Anna von Wessen (13 page)

Clyde asked Vaya how she knew to do all that she had done; but she had no answer to give him. She said it was something like the knowledge that comes to one in a dream; only one never does truly understand whence the knowledge came. We can liken it only to the same power which drove Greyson to wake Vaya. We shall call it the power of truth: always discreet in its methods, to avoid its charges discovering its origin, and thereby destroying what should have been their faith; but nonetheless effecting change according to the schedule of fate.

Perhaps we needn’t go on to give an account of Tokin’s fury, upon finding in the morning that he could not escape his chamber – but suffice it to say that it was fury of a considerable magnitude. And it was no wonder, really. For some reason – probably it had to do with the fact that the talisman had previously been one of those powerful objects designed by the Endai – this particular Aera was most especially potent; and after placing his hand on the doorknob, in an attempt to turn it, Tokin was blown as if by an invisible force, clean across the room,
and atop an old suit of armour. Unfortunately, the suit was complete with polished, sharpened sword; and Tokin was none too pleased to find himself very effectively skewered through the neck. His displeasure and discomfort did not last long, however, for but a moment later he was utterly dead – his head having been unlucky enough to fall off, and thereby to spoil all of Vaya’s efforts not to kill him in the first place.

But we have digressed. Presently Anna stood before the door to Greyson’s cell, waiting for Golkin to move aside. He was quick enough about it; and when he had turned round, he even gave Anna something of a smile.

“Go on, Anna,” he said. He was a nice enough fellow, really, for a great hulking guard. “Take as much time as you like.”

“Thank you, Golkin,” said Anna, as she entered the room.

Still there was that faint thing that could not even be called radiance, which flowed from the aforementioned place in the South wall. Moved to the total blackness of the cell, it seemed to double in power, and to make something of a grey murk out of the place where Golkin stood.

But even this slightly comforting lesser darkness was taken away, as Anna moved full into the room, and the door was fastened behind her. She searched for Greyson in the
pool of black; but it was so very thick, it served to render the power of even her Lumarian eyes almost moot. 

“Greyson?” she said. “Where are you?”

“I’m here.”

His voice came from a distant corner of the large room. Anna moved towards it, all the while fishing in her pocket for a book of matches. When she found it, she took one in her hand, and struck it lit. Greyson’s chalky face greeted her with a sad smile. She hurried to him, and handed him the match. He looked at it for a long while, as someone hungry would eye a piece of food, however pitiful – and Anna’s dead heart ached for him.

The room was fitted with not a single article of furniture – not even a wooden bench along the wall. There was only the chilly stone floor. So Anna sat there beside Greyson, watching the flickering flame with him. When it expired, he gave a little squeal; and she quickly produced another.

“How do you feel, Greyson?” she asked.

“Shipshape,” he answered dully, his eyes fixed like rivets upon the match.

“That was a ridiculous question, I suppose. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he replied; though with not a jot more emphasis. “You ask me every day. I like it when you ask.”

“Oh.”

They lapsed into a lengthy silence, then, which was broken only when Greyson’s matches went out, and he uttered a fearful cry at the return of the darkness.

XIII:

The Interview

B
ut now we diverge.

In those days after her arrival at the castle, Vaya Eleria was cross and irascible, and wanted not to speak to anyone, any more than Anna herself did. She would not acknowledge Ephram, after her initial objective had been met, and she had brought just as much trouble as she could down upon the heads of the ones who had disturbed her rest. Happy was she when she heard that Greyson had been locked in the tower. She was far from satisfied, however, with the outcome of Anna’s share in the whole farrago. She learnt, after the scene in the royal chamber, that no punishment whatever had come to that accursed individual – and she was all the more irate because of it.

She looked to the lowliest caste of Drelho, the members of which slunk in its very darkest and remotest corners, the better to come away innocent from those breaches of Lumarian doctrine and propriety in which they sometimes liked to indulge. Working through them, Vaya thought, there should be very little chance of her questions’ echoes reaching her father’s ears. It was, then, that large puddle of the steward’s least influential subjects – the sort who somehow always seem to be the ones who love gossiping best, at the expense of their master – which gave her what information she craved. From them she learnt all she wished to know about
Anna von Wessen,
her father’s sickening little prodigy, complete with all the fallacious embellishments of minds which do not wholly understand the matters on which they ponder.

What she heard, however, was enough to incense her still further. It was this particular brand of aggravation, probably, that drove her finally to her father. She sought him all through the castle, and found him in that same drawing-room where the very idea of her return to the waking world had been forged – sitting beside a little fire, in the very chair where Greyson himself had sat, admiring her portrait.

