The Queen's Necklace (45 page)

Behind his frozen smile, Luke began to feel ill. As though Lord Flinx were an ordinary doting uncle. As though his niece were an ordinary schoolroom miss.

“Perhaps you have not yet heard,” put in Lord Polyphant. “Lord Flinx has just been appointed the new Prime Minister.”

Again that very smallest and stiffest of bows. “I congratulate you, sir,” said Luke, forcing out the words. “No doubt this is your reward for the truly—extraordinary sacrifices you have made on behalf of your country.”

Lord Flinx smiled urbanely. “But I understand that you, also, are to be felicitated. No doubt there is great rejoicing in Winterscar.”

At this, Luke swiveled to address the ambassador. “It is on that very matter, Lord Polyphant, that I desire to speak with you. If you will be so good, I would like a few moments of your time—alone.”

“With the greatest pleasure in the world,” said the ambassador, continuing to smile sweetly. “We can speak privately in the next room.”

When Lord Polyphant and Luke were alone in the embassy library, the ambassador's smile faded. “Need I tell you, Mr. Guilian, that was not very wise?”

“That may well be,” Luke retorted. “But if you value my friendship, you will not make a habit of presenting me to men who would never be acknowledged or received in Winterscar.”

Lord Polyphant cocked his head to one side. “May I remind you that this is not Winterscar, that this same Lord Flinx is a very powerful man? He is, I might add, the very pink of gentility. I think that you listen to too much gossip.”

“Gossip?” Though he had not been invited to sit, Luke flung himself down on one of the lyre-back chairs. “I don't listen to gossip at all. But when a man is paragraphed in the newspapers of every nation on the continent, when his name may be heard in scurrilous ballads sung on the streets in places as far away as Vordheim in Kjellmark—” Luke's teeth came together with an audible click. “You are correct, Lord Polyphant, this is not Tarnburgh and this is not Winterscar. It is a nation run by madmen and hypocrites. Unfortunately, they would be much better off were they ruled by the madmen solely, and dispensed with the hypocrites altogether!”

The ambassador regarded him with mild amazement. By now he was accustomed to Luke's vehemence, knew him to be a man who might wax eloquent on a variety of subjects, from the trivial to the profound, yet he had never seen him display anything resembling such furious indignation.

“Such heat, Mr. Guilian. One might almost think you had a personal grudge.”

Luke glared. He opened his mouth as though he would speak, but the ambassador made haste to change the subject. “Yet I believe you meant to speak of events back home in Winterscar.”

This was not so happy a switch as Lord Polyphant might have wished. Lucius reached into his coat, pulled out a piece of paper, very much tattered and water-stained. “This came this morning. A letter from my old tutor, Doctor Purcell, in which he describes the ceremonies and festivities surrounding the royal nuptials in Tarnburgh—three
full months ago. The letter was delayed along the way by storms in the north.

“What I wish to know,” he went on, with a savage gleam in his eye, “is why it is that since
you
knew, since
Lord Flinx
knew, since seemingly
everyone in the world
knew but me, you never bothered to mention the fact that my cousin the king was so recently married?”

Lord Polyphant shrugged. “The news is but a day old here. Indeed, it was I who told Lord Flinx, not a quarter of an hour ago. Other letters than your Doctor Purcell's were delayed by the weather.”

“Quite possibly true. But according to this letter, the
betrothal
had been officially announced during the month of Oragia, when communications are very swift. So why was this not the very first thing that anyone mentioned when I arrived in Luden eight long weeks ago?”

The ambassador fingered a pair of ridiculously ornate scissor eyeglasses, which he wore on a scarlet ribbon around his neck. “But do you mean to tell me, Mr. Guilian, that you were actually ignorant of the king's
betrothal
?”

“I spent most of the summer and early autumn in the Phelegra Montes. I did hear rumors while I was passing through Lichtenwald. I dismissed them as gossip—which, as I told you, I never listen to.”

“Then perhaps you should have done, that one time. I thought—everyone thought—when you appeared so reticent on the subject, that it would be tactless to mention a union of which you so obviously disapproved.”

