by C. L. Polk
“As Chancellor, you are my chief inquisitor into the matter you have brought before me concerning the Laneeri delegation and their plot to bring down Aeland from within. You must keep the details of this investigation secret. Do you understand?”
Oh. I blinked and groped for words. “I do, but there’s a problem, ma’am.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t speak Laneeri.”
That didn’t stop her for one moment. “Your brother served in Laneer, did he not?”
The blood drained from my face, leaving behind a chill. “He did, ma’am.”
“Did he learn to speak their tongue?”
Oh, no. No, no. “He did, ma’am.”
“Use him.”
I couldn’t do that. “Ma’am—”
She gave me a look that stopped my tongue. “Is there a problem, Dame Grace?”
I didn’t even have time to appreciate her not calling me “girl.” “Your Majesty, Miles was a prisoner of the Palace of Inquiry for months before the Johnston Rescue.” A rescue our father had engineered, because he’d known perfectly well where his son was. And when Father had been ready, he’d moved all the pieces in position, allowing me to find Miles again, ignorant of the truth. Miles had earned freedom and rest. I couldn’t drag him into this.
“Then here is his chance to bring justice to his captors,” the Queen said. “Include him in your plans.”
“My brother suffered grave injuries at Clarity House,” I said. “He’s still weak. He tires easily. He needs to recover.”
“Grant him every possible accommodation,” the Queen said. “But I don’t want the truth of this to come out until I am ready to present it. Do you understand me?”
Once Queen Constantina made up her mind, she was impossible to budge. Beside her, Prince Severin caught my eye, and gave the tiniest nod. He believed it was the best idea, then.
I’d have to ask my brother to walk back into that nightmare, by royal order.
THREE
To Serve Aeland
No. I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it. There were hundreds of people in the palace. I could find one who could translate and stay quiet about our assignment.
I headed toward Government House, where the office of the Chancellor—my office—waited for guidance and instruction. I would set someone to researching suitable candidates immediately. It would probably take all week. Janet, Father’s—my—secretary, could prepare a press statement, and we had to build the beginnings of a top-level plan to handle everything that was about to come flying at the office. That schedule would probably have me home in time for a late supper. I already wanted to kick off my boots and steal a nap somewhere, but I had to get notice to what was left of the Circle—no. That could wait until morning.
“Grace?”
I halted in my tracks and turned to bow. “Severin.”
The Prince moved to my side, hardly noticing the people who halted in their progress in the corridors to bow their heads until he had passed. “Grand Duchess Aife wants to see you.”
“Now?”
He smiled and offered his arm. “It would go better for me if I brought you to her, so she could see that you are well. It shouldn’t take long.”
“I will be happy to meet Her Highness, but I can’t stay.” I took hold of his elbow and fell into step beside him. “I have to get to work.”
“This is work,” Severin said. “The Grand Duchess won’t go a minute in session without bringing up your incarceration.”
Was it Aife’s advocacy that had freed me from Kingsgrave? It could have been. I would go and speak to her, but I had too many things to do. “Then I will put her at ease. Where are we going?”
Severin guided me along a hallway lined with masterwork paintings. I barely gave them a glance. “We gave the Amaranthines the ambassador’s wing.”
I had passed it many times on the way to Government House, the doors always locked, the corridor behind it silent. “I’ve never seen it.”
“I used to explore it as a child,” Severin said. “I used to pretend a delegation had come, and all the dust covers would come off all the furniture and the place would be full.”
Aeland had closed its borders so long ago the furniture and decorations in the diplomatic wing were ancient by fashion’s standards—heavy, dark wood, no spring-padded seats, all of it carved into busy, gaudy excess. I glanced at pedestal tables holding urns filled with hothouse blooms—carefully grown in one of the palace’s smaller, shyer sisters to the Kingston Royal Gardens, crowded year-round by the public—
A heavy weight pressed on my shoulders. The Gardens depended on aether to heat the glasshouses and their faraway, exotic specimens. The innocent plants of the public gardens couldn’t have survived, or the jewel-colored birds or the butterflies of unreal shape and hue that depended on that splendid glass cage to live.
