The hunter crawled toward me, pressed his hips against my right leg, and leaned the rest of his weight into his straightened arms. Then he kissed me, smooth as the ruby libation I, and likely he, had drunk. The ground rushed to catch me as he pushed me downward. Our lips parted. I touched his neck and shoulder, blood and muscle. Alive.
He swept my hand from his shoulder and guided it downward. What had weighted against my hip pressed into my palm. My mind contemplated the contours, lingering, until he groaned. I realized what I’d heard in the unlocked room.
My lack of fear frightened me, unable to discern will from drive. The hunter knocked away his helmet, brought his lips to my neck, and clutched my breast. He was urgent but not rough. I sensed no cruelty in him, only the ordinary debauchery of a decent man.
As the hooks came loose from the back of my bodice and the row of buttons from his trousers, I kissed him in search of the threshold. The night was cool. The shock of heat from his fingertips on my shoulder made me gasp. He froze when I touched him, unclothed, his tongue mute. Then he moved again, his hand under my skirt, over my knee, to the gap in the drawers where my thighs were bare, higher still at the part of my legs.
I held him in a gripping rhythm.
“Let go,” he said.
I didn’t, but I paused while his touch swept against my unchaste skin until a current ripped into every eddy in my flesh.
Then, before our bodies decided what to do next, he lifted away from me to his feet.
“Put on your mask. You know the rules,” a man said. He was hidden outside the labyrinth entrance, but his arm held out the horned mask within the space.
I began to hook my bodice as the hunter fumbled with his buttons, then slipped the helmet back on his head. I hadn’t seen him clearly when it was off, so occupied had I been. If I were to see him again, I wouldn’t have recognized him. The illusion of who was behind the mask I could easily retain.
“Go back to the house,” the man said.
The hunter grabbed the quiver and bow. With a shadowed glance that seemed wistful, he disappeared.
“Are you hurt?” the man outside the labyrinth asked.
“No,” I said, walking into the open.
The man wore a dark coat and trousers and an unadorned mask across his eyes. His thinning hair fluttered in a gust of wind.
“Naughton! What are you doing here?”
“This isn’t my first spring ball,” he said. “Come along so that I may hail you a carriage.”
“You had no right to interfere,” I said, furious. The longing of the third sip had thickened within me and was slow to thin. I hadn’t had my fill.
“All guests are meant to stay masked.”
“What harm is there if not? You had no right at all.”
He looked down at the ground for a moment. When he raised his eyes again, there was a hint of remorse. “No, I didn’t.”
The admission was as unexpected as it was sincere. It left me speechless. I suspected he’d been watching me all night, and I didn’t know why. Nor did I ask. Part of me wanted to march back into the house to see what I was missing, but my mood was spoiled.
“I should at least bid good night to the host.”
“This isn’t that sort of party, Miss,” he said.
I followed him without a word. Naughton opened a carriage door. Before I climbed in, I reached to remove my mask.
He grabbed, then released my wrist. “Leave it on until you’re behind your own door.”
As the horses pulled me away, I looked through the rear window. The moon was high, the sky twinkling. Smoke drifted above the manor from the hungry fires.
The raw trace of the hunter was still on my lips.
May /36
Dear Secret,
Clutch your smelling salts. Prepare yourself for the great shock—Haaud and Giphia are at war. The kingdoms, once again, at each other’s throats! I was on my way to the former when a messenger intercepted my envoys with the news. Given the strained relationship between Ailliath and Haaud, one I hoped to understand better for myself, my advisers decided it best to postpone the visit. I attempted to convince them otherwise. No time for a social call, they said, although I’ve not once perceived this twelve-, now eleven-, kingdom journey as a holiday. They’ve been present for a majority of my meetings. None has given an indication I’ve committed a single calamitous gaff of diplomacy. If I’ve done well, they’ve made little mention of that either.
