The line advanced quickly. Each noble lord and lady bowed or curtsied before the Infanta and whispered a word or two of greeting accompanied by a range of smiles—from the sincere, to the formal courtly, to the ingratiating. Claere Liguon’s small pale face was also frozen into a courtly smile that evolved more and more into a rictus of tension and eventually became a poor grimace of exhaustion.
“Happy Birthday, Your Imperial Highness!” they all said.
“May your future be filled with pleasure and delight!”
“This day is a glorious holiday for the Realm!”
“Your beauty and kindness grow every year!”
“No words can express our fondness of Your Imperial Highness!”
“You are the dearest most lovely Grand Princess in the history of our proud nation!”
The Infanta listened to them, nodding gently, repeating the words “thank you” in a faint whisper. At some point she was taken with a fit of coughing, and the old grand dame who was congratulating her in that moment went into a sympathetic fit of flutters, wringing her own hands and offering a silk handkerchief which the Infanta took with gratitude and placed against her lips momentarily, then lowered it to her lap.
She then continued to nod and smile faintly, but her facial expression now resembled the emptiness of a corpse.
“Oh, the poor dear is not holding up very well,” Jain Lirabeau whispered to the Duchess ahead of her, as the greeting line moved rather quickly and they neared the Infanta. One or two more lords and a lady in front of them, and it was now the Duchess Rovait who curtsied elegantly and stood before the seated Infanta, speaking something warm and genuinely kind to the Grand Princess.
The Marquis Fiomarre took yet another wooden step forward as the woman before him, Jain Lirabeau, now swept a deep curtsy and her voice carried as she spoke her greetings. His heart had grown cold as ice, and his extremities too were cold, like the winter outside, despite the pleasantly maintained warmth of the Silver Hall.
He should turn back. He could do it, simply fall back out of line, and walk away—but no, he should simply walk forward and proceed to speak the greeting, as everyone else, and nothing would happen. Such an easy thing he could do, just keep walking forward and go through the motions as everyone else. . . .
Like everyone.
Another instant, and the Countess Lirabeau was done, and the moment was at hand. His moment.
Vlau Fiomarre stood before the Infanta.
The world had stilled around him, around them, and he heard a distant rush of something in his temples. He looked at her, seeing only great silver-grey eyes looking up at him tiredly, barely registering him as a passing shadow before her field of vision.
He looked and saw the true pallor, the greyness of her skin up-close, barely concealed by powder. He saw the weight of the glittering whiteness that was her wig and Crown. And it was that last thing, a cluster of diamond snow stars, that he focused on, that reminded him of his purpose as he stood, his lips parting not with words but upon a silence, while his right hand reached to the folds of his black velvet jacket, and with a long-practiced movement drew out a small sharp thing of steel.
That dagger had been in the family Fiomarre for generations, and it was the same one that had been used more than once for acts of ultimate honor.
And now, Fiomarre felt its grip, ice-cold and sure. And in silence he plunged it forward, taking an additional step, closing the distance between them, taking hold of her pale exposed shoulder and thrusting the blade into her. It was at that touch on her shoulder that she started, made a sound of surprise, awakening, and then, the next instant the steel was inside her like a lover, striking her directly underneath her shallow left breast as she gasped.
The rest of the moments elongated and became dreams.
The Infanta’s faint cry; a second gasp coming in unison from all throats in the Silver Hall.
Then, long and short distorted screams all around, a clatter of armor from the Imperial guards as they moved in too late; the feel of merciless hands upon him as he was taken in a vise of iron and then dragged backward, beginning to cry out, on top of his lungs, “Death to the Liguon! Death to the Deceiver and his filthy Line!”
Clamor and madness and again terrible silence—for as Fiomarre cried out, he was dealt blows on his face, blows on his chest which took his breath and silenced him momentarily, while he panted in fury, in exultation, knowing now that he had accomplished what he had dared only in his dreams, and that Fiomarre was revenged at last and he could die with honor.
. . .
But the silence had come because the Infanta stood up now, slowly, trembling.
She stood, hands upraised in a gesture that was a question and surprise, while the dagger of Fiomarre was lodged up to the hilt in her chest, and a crimson stain bloomed from its centerpoint like a winter rose. The stain increased, blood running down her chest in rivulets, making patterns of red icicles on her dress, her crinoline skirt, while she looked down on it, eyes great and filled with strange new life, a sharp awareness, as though in death she had come to be fully
alive
for one acute final moment.
The Infanta’s lips were parted, and they mouthed a silent “why?” while a tiny trickle of red came at the side of her lips, to slide gently down her white cheek.
And then because she yet did not crumple, did not fall as expected, the physicians who had been summoned and who had come running in seconds, stood a few steps away from her in odd expectancy, while the Emperor and Empress stood also, having gotten up from their Thrones like broken gilded puppets.
There was a circle of emptiness around her.
The Infanta stood while her blood continued to empty out of her chest. Her gaze was clouded with pain yet did not lose its impossible intensity as she searched the crowd and then found him and stopped to look at him. She looked at the one who had struck her this blow, who now stood restrained by many guards, stricken in his own way. He was watching her in return, in horrible wonder, as everyone else in the Silver Hall.
The Infanta took a step toward him, stepping in a puddle of deep red—her own blood. “Why?” she said softly. “What have I done to you?”
“Die, Liguon!” he whispered hoarsely. But when the guards on both sides of him threw him to his knees, she raised her hand in a stopping gesture.
“No,” she said in a loud strong voice the like of which had never before issued out of her. “Do not yet kill this man as he had tried to kill me. I must know why he did this thing, why he hates me so. He must live until I know.”
