Frozen in place, hand outstretched, I watched him go. He cast a last ravishing smile over his shoulder as the mist enfolded him. I could not say whether he dissolved or walked away.
When I could move again, I raced after him across the gardens and into the east wing, no doubt leaving a tale of haunting behind me. Three mirrors along the way testified to the continued efficacy of the invisibility potion.
The man . . . ghost . . . revenant . . . moved swiftly, too. When I topped the stair to the queen’s private gaming rooms, black-and-white-striped sleeves were just visible through the closing door. I could approach no closer. Lady Antonia had pulled a chair in front of the door and sat herself there like Doorward Viggio’s apprentice. Even unseen, I could find no way past her.
I did not return to my own room. Rather I sped back through the palace halls, fevered to confirm the suspicion rising in me. Past Castelle Escalon’s public rooms, through the west-wing doors, up steps, down passages until I reached the gallery I had traversed so often to reach Lady Cecile’s apartments—the Kings’ Gallery.
And there he was, taller than life, one hand on a ruby-studded sword hilt fashioned in the shape of a dragon, one on the hip of his out-of-fashion trunk hose, a short purple cape thrown artfully across one shoulder. Brown beard and narrow mustache shaped carefully around full lips, quirked to give the merest hint of a disarming, lopsided smile. A gallant, commanding, captivating presence, even rendered in oils. Soren de Maslin-Nivanne, sixty-first King of Sabria, a man more than twenty years dead.
Antonia’s adored son had fallen in battle with the Kadr witchlords when he was but six-and-twenty, before his child wife, Eugenie de Sylvae, was old enough that their marriage could be consummated. And now he visited her in the night.
Back to the wall, hands to my temples, I slid to the floor of the gallery in front of the portrait, reason, emotion, and body entirely exhausted. I could not move.
You’re awake late. Another curse we share. Would you talk?
But neither practiced self-discipline nor the clear voice of my friend of the mind could hold back the mindstorm.
23 OCET, DAWN
“TIME TO BE UP, DAMOSELLE. Sixth hour every morning, you told me.”
I jerked upright to see Ella’s freckled face bathed in candlelight. No earthshaking, but her hand on my shoulder, had startled me into waking. “Yes. Certainly. I need to be awake.”
My mouth felt stuffed with wool; my head with rock. At some dark hour of the night a footman had found me sleeping in the Kings’ Portrait Gallery, and somehow I had staggered back here to bed. The Aspirant’s leather face and guttural voice had haunted me through hours of fitful slumber, along with a girl child’s moonglow eyes and a dead king’s air-touched kiss.
I kneaded my right hand where I could yet sense the brush of his beard. An apparition . . . a phantom . . . conversing, gesturing, thinking, reacting like a human person. Impossible.
Duplais had to know what I had seen. I’d tie a love knot to my window. But what was I to do between now and sunset? Idleness would drive me mad.
Ella brought cheese and baked apples. As I dressed and ate—checking my ring, holy saints, always checking my ring—I tried to devise some strategy for the day. I had an hour until I would be expected in the queen’s bedchamber. If I could get my hands on the Mondragon
Book of Greater Rites
and find out what magical working required raising the dead, perhaps we’d know what Dante and the Aspirant planned. I could use the potion, steal the book from Dante’s room. But I’d need Duplais to help decipher its meaning.
Perhaps I had time to learn something of nireals. Shoving the remains of breakfast aside, I pulled the two pendants from the armoire. Though the same highly polished silver as Dante’s palm-sized spheres, they were but solid, flat ovals the size of my thumb. They bore no markings save the frog on Lianelle’s and the olive tree on the unbound one she had made for me.
Soul mirrors
, she’d called them. There was only one way to learn more.
Barricading the rising mindstorm, I grasped the pendant my sister had named hers and invoked its key.
“Soror deliria
.
”
Silly sister.
And she was there. As if she had run past me only a moment before. As if I might glimpse her through the sun glare did I turn my head quickly enough. So close . . .
