Winterspell (39 page)

“You are kind to me,” Clara said softly over her shoulder. “Why?”

Anise paused in her ministrations. Her knuckles brushed across the small of Clara's back.

“Do you think I care what that damned prince is actually doing?” She rose, stalked to her dining table, knocked back her unfinished wine in one ferocious gulp. “This isn't the Cane that Nicholas remembers. It's a stranger to him. It's
my
Cane now, and he is an inconsequential bug, burrowing around aimlessly, armed with a self-righteous sense of entitlement. I am far from worried about one tiny, prideful bug.” Anise spun around, eyes flashing. “Did you know, I am a royal too?”

It was best, perhaps, to be honest. Clara sat up. “I did.”

Anise was scornful. “Dear, virtuous Nicholas told you, did he?”

“Your parents were a human king and a faery countess.” Clara paused. “They were killed for it. For the affair, I mean.”

“Nicholas's family killed them for it,” Anise corrected. “Because the four royal families were nothing if not a passel of bickering, greedy egoists.” She flopped irritably into a chair. “I could pass the night telling you about their many inbred wars, but it would be a waste of breath. And they're all dead now anyway.” She smiled to herself.

“If you have royal blood,” Clara said carefully, “then why shouldn't you have as much right to the throne as Nicholas does?”

Anise's eyes shot to her, surprised and trying to cover it. “That is the true question, isn't it? The answer is, I
do
, and he can't stand that fact. He and his family were never able to accept that my claim is at least as strong as theirs.”

Clara decided not to point out that Nicholas might not have such a problem with Anise's royal blood if she were not in fact using it to torture the kingdom—the people, and the land itself.

“That seems petty,” she said instead, and her vexed expression was genuine. Nicholas had confessed to her, hadn't he, that he felt himself
regressing?
I feel the hate returning, and the violence.
If he were somehow able to reclaim his throne, what proof was there that he would not turn into the human version of Anise, enslaving and tormenting the faery population as she had done to the humans?

She felt uneasy beneath the weight of these thoughts and Anise's piercing gaze.

“You asked why I was kind to you,” Anise said at last.

Clara nodded and forced herself to concentrate despite her disquiet, for Anise's voice held within it a tiny bashfulness, a hint at confession.

Anise seemed at war with herself. “I don't care much about Nicholas, you see. My courtiers do. They think of him, and they think of what life used to be for us—how dangerous it was, and how bloody. I think of him and I want to laugh. One small prince. What should I care about that? He'll dare to show his face one day, and I'll kill him and be done with it. No silly curses this time. Only swords.”

Such a cavalier dismissal. Clara fought not to react.

“But you, Clara . . .” Anise let her eyes wander down Clara's body and back up to her face. “I see great potential in you. It will just take time to convince my kingdom of it.”

Clara's skin prickled, coaxed into gooseflesh by the focused heat of Anise's gaze. She was not sure whether to feel admired, violated, or simply assessed.

Anise rose, fiddling with her gown, such a pale blue that it almost matched her skin. “Unfortunately for you, the time will be painful. It can't be helped.” And with that Anise was cold, unreachable Anise again. She finished nursing Clara's wounds with an efficiency that bordered on harshness. Only as Clara drifted to sleep, Anise watching from the next pillow, did she catch, right at the last, the sweetness on Anise's face—the worry, and the guilt, and the
hope
—when she thought Clara was no longer looking.

T
he next morning, after Anise had brought Clara to her cell and before she'd slipped back through the Door, Clara caught her arm. Anise turned back, surprised. Clara did not have to pretend the awe in her voice. The queen was many ugly things, but on the surface at least, she was a vision. The Door's shifting lights painted her skin lustrous.

“Thank you,” Clara said, “for tending to me.”

She stepped forward and kissed Anise's cheek. It was a risk, but a calculated one. She lingered there, her hands hovering over the dip of Anise's back, Anise's lovely white hair tickling her palms, and whispered it again. “Thank you, my queen.” And then, she could not help herself. Anise's nearness was a lure; Clara leaned closer. Her lips brushed Anise's neck—a chaste gesture, almost reverent—and it was a warm, surprising delight.

Anise left without a word, her expression revealing nothing, but no one came for Clara that day. Morning came and went, midday came and went, and she was left alone.

They could, she supposed, come for her in the afternoon. But it was unlikely, if her suspicions about Anise were correct. And again—that twinge of guilt for manipulating her, that shameful feeling of softness.

Clara ignored it. She could not be distracted if she were to successfully open a Door out of her cell.

* * *

Traveling across a room was one thing, but traveling out of one room and into another she couldn't see was something else entirely. Clara spent an agonizing few minutes convincing herself to do it, doubt tying her into knots.

It was the screams of the other prisoners that persuaded her. One of them, she thought, sounded a bit like her father. It gave her courage and urgency—fifteen days here, three days and eighteen hours at home. She faced the door and prepared herself, turning her concentration inward until she found her power, waiting and steady. She fancied she could feel the scrape of blood against vein, the vitality singing through her nerves.

Clara pictured the hallway outside her door and drew the image into her mind. Damp walls framed with exposed piping, the faint outline of doors. Darkness.

She drew a breath and held it. It would work, wouldn't it? It had to. She had practiced. She could travel across her cell without even trying now, and her disorientation when she did had decreased to manageable levels.

It
would
work.

She thrust her palm into the air, drew it back, and pulled her fingers into a fist. The lights shimmered into being, and she stepped through, and landed clumsily in the dank corridor. She wavered for a moment, unsteady; passage through this Door had been rougher than the others, perhaps due to her nervousness. But she had done it; she was
through
. She turned into the dark.

* * *

Each cell door had a narrow slot through which food could be deposited. Clara steeled herself for what she might find before she bent, pried open the first slot's hinged cover, and peered through.

