The Charnel Prince

by Greg Keyes

  He nodded, feeling disheartened. “Thank you for your time, then. It was good to hear you sing a bit of it once, anyway.”

  “The honor was mine, sir,” she said. “And thank you for your honesty.”

  “Come,” the governess said. “We might be in trouble even for coming here.”

  They left, and Leoff sat back down, disheartened, hoping all the auditions didn’t go this way.

  It was a bell later before the next arrived, and Leoff felt a ferocious smile widen his face when he saw who it was.

  “Edwyn!”

  Edwyn Mylton was a tall man, gangly as a scarecrow, with a face that seemed at first glance long and sorrowful until you got to the eyes, which positively gleamed with mischief and goodwill. Edwyn grabbed him in a bear hug, slapping him on the back.

  “Court composer, eh?” he said. “I always knew you would make well in the world, Leoff.” He lowered his voice. “Though it’s a bit shaky around here, isn’t it? Was there really a coup?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so—but my performance goes on, er—in a sense. How have things been with you? I never dreamed to find you turning up at my doorstop. I thought you were still playing for the dreadful Duke of Ranness, a hundred leagues from here.”

  “Ah, no,” Edwyn said. “We had a bit of a falling out, me and the duke. Or perhaps I should say a throwing out—of me. I’ve been in Loiyes, at the court of the duchess there, a delightful if taxing creature. I heard about this performance from Rothlinghaim, who received your invitation but could not come. I hoped to present myself as a suitable replacement.”

  “A very suitable replacement,” Leoff agreed.

  “Well, don’t keep me waiting, man, show me the piece.”

  “A moment, Edwyn,” Leoff said. “I need to make plain a few things first—about the performance.”

  He explained to Edwyn the same things he’d told Areana, but with a bit more detail about the particular objections.

  “But he can’t actually do anything, this praifec, can he?” Edwyn objected. “He has no temporal power.”

  “No, but then again, he has the ear of the prince, whom I don’t know at all. I cannot say what will happen when he finds out that I’ve deceived him.”

  “But won’t he attend rehearsals?”

  “I’m sure he will. But I think with careful planning, we can rehearse the piece the way he wants it and perform it as it should be done.”

  Edwyn nodded. “How serious do you think it will get?”

  “At the very least I will lose my position. At the very worst I shall be burned as a shinecrafter. I expect something in the middle. I honestly believe the risk is much smaller, if not negligible, for my musicians, but I can in no way promise it.”

  “Hmmph. Well, let me see that. I’d like to know what all the fuss is about.”

  When Edwyn saw the first page, his face and body went still, and he said nothing until he’d read every last word and note. He looked up at Leoff then.

  “Saints damn you, Leoff,” he sighed. “You knew I would risk death to perform this.”

  “I’d rather hoped,” Leoff replied. “Now, let’s only hope we can find twenty-nine more such like-minded souls.”

  “You will find them,” Edwyn said. “I shall help you.”

  By the end of the day he had recruited eight more players and had sent as many away. The next day went better, because word was starting to get around, and only those with stronger resolve showed up. He didn’t worry that anything would get back to the praifec at this point—he trusted everyone he had invited, and the musician’s guild was tight-lipped about its members and their business, as a matter of principle.

  He was nearly ready to end his day when he heard another tap at the door. He opened it and found Areana there, this time without her governess.

  “Hello,” Leoff said uncertainly.

  She held her head high. “If you haven’t filled the part of Lihta,” she said, “I would very much like to sing it.”

  “But your governess—your parents—”

  “I have some money of my own,” she said. “I have taken a room in town. I know my parents, and they will come around.”

  Leoff nodded. “That’s wonderful news,” he said. “I just want to be certain you really understand the danger you might be in if you join me in this.”

  “I understand, cavaor,” she said. “I am prepared to face whatever punishment should be pronounced upon me.”

  “I hope that will be none at all,” Leoff said, “but I thank you for your courage.” He gestured toward the hammarharp. “Shall we begin rehearsal?”

