The Born Queen (24 page)

Anne nodded. “Cape Chavel, I don’t think I’ve thanked you for saving my life.”

“I’m glad you haven’t,” he replied. “It would only embarrass me. Especially as it was your saint gifts that got most of us out of there alive.”

“Well, you’ll have to be embarrassed. Thank you.”

He actually blushed. He was a funny fellow, a bit like Sir Neil but a bit like Cazio as well.

Cazio. She had seen him free, with z’Acatto, but Dunmrogh fallen. And Hespero—but that part had been unclear. In fact, any vision concerning the praifec was unclear.

“How are you feeling?” the earl asked.

“Better. The leic will let me walk in a day or two. Nothing too badly hurt inside, I suppose.”

“I’m relieved,” the young man said. “Very relieved, in fact. I’ve seen such wounds before, and they are usually, ah, worse.”

That gave her a bit of a pause. It had been rather bad, hadn’t it? The shaft had been half in her. She had seen bodies cut open before. How could it have missed all of that? She should have died, shouldn’t she?

She remembered the knight who wouldn’t die, the one Cazio had been able to stop only by hacking the body into individual pieces. She remembered the other one in the wood near Dunmrogh.

And her uncle Robert, whose blood was no longer quick but who walked and did his evil anyway.

Oh, saints,
she thought.
What have I become?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

T
HE
S
INGING
D
EAD

L
EOFF STARED
at the blank parchment, terrified.

It was not the sort of thing that usually frightened him.

Since childhood he had been able to hear music in his head: not just music he had experienced but music he imagined. Not only melodies but harmony lines, counterpoint, chords. He could compose a sinfonia for fifty instruments and hear each individual voice. Writing it down was an afterthought, a convenience, a way to share his music with the less fortunate.

But now he feared the music lurking in his skull. Every time he tried to think about the forbidden modes he had rediscovered while he was Robert’s captive, he felt ill. How could he find an antidote when he couldn’t face the disease?

“I saw my mother last night,” a soft voice behind him said.

Startled, he turned to find Mery watching him from a few paces away.

“Did you?” he asked. Mery’s mother was dead, of course, but one saw the dead now and then.

“In the well,” she confirmed. “The old well in the back garden.”

“You shouldn’t be playing around there,” he said. “It’s dangerous.”

“I wasn’t playing,” the girl said softly.

Of course you weren’t,
he thought sadly.
You never play anymore.

Not that she ever had, much, but there once had been something of a little girl about her.

“Did your mother say anything?”

“She said she was sorry,” Mery said. “She said she’s been forgetting things.”

“She must have loved you very much to come see you,” he said.

“It’s easier for them now,” she said. “The music makes it easier.”

“The music we made together? For Prince Robert?”

She nodded. “But they’re singing it now, over there.”

“The dead?”

“They sing and sing and don’t even know they’re doing it.”

Leoff rubbed his mess of a hand against his forehead. “They’re singing it,” he muttered. “What is happening?”

“Why does it make you sad that the ghosts are singing?”

“It doesn’t,” he said gently. “Not in and of itself. But the song is bad, I think.” He held up his hands. “Do you remember when I could play hammarharp with these?”

“Yes,” she said. “The praifec had your hands broken.”

“Right,” Leoff said, shying from the memory of that pain. “And for a long time they didn’t heal, but now they have. Something in the world is broken: The thing that separates life from death. Our song made it worse, and I think
their
song—what you hear them singing—is
keeping
it worse. Preventing things from healing.”

“Your hands didn’t heal right,” she said. “You still can’t play hammarharp.”

“That’s true,” he conceded.

“What if the world heals, but not right?”

“I don’t know,” Leoff sighed.

She looked at the blank paper. “Is that what you’re trying to do? Make music that will heal things?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Will it heal me?”

“I hope so.”

She walked over and leaned against him. “I’m sad, Leoff,” she confided. “I’m always sad.”

“I know,” he replied.

“I wish I could help you, but every time I try to play something, I hurt people.”

“I know.”

“I sing for the ghosts, though, and sometimes play for them very quietly, when no one is around. Like at the well.”

“Does that make you happy?”

“No. But it makes me feel a better kind of sad.”

