As I retreated to my bedchamber, I could not leave off thinking of Cecile de Blasencourt’s accusation. Duplais had brought a sorcerer to Montclaire on the day my mother’s mind collapsed. A fearsome sight he had been, cloaked, hooded, and gloved so one could not see a bit of the human person. Yet Duplais had done all the questioning. The mage had but touched Mama’s hand. How could a single touch drive a person mad?
Later, when I’d heard our guards whispering of the queen’s devilish mage and his exhibition of sorcery that had frightened the wits out of half the court on the night of the Grand Exposition of Science and Magic, I assumed it was the same sorcerer.
My breath caught. What had the apprentice guide at Seravain said?
A master mage came from Merona and laid heavy enchantments about her body.
And I’d seen a mage watching me through the gate tunnel—broad-shouldered, dark-haired, leaning on a white staff, as had the mage at Montclaire . . .
The same mage, certainly. Duplais’ comrade. They had called him Dante.
I slammed my bedchamber door as if Portier de Savin-Duplais stood in its path. How weak and stupid I had been to believe civilized men incapable of horrors. The Royal Accuser had brought me here, but as sure as I lived, his reasons had nothing to do with marriage portions. He believed I could help him capture my father. Certainly he knew what had happened to my mother—he and his mage. Had they murdered Lianelle as well?
It was as if I had leapt suddenly from childhood to adulthood. Why had I accepted the Collegia Seravain’s account of Lianelle’s
accident
so meekly? I should have rattled the collegia gates and demanded to see the mages.
Why hadn’t I bartered with Duplais? Not one step from Montclaire until he told me everything he knew. His every word, every move these past days had been veneered with lies and withholding. Why had he not made a show of our leaving from Montclaire, trusting public view to protect us? Why had he not insisted the Guard Royale escort a maid of honor and royal messenger as far as Merona? We could have slapped our mounts and galloped easily past the three thugs on the forest road. Duplais had seen I could ride well and had even provided me a familiar mount. He had brought de Santo and the other man to defend us. . . .
With only this modicum of reasoning a new and startling truth—stark, vile—lay exposed.
In these recent days, as ever in my life, crises had ensnared me in girlish emotion, self-debate, and hesitation. Words of useful eloquence or forceful wit had died in my throat because I could not formulate them fast enough. Only now, after the events, did my thoughts shed their cobwebby confusion and display answers like a swordmaker’s wares, bright and keen-edged. Duplais had
allowed
us to be caught by our masked pursuers. He wanted to see if I would run to my father or bargain my safety to be taken to him. He had entrusted our lives to his confederates, so that he could judge what our assailants were after and how I would respond.
As if by an alchemist’s hand, anger fused festered guilt and grieving into molten iron. Spirit and flesh pulsed with its heat, and its weight settled into my belly. I had to grow up. Trust no one. If I were to find justice for Lianelle, Ambrose, and Mama, I’d no more leeway for sentiment or timidity. I had to become as bold as Lianelle imagined me.
Lianelle’s lockets and ring went into the hidden drawer in the armoire, mixed up with my mother’s jewelry. The key to the drawer went around my neck on a silver chain. The ivory case would sit on the dressing table with my toiletries until I could decide what to do with the powder inside it. As an afternoon storm yielded to a mournful drizzle, I read Lianelle’s letter one more time, committing every word to memory. Then I lit the papers with my candle, dropped them on my emptied plate, and watched them reduced to ash. No one would learn my secrets until I was ready to share them.
CHAPTER 7
5 OCET, EVENING
I
stood at my bedchamber window, watching the storm clouds roll in from the south, in a race with the night deepening in the east. “It’s best you take the inside way round to the ducessa’s apartments, damoselle,” said Ella from behind me. “Cutting through the ball-rooms makes it quick enough.”
“I don’t understand. I can walk straight through the inner courtyards to the west wing. If it rains, I can detour through the Rotunda. It will take me half the time.”