So did Ephram look upon it now, with expressionless eyes that spoke somehow all the more of his grief. Vaya heeded it not, but approached him in quite the proudest manner she could muster, and looked down on him with a dark and indifferent eye, as if it were indeed all she could do to keep from spitting on him, and as if it were the very most benevolent thing she could have possibly done, merely to condescend to speak to him.

“Father,” she said brusquely.

Ephram looked up at her, with the bright and hopeful face of a small child. “Hello, Vaya,” he said meekly.

Vaya turned from him, and took a seat. If she had known, that she sat then exactly where Anna had previously sat, probably she would have leapt up as if she were afire. But she did not know, and so kept her chair, while she commanded the long minutes of silence which fell heavily over the room.

Ephram looked from the portrait, to the real Vaya; and the ghosts of tears he could not physically shed filled his eyes. But Vaya did not appear to be moved.

“Much has changed, I think,” she said, “in these two-and-a-half centuries. More, in fact, than I would care to know.”

One moment, Ephram looked imploringly into her eyes; and the next, he seemed to be having trouble even meeting her gaze. “Perhaps that is true,” he said softly. “Indeed much has changed – and you must decide how you will face it.”

“How
I
will face it?” scoffed Vaya, as she leant forward a little in her chair. “It seems now, Father, that you cannot even face
me.
” She uttered a low laugh, and her eyes glittered malevolently in the glare of the fire. “Though I own that you have very good reason,” she added.

They turned their faces from one another, and Vaya directed her poison to the burning grate, while Ephram averted his tormented gaze towards the shadows.

“Tell me,” Vaya said suddenly, “about Anna von Wessen.”

“What do you wish to know?”

Vaya abandoned all clemency, looked directly into her father’s pained countenance, and asked, “Do you love her as you once loved me?”

Ephram said nothing.

“Do you, Father? Tell me – is she all you could ask for?”

“Please, Vaya –”

She held up a hand, and he fell silent.

“Answer my question, Father.”

“I care for her,” said Ephram, with just a slight amount of resolution creeping into his voice. “She means very much to me.”

“I’m sure.”

Much to Vaya’s obvious surprise, Ephram suddenly jumped to his feet, and pointed his finger into her face. “Do not judge me,” he thundered, with a familiar fury flashing in his eyes. “You would have been with me, all these years – you would have been Queen! You could have had everything. But what did you expect from me, Vaya – when your vile actions made you the opprobrium of your own people?”

At this, Vaya too sprang from her chair, and stood staring defiantly into Ephram’s face, though her own dipped nearly a foot below it. “You dare,” she said, “to speak of that to me? In the very first days that I wake from my death – the death you gave me?”

Ephram lowered his hand, but was unwilling to concede. He backed away from Vaya, and leant an arm against the mantel, where he stood gazing into the fire. “You don’t understand, Vaya,” he whispered. “I was King! I had to do what I did.”

“And now?”

“Now, Vaya? Now I am nothing but an old man.”

“And what is Anna von Wessen?”

Ephram was silent.

“Will you keep us both for a while?” pressed Vaya. “Will you hold us one against the other, and leave the one which pleases you least, to lie alone in a rotting tomb?”

“Vaya!”

“She is nothing! Don’t you see that she’s nothing? She isn’t me, Father! A very
poor replica, actually, if you want my opinion.”

“You will let her alone, Vaya,” said Ephram. “You will make no trouble for Anna. What stands between me and you, that has nothing to do with her. She is an innocent, brave, and beautiful girl – and you will not sully her.”

Vaya smiled scornfully, as she made to sweep from the room. But she turned back for a moment, and met her father’s eyes in the dim firelight. “There is no such thing,” she said, “as an innocent Lumarian. Whether brave or no, I know not – but I’ll grant you that she is very beautiful.”

She passed out of the chamber, and slammed the door so very hard in her wake, that it collapsed down to the stone floor of the hall. The crash resounded through the castle; and all inside it knew, that Vaya Eleria had just concluded her first interview with her father. 

Part the Second

Episode III

XIV:

The Bolt-Gun

F
rom out of the days of hardship which had already accumulated, there came the fourth feast of Anna’s stay at Drelho. She left Greyson in the tower, mere minutes before she was due in the dining hall, then returned to her chamber to dress, and to try somehow to smooth the signs of exhaustion from her face. She was thoroughly worn and haggard after the sleepless fortnight she had passed, and was famished beyond comprehension.

