When the Villian Comes Home

by Gabrielle Harbowy

  She followed the narrow hallway, extinguishing the lantern and emerging through the hinged panel into her own bedroom—which had once been the library, before Lord Blackburn had ordered the burning of the books. Bare shelves lined the walls, their edges splintered. She paused a moment to catch her breath and tug her sleeves down over her raw elbows. Though it was pointless, she straightened her hair in the looking glass she had propped in an empty shelf and made sure there were no smudges on her face. She left via the proper door and took the main stairs up the tower and into the southern dome, forcing the slowness of a casual wander to her steps as she passed a pair of guards.

  Starkeep wasn’t quite a castle or a keep, for all its imposing mountaintop grandeur and supposedly defensible stone. It wasn’t just an observatory either, despite having two tall sky-watching domes. Starkeep wasn’t even where stars were kept—and learning that had been perhaps the greatest disappointment of eight-year-old Riss’s life.

  Then the invasion from the Westlands had come, claiming the keep in some centuries-old border dispute. Ellis Blackburn, still a boy-prince then, had been given Starkeep by his father to let him practice ruling and to keep him out of the way. He was as displeased to be shuffled off to Riss’s remote home as she was to have him in it, and he expressed that displeasure by taking it out on those around him.

  Thus, Riss had learned what disappointment truly was. In the ten years since, Lord Blackburn had not let her forget.

  The astromancers who had raised Riss, who had used their grand sky-domes to map the heavens and study the way of the stars, had all displeased their spoiled young master sooner or later, and had either fled for the sanctuary of the Eastland foothills or had been dispatched to the heavens, themselves.

  It was only Riss who could not leave. It was tradition for Eastland royalty to receive their instruction at Starkeep, and she was meant to be its steward when she was of age—a parallel which Blackburn’s father must have knowingly mocked. Instead, her freedom had been traded for security—the king must also have known that the Eastlands would not seek to take back the keep while their only heir’s life was poised under the Blackburn thumb. But within the confines of the walls, she could roam freely.

  5

  Using the contact crystal was like trying to angle a bit of mirrorglass so that someone across the room could see the reflection of their own left eye in it, without the benefit of being able to ask them which way they needed you to tilt it. It took considerable time and even more patience, and Riss was running dangerously low on both.

  Finally, the glow of filtered starlight passed through the condenser lens at just the right angle and caught in the shallow cup of carved quartz, making it resonate subtly in her fingertips. Carefully, without spilling it, she turned the lens aside, brought the vessel to her lips and blew across it. Fine quartz powder misted up into a shimmering cloud and resolved into the ghost of a shape. Scrying was neater (if wetter), but the benefits of the contact crystal’s magic were many. One of them was sound.

  “Where are you?” Riss and the figure asked each other at the same time. The words always carried the buzz of bees at first, before the dust was thick enough to transmit the vibration properly. There was an awkward silence as each waited for the other to answer.

  “The observatory,” Riss said into the pause.

  “My father’s observatory,” her apparition of a visitor answered sharply.

  The view from the sky-domes was so spectacular that Lord Blackburn had made the northern one his bedchamber. They had been built in such a way, with complex mixings of dusts and light, that they were shielded from outside view completely; an astromancer who wanted complete dark for sky-gazing in one tower would not be hampered by the light needed by an astromancer writing up his notes in the other. And since Lady Blackburn had a dome all to herself, she had no interest in visiting its twin. It was a place where Riss could be almost assured of privacy.

  “The observatory,” Riss said again. “Don’t go down that bitter road now, Mother. We haven’t time.” Each of her breaths across the cup wafted more of the fine powder, gradually reinforcing the ephemeral shape into something vaguely familiar-looking, filling out the face and hairline, depicting what she knew to be dark in ghostly pale. “I saw the fire.”

  It strengthened the voice, as well. “I, too. What does she know?” the shape asked.