  “It would be my pleasure,” she returned.

  And all Leoff’s doubts vanished—but for one.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  RODERICK

  AS ANNE WHEELED HER mount from the road and into the forest, a wind blew through, resurrecting the dead leaves into aerial dancers pirouetting in vorticose ballet. A faint chorus of women’s voices attended them, thin and without depth, as if the song had fallen from a great height and been stripped and broken as it fell until nothing was left but a memory imprinted in the air, with that fading, too.

  She thought she heard her name and then only the thumping of Tarry’s hooves and her breath, which seemed almost to hover around her rather than come from inside. The tree boles went by hypnotically, one by one, rows of columns that never seemed to end.

  Tarry leapt a fallen log and nearly stumbled on the slope beyond, but he recovered, and then the slope evened out. For that brief moment when she seemed to float, sunlight seemed to explode around her, melting the trees down into green grass and misty rinns far below, and she was again on Faster, hurtling down the Sleeve, terrified, giddy, and blissful with life.

  For an instant she held it, but then it was gone, and she realized with a leaden heart that that, too, was only a memory of something irrevocably lost. That life, that childhood, was gone forever, and even if she made it home it wouldn’t be the home she knew.

  Tarry squealed and stumbled again, legs buckling, and in a fog of golden light Anne hurled forward through the dancing leaves and fertile smell of promised rain. She hit the ground and bounced, heard something snap, and pain like nearby thunder detonated in her thigh. She felt the flesh skinning from her elbows and arms as she wrapped them to protect her head, and finally fetched to a stop against a stump amidst the scents of turned earth, blood, and broken roots.

  For a time she forgot where she was, and puzzled at the branches above, wondering what they could be, as something beat toward her like an approaching drummer.

  She saw a face she ought to know but couldn’t quite place, before it—like the wind and her childhood—faded.

  Something lapped around her like the tongue of a giant dog, or waves on the strand, irregular in rhythm, soothing. Anne tried to open her eyes, but they seemed infinitely heavy, so instead she looked through the lids and saw her room—except it wasn’t her room. It resembled her room, but the walls were falling in, and through a great hole near the ceiling red light streamed in that terrified her even to look at, and nearby—from the corner of her eye—she saw the door opening, and someone stepping through who shouldn’t be there, whom she couldn’t look at, and she knew suddenly that she hadn’t awakened at all, but was still in some Black Mary of waking.

  She tried harder to wake, then, to force her eyes open, to pry apart the wall of sleep and step through. But when she did, she was back in the room, and the red light was stronger, the door swung wider, and the shadow stepped in. Her skin felt a thousand stings, as if she lay in a bath of scorpions, and she woke, and it all started again . . .

  She sat up and heard a voice screaming, which she took a moment to understand was her own. Her chest heaved as she clutched at strange bedclothes and prayed this was finally an end to sleep, and not another trick of the Mary. Then she felt the pain in her leg where the arrow had pierced her, and looked around in a fresh panic. She’d awakened before, not knowing where she was, not rec
ognizing anything, and then gradually realizing she was in a familiar place made strange by the linger of dream. But as she stared about the room, it did not become familiar.

  The lapping of her dream turned out to be the fire in the hearth a few yards away. Heavy tapestry drapes covered the windows, so she couldn’t tell if it was day or night. A wolf pelt lay flat on the floor, and near the fire there was a loom and a stool to sit at it. Other than that, there was only a door, wooden and solid with iron bands.

  She threw back the bedclothes. She wore an amber dressing gown worked with golden roses on the hem. She pulled it up until she could see her leg, and found it bandaged. She felt clean, as if she had been scrubbed, and a lilac scent seemed attached to her.

  Anne lay there another moment, trying to remember what had happened. She remembered Tarry falling, and after that very little that could be separated from phantasm.

  Whoever had found her, it couldn’t be the Hansan knights. They had never shown any interest in taking her captive, much less in bathing her and bandaging her wounds.