Rain had washed Haundwarpen that morning and left it smelling new, as if its cobbles and bricks had been laid that morning. It was a neat little town anyway, but today it almost looked like something that had been painted, so fresh were the yellow and rust trims on the houses, the blue sky held in street puddles, the copper roof of the clock tower. Artwair’s estate was only a short walk from town, and Leoff enjoyed going there, especially with Areana, who despite having grown up five leagues away in Wistbirm, seemed to know everyone. He liked to watch her haggle for fruit, fish, and meat and knew by the curve and tautness of her neck when she was about to settle.

He enjoyed the details of the place, the door knockers in the shapes of fish and flowers and especially hands, the weather vanes on the rooftops, some shaped like banners, others like cranes or dragons, but especially hands.

And he loved the Rauthhat, the lively beer hall in the center of town. It was always alive with both locals and travelers, and there was usually a minstrel or two trying to get by to learn new melodies from.

He needed the quiet of the estate, but he needed this, too—life. Especially after his talk with Mery that morning.

So the three of them found an empty table at the Rauthhat, and Jen, the barmaid with red hair and a wide grin, brought them the brown beer the place served, mussels cooked in wine and butter, and some thick, crusty bread to sop up the liquid with. Not surprisingly, Leoff felt a little more cheerful. Areana sparkled like a jewel as she said her hellos, and Mery at least ate some of the mussels and sipped at the wine.

But that went only so far, and even in the Rauthhat things were a bit subdued. No one was talking about it, but everyone knew there was an army from Hansa just a few leagues away. Haundwarpen had a garrisoned keep and respectable walls, but determined armies had taken them before.

But for this night at least, Leoff joined everyone in the place in pretending nothing bad was afoot, and he let himself develop a bit of a glow. That all ended quite healthily in the arms of his young wife that night, when, as they lay damp and sleepy in the sheets, she kissed his ear and whispered, “I’m with child.”

He cried with happiness and fear, and they fell asleep holding each other.

The next day found him staring at the blank sheet again, with—finally—the glimmer of an idea.

What if he could give the dead something else to sing?

A number of questions came around at that. Why were they singing the deadly music he had written? Would they sing anything using the forbidden modes?

Was Mery lying or deluded? That was an important one.

The old music had progressed in stages, coaxing and finally seducing the living toward death. Those who had died seemed to have expired by some act of sheer will, their hearts stopping because they—with all the strength and purpose in them—
wanted
their hearts to stop.

He remembered wanting it, too. He had almost surrendered everything.

Was it possible to write a backward progression? One that would make the dead yearn toward life? And if so, would that be the right thing to do? He pictured hordes of corpses rising, walking to the Rauthhat for beer, seeking the beds of their widows and widowers…

But at least he was thinking now.

He made beginnings, musical vignettes and fancies on the themes of life and death. He wrote melodies and countermelodies stripped of the modal accompaniments that would give them real power, able now to sense something of what they might do in his head.

It was with a start that he realized it was after midday and someone was calling—no, screaming—for him.

He flung open his door and hurried out of the house. Areana was running toward him across the clover, her long lace-trimmed blue skirt billowing. Her face was red from crying, and she was so hysterical, hiccups kept any sense from her words. But she was pointing, and he finally made it out: “Mery.”

The girl was lying in the well, facedown. His first thought was that it wasn’t Mery at all but just a little doll someone had dropped down there.

When the servants fished her out, he couldn’t pretend that any longer. She wasn’t breathing, and water poured from her mouth and nose.

The next few bells were a blur. He held Areana and tried to say comforting things while the servants changed the girl, cleaned her up, and put her on her bed.

“She was so unhappy,” Areana said when things starting coming back into focus. “Do you think…”

“I don’t know,” he said. “She told me yesterday that she heard the dead singing at the well, that she saw her mother. I told her not to go there anymore, but I should have—I should have stopped her.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“It’s all my fault,” he replied. “If I had never written that cursed music. If I had watched her more carefully…”

“You loved her,” Areana said. “You gave her more than anyone else in her life. You showed her a little of what she was capable of.”

He just shook his head, and she took him by the temples and kissed his forehead.

“Why are you crying?” Mery asked. She was standing in the doorway in the fresh dress they had put on her. Her hair was still wet.