  “Only that they’ve failed and are retreating. I couldn’t keep that much from her. They’ll be slower to return than if he’d succeeded and flown home on dragonback,” Riss answered. The spectral head tilted slightly, and Riss could feel the weight of her mother’s pointed gaze. She scuffed a foot. “And...maybe I wanted her to have a taste of concern.” She didn’t add that she’d been intimidated into it, or pressured, or that the base of her scalp still ached, or that she could have been run through. It had been ten years since they’d seen each other in the flesh, and her mother worried enough about her as it was.

  “You’ve done well. You know what knowledge you must keep from her. I’ll ride out with the troops at first light. You’ll see me in two days.” The queen’s ghostly form raised a hand and passed one fingertip over the steep slope of Riss’s upturned nose.

  Riss made as if to rub her nose clean—not such an act, with the powder the spectre’s movements left behind on her burnished brown skin. “I’ll watch your progress as I can, but she’s in a mood now. I don’t know how much of a chance I’ll have.”

  There was another awkward silence, this one born of two people trying not to speak the same words. Without knowing what tomorrow would bring, it always felt so final to cut off contact, never being quite sure if you’d ever have a chance again.

  “Get some sleep, Larissa,” Riss’s mother said. “It must be done.” Perhaps a feeble way to say I understand and I miss and I wish, but one that worked and was simpler than all those things.

  “It must be done,” Riss answered. It had become something of a mantra.

  Her mother slipped away first, the cloud of dispersed dust falling without her energy and mass to support it. Riss caught it mostly in the cup, but knew she’d have some careful and reverent sweeping to do before she got any of that promised sleep. Even then, with so much weighing on her mind, sleep would not come soon.

  5

  Two guards flanked the entrance at the top of the winding stairs. This was new, and it made Riss’s stomach flop over. She straightened her shoulders and waited for one of the guardsmen to knock and open the door, then stood uncertainly just inside the doorway of Lady Blackburn’s sky-dome. Riss was surprised that the lady had waited so long to summon her. She hoped it wasn’t a bad sign.

  Lord and lady sometimes took their meals at the small wrought iron table in the chamber, and that was where Arabella Blackburn was seated now, gazing out at the night with a dragon-clawed silver goblet held tightly in her hand.

  “My lady?” Riss ventured quietly.

  Silence held for long moments. Lady Blackburn took a long swallow and refilled her goblet from the pitcher Riss had heard them preparing in the kitchens. More graceful movements of those delicate, deadly hands.

  “I remember the first time I saw you,” Lady Blackburn said quietly. “It was in the great hall, at my betrothal feast. Do you remember? He hung that great purple dragon head, and had a cloak made for me of its scales. He sat you at the end of the main table. At the far end, with empty place-settings all around you. He wanted you to feel exiled, but to me you looked like a treasured little porcelain trinket on a shelf, set apart to be admired. An exotic princess, captured under glass. How old were you?”

  Riss’s throat worked on the second try. This was the most that either Blackburn had ever said to her at once, to her memory. “Fifteen, my lady.” She remembered that feast. She had been so excited to dine in the grand hall again, as she had in her youth. She remembered the way her stomach sank when she was shown to her place. Sh
e remembered sitting quietly with an empty cup and plate, with four days’ hunger gnawing her middle apart while the Westlanders feasted and danced and the scents of meat surrounded her, and the severed dragon head watched her with its cold black eyes, its parted jaws laughing at her discomfort, as its lord did.

  “And you’d been how old when Lord Blackburn took the keep?”

  Riss wasn’t sure where this was going. “Eight, my lady.”

  The mistress of the keep lost herself in thought again, drinking her wine. Pouring. Drinking. The bread and cheese were still untouched on the platter. Her lips were stained red, like Lord Blackburn had been in the vision. Riss tasted blood. Not Lord Blackburn’s, she realized, but from the inside of her own cheek.

  “He was twelve when the king gave him this place. And you were a part of it, where I had not been.” She set the goblet down. “Speak freely.”

