by Callie Bates
I kick my way out of the blankets twisted around me. The ormolu clock on the mantel reads eleven. I’ve slept late from exhaustion and no doubt missed breakfast. A platter loaded with pastries and fruit and boiled eggs sits on a side table, along with a swaddled pot of tea—still hot. It occurs to me that we got in too late for supper last night, and though my mother fed me shortbread, it wasn’t enough to last fourteen hours of sleep. I gorge on the food until I think I’m going to be sick, then cautiously open the bedroom door. The hall stands empty, lit by daylight from the distant atrium, brushing over the gilded frames of paintings on the walls. A woman is talking in a nearby room, and somewhere down the hall I hear my mother’s touch on the piano. Does she play all the time?
There’s a sudden rumble of male voices, and my father emerges from a room down the way, Finn and Hugh behind him.
I close the door. My palms flash hot and damp.
Some helpful maid left a gown draped over a chair for me, with a flounced underskirt to go over one of those hideous old-fashioned stays that squeeze your whole middle and breasts together in a rigid cylinder. I much prefer—and only ever wear—the Paladisan style, shorter and softer, so that I can breathe and bend over all the way. I dig through the cedar chests and armoire, but I can’t find the clothes I wore here. They must have taken them to be cleaned. Not even a decent pair of trousers or a reasonable coat—I’ve been supplied with a lady’s wardrobe, all frills and fluffs and pastel pinks. Don’t they realize I’m a scholar as well as a lady of fashion?
My own stays have disappeared with the rest of my clothes. I give up and put on the flounced underskirt beneath a morning-robe; no stays. I can’t lace these bulky stays up myself anyway, even if I wanted to. At least they supplied me with a decent pair of shoes—brown leather and sturdy around my ankles. Instead of a proper coat, there’s only a sort of capelet, but nothing can be done about that. I thrust a cap over my messy hair and peek once more into the corridor. No one.
I edge into the hall. Mother is still playing her piano. There are other voices, but no one around. I decide to go outside. I make my way down the grand stairs, not looking behind me, even though the high oculus in the foyer begs to be stared at.
I let myself out into the autumn day. It is light and bright and glorious.
The front drive makes a neat sweep before me—a party of horsemen rides toward the house through the distant elms—while off to my left, among the oaks, only the wind reigns. I run to the trees, my feet kicking through the leaf litter.
A tremor runs through the ground, like the memory of the earth’s heartbeat. I stop short, the breath catching in my throat. Tears spring to my eyes. I want to hear the sound of the earth so badly. I want to feel it in my bones. In my heart.
Yet if I do, it means I choose Caeris; I choose my father and his revolution.
And I can’t be a figurehead for the father who forfeited me like a pawn in his play for a Caerisian king.
I’m standing beneath the wide arms of the oaks. A hush has settled around me. Looking up into the interlacing tree branches, I seem to shrink. I’m a child again, holding my breath in wonder at the enormity of the forest around me. A line of mushrooms scrabble up a nearby ash tree and, high above, songbirds make curious calls. The air smells moss-sweet and autumn-dry.
A wild exuberance builds in my chest.
I glance behind me to be sure no one’s watching—none of my father’s lackeys, eager to report that I do, in fact, like this place. That part of me still loves it with a child’s uninhibited joy. Then I run. I gallop through the woods until even the outline of my father’s roof has disappeared, until the ground pitches upward toward a hill.
I almost step on it. White, delicate, fringed: Amanita virosa, pressing up through the leaves.
Rage burns through me. I lift my foot to step on it—deliberately.
A single mushroom has ruined my life.
Branches snap behind me. I drop my foot in surprise and see a young woman staring at me from the other side of a pine tree. She’s tall and blond, with eyelids so pale they’re almost pink, and her neat, square-necked gown is woven in a pattern of the same color. She holds a basket stuffed with pinecones and neatly clipped boughs.
“You must be Elanna,” she exclaims. “You came with the prince. Is he as admirable as they—” Her gaze is open and eager, but now she flushes and presses her lips together as if embarrassed.