I had destroyed so much. I had so much I had to mend and make right. How could I undo everything I had done, and what the First Ring had done? The task spread out before me, so vast that I shrank before it.
Severin glanced at me. “All right?”
“Just a passing melancholy,” I said. “It’s gone now.”
Severin nodded. “We’re here.”
Two dark-skinned Amaranthines, armed and armored, stood sentry by a pair of heavy, black lacquered doors, carved all over with birds in flight.
“Crown Prince Severin Mountrose and Chancellor Dame Grace Hensley to see Her Highness,” Severin said, and the guards opened the way to us.
We walked into a room of glass, faceted like a jewel between panes of black ironwork. A butterfly as bright as a flower bumbled toward us, its tiny wings an azure and emerald blur as it wound its way back to where others frolicked under a glass dome. Music thrilled its way over my skin—a melody that made me think of the sparkling reflections of sunlight on a shallow brook.
Aife sat on a guitarist’s perch. Her skirts draped over the floor as she played the music that filled the room. Amaranthines gathered in clumps, working on craft or art—I spied spinners, weavers, and a man who tatted lace so quickly his shuttle blurred. One woman draped in nothing but a length of cloth and black hair like a river stood statue still for another woman painting her likeness, and I shivered in sympathy before sending out tendrils of power to warm the air.
A few of the guardians glanced my way and smiled their thanks. I smiled back and waited for Aife to notice our arrival.
She stopped playing when she caught sight of us, and the troop of butterflies vanished in the silence. She set the ebony guitar on a stand and moved to greet us, catching me in a hug I didn’t have to bend to return. Her hair smelled of luckgrass and violets, her tight golden curls brushing light fingers over my cheek.
“You are well,” Aife said. “My fears can rest.”
I smiled. “I could use a change of clothes and a decent night’s sleep. But yes. I have been freed and assigned the post of Chancellor. Unfortunately, my duties begin now, so I have to run—”
She took my hand and squeezed it. “Nonsense. When did you last eat? The palace staff will be here soon. Stay and take a meal with us.”
I had planned on ringing for a tray while I strategized, but refusing to eat with an Amaranthine was a sign that you distrusted them. “I will—if there’s a spare lap desk and some material for correspondence.”
“You can borrow Ysonde’s,” Aife said, and led me to the Grand Duchess’s black-clad secretary, who stood by a perch near the glasshouse’s doors while hand-feeding his beloved, raven-black doves. He was the tallest Amaranthine in the party, his long, braided hair and dark-skinned features so arresting that I had to remind myself not to stare. He nodded at me in greeting, offering a dove to Aife.
She stretched out her hand, and the dove hopped to her finger. “What news from our friends?”
“The temples are full,” Ysonde replied, pushing a silver-beaded braid behind one elaborately ornamented ear. “People attempted to gather in the p
arade square this morning, but a squad of Queensguards forced them out. There are people lining up for hours to get inside shops that sell food, people begging in the street for coins.”
I listened to this recital with a hollow pang in my stomach. Severin cleared his throat. “Without aether, the people are disrupted. Factories are at a standstill, and there’s no work. They’re worried about putting food on the table, about being able to keep their homes—it’s an enormous problem.”
“Grace.” Miles rolled to a stop beside me, tucked into a rush-backed wooden wheelchair with a colorful tapestry blanket draped over his lap. “Excuse us, please,” Miles said, and Aife nodded her permission for me to go.
Tristan beckoned to me, and I followed them to an unheated corner of the room where the glasshouse met the palace’s stone walls. We settled next to the view of an ash tree. It stretched out snow-covered limbs dripping with flame-red berries.
Miles still looked too thin, but he wasn’t in Death’s arms any more. I smiled through the warm rush suffusing my limbs. “Should you be out of bed?”