  Experimentally, she swung her legs over the bed and eased down to the rug upon the flagstone floor. When she put weight on the damaged leg it ached, but not so much that she couldn’t bear to limp upon it, so she limped to the window and pushed the tapestry aside.

  It was twilight outside. The sun was gone, but clouds of royal purple trimmed in gold and verdigris lay across the eastern sky. A light rain was falling, misting the thick glass of the window, which was cold to the touch. Plains or pasture stretched out and away to a dark green haze in the distance that might be forest, all resembling a painting that had been dipped in water while still wet.

  She let the tapestry drop and hobbled to the door. As she had more than half expected, it was locked. Sighing, she turned back to examine the rest of the room—only to recoil at a sudden movement at the edge of her vision.

  She fixed her eyes in that direction and saw a woman staring at her. She had almost opened her mouth to demand who she was when Anne understood that she was looking into a full-length mirror.

  Her reflection was gaunt and hollow-cheeked, and the area around her eyes seemed bruised. The thin frizz of red hair was weird and shocking. Her freckles had darkened and enlarged from long days in the sun—but more than that, her face had actually changed. Grown older, not merely metaphorically, but in fact. The very shape of the bone was different—her nose seemed smaller, and for the first time ever she caught a glimpse of her mother in her.

  How long since she had seen herself in a mirror? How much could a woman change between sixteen and seventeen?

  And she was seventeen now, though she had missed her birthday. She had been born in Novmen, on the eighth. It had come and gone without her ever knowing or thinking about it until now.

  There should have been a party, and dancing, and cakes. Instead she couldn’t even remember where she had been, because she didn’t know the date now, except that it was well past the month of Novmen. Indeed, the Yule solstice had to be approaching—if that, too, hadn’t passed her in the night.

  Unable to gaze long on what she had become, she searched the room for anything that might be useful as a weapon, but the only thing she found was a spindle. She took it in her hand and limped back to the bed, just as somewhere near the vespers bell began to toll.

  Before the next bell, the creak of the door opening disturbed her. A stooped little woman in a gray dress and black shawl entered. “Highness,” she murmured, bowing. “I see you are awake.”

  “Who are you? Anne asked. “Where am I?”

  “My name is Vespresern, if it please you, Princess Anne.”

  “How do you know me?” Anne demanded.

  “I have seen you at court, Highness. Even with your hair shorn so, I would know you. Is there anything I can get for you?”

  “Tell me where I am and how I came to be here.”

  “My master asked that he be allowed to explain that himself, Your Highness. He asked me to fetch him when you woke. I’ll find him now.”

  She turned and closed the door behind her, and Anne heard a key turn the lock into place.

  Anne went back to the window and unlatched it. The air outside was wet and chill, but it wasn’t the weather she was concerned with, but rather what sort of building she was in and how great the distance to the ground. What she found wasn’t encouraging. Gray stone walls winged away in both directions. She could make out battlements above her and a few more windows below. The drop was perhaps twenty yards, and that to a moat of ugly-looking water. There weren’t any ledges she could see other than the narrow casements of the windows. If she tied her bedclothes together, she thought she might decrease the jump by half, and the water might break her fall, if it was deep enough.

  She closed the window and sat on the bed to think. Her leg was really bothering her, and she wondered how long such a wound would take to heal. Would it mend entirely, or would she limp for the rest of her life?

  About a bell later, she heard the key scraping in the door again, and, clutching the spindle, she waited to see who it was.

  A man stepped into the room, and immediately she knew him. Deep down she’d known she would.

  “Well,” he said. “I mistook you for a boy once before, and did so again when I saw that hair.”

  “Roderick.”

  “Well, I’m glad you remember me now,” he said. “After meeting you on the road, I wasn’t so sure you hadn’t quite forgotten me.”

  “Roderick,” she repeated, searching for something plausible to say.

  His tone sobered a bit. “You terrified me, you know. I thought you were dead.”