She entered the hall late, and under the eyes of all collapsed into her seat at Ephram’s table. She fell to the meat before her, ignoring with all her might Greyson’s vacant place beside her, and did not stop till there was none left to lay her hands upon. She then sat back in her chair, weary and dizzy, watching the torchlight flicker over the multitude of faces below the head table.

“Are you not feeling well tonight, Anna?”

Anna turned her head towards the voice; and saw Valo there across from her, looking upon her with a countenance which bespoke of a presumably sincere concern. It seemed he had cast off his anger once again, and taken up the torch of his long-declared love.

“I shall be fine,” answered Anna, “in good time.”

A low snicker originated from the air beside Valo; and upon looking in that direction, Anna discovered the pestiferous sight of Ari, laughing very earnestly at her own expense.

“Shut up, will you?” Anna said hotly.

“And if I don’t?”

“If you don’t, I shall climb over this table, and skewer your hideous face with my fork.”

Valo chuckled, before he could quite stop himself. Ari looked to him with the very most injured expression she seemed able to muster; whereupon he fell immediately silent, but did not entirely cease his grinning.

“You laugh at me?” Ari demanded. “You laugh at
me –
for her? And what do you want her for, anyway?” She turned to face Anna. “You filthy, counterfeit Lumarian!”

Valo flamed up at these words, swivelled his body in his seat, and struck Ari full across the face. “Watch your mouth!” he shouted.

Meanwhile, Ari was kneeling most shamefully upon the floor, having been knocked clean from her chair by the force of Valo’s open hand. “Oh, Valo!” she cried. “Don’t speak to me that way! You know how I love you!”

“Oh, get up off your knees, you silly little sycophant,” Anna spat. “You’re making a fool of yourself.”

It was only after the small scene which ensued, when Valo slapped Ari, that Ephram’s attention was drawn away from his conversation with the steward. “What is all this?” he demanded. “Valo, what goes there?”

“Nothing, Father,” Valo answered calmly. “Nothing at all.”

“Why have you fallen from your seat, Ari?”

Ari made no reply, but raised herself off the floor with much exaggerated movements, her eyes fixed mournfully upon an oblivious Valo.

Ephram laid his hand on Anna’s arm. “Are you all right, my dear?” he asked.

Anna turned to respond; and in so doing her eyes fell upon the figure seated at Ephram’s opposite hand. It was no less than Vaya Eleria herself.

Anna stared at her for a long moment, utterly amazed and bewildered. The newly raised Princess, without even having undergone a trial to obtain the Council’s pardon for those crimes which had brought about her very execution – she was sitting here at the head table, directly in betwixt the King and the steward? It was preposterous.

Vaya returned Anna’s gaze with cold, empty eyes, and a sneer which denoted all too plainly her intense scorn. It was then that Anna regained an amount of her equilibrium; for her pride had been pricked. So she hardened her stare.

“Do you wish to say something to me?” she asked in a low voice.

Vaya Eleria narrowed her eyes, and increased the width of her mocking smile, but said not a word. Ephram sat looking from one to the other of them, and appeared quite helpless.

“Well enough,” said Anna. “Well enough.”

She shifted into the corridor outside the hall; wished immediately for Greyson; but then recollected with immeasurable frustration, that he had not even been with her at table: that he was confined beyond her reach in the South-West tower. She swept in a blinding rage through the corridors, pausing ever and anon to put her fist partway through a stone wall.

She walked for a long while, but went finally back to her chamber. Once there, she paced the floor for a time, from one end of the room to the other. In the centre of the floor, she found herself looking constantly to either side, at the walls which stood so far away. So she moved nearer to the one wall, only to find that it made the other too distant, and the empty side of the room but a gaping maw of shadow.

She wished for her room back home. This one was too large, too cold and too dark. Everything about it only made her feel worse.

So she went finally to sit in the nearest of a pair of armchairs beside the window – the pair of armchairs in which she and Greyson had passed the night, after Vaya Eleria’s arrival at Drelho. Now Anna sat alone; Greyson was trapped in a black tower; and Vaya Eleria maintained a place of honour beside Ephram.

Anna felt suddenly sick. She ran to the window, threw up the sash, and leant out into the cool night air; but managed to work her throat just enough, so as to keep from losing her supper. Still she remained in that semi-awkward position, half in the room and half without, staring down the height of seven storeys to the ground below.

