The Element of Fire (26 page)

She said, "Listen, you dried-up old bitch--"

Ravenna smiled.

Kade took a deep breath to give herself enough air to get the words out. "If you want my help in pulling your fat out of the fire, then you can damn well keep your offers and your speculations to yourself, because I don't want to hear them and I won't, do you understand?"

"Quite well, thank you, dear." Ravenna nodded pleasantly.

Kade stalked out the door and slammed it behind her.

The anteroom was empty.
Why do I stay here?
Kade raged at herself.
I meant to cut off all these old ties, say what I wanted to say, and forget about all of it. To get some peace at last. But I've done nothing but get into stupid arguments with Roland and make Ravenna think she can put me under her thumb again. How dare she even imply... Imply what?

She paced a tight circle in the anteroom, remembering Ravenna's smile at her angry response.
Did I just make a mistake?

The door to the hall opened and Thomas walked in. Kade jumped guiltily.

"Did you put blood on the lintels and the cornerposts of this house?" he asked her, keeping his voice low.

She held her hand out, to show him the fresh cut across the white skin of her palm, and thought,
He has such dark eyes, like velvet.
She was starting to blush again, for no accountable reason. To distract herself, she asked, "What happened while you were gone?"

He regarded her for a moment. "What is it for?"

God, can no one answer a direct question?
She folded her arms and looked at the floor. "To keep fay out. To let them know I'm in here, and that I'm not receiving visitors."

"Will it work?"

She shook her head. "Not that well. The ones it will keep out wouldn't be that difficult to deal with anyway. But it's something."

"Why did you choose here, and not one of the other buildings?"

Not wanting to answer, she began to tap one foot in growing irritation. He waited. Finally she looked up and said, "I like it here. There, are you happy?"

He said, "Delighted," and went into Ravenna's room.

Well, I handled that brilliantly,
Kade thought. A soft noise made her glance back and she saw Falaise standing in the doorway to her room. She was wearing a pale blue heavily embroidered mantua and her hair hung like a chestnut curtain. She looked like a startled fawn. "What is it?" Kade asked her, temporarily distracted.

Falaise made a noise like a strangled gasp and vanished back into her room.

Kade followed her. Inside was the tumbled splendor of a parlor attached to a small bedchamber, three ladies-in-waiting looking up at them in surprise. Falaise stopped in the middle of the room and shrieked, "Out! I want to be alone." It wasn't the full-throated bellow Ravenna was capable of but it worked well enough. As the gentlewomen scurried for the door, Kade stayed where she was, correctly surmising that the order had not been directed at her.

As soon as the door closed behind the last woman, Falaise seized a wine glass from the table and dashed its contents onto the polished floorboards. As Kade stared, the Queen shoved a chair away from the wall that adjoined the Dowager Queen's quarters and crawled under a table, placing the glass to the wall and her ear on the glass.

"What are you doing?" Kade asked, baffled.

"There's a weak board here. I can hear through to Ravenna's room."

"Brilliant!" Kade climbed onto the table and pressed her ear to the wall, but couldn't hear anything but muffled voices. "What are they saying?"

"Shhh."

Short of dragging Falaise out from under the table by the ankles and taking her place, which would cause them to miss some of the conversation, there was nothing to do but wait. Kade paced, tangled her fingers in her hair, and tried to contain herself.

Finally, as doors slammed out in the anteroom, Falaise crawled out from under the table and sat back on the floor with a sigh.

Kade bounced with excitement. "Well?"

Falaise scrubbed wine out of her ear with the sleeve of her mantua. "It was a terrific fight."

"About what?"

"He has a plan for leaving the palace because we're going to be attacked by the fay again. He said they're just waiting, they have a traitor inside helping them, and that when they can come through cracks in the walls, we can't hope to keep them out forever."

"He's right."

Falaise sat back on the floor, hugging her knees, looking up at her quizzically. "Are the wards working?" The question was anxious, but not panicky.

Kade decided to tell her the truth. "They're working up above us. But most of them aren't touching the ground anymore. It's only the siege doors and the gates keeping the Host out."

"I see." The Queen bit her lip.

"But what did they fight about?" Kade demanded.

"We're going to be leaving in the morning. But Ravenna doesn't like some part of the plan, and it made her very angry. She yelled and threw things, and said she didn't intend to die alone."

"Really?"

"Yes, and he told her she was too mean to die at all, alone or in company, and if she thought he was fool enough to fall for these mock hysterics then she should think again and she was going anyway if he had to tie her to a horse." Falaise shook her head, an irritated kitten. "Something happened in the Albon Tower, something to do with Roland and Denzil. But she already seemed to know what it was, and they didn't discuss any details."

"Hell, that's not much."
Maybe I can find out more downstairs.
As Kade reached for the door Falaise said, "If you find out anything else, will you come and tell me?"

"All right."

"Thank you."

Leaving the room, Kade wondered if Falaise had heard her own conversation with Ravenna, and if it mattered.
It might. She is full of surprises.

* * *
 

Thomas crossed the hall and went into the map room. The fire burned low behind the grate and Vivan was gone; he was unsure if that was a good sign or not. He stood for a moment contemplating a faded parchment map of the city on the table. He needed to go back up to Ravenna, but he didn't trust his temper quite yet.

He knew she would agree to his plan. She wouldn't let emotion get in the way of necessity for too long, and it was only his part in it that disturbed her.

And whatever she did, he didn't intend to give in to her this time.

"Captain! Captain, look!" someone shouted from outside the room. Stepping toward the door, he saw Gideon surrounded by a noisy group of guards and conducting another man across the hall in an apparently friendly headlock.

Thomas started forward as Gideon released his captive with an affectionate shake, and felt an idiot grin spreading over his face as he saw who it was.