  “I’m in your father’s castle, then?” she asked.

  “Yes, welcome to Dunmrogh.”

  “I had friends back in the forest. We were attacked.”

  “Yes, I know—I’m sorry, they were all slain. Brigands, I suppose. We’ve had our troubles with them, lately. But look, Anne—it’s impossible that you could be here. How in the name of Saint Tarn is it that you are?”

  She studied his face, the face she had dreamed about for so long. While hers had seemed older, his seemed younger, and not as familiar as it ought to. It came to her that she had really known him for only a few days, not even a month. She’d been in love with him, hadn’t she? It had felt like that. Yet now, looking at him, she didn’t feel the overflow of joy she’d been expecting.

  And it wasn’t just because she knew he was lying.

  “Stop it, Roderick,” she said wearily. “Please. If I ever meant anything to you at all, just stop it.”

  He frowned. “Anne, I can’t say I know what you mean.”

  “I mean my letter,” she said. “The one I sent from the coven. Cazio did have it delivered after all.” She shook her head. “I don’t know why I doubted him.”

  “You’ve left me behind someplace, Princess. I thought you would be happy to see me. After all, we—I mean, I thought you loved me.”

  “I don’t know what love is anymore,” Anne said, “and there’s too much else in the way of me wanting to remember.”

  He took a step forward, but she held up her hand. “Wait,” she said.

  “I’ve no intention to harm you, Anne,” Roderick said. “Indeed, quite the opposite.”

  “I ask you once again, don’t lie to me,” Anne said. “It won’t do you any good. I know you betrayed me. I’ve been chased over all the earth by men who tried to kill me, but when I finally started chasing them, where did they come? Here. They’re here, aren’t they?”

  Roderick stared at her for a moment; then he shut the door and locked it. He turned and walked back toward her.

  “I didn’t have a choice, can you understand that? My duty to my family—that’s always first. Before king, before praifec, before love.”

  “It was no accident that we met,” she accused. “You were looking for me, that day on the Sleeve.”

  He hesitated. “Yes,” he said at last.

  “And my
letter—you showed it to them.”

  “Yes, to my father. And then I hated myself—I still hate myself for what you went through. The whole thing began as a charade, to get you to trust me. But I got stuck in it somehow. Do you know how I’ve dreamed of you these months? Everything faded when I thought you were dead. I wished to die myself. And then, by a miracle, I found you here.” He put his right hand to his forehead. “The dreams, Anne. The dreams of you, of holding you—I cannot sleep.”

  Roderick’s voice shook with desperate sincerity, and she suddenly remembered the day she had met him. She and Austra had gone into the tomb of Genya Dare, below the old horz in Eslen-of-Shadows, and they had written a curse against Fastia on a lead tissue and placed it in the coffin so Genya could take it to Cer, the avenger of women. Only she hadn’t really cursed Fastia, but simply asked that her sister would be nicer. And on a whim she had added, “And fix the heart of Roderick of Dunmrogh on me. Let him not sleep without dreams of me.”

  “Oh,” she murmured to herself.

  Roderick dropped down on his knees and reached for her hand so quickly, she did not have time to withdraw it. He clutched it desperately.

  “No one knows you’re here except for Vespresern, and she won’t tell because she loves me more than my own mother does. I can save you from them, Anne. I can make everything up to you.”

  “Yes? And how can you do that, Roderick?” she asked. “Can you return Austra, Cazio, and z’Acatto to me? They are here, too, aren’t they?”

  He nodded, his face a misery. “They’re going to do something to them, something in the woods to do with the Old Worm Fane. I can’t do anything about that, Anne. You don’t understand—I would if I could—but it’s too late.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I’m not sure, really. They’re from everywhere, although a lot of the knights are from Hansa. They serve the same lord as my father. A lord of great power, but I’ve never heard his name or where he lives.” He reached to stroke her face. “You have to forget them, if you want to live. I can’t hide you here forever.”