I might return home by next summer because of this itinerary change. Now I’m in Emmok visiting my sister. I’m an uncle again. Charming had a son three months ago, a hale little fellow named Iwen. Pretty’s daughters are now seven and five, but I didn’t first meet them as infants. What a creature, a baby. Watching eyes and grasping hands. Did you know they have a scent? I asked the nurse why. She had no explanation and seems suspicious of me because I often ask to hold him.
I couldn’t help but become pensive as he slept in my arms this morning. As I write this, Deket is surrounded by arrow, sword, and cannon, but the real siege is the threat of starvation. There are small ones like Iwen, and my nieces, behind that town wall. Innocents, everywhere, young and old. I’ve not turned a blind eye during my travels. The degrading poverty in Rothwyke’s southeast wards is in almost every town in our kingdom and the ones beyond. In some of the remote villages, I’ve seen people so wan it hardly seems possible they can rise from bed much less work a field. Then to a manor or palace I go, as if to a magical realm where all is gold and fat geese.
I remembered that morning I took you to the fields, and as we rode out, you told me of the orphan child you’d seen. I quoted my mother, “Fate has its favorites.” This thing fate, it’s so arbitrary, I thought again today, and then how cruel the complacency with which we regard it, stations low to high. As if we are powerless against it. Is war a product of fate? Or for that matter, love?
No one speaks of such things at court.
I didn’t intend to write such a serious missive, but you’re not here to talk with me. So then.
Well, there’s the option to abdicate should my constitution prove fatally flawed. Think now. Iwen could take the throne, or another future nephew, if I have no son to embarrass first. There are cousins on my father’s side as well. Where would a philosophical prince go for his exile? Would you come away to see me?
Your account of the dinner with the admiral, theologist, and actors entertained me. I’m very glad you went and found pleasure in the company. I’ve noticed your letters are less frequent. You’ve mentioned before you wish not to be redundant because one day is rarely different from the next, but I don’t mind. It’s the closest I get to hearing your voice.
Affectionately,
Nikolas
Coincidence is not a synchronization of random events so much as it is a magnet drawing the moments together. So, although I wanted to dismiss what happened when I stored Nikolas’s letter among the rest, a part of me knew I could not.
I opened my desk drawer, tilted the front, and was about to place his letter at the end of the stack when I heard an object roll forward.
I’d forgotten I had the cogwheel, but I remembered who gave it to me. The orphan child Nikolas mentioned—that was Harmyn, the strange little waif who wore mismatched clothes and yellow spectacles and who chirped and peeped as he walked. The one I thought had sung, unnoticed, at the performance three months prior.
The first time I met Harmyn, he gave me a flower. The second time, the cogwheel he’d found. The third, he told me the middle of Rothwyke was in the wrong place and led me straight to the grate in Old Wheel, over the tunnel that led to the woods.15
As I held the cogwheel, bronze with a missing tooth, I heard music as if from a music box, but the sound was too loud and too layered to have come from a neighbor’s machine. As I tried to discern the source, my joints started to ache. A cold sweat trickled from my pores as the rupture broke through.
My throbbing feet stood in my apartment, but th
en the room seemed to vanish. I listened to a twinkling melody; underneath it, the smooth turn of gears; above it, the voices of children singing along.
Suddenly, my chest heaved with the blunt force of grief. The image took form—huge wheels turning, the music coming from them. I refused to endure it, threw the cogwheel out of the window, and leapt onto my bed.
I grabbed the carved wooden stag, stilling my breath until all I could feel was the whisper of air at the top of my lungs. Almost a year had passed since I’d had a mental rupture or a dream like this—the inexplicable sounds and images that came without warning and with the visceral presence of memory.
JUNE /36
THAT JUNE, CHARLOTTE REPORTED “ESCALATED wooing” from a Mr. Frigget. He was ten years older, well established in his father’s textile company, and a widower with a two-year-old daughter. She conveyed a fondness for him, although she wasn’t ready to dismiss the attention of “the titillating—and titled—Lord Tyson-Banks.” Her blatant inquiry of my prospects was as surprising as it was laughable.
