While Beauty Slept (30 page)

“No one must know,” Mrs. Tewkes admonished. “Not even the queen.” Quickly, she explained the danger I faced. It would not matter that I had served the king and queen faithfully for years or that Prince Bowen had no knowledge of my parentage. As his daughter I would be an object of suspicion, my motives questioned. I would have all the burdens of royalty with none of the advantages.

Royalty. Had my true father passed on the deep, unshakable ambition that had brought me from a country farm to the queen’s favor? I might hate Prince Bowen for his betrayal of my mother, but his noble blood flowed within my body. Had he acknowledged my mother as his mistress, I might have been raised as a cousin to Rose. The thought brought a quiver of pleasure.

“Best you put all this from your mind,” Mrs. Tewkes concluded. “I’ve no doubt you can. You have a cool head. It’s what makes you such a fine attendant.”

She stood and peered down at my face.

“Most would not see it, but you have a trace of him, about the eyes,” she said, regarding me as she would a painting. “A fine, proud posture as well, very like the king’s mother.”

I sat stiffly under her gaze. Stepping back, Mrs. Tewkes asked brightly, “I hear you’re to be married?”

Though she had shared the truth with me, I was not ready to do the same. Saying my engagement had been called off would make it true, and I could not yet bear to accept a future that did not include Marcus. I simply smiled and nodded before making a hasty exit.

God showed his mercy that afternoon, for he granted me a few quiet hours alone to collect my thoughts and mourn what I had lost. When I shared the news of my broken engagement with Queen Lenore, I wove a tale that mixed truth and fantasy, putting the whole episode down to youthful infatuation. Now that I had reached the womanly age of eighteen, I told her, I realized the importance of choosing a husband suitable to my position. When I cried into my pillow that night, my body shuddered with withheld sobs, and I vowed that my mistress would never know the sacrifice I had made on her behalf.

The progression of weeks, then months, softened my stabbing pangs of regret into a dull ache. Every time I watched Rose scamper across the garden or received a grateful smile from the queen, I told myself I had made the right choice. I was well fed and well clothed, living a life that most in the kingdom would envy. If at times my mind wandered to thoughts of what might have been, to visions of myself in Marcus’s arms, sharing a bed as man and wife, I pushed them forcefully aside. I fixed my eyes firmly on the road ahead, on my work with Flora and my duty to the royal family, hoping time would act as a salve and fade Marcus from my memory.

For poor Petra the castle offered no such refuge from heartbreak. So she escaped in the only way she could. Within a few months of Dorian’s rejection, she married a blacksmith in town, brother to one of the castle grooms, who had already buried one wife and sought a new mother for his two small children. I met him for the first time at their wedding dinner, a quiet affair held at her new husband’s modest house. He was a brawny man, as blacksmiths often are, yet quiet almost to the point of sullenness. I could not imagine a greater contrast to elegant, witty Dorian.

Petra looked lovely in her bridal gown, made of a delicate silk I had bought her as a wedding gift. Her hair, liberated from its servant’s cap and arranged in a pattern of braids and rolls, glistened in the sunlight that streamed through the windows. The children appeared much taken with her, and the smaller girl clutched Petra’s skirt for most of the afternoon.

When we finally stole a moment together, I clinked my glass of wine against hers in a toast. “I wish you much happiness.”

“Wish me peace.”

Petra’s face was weighted down with weariness. Gone was the girl I had once known, who chattered with delight in the bed beside mine and laughed as she pulled me behind her through the Lower Hall.

“Do not pity me,” she said with a brief, wry smile. “I am told he is a good man. His brother assured me he never beat his first wife.”

“Is that all you require in a husband?” I had intended to be humorous, but Petra’s smile wilted.

“I saw no other way.”

Her grief-stricken expression told me all she dared not say aloud. Anything, even keeping house for a tight-lipped blacksmith and his demanding children, was preferable to living alongside Dorian. He continued to flirt and preen in front of the castle ladies, and I was convinced his promise of marriage had been no more than a ploy to lure Petra to his bed. She—like my mother before her—had been used and cast aside.

I grasped her hands. “I understand.”

Had it been mere months since Petra and I giggled over tales of our sweethearts, basking in the pleasure of being loved? It seemed so very long ago. Time enough to transform us from hopeful girls to heart-hardened women.

Though we parted with tears and vows of friendship, Petra and her husband soon moved to a village across the kingdom that had lost its blacksmith and would pay well for a new one. She promised to write but did not. At first I thought her disappearance a betrayal of our friendship, but with time I came to understand and honor her decision. Whatever her affection for me, I was part of a life she had left behind, and any news I sent from the castle would only prolong her pain. The Petra who had been my friend no longer existed.

I, too, had changed. Rather than gazing hopefully toward the future’s horizon, I learned to be content living out each day as it came. Each morning I awoke with the sunlight, rising from my pallet in the alcove off Queen Lenore’s room. I dipped a cloth in cool water to wash the sleep from my eyes, then helped my mistress do the same. I fetched the breakfast trays from the chambermaid, laid out the queen’s clothes for the day, accompanied her to services in the chapel, and sat at her side before the fireplace, embroidering pillows or reading poetry. I played with Rose, delighting in her clever way with words and her infectious laughter. I accompanied Flora on her rambles through the herb garden and, in time, took over the planting and harvesting as her fingers stiffened with age. In the evenings I arranged Queen Lenore’s hair for supper, then brushed it out hours later as the candle on her dressing table dripped away. Seasons passed as I watched flowers erupt on the rosebushes, then fade and fall. The tumult of youthful emotions became a distant memory.