Miles rolled his eyes. Around his head, a crown of witchmarks glowed to my Sight, filled with power feeding the intricate spell knitted over and inside his body. When Cormac had first laid the magic on him, it had done the work of breathing, of making his heart beat steady and true. Now the threads of magic were fewer, softer in intensity. “I should be moving more. I’m eating like three horses, I’m putting on weight, I’m getting better—”
“And healers are the worst patients,” I said, echoing what the Amaranthine’s healer had said in response to Miles’s impatience with rest and recovery. “You have to give it time.”
Tristan looked up, alerted by movement coming our way, and Prince Severin stopped beside us. “Ahoy, Sir Christopher. ‘Miles,’ I’m sorry. Your sister told me you preferred ‘Miles,’” Severin said. “My thanks for your service.”
Miles took the Prince’s offered hand. “I gave what I could, Your Highness.”
“And for your future service,” Severin said. “Grace hasn’t had a chance to talk to you about that yet, of course. Still, I wished to express my gratitude.”
Miles’s smile had a polite, automatic curve. “I am honored, sir.”
I wasn’t sure if I could keep my dismay out of my voice. “I still have decisions to make about my plan.”
“Miles can help you make them,” Severin said. “He’s as important to this task as you are.”
He patted Miles’s shoulder and walked off, pausing long enough to snatch a few pastry puffs from a tray before leaving the gathering. I would have thrown something at his head if it wasn’t treason. I laid a hand over my quivering stomach and met Miles’s eye.
“Grace,” my brother said, almost too quietly to hear, “what was the Prince talking about?”
* * *
We left the music and phantom butterflies behind. My stomach growled as Tristan wheeled Miles up the hall to a smaller black lacquered door, this one carved in concentric rings. Miles leaned forward in his chair to twist open the knob, and Tristan pushed him into a chamber decorated in deep blue, ivory, and gilt. A fire slumbered in the grate, and Tristan left Miles’s side to wake it with another seasoned log.
I perched on one end of a settee while Tristan draped himself in a chair next to Miles, one leg hanging over the armrest. “What’s going on?”
I pressed my lips together and watched the fire. “Severin presumed too much. I wasn’t going to say anything. I’m so sorry, Miles. It’s nothing you need to concern yourself about.”
“Best to just say it outright,” Miles said. “What service am I supposed to be performing for my country?”
No help for it. I petted the velvet nap of the settee’s upholstered seats and tried to think of the right words. “I told the Queen about our hypothesis concerning the possessed veterans. She wants proof, and she wants me to get it. Only—”
“Only you don’t speak Laneeri, and I do,” Miles said.
“Impossible. No,” Tristan said, sitting up properly. The heel of his boot thumped on the antique Falondari carpet. “It’s out of the question.”
“I agree,” I said.
“He talks in his sleep,” Tristan went on. “You know perfectly well that he dreams about that place.”
I didn’t know Laneeri, but I had a good guess at what Miles whimpered from the depths of a nightmare. I probably knew the words for “no,” “stop,” and “please.”
“That’s why I wasn’t going to say anything. Miles. You don’t have to do it. I wasn’t going to ask you. I wasn’t going to let you near it. I wasn’t even going to tell you.”
Miles wrapped his arms around his middle, staring at something none of us could see. The gently swaying gaslights in the chandelier above lit the pallor of his skin, his cheeks still too hollow, his shoulders too sharp, too bony. I clenched my hands, balling them up to keep from trying to touch him, trying to comfort him. He could be startled by touch.
“Miles,” Tristan said. “You’re in Mountrose Palace. You’re in Aeland. Not there. Here. I’m here.”
“I know,” Miles said. “I know I’m here. I know you’re here.”
“Tell me five things you see,” Tristan said.
I bit my lip and kept silent while Tristan slowly, gently pushed Miles away from the horrors that would haunt him for the rest of his life. I swallowed the lump in my throat as Miles named the things he could hear and smell and feel. He stretched out his hand to Tristan, and Tristan cradled it like priceless glass, tracing a spiral in the middle of Miles’s palm.
