Eugenie herself was recovering there, enjoying the devoted attentions of her brother and frequent private visits from her husband. She remembered very little of Voilline, she told me one afternoon as we strolled Ilario’s dying gardens. A yellow-brown fog had engulfed her party on the road not far from Merona. Philippe’s guards, unable to see, had been quickly killed or taken prisoner. We grieved together for Marquesa Patrice, who had pulled a knife from her bodice and died defending her queen. Her masked captors had forced Eugenie to drink a potion that gave her scandalous dreams she blushed to recall. I didn’t tell her they likely weren’t dreams.
We spoke a little of Antonia, who had died the same night as the Mondragon Rite. Eugenie mourned her foster mother’s true affection, while confessing Antonia’s imperious ways had made life difficult in her household. “How could I condemn her, Anne, when I understood so perfectly her feeling of helplessness? For half a year she ruled Sabria and did many fine things, and then was told that a council of ill-educated men and a thirteen-year-old boy could do better. I thought that if I allowed her to rule me, it might make up for that a little. I never imagined her conspiring against Philippe, or, saints’ mercy, murdering Cecile.”
No purpose would be served by sharing my suspicion that Antonia had murdered Eugenie’s children. When I made a sidewise reference to Soren, Eugenie blushed. “I tried to tell Dama Antonia that I had only admired him, as a girl child admires any man so handsome and powerful. He was her child, as Desmond and the others were mine. Perhaps she worried about his Veil journey. I didn’t know the meaning of love—or the bitter price of loving a king—until I married Philippe. Did Soren’s visits please me? I knew he was not real, and yet . . .” She shook her head. “Life is complicated.”
Eugenie adored Philippe and feared him, terrified to lose him and terrified to love too unreservedly, thereby, inevitably, losing herself.
I was beginning to understand that.
AND SO THE DAYS OF autumn passed. I slept and reveled in the quiet. Once Papa was strong enough to feed himself, I read him the nonsensical stories and essays I found in Ilario’s library. He slept prodigiously, slowly regaining strength, though physicians warned that he would never be aught but frail. His mind began to wake from its starved torpor, but he had not yet convinced himself that the bed, the food, Ambrose, and I were not dreams. We didn’t argue. Too much pain awaited him in the real world.
My brother dealt with his own pain. He could not bear walls or any sedentary occupation. Nor could he abide being touched. For hours on end he practiced his swordwork in Ilario’s fencing yard, but without poetry or joy. I could not help him, save by understanding. Though we walked in the gardens, we rarely spoke beyond triviality. He was not ready to speak of his ordeal, any more than I could explain what troubled me.
I didn’t know who I was anymore—reserved, scholarly Anne de Vernase, dutiful daughter and sometime mistress of Montclaire, or Anne de Mondragon, a dangerous, untrained sorceress who found power for magic in hate and vengeful murder. Who relished it.
I believed violence and murder barbaric, yet my blood would not cool. Every thought of Jacard, Kajetan, Gautier, or the Camarilla brought my knife to hand. And why could I not stop thinking about a sorcerer who baldly confessed his violent nature and his disdain of so much I valued? I felt as if I’d left my soul on Mont Voilline, drowned in a dark river of murderous magic.
CHAPTER 44
A
month or so after coming to the country, I received a packet from Merona. It contained a small tin of five pastilles and a terse message.
Give her one of these each day for five days. The keyword is
sallebruja
. You’ll thank me.
“What do you suppose they are?” asked Eugenie.
“I’ve no idea,” I said. “The keyword means
southern witch
or something like.”
“Burn them,” said Ambrose. “It’s that Jacard, hunting vengeance.”
It was true that neither the king’s men nor the Camarilla had been able to locate Jacard, who had disappeared at some time in the last frenzy of the rite on Voilline, along with the
Book of Greater Rites
. And the script was uneven and angled oddly, little better than a child’s ragged scrawl, as if meant to disguise the writer. Yet the packet was addressed to me, thus the
her
must be someone other. Not Eugenie. Blooming with health and happiness, the queen had abjured all medicine, tisanes, and inhalants.
