of all of us Dimity is closest to my grandmother. She is her right hand.”

  “That’s the safest place for an assassin to be.” Spencer said.

  “My sister is not an assassin.” Lorna insisted. She looked to Daphne for reassurance, but the expression on her sister’s face gave her none.

  “Maybe not,” Spencer said, mindful of the fact that a commoner accusing a royal of treason risked execution, “but you must find her and make sure. You can’t deny that she stands to gain much. There are only three people ahead of her in line for the throne.”

  “Father.” Lorna whispered brokenly. “Anise. Eudora.”

  “We have to get the book back,” Spencer said urgently. “Where is Dimity now? How do we find her?”

  ***

  The priest did not realize his mistake until it was too late. He should have noticed immediately upon his return that the door of his rented room was not locked, but he was preoccupied, and he had taken several steps into the room, wasted several precious seconds, before his mind caught up with his body and he realized with absolute certainty that he had just walked into a trap. The blade was in his back before he could curse his own carelessness.

  His mouth opened soundlessly, and he dropped to his knees. There was a steadily spreading warmth on the outside of his tunic, but the rest of him was suddenly quite cold. It was only then that the man revealed himself, stepping in front of the priest with calmly calculative eyes. He did not look triumphant, or even particularly evil. His expression was perhaps closest to that of a baker in the midst of kneading dough, or a shoemaker fashioning a sole. He looked in his element, preoccupied by his work.

  The priest fell face down, and somehow the pain of his crushed nose was worse than the feeling of his life slipping away. He struggled to right himself, to roll over so that he could at least stare up into open air as he died, but before he could gathe
r the strength he was gone. There was no last thought, only the urge to roll over and then nothing.

  The queen’s hunter stared down at his latest quarry curiously. For an old man— and a priest at that— this one had been unexpectedly elusive. He was careful to cover his tracks, acted anonymously, and blended easily into a crowd. Ultimately, it was his dogged surveillance of the castle that had proved his undoing. His constant prowls along the outskirts of Castle Wulfyddia had made him predictable, and therefore vulnerable. Whatever the old man had been waiting for, he had not lived long enough to see it come to pass.

  Or had he? The Hunter thought not, but as he searched the man’s body, he could not find the possessions that the queen had described. There was nothing on the man but a simple purse and a small knife. The Hunter collected both of those, determined to bring every personal possession back to Tryphena as the queen had commanded, but he felt quite sure that neither the knife nor the meager sum in the purse were what Tryphena had expected him to find.

  Perhaps they were somewhere in the priest’s room? The Hunter searched the little chamber, as well as the hall outside and the even the street beneath the man’s window, but he could not find any papers, nor indeed anything that could have conceivably upset the queen so. It was a mystery, and not a particularly pleasant one. Despite the fact that he had followed the queen’s instructions to the letter, she would be furious if he returned without the papers he had sworn to bring back to her, and if she lost her temper he was likely to lose his life.

  Eventually, he had to concede defeat and take steps to be sure that the priest’s remains would never be discovered. But before disposing of the body, Fane stared down at him for a moment, musing, and wondered that these unassuming remains could possibly be all that was left of a man who had threatened the Queen above all others.

  Who are you? The killer wondered. What hold did you have on her?

  And, most importantly, who had the evidence now?

  ***

  Dimity climbed the steps to her chamber slowly, expecting her grandmother’s voice to ring out at any second, demanding something of her. But there was no one. No one hounded her, not even Arthur dogged her footsteps. It was an uncommon thing, to have these precious moments to herself, perhaps further proof that the fates smiled on her and there was some force at work on her behalf.

  Of course, she thought with a small smile, there was her own magic. She had begun teaching herself several years ago, in secret. It had become apparent to her quite quickly that she had no natural talent for it; just as she had no right to the throne as Delwyn’s third-born daughter. Nothing had ever come easily to her save deception. But she had put in the hours anyway, long, painstaking hours under cover of night. Her progress had been frustratingly slow, but she knew enough for this. It was her own blood, Lucretius blood, that had bound the slayer within the pages, and now it was her blood and her power that would release it. Oh yes, she knew enough to free the imprisoned one, and when it had scourged the castle of those who had so long stood in her way, she would put it back where it belonged and when the dust settled, she would be the eldest of the survivors, the new heir to the throne.

  She hadn’t the stomach to kill them herself. She’d thought she could, but on midwinter’s night, after the Fool was lost to her and all hope seemed dead, she had followed her sister out into the snowy forest, with every intention of putting a blade in Anise’s heart. But she had faltered, and it had become apparent that she needed the book to achieve her end.

  Now, as she drew her curtains and lit her candles, she had never been more certain of her purpose. She would not grow old and die as right hand to one Lucretius Queen after another. She would not allow her inferior to rule her. And she would see Anise dead before she would see her crowned Queen.

  She had been practicing the spell to release the queenslayer for many months, and now the words came easily to her lips. Slicing into her own flesh was somewhat harder, but she bore the bite of the blade and let her valuable blood drip onto the cover of the book. Initially there was no sign that the spell had taken, but then the scarlet drops vanished from the cover as though they had been sucked into the book. There was a faint sound, like a high pitched whine. At first Dimity thought it was coming from the square beneath her window, but she realized that it was the book itself, which seemed to be moaning like some grievously wounded animal. The sound grew in pitch until Dimity could not bear it. She crouched over, hands pressed to her ears; the pain was excruciating. Just when she thought her head might burst, the sound died away and the pages of the book stirred. The creature that emerged was not corporeal. It was mist; it was smoke. It bubbled forth from the pages, spreading like a stain. Then there was a voice in Dimity’s mind, high and cold.

  You are of the Lucretius bloodline.

  “I am your savior. I have released you so that you might have your vengeance.”

  There was a form, deep in the mist, a figure that seemed to be attempting to emerge, but every time was sucked back into the fog.

  I need a body.

  “Then take one.”

  ***

  It was malice. It was vengeance. It boiled down the great staircase, seeking, longing. It passed close over the heads of three courtiers in the hall, and they felt it not, though the rats in the walls were stifled by the force of it. On the pitched roof above, the castle ravens took flight, feeling a strange and deadly heat in the stone under their talons. It rushed on, past the vapid courtiers and their shallow souls. It sought depth; it sought sorrow and the pain of a secret.

  Locked in her tower, sequestered away but sheltered from nothing, Cicely started and pricked her finger on a needle. Blood dripped, unheeded, onto white damask as the all-seeing one froze, eyes rolling back in her head as she was seized by a vision. Down at the docks, the breeze faltered, then failed altogether, stalling over an ocean that was deathly in its calm. Mollfrida shuttered her windows and let the cat in, drawing the beast to her chest, her wrinkled cheeks white beneath the rouge, tattooed fingers plucking anxiously at his fur. In the bowels of Castle Wulfyddia, the Beast threw his head back and roared, as the ghost whirled around him in panicked circles, her fear closing in on him and provoking feelings he had never known. Her pain was too much for him, too overwhelming. The Beast pressed grotesque, clawed hands to his face and wept. And still the darkness hunted, scenting for nearby souls, reaching greedily into the chests of everyone it passed, seeking a certain kind of heart.

  It found Melisande’s. She was on the third floor of the west wing when the blackness came for her. There was a book under her arm and a candle in her hand, though they both clattered to the floor when the blackness, uncloaked and naked to her eye, whispered up the stairs and thickened the air around her. There was little time for thought as it rushed at her, no time at all for her to heal the parts of her that cried out to the evil. Then there was nothing at all, only rushing darkness and a swift night.