“Try the gloves too,” Gilles said, and Perrotte danced back and pulled those on too. She spun around the room again, carrying on in an imaginary basse danse.
She stopped, panting. “Fast shoes,” she announced.
“Pardon?” Gilles asked.
“They dance so quickly, I’m already out of breath!”
“Ah,” Gilles said, nodding. “Certainly. Sit down, and rest a moment.”
She sat beside him and yawned gapingly. “I’m tired,” she said.
“Then I should go.”
“No! Stay. I won’t see you again for a long time, after tomorrow.” Maybe not ever. If Jannet ever managed to have a son, would Perrotte ever return to Castle Boisblanc?
At least she would see her father at court from time to time.
“I suppose not,” Gilles said. “But still. I should go.”
“Why?” she asked, yawning again. “Do you think I’m going to go to sleep here, and need some privacy?”
“Mayhap. If you wish to sleep here, perhaps you should. Just . . . close your eyes.”
It did seem an attractive prospect, to close her eyes. Her vision blurred. Tiredness crashed over her like a wave. Her muscles relaxed of a sudden, and she toppled over. “Gilles?” she slurred. “What’s happening . . .”
“Shhh. Just go to sleep, my lady. Let yourself fall.”
That was when she knew—knew that Gilles knew something. Had done something. She fought the tiredness, trying to sit up. She managed to push herself upright, even shoved to her feet.
“What did you do?” she asked, stumbling toward him.
“Lady Perrotte.” His voice was pleading. He was standing now, his arms were reaching for her, his hands were on her shoulders, he was trying to push her down—she jerked away.
“What did you do?” she asked again.
“I—nothing bad! Nothing wrong! You are going to go to sleep, my lady. Gentle as anything. Go to sleep, and dream pleasantly for a long time.”
“I wasn’t tired,” she told him, fighting to understand what he meant, fighting to think how to explain to him why it was that she was not going to sleep.
“Be still, you don’t want to fall and hurt yourself,” he said, reaching for her.
She pulled away from him, but the movement overbalanced her. She stumbled and hit her head against the wall. Gilles cried out. Her blurred vision turned black and sideways for a moment. She lost track of up and down. She fell to her knees, then collapsed completely. Her head hit the floor and a light sparked behind her closed eyes. Gilles shouted again, grabbing her arm.
She tried to protest, to tell him how wrong he was to grab her, to tell him how she knew, she knew he had poisoned her slippers or gloves, but it all came out as an incoherent, garbled howl. She had lost her ability to stand. She had lost her ability to talk. Her vision was gradually fading back in from black and sideways, but it was slow to return, and everything remained a blur.
She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream. She wanted to use words and fists. But she couldn’t. Her body wasn’t her own anymore.
From beyond the blur of her vision, Gilles cursed. “She’s dying!”
Farther off, a woman’s voice answered. “What did you do?”
“Only what you told me! You lied, my lady. This wasn’t gentle.”
25
Coins
A SHRILL SCREAM WOKE SAND. HE SAT BOLT UPRIGHT.
“Perr?” he asked into the darkness, but she didn’t answer. He couldn’t hear her breathing, and when he reached for her hand across the corner of their mattresses, he touched nothing but fabric.
The scream had come from far away. He leaped up, lit his candle from the fire’s embers, and went in search of her.
She wasn’t in the library, her old room, or the kitchen. Nor the chapel. The last place he expected to find her was the crypt, and when he didn’t find her there, he truly began to worry.
She was close enough that he’d heard the scream, so he presumed she must be in the area of the inner courtyard. But she had not screamed again. He called for her in the great hall and then started searching the keep, room by room.
He noticed a tattered tapestry had been pushed aside, and a small, broken door once hidden by the fabric was open. The faint light of a candle came from within. He heaved a sigh of relief, and entered the room.