Lucas and a younger guard named Gerard, whom they had also given up for dead, staggered into the room under the enthusiastic greetings of their comrades.

Lucas grinned back at him. "What are you gaping at?"

"Why aren't you dead?" Thomas caught the older man in an embrace. "And where the hell have you been?"

Lucas dropped onto a bench at the table. "I've been banging on a bloody gate, trying to get the idiot on the other side to let us in. Before that we were crawling through the streets on our bellies. Look, God bless that man for a saint!"

Anticipating the request, Phaistus was bringing in an armful of wine bottles and tankards.

As the wine was passed around, Lucas said, "It's a wonderful story; do you want to hear the version where I climbed the St. Anne's Gate in a hail of heathen arrows with my sword in my teeth and a fainting Gerard slung over one shoulder?"

"You lying bastard!" Gerard objected, slamming down the tankard that someone had just handed him, spraying everyone around him with the contents.

"We got out the Postern Gate, actually," Lucas admitted more soberly. "It's a ruin, no sign of anyone. We couldn't come along the outside wall; there's a lot of somethings-or-others congregated along it that we didn't want too close a look at. We had to go several streets over to get around and back to the Prince's Gate. There's a very large hole in the park side of the Gallery Wing. I couldn't get very close but it looked as though something erupted out of the floor in the Grand Gallery."

Thomas knew Lucas well enough to recognize the fear in his eyes. That fear was masked by bluff, as it was in most men, and the louder the bluff the greater the fear. It was very loud in that room right now. "Out of the floor?" he asked. "Are you certain?"

"Yes. Don't ask me what it was; I've no idea. If we hadn't been in the portico and halfway outside already when it happened, we'd be dead." Lucas turned his tankard around thoughtfully. "As it was we lost Arians, Brandon, and Lesard." He looked up. "That I know of."

Thomas told him. "Twenty-six altogether, not counting you two."

"That many." Lucas looked away.

"What's it like in the city?" Gideon asked softly.

"It was hard to tell. We saw some houses broken into and burned out, but others locked up tight. No one's out on the streets anymore that we could see. There was ten or so palace-folk that crept out after us, but they decided to chance it in the city. We thought we'd try to make it back here so we could die with our friends like gentlemen." He looked around at everyone. "So? How have you lot been keeping busy?"

THOMAS AWOKE KNOWING what it felt like to be a corpse--stiff and cold. The fire had burnt down to coals, and seemed to be emitting nothing but a dim red glow. Any heat produced was lost in the frigid air. He eased out of the chair and started pulling wood out of the stacked pile beside the hearth. His hands were numb.

The kindling he dumped on the coals caught and he started to add the logs. After a timeless wait the heavier wood started to burn and he began to feel alive, and only two or three times his age.

Sitting on the floor in front of the fire and still shivering, he heard the timber frame of the house creak protestingly against the onslaught of a harsh wind. It was an oddly sudden cold spell for this time of year.

They should be due for two to three more months of fall rain before winter set in. It never
got this cold until after midwinter.

He climbed to his feet and found his cloak on the floor across the room and bundled up in it, then went out into the hall. Only two lanterns were lit there now, and it was as cold as a saint's bed. An old house with this many restless bodies crowded into it could never be entirely silent, but all the sounds--footsteps of patrolling guards creaking the boards on an upper story, the fitful stirring of sleepers on the hall floor, a child's frustrated crying--were oddly muted. Shadowy forms wrapped in blankets stumbled around the dark cavern of the hall's huge fireplace, building up a fire in the hearth that had been scraped clean and unused since last winter. Once they got the blaze going, warmth from the chimney would help heat the upper floors, though not nearly enough for comfort.

Thomas started upstairs, buttoning up the sleeves of his doublet.

There was a small window looking out into the court from the second-floor landing. Ice was starting to form on it already. Clouds still streamed across the sky, allowing the shrinking moon to briefly illuminate the court one moment, leaving it in pitch darkness the next. He could hear the wind howling, and the front wall protesting faintly in response.

He didn't hear Kade's footsteps but was somehow unsurprised when he noticed her standing beside him.

She said, "Grandier had to work on this for days."

He looked down at her but there wasn't quite enough light to see her expression. She looked like a fanciful drawing of a gypsy with her hair flying in all directions and a torn piece of petticoat dragging the ground. She wore a blanket over her shoulders and the night muted the red of her dress, making her look very human and solid. He asked, "How did he do it?"

"A shift in the wind one day, gather clouds from over the sea the next. Very slow work, and very subtle. Oh, it might have made it a little cooler than it should have been, or there was less rain or more rain. But who would notice?"

The slender moon peeping through a gap in the swift-moving darkness above revealed clouds like monoliths, black streaming giants crossing the sky.

Thomas watched the clouds. This was obviously meant to be the last nail in their coffin, trapping them within the city, forestalling aid. "Can you do anything?"

She shrugged. "The spells to do this were set and done months ago, when the forces were favorable. Now the planets aren't in the right houses for influencing the weather, and they won't begin to favor atmospheric magic for another month at least. His timing of its arrival is excellent, and there's no saying how long it will last. Galen might know of something to try, but I don't. I'm only the Queen of Air and Darkness by inheritance, and I don't have a degree in philosophy from Lodun."

They stood there quiet for a time. The wind's fury made the timber and stone wall of the house seem flimsy, as if they were separated from a vicious animal by only a thin layer of decorative fence. Thomas found himself watching Kade. He was no longer certain what to think about her, and that disturbed him far more than it should, considering everything else there was to worry about.
I always try to understand my enemies,
he thought,
but it's time to admit that the one thing she is not is an enemy.
Finally, he asked, "What does it mean to be the Queen of Air and Darkness?"