Briarheart

by Mercedes Lackey

  “It’s a good likeness,” she said, looking down at the statue. “But leave it at the door. We have work to do.”

  Her words sparked another bit of hope in me, and I followed her into the cottage, leaving the statue at the door so I wouldn’t forget it. Somehow, although he was as white as a bleached shift, the guard had managed not to faint at all the strangeness and Faeness. Apparently, no one had told him what he might encounter when he was given this assignment.

  The interior of the cottage hadn’t changed appreciably. The only difference was that now there was something like Wizard Gerrold’s workbench in the middle of it, albeit on a smaller scale. And in the middle of that workbench was a bit of gold jewelry in the shape of a wild briar rose that looked as if it had been woven and braided out of thin gold wires hardly bigger than a baby’s hair. When I looked more closely at it, I saw that the gold wires were braided with actual hair. Aurora’s hair?

  “I’ve done what I can with this,” Brianna said. “The mechanics of the spell are all in place. It will be your task to empower them and bring them to life. But I must warn you that it could be—probably will be—very dangerous for you if you actually have to trigger the spell. It will bring you to Aurora’s side wherever she is even if that means right into the middle of a gathering of Dark Fae or worse.”

  I thought about my great-great-great-great-grandmother, what she had faced, what she would say about this, and the expression on the carved face of that statue. “Tell me what to do,” I said—not steadily but with absolute certainty. “I don’t think I would be able to live with myself if something happened to Aurora and I didn’t at least try to save her.” Because I could think of one thing that would be worse than death, and that would be to live knowing that I could have gone to my baby sister’s rescue and hadn’t.

  It was the right thing to do, at least as far as the human magic inside me was concerned, because it all but poured out of me, filling that rose, until I found my sight dimming and I started to sway. Brianna snatched it out of my hands, breaking the connection, and I quickly caught myself on the workbench.

  “Give me your locket,” she demanded, and I gave it to her. The rose just fit inside, flattening the other two locks of hair behind it. She closed the locket and gave it back to me.

  “Anytime you are alone with the baby, open the locket and take the rose out and place it on her under your hand to charge it more,” Brianna ordered. “But please take care not to drain yourself doing so, or you’ll draw attention to the fact that you are doing something the King would probably not approve of. I am not altogether certain that he intended anything like this when he reminded you of your responsibility to Aurora.”

  I put the locket around my neck and staggered over to the settle. Brianna plied me with a drink that tasted like honey and sage—which was better than it sounds. “I want you here every afternoon,” Brianna said sternly. “The King can take away freedom, but at least he is still allowing you to train, and we will take advantage of that. And I will have a word with him about doing away with that useless guard. I value my safety and my privacy, and he contributes to neither.”

  I nodded, my spirits falling again at being reminded of how much I was watched, measured, and judged.

  After that, we practiced until I was as tired as if Sir Delacar had been working me, and she sent me home just in time for dinner. This time the guard had no trouble keeping up with me. I wondered what he was thinking. Nothing in his expression gave me any clue.

  But I was not going to eat with the Court. Not unless I was ordered to. The very last thing I wanted right now was to eat with a hundred or more pairs of very disapproving eyes on me. I went straight to the kitchen, grabbed a slice of trencher bread and one of the wooden mugs, and slipped around the kitchen helping myself, then I went back out into the garden to that secluded little stone bench Wizard Gerrold had shown me. I ate very little, but I hadn’t taken much in the first place. I crumbled up the remaining trencher bread and scattered it for the birds in the morning and sat in the gloom.

  I had left my statue at the foot of the oak tree when I went to the kitchen, and after a while, I got up and brought her back to my seat. I stood her on the seat beside me, and she seemed to have a faint glow in the dusky darkness.

  “And what would you do?” I asked the statue. “Sir Delacar is going to continue to train me, but is he going to put his heart and soul into it? There’s no reason why he can’t keep us doing the same things over and over, and never teach us anything new. And why should any of the others continue in the Companions when we’ve been so restricted?”

  “Because we’re your friends?” I nearly jumped out of my skin as Anna and Elle came around the oak. “We were looking for you all afternoon,” said Anna as she moved the statue off the bench so she and Elle could sit beside me. “Were you with Lady Brianna?”

  “Yes,” I said, aware that they wouldn’t be able to see me nod in the gloom.

  “Good, now she knows what the King did to us.” Anna was next to me, and she seemed to be staring at her hands, which were pleating and repleating the fabric of the skirt of her gown. “And what did she say?”

  “That she’s going to continue to train me in Fae magic regardless of what the King says,” I replied, and I felt my desperation ease a little as I said that. “She advised me to continue wearing my sword, but she doesn’t think the King is going to take it.”

  Anna looked up, her hands dropping the fabric as she clasped them together. “Oh, thank heavens! I was afraid he’d already taken it!”

  Elle nodded. “If he had, I was planning on figuring out a way to break into wherever he put it and get it back. I’m pretty sure I could sneak into the armory and get it without anyone noticing.”

  “You’d have done that?” I was astonished.

  “Miri, we love you, and we love Aurora. The King can say whatever he wants, but nothing he says will break up the Companions,” Elle said firmly. “Anna and I talked to the boys, and they feel the same.”