Maybe my stare has turned into a glare. I try to put the proper amount of civility into my “Yes?” but I’m not sure I succeed.
“I’m Sophy,” she says, still flushed. “Sophy…Dunbarron. I heard you’d come home.”
Home. I am glaring. I look at the contents of her basket, willing myself to breathe.
Sophy’s gaze follows mine. “Oh! I was collecting things. We’re making wreaths today, so they’ll last all winter.”
Wreaths. What a useful occupation, with my father about to start a war.
“Are you lost?” she asks. “I’ll show you back.”
“I’m not lost,” I begin, but stop. I can’t really say that I came out to remember my magic, to see what I could manage to do with my power. What’s the use? My father killed the king with an amanita and is letting me suffer the blame. I kick the mushroom with my foot, scattering it into fleshy white shards on the forest floor. And then I follow Sophy Dunbarron back toward the house.
—
WE HEAR THE shouting before we see them. A boy’s high clear voice: “Take your own horse, you shit-faced southerner!”
Sophy drops her basket. We exchange a glance, then we’re both running toward the front drive, where the shouting came from. Just before we burst through the encircling elms onto the gravel, I grab Sophy’s arm and drag her to safety behind a tree trunk. Our shoulders press together. We peer around opposite sides of the tree, to where a fight is breaking out on the front steps of my father’s mansion.
For a long moment—too long—my mind struggles to make sense of the confusion of bodies. Brown, green, blue, gold. A thrown punch. A stableboy spitting at a man a head taller than him. The sharp ring as a man in blue-and-gold livery draws a sword.
Blue-and-gold livery. The queen’s men.
The royal guard is here.
“Ow,” Sophy whispers, and I realize my fingers have tightened into her arm. I let go, digging my fingernails into the tree instead.
The boy who spat is now getting his head bashed in. The royal guardsman strikes him, hard, across the chin, and again, and again. More guardsmen hit more stableboys; more stableboys hit guardsmen. Maids have run out from the kitchen door, three of them, swinging heavy black objects. Frying pans, a kettle. Men run behind them in a flash of green-and-white livery, their swords and bayonets shining—my father’s guards.
The spitting boy falls to the ground and lies very still. Too still.
Sophy draws her breath in with a hiss. Before I can stop her, she’s running out into the melee, unarmed, shouting. “Stop this! Stop this at once!”
A guardsman throws a punch into her stomach. It brings her up short. She staggers around, gasping, heaving.
This is not my fight. It is not.
But I’m running anyway.
On the periphery of my vision, I realize the ash trees Sophy and I ran through have begun to move, to dip and sway, as if a great wind buffets them. A flight of birds swoops up over the mansion, dives down toward us. I smell earth in my nostrils.
I grasp Sophy by the waist and pull her toward safety. “You need to get Hugh. Somebody with my father’s authority.” I push her toward the house so hard she stumbles. But then she picks up her feet and goes.
Most people just need orders. Then they’ll do the sensible thing.
The ground trembles under my feet.
The fallen stableboy is still lying there, amid the fighting. I dart between the fighters, past a maid cracking a pan into a guardsman’s ribs. The boy lies with his head twisted to the side, blood smearing his mouth and nose. God
s, no. He can’t be dead. I fall to my knees, feel his neck for a pulse. Sluggish, but there. Another stableboy trips over the fallen one’s legs.
The ground is shaking and the trees are billowing. I hook my hands under the boy’s armpits and drag him, one step at a time, toward the doors. A stray punch glances off my cheek. I move backward, full-bodied, into someone else. I grind my teeth together and keep moving. A guardsman flings a punch into my eye, then trips over the boy’s knees.
Stone beneath us. The doorway, finally. The boy makes a gurgling sound. The blood bubbles in his nostrils. “Damn you, Belenus,” I hiss, and then I curse myself for using the name of the Caerisian healing god, not the familiar Idaean one. Hugh’s stories must be getting in my head. The boy needs a doctor, not a botanist. I yank off my morning-robe and stuff it under his head, not even caring that it leaves me in a chemise and underskirt, practically naked. My skin burns and splits into cold shards.
