The Element of Fire (20 page)

Denzil asked, "Are you all right?"

"You ask me that?"

The voices below had grown softer. Thomas took a silent step forward to the railing to hear more clearly. After a moment Kade joined him.

"What? Were you worried?" Denzil's voice had a laugh in it. "That was barely worth the effort."

"You take too many chances. But you should have left that boy alone. He's nothing." Roland was oblivious to the fact that Aristofan was perhaps a year or two older than himself.

"He insulted me. And you should thank me for ridding you of him. He's your wife's lover."

"He's nothing. All the married women in the city have lovers. My mother has lovers. God knows my father had worse habits--"

"Don't. If your honor means nothing to you, it means something to me."

And how is Roland's honor affected by an insult to Denzil,
Thomas wondered. Where was Dr. Dubell to ask the pertinent question?

"Sometimes I think you're the only one."

Denzil did not dispute this. "I'm sorry I upset you. That bitch of a sorceress--"

"Is my sister."

At his side Thomas sensed Kade stiffen.

"And where was she when you needed her?"

"She ran away. I loved her and she left me behind without a second thought."

Kade shivered once, a slight movement with all the intensity of a restrained convulsion. Thomas found himself unwillingly sympathetic. Roland had been the Crown Prince; his exiled sister could hardly have taken him with her, as if they were farm children escaping a harsh master. And the choice to stay with him in the city had been taken from her by Ravenna's command.

Kade drew back as if to leave. Impulsively, Thomas put a hand on top of hers on the railing and she froze. At that moment an army probably couldn't have kept her on that balcony by force, but that gentle touch seemed enough to hold her there.

"Who stayed with you?" Denzil asked.

"You did. I'd have died without someone."

"Then it's a good thing she wasn't all you had." There was silence, then a creak as one of the men below opened the door.

Thomas released Kade's hand, and she vanished back through the archway.

KADE FOUND HERSELF in need of company. Falaise was the only person she could think of who might possibly be willing to put up with her, and Kade was in such a mood that she was willing to put up with moping, which was probably what Falaise was doing at the moment.

The Queen's apartments were on the fifth level of the King's Bastion, but when Kade came up the stairs to where she could see the doorway of the first antechamber, it looked like a disturbed anthill. Gentlewomen and maidservants were running in and out, and Queen's guards were stalking around outside the door.
That doesn't look promising,
Kade thought. She didn't particularly want to start another sensation, so she crept back down the stairs and out of sight.

The next stairwell gave onto the cathedral-like entrance of an old gallery, and she stopped in front of the oaken doors carved with willows and birds of paradise. This was the hall where the royal portraits were kept, "where the family was interred," as some long-ago courtier had referred to it.

After a moment, Kade went inside.

It was cold with the chill of marble, fine wood laid over stone, and gilded frames, and it felt barren as rooms that have never been lived in feel. The hall lanterns illuminated ancestors, distant relations, and the notables of this or other ages, which Kade passed by without more than a cursory glance. There was only one set of portraits here anyone ever came to see. They were the Greancos, the portraits of the royal family.

Other painters had done royal portraits which were scattered about the palace or presented to favored nobles, but Greanco had been a seventh son of a seventh son, with half his mind in the Otherworld. Having a portrait done by him was to take a chance at having one's soul revealed. Fortunately for Greanco, this held a fascination for Ravenna and her family that had kept him at court longer than anyone else would have put up with him.

Knowing the effect and having felt it before didn't help; shivers ran up Kade's back as she stood beneath those canvas eyes. She had to fight the conviction that there were people watching her who disappeared when she turned to face them.

She stopped before the portraits of the old kings: Ravenna's father and grandfather. Their hard eyes stared down at her. Both men had been beleaguered warrior kings, and the primary impressions the portraits gave were those of guile and strength. Undoubtedly they would have found Ravenna a proper daughter; her strong features were echoed in theirs. But what would they think of Roland, Kade wondered. Or herself, for that matter?
Probably not much,
she decided. Why Ravenna's father had chosen to settle the ruling right on Fulstan and not on her was a mystery. Perhaps he had not entirely trusted her, or perhaps he mistook independence for willfulness. Kade had heard that Fulstan had always put on a good show for his father-in-law. It hadn't mattered in the end, and Ravenna had had the kingdom in reality, if not in name.
We all make mistakes,
she told the portrait silently, as she moved on.
But some of us have to live with them.

There were solemn representations of other relatives, and courtiers she should have known, generals or statesmen who had walked these rooms when she was a child and had since died. But like the children she had played with until her father found reasons to send their families away, she only dimly remembered their faces and couldn't quite recall their names.

Then she circled a pillar and found herself facing the portrait of Fulstan in his prime. Surprisingly, Kade could look at it without emotion; Greanco had painted an empty slate, a weak vessel that had not yet been subjected to the stresses that would deform it. He had faithfully depicted the handsome features, the full brown hair, and the wide-set blue eyes but had managed to give the impression that the beauty was transitory, and not something that grew out of character, that would last through age. The later portrait that revealed the older bitter man was said to hang in Ravenna's bedchamber, there only because the Dowager had reportedly said that she couldn't think of a better place for him than nailed up there on the wall, watching.

After the Arlequin's attack, Denzil had brought up the subject of Fulstan's suspiciously quick illness and death, and Kade had felt an odd mingling of triumph and guilt. She had been almost certain for years that she had caused Fulstan's death with that same unskilled power that had smashed the cathedral's windows, that she had wished him dead all the way from the Monelite Convent. But she was a little afraid of those thoughts, too. She wanted to think her sorcery had some control, that it wasn't as wild as her fay magic. But study was the only cure for lack of control; she should be studying in the quiet peace of Knockma instead of stirring up trouble here.

