The Element of Fire (10 page)

"It will do," Ravenna said. "Elaine, find me that lapdesk, please."

As the girl brought the flat wooden box with the ink bottle and pen set, Thomas noticed the crowd around Roland had cleared and one of the stewards was presenting Dr. Galen Dubell to the King. As the old sorcerer bowed deeply, Roland said, "Come up here, Sir, and tell me how things are at Lodun."

Roland had wanted to go to Lodun or the smaller university further off in Duncanny, but Ravenna had needed him here during her regency, and before that, Fulstan had refused to even let the boy make a progress there to see the place.
It couldn't have hurt,
Thomas thought as Ravenna's pen scratched across the parchment.
He'd have tired of it in a few months, but it would have made him happy. God knows, they might even have been able to teach him something.
Roland resembled his father, with his curling brown hair and blue eyes, but his features were a good deal more delicate. The King's servants would never have let him out of his rooms looking anything other than immaculate, but he still managed to look incongruous in his cloth-of-gold slashed doublet, and the lace of his falling band was beginning to turn.

Galen Dubell climbed the dais and took a seat on the stool a servant whisked into place for him. Roland asked a question and the sorcerer's answer made him laugh. Thomas looked over the crowd for Denzil and spotted him in deep conversation with a man he didn't recognize. Denzil's companion had dark hair and sharp features, and though he was dressed in the heavy brocades of court finery, he was obviously ill at ease. That might not be due to the lofty company: most of the city's monied class was here, bringing with them all the rivalries and old scores that wanted settling. But something about the way he was standing, the way he turned his head, made Thomas think he was observing the crowd and the room with particular care.

If this was some new advisor of Denzil's, he hadn't been in the last report. And if the spies paid to watch Denzil were taking bribes to leave out certain details, then there were going to be a few new heads adorning the spikes on the Prince's Gate come morning. But in that case, surely the man wouldn't casually wander into a court function.
He might be only an acquaintance,
Thomas thought. But Denzil seemed to draw all of his acquaintances into his plots eventually.

Then Denzil broke off the conversation and started toward the dais. "Here it comes," Thomas said quietly to Ravenna.

When the Duke of Alsene bowed in the Dowager Queen's direction she smiled sweetly back at him and nodded graciously.

The steward caught Roland's attention unobtrusively and stepped aside as Denzil bowed.

Roland said, "Welcome, cousin." He looked pitifully glad to see the older man.

With just the right amount of theater Denzil said, "Your Majesty, my home is in danger."

Caught by surprise, Roland said, "You told me your home was here."

Thomas winced. Roland's reply had the distinctive sound of a lovers' quarrel rather than a sovereign dressing down a lord, and the courtiers near the dais were growing quiet to listen.

Denzil recovered smoothly. "It is, Your Majesty. I was speaking of my home at Bel Garde."

"General Villon has spoken to me about it. It's in violation of my edict because the walls are greater than twelve feet in height." Roland shifted uncomfortably. "They will be careful of the surrounding land, and it will improve the view."

Denzil's expression remained stern. "Your Majesty, it is my ancestral home. Its walls have defended our family for generations, and are a symbol of my allegiance to your crown."

Roland's brow furrowed. "I will give you another manor in compensation. There is an estate at Terrebonne that--"

"My cousin, it is Bel Garde that concerns me." The carefully calculated interruption, the appeal in his expression, were all part of the deliberate assertion of his personality over the younger man's.

Thomas could see Roland waver. The King said, "You are a trusted councilor."

Denzil bowed again. "There is none more loyal than I, my cousin, and I need Bel Garde to defend that loyalty."

Then Galen Dubell, forgotten at the King's side, said something to Roland. The King looked down at him, startled.

Denzil caught a hint of something that worried him. Almost too sharply he said, "What was that, Sir?"

Frowning in thought, Roland said, "It is an interesting point. Why do you need the fortress, Sir, when you are under my protection?"