“Please, you’ll not want to do that, damoselle.” Ella’s freckles pulsed on her pale cheeks. Green chevrons gleamed from beside her eyes. “It’s already raining, and”—the words gushed from her in a torrent—“the Rotunda’s a dreadful place. Haunted.”
The palace tower bells had just rung seventh hour in the evening watch, and I was more than ready to set out for my evening tutorial. Surely in the privacy of her own chambers, Lady Cecile would speak more freely. I had a thousand questions, but before all, I wanted to hear what she knew of my mother’s illness. And surely the ducessa could advise how I might get permission to visit Ambrose.
I latched my writing case and took the mantle Ella held waiting. “I’m sure that if a ghost wished to haunt Castelle Escalon, it would prefer the dungeons in the old keep to the drafty Rotunda. My sister and brother and I played ball or echo games there when we would visit Merona. Not a single phantasm ever showed up to frighten us away.”
People who could slaughter a seventeen-year-old girl with impunity or break a woman’s mind, hiding their misdeeds behind a cloak of magical mystery, terrified me more than spectral gossip. The afternoon’s mundane tutorials had given me time to consider the disconcerting sights in the city. Likely everything I’d seen could be reasonably explained: the floating lights by some gaseous emissions, the oddly falling objects by optical illusion. And every waterfront city had problems with rats. Duplais might think it useful to frighten me.
Ella stacked my supper cups and plates and wiped the table. “The haunting’s only been since the Grand Exposition,” she said, not at all mollified. “A gentleman fell ill that night and died in the Rotunda. Some say his ghost lingers, as he left unfinished business behind. Others say it’s the dark mage who cursed the place that night—and mayhap the whole city as well.” The girl’s voice and spirit shrank. “He raises the dead, you know, for the queen, so she might comfort her poor mites as they travel Ixtador. But the Temple folk are too scared of him to look into it. None goes into the Rotunda twice and never, never at sunset. Don’t do it, miss.”
My heart seized. Not from the fancies of ghosts or hauntings. Nor from the vile chicanery of deadraising, though it was despicable that anyone should exploit Queen Eugenie’s tragic history—four children dead in infancy. Rather it was the memory of an act of indisputable human evil. Edmond de Roble, a gentle-spoken young lord, the fairest gentleman I had ever seen, had not fallen ill on the night of the Grand Exposition of Science and Magic. He had been cruelly murdered.
“I don’t believe in ghosts or deadraising,” I said, breathless with the hurt. “The Pantokrator has created the Veil to divide the demesnes of death and life.”
I dismissed Ella and hurried off in search of answers, though some questions could never in the world be resolved.
I had met Edmond de Roble only once, a few months before Papa’s disappearance. But I had noticed a singular, pleasurable . . .
warmth
. . . deep in my stomach whenever I thought of him, and decided that if Papa would not allow me to remain an independent woman as I wished, Edmond would be a fair compromise. Papa had held the young lord in great regard, or so I had believed.
I could scarce recall Edmond’s true visage anymore. It was Duplais’ description of the young man’s mortal torment, recounted at Papa’s trial, that would be forever etched on my spirit. Evidence said that my father, whom I had believed the strongest, wisest, most honorable man in the world, had systematically lacerated Edmond’s flesh, drained his blood, and ordered his body deposited like offal on the floor of the Rotunda. What daemon had come ravening from Dimios’s frozen demesne and eaten my father’s soul?
I emerged from the ground floor of the palace into an expansive puzzle of open plazas and gardens. My path to the middle section of the west wing, where Lady Cecile resided, must cross the vast open space, now awash with autumn rain. Or I could detour slightly to my right through a vaulted arcade and into the ancient gray-domed structure that intruded on the newer palace like a troll’s barrow pushed from under the earth.
The bells rang the quarter hour. Rain sluiced down the walls and drainpipes. Dreadful memories were not ghosts, nor were shame or grief or an anger that scalded my blood. I set out for the Rotunda.
I remembered the dim, cavernous Rotunda as a refuge in summer heat, its thick walls retaining the night’s coolness until late afternoon. Indeed, when I tugged open the heavy door, a chilly flood set me shivering. Foolish, Ella’s talk of ghosts and deadraising.