The color returned to Miles’s face as he raised his hand and cupped Tristan’s jaw.
“I’m here.”
“And you’re not going anywhere.”
“That’s right.” Miles let his hand drop to Tristan’s knee, and turned his attention back to me. “What do you plan to do?”
“I was going to pull personnel records and interview candidates—”
“You need to isolate them,” Miles said. “For the interviews. No contact with each other, no way to communicate. Each one needs to be alone. If you keep them together in the initial stages they’ll draw strength from each other, solidarity and resolve—”
“No. Miles. This is not on your plate,” I said. “You don’t have to have anything to do with this.”
“I know. And I understand that you wanted to protect me. But I’m the best tool you have.”
“Miles, no,” Tristan said.
Miles ticked off the points on upraised fingers. “I speak Laneeri. I know how to interview subjects who are trying to hide things from me. I know what tactics you can use to break their silence without stepping over into torture. You won’t find anyone else who can do all that.”
He was right. We all knew it. But hadn’t he sacrificed enough? “They hurt you. They kidnapped you and locked you away and—”
“Used the foulest magic to attack us,” Miles said. “And I want to know why. I deserve to know why. You’re stuck with me, little sister. I’ll do it.”
* * *
Once I made it to the Office of the Royal Chancellor, all three of my secretaries hopped to their feet and chorused “Good morning, Dame Grace” before the door clicked shut behind me. Janet picked up a clipboard with a neatly typed document.
“Good morning.” I took the clipboard and scanned it. Bless Janet. How could I do this job without her? “Thank you, all of you, for continuing to keep operations here flowing in my absence. What do I need to know first?”
“Member Albert Jessup has called an emergency session of the House on the twentieth of Frostmonth to discuss rationing,” Janet said. “Do you have anything you wish to add to the agenda?”
“Not at the moment.” I crossed the reception room and opened the door to my office, a golden oak-paneled room lined with bookshelves on every space that wasn’t a window. The feeders mounted outside the windows were visited by a flock of messenger doves, the feral descendants of the birds
used in the days before aether and telephones made their service obsolete. “Is there anything to eat? I’ve a hole in my stomach.”
“Right away, Chancellor. I just updated that report an hour ago.” She nodded at the clipboard in my hand. “The relevant source documents are in your tray.”
“Thank you.” I smiled at her and skimmed the report when she left. Some of it I knew—the arrest of the entire Cabinet, the aether outage shutting down factories, the arrival of the Amaranthines. But there was a report on citizen unrest, from protests and demonstrations to increased incidents of vandalism and heightened crime—culminating in a quickly suppressed riot. I read a truly alarming report about the estimated loss of crops due to the storm on the eighth of Frostmonth.
I had been reviewing the progress of the trial of Sir Percy Stanley when Janet brought me tea and enough lunch to feed three women. I ate it all while she brought me up to speed on the chaos that had run wild in the days while I dawdled in Bywell. We made lists, prioritized tasks on a wheeled black slate chalkboard, and tapped two dozen minor scribes to copy the messages I needed sent by post, restored by royal order to deliver five times a day. The sun cast long shadows across the small square in front of Government House when I finally left my office, weary beyond measure.
It had been a productive day. Janet had been a brick, handling my absence with her usual omniscient efficiency, picking up from when I had only been my father’s proxy. She had me up to speed in an afternoon. There were reports to read and people to meet, but not until tomorrow. Not until I had a proper meal and a hot bath and as many minutes sleeping in my bed as I could manage before it all began again in the morning. My sled waited for me at the foot of the stairs, bright and bold, orange as a pumpkin even in the blue-tinted shade that fell on it from the peaked rooftops of Government House.
A dark figure popped out from behind a pillar. I caught the full force of a flashbulb right in the eyes. I put up my hand, blocking another photographic assault, and a familiar face emerged, discolored by the green spots in my vision.