  Riss looked down at her awkward hands with their short, chipped nails. “I...I am at a loss for words, my lady. I would not presume to know my lord better than you. For all that we have both been here, we do not share a childhood in common.”

  She had explored the secret passages with Arin, lovely Arin, who had been the obvious object of Riss’s free time and thus the boy-lord’s first kill. The lady still watched her silently, so she continued. “I apologize that it seemed so, to you. There was fighting, lady. Horrible fighting, and then he came, and I was moved to the shadows. And I, in great thanks for his generosity and my freedom within the keep, make pains to honor my lord and remain unseen, save when he summons me. Then I serve fully, in loyalty to him, and you, and the rule of the Westlands over Starkeep by ancient right.”

  Had that been respectful enough? Had she spread it on too thick? He took my home from me, she wanted to say. He murdered my teachers, my only friends, just to see whose loss would make me cry most. He took away everything good and noble about this place, and locked me in its hollow shell; mourning behind its empty eyes, like the dragon’s, that no longer explore the sky. But she knew that such insolence had its price, and that she only need hold out a little longer.

  Lady Blackburn turned inward, filled the goblet with more wine. It flowed black in the harsh light. “A whole flock, you said. How many killed?”

  “Of us, lady?” Carefully us, not you. “Half, it seemed. I saw the wounded tending to the dead. I did not see my lord, but if he was giving orders, he would have been out among the most capable.”

  Lady Blackburn seemed to accept that, nodding slowly to herself. Riss felt the moist squish of sweat between her shoulder blades and hoped it would not also drip down her front and betray her.

  If Lady Blackburn knew her lord husband were dead, she would send word to his father and flanks of reinforcements would arrive from the Westlands. But it was vital that Starkeep be unprepared when Blackburn’s body arrived—on the shoulders of the Eastlanders who had slowly replaced half his personal guard, and at the head of her mother’s column of Eastland soldiers, reinforcements who would meet them at the mountain waypoint. Arabella could not know.

  Further, if she knew that those Eastlanders had replaced half his personal guard—the surviving half, not coincidentally—she might suspect the veracity of the information that had led him to take his full personal guard to go and trap a lone dragon in the first place.

  But for now, it seemed, she suspected nothing. “He insisted on keeping you, you know. He said a castle was no place for a child like you. He wanted to spare you the indignities of being in line for the crown, you see, because it is what he knows. What he has always been. He opened his home to you, even though he risked your anger—it would have been yours by now, you know, if we’d not come along.”

  Riss could not find the appropriate, nonviolent words to express that yes, indeed, there was never a moment when she did not think about that particular bit of knowledge. How generous of the young lord with the hard eyes to spare her from the horrible burdens of family, and freedom, and royalty, and stewardship of a great academy, and the secrets of the stars. She remained quiet and dipped her head to keep from glaring. Let the lady think it a move of submission; let her think her attempt at manipulation subtle. If, with that much wine, she was still thinking at all.

  “I can scry in the morning,” Riss offered, “try to catch a glance of him.” She knew he would be shrouded and indistinguishable in the supply cart, but Arabella did not need to know what Riss knew. “I may be able to give you names of those who still stand.”

  “Names matter not,” Lady Blackburn muttered, flicking her fingers dismissively. Those fingers that always looked like they were meant to launch fairies into a great aerial dance with the little gesture, not splatter cold porridge.

  Riss held in a sigh, letting it leak slowly enough to be silent. Not much longer.

  Lady Blackburn had trailed off again, frowning into the empty pitcher and empty goblet. “What is their position, Riss?”

  Riss blinked. She couldn’t just scry out of nothing, with no—

  “Larissa.”

  She looked up, into cool gray eyes lined with the red of uncertainty. “What was the state of them, when you last saw?” she clarified. After a moment, quiet as a mumble, she added, “Please.” Or perhaps it was some chirrup of a little night-mouse, and not her at all.