It was the treasury. He swallowed hard, his mouth suddenly dry. He’d never thought himself particularly greedy, but here lay more gold and silver than he imagined existed in the world, let alone an amount he ever expected to find in one room.
Perrotte sat on a pile of coins, a leather bag grasped tightly in one hand, staring at the ceiling.
Was she having some sort of fit?
“Perrotte? Perr? Are you all right?” He placed his candle holder near the door and knelt beside her. Sharp edges of broken coins poked his knees, and he shifted uncomfortably.
To his relief, her eyes moved to meet his. She gasped and grabbed his arms. “Sand. Sand.” She wrapped her arms around his neck and held on to him tightly.
He wasn’t sure if she was crying or not; if so, she was nearly silent. But then the hot tears hit his neck, and he knew. It was sort of foul. He was pretty sure she was leaking snot onto him, too. But he put his arms around her in return. The world was too big and the castle too small to worry about the foul sensation on his neck while his friend was weeping. He held her tight.
Eventually, her arms loosened and her body relaxed away from him. He let her sag back onto the pile of coins.
“What’s wrong, Perrotte?”
Her mouth worked, trying to form words, before she closed her eyes and shook her head.
He sat for a long moment, frustrated and fearful. “You don’t have to tell me, of course,” he said at last. “But it will make you feel better. My grandmère likes to say, ‘A burden shared is a burden halved.’”
Perrotte opened her eyes. Now she scowled at him. “Oh? And you’ve halved all your burdens, have you?”
“You know my heart better than anyone living, at this point.”
Her eyes dropped to the candle flame, which she watched for a few moments. A small line creased between her eyebrows as she looked down at the candle. His father’s forehead had a line like that, made permanent by repeated use over the years. Agnote would pretend to try to wipe it away with her thumb. She called it his worry line.
“Is that it?” Perrotte asked quietly. “Those are all of your burdens? You want to be a blacksmith but your father wants to send you away?”
“That’s far from it,” he said sharply. Anger rose within him that she would be so callous. “I fear that I’m a witch. I worry for my sisters, if my father wants to send them away as he wanted to send me. I am sad for my grandparents, who lost a daughter to fever and a son to war, and now have no one to pass their secrets on to. I fear we will never escape this place, and we will die here before our times.”
Her laugh was brittle.
“What?” he asked, appalled that she should laugh at his fears.
“One of us already died before her time.” She stood abruptly and shook away the coins whose ragged edges clung to her skirt.
He tamped down his anger. She wasn’t thinking properly. “Perrotte . . . ,” he said. She looked down at him, waiting. “You screamed. It woke me. What happened? Did you remember something bad, like you did in the tower?”
Perrotte offered him a hand, her eyes steady on his. “I did.”
He took it and rose to his feet. “Well?”
Their hands parted, and fell to their sides.
“Well, Sand, I was murdered.”
Sand’s whole body tensed. He found himself panting for breath as though he’d run miles. His legs wanted to crouch, his hands wanted to become fists. He was ready to fight. But who would he fight with? Perrotte?
He forced his legs and hands straight and his breath to slow. He was shocked by Perrotte’s news, but not surprised at the same time. Because it made sen
se of a strange story: How could a girl so young and so healthy die so suddenly? Certainly, she was just as likely to have died of some plague or disease as anyone, including his own mother—but she would have remembered falling sick. And castles did not sunder themselves over natural deaths. He was certain of that.
No, he wasn’t surprised. What did surprise him, however, was the sudden, violent rage that filled him, and how all he wanted to do was find the person who had killed her, and—kill that person back. Murderous rage, he’d heard this feeling called, but he’d never realized how hard it was to bear, how he was bursting with it, how he felt it in his eyes and ears and down to his toes. Rage filled him to the brim, and it felt like any movement would tip him and he’d spill this disastrous emotion out into the world, using words or fists—or a knife if he could find one.
