Kissing Eugenie’s cheeks and sweeping a bow to me, he never missed a syllable.
“Why ever, beloved sister, must we depart so early in the day? I’ve enough baggage beneath my eyes from this early rising to supply a full expedition to Syanar. And no, Damoselle Anne, I have not forgotten your most generous offer to speak with me of the perils of travel and the likelihood of finding crocodiles and other beasts in the Caurean Isles. But for now all I can think of is a nap, as we await the bold flowers of the household who will venture this journey. Saints Awaiting, ladies, my eyes will not stay open.”
Tossing his fashionable tall hat to the floor, he flopped on the blue couch, a perfect simulacrum of a man who came no nearer flowing blood than a meal of rare beef. I watched in vain for a glance, a wink, a raised eyebrow, or some sign that he had passed on my message to Duplais. Ilario de Sylvae was no actor, but two wholly different people.
As Eugenie relaxed on her cushions, consumed in laughter, and remonstrated that the hour was not at all early, but already midday, I began putting her medicine bottles away. My hand slowed . . . This was a rare opportunity. Only the three of us present. Anything discovered might move on to Duplais through Chevalier Ilario.
I quickly pulled out the rest of the bottles and lifted the bottom tray of the medicine box. Snatching up what I wanted, I rejoined the queen. “My lady, excuse my curiosity, but I was dusting the lower compartment of your medicine box and found something I think might belong in your jewelry case instead. Yet it could be some kind of magical remedy.”
Lord Ilario sighed and began to snore.
I knelt and emptied the little copper circlet onto Eugenie’s lap. Her smile warmed, despite a touch of sadness.
“I’m so happy you found this. It’s unseemly, maudlin, for me to keep it when it rightly belongs in your family. And Philippe would never countenance—Well, you must have it and do with it as seems best. But I’d recommend you keep it to yourself until all the furor dies away.” She pressed the trinket into my hand.
“Me?” This was the last thing I expected. “But why, Majesty? I don’t even know what it is.”
“It’s an infant’s shield bracelet. A northern custom my dear maman held to. You place it on a male child’s arm or ankle, to be worn throughout his first year. You see how the metal is soft, so you can make it larger or smaller with your fingers as you need, and light, so the little one is not troubled by it. Noble families shaped them to include the family’s heraldic device. Commonfolk made them plain, or engraved kin names or god symbols or just a favored image. It ensures your son will lose neither life nor honor in battle. Desmond wore it last.”
So it was no proof against sickness or murder.
“Surely your own family should keep custody of it.” The device was certainly not the king’s interlaced
S
and
V
.
“But it’s not a Sylvae bracelet,” she said, affecting a tone of conspiracy. “Neither the beast nor bird on the bracelet is a
crane
. You can envision our family crest sprawled over there on my divan: long shanks, fine plumage, a trumpeting call, and forever a wild dance when he is
awake
.” Eugenie smiled at Ilario and raised her eyebrows at me. So she knew of his mode of retiring from a conversation.
Ilario gave a snorting cough, then settled into his rhythmic snoring again. Dare I imagine I saw a smile dart across his features? A heraldic crane also symbolized fidelity and eternal vigilance.
But the mystery remained. I dusted lint from the tarnished copper. “Then whose device is it?”
“Well, of course it is your father’s, Anne. Did he never show you? He gave it to us when Desmond was born. He said he intended to stand protection for our son in every way.”
The world, the knight, the queen, and every concern plaguing me vanished, as I stepped through yet another door into impossibility. I hurried to the window. Holding the worn circlet in the best light, I tried to discern the details. The long-snouted beast could only be a crocodile— amusing in any other circumstance. The bird could be anything. My tremulous hands prickled as if new wakened from numbness.
“But my father never knew his true family. And Gavril de Menil—the man who raised him—wore a crest of five feathers.” In all the stories of his childhood, my father had never mentioned the copper circlet. Had he ever tried to learn the symbol’s meaning?