It’s begun to rain. And they’re all still fighting. For what?
I surge to my feet. “Stop this!” But my shouting just sinks in with the other voices, buried beneath the roar of the wind. The day has turned black.
Not my doing. It can’t be—but of course it is.
I widen my stance. The wind doesn’t buffet my clothes alone: I feel it in my body, a howl spreading through my lungs. As it sweeps through me, I know what to do. I clap my hands together, and thunder rumbles. It rumbles from the sky down into the earth, burrowing, ferocious, shaking and tumbling up through my bones—through everyone’s bones. The fighters have fallen back from one another, except for two locked in a kind of embrace.
Some of them are staring at me. Others turn to look. A guardsman swears. Thunder trembles in my legs. My hair rises up, wild, an aureole around my head, just as it did when I saw the poster in the village. I am electric, ablaze.
Lightning flares.
I feel its heat through my body, jolting me back to common sense. What have I done? I’ve just shown the Ereni I’m here. I’ve just proven, before the queen’s own guards, that those charges of witchcraft are true.
A hand grasps my shoulder—Sophy. I’m almost grateful to see her.
Until I realize her face is white, and the hand on my shoulder cold and clammy. “You need to come inside. Now.”
—
A HUSH LIES over the house, despite the storm booming outside. Sophy’s hand tightens on my wrist. From the rooms behind the grand staircase, a voice echoes, a man’s, sonorous and rising.
My father’s.
Sophy releases a breath, and I realize I’m holding mine, too.
“Come on.” She tugs me toward the staircase, but I dig my heels in.
“We’ve got to smuggle you out of here,” Sophy says fiercely. “We can’t let them take you.”
Smuggle me out?
There’s a flurry at the top of the stairs and the housekeeper comes running down, breathless in her flounced cap, the keys on her belt jangling. She slows, seeing us, and whispers loudly, “Lady El! Come up at once. We’ll get you and the prince out of danger.”
So they’re getting Finn out of here, too.
I almost let Sophy drag me up the stairs. I almost let them take me to sanctuary elsewhere. It would be almost a relief to go into hiding—from my father if no one else. I don’t need to meet him; I don’t want him to look me in the eyes and say it’s me he’s been waiting for.
The door bursts open behind us: one of the stableboys. “Domnall’s almost dead. He needs a doctor.”
But I am so tired of running away.
Sophy’s grip had loosened at the boy’s words, and I wrench my wrist free. Before she can stop me, I’m marching beneath the high oculus to the receiving room beyond. It is a white-and-gold salon, delicate and regal. My father stands at the center, seeming to occupy the whole room.
But another man challenges him for that position. A man in gold-and-blue livery, a bowlegged man who carries a cane, whose hoarse voice cuts beneath my father’s.
“Your beliefs do not amount to evidence, Your Grace, and the evidence is against your daughter.”
I go cold. I should turn back. I should run.
It’s the Butcher.
“And what makes you think my daughter is here?” Like last night, my father hasn’t even seen me yet. I might as well be a shadow in the doorway. “This would be too obvious a place to run, for a regicide cunning enough to poison the king with a mushroom.”
The way he says it makes it obvious he thinks it’s funny. And maybe it is, if you don’t value your life.
“Lady Elanna is here,” the Butcher says. “Where else can she go? No one else will welcome her now the world knows her as a witch and a regicide.”
“She did not kill the king.”
My father speaks in a matter-of-fact voice, firm and certain. I catch my breath, waiting for him to say what I know he must. What he will, because he has no shame. He considers it another strike for Caeris. The king’s death, the confusion, the blame, the prince from across the sea. His daughter, a sorceress.
I wait for my father to name himself the murderer, to proudly own the blame.
But he doesn’t.
“I am afraid that decision must be left to a judge and jury,” says the Butcher, “although running away does rather diminish her chances of getting off. She will be well treated until her execution, I assure you. I dislike cruelty.”
