Shana Abe (31 page)

“I have a story. Would you like to hear it?”

“Of course,” Kyla said.

The doll was cloth, with tiny sewn features, a flat nose, a rosebud mouth. It had long yellow yarn for hair, fraying at the ends. Elysia picked up another with her other hand, this one carved from wood, with a cleverly painted face and a gown of pink.

“There once was a queen,” Elysia began. “She was good and kind. Everyone loved her.”

This, apparently, was the yellow-haired doll, which bowed to Kyla.

“The queen loved everyone, too. Even the king would tell her not to love so much, not to trust so much.”

Kyla felt her breathing begin to slow, the shade grew cooler. Elysia’s hand moved, making the doll’s head shake back and forth, just once, almost coy.

“But the queen didn’t listen. She believed everyone was good like her. She thought the king was mistaken.”

The painted doll moved over to the cloth one, dipping down in a parody of a curtsy until the wooden joints clacked against the gravel.

“Dear Queen!” Elysia’s voice grew high. “You may trust me!”

The cloth doll pressed against the wooden one, an embrace.

“I know!” The voice lowered slightly. “I know, dear friend!”

The tips of Kyla’s fingers were tingling, her toes were cold and numb. She found herself unable to look away from the scene played out before her, the small hands manipulating the dolls, their awkward movements. There was something almost grotesque about the way they looked to her right now,
not quite human, a mockery. The queen’s sewn eyes even had little black eyelashes spiking outward.

Elysia discarded the cloth doll, laying her down, picking up a new toy now, some sort of knight or soldier.

“Oh, no,” said the wooden doll, seeing the soldier. “Oh, no, oh no oh no oh no.”

“Quiet!” growled the soldier. “Do as I say!”

“No,” cried the wood doll. “No, I can’t! I won’t!”

“Do as I say and they won’t have to die.” The soldier pushed against the wood doll, chest-to-chest.

“Noooo,” moaned the wood doll, but it was too late. She was thrown to the side and the soldier slammed against the reposing queen, coming down on her again and again, making the yarn hair fly in all directions against the gravel, the rosebud mouth unchanged.

Kyla watched in horror, breathing through her mouth, wanting to shout
Stop it! Stop!
but unable to say anything at all, only watch as the soldier pummeled the queen, kicked her over and over until she skidded across the path and came up against a leafy fern.

The soldier was done, limp in the childish grasp now, folded over. Kyla slowly looked at Elysia again, white-faced. Elysia looked back at her, right into her eyes this time.

“Betrayal,” the girl said in her normal voice. “Betrayal and death. That’s what happened to the queen.”

Helaine’s crypt, a shrouded body on a slab of marble, not her mother, oh, surely not, the frail shell of a woman lying there, her beloved face almost normal, almost asleep, surely not dead—

“Betrayal,” said Elysia, the shifting sunlight making the blue of her eyes bright for once.

She was worried that her mother couldn’t breathe past the shroud, fine as it was. She was going to smother. But of course she couldn’t breathe, because she was dead, dead, dead—

“Death,” said the child.

Conner’s hands, the last thing to disappear beneath the earth in the shallow grave she had scratched out for him, covering him with fistfuls of dirt. Alister silently weeping, her nails black from scraping at the hard winter mud of the ground. Conner’s hands folded across
his chest, speckled with the dirt she threw on as fast as she could, it wasn’t fast enough—

“Bloodshed,” chanted Elysia.

Alister, now looking so like their father, both of them in the broken earth, both of them buried through her sweat, no tears, not now, bury him deeper, deep as you can, try not to think about how the dirt shouldn’t be on him, a sacrilege to put it on his face, but she had to, there was only her to do it—

She was stumbling backward in her haste to get up, scoring the tender flesh of her palms on the gravel, slipping.

Elysia almost seemed to watch, the dolls mute and still now around her.

“It’s done now,” she said. “It’s over. This part of the story is over.”

Kyla barely heard her. She was kneeling in the path, fighting the memories.

“The queen is in heaven now,” said Elysia in a strong voice. “All the good people are in heaven. They are happy now.”

Kyla stood up and turned away, walking aimlessly down the path. She found the garden gate somehow, worked the latch with unfeeling fingers, and still remembered to shut it behind her.

A normal thing. Shut the gate. Shut the gate behind you, so that the deer won’t come in. Of course, the tame deer. Eleanor. Don’t let them in.

She walked until she saw something familiar, a corner of the bailey, a smooth expanse of grass, the weathered walls of the keep.

She focused on the keep. She should be inside, that’s right, there was some reason she was supposed to be inside, and Roland was going to be so mad at her. She really hated it when he grew angry, it seemed to shrivel something in her, something vital that she needed to keep going. She didn’t want him to be angry again. She missed him. She did.

A man came up to her, took her arm. She allowed this; it must have been a soldier. Perhaps the steward. He looked familiar. He would guide her back inside, back to Roland.

“Countess,” the man said, and again came that chord of
memory. The interior of the keep was blessedly cool, soothing dark. They walked past the main stairs, they walked down a narrow corridor she didn’t know. The man’s grip on her arm was too tight. He kept her close to his body, she didn’t like that, there was something wrong with the way he was pulling her along, down this strange path.