Eugenie had joined me at the window. “Your father didn’t lie about this, Anne,” she said, gently chiding. “He
wept
when Desmond died. More than Philippe, I think.” Her hands closed my fingers about the little bracelet. “He said he’d worn this in his foundling basket, and for the required year thereafter, and had emerged from every battle with life and honor intact. What does that say about the shield magic? And what does that say about your father?”
Eugenie’s jeweled finger raised my chin so I could not avoid meeting her gaze. “Michel and I were never friends. Our opinions diverged on almost everything. He pitied Philippe for finding it politically expedient to wed a girl of twelve. He considered me spoilt and ignorant, which I am, and unworthy of an incomparable king, which is likely true, as well. But I saw him look on his own daughters, Anne—on you, especially, his firstborn, his soul’s child—and he could never in this life have hurt that poor Ophelie.”
Her warmth drew out my own declaration. “I doubted my father for a long while, lady. But now I believe, as firmly as I believe in anything, he is a victim of these evildoers, not one of them.”
Lady Antonia’s clarion tones echoed in the passage, along with other women’s voices.
The dark eyes that met my own displayed no frailty, no doubt, no fear. “Then I’ll believe it, too.” Eugenie’s conspiratorial smile transformed her into a lady of mischief. “Now, we’d best be ready.”
In a rustle of satin, she returned to Lord Ilario’s divan and shoved his feet aside to take a seat beside him. “I hate when duty takes us out these days,” she said, loud enough the approaching company could hear her. “The city is so strange. People tell me it is some ordinary shifting of the ground that settles abandoned tunnels and drives birds and beasts from their usual lairs
.
I don’t believe it. My driver never explains why he chooses one route over another anymore. Someday we’re going to roll straight into one of these pits of Dimios.”
“Not while I am with you, Geni fair,” said the chevalier, sitting straight up as if someone had stuck him with a pin. He yawned prodigiously. “I shall spread my cloak across every pit and pothole, and you shall not topple. I had Jacard charm it just a few days since.” He slapped one gloved hand to his mouth. “You don’t suppose the charm will fail or reverse itself now he’s been sacked?”
I left them to a discussion of what charms and wards they should take with them, and returned quickly to the medicine chest. As I reassembled it, I bumped the case and the lid fell, landing on my left arm. The pain nearly shot the top of my head off. I had the case only half reassembled when the ladies entered the bedchamber.
Lady Patrice accompanied Antonia, as did tall, bony Marie-Claire de Tallement, the exceedingly aloof maid of honor I’d seen at cards with Eugenie and Lord Ilario. Was she Eugenie’s choice or Antonia’s or Ilario’s? The chevalier held her chair and gallantly offered her wine, sweets, and unstoppable conversation, while Antonia and Patrice fussed over Eugenie. Though almost as tall as Eugenie the girl never looked at his face, but she bit her lip as if a smile might be struggling to get through. Perhaps she was only reserved, not proud.
I was most pleased to note that the gouty Lady Eleanor was not in the party.
After much fussing and kissing and talk of shoes, charms, smelling salts, pastilles for nausea, and the possibility of rain, the lord and ladies departed. Hard on their heels, I abandoned my post. Cradling my throbbing arm, clutching the copper circlet and a growing excitement that gave my feet wings, I hurried off to find Lady Eleanor. She had bored me to distraction with endless exposition on Sabria’s family heritage, but if anyone in Sabria might recognize this device, she would.
THE DUCESSA ELEANOR SAT IN the Rose Room, writing out the queen’s schedule for the following day. Her heavy jowls and wattled chin sagged as she wiped her pen and sat back to rest her full glare on me. “What kind of question, damoselle?”
“As you know, Lady Antonia has taken upon herself the difficult duty of soliciting offers for my hand, a service for which, naturally, I am most grateful. As it happened, a gentleman approached me yesterday and asked if he might present his credentials to my goodfather’s representative. He was a well-spoken gentleman and immaculately turned out, which—please excuse my frankness, my lady—the Barone Gurmeddion is not.”