PART
III

FEALTY AND FIDELITY

To pledge fealty, one must first know what it is, my lord. Thus, although a dog might be loyal in an unreflective fashion, it can never give you fealty. You are surrounded by dogs, my lord, and I am not one.

—T
HE TESTIMONY OF
S
AINT ANEMLEN AT THE COURT OF THE
B
LACK
J
ESTER

I see. Well, dogs must eat.

—T
HE
B
LACK
J
ESTER, IN RESPONSE

Decios mei com pid ammoltos et decio pis tiu ess

Tell me who you walk with, and I’ll tell you who you are.

—V
ITELLIAN PROVERB

CHAPTER ONE

T
HE
H
ELLRUNE

D
AWN HADN’T
yet shown her rosy hair when Alis gently woke Muriele.

“Berimund remembered his promise, apparently,” she said. “A lady has come to fit you into a riding habit.”

“Really,” Muriele said, rubbing her eyes. “They hunt at night here?”

“No, but early. You’ll want to look your best, won’t you?”

“Doubtless. Very well. Give me a moment and let her in.”

She went to the window. The air was cool, and most of the city below was a dark mystery, with only a few pinpricks of light. The stars were diamonds and sapphires still. There was that faint smell of differentness in the air, or she might have been looking out of the Wolfcoat Tower at sleeping Eslen.

What was happening there? Was Anne well?

An image flashed through her mind of Anne at four, her hair in long red braids, scrunched up in the window of the chamber of Saint Terwing, dressed in boy’s clothing, singing a little song to herself as she fiddled with a toy sword. Muriele hadn’t meant to spy on her, but the girl hadn’t seen her in the darkened hall, and she had watched her daughter for long minutes without knowing why.

She remembered Fastia with her long dark hair and prim humor and Elseny, never too bright but so sweet, so full of life.

Gone now. She’d once thought she heard Fastia whisper “mother” in Eslen-of-Shadows, but that had faded, and nothing remained of her beautiful girls but those things in their coffins.

But Anne had survived. Anne whose mischief often had crossed the line into caprice, who’d never thought herself pretty, who had tried to keep out of the way of the family and its affairs her whole childhood.

Anne, who had seemed at times to hate her. Anne, who probably needed her now more than she ever had.

Why had she left her only remaining daughter?

Maybe she couldn’t bear not to.

A throat cleared softly behind her.

“I’m ready, thank you,” she said.

The sun was a hand above the horizon when she met Berimund in the courtyard. The young man’s face was flushed, and his eyes a bit glassy.

“I hardly believe you can walk,” Muriele said. “I’m impressed.”

“Practice,” Berimund said. “Long practice from childhood.”

“Well, I thank you for remembering your promise.”

“About that,” he said. “There’s still time to change your mind.”

“Why would I? I’m looking forward to meeting your father.”

He nodded, looking as if he wanted to say something but not saying it.

“You make that riding habit look very nice,” he said finally.

“Thank you,” she replied. “It’s an interesting dress.”

The overskirt was cut rather like a knee-length hauberk, split up the front and back and made of wool felted into myriad patterns of serpents, falcons, and horsemen in muted golds, reds, and browns. It was sleeveless, so she wore a darker brown shirt beneath and numerous underskirts to protect modesty. Her calf-high buskins fastened at the top with a wolf’s head and were laced over woolen stockings. It seemed silly and barbaric, and she had thought at first that the dress was an attempt to humiliate her.

But Berimund was attired in equally outlandish pants and a robelike coat.

“Interesting,” he repeated, grinning. “I sense an understatement.”

“I’m not familiar with the fashion, that’s all.”

“It’s a recent one. My father has an interest in the ancient times, and his scholars have determined that our mountain tribes are more like our revered ancestors than we folk of the cities. We have therefore adopted some aspects of their dress.”

“I see. I had no idea the mountain tribesmen wore Safnian silk shirts.”

“Well, there have been a few adaptations, I’ll allow.”

“When I first came to Eslen, the men were favoring floppy woolen caps like the ones the Cresson brothers wore at the battle of Ravenmark Wold. It seems silly now.”

“I wouldn’t make that comparison,” Berimund said stiffly. “Or call our fashions silly. Is it a bad thing to remember the virtues of our forefathers?”