The dark mage
. . . this Dante again, Duplais’ comrade—the only one of the queen’s consilium not executed as my father’s conspirator.
My slippers echoed lightly as I hurried through the deserted foyer, between the circled ranks of columns supporting the crowning dome, and into the vast open space. A feathery touch brushed my cheek. I blinked, just as a thread of purple light caught my eye high in the dome.
My heart, ignoring reason, rattled in my breast.
Silly girl.
I peered into the gloom. King Philippe had suspended a great pendulum from the peak of the dome for the Grand Exposition. And though my brother’s remarks were sauced with spite, Ambrose had confessed it a wonder, its path scribing the very circle the theories of the earth’s rotation predicted. Perhaps the purple light was some part of the pendulum structure.
I moved on more slowly, eyes drawn upward. Another soft brush on my forehead. Another on my hand. No sooner did I give in and blink than rose and green threads floated beside three purple ones. I stopped again. The soft rhythm of my slippers seemed to continue, a tap embedded in a sigh of moving air.
Near the center of the Rotunda, a vertical gray wire stretched into the dark heights, a ball of dulled gold suspended from it. The unmoving pendulum.
The muted taps soon sounded more like the chink of metal on firm-seated metal, hammer on chisel. A tide of cold air flowed from across the chamber. I blinked a’purpose, and the threads of light—hundreds of them now—drifted downward from the dome like falling leaves, coalescing in the air near the stilled pendulum. Soon I could see them even without blinking, settling themselves into some pattern. The sight reminded me of a game played with a beam of light in a dark room . . . where a reverse image was formed by light thrown through the design cut into a paper.
But neither will nor diversion could obscure my horror at the crime that had happened here.
The threads shaped an upraised hand. The shadings of pale flesh streaked with scarlet must surely be the odd light, illuminating one of the mosaic figures in the dome. Yet the hand seemed too large, too close, too real. Not far from the hand, mottled gray threads wove themselves into wide diagonal swaths, shaded folds, and then glimmers of scarlet joined and pooled across the gray. And even as I named the red stains blood on fabric, more flesh took shape above the gray garment . . . a chin . . . a cheek. . . .
Father Creator, send thy angels!
A well-proportioned mouth, the straight nose, wide-set eyes, closed in repose, bruised and abraded flesh, blood everywhere.
Edmond
. The very image that had occupied my mind since leaving my bedchamber.
As if fed by my grief and outrage, the image rapidly reached its completion. No sacred mosaic, the figure took on bulk as well as dimension—a young man bound, hands over head, as if he dangled from the king’s pendulum. Yet still the atrocity was not done, for the light-sculpted figure began to writhe, and soon the lacerated face was ridged and seamed with agony. The pale lips stretched, and a whisper in my ear resolved into a faint keening as of a wounded animal. The eyes flicked open, black and wholly empty.
Pain crushed my heart and ribs, near blinding me with heated colors that smeared and melted into blazing scarlet.
“Stop this!” I could not have named the target of my outrage.
The image shattered. In a frenzied explosion, the thready lights sprayed across the vastness of the dark before collecting like fireflies around a human-sized silhouette not five metres away from me. The cloaked figure twisted in my direction so fast, the face was but a pale blur streaked with black. But I could not miss the white staff in his grip.
Get away. Get away. Get away.
Throttling a whimper, I raced across the chamber toward the golden pool of lamplight that marked the far doors. Under the colonnade. Through the vestibule.
I stretched my hand toward the door, only to have the bronze slab fly open before I’d touched it. Gray evening outlined a figure in the doorway. I yelped like a dog who’d been stepped on.
“Hold! Hold, damoselle!” He grabbed my flailing hands.
“Let me go!” I thrashed and struggled to get loose, straining to see through watering eyes.
“What’s happened here?” He held firm. His hands were warm and solid, his form slender and of modest height. Not monstrous. “Damoselle Anne?”