I thought those unremarkable years the end of my story. I did not know I was destined to be part of history once again, at the center of events terrible beyond imagining. This time I would play a leading role.

Twelve

SECOND CHANCES

I
s it possible that ten years could pass as one? A single afternoon with Marcus could demand an hour’s telling: the feel of the sun on my face, the looks that passed between us, the things he said to make me blush. Yet I can recount the decade after our parting in a few words: My life carried on, unchanged. Within the castle, day followed day, month after month, the rituals of court unaltered by the passing of time. Yet beyond our walls the shadows gathered. The evil we had sought to hold off for so long swirled inexorably closer, spreading suspicion and panic in its wake.

The kingdom had become a land ruled by fear rather than strength. Lord Steffon’s was the first in what would be a series of mysterious deaths, the victims all nobles traveling in far-off regions. A year would pass without incident, even two, but by and by word would come of a terrible fall or an unexplained collapse suffered by a relation of the royal family or a courtier’s nephew. Was it Millicent’s doing? We could never be sure, and the uncertainty pushed King Ranolf to govern with an ever-harsher hand. Soldiers were sent northward, where they confiscated the homes of the deRauleys and their supporters, then fortified the dwellings into citadels from which they could patrol the region. Networks of paid informers sifted through even the most innocuous gossip, and the castle dungeon filled with those who had foolishly uttered disloyal thoughts aloud. Queen Lenore turned inward, spending hours at prayer in the royal chapel. Desperate for God’s forgiveness and protection, she traded in most of her finery for humble black gowns and became easy prey for traveling nuns and so-called seers who sold her religious talismans meant to ward off evil.

And yet, despite the anxious rumors that were our constant companions, we thought ourselves safe inside that towering ring of rough-cut stones. Until the very end, we believed that the castle would protect us.

I was no longer the shy country girl who had quaked at the sight of the castle’s imposing gates. Unmarried at the age of twenty-eight, I might have been an object of pity to some, but never to myself. I was a fixture of the court, confident in my role and my position. The touchstones of my former life were gone: My sole surviving brother, Nairn, sent word that our father had died, unmourned, and that he was off to seek his fortune at sea. Marcus and his parents had long since moved from their shop in town, and Flora, my teacher and ally, had become a sickly, bedridden recluse. I spent an occasional Sunday with Aunt Agna, whose household had grown less lively as her children married off and moved away. Only my cousin Damilla and her husband, who had taken over the family’s cloth business, remained, along with their daughter, Prielle. She had grown into a quiet but curious girl who reminded me of myself at her age. I did my best to draw her out with my tales of court life, which she listened to with rapt attention.

Prielle’s reticence could not have been a greater contrast to thirteen-year-old Rose, who delighted in lively conversation and did not hesitate to make her opinions known. She was a beacon of light in those somber times, her sturdy health a daily defiance of Millicent’s hatred. She had her father’s rich auburn hair and the large, expressive eyes of her mother’s people; her full red lips brought to mind the bud of her namesake flower. Such looks would have inspired marriage proposals even without her title and vast wealth, but the king did not wait to secure her future, betrothing her at the age of ten to Sir Hugill Welstig, a distant relation whose family owned a vast estate in the western part of the kingdom. A girl of royal blood often said her vows at fourteen or fifteen, but Rose begged not to be married until her eighteenth birthday, and King Ranolf, as always, acceded to his daughter’s pleas. He could never deny her anything.

Feeling no great pull toward marriage myself, I sympathized with Rose’s reluctance. I could have married a fellow servant, kept my place, and done no more than move my bedroll to a different room. More than one man had signaled with admiring stares or flirtatious jokes that he’d have me. But my sights had been set perilously high. I never came close to feeling what I had for Marcus. I’d had love once, and modest affection was not enough to tempt me.

I was not such a fool as to think love necessary for a successful marriage. Women marry to be assured a roof over their head and food on the table. They marry because they need a protector or because they wish for children. All perfectly sensible reasons, and none to do with love. But my needs were met: I had a fine home and fine food and fine clothes. As the queen’s attendant, I was respected and respectable even without a husband. Having seen what I had of childbirth, I was relieved to have been spared that suffering, but I did feel a pang whenever I held a swaddled baby. I wondered how it must feel to be bound by flesh and blood to such a tiny creature. The love I might have showered on my own children went to Rose and Prielle instead.

Only once in all those years did I question my decision not to wed. Walking the streets of St. Elsip after a visit to my aunt, I was jolted out of my daydreaming by a familiar face. Marcus had lost all trace of boyishness in the five years since we’d parted, and he carried himself like a man of substance, walking through the cathedral square with a short, stout woman and a young girl. He pressed his hand against the woman’s back, guiding her through the crowd, and I remembered, immediately and viscerally, how it felt to be the object of his gentle concern. Here, before me, was the life that might have been mine. A wave of longing churned in the pit of my stomach, and I turned to go before he could see me.