The next portrait was of Roland as a child. The better-known and inferior portrait by Avisjon hung in a more prominent location downstairs. Despite the trappings of royal tunic and mantle, the scepter and the Hand of Justice, Greanco had captured Roland's frightened eyes all too well.

She wandered down the wall a little and unexpectedly encountered her own portrait.

I should have known,
she thought, staring. Ravenna wouldn't have let Roland burn the rags Greanco used to wipe his brushes, let alone one of his paintings.

When it had first been painted so long ago, Kade had been upset that her awkwardness and anxiety had been so well revealed. Now she saw what had really been there. It was pain.

So that's what it was like,
she thought.
It seems I might have forgotten.

Kade now understood why Ravenna had had the portrait put away after it was complete. It was also a reproach. How it had found its way up here she couldn't imagine.

She stepped back to where she could see both her own and Roland's portraits and thought,
Did I run away?
At the time it had seemed a glorious escape.
What would have happened if I'd stayed? Nothing or everything.
She couldn't remember being angry at Roland when she left for the convent. She felt like a contributor to that expression on Roland's young face which Greanco had captured so well, and she didn't like the feeling.
I should leave, tonight, now,
she thought wearily.
This isn't turning out the way I imagined and I'm just in the way. Now that they've seen me again they probably won't even be afraid of me anymore.

Kade remembered that hot Midsummer Eve's day when the power had come flowing out of her as if she were a bottle shattered from pressure within. She hadn't had any grudge against the cathedral itself; in fact, she rather regretted the destruction of those stained glass windows. She had done simple magics under Galen Dubell's tutelage, but that had been the first time the ability had risen in her with such strength, the first time she could focus it at will. It had been marvelous. But it was the first and only time. She would not reach that peak so easily again. The only road to that kind of power was the one of hard study, and she had dedicated the years since to mastering her abilities, though it had never been easy. And perhaps she had let the more painstaking magics of sorcery take second place to the easy power of fayre.

She turned to go, but she had missed the paintings on the other side of the gallery and now one caught her eye. It was an informal portrait of a younger Ravenna with an elite group of her Queen's Guard and the officers. She sat in the center, dressed in a mantua of black velvet and flame silk, a rose of diamonds on her breast. A younger Thomas Boniface leaned on the chair at her side and slightly behind her, with the rest of the guards grouped around, all handsome and all with a pronounced air of danger.

Kade didn't remember seeing it before. It must have been done after she had left, to commemorate the recently victorious Bisran War, when Ravenna had brought the years of fighting to an end. It was odd that it wasn't somewhere downstairs, but Kade supposed that it had been scandalous for an independent queen with a useless husband to have her portrait done with a group of young men. But then that was Ravenna down to the bone, and Greanco had conveyed that, too. During that war, Ravenna had traveled extensively around the disputed borders with her guard and one or two maidservants. Knowing Ravenna, she had probably chaperoned the maidservants more than they had chaperoned her. A few bishops had spoken out against her, but the rest of the country thought the Church poked into other people's morals too much as it was; landlaw barely took notice of adultery, and queens had traditionally taken lovers among their personal bodyguard.

It was the tacit rules of landlaw that allowed Ravenna to keep command of the Queen's Guard when she should have passed it on to Falaise as the younger woman was crowned. Under landlaw, a personal bodyguard could not be inherited or given away without the liege's permission. If there was something Ravenna was good at, it was manipulating laws and circumstances to her own ends.

I should learn to do that,
Kade thought, bitterly amused at herself. But fayre had few laws, or at least few that made sense. Like the court, the denizens of the Kingdoms of Fay fought, plotted, and stabbed one another in the back to excess, but they were soulless creatures and their passions were short-lived and shallow. The outcomes of their games didn't really matter to them, and there was nothing like the solid trust that was reflected in this portrait...

You are getting sentimental, you idiot.

The next portrait was of Thomas Boniface, also in informal dress. Even for a Greanco it was dark and elusive. Though Thomas was more than ten years the elder, he and Denzil had much the same presence in person: arrogant and sensual and well aware of their own worth, both wolves in lapdogs' clothing. The portrait suggested that in the Captain's case the arrogance might be tempered by irony.

Tradition dictated that the Captain of the Queen's Guard as well as the Preceptor of the Albonate Knights renounce all familial connections so their whole loyalty would be to the crown. Nepotism and interfering relations could be permitted with other nobles who served in the palace, but these positions were seen as too important. Renier had been Duke of something, Kade remembered, when he handed the whole thing over to a younger brother and took his post for Roland. Thomas had been Viscount Boniface.

Both court offices came with a huge amount of wealth and some land, but gave up the right to leave that wealth to any heir other than the next man appointed to the position. If the Albonate Preceptors lived to retire they were usually created a duke and awarded estates and income. It was assumed the same thing would be done for the Captains of the Queen's Guard, but in recent history all of them had died at duty.

Kade realized abruptly that Thomas Boniface probably expected the same to happen to him. If he outlived Ravenna his position at court would not be a good one. Roland and Denzil were both against him, and Falaise seemed helpless to protect anyone including herself. That was what the portrait conveyed, Kade knew suddenly. It was the face of a man who took service with the crown accepting the possibility of eventual betrayal and a violent death, but not one who enjoyed having to kill people whose main crime seemed to be stupidity.