The Safe-Keeper's Secret (23 page)

Thomas had not moved, but now he looked up, straight at Fiona. “He is coming here,” he said quietly, in that voice of certainty that meant some truth had been revealed to him and could not be doubted. “And he has come to look for … something that belongs to him.”

Fiona put a hand to her heart, feeling faint for a moment, but neither Robert nor Reed appeared to catch the significance of that remark. “Here—your cloak—and you'll need some warm socks inside your boots,” Reed said. “Hurry, Fiona! You don't want to miss him.”

Thomas too was on his feet. “No,” he said, heading to the main room and the box of muddy boots. “None of us wants to miss this.”

They woke Isadora and insisted she come with them, though she said she had had enough of royalty during her weeks in Wodenderry. Nonetheless, to please them, she pulled on her boots and wrapped herself
in her cloak and followed them out the door. Then, moving as fast as such an odd party could, the whole group headed directly toward the village, and they were not the only ones. In that mysterious way that news spreads over country towns, the word seemed to have gotten out to everyone that the king had come to Tambleham. The three or four houses they passed on the way stood empty; Fiona never doubted that all the residents were on their way to the town square. Their own group of five overtook several other parties, bigger and smaller, all of them heading for the main street of the village. “Did you hear?” they called to each other as they tramped through the mud and snow. “Did you hear? The king has come to town!”

They arrived to find the town thronged with people, everyone who lived within ten miles having somehow thought to gather here at this exact moment. The crowd was awestruck and well behaved, though, milling about at the fringes of the town square, no one willing to get too close to the cortege that had pulled up right by the village green. Reed had been right: The procession consisted of two carriages and what looked to be dozens of riders, both men and coaches decorated with the king's colors of scarlet and gold. Fiona had never seen horses so fine as those that pulled the elegant black carriages or those that carried the king's silent, watchful men.

Someone grabbed Fiona's arm and called her name. “There you are!” It was Angeline, and her face was bright with excitement. “I wanted to come back to get you, but I didn't want to leave! Are you all here? Reed and Isadora and everyone? The king has come to town—can you believe it?”

Fiona pushed forward through the mob, towing Angeline behind her. “Thomas, Reed, Robert—let's all get as close as we can. I want to see the king's face—I want to hear everything he has to say.”

She met less resistance from the other villagers than she expected. Everyone else wanted to see the king, too, but everyone else was just a little afraid of being quite so close to royalty. Within a few minutes, she and her small group of friends had won their way to the very front of the crowd, till they were so close to the two carriages that they could see the brushstrokes on the coats of arms. The king's outriders drew a tight circle around the coaches, their spirited horses dancing a little from side to side. Fiona could get no closer, but she was near enough to see the door of one coach open, and a tall, severe figure step out and come to stand on a small dais in the center of the green.

The crowd was deathly quiet for a moment, and then everyone began to cheer. It was the king.

“His majesty, King Marcus!” one of the riders bawled out. “Her majesty, Princess Lirabel!”

For a second figure was stepping out of the second coach and coming to take her place beside the first. Fiona stood on tiptoe, as curious to see the woman as the man. The princess was nearly as tall as her father, dark like he was, her features as strict and grave. But, as Reed had said, her face looked kinder and sweeter, touched with sadness or disappointment. She stood behind and a little to one side of her father on the dais, her gaze fixed on his profile.

The king was staring down at the crowd, his eyes darting from face to face as if he was looking for someone he might recognize. “Who among you is mayor of this town?” he asked at last. His voice was thin and cold and carried easily to every listener in the throng.

The assembled people murmured amongst themselves and shrugged a little and did not answer. “Have you no mayor, no one who acts as leader?” the king repeated, his voice even colder.

Dirk the tavernkeeper shouldered his way forward. “I speak up now and then, sire, as the occasion demands,” he called up to the stage. “I reckon I can speak for the village now.”

A general undertone of approval meant the villagers were agreeable to making Dirk their spokesman. The king fixed his dark eyes on the barman. “Then I have a question to ask you,” he said.

“Anything, sire.”

“Eighteen years ago a baby was brought in secret to this village. It is news I have just this week learned from a young woman recently come to court.”

Fiona's hand clenched on Isadora's arm. “Megan,” she whispered. Isadora nodded but put her finger to her lips for silence.

The king was still speaking. “The child was a boy. No one knew his name or his parents' names. Yet he was brought in the arms of the Safe-Keeper from my court—who died by his own hand on his return from your village.”

Now the crowd was full of muttering and speculation. Fiona caught more than a few people staring in the direction of her own little knot of friends. Dirk nodded calmly. “Aye, sire. That story is true.”

The king's eyes seemed to glitter in the frosty air. “I would meet this boy,” he said, his voice very stern. His daughter took a step back from him and trained her gaze on the wood of the stage. “I would meet this young man whom I believe to be my son.”

Now the mutterings of the mob grew louder and more excited. Those in back were standing on tiptoe, looking around, trying to locate Reed in
the crowd. Those nearest the king had already spotted Reed's tall form, and eager hands began to push all of them forward from behind. Fiona stumbled from the force of their enthusiasm; she saw Reed turn indignantly to upbraid someone behind him.