Eleanor’s eyebrows twitched and nostrils flared in just such fashion that I could see she agreed with my assessment of the Honorable Derwin.
The copper bracelet remained in my pocket, lest she ask how I had come by it. I called upon every maidenly matchmaking discussion I had heard from my fellow maids of honor. “As I am anxious to satisfy my goodfather, the king, with the best match possible, I must not fail to present this other gentleman. Only with my sudden summoning after Her Majesty’s fainting spell that night, I never got his name. I do recall the outline of the crest he wore on his tabard. Cloth of gold it was, my lady!”
Though her impressive bosom heaved an equally impressive sigh, Lady Eleanor did not hesitate to reach for the book I had never seen more than twelve centimetres from her hand. At the same time, she nodded at the stack of paper and the pen she had just abandoned. “Sketch what you recall of the device. We shall see if he has the quality of a good match or merely a good tailor.”
She removed the dark leather volume of
The Grande Historie of the Sabrian Peerage and Families of Lesser Note
from its blue velvet wrappings as reverently as if it were Philippe’s own crown, while I drew a reasonable approximation of the beast and bird from the bracelet. I blotted the page and turned it around to show her.
The ducessa pulled it close, squinting. She slammed her book shut, her complexion taking on the color of the age-mottled leather. “What insolence is this, girl?”
“My artwork is crude, I know. Perhaps it is not very like—”
“None wore that crest in this house,” she snapped. “None wears it in any house, nor does it appear in my book. Even to draw it is to cross the law.”
The room grew cold as a daemon’s heart. But I had to hear it. “What did I draw, lady? I’ll search out the man and discover the correct device, as I’d never wish to slander such a gentleman. But tell me, please.”
She snatched up the pen and dipped it again, and with the magic of an artist born she lengthened the stretched-out bird, rounded the crocodile’s snout and the bird’s beak into similar heads . . . added two crescent arms and the suggestion of legs until each had the same number . . . and spun the paper to face me. “No other mark bears this exact configuration. Nose to nose. Bird and beast. Crocodile and crocodile bird. This reconstruction is all that’s been seen for more than a century, and that’s rare enough, bless the Pantokrator’s mercy.”
I
had
seen her “reconstruction”—two eight-legged beasts entwining deadly pincers in an unending battle. Dueling scorpions. The mark of Mondragon.
CHAPTER 29
23 OCET, MIDDAY
T
hroughout history artists had reused canvases, slathering paint over older works they disdained as out of style. But now restorers at the great schools of art spent years delicately cleaning away the newer, mundane work to uncloak the glories of Sabria’s ancient cultures. What if one didn’t like the work uncovered? What if you realized the portrait you had just washed away was the image you loved?
“Divine grace, damoselle. Are you well?” The man stepped from a side passage.
As fate had mandated since our first encounter, my path had crossed with Physician Roussel’s yet again in the morning flow of householders.
“Yes. Certainly. Very well.” I shaped a smile and folded my arms gingerly, hoping to disguise any telltale bloodstains on my sleeve. The blow from the queen’s medicine box must have started it bleeding again.
A door slammed from the direction I had just come.
“Your color seems high.” Brow wrinkled, he glanced up and down the corridor. From around the corner came the unmistakable thump of Lady Eleanor’s cane. “If I could offer assistance . . .”
“Honestly, it is nothing. Please excuse me. I’ve duties.” My tumultuous emotions left me nothing to offer.
“Forgive my presumption.” He backed away and bowed briskly.
“Divine grace, sonjeur.”
Numb feet sped me to my hidden balcony, where I huddled amid the rubble of plaster, stone, and every belief about my family’s place—my place—in the world.
Long fingers of mist twined through the east gardens, teasing the eye with glimpses of color—here green leaves limned with autumn gold, there a red tile roof or a gold-tipped spire. Glimpses of truth. But not the whole of it. The trees might grow within a courtyard garden or a cultivated orchard or a lingering grove of the wildwood. The roof might cover snug rooms or open colonnades.