There was a tension in Roland's voice that quieted the rest of the conversations around the dais and stopped Ravenna's pen. Denzil hesitated, staring at the young King. Then he made a gracious bow. "I need it...to present it to you, Sire."

There was a moment's silence as the surrounding courtiers digested that, then a polite murmur of congratulations and applause. "Oh, how delightful," Ravenna exclaimed loudly.

"I accept it, Sir," Roland said happily. "I'll have my best architect put in magnificent gardens, and then I will return it to you."

There was more applause. Ravenna folded the half-written order and handed it to Thomas. "I shall like Bel Garde a great deal with a new formal park."

Thomas allowed himself a slight smile, and dropped the paper into a nearby brazier. "You'll like it even better with your troops all over it."

BEHIND THE WOODEN backdrop of the stage, in the small actors' area curtained off from the glories of the gallery by dusty velvet drapes and a canopy, confusion reigned.

Ignoring the outcries and exclamations from the actors and clowns rushing around in the lamp-lit gloom and musty heat behind her, Kade had enlarged a hole in one of the dark blue curtains and was looking out at the rear of the gallery. The back wall was mostly paned glass, its windows looking out onto the terraces and a wide expanse of garden designed to provide a harmonious view.

She remembered that garden, though she could see little of it now through the glare of candlelight on window glass and the darkness beyond. She could have pointed to the stand of sycamore trees, or the hill with its classical ruins carefully constructed to look aged and abandoned. She had expected to remember the palace, but she had not expected its sights, textures, and scents to press in on her in such an overpowering way. The walls were stained with powerful auras of old battles, old anger, love, pain. They hummed with the revenants of the emotions and magics of long-dead sorcerers. She had left her own marks here, somewhere. She was not pleased at the idea of coming upon one of them suddenly.

Here Kade had learned her first real sorcery from Galen Dubell. He had taught her High Magic, with its slow painstaking formulas that used alchemy and the powers of the astral bodies to understand and compel the forces that governed the universe. Galen had been an excellent teacher, his instruction touching on everything from the simplest healing charms to the architectures of the Great Spells that eventually took on lives of their own. When he was banished for that teaching, Kade had been sent to the Monelite Convent, where she had learned about herbal poisons and the Low Magic of witchcraft from the village women. Later she had learned what she could of fay magic from her mother, but her human blood kept her from shape-changing and practicing many of the other skills that came so easily to the fay. It had been Galen's teaching that had enabled her to survive. Human sorcery was painstaking and slow, but powerful, using numbers, symbols, carved stones, music, and other tools to explain the unexplainable, to control and direct the astral forces the fay only toyed with.

I shouldn't have come back,
Kade thought. Somewhere between here and the Mummer's Mask, her courage had fled, leaving her to pick up the pieces of her plan alone. Not that it was a good plan to begin with. She felt an overwhelming desire to discard it and stay with Baraselli's acting troupe for a few weeks. The gods of the wood knew the actors could use the help. Only one thing stopped her.

I might be able to stand feeling like a coward, but I can't live with feeling like this much of a fool.
And it would be foolish to turn back when she had come this far. But the more she thought about it, the more the idea of returning to Knockma or Fayre with nothing solved and facing the same old difficulties seemed worse than continuing on this course.

It had become apparent to her that she needed to go home, to the palace at the heart of Ile-Rien, to face her past. To face her half brother Roland, to see if it was really him she hated or the memories and the father he represented. And perhaps to face Ravenna as well, to show the Dowager Queen what that once-unlovely changeling fay child had become.
To get her approval?
Kade asked herself suddenly.
I bloody well hope not.
She bit her lip, fingering the frayed edge of the curtain.
So it's either stay with Baraselli's troupe forever, or go on with what I came to do, what I said I had to do,
she thought. A group of women passed by in front of the windows, the light glittering on their satin gowns, gems, and starched lace collars, their motions hampered by layers of underskirts, hip rolls, and fashionable puffed sleeves.
Perhaps I'll wait and see how the play does before I decide.