Kyla came back to her senses abruptly, painfully. She turned her head to look up at the man. Who was this? Not a soldier, not the steward, a stranger to her. Coarse, black hair, a hard profile—

Kyla twisted her arm from the man’s grip, yanking backward with as much force as she could muster. The man responded by pulling her easily back into him, covering her mouth with one hand, using the other to twist her arm behind her back and pin her body against his.

He smelled of dirt and old leather, and something else. Desperation.

“Lady,” he said, a hoarse whisper, moving them both back and through a door, into a blackened room without windows. Kyla writhed in his hold to no avail, kicking at his shins, wanting to scream but unable to manage anything beyond a muffled whimper.

“Don’t fight me, my lady,” growled the man. He let go of her arm; a sudden pinching of her waist made even the blackness grow faint, sparkling dots of blue bursting on the edges of her vision.

“Don’t fight,” he said, but his voice was far away. She couldn’t breathe. The dots grew bigger, multiplied. She sagged in his arms.

He shifted, loosened his hold. She felt one hand roam up her body, a rough palm against her, back down to her hips.

“Where is it?” he barked. “Where?”

She took a shuddering breath around his other hand still over her mouth, clearing her vision. His heavy touch roved upward now, over her stomach, across her ribs.

With a strength born of fear and fury Kyla joined her hands together in front of her and then jabbed one elbow backward into her assailant’s stomach, making him lose his
breath with a sudden
woosh
. His grip on her slackened enough so that she could turn and without thought she slammed the flat of her palm into his throat. She felt the flesh there collapse under her blow, a sickening crunch.

He released her with a strangled gasp, sinking to his knees. Kyla ran for the door but was plucked backward, making her stumble. A wild look behind her showed the man stretched out flat on the ground, one hand clenched on the hem of her gown. He was dragging himself up, using her to do it.

Kyla pulled with all her might and was rewarded with the sound of stitches popping free, and then all at once he lost his grip on her skirt.

She fled through the door and straight for the bailey.

R
oland heard the news when he first docked after his trip to Forswall. If he had come back even an hour earlier, he might have prevented it. Less than an hour. Half of that.

Half of that and he would not have experienced the sick slam of his heart in his chest when Duncan met him at the pier and told him she had been attacked again. Half of an hour and he would not have had to fight the void that wanted to eat him whole, ready, jabbering darkness suddenly flowering to life again in the pit that was his soul. Madness eager to embrace him.

He found her in Marla’s room. She had refused to go back to their own, he was told, no doubt fearing being confined there for the rest of her life. Which wasn’t such a bad idea.

She sat in the chair that had been his mother’s, the one Marla had claimed as her own as a girl. Portions of her hair had come loose from its bonds, silky red strands floating to her shoulders, making her look ridiculously young and vulnerable.

Her knees were drawn up to her chest, she was shaking her head at Marla, refusing the tea that was offered, a mulish set to her lips.

The door hit the wall with unnecessary force when he opened it. He hadn’t meant for that to happen.

Kyla jumped in place, turning stricken eyes to him, and so
help him it was all he could do not to fall at her feet, not to bury his head in her lap and weep for her, for the bruises he could already see around her mouth, the mussed hair, the defensive posture of her curled up in the chair.

Instead Roland walked calmly forward, made himself take her hand, examined it, ignoring the silence around him.

Slender, delicate. Short nails, no wounds. Her fingers closed tight around his. He lowered his lips to the smoothness of her inner wrist, tasted the warmth there, felt the blood beating through her veins in rapid thrums.

“Can you speak?” he asked.

“Of course.” Haughtiness, perhaps to mask her fear. “It was the black-haired one. Not the other.”

He had already heard the details from Duncan. But hearing the words from her seemed to solidify the unthinkable thing in him, set the pulse of it to life again.

Destroy, destroy, destroy …

“What were you doing out alone?” he asked, keeping that pulse from his voice.

She looked away, stubborn, sulking, a trace of guilt in the angle of her head.

He waited, then: “No matter. It won’t happen again.”

He let go of her hand and turned to leave.

“Roland, wait,” Kyla called, but he didn’t pause, gave her no indication that he even heard her. He walked out, leaving the guard to close the door.

Marla sat down on her pallet, stared down at the mug of brewed herbs she still held with a look that Kyla could only describe as bitter resignation.

T
hat night he did not come to her, nor the next, nor the next. And although she found she was not to be held forcibly in their rooms, Kyla had now not one guard, but two.

They became her steady companions, Thomas and Berthold, both dark and massive, with grunts for yes or no, taciturn and firm as they watched everything that occurred
around her. She remembered them from the journey from Scotland, two of her husband’s most trusted men.

She should be honored, she supposed, except that with them she felt even more exposed than before. No one could mistake her presence any longer. No more slipping into shadows to spy on a world that would have spied on her, no more entering a room with quiet plans to assess whatever circumstances she was about to walk into. No more sneaking off into the tunnels of the castle, even. Roland had made good on his promise to bolt the armoire to the ground.

Now wherever she went people parted like a school of flounder for a shark that slid into their midst. Thomas and Berthold on either side of her, or in front of and behind her, emanating unspoken malice for so much as a stray thought that might wish to harm her. She was surely going to stifle from all this protection, go starkly insane with it.