Dirk turned to survey the surging mass. “He's here, I believe, sire. I saw him earlier. Reed? There you are, lad! Come forward and meet your king.”

Fiona felt someone's hand close iron-tight around her arm, but she didn't even look to see who grabbed her. She was watching Reed take an uncertain step toward the dais, then look back as if afraid to see what he was leaving behind, and then take another step. Dirk caught him by the shoulder and presented him to the king.

“This is Reed, sire, the child brought to the village in secret so long ago. He's a good boy—or rather, a fine young man. Any man would be proud to call him son.”

Princess Lirabel seemed to grow smaller and thinner as King Marcus bent down very low to look searchingly into Reed's face. “Are you that baby?” the king demanded. “There is nothing I would not do for a male child of my body, be he legitimate or bastard. Are you my son?”

“I don't know,” Reed said.

Another voice rang above all the other murmurings of the mob. “He is not!” the speaker proclaimed in a voice meant for carrying news as far as it needed to go. “You have no son!”

And Fiona felt herself jerked forward by the man who was speaking, the man who had such tight hold on her arm. Thomas, whose greatest wish was coming true as he announced an unwelcome truth to the king.

The king, in fact, was glaring at Thomas with a most unnerving fury. He was still bent from the waist, the better to stare at the people arrayed before him. “Who are you?” King Marcus demanded. “What do you know about this boy and his parentage?”

“I am a Truth-Teller, and I have never told a lie,” Thomas said calmly. He had dragged Fiona so close to the dais that they were merely inches from the king. Reed put his arm around Fiona, but she could not tell which of them was trembling. She looked up at the king, at his handsome, unhappy face, and watched his gaze flick between Thomas and Reed.

“You are telling me this child was brought here from the royal city eighteen years ago, in great secrecy, and yet he is not my son?” the king demanded, his voice very tight.

“He was not brought here that night. He was born here to the Safe-Keeper herself. The child brought here that night was a girl.”

And Fiona felt herself pushed forward one more time, till she was almost nose-to-nose with the king.

And then it was her wish came true.

“Look on your father's face, Fiona,” Thomas said. “For you are the child brought here from Wodenderry that night.”

The king straightened to his full height, disappointment and displeasure making his face look even bleaker. “Is this true?” he said at last, though it was unclear whom he asked.

Fiona found her voice. “True, sire,” she said in a breathless voice. “My mother—the Safe-Keeper who raised me—told me the story a few days before she died. My aunt can confirm it, for she was there the night I arrived. They did not know how valuable I was or why I might have been hurried from the city, so they thought to protect me by pretending I was the Safe-Keeper's daughter instead.”

“Then—then—who is this boy?” the king demanded, pointing at Reed. Who stood stock-still beside Fiona, as dazed as the king, as astonished as everyone else in the now-silent crowd.

Thomas answered that. “The Safe-Keeper's son.”

“Who is his father?” the king snapped, still clearly unwilling to believe the story that was unfolding around him. “Since everyone apparently believed him to be me.”

“His father was a merchant from a nearby town,” Thomas said, gesturing with his left hand. Behind her, Fiona heard a choked cry. “A man with whom the Safe-Keeper had had a brief liaison when he believed his own fiancée had perished in an accident.”

And so it was that Robert Bayliss's wish came true.

“Then—” the king said, and looked around him blindly, as if surprised to find himself before an unruly audience of people, hearing things he did not wish to know. “Then this boy is not my child. He is not my bastard son.”

“You have no son,” Thomas said, speaking with a certain relish. “You have never sired a son. You never will. You have only Fiona and Princess Lirabel. You must name the princess the heir to your throne, for you will beget no other legitimate children.”

And so it was that the princess's wish came true.

The king turned clumsily toward the woman next to him on the stage, who seemed to have grown stronger and more regal in bearing with every one of Thomas's words. “Lirabel,” he said, and his proud voice was broken. “Lirabel, help me to my carriage. Ride with me back to the city.”

“Gladly, Father,” she said, and her voice was rich and compassionate. “Step carefully here—take your courtier's hand. There. I will join you in a moment.”

And as soon as her father was seated, Princess Lirabel stepped back onto the dais and crossed to the very edge. No one had moved. Reed and Thomas and Fiona were standing exactly where they had stood for the preceding momentous ten minutes, and the entire crowd waited still, expectant and hopeful.

Lirabel came to her knees at the edge of the stage and reached her hand out to Fiona. Unthinking, Fiona put her own in that strong, sure grasp. “Come to me in Wodenderry,” the princess said in a voice so low only Fiona could hear it. “I would like to get to know my sister.”

Fiona nodded, still too numb to say very much. “I would be glad to,” she whispered. “In a few days. When everything is settled here.”

Lirabel squeezed her hand and let it drop. Quickly, she rose to her feet, disappeared inside her father's carriage, and shut the door. The outriders cleared a space in the crowd for the two coaches to turn, and the trumpeter announced that the king's carriage was on the move. In a few moments, the king and his entire procession had disappeared down the road.

Chapter Sixteen