And then her upright position faltered, at which point the physicians rushed to support her, to check the wound in her chest.
One doctor wanted to pull forth the dagger, while another prevented him in terrified silence, knowing that the dagger was also a precarious safety plug over a hole that contained unknown internal damage, and that its dislodging could cause a final bleeding.
And yet, thought that same doctor, how was it possible that this was not a fatal wound? For it was right at her heart, and yet the Infanta lived. “We must take her to her quarters, tend to her, quickly now!” he and the others muttered.
But in that moment the Infanta’s small hand reached down—while they fussed over her, holding her up, trying to make her lie down, trying to carry her, or feeling her brow, her pulse, her throat—and she pulled out the dagger from her own chest.
Blood came gushing out, the last vestiges of it; rich like wine. And in unexpected terror they attempted to stop it, putting up ripped pieces of her skirt, holding bunches of fabric at her chest against the flood, against the inevitability.
And yet she lived, and her breath seemed to have stilled, but she watched them. One of the doctors listening to her chest exclaimed suddenly, in horrified awe, “Her heart! It has stopped!”
“But no, it cannot be!” the others said.
There was absolute quiet in the Hall, and the winter wind had long been silenced outside, as though swallowed by a void.
And she shook them off then—shook off their useless touches and ministrations, and threw down the bloodied crumpled rags, and got up.
The Infanta stood in the Silver Hall, covered with her own life blood, red upon white, while her heart had stopped many moments ago, and her lungs did not fill with breath unless she consciously willed it.
There was no need for heartbeat, or for breath, now.
The Infanta stood before them, dead and yet living, and their hands shook while they crossed themselves, in terror.
“I will see the Birthday Gifts now,” she whispered.
T
he man came riding like the wind. He swept through the darkness of the village Oarclaven, waking Percy from her freezing sleep as she sat on her father’s porch.
He wore red and gold, muted by the night, and yet the design of his livery and the pennant he bore was recognizable as the Duke Vitalio Goraque’s own colors.
“Neither side wins!” he cried. “It’s a riot, but neither side wins! Witchcraft and unholy abomination is upon us!”
And as people started to come out of their houses, the messenger’s hoarse voice continued railing and dissolving into echoes as he receded along the streets, on his way to the heart of the Dukedom, the Castle Goraque.
Percy got up, stomping her wooden feet, not feeling anything in her frozen extremities—were these
her
toes,
her
fingers, or some other’s?—just as the door behind her opened and her sister Patty’s face peered from the inside, silhouetted against the fireplace glow.
At the same time the neighbors from two houses down opened their door, in turn causing old uncle Roald from directly across the street to step out into the cold in nothing but his long nightgown and sleeping cap. “Heh? What was that about?” he bellowed, sending the dogs to barking and thus waking up the rest of the neighborhood as surely as the messenger had managed to disturb only a portion of their slumber.
Percy’s father was now standing behind her, his face shadowed, and his large palm on Patty’s tiny shoulder, moving her gently out of the way and stepping onto the porch.
He saw his middle daughter and came awake, it seemed. “What’s this? Go inside, girl, you’ll freeze
. . .” he whispered hoarsely, his voice leached of all strength by tears.
Percy obeyed, gratitude welling within her—despite a wall of winter-ice atrophy that seemed to have grown solid, taken hold of her flesh (death had latched onto her but did not consume). She had dreamed as she sat in the cold, it seemed, dreamed of unresolved moving shadows and delicate white cobwebs. And now she slipped past her father and sister into their dwelling, into the firelight and the stilled death and air only slightly warmer than the winter outside.
Out in the street the neighbors continued conversing. She heard their familiar voices talk of Ducal armies and battles fought on ice in the dark. But all she could see was her mother Niobea’s stonelike form, sitting at the bedside of Gran, holding the icon of the Mother of God at her breast, while the same shadow stood in the corner.
That and her grandmother’s rhythmic death rattle.
It would not stop.
H
ours later came dawn, but no respite for old Bethesia. Only the winter sun had risen, turning the sky milk-grey.
Belle and Patty had fallen asleep in their chairs, and Niobea seemed not to breathe as she sat with her eyes closed, as the dawn seeped in through the slits in the poorly shuttered windows.
The fire in the hearth had burned down sometime in the middle of the night, soon after Alann had gone to fetch the priest after all. The priest’s residence was on the other end of the village and he would probably show up only after it was light.
Percy sat at the table, watching them all, hearing Bethesia’s regular dying breath, until her thoughts clouded with weariness and she was hallucinating.
Or so she thought. Because the shadow of darkness seemed at times to move like vapor and then again be frozen in repose as a human figure, never looking at her or anyone else but the old woman, watching and waiting.
As the light outside deepened, there were harsh sounds of metal and many horses—heavy cavalry. The Duke’s knights were returning.
Niobea looked up once, slowly, her gaze drawn to the windows, but she did not go to open the shutters. This was an ongoing wake and death was in the house. Or so she thought.
Belle came awake with a start. Her first look was toward the old woman in the bed, but no need to ask—the labored breathing could be heard from across the room, dissonant solemn music. And so she moved and stood up, shivering, and then gently came to stand at Niobea’s side.
“Should I start the fire?” she whispered.
Niobea wordlessly nodded.
Outside in the street, under a silent dusting of snow, Duke Vitalio Goraque’s army continued their clanging march home.
A
lann came back with the priest just before noon. Father Dibue was a large man with a craggy face, coarse ruddy skin, and a jutting chin. He wore his hood tight over his face and underneath there were many layers of grey shawl. His mittens were thick and barely worn, and his woven belt held a number of key rings and pouches.