You’ll thank me. . . .
My companions likely thought me having a relapse into madness when I leapt from my chair.
Warmth, wonder, and lunatic hope rose as one. Dante had spoken those very words in the escalon on that morning of revelation. Certainly his hand would be awkward now he couldn’t see. And I knew only one
southern witch
. “Ambrose, these are for Mama. Do exactly as it specifies. Yes, I’m sure. I swear I am not mad. Ride!”
A MONTH LATER I FIRST told my father about my mother’s madness, and at the same time read him Ambrose’s letter about her astonishing awakening, as from a long fever. She would be ready to come home early in the new year. I also told him about Lianelle that day. Papa was still quite fragile. I kissed him, left him my brother’s blessedly descriptive letter, and shut the door so he could weep without shame.
At about this same time Portier came for a visit. To our cheers and applause, he demonstrated his facility with his cane, which looked to be his lifetime companion. After dinner, the two of us left Ilario and Eugenie to a game of cards and walked out in the garden.
We shared our stories, shaking our heads at our blindness. I was sorry to hear that he’d seen no sign of Maura ney Billard. The Aspirant had not bothered to tell him if the note was forged. Both of us, it seemed, had been left with unsettled questions.
“As soon as I’m able to sit a horse, I’m off to Abidaijar,” he said as we sat in the weak sunshine. “Ilario told me of a man expert in the teachings of the Cult of the Reborn, but more in the scholarly line than the priestly, if you know what I mean. If he’ll have me, I’ll spend the winter with him. To say truth, I’m ready for a little desert clarity.” He stared into some distance beyond the fingers that gripped the head of his cane.
“Go on.” Too much remained unspoken since the night on Voilline.
“I am no reborn saint,” he said. “I don’t believe in them. Never have. Holy mercy, if I’d come back from Heaven for something important, you’d think it would be what we just went through, wouldn’t you? Instead I’m lured into a trap, and spend one night being twisted into jackstraws, and another sunk to the bottom of a puddle. Yet I must confess. . . .” He would not look at me. “I drowned three times that night. Three times I felt Dante lose hold of me. Three times he fetched me back.”
“Creator’s Hand!” Horror at the imagining stole my breath.
“Maybe I died,” he said, “or maybe I didn’t. I was half crazed. But the sensations were very like thirteen years ago. That pervasive smell of dead leaves, dry grass, and rot, and the feel of it—the dry air, the emptiness of time and purpose. Not the best evidence. I still couldn’t force myself to open my eyes. But this time, perhaps because it happened at Voilline or because of the magic Dante worked that night, I felt . . . others there. Not spirits, not wandering souls as I expected, but beings very like a spectre that plagued de Santo when he was trapped at Castelle Escalon. Savage things, angry, hungry . . .”
“Ravenous. Trapped. As if they were what was left when the soul is leached away from a dead spirit.” Exactly what Lianelle had shown me as I held her nireal. “And blind, I think.”
“Yes,” said Portier, glancing up sharply. “Dante told me that a spectre was not a soul but a lingering image of something that once lived. That’s what they were . . . what they
are
, for I’ve no reason to think they aren’t still just beyond the Veil. It’s not merely that they prefer being alive to being dead. They’re not
where
they’re supposed to be and they’re not
what
they’re supposed to be. And it wasn’t just that I didn’t belong there.
No one
belongs there.”
A chill shivered me despite the amber sunlight.
Your friend can tell you
. Lianelle had truly spoken to me. She had known my friend Portier was in that place.
“You were there,” I said. “It was all true. Roussel and Kajetan believed you couldn’t die. They intended to seal you in that pool forever, to keep the rent in the Veil open by your continual passage between . . .” I told him of my sister’s nireal then, and what I’d heard as it scalded my hand before we closed down the rent in the Veil.