“Not at all,” Muriele said. “I wish you and your father were more reminded of them, as a matter of fact, since your forefathers helped in originating the ancient covenant of embassy.”

Berimund actually seemed to wince slightly, but he didn’t reply.

“Shall we go to the hunt?” he asked instead.

The horses were clad in similarly strange harness, and her mount was provided with a quiver of arrows and a spear with a broad leaf-shaped head.

So caparisoned, she and Berimund and six of his retainers rode out of Hauhhaim through Gildgards, a tidy neighborhood with so many gardens that it seemed almost like countryside. She asked Berimund about it.

“The merchant guilds are given land within the walls for farming,” he explained. “In good times, they sell their surplus and profit from it. When Kaithbaurg comes under siege, their produce reverts to the king. Anyway, it makes the city more pleasant, don’t you think?”

Muriele agreed, and not much later they passed through the Gildgards gate and into a countryside of vast barley fields and small villages. After perhaps a bell, their path took them into the lowlands around the river and finally into Thiuzanswalthu, Marcomir’s hunting preserve, a vast, parklike evergreen wood. Soon they came upon a bustling camp sprawled out around a large tent. A group of horsemen and horsewomen were mustering like a small army, and they were all dressed much as Berimund and she were.

Berimund dismounted, took the reins of her horse, and led her over to the group.

Marcomir was a bit of a shock. She had met him once when she was fourteen and he had come to the Lierish court. At that time he had been in his fifties, but she still had been struck by the physical power that seemed to animate him, and she’d been a bit infatuated, taking every excuse to hover around while he was visiting.

Even now, she had a clear image of him in her mind.

That image was no longer accurate, however. Time had so shrunken and bent the monarch that she didn’t recognize him until she was introduced. The color had been bleached from him. If she didn’t know better, she would think him an albino. He trembled constantly.

But when she met his gaze, she glimpsed that old strength. It had been drained from his body and fermented, distilled, bittered there behind his eyes. As those pale orbs fastened on her, she felt as small as a barleycorn, and less significant.

“Father,” Berimund said. “I introduce to you Muriele Dare, queen of Crotheny, queen mother to Empress Anne I.”

Marcomir continued to stare at her.

“I’ve invited her to hunt with us.”

“What do you want here, witch?” the old man asked. His speaking broke the spell; his watery, quavering voice could not match his gaze. “Have you come here to murder me? Is that your intention?”

Muriele sat straighter but did not see any reason to answer such a question.

“Father!” Berimund said. “Do not be so ill-mannered. This lady—”

“Hush, whelp,” the king snarled. “I told you I would not see her. Why have you brought her here?”

“You said I could not present her in court,” Berimund replied. “You said nothing about hunting.”

“That’s a hair in my beard,” Marcomir snapped. “You understood my intent.”

He swung back to Muriele. “But since you are here, let me spell clearly for you. Your shinecrafting daughter is not and will never be queen. She has unleashed horrors that no man should ever see and tilted the world toward doom. I will not be guiled with words; I will not be won with gifts or favors. This is the battle foretold, the great war against evil, the ansuswurth itself, and we—with the holy Church—will stand against your dark lady and your unhulthadiusen, and we will send you all back to the abyss.”

As she watched the spittle drip down his chin, Muriele found that she had had enough.

“If I had known,” she began, “that Your Majesty was a despicable liar who clothes himself in holy raiment to disguise the greedy, covetous ambition he has nursed for decades, I certainly would never have come here in hopes of a conversation. You are a loathsome thing, Marcomir. A better man would simply admit his avarice for power and control, but like a little child you make up stories to disguise your disgusting nature and in doing so become even more abhorrent. You dress your lords and ladies in homage to your beloved ancestors, but there is more honor in a single one of their rotting bones than in your entire body. Sing your churchish songs and play the harp of saintliness, but I know what you are, and so do you, and nothing you say or do, no host you muster, no war you win, will change that. I traveled to Hansa in hope of finding a man. Instead I find
this.
How sad and repulsive.”

Marcomir had found color for his face somewhere. He trembled more violently than ever.

“My dear sister-in-law,” a voice said behind her. “You still have that turn of phrase that so wins the hearts of men.”

Only Muriele’s anger kept her from screaming as she turned and saw Robert Dare sitting casually on a spotted mare, grinning from ear to ear.