Darkness. It was so confoundingly dark down here. No torchlit sconces for the prisoners to enjoy, Clara supposed. She couldn't see a thing.

The Doors, she remembered, emanated light. If she opened one, a tiny one that would not lead anywhere but right beside her, surely its glow would be enough to see by. Besides that, it would be a way to practice controlling the flow of her power.

Crouched at the first cell door, Clara looked at the space directly beside her. She imagined her focus as a needle's eye through which she must somehow thread this new, eager strength within her.

It worked, but not without the extra effort for control temporarily draining her. She felt as she had in Mira's Ring, when the cold had left burns across her skin, reeling from the impact of falling between worlds. But she could see now at least. She squinted through the slit in the door.

A prisoner was there, yes, a dark-skinned human with no arms, lying in a pool of his own blood and excrement. He might have been the one she had heard screaming; he was not moving.

Clara turned away, wishing she had not seen him. Perhaps inspecting these cells was not the best idea, but her father could be in one of them, so she swallowed her revulsion and forced herself on to the next cell, and the next. By the time she had searched the entire corridor, she was buzzing with power, light-headed, but she had seen nothing of her father. The cells held both faery and human prisoners—a human woman standing in the corner of her cell, facing the wall and humming to herself; a faery in chains who lunged at the door when she peeked through.

Despair filled her at having to leave them. She could have entered each cell through a Door and freed them, one by one, but some of them were violent and others simply mad. They would have given her away.

So she found the stairs up and down which Borschalk's men had dragged her these last days. The steps were narrow and winding and thick with grime, and Clara followed them up slowly, leaving the dungeons behind.

* * *

At the top, after ages of climbing, she flattened herself against the wall, closed her eyes, and struggled to control her breathing. If he could have seen her, Godfather would have scolded her for letting her nerves so overwhelm her.

Thinking of him was both painful and helpful. The memory of his voice was a balm. Carefully she let him in:

You must move as though through water. The room is yours to know, to possess. The energy within you subsumes its energy. You
are
the room. You
are
the shadows. Try it.

The energy within her indeed. It occurred to her that he had been hinting at her latent power even then—itching to tell her but never letting himself, for love of her.

She peered around the corner to find a long, black corridor, like those she had glimpsed during Anise's tour. The polished floors gleamed with blue lamplight, and unblinking kambots perched in the rafters. One of them began swiveling its tiny black head toward her.

Clara retreated back against the wall.
Kambots.
How had she not thought of this? She couldn't simply go traipsing about the palace with Anise's birds watching.

Voices came to her from down the corridor, and the sharp tread of boots against stone. Holding her breath, she peeked back around to see two faery soldiers exit one room, cross the corridor, and disappear into another. She listened for their footsteps, how they echoed, measuring the distance they traveled. Faintly she heard doors open, saw a faint swell of light from outside; then darkness again as the doors closed.

Outside, so close. Fresh air and snow and
freedom
. Her blood urged her toward it, eager.
That way,
it seemed to beg.
That way lies escape!
The temptation pulled at her. She still had time to find her father, but it was starting to feel slippery, like trying to maintain pursuit of a swift creature in gathering darkness. Besides, what good was escape without
some sort of information? By leaving, she could be abandoning him to a fate as ghastly as the prisoners'.

What now?
she wondered. Across from her the opposite wall glimmered. She froze. It was her reflection, there in the lattice of dark glass and scrolling ironwork. Her
reflection
. The sight triggered a memory from her tour of the palace: the Glass Hall, with its many mirrors. Could she, perhaps, open a Door to it from here? It was a dangerous thought—she had no way of knowing if the Hall would be occupied, and though she hadn't noticed kambots there, she could certainly have missed them.

Or perhaps,
she thought, the idea bursting out of nowhere and sending her heart racing,
I could open a Door to Father.

The image of him on the chromocast—that dark room, the blizzard outside. If she focused on that image, would the Door take her right to him? Snow, like the tundra outside; a dark room, like those lining the Summer Palace's echoing corridors. He could be here somewhere—breathing the same air, listening to the same ever-present hum of unseen machinery.

She forced herself to calm, slowing the frantic rush of her thoughts. So far she had only traveled short distances using Doors, and who knew precisely where her father was being kept? She knew nothing of what Doors could and could not do beyond her own experimentation. It was risky to try.

She
had
to try.

Retrieving the chromocast's image from her mind, she went for it before fear convinced her otherwise, opening a Door right there in the hallway, stepping through, rigid with expectation—

—and landing hard on her knees, not a stride's length from where she had just stood.

Cursing, she scrambled to the wall, hardly breathing as she listened for signs that someone had heard the racket. A moment passed, and then another, but the corridor remained silent. She relaxed, shaking.

Had her thoughts been too distracted for the Door to work
properly—too full of hope? She tried again and again, with the same result, each passage sending her hurtling back to the same stretch of corridor. The pain of unsuccessful passage was so great, she nearly bit through her tongue trying not to scream. She slumped, sapped of energy and afraid. If she had lost it, somehow, if her power was failing her . . .

She tried once more, cautiously, this time thinking of her cell, and when she emerged there, unharmed and without difficulty, she wondered if her father was simply too far away to find. Perhaps he wasn't being held here at all. She blinked back tears of disappointment; it had been foolish to think it would be so easy to find him. For a moment she considered trying again but dismissed the idea immediately, feeling hopeless. Traveling from room to room was one thing, but through an entire palace, and perhaps even through the kingdom beyond, on some wild, directionless search using a magic she had only begun to understand?

She was not strong enough.

However, she decided, clinging to the thought of those she held most dear—all of them, even the lost ones about whom it was unbearable to think—she
would
be.