When she began to feel a little more composed, she retracted her head from the window, and returned to her seat. She sat for a while, with her eyes slipping slowly shut; and when finally she looked up, having been roused from her half-sleep by a loud thump on the next floor, the first object she saw was the thick, heavy, seven-foot mirror of black oak which stood against the far wall. She caught sight of her white face in its glassy depths, ringed all around with a halo of wild hair. In an instant she flew to it, and suddenly her eyes were visible, two round burning coals set in the grey hollows above her cheekbones.

As of late, each glance at the reflection of her unchanged face had inspired in Anna a strange sensation. It was the only face she had ever known – always the same, and never altered in the least. But now there
did
seem something different about it. Perhaps it was not a physical manifestation which she was realising, but rather a sort of internal one. She would have liked to believe, to insist to herself, that it was a thing which had begun only since coming to Drelho; only since learning of Greyson’s foolish handiwork, and living long weeks with its secret, lodged like a thick spile within her breast.

She would have liked to believe this. Yet when she began to do so, she remembered that brief period of strangeness, which had taken place before having even left New York. She ate her fill, that night, and was hungry still. She took to the streets, and feasted again; but when she woke in the morning, she was seized with an inexplicable sickness, which she could liken only to one of those incontestable, unstoppable ailments of the weak human body. Two days later, she partook of yet another meal.

All these weeks since then, she had felt nothing of the kind, and had quite convinced herself that the whole thing had been contrived by her own imagination. But tonight? Tonight she looked in the glass, and was unsure of what she saw there. There seemed something in it, now, that was reminiscent almost of age. It was a weakness round the eyes, an indisputable augury, there in the skin, of physical frailty. An augury, yes; as of yet a mere presage; for certainly there was nothing, at present, which was at all feeble in her, unless mayhap it should be her hope for the future.

But what did this thing, what did this hint of weakness in her face portend? Had others seen it? If they had, they had not said so. But then – she suspected very much that it was only something she could see, only something which
could
be seen, when it was somehow already expected.

At the edge of the silence, there came to her attention the ticking of the clock. She turned to read its face, and was much surprised to see that it had already gained the hour of one.

Merely five hours gone, then, was a meal which was intended to suffice for fourteen days. But already there was a persistent, uncomfortable rumbling in the pit of her stomach.

~

Anna spent that night, much the same as she had done with other recent ones; and she found herself sitting awake, in her chair by the window, all through the creeping hours of darkness which stole slowly past her bleary eyes. She was there with an unwilling consciousness, to greet the first rays of the morning sun. She watched as they slipped through the window, and across the floor; as they began gradually to ascend the walls; and finally, as they stained the distant ceiling with a faint radiance. The light grew brighter, and warmer, with each chiming of the clock, and still Anna sat watching, with her eyes prised open wide by invisible fingers.

Meanwhile, Vaya Eleria sat alone with her father. By now she had shrugged off her heavy mantle of discontent, and had begun to feign the sort of earnest affection which, many years ago, she had bestowed freely upon Ephram. There was far more to be
gained, she concluded, by just a little diplomatic untruth, than there was by a whole slew of acrid honesty.

She had been closeted with Ephram for hours in his study. Very gradually, she had begun to work her way up to her primary purpose; and now she took her boldest step yet, in an effort to direct the conversation in her own favour.

“Well,” she said (in a tone cautiously nonchalant, but at the same time slightly pointed, so as not to make a possibility of the sloughing of her topic), “if you intend to remain here all that time, and with such a long list of measures which must be taken – surely you do not mean to keep the steward on.”

“I do, for now.”

Vaya waved a hand, and leant back in her chair. She looked away from her father, and towards the window, so as to limit the evidence of her personal interest. “Well, for now, of course,” she said lightly. “But always this has been your castle. No doubt, the steward’s first intention will be to step down from your seat. You have already sat in your throne, after all. You have already held the Sonorin – and it remembered its master.”

“Be that as it may,” Ephram replied absently, “Byron and I have not discussed it yet.”

Vaya simply nodded. She thought it imprudent to say anything further on the subject, until something should happen to put it more in her way. So she merely looked to her father, and forced a smile, as a sign that she had done with the issue of his sovereignty.

She had come, by now, to cease regretting her return to the earth. It was either that, she knew, or request that she be put to sleep once more, and replaced in her lonesome crypt. Such a thing, anyway, she was not sure whether Ephram would be able to manage. He seemed to grow fonder of her each day, with his old bitterness and resentment passing quickly away. He had loved her too much