  The boys! I hadn’t even given a thought to them. “Where—”

  “Delacar made them all his squires absolutely and officially, remember?” Anna said. “So they’re all still living with the other squires and they’re all still training with Sir Delacar.”

  “I don’t know why he didn’t make us squires too,” Elle said darkly. “It seems extremely unfair to me.”

  “Maybe because our parents wouldn’t approve of it. I know mine wouldn’t; they were only going along with my training because of the prestige of being a Companion. Or maybe Sir Delacar didn’t to throw the King off the scent. Or maybe because there is no way that he could make Miri his squire without getting the King’s permission first, and there is no way that is going to happen,” Anna said sensibly. “This is the only way Delacar can keep the Companions together.”

  “But we are together!” I exclaimed, and a wash of warmth came over me as I realized that the others weren’t going to abandon me. “There’s no reason why we can’t train in Lady Brianna’s cottage, either! I’m still allowed to train with her, and—”

  “And we just won’t tell anyone that we are going too as long as Sir Delacar approves,” said Anna, with a nod.

  But Elle laughed at that. “Oh, I promise you, he’ll approve. He was probably pretty angry when he found out about Serulan and the Goblin Market, but by now, he’s over it. And I know Sir Delacar doesn’t like all the restrictions the King has put on us—or the way he tried to get our parents to take us out of the Companions.”

  I hugged them. “You’re brilliant, both of you!”

  They hugged me back, Anna sniffing a little. “We aren’t going to let the King stop us from doing what’s right,” Elle said fiercely. “And what’s right is helping you protect Aurora.”

  “If he finds out, the King might demand that your fathers take you away from the Court altogether.”

  “Then we have to make certain that he doesn’t find out,” Elle said. “You keep moping
around the way you have been today. Avoid meals. Avoid your parents. He’ll be sure that you’re not up to anything because you’re sulking. That should put him right off the scent.”

  “Sulking” and “moping” were very unflattering descriptions of how I’d been acting, but Elle did have a point, and I was sure that this was how Papa and Mama were thinking of my behavior. They were adults, and when adults are annoyed with you, every demonstration that you’re feeling bad is sulking and moping.

  Well, I could keep right on sulking, but I’d have to be very careful about it. Too much and they’d get impatient with me and get me another governess to “occupy my time properly.”

  Just then, Elle changed the subject.

  “Why on earth are you carrying around a statue?” she asked. “And who is it? Do you know?”

  “Serulan gave it to me. He said that he had it made ages ago and that I ought to have it because it’s my great-great-great-great-grandmother.”

  “Really?” Elle picked it up and peered at it. “It’s not as heavy as it looks. Your great-great-something was a knight?”

  So I had to tell the story about my many-times-great-grandmother and being the Nameless Knight and the first holder of my sword.

  They weren’t as curious about it as I thought they might be; they were more interested in the fact that the dragon had chosen to give the statue to me. Anna took it from Elle and brought it out of the shadows into a shaft of moonlight to look at it more closely—and all three of us gasped as the statue seemed to light up softly from within once the moonlight struck it.

  “What is this thing made of?” Anna looked as if she was afraid to put it down.

  “I have no idea. Serulan didn’t tell me. It’s not magic; it must be a trick of the stone.”

  Anna took the statue out of the moonlight, but it glowed for a little while longer before the light inside it faded. She handed it to me again. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  “I don’t think anyone has. Or we’d have heard about it by now.” I thought about it some more. “Wait, there might have been something… something about transforming quartz with dragonfire?” I shook my head. “It wasn’t important then, and it’s not important now.”

  “You’re probably right. You take care of Lady Brianna tomorrow and leave the rest to me,” Anna said. “When you come back tomorrow night, we’ll all have dinner in our room and we can catch up with one another.”

  “Snatch luncheon and breakfast from the kitchen. I’ll get a tray for you from the kitchen for suppers,” Elle said. “There’s a lot of sympathy for you among them. Giles told me that, and he still has those friends.”

  Of course he did, and he wouldn’t have deserted them just because he’d been made a Companion and then a squire. I knew from my own experience that everyone in the kitchen knows what’s going on all over the palace.

  I’d have tried to talk to him alone, but that would have been a very bad idea at this point. The King was livid with me not only because I hadn’t checked with someone before running off to do things on my own but also because I’d kept the fact that I was doing so a secret. But if I was spotted with Giles alone, without a chaperone and acting in a clandestine manner, my reputation could be utterly ruined, the King would certainly be sure that I was back to keeping things secret from him, and I would probably be exiled to my little property under the strictest of guards to make sure I wasn’t caught alone with a young man ever again.

  I hugged Anna and Elle once more. “If you weren’t sticking with me, I—I don’t think I could bear this.”