Luke's dark eyebrows came suddenly together. “I disapprove? Why should
I
disapprove? I know nothing about the young lady myself—that is, about Her Majesty, the new Queen of Winterscar. I met her only once. Is there any reason that I
might
disapprove, something I don't even know about?”

Lord Polyphant hesitated; something flickered behind his eyes.
“It was only your seeming reluctance to discuss the match. Speaking for myself, I naturally assumed King Jarred had written to tell you himself.”

Luke frowned thoughtfully. It
was
very puzzling, even disquieting, that Jarred had never done so. But he was not about to mention his misgivings to Polyphant, whose discretion he could not rely on.

The air on the street seemed cleaner, the winter landscape of snow-covered roofs and frozen canals a better and purer place, after the perfumed decadence of the ambassador's salon. Luke leaned up against an iron lamp post and took several deep, restoring breaths of the crisp air.

As usual, the street was filled with a hustle and bustle of tradesmen hawking their wares, with a great coming and going of carriages, wagons, and horse-drawn sledges. Knife-grinders, pie-men, and bustling housewives; country bumpkins carrying baskets of eggs, turnips, hickory nuts and chestnuts over their arms; all of these passed by on foot, while stout old merchants and their even stouter wives went bouncing by in rattling dog-carts. Over on one of the canals, Luke spied a group of children whisking about the ice on skates made of bone and steel.

He took a final deep breath, and then set out walking at a brisk pace. On an impulse, he headed in the direction of Doctor Van Tulp's.

It was a fine day, as sunny as it was cold, and if the streets were a bit slick, there were footpaths and wooden sidewalks most of the way. Within half an hour, Lucius was at the wrought-iron gates of the great institution. He nodded to the porter, who by this time knew him very well by sight, paid a penny for a ticket, and was immediately admitted inside.

In their private world at the top of the house, Izaiah and Tremeur were working on their map. It was a vast project, one that took up
most of the floor, and had already occupied a week of their time. The map was made of six soft calf-skins, beautifully tanned and sewn together, offering a fair smooth surface for the king and his “duchess” to sketch in a fanciful representation of an imaginary continent in charcoal and chalk.

Luke was surprised by the progress they had made since his last visit: the southern half of the continent was finished and all made permanent in black and scarlet ink. Now the lady was very busily chalking in a large portion of the north, while the old man sat on a stool and offered suggestions.

The map was a remarkable portrait, not only representing the physical features, but also the cities, palaces, and the native flora and fauna of the lunar landscape. Though the interior was fanciful—with fire swamps, impossibly high mountains, and floating cities—though the coastline was jagged and unnaturally angular, it was possible to perceive in the overall outline a certain resemblance to terrestrial maps.

Staring down at what the king and the girl had created, Luke knew he was seeing something far more profound than the wild inventions of a mad old gentleman and his fey young companion. The king who had seen his reforms balked again and again by smaller, less far-seeing men, was mapping out a world of his own—a world of the mind where he reigned supreme, where he and his charming little consort in fancy could have everything exactly as they wanted it to be.

The lady was kneeling down on the map in a delightful confusion of flowered satin, lacy petticoats, and whalebone hoops, but at Luke's approach, she sprang to her feet and dropped him a very pretty curtsy.

“Well, General Zabulon,” she said, with a whimsically haughty lift of her eyebrows. “We had begun to think you were never returning to us, that the squids and the cuttlefish had finished you off.”

Luke clicked his heels and saluted. “General Zabulon” was the name she had given him, part of the endless adventure that occupied much of her time. The general, he remembered, had last been seen sailing off in a silver galleon, in search of sunken gold. “Indeed, Your Grace, the cuttlefish and the purple octopi all grow very fierce in this weather, but I found I was able to fight them off.”

The king nodded approvingly. He seemed to take special delight in tales of the sea and of buried treasure, so his duchess humored him with as many such stories as her fertile invention was able to provide. “And the tides?” he asked, on a slightly querulous note.