His rage chose fists. He turned and pounded one of the broken money chests in the room, breaking it wide open. Coins fell, pelting the floor in a hard, swift rain. Perrotte may have called his name, but all sounds had meshed into one, and he wasn’t sure.
Sudden embarrassment at his outburst pulled his rage back from the edge. He cringed away from the money chest he’d been pounding, and pulled his fists into his sleeves. He gulped for air, filling his belly with breath, then let it out in a slow, ragged rush.
He took a physical step away from Perrotte, his feet crunching on the half-coins below. He swallowed painfully, his throat suddenly parched.
“Yes, well,” Perrotte said, eyeing him closely. She hadn’t moved during his explosion. “And sometimes a burden shared is a burden doubled.”
“Who?” he asked.
Perrotte was silent.
“Who murdered you?”
“Who do you think?”
“The Countess.”
Perrotte turned away, speaking to the wall. “She and my father married when I was seven years old. It never occurred to me then that it might end like that, that it could end like that. Mothers love you, don’t they? Mothers protect you. Even if you are a bad child. Even if you don’t deserve it.” She held herself stiffly, arms folded tight, looking very narrow and alone.
“I’m so sorry, Perrotte. Even if you were bad, you didn’t deserve it.”
“Of course I didn’t.” Her voice was hollow, unconvinced. He had no idea what to do for her. “Perhaps you should go back to sleep,” she told him.
Anger had burned through him like a wildfire, and now he felt ash-ridden and raw. His hand was raw too, bleeding lightly from a half-dozen fine cuts caused by the rough edges of coins and splinters of wood that he’d smashed his fist on.
It was the opposite of his nature, to feel so wild. Perhaps it was having been practically raised in a smithy; perhaps it was because he had been tending fires under his father’s eye for six years; but Sand had the most appreciation for a purposeful fire, not one that was out of control.
He had to help her. He had to make Perrotte’s life better.
“How can I mend this?” he asked.
“You can’t. Just go to bed, Sand.”
He didn’t believe that. Everything could be mended. He just had to figure out how.
26
Star-taker
IT HAD NOT BEEN HER INTENTION TO LIE TO SAND, BUT Perrotte could not tell him that his father killed her. Though she had no doubt that Jannet had ordered the deed done, Gilles had made and delivered the poisoned slippers or gloves—she wasn’t sure which, and perhaps it was both. You lied, my lady. This wasn’t gentle.
Perhaps she should have told him—not just about Gilles, but also about Bleyz and the rebellion. But his rage was too much for her to bear. The small glimpse she’d seen had frozen her in place with fear—this wasn’t Sand, was it?—but also, she’d been . . . just a bit . . . annoyed. This was her problem, not his. She was the one who’d been displaced and murdered.
She waited, standing stiffly in the middle of the treasury, until she could no longer hear Sand’s footsteps. Rubbing the tense muscles in her jaw, she cast about, looking for the leather sack she’d brought in with her. When she found it, she scooped coins into the sack haphazardly and tucked it into her bodice.
She climbed her favorite guard tower with a tight throat. She felt on the verge of tears, yet no tears fell. She signaled with her lantern, covering and uncovering the light three times. Then she waited, still rubbing her jaw, until Sir Bleyz’s torch approached. He called softly to her; she waved, and didn’t speak, just threw the pouch of coins out over the hedge as hard as she could. It landed well beyond the thorns.
Sir Bleyz dismounted and picked up the sack. He looked inside, then stared back up at her. “This will do very well, my lady!” he said. He tilted his head to one side. “Six times this amount would hire a company of Swiss pikemen.”
Perrotte swallowed hard against the pain in her throat. “Come back tomorrow night, I’ll have it ready for you.”
Sir Bleyz saluted her as though he were a knight about to take the field for the joust. Words of praise and gratitude tumbled from his lips, but she didn’t care. She turned away and left the tower.
She was tired, but she did not feel that she could return to her father’s room. She crept down to the kitchen, blew out her lantern candle, and curled up on the warm spot on the hearthstones. The only noise was the whisper of the fire, and the occasional tap of Merlin’s talons on the rafter.