Portier blew a pent breath and shook off a visible horror grown throughout my tale. “I’ve told Dante some of this,” he said. “He believes the Mondragons created Ixtador by mistake. When the Gautieri learned what their rivals had done, they would not rest until they controlled it—and the knowledge and use of it—for themselves. And so we got Germond and his diabolical scheme. Certainly the place where I was, whether Ixtador or something else, is not divine, but an aberration, a disorder.”
“Our beloved dead
pay the price of Gautieri greed
.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s from a history—Reviell de Mondragon’s warning, as he was being executed at the end of the Blood Wars. And the Mondragon rite confirms it.” Eager, appalled, I dredged up the words. “Creating a child who straddles the realms of death and life would not only cause the inversion of the natural order the Aspirant wanted, but see
Ixtador Beyond the Veil nevermore dissolved nor shaken nor altered in its composition
. Ixtador, this unnatural place, would become permanent. We stopped that—for the moment—but Ixtador remains.”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “It all fits. And it does not comfort me that we’ve recovered neither the Mondragon codices nor Dante’s four remaining nireals.”
No one had told me that. “Jacard took them?”
“We presume so. Dante says it’s not a concern, as Jacard hasn’t power enough to work vermin wards, much less translate the books or use them.”
Portier’s rueful head shake reflected my own misgivings.
“I’ve had this thought,” he said, “and this is where Dante vehemently disagrees with me, that Ixtador’s existence disrupts that part of natural law that encompasses what we know as magic. Perhaps that’s why even our most reliable spells don’t work so well since the Blood Wars. Perhaps that’s why Dante’s work, the purest, most natural magic I’ve ever experienced, devours his body and drives him to this brink of control. I doubt he was ever mild mannered, and, yes, he worked hard to convince me of his wickedness, but the explosive rage was never playacting. And now this injury threatens everything he is . . . everything he values. I fear the consequences of leaving Ixtador as it is, and we need our best magical practitioner to turn his mind to the problem. But even more, I fear for my friend.”
All my unspoken anxieties came into focus. “He’s found no remedy, then?”
“He can find no residual enchantment to counter, and has no faith that the damage will reverse itself on its own. Worse, he is convinced that this sensory deprivation will inevitably destroy his magic. He’s at a loss.”
Duplais massaged his leg with a grimace, then propped his chin on his cane, glancing at me in a most peculiar fashion. “How you worked with the man is beyond me. Any mention of you sets him chewing the walls worse than he does already. He damns you with profane names, then in the next breath brags how you kept him from sacrificing me, for which I thank you, or your father, for which I’m sure
he
thanks you. He expounds at obscene length on what you were able to contribute to the work that night, while scorning any suggestion that ‘an aristo child-woman’ might actually
develop
such immense potential.”
He stopped. Twiddled his cane. Glanced sidewise at me again. I sensed he was not finished.
“Such a compliment from Dante, even awkwardly given”—Portier shook his head like a sage of ninety summers—“you know how rare that is, yes?”
Why did my skin feel like summer noonday? “I’ve a glimmer.”
And still Portier fiddled. He heaved a deep breath. “He’s forbidden to return to Castelle Escalon. But the king has offered him a small house called Pradoverde. It sits on a few hectares of meadows and woods near the village of Laurentine in northern Louvel. Isolated, which he likes. A royal gift, which he doesn’t, but might be persuaded to accept. Secret, which is necessary, as we’ve heard a thousand calls for his execution. I’ve loaned him Heurot to do for him until he is more accustomed to his condition. Dante hates it, but Heurot is staunch, patient, and not easily discouraged. All necessary, as you might imagine. And I pay the lad well. The mage threatens to disembowel anyone who offers him help. It would take a ferocious will.”
“You want me—?” Unnecessary even to complete my question. As ever, the master logician had laid out his case precisely, and in so doing had resolved my own turmoil into a clear—and scarce conceivable—course of action.
Portier hauled himself to his feet, pulled a brass ring from his pocket, and pressed it into my hand. The hairs on my arms rose with the telltales of enchantment. “Give him this. Tell him his
student
says he must consider taking up teaching.”