  Riss took a breath. Flames warmed her fingertips. “It was slaughter. The den was settling down to mate. It’s the time when it’s most dangerous to disturb. My lord loosed a dragonsbane arrow at the only one they could see, and it went through his wing and into the rib of his beloved, whom he was sheltering.” She told the story without passion. She had not been there. “It injured the male where it passed through, and its poison killed the female. The male roared, I assume, from the way he lifted his head and tilted his wings forward as if to guide the sound. And then more poured out from that same mountain and ones nearby we’d not even checked for Dragonsign. The front ranks were crisped. Nothing left but bone flakes and ash. The rest of the dead have...that is, there are...remains.”

  Riss’s eyes focused on the present once more. “I cannot see the future. I know only that he is with them, in some condition, hidden away because it is in their best interest to hide him; perhaps merely because he is the leader.” A calm, controlled lie. He is dead, my lady. He rots. And you will rot with him soon.

  Lady Blackburn turned in her seat and cradled Riss’s cheek with her palm. It was the first time in an age that someone who was not her nursemaid had done so, and Nurse had been dead these three years. It brought stinging tears unbidden to fill Riss’s eyes. She dared herself not to blink.

  This tenderness wasn’t the prelude to a thrashing, which made it even more confusing still; the lady actually seemed to mean it, grateful for the information even though she still worried about the bits Riss left unsaid.

  Riss lowered her eyes with something that would look like humility. This wasn’t something the lady should thank her for. “Two days, my lady. Tomorrow we’ll set out the linens, prepare the ritual baths. I’ll help you clear the tombs. I’ll help you organize the families so that when the bodies arrive you can focus only on your lord’s health, and all the rest of that busy-hands work will be done.”

  “You speak of him in the present,” the lady said hollowly, without the epiphany of afterthought, turning her gaze beyond the distant mountaintops once more.

  Riss’s stomach flopped over again; at least it was back in its true position now, if the flops had been of even intensity.

  In the present. Not as one flustered and caught off-guard might speak of someone whose death they’ve seen, if they’re caught nervous in a lie. Of course that had been her game. Why had Riss not seen it?

  Riss’s cheeks flushed hot; the lady could assume her blush was some sort of misguided humility. “Of course, my lady. Does he not still rule over these halls?” She made her eyes a bit too wide, too innocent, but that could also be
read as surprise.

  “He rules over fewer now. So many men lost. He will be in a right fury by the time he returns.” A sigh, a real unguarded sigh, left Lady Blackburn’s throat. “Thank the gods for leaving you with us, Riss. We need you in a crisis.”

  Arabella stood, curling into the curve of Riss’s arm like a child. Two princesses, relying on each other to not learn what they relied upon each other for. Wrapping an arm around the slender, paler Westlander, Larissa N’Eastlanden steered her toward the black iron bed with its curling, thorned vines. It was more manipulation. Riss knew it. And yet...

  “Do you remember...” Arabella murmured weakly. “He used to slide all the way down the staircase rails. He got in trouble for it, because he’d fall off at that sharp turn, but he tried and tried, because he’d seen you do it and hang on.”

  Already hollowed-out, Riss had nothing left with which to react to that. She was a sponge, long out of water and dried in the sun, all her hollow chambers having stiffened into uncomfortable, empty shapes. She shook her head.

  “He’ll be home soon. Lie down, my lady. I’ll begin drawing lists for the servants. Everything will be ready for you tomorrow.”

  There was no resistance, so Riss kissed Arabella’s forehead—why had she done that?—and left.

  5

  At dawn on the second day, trumpets sounded from beyond the gates. Riss, already dressed and expectant, nudged away the mouser that lounged across her feet and rushed to her window. There was the small company of personal guard, bearing their injuries boldly, with the solemn wrapped bodies in stained white cloths. Behind, Riss’s mother, having gained considerable age about her face and, apparently, a fondness for the color blue. The army glittered behind her in their armor, the reflection of stars on water. Her glory was captured in all of them.

  Riss took the twisting hidden passages and was among the crowd at the keep’s entrance before Lady Blackburn arrived at the wall.