“What’s happened here?” I said.
“Your father happened,” said Duplais. “Dante happened. Ride faster. Come sunset, we could be equally beset. Come sunset of Sola Passiert, the possibilities are worse.” Sola Passiert—when night overbalances day.
It was a relief to emerge from Riverside’s gloom into the afternoon bustle at the harbor. The river sparkled like diamond-dusted satin. A swarm of small boats threaded their way through anchored barges and fishing vessels to a newly anchored caravel like ants to a discarded bun, each hoping to be the first to glean news or scoop up rare finds, to sell spirits, limes, or luck charms to returning seamen, to deliver letters and collect harbor fees.
But as soon as I spied the forbidding finger of black stone rising from a rock in the deepest channel of the river, all other concerns dropped away. Ambrose . . . my exuberant, never-still-a-moment brother.
Saints have mercy.
Duplais paid a tallyman’s lad to watch our horses, and we trudged down to the waterfront on planks laid across the muddy banks. Gulls swooped and screeched or marched around the mud flats, pecking at mussels and crabs. Black posts flanked one of the docks, where a dark-skinned man with a pistol at his belt lounged in a small boat, picking his teeth. His eyes sat atop his face as if the Pantokrator had near forgotten to put them there. “Summat thinks to visit the Spindle?”
“I am escorting the lady to visit a prisoner,” said Duplais. “We carry the queen’s warrant.”
“Warrant don’t mean fishbones to me,” said the rower, stretching his shoulders. “I’m just Scago the ferryman. Come aboard.”
As he goaded the little boat through the slopping current, Scago grumbled of unstable tide flows, tricky rocks, and unnatural fogs that had tormented river men of late. I did not heed his chatter. The Spindle demanded my full attention, huge and dismal, a blight on the day.
The black granite had been smoothed and glazed, and barred slot windows had been inserted into the featureless stone. Elsewise, one might have thought the tower sprouted naturally from its rugged base. The gray-green water of the Ley chopped and frothed against the ugly lump of black rock. Barely enough mass extended from the base of the tower to allow the waterbirds a gathering place.
The sole entry to the Spindle lay beyond an iron gate anchored in giant rock pillars that protruded from the water. The gate, the first of three, so I’d read, clanked upward when Scago blew a whistle in a stuttering pattern. The pattern changed by the day, he told us.
With a few heaves of the ferryman’s powerful shoulders, we lurched beneath the weedy, dripping gate only to face a second at least six stories high, its bars wrought with outlines of monstrous beasts bound with chains. The first gate groaned, scraped, and plunged into the water behind us. Ambrose had been brought here at night. In chains. Hearing that dreadful sound must have felt like the end of the world.
As our boat bobbed in the slurping channel between the gates, growing dread gnawed my spirit. The murky water stank of sewage. And my ears itched and buzzed, as if I stood in the heart of a great city—as if the effects of Lianelle’s potion were just wearing off. “Magic . . .”
Duplais’ head jerked around. I’d not meant to speak it aloud.
“Aye,” said Scago, feathering his oars to maintain our position. “Spindle were enchanted before the Blood Wars, when sorcerers ruled. You’ll see nae spit of rust on gates, locks, or bars. And none’s been able to escape the wards, save the Treacher’s whore four year ago. None knows how that was done. Magic, likely. Magic’s comin’ back, you know. World’s changing. All can see it. Maybe the Spindle won’t hold no more. Or maybe it’ll be locked forever and none’ll ever go free.”
World’s changing.
I drew my thin cloak tighter. The “Treacher’s whore” was Maura ney Billard, my father’s dupe. I glanced over my shoulder at Duplais. For once his stony face was staring at something . . . or someone . . . a long way from me.
“I’ll see your warrant.” A short, smiling, round-cheeked man greeted us from the far side of the second gate. “I am Pognole, Warder of Spindle Prison.”
Warder Pognole appeared sturdy as a rock fortress himself; almost as broad as he was tall, his head bald and leathery, his garments of padded canvas and leather sewn with steel plates. His thighs might have been more of the granite pillars. He could likely bend the iron bars of his gates without losing his smile. I prayed my face revealed no smuggler’s guilt.