  “But we did, and we’ll keep right on sticking with you,” said Anna fiercely. “No matter what. For Aurora, yes, but most of all for you. Because we’re friends. And that’s what friends do.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  BY THE TIME THREE DAYS HAD PASSED, WE WERE BACK TO A modified version of our old routine. I say “modified” because we were no longer learning horsed combat and Sir Delacar had us doing an awful lot of remedial exercises, but in the second half of our training sessions, he’d take a moment to make sure we weren’t being watched by anyone, then we’d switch to more advanced work. He didn’t say anything, but within two days, I was pretty sure that although he was still very irritated with me, he was also determined to continue training us exactly the way he’d started. And I was certain that he was just as irritated with the King as we were for pulling us off guarding Aurora.

  We were back to the same schedule of weapons training in the morning and combat involving magic every other afternoon. And, of course, I had my solo sessions with Brianna. I had been skeptical that she would be able to do anything about my bird-dogging guard for those sessions, but after two days, he suddenly didn’t show up. I still don’t know how she convinced the King to pull him off.

  But then again, I’m not sure even the King was willing to deal with Brianna when she was angry.

  Brianna and I talked a little bit about the Serpent Sisters’ captive, who I was sure was my father’s mother—but she didn’t have anything to add, and at this point, I had realized that… it didn’t matter.

  That’s right. It didn’t matter. I had let my own selfishness rule over what was important. I already knew that my father had been a good man, the best of men, and that was what mattered. Not whether his mother was Dark Fae, Light Fae, or a sorceress. He had been a good, kind, wonderful father, and it was up to me to live up to that—and not obsess over details that made no difference to the person I was.

  I’d stop at the kitchen for breakfast and luncheon, and Elle and Anna and I would have dinner in my room to avoid having any meals in the Great Hall.

  I really didn’t like this arrangement. It had me out of the palace most of the day, which left Aurora vulnerable. But at least all the guards watching her nursery had been given spells to enable them to see magic and magic creatures, so they weren’t totally “blind.”

  As often as I could, I put more magical energy into my amulet, and as often as I could manage it during my visits to her without getting caught, I attuned it to Aurora. She seemed to enjoy it when I did; she giggled and cooed as if she were being tickled and played with.

  And I avoided my parents. Which is easier to do than you might think when your parents are the King and Queen. They were busy all day long and often well into the evening, and what little time they could spare from their duties they spent with Aurora. Since they didn’t confide their thoughts about what I was doing to anyone I spoke to, I didn’t know how they felt about the way I was behaving. When Father was alive, I was pretty solitary, so maybe Mama thought I was reverting to my old habits: keeping to myself and reading in quiet places when I wasn’t training. Without Belinda around to disapprove, that would have been logical. And it wasn’t as if I had any actual duties to attend to, nor was there any pressure on me to make a brilliant marriage. I could, in fact, do whatever I wanted to. And since my duties were to train right now, and that was what I had been doing, I suppose they figured they’d wait out my sulks.

  After all, they had plenty to worry about, and until I’d gone off rescuing dragons and visiting the Goblin Market, I had always been obedient, never questioning anything they asked of me or told me to do. So they probably assumed I had gone back to being that strictly obedient daughter.

  If they wondered where the oddly luminous statue of the armed and armored woman in my room had come from, they didn’t ask. Or maybe they never looked in my room to preserve something of my privacy. Not that you were ever really private in the palace, with servants running into and out of rooms all day long.

  I never saw any signs that Papa had had my room searched for my sword. My armor remained in the chest where I had left it, and the sword never left my side. Then again, it was possible that he assumed it was in the armory, which was the logical place for it to be. If he’d asked Sir Delacar about it, I’m fairly certain Delacar would have said something like “As far as I know, it’s where it belongs,” which certainly wasn’t a li
e, but it would allow Papa to draw his own conclusion (wrongly) about where it was. Just the same, I was glad I had it with me at all times because there was always a chance that he’d go looking for it. Not a likely chance, because Papa was anything but a fool, but it was a chance I hadn’t been willing to take.

  By the end of the week, we had a routine, and my parents and I were carefully avoiding each other, each of us for reasons of our own.

  And things might have stayed that way indefinitely.

  Melalee’s screech woke half the castle.

  I was one of the first to reach the nursery, where the two night guards lay insensible on the floor and Melalee was on her knees beside the empty cradle, screaming her lungs out in panic and grief.

  Empty… cradle.

  Part of me wanted to drop to the floor and howl with Melalee; part of me wanted to kick the comatose guards until they were one bruise from head to toe. And a little bit of me grimly whispered, I told them so. And they wouldn’t listen.

  Melalee’s incoherence wasn’t helping. How long ago had she last checked on Aurora? Had she seen anything at all? Smelled anything? Seen the curtains moving at the window? All these things could tell us which way her kidnappers had taken her or even if they were still in the palace!

  But I didn’t get the chance; within moments, I had been shoved out of the room by more guards and Mama and Papa and Gerrold, and I could only hover impotently at the door while Gerrold worked a spell that might tell him who or what had taken her and possibly where.

  I strained my ears to listen while I did the little I could think of by performing both Fae and human magic on the unconscious guard not far from my feet. I didn’t wake him, and I couldn’t figure out how he’d been rendered into this state except that it wasn’t by magic.

  At least he was breathing regularly, and it didn’t look to my untutored eyes as if he was going to die anytime soon. Though when he woke, the watch commander was probably going to make him wish he were dead.