The Fiend Queen (33 page)

He cocked his head.

“Teach me what I need to know, and let that be that.” Images reared in her mind, her doing or his she didn’t know: the awful way she’d treated Dawnmother and Katya and Maia. Starbride fought the feelings down, but one image wouldn’t go away, the shutters fluttering in the breeze. Had he been using her body while she slept?

“Don’t bother telling me that you’re all I have,” Starbride said, “Instead, consider this: I
am
all that you have.”

His eyebrows lifted. “Marienne is filled with your kind now.”

“And which of them will have you? Redtrue? Think again. Her very nature would make her turn tail from you and run.”

Yanchasa smiled, and she saw respect in his gaze. “Do you seek to become my teacher, daughter?”

“No. Horsestrong knows you have more wisdom for battle and strategy, but I can’t let my friends be sacrificed.”

“Sacrifice is sometimes necessary. Katya knows this.”

Starbride screwed her eyes shut. “And please stop digging through my memories. I am not Katya. I am me, and I will not sacrifice my friends!”

Yanchasa held her hands up in surrender. “As you wish. From now on, if you want my help, you must ask. I will be but a shade lingering in your mind.”

Yanchasa was annoyed, but Starbride would take irritated over imperious and commanding. When she blinked again, Yanchasa was gone. Starbride glanced around, unable to remember the last time she hadn’t been able to find him when she looked.

“Starbride?” Freddie asked.

She’d forgotten he was there. “Are you wounded, either of you?”

“A bit,” Freddie said just as Hugo said, “Not after transforming.”

With a thought, Starbride healed Freddie’s cuts and bruises. As Hugo said, he was whole, even if he did look a little drowsy.

Freddie cleared his throat. “What happened?”

“Put your necklace back on, Hugo,” Starbride said. “We should find the messenger, and then I need to round up the chil…the others.”

“What happened?” Freddie asked again as he tried to keep pace with her.

“Think you and Hugo can find the rest of the horses?”

He stepped in front of her. “Is it like a children’s story, and I need to ask three times?”

Starbride took a deep, steadying breath. “I cannot begin to explain.”

“Because I’m too stupid to understand?”

“If it gets you out of my way, yes.” She stepped around him.

“I think my horse went that way,” Hugo said loudly.

Freddie slashed a hand through the air. “I’m not leaving you alone until you give me some clue about what in the name of Ellias’s big balls is going on!”

“And I’m sure your horse went that way!” Hugo yelled.

“Both of you shut up.” Starbride didn’t know what she could say. Her feelings were still a jumble. She was annoyed and amused at Freddie and Hugo, ashamed and proud of herself. It was like having two minds, but she couldn’t feel Yanchasa however she turned. “Let’s finish the job here, let me work a few things out, and then I will try, Freddie, truly I will.” She let some of the adsna back in, letting it calm her. It was a difficult balance, like figuring out how to work a stubborn sluice gate. How much to let in and how fast determined what she felt and when. She had to keep the cold at bay, at least.

Freddie’s lips mashed together so hard they turned white, but at last he lifted his arms and then dropped them. “Come on, Hugo. Let’s go find the horses.”

Katya

Whatever she did, nothing led Katya any closer to figuring out a way to free Starbride from Yanchasa’s influence. Maia had been overwhelmed by the merest trace of Yanchasa’s personality. Roland might have had closer contact with the Fiend, but it had only driven him more insane.

Redtrue consulted Leafclever about the capstone, and he agreed that they couldn’t cleanse it on their own. It would take all of the adsnazi working in concert to change such powerful magic. And they couldn’t say what would happen to someone attached to that magic, like Starbride, and all those who carried a piece: Katya’s father, Reinholt, his children, Maia, Hugo, and now Brutal. They could be cleared of the Fiendish taint, or they might be killed.

Katya nodded when she heard. “Keep studying. We can’t act on the capstone until we know everyone will be safe.”

Redtrue frowned. “What if the only conclusions I can draw are ones you won’t like, those that will only serve the greater good?”

“I suggest you don’t speak such answers out loud.” She slid her thumb along her rapier pommel, and Redtrue left her alone.