I had never confided in her, or anyone, my doubt I would ever marry. No beauty did I consider myself, or beguiling. I couldn’t fathom marrying for the convention of it, which I suppose most did out of necessity. There was little reason to fear I would end up like the Misses Acutt; between my own wages and eventually my inheritance, I would be secure.
Of course, I wanted to know the depths of love, and what I’d read in the better poetry, the occasional novel, and numerous myths and tales. What must it be like to feel cherished and to feel that way for another? I wondered.
Desire—that was no requirement for love. That had a will of its own, as I well knew, and although I might have regretted my actions later, I did wish my encounter with the hunter (oh, Michael—the primal lust) wasn’t consummated only in my imagination. The knowledge I’d acquired from the library’s erotic texts—useless, impotent!
But I could write of none of this. Not of my expectations, or of the stir awakened in me, not only carnal but also sensual, certainly not of the ball itself.
In truth, writing to my friends had been difficult for several months. Of course I told how I’d spent my days, of the books I’d borrowed, the dinners I’d attended with interesting guests, even what was displayed in some of the rooms. Still, there was much I hadn’t said to Charlotte or Muriel, or Nikolas, who was closest to me. My letters were suitable for the eyes of strangers, with appropriate conveyance of affection, absent intimacies of detail and feeling. I withheld because I was becoming someone I didn’t expect to be, uncertain she was someone they would care to know.
One indication—I removed myself from Erritas’s and Goram’s waiting lists. Either, or both, might have had a seat for me by the summer’s end, but what had once been so important to me seemed less compelling. If knowledge was my true quest, I pursued it without limit in Fewmany’s library. If escape was what I desired, I had done so without leaving Rothwyke, simply by choosing to live on my own.
Father accepted my decision without protest, which I found somewhat perplexing as he’d always expected me to attend high academy. He assured me the fund he set aside for my education would remain until I needed it and suggested I could apply my independent studies later, possibly skip a year or two ahead. When I told Fewmany, he was pleased to know I’d stay, but I sensed he wasn’t surprised. However, my friends and Leo, all informed by letter and who replied within weeks, were taken aback; Leo, also disappointed; Nikolas, concerned. How unlike you, each one conveyed in some similar phrase or another.
And it was, for the girl I had been.
For the young woman I thought I was becoming, that wasn’t so. She had fallen under a spell of beautiful things, delectable foods, astounding books, and fascinating people. How easily I could live that way, forever, she thought. As if the enchantment would last.
JULY /36
ON MY FIRST ANNIVERSARY AS the keeper of tales, I stood at one of the west windows. A flight of blue swallows twirled over the flat green land. I recalled I’d seen them on that day a year before. How much had changed within my own life, I thought, while the cycles outside remained the same.
Not long after Naughton served morning tea and placed an arrangement of lilacs and white roses on the cabinet, Fewmany rap-rap, rap-rapped and entered with Mutt at his heels. The dog ignored me to race up a spiral stair to the gallery.
Near my place at the table, Fewmany stood with his hands behind his back. “ ’Tis a year today that you have tended my athenaeum,” he said.
That he remembered seemed sentimental, and unexpected. “It is,” I said.
“You’ve earned a measure of my trust. I wish to bestow a boon,” he said. I heard the clink before I saw the keys. In his left hand, one made of brass. In his right, a ring of them, seven of all sizes.
“Choose,” he said.
“What do they open?”
“First decide, then I will tell you.”
I glanced up at him. My fingers hovered over his palms. That instant, before a second thought, I reached to take both. My lips stifled a laugh as he cried out in surprise.
His eyes narrowed with a hint of mirth.
“You didn’t say, ‘Choose one,’ ” I said.
“ ’Twas implied.”
“But not stated.”
“Wily you are today, Miss Riven.”
“What will they open?” I asked, the metal warming to my touch.
“The single one, the main doors to the house. The set, the door to the east wing and some hidden within.”