Neil glanced up at the vast ceiling of the chapel and shook his head.

“What’s that for, Sir Neil?” Alis asked.

“Why is it so big?”

“You don’t find it beautiful?”

Neil traced his gaze up a narrow buttress that must have been twenty kingsyards high. Light colored its lean length, suffused through a dome pierced by a myriad of crystal portals that also illuminated statues of the winged saints, the lords of sky, wind, thunder, the sun, moon, stars, and planets. Many looked as if they actually were flying.

“It is. But it’s also distracting. How can one pray properly among so much…so
much
?”

“The chapel in Eslen is easily as large and ornate.”

“I know. I didn’t understand that, either.”

“It’s not so in the islands?”

“No. The chapels are very plain and no bigger than necessary to kneel or be lustrated. I feel lost in a place this big.”

“Well, I, for one, feel the need to pray. Will you wait for me?”

“Should we separate?”

“I don’t see why not,” she said. “If our escort wanted to do us harm, I don’t imagine that would be a problem.”

“I’ll try to find Lier’s fane in all of this, then,” Neil said. “I’ll meet you back here in the center.”

Alis nodded and walked off, the
whisk-whisk
of her skirts echoing in the cavernous place.

Neil strolled past the saints of law and war, wondering if he ought to stop there, but the real need he felt was to find Lier, and so he continued to search, wondering what the saints thought of such ostentation. He supposed it depended on the saint. Some of them might be flattered.

It took a bit of time for him to realize the consistency of the groupings. The saints of sky were above, those of the qualities and affairs of men at eye level. That meant logically that he ought to look for a staircase down.

Once he knew what to search for, it wasn’t hard to find. Soon he was in a darker, quieter part of what was rightly a temple rather than a chapel.

There he found the saints beneath the earth and there, at last, the alter of Lier. The saint was carved from marble and shown as a man rising up from a wave, his long hair and beard blending with the foam.

The chapel on Skern had a rough image whittled from an old piece of mast found as driftwood.

Neil knelt, placed two silver coins in the box, and began to sing his prayer:

Foam Father, Wave Strider

You feel our keels and hear our prayers

Grant us passage on your broad back,

Bring us to shore when the storm’s upon us,

I beg you now

Grant passage to my song.

It echoed weirdly through the halls, coming back to him to form odd harmonies. He tried to focus beyond that, to fill his mind with the presence of the saint, with the wild salt spray, with the great eternal thing that was the ocean. And at last he did, as the rhythm of his prayer ebbed and flowed, and he felt the deeps beneath him once again. He prayed for Alis and Muriele, for Queen Anne and his friends, for the dead and the living.

When he was done, he felt better, and humbled. Who was he to disparage what sort of chapel someone chose to build?

Before Muriele could find any words to meet Robert with, Marcomir’s voice began rattling in such rapid Hansan that she couldn’t have understood him if she was trying to, which she wasn’t. She was vaguely aware that Berimund also was shouting. Robert’s grin became somehow more wicked.

Marcomir’s tone dropped, and he finally switched back to the king’s tongue.

“You do not speak to me like that,” he said very coldly. “It is a mistake you will regret.”

Muriele kept her gaze on Robert as she replied.

“Here is the proof of your hypocrisy,” she said. “You claim my daughter to be a witch, and yet you harbor this—this
thing
at your court. He is a fratricide and an abomination of nature. Cut him; see if he bleeds. Feel his heart; see if it beats. You will find it does not. But then, you already know that, don’t you?”

“Oh, dear,” Robert began. “I know we’ve had a bit of a tiff, Muriele, but really—”

“
Swiya!
Silence!” Marcomir snapped at Robert before turning his full fury on Muriele.

“I ought to kill you like a rabid bitch, right here and now,” the king said very quietly. “You twist words, but I know the truth. You speak for
her.
” He came closer. “There will be no truce with evil, no compromise, and no peace. We will destroy your daughter and the heretics who follow her, or we will perish trying. In either case, no peace will ever be made, so I need never explain what happened to you.”

“You would not,” Muriele said.

“He wouldn’t,” Berimund replied.

“What do you know, whelp? What makes you so compliant? Have you lain with this mother of witches?”

“I have not,” Berimund replied.

“Haven’t you?”