This is so absurd—and so patently untrue—that it shakes me from my shock. Antoine used to boast that the Butcher has never showed a scrap of humanity. I take a step forward.
“Perhaps we might come to an agreement,” the Butcher adds. “Lady Elanna has helped us before.”
I freeze. I think my father does, too, just for a moment, though his face remains a stern, polite mask. But I see how his whole body goes still.
“Oh, yes.” The Butcher is enjoying this, damn him. He links his hands behind his back. “What put a stop to your last attempted insurrection? Who told us the Pretender Euan Dromahair was about to land on Caerisian soil? It was a child who gave away your revolution, Lord Ruadan.” He pauses. “One should never entrust children with great power.”
To my father’s credit, his voice remains level. Close to calm. “I never plotted against the king. I was exonerated.”
“Indeed, you are too clever to let any direct evidence condemn you. But willing enough to let us keep the daughter who betrayed your cause.”
My father’s lips tighten. He says nothing.
It’s true, then. He’s known all along, all these years. That is why he did nothing. That is why they never came to rescue me, why he won’t even look at me now that I am here.
What am I even doing in this place?
I seem to be outside my body, at once present and separate. I watch myself move forward. I observe as I open my mouth.
“Then, Lord Gilbert, I give myself up.”
—
THE BUTCHER SWINGS around and I fall into my body, my heart flaring white. It pounds in my throat, but my hands clench each other, cold.
My father sees me now.
Everyone sees me now: my mother, Hugh, the others gathered behind them.
I clench my hands in my skirt. I force myself to meet the Butcher’s eyes.
He gives a courtier’s smile. “Lady Elanna.” A nod at my face. “That’s going to turn purple.”
I had forgotten that one of the guardsmen struck me. I bare my teeth in a smile. “You ought to train your guardsmen better, then, sir. They’re brawling with my father’s stableboys.”
The Butcher clucks his tongue, but at the same time he’s reaching into his pockets. One hand emerges holding a pistol. He cocks it at my face.
The other object he holds is far more dangerous: a small, clear quartz stone.
I swallow hard. Already I can hear the small stone humming—a high-pitched whine, just beneath the level of my hearing. Witch stones, they’re called. The witch hunters used them during the witch hunts, to track down
witches and drive them mad. I prayed I’d never see one in person.
The world knows I’m a witch, now. I’ve given the game up myself.
Stretching out his arm, the Butcher walks toward me, the pistol pointed at my head and the witch stone held against his chest. It is just like what happened when I was a little girl. Just like every terror I’ve had since, imagining it would happen again.
I close my eyes.
Boot heels ring on the parquet floor, and a warmth moves in front of me. I look up at my father’s back.
He’s standing between me and the Butcher.
Between me and the pistol.
Between me and the witch stone.
“You will have to kill me first, if you want to take her from here,” he says.
I think I’m going to collapse.
“Lord Ruadan.” The Butcher explodes a sigh. “You are obstructing the queen’s justice. I could very well have you arrested, too—”
My father swings around to face me. We are a breath apart. I want to shrink back.
“Elanna,” he says, “did you murder the king?”
The word sticks in my throat. I force it out. “No.”
“Do you know who did?”
“No.”
He turns back to the Butcher, snapping his fingers. “There you have it. She didn’t do it. She doesn’t know who did. You will leave her here and return to the queen, saying you received her testimony and deemed her innocent.”
The Butcher raises his brows. “Will I?”
“Oh, yes,” says my father, “or Elanna will see to it that you don’t return to Laon at all.”
My heart leaps. He means my magic. I knew it. Already, he’s using it—and me.
The Butcher’s mouth twitches down. They stare at each other for a long minute, then the Butcher lowers his pistol. He thrusts the witch stone back into a pocket.
He walks past us toward the door. But at the threshold, he pauses and looks back.
“You realize how I must treat you now, Lord Ruadan,” he says. “There are many ways to betray the crown.”
“Then,” my father says, “I am a traitor.”