Scago eased the boat to the gate so Duplais could pass the royal warrant through the bars.
Pognole glanced up sharply from the document. “Damoselle de Vernase! Indeed! And come to the Spindle of your own will. Bravely done. And who might you be, sonjeur?”
“Portier de Savin-Duplais, administrator of Her Majesty’s household, sent to supervise Damoselle de Vernase.”
The warder’s glance scanned the warrant again. “Alas, you needs must remain out here.”
“But I am required—”
“You’re not
Named
.” The warder rolled the page and stuck it in a pouch slung from his belt, opposite a plain, battered sword. “Don’t matter who you are. I’ve a method here. Those not Named in the warrant don’t enter. Out the boat and onto the bench, or I’ll have Scago tip you out.”
The bench was a slimy wooden platform bolted to the gatehouse wall some ten centimetres above the wavelets. The only way to get anywhere from the bench was to climb a sheer stone wall or swim through the palm-width gaps between the bars of the gates.
Duplais, red-faced, seethed as he clambered from boat to bench. But he didn’t bother to launch into bombast or otherwise assert privilege. No one with a mind would believe that useful. Warder Pognole could crack his spine like a dry stick.
Once the administrator was perched on the bench, knees drawn up to keep his boots out of the river, the second gate clanked and groaned, rising slowly from the water. Not a speck of rust marred the thick bars.
“Maintain your dignity, damoselle,” Duplais called, as Scago rowed under the second gate. “You are Her Majesty’s gentlewoman. And consider: False hopes are worse than any bars or gates.”
Unlike his usual pronouncements, these did not sound like warnings from a Royal Accuser to a suspect. His head sank to his knees, and I wondered if he thought of sweet Maura, condemned by his own relentless pursuit of treachery.
The second gate clanged shut. Across the stretch of churning water, a wooden dock stretched out from the mouth of a narrow cavern that penetrated the Spindle’s rocky base. No evidence of the third of the Spindle Prison’s notorious water gates was visible. Scago shipped his oars, and the boat bumped gently against the bollards.
While the oarsman tied up his boat, the warder offered me a hand up to the dock. A few metres’ walk took us onto the apron of rock that fronted the cavern.
“I’ll see the bag now, damoselle,” said the warder, grinning cheerfully. An ugly, pale scar creased one ruddy cheek from brow to chin. “Can’t have any naughtiness brought into my prison.”
He laid out books, clothes, paper, ink, and wine flask on the ledge of a barred window hacked from the stone to provide light in the cavelike gatehouse. He sniffed the ink, shook out the bag and the shirts, and quickly thumbed through the books and papers.
Clicking his tongue in disapproval, he held up the bulbous green flask. “Don’t like books or wine for prisoners,” he said. “Don’t like ’em forgetting what they are or where. It’s discipline gets ’em through the days. Not coddling.”
“Perfectly understandable,” I said, trying not to bristle. “But of course my brother is hostage, not prisoner. I assumed you would permit a few small reminders of home.”
“Maybe. Don’t imagine he’ll care. He’s not a friendly sort. Nor studious.”
Mumbling, he passed a pewter charm over the wax plug sealing the wine flask. He frowned and rubbed the charm with his thumb. Mumbled again. This was no Gautieri brilliance, but the kind of magic I’d seen growing up—unreliable and inefficient at best. Pognole tried his charm three more times until satisfaction replaced the frown. “Spell seal seems to be intact. So you’ve not put something ill inside the flask.”
“The wine was brought straight from Castelle Escalon’s cellar.”
He chuckled. “That’s no recommendation. But I’ll bring it along once I’ve put it in a skin. Not allowing the young rapscallion to have a bit of glass, now, am I? Might break. Might cut.”
He set the flask aside, his smile crinkling the leathery skin around his eyes. He breathed through his mouth, nasal, liquid breaths, as if his nose was clogged by the river damp. “Have you weapons on you, damoselle? Or magics? Pretty little daggers or pox charms or unlocking spells? ’Twould be a foolish deed for a girl by rights should be living here alongside her kin.”
“Certainly not.” I mustered innocent indignation. But I dared not add more words. Stammering would make him suspicious.