Heat and blazing Aubine sunlight, blinding swaths of gold and green and rich brown, scorching hair and blistering skin. She’d been traipsing through the maquis . . . the fragrant oils of juniper and madder, smilax and sagewort hung sticky on her clothes . . . and the smell of dog. She never went anywhere without the dogs . . . wrestled with them in the grass . . . napped with them in the heat of the day. The dry ground crunched beneath her boots as she ran. . . .
Saints, Nel, do you never
walk
anywhere?
Whistling at woodchats. Yelling at the shrike to scare it off the particular lizard she was hunting. Forever hunting, for herbs or insects, for leaves or roots or arrow grass, for pebbles or eggs or carob buds on the verge of bursting, for bits of glass or bark, for a cloud shape, for a raindrop, a scent, a nut, for sand or clay or green stones . . . Insatiable. All to feed her magic.
For a moment, I felt as if I were falling . . .
. . . and then did the immensity of my sister’s desire rattle my bones, like the substance of the earth rising through my feet . . . and then her talent, forked fire touching every piece of the life she loved—the natural world, learning, adventure, Ambrose, Mama, me—and binding it with laughter and rebellion and teasing and the vow never, ever to stop, to hide, to be quiet, to stay in one place, to serve, to forgive, to be satisfied, to hold back, to fail, to be ordinary . . .
. . . and then I felt words, not spoken in the present moment, as my mysterious friend did, but waiting for me in this magic to be graven in my spirit for now and forever. . . .
Don’t be scared of this, Ani. I want you to understand. We’re not the same and that’s good. Magic is my calling. War and poetry and prison will drive and shape Ambrose. But you are our true warrior, our defender. Your mind and heart are our bright center . . . our fortress . . . our home.
I dropped the pendant. Bent double, I clutched my breast, racked by dry, barren sobs. How could talent and life so large fit in one single heart? And how could it all be snuffed out? For all these years, even before Papa rode away, before Mama went mad, I had chided and scolded Lianelle because she was not some imitation of me. Someone polite and tidy and reserved. Someone ordinary. “I never knew, Nel. Never understood. And I’m not what you thought. I’ve lost you and lost Ambrose and failed. . . .”
A sharp rap on my bedchamber door wrenched me from grief and regret and deposited me alone in my bedchamber.
I blinked, fist clutching at the hurt in my breast, stunned by the incomparable wonder and undeniable terror of the pendant’s magic. Lianelle had been present in a manner far more deep and true than memory, more substantial than the person just beyond that door. And Dante had created something similar that he used to summon the dead. Was that why they seemed so
real
?
The visitor rapped again.
“Yes, all right. Coming.” I pinched my cheeks and pressed my temples. The turgid gray beyond my window had taken on a rosy cast.
“Heurot!”
Duplais’ yellow-haired secretary, lacking his usual grin, bowed and passed me a folded paper, sealed without any device. “This was left at the main gates day before yesterday, damoselle. The gate warders sent it to Sonjeur de Duplais, as that had been their standing orders. But my master was out most of yesterday, and now he says you’ve been raised up in the household and his mandate did not allow what was the rule before. He begs your pardon for the delay.”
“Yes, all right. Thank you.” I hurried him out and wasted no time breaking the unadorned seal. No signature. An unfamiliar hand.
Damoselle, I’ve business with you in reference to our last meeting. As a result of your timely message, I’m off to foreign parts, thus my visit to Merona will be brief. I’ll watch for you outside the postern at sunrise three days running. I sincerely hope this finds you, as this time I’ve no assistance to get your name correct.
A riddle. But from whom? I dared not bite without knowing.
Ambrose would not dare come here, even using someone else to write the message. The grammar was not Bernard’s, and Melusina did not write. The writer referred to a
timely message
. . .
Adept Guerin! I’d sent Lianelle’s instructor a warning about the dark deeds at Collegia Seravain. He was here in Merona, and the third sunrise was not a quarter of an hour away.
“Heurot, wait!”