She turned back to the troupe's frantic clamor as Garin hopped through the curtained stage doorway. He was immediately attacked by three other actors and their helpers, who began to tear off his Pantalone costume and wrestle him into the Brighella outfit. Kade picked the wig and cap off the floor and handed it to them, trying not to get her fingers torn off by their frantic grasping.

Baraselli peered through a gap in the backdrop. "Terrible," he moaned. "It isn't going well at all."

"Damn it, man, I've done my best," Garin snapped, his voice muffled because Uoshe was forcing a new shirt over his head. "If it isn't good enough, then you get out there."

Unlike other theatricals, Commedia had no playbook for the actors to learn. The plot was determined by the characters, and the actors learned only the standard lines for one role and supplemented them by whatever jokes or local gossip came to mind. Garin was doing the unfamiliar Brighella role more ad lib than usual and using the standard lines only when he could remember them; it was confusing everyone else terribly.

Garin had taken the extra role because the worst had happened. The Master of Revels and the Cisternan guards who examined entertainers for the court had refused to allow the clown who played Brighella entrance into the palace. The clown had a cousin who was on a list of participants in an ill-fated Aderassi independence revolt. The officials had been terrifyingly polite about the whole thing, and Baraselli, suspecting them all to be magicians of the blackest kind for knowing about it in the first place, had not dared to speak even a word of protest.

In the prisonlike barrenness of the questioning rooms of the St. Anne's Gate Guard House, the troupe had been kept waiting for hours. Partly, Kade knew, to give those who had reason to be nervous a chance to betray themselves, but mostly to allow the clerks to look through the rolls of "undesirable" names that the King's Watch endlessly compiled.

"And what's your name, darling?" the Cisternan guard had asked Kade when it came her turn.

Kade knew the robed academician in the corner of the whitewashed questioning room was a sorcerer, using spells to search out hostile magic. As the guard asked her the question, Kade felt the sorcerer's spell settle over her like a cold mist, invisible and intangible to anyone not trained in magic. It met the masking spell she had prepared and set around herself hours earlier, then slid across and away without friction. The sorcerer's second and third spells did the same. He stopped there, just as her masking spell was beginning to fray on the edges. He might have cast five or six spells and caught her out; Kade, being Kade, had taken that risk. If the sorcerer had detected either her magic or that she was fay, she would have thought of something else.

In answer to the guard's question, she had said, "Katherine of Merewatch. They call me Kade, short for Katherine." Merewatch was a hamlet near the place she made her home much of the time, and so it was factual enough not to set off the truth spell that blanketed the whole room. It was a complex spell, older than she was, as intricate and detailed as the inside of a Portier clockwork toy. It had the combination of ruthless logic and artistry about it that marked it as old Dr. Surete's work. Despite great temptation, she decided not to tamper with it.

The guard stared at her a moment. She had a minor qualm, wondering if they had really burned the only portrait of her, as Roland had claimed they had so long ago. But the man only said, "You ought to change that, you know. Could make trouble for you."

"But it's what my mum calls me."

"Your lookout then. And how's your mum's family called?"

"She didn't have one that I knew of. In Merewatch they called her Maira." Also true; the deep northern brogue of the Merewatch inhabitants rendered Moire as Maira. Kade sensed a faint tremor in Surete's truth spell, but her statement was on that very narrow line of truth and falsehood, and it didn't betray her.

Neither questions nor spells had shown anything odd about the actor who played Arlequin, and that puzzled Kade.

She had suspected him of something, of what she wasn't completely sure, but she knew the palace's protections to be good ones. She had gotten through them with a substantial helping of fayre luck and the willingness to take a risk, and she knew that having been born inside the wards had let her pass them and any other traps Surete might have laid. It didn't seem possible that an ordinary human sorcerer could accomplish it.