Luke knew the answer that Izaiah wanted. “The tides, sir, could hardly be lower, and the dikes still hold.” The king was always agitated when the sea ran high. Was he thinking, Luke wondered, of the Maglore engine, the Silver Nef, now in the keeping of the Princess Marjote?

The duchess left her place in the middle of the map, being very careful about the placement of her tiny feet along the way, in order to avoid smearing her handiwork. Under the skirts of her lacy petticoat, Lucius caught a glimpse of rose-colored stockings. Stepping lightly onto the floor, she extended a soft white hand. Feigning a casual gallantry he was very far from feeling, Luke brushed his lips across the tips of her fingers and reluctantly released it.

“We have needed you sadly,” she said, indicating with a motion the map on the floor. “We are baffled by the arctic climate, and have no idea how we ought to go on. We thought if you told us some stories of your northern countries—”

“I have never been in Nordfjall,” said Luke, still reeling from that moment of contact, “and only for a short time in Kjellmark or Lichtenwald, but nothing would give me greater pleasure than to tell you something of my home in Winterscar.”

“Then do so,” she replied, with an imperious wave of her hand. Moving carefully around the edge of the calf-skin, she knelt down
near the polar regions to resume her drawing, this time according to Luke's directions.

So he tried to describe the wild, stark beauty of his native land: the icy glaciers, the rocky moraines, the terrible fissures ripped in the earth, where it was actually possible to see the volcanic fires burning down in the depths. He spoke of dark blue lakes, so cold and so pure, and of boiling hot springs; of the River Scar which tumbled down from the mountains and continued along its course for hundreds of miles through dangerous rapids; and of bears, wolves, and shaggy white boars lurking in the pine woods. “Perhaps it was for contrast with the rugged landscape, the dangerous wilderness to be seen on every side, that the Goblins, when they built the great city of Tarnburgh, chose to make everything so dainty, so exquisite.”

The duchess stopped drawing volcanoes and ice-caverns. She gazed up at Luke, her violet eyes sparkling. “Are the cities of Winterscar truly as people describe them? Are they really like something out of a fairy tale?”

He knelt down beside her. “Tarnburgh is ten times a fairy tale. It is like an expensive toy, a beautiful little clockwork city. And life there can be so elegant, so mannered, so utterly humane, that it's sometimes hard to believe that pain or suffering or cruelty could possibly exist anywhere in the world.”

She was watching his face intently as he ended this speech. “And is that why you first set out on your travels? To see for yourself if these things were true?”

Luke smiled ruefully; he shook his head. “A single visit to the Goblin Quarter in Tarnburgh was enough to teach me the truth. Though I must admit, even the very worst parts of Tarnburgh have nothing to compare with the dirt and wickedness and misery I have since seen elsewhere.”

She gave a deep sigh. They were kneeling so close together there on the floor, Luke could feel her breath on his face. She smelled of
soap, and gingerbread, and attar of roses. Inhaling that scent—looking into her pretty, innocent, whimsical little face—he could not at that moment believe any of the vile stories attached to her name.

Even when he was away from her, even when he was far removed from the spell of her beauty and her wit and her originality, Luke was convinced she could not possibly be the king's mistress. There was something in the way that Izaiah looked at her, something in the way that she spoke to him, that made the idea unthinkable. In this, at least, she must be the victim of evil-minded gossip—of the uncle who was willing to let people believe that terrible, incestuous thing about her, merely because it suited some purpose of his own.

Of the other things—things that were said about her disreputable past, of the many men she had slept with and the shocking details and circumstances under which she had done so—when he was not actually with her, Luke was not so certain whether he believed them or not.

But one thing he knew, one thing remained unshakeable in his mind: whatever the sins of one Tremeur Brouillard—whatever she might have done, or suffered to have done to her—those sins had nothing to do with that sparkling little creature, the “Grand Exalted Hereditary Duchess,” who lived with the king in these enchanted rooms.

There was a short moment of slightly embarrassed silence between them. Then she blushed and looked away, went back to sketching her map. “You must be very eager, I think, to go back home.”

“Sometimes I do want to go home. But I promised myself that I would not return for a very long time. There is still so much that I want to learn.”