Saints be thanked, the youth had dawdled outside my door. He leaned on the passage wall, laughing with Ella and another serving girl. But he popped to immediate attention, while the girls melted into adjoining bedchambers.
“Take a message to your master. His interruption of my post and messages has been despicable. He must notify the stewards and the castellan immediately that I must be accorded the respect and privacy due Her Majesty’s ladies. But first he must inform Lady Eleanor that my chambermaid has spilled ink on my day gown, thus I shall be two hours late to the queen this morning. While I see to Ella and her laundering, I’ll
respond
to this horribly delayed message.”
“As you say, my . . . uh . . . damoselle.” Heurot’s good manners handled shock and a bit of confusion well. He bowed and retreated, while stealing glances at my unsullied skirts.
I disliked blaming Ella for an untruth, but Lady Eleanor, on duty in the bedchamber before dawn, would approve such an excuse for my lateness. The dull, excessively proper ducessa viewed the need to discipline servants as a divine mandate.
I darted back to my room just long enough to return the nireals to the drawer and dig out my zahkri. Blessed Melusina insisted on sewing a fitchet into my every skirt and petticoat. Strapping the Cazar knife to my thigh behind the hidden knife slit, I set out for my dawn assignation.
CHAPTER 27
23 OCET, DAWN
T
he postern was far busier in the dawn hour than were Castelle Escalon’s main gates. Coal wagons, farm carts, boys wheeling barrows, and girls herding pigs passed in and out of the narrow gatehouse in a steady stream. Scullery maids and sweeping girls pinned on caps as they ran or yelled at the guards to let them by before milady or the chamberlain sacked them. A broad-chested understeward haggled acrimoniously with a fishmonger over the night’s catch. A tinker had set up a booth and was banging on a dented cauldron, while acrid smoke bellied up from his stove, further graying the murky morning.
Frustrated, I scanned the crowd from the shelter of the wicket gate, seeing no sign of the boyish adept. With the pain of Lianelle’s death so fresh in mind, I was in a frenzy to know what Guerin had come to tell me. If he was truly leaving Sabria as a result of my warning, I might never hear.
A fellow ambling alongside a coal wagon broke off when the wagon rolled to a stop at the guard post. He strolled around behind the tinker’s booth and vanished. Curiously, he emerged back down the road and tagged on to another party. His dark green jerkin, leather breeches, and worn rucksack were wholly ordinary. But surely this was the third time he’d done the same.
I drew a gray shawl over my hair and strolled out of the wicket, setting a course to intercept the man as he approached the tinker’s booth again. Fair hair peeked out from his broad-brimmed felt hat.
“Divine grace, sonjeur,” I said, matching my pace to his. “We’ve business, I think.”
The young man puffed a relieved breath. “Blessed angels, damoselle. I was about to give up.”
“Palace confusion delayed your message. You’ve abandoned Collegia Seravain?”
“Can we get out of the way?” he said, his eyes darting hither and yon. “For sure someone’ll notice if I go round again. Skin’s been crawling since Tigano.”
“Follow me up the path behind the sheep sheds,” I said. “I know a place.”
I kept a businesslike pace, skirting the animal pens and coal stores that sprawled along the road, then angling across the rocky slope toward the ridge top. Guerin strolled along behind like a shop clerk taking the morning air.
Ambrose and Lianelle and I had often played adventurers or chase-and-hide on the ridge behind Castelle Escalon. I knew every crevice in the rocks, most particularly the steep stair someone had hacked out of a fissure. Almost obliterated from centuries of rain and rockfalls, the narrow steps led to the highest point on Merona’s toothy spine.
Long before the Sabrian kings built Castelle Escalon, a watchtower had stood atop these crags of slate and granite. Little remained of it. A weedy clearing tucked amid great slabs and boulders. An arc of its west-facing foundation that jutted from the height like a scrap of jawbone. A few rough-dressed blocks scattered in the apron of slabs and boulders that spilled all the way from the foundation arc to the flatter shoulder of the ridge where the palace stood. It was as if a god had sent a bolt of lightning purposely to shatter the tower and erase all memory of it.