“Where is the door to the wing?”
“First-floor chamber to the parlor’s left, behind drapes that don’t cover a window.”
“To which I now have a key?”
“Yes. You must remember to lock what you open. Always. The keys are to remain here, stored in the cabinet. You may, of course, carry the key to the manor.”
“I am glad for the privilege,” I said.
Fewmany smoothed his hands past his lapels to the bulging coat pocket. “You’re welcome, although I’m stung by your trick. Mutt! Come!” he said.
The dog gave me an appraising look as he passed, as if he knew something I did not.
The following afternoon, I entered the east wing for the first time.
Behind floor-length drapes, a door led into a tomb-black hall, not into the glassed pavilion between the main house and wing. Inside the hall to my left, as expected, was a small table with a vesta and lamp, which I lit. With apprehension, I walked ahead with the key ring in my pocket and, as was my habit, turned the knob of every door on both sides of the corridor. None gave entry. The hall forced me to turn a corner, left, where there were more locked doors, then left again. I realized the hall was U-shaped. In the dark warm silence, I continued onward.
At last, a knob circled at my touch, but the thrill gave way to panic. What if someone on the staff had failed to lock the door? Surely they were bound by the same rules I was. To have someone meet trouble for this—including me, now that I had a ring—was a matter I wished to prevent. My hands trembled as I tried my keys, hoping one fit. The sixth turned the lock. Relieved, I entered the room.
As my light shone upon the jars, revealing their hideous contents, I winced but didn’t turn away. Closer I went with the lamp high to stare upon a two-headed piglet, a skinless arm twisted with vessels and muscle, a head with a monstrous brow, a perfect coiled snake, a tortured heart. Shelf after shelf were specimens, some as beautiful as the others were grotesque, all labeled with descriptive tags. I paused to stare at a fetus, the cord looped at his neck, thought of my two brothers, born blue before me, and shivered.
Aware I’d spent too much time away from my duties, I hurried off, locking the doors behind me, and returned to my table. I tried my best to concentrate, but my thoughts strayed to wonder what else was hidden behind those many doors.
“If you would, please, Miss,” Naughton said as he set down my afternoon cup of tea, “ensure the doors latch
when you leave the open chambers or lock the ones to which you have access.”
“I’m quite certain I do.”
“I only wish to impress a reminder.” He paused with the pot near his chest, which prompted me to look at him. “Ever so many locks here, and so few keys. We servants keep an extra one to our entrance hidden under the boot scraper. One never knows when one will be locked out.”
THE NIGHT OF THE TWELFTH of July, I joined Remarque and Fewmany for dinner, prepared to be entertained and hopeful Remarque would have no surprises.
After we ate, Naughton was dismissed, and we went to the library. Fewmany showed Remarque his new waywiser—an object I’d never seen before, but I knew what it was. Perhaps I’d noticed a drawing in a cartography book. How odd Fewmany left it there, when it seemed like an instrument he’d keep in his mechanism chamber.
As Remarque pushed the squeaky contraption around the library, Fewmany revealed what Remarque delivered. “Limited first edition of the newest translation of the kingdom’s chronicles—from the era of The Mapmaker’s War.”
I brushed my fingers across the front board, a good leather, tooled with a detailed eye.
“I confess,” Fewmany said, “ancient history rarely holds me in thrall. So often the language is stilted, spoiling the facts it means to convey, a putrid sauce over a fine meat. This edition is quite good, lively even—at least the chapters I perused.”
“Such as?” The spine made that wonderful cracking sound when I opened it.
“An example? The account of how the people selected Prince Wyl’s feat has a marked sardonic tone. Before that time, as you surely know, the people chose hunts or feats of strength, but this was the first quest to find the dragon and its treasure. The chronicler must have been of a rare minority mind, then, to insinuate the prince went to search for a figment.”
“Unless the translator’s interpretation of the text, rather than the text itself, reveals whose opinion it is.”
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