Maybe all of Katya’s troubles would blow over, a voice inside her suggested. Yes, and maybe tiny winged spirits would deliver her dinner. The world was full of ifs, and as Dawnmother would say, every one of them was a hole in the road.

Katya decided to wander, her solution to so many problems in the past. She wasn’t surprised when her feet took her past the council chambers. With so much to fret over, it was no wonder her brain tried to find yet
another
set of problems.

What she needed was something to put her sword to. By the raised voices in the council chamber, she thought her father might appreciate that.

Before she reached the door, it flew open, and nobles boiled out, faces thunderous. A few nodded as they stomped past. Only Count Mathias and Countess Nadia seemed calm. Leafclever and Dayscout brought up the rear, and they seemed just as agitated as the others. At least they offered a smile before they wandered off, heads close together.

Katya found her father in his usual seat at the head of the long council table. He rested his chin in one fist and stared out the row of windows lining one wall.

“I won’t ask how it’s going,” she said.

The lines under his eyes were deeper, purple-tinged. “This isn’t a council. It’s a giant millstone, and I’m the donkey trying to keep it going round. Most of the nobles are dead set against a parliament. They see it either as the catalyst for the capital’s fall or knuckling under to the demands of the peasantry.”

“Did they catch the part where a madman was actually the catalyst, and that the peasantry helped reclaim the kingdom?”

“Call it selective memory. I think their backs are up because of the Allusians. I tried to press upon them that the Allusians are only here to look after their own interests, but some don’t believe me. I’ve told them we could learn from our neighbors, but you can guess how well that went.”

Katya slipped into a seat beside him. “As welcome as a bad smell.”

Da rubbed his chin. “Maybe if I push the Allusians on the nobles more, they’ll better buy into the parliament idea, clinging to their fellow Farradains, no matter if they’re poor.”

“But using the Allusians like that would alienate them, yes?”

He shrugged. “They like the parliament idea. If I can get Dayscout to go along, perhaps we can perform a routine to get everyone looking the way we want.”

“I don’t envy you.”

He sighed. “I miss Cat.”

Katya’s heart thudded. They hadn’t really talked of Ma since the day they’d all been reunited. “Me, too. She always had clarity.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

They chuckled before bowing their heads in the face of all they had lost. Katya watched her father struggle with emotion even as she did. “When will we have the…” She took a deep breath. “The funeral.”

“Tomorrow.”

“So soon?”

“Not soon at all, my girl, as these things go.”

Katya couldn’t help but remember her grandmother’s funeral, when events in the capital had come to a head, spurred on by Roland. She wondered if the glass carriage used to carry the royal coffins was still in one piece.

“We’ll gather quietly at the crypt,” he said. “Family, friends, and a few nobles waiting outside. I thought you’d want to inter Averie at the same time.”

Katya hiccupped through a nod. It was probably best to avoid a show of wealth when so many people in the city had lost someone. They couldn’t all have a state funeral, and it was best not to remind them of that fact.

*

When Katya emerged from the palace early in the morning, she stopped cold. The glass funeral carriage rested at the bottom of the stairs, empty but polished and ready. Reinholt stood beside it, and Katya just kept herself from lunging at him. Their father had come up with a simple, effective way to keep the populace from resenting the royals anew, and Reinholt stomped all over it.

When he saw her, he grinned. “I did consult him, Little K.”

She skidded to a halt and forced herself to look at the noticeably empty carriage. One glass side had been left out. “What’s going on?”

“This isn’t for Ma. My friends and I have been circulating through the town, telling everyone this is a day of mourning.” He looked up at the sky. “Come on. We’re late.”

He climbed up into the carriage’s seat and waved her aboard. She climbed up slowly, giving him a sidelong glance. The remaining side to the carriage rested beneath them. “Where is Da?”

“He’ll meet us at the crypt.”

Katya kept her frown as they drove through the streets. When a woman stepped forward from the meager crowd and set something in the open side of the carriage, Katya watched her warily. She wiped tears from her cheeks, glanced at Katya, and nodded.

She stepped back, and Katya saw a rag doll, one button left in its dirty white face, sitting upon the velvet lining inside the carriage.