His thick fingers curled, rubbing idly together as his gaze roamed over me. “We’ve no females here to inspect you, and I don’t trust these charms to detect all. ’Twould be sufficient grounds to turn you away. You see, I’ve just got the boy tamed. Don’t like the thought of him getting riled up again.”
Of a sudden the barrel-necked warder’s round cheeks, thick fingers, and crinkle-eyed smile sickened me. How had he
tamed
and
disciplined
my brother, who would have been wild with terror when they brought him to this horrid place?
Maintain your dignity
, Duplais had warned. I summoned the hauteur of Eugenie’s highest-ranked ladies. “Warder Pognole, the Queen of Sabria has expressed her especial trust in me by that document you hold. She can hold no fond memories of this place, having herself been unjustly imprisoned here. And as Sonjeur de Duplais will tell you, and as you yourself noted by so rightly forbidding him entry, she will allow no whim to contravene her warrant.”
Pognole’s smile became chipped flint. For a moment I thought he might topple me into the gray-green water. But I did not flinch, and with a motion deceptively quick, he shoved the two shirts and one of the books into my arms. The rest of the materials he returned to my bag, which he slung over his thick shoulder. “I’ll provide the wineskin. But I’ll pass the detainee the rest of your bounty only as he deserves. Hostages, just as prisoners, must be taught proper behavior. Come.”
The warder snatched a torch from a bracket. Leaving Scago snoring in his boat, we climbed the slanted walkway into a natural rock cavern. Walls and ceiling were slimed with moldy seeps. Every step required attention, as the flat floor was riddled with cracks and channels, some no more than a finger’s width, some spanning almost a metre. Water slurped and gurgled in the inky depths.
As we left the afternoon behind I felt, more than heard, the warder mumble a word. Iron bars shot up from the water, from the lip of the cavern ceiling, and from either side of the opening, slamming, screeching, clanging into an impenetrable grate behind us.
The metallic dissonance faded into a profound quiet.
Pognole parked his torch and pointed up a narrow, twisting stair lit by gloomy daylight. Every twenty or thirty steps, a barred window open to the weather illuminated a landing and two or three iron doors.
The wind gusted through the barred portals, skirling up and down the stair. Together with the distant, lonely cries of river birds, it composed a song of misery that only compounded the silence from behind the doors.
“How many are prisoned here?” I asked as we climbed.
“Only three just now.” He was sorry for it.
The warder did not stop until we had reached a single iron door at the topmost step of the Spindle stair. As the damp wind whipped my hair, Pognole unbolted a hinged steel plate and peered through a square grate in the door. “Seems he’s at home. No surprise, eh?”
From inside came the sound of soft, quick breaths.
Pognole pushed a key from his belt ring into the lock. The door swung open and the warder stepped through, motioning me, in no questionable terms, to wait. But around his sturdy bulk I glimpsed a blur of long limbs, whirling, lunging, one brief pause to balance, then another spin-and-slash executed with grim, mute precision. Martial exercises.
My heart raced from the climb, from anticipation, and now from the fear that the tall, hard man I’d glimpsed—dark hair trimmed close to his head and jaw, gaunt limbs rippling with corded sinews—could not possibly be my brother. Ambrose had adored both fighting and dancing, and practiced them with equal devotion, but always laughing, a handsome, rangy youth whose flowing hair glinted with copper, whose easy grace and careless beauty had roused both pride and jealousy in his elder sister.
“Display before your warder, prisoner. ’Tis not a day to play your games. You’ll rue the choice.”
The prisoner had moved out of sight. After an overstretched moment, Warder Pognole motioned me into a semicircular room of rough stone, the barred, slotlike gaps in the wall open to the weather. A thin mat leaking straw, a single blanket, a battered tin pot—nothing more occupied the room, save its resident.
He stood, back to the door, arms spread and hands flat against the curved wall, legs splayed wide, bowed head pressed to the stone. A mortifying posture. Indecent. Slops of common canvas scarce reached his knees. A filthy shirt stretched thin and tight across his shoulders, sleeves ragged. No hose. No shoes. Angry red scars glared on his wrists. Impossible . . . yet the back of his left hand bore the imprint of an angled knife—the zahkri, the mark of our Cazar blood.