Perrotte fell asleep.
SHE WOKE WHEN SHE sensed Sand nearby. She hadn’t heard him enter the kitchen, but the swish of his clothing and the soft padding noise of his stocking feet so close to her face, back and forth, back and forth as he found food, must have disturbed her slumber.
She kept her eyes shut.
He left before long, and she breathed a sigh of relief and sat up. Not much later, she heard the telltale noises of his work in the smithy.
Her throat still hurt, like there were words stuck in it.
She should tell Sand. If not about his father, then at least about Bleyz and her barons and her Swiss pikemen.
She heated water to wash up, but untying her hair, brushing it, and retying it felt like too much work, so she just left it alone, and went down to the smithy.
Sand was working the bellows when she arrived. Perrotte just stood and watched.
He pulled one of the pieces of metal out of the fire, quickly hammered it against the anvil at a sharp angle, straightened the angle, hammered some more, and replaced the item in the fire. He began the same process with the other piece of metal. He moved with a strange, urgent energy. She had never seen him like this.
Perrotte didn’t think Sand had seen her in the doorway, he was so focused on his work. But he turned his head and barked, “Come here. Hold this piece.”
She didn’t like his tone, but as long as he was using it, she didn’t feel bad about not confessing to him. She took the tongs from him, holding the metal exactly as he instructed.
“When I tell you to put it in the fire, lay it in right where the coals are brightest and hottest. Go in sideways—this is a welding fire, and there’s only a small opening to reach the coals,” he said. “Up to about halfway—here.” He pointed at the spot on the iron bar. “Pull it out as soon as I tell you, then hold it just like this. I’ll do the rest. But don’t move it yet.”
He pulled over a small box of white powder, and sprinkled some of the powder over the flattened, notched end of the metal he’d just worked. He did the same with the other piece. “This powder is called flux. Now, put your piece back in the fire.”
They put both their pieces into the heart of the fire, then Sand pumped the bellows with strong, steady strokes. Perrotte peered in at the white-hot burning coals, mesmerized by the fierce light that seemed to bore straight through her eyes and into her brain.
“Does the metal match the coal yet?” Sand asked.
“No . . . not really.”
He worked the bellows some more, steady and strong.
“Close,” she told him, and now he pumped th
e bellows with vigor.
He craned his neck, staring into the fire. “Now.”
She pulled out the metal piece and held it on the anvil as he’d instructed. Quick as a hare, he brought out his piece, fitting it over hers so that the notches aligned. Then he brought his hammer down in one powerful stroke. A bright spark shot out between them, almost crossing the smithy. The tongs jarred Perrotte’s hands as Sand struck twice more.
“Open your tongs.” He pulled the metal away from her to put it in the fire again. The two bars were one complete piece now.
How could he ever argue that his mending wasn’t magic?
“It’s not magic,” he growled, as though he’d heard her thought—or maybe she’d spoken aloud. “It’s just welding. Almost any smith can do it.”
She cocked her head, trying to figure out what he was making.
He heated the metal again, brought it out and began to expertly bend it into a circular shape. He worked the piece for some time, alternately flattening it and making the ends meet. He notched both ends, as he had done before when the piece of metal had been two bars; then he added more flux, and welded the ends together. He’d made a complete circle.
Perrotte’s heart sank a little when she realized he hadn’t asked her for her help with this weld, but then Sand pulled from his ash pile two more complete circles. She leaned forward to examine the circles—then her breath caught.
“Sand,” she said, becoming still. Her fingers reached out to touch, but he swatted them away.
“Dark heat!” he reminded her. “It’s quite hot still.”
“Is it—is it an armilla?”
Sand looked confused. “No. It’s an astrolabe!”
She wanted to laugh, but knew how rude that would be—even though she would be laughing from delight, not out of ridicule.
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