As they continued, more people came forward to lay objects in the carriage until they had to stop and put up the side. Even then, people put their keepsakes on top. Sometimes they just touched the carriage as it rolled by, darkening the glass with fingerprints. A day of mourning; she finally understood. Reinholt invited the populace into their grief instead of hiding from them. It let them know that their monarchy mourned with them, that their leaders had lost people, too.

“Clever, Reinholt,” Katya said.

“Not all of us are thinking with our
crowns
, Katya. People need this.” When she stared at him, he returned the look, but his held a hint of defiance. “I’m serious. Of the two of us, who is more in touch with their feelings?”

Bad feelings, she’d give him that.

When the carriage was overflowing, people started laying things behind the driver’s seat or at Katya’s and Reinholt’s feet. Katya put them beside her, but soon she had to walk in order to make room, and by the time they reached the graveyard south of Marienne, Reinholt walked, too, leading the horses.

A crowd followed them to the graveyard gates and stopped. Maybe they thought the less people to disturb the dead, the better. The gravediggers had been operating overtime. Unclaimed bodies now rested in a mass grave near the back, and that was where Reinholt steered the glass carriage. They paused before a large pit, gaping black like a wound in the earth. Da waited with Maia and Brutal. Off to the side stood Countess Nadia, Baroness Jacintha, Dayscout, his servant, and a few others. More townspeople gathered at the fence to watch.

“Today we bury the dead,” Da intoned, “so that the living might continue.” Old words, said at gravesides since Marienne’s beginning, only not by loved ones, not by the king. The gravedigger said them before he cast in the first shovelful of dirt.

“Come on,” Reinholt whispered in her ear.

Katya helped him lift the glass carriage from its wooden base. Brutal, Jacintha, and some of the others carried it to the large pit, and the gravediggers attached it to a pulley, just as they would a coffin. Maia and Nadia led the others in gathering the loose keepsakes. They placed them in the grave as the carriage slowly descended.

The glass funeral carriage that had cost a fortune was soon entombed in dirt. The people along the fence moved away in little groups. Katya and her family trekked toward the large crypt where scores of Umbriels slumbered, the stone and marble square guarded by the statue of an immense hawk that peered at them with suspicious eyes.

Captain Ursula met them just inside the iron doors, standing guard over two bundles, both swaddled head to toe in linen and tied with cloth-of-gold cord. The smell of flowers and rosewood oil permeated the air, and Katya spied plant stems woven through the shrouds.

She grabbed at her side for a hand that was not there, might never be there again. Tears threatened to choke her, and she feared her feet might not carry her farther. Maia caught her right hand and Reinholt her left as they followed Katya’s father deeper into shadow.

“Captain,” Da said, “thank you for guarding my family.” His eyes were so soft and sad, Katya wanted to put her arms around him, but she feared letting go of Maia and Reinholt.

Ursula bowed and stepped out. Katya saw a shadow waiting in the back, the man who would entomb her mother and Averie. There were already two niches waiting in the wall, and plenty of bare space for the rest of them.

Da touched Ma’s forehead. Without a word, he turned and left, cloak flapping behind him. Maia approached the bier on shaky legs. She laid the ghost of a kiss against the fabric shrouding both bodies and then followed Katya’s father.

Reinholt gave Katya a squeeze, but she wouldn’t let go. “I killed Averie,” she whispered. “I let our mother die.”

Reinholt bent to her ear. “The monster did, not you.”

She shook her head wildly, and the crypt blurred. “You don’t understand. I—”

He gripped her hand so hard shocks of pain traveled up her arm. “I do understand, and I’m still right.”

Had Castelle told him what had happened to Averie, or was he just trying to make her feel better? It didn’t matter. He let go and then bid farewell to their mother. Katya realized she’d never been so happy that Lord Vincent kept the children away. She didn’t want to think of them seeing their relatives fall to pieces.

Katya sank down beside the bier. She and her mother had already said good-bye, once in life and again in death. What words could comfort her now? She couldn’t rid herself of the image of Averie’s terrified face the night Roland had captured her, long before he’d turned her into a weapon.

One touch and then the smell of flowers was too overwhelming, the crypt too close. She staggered outside and tried to block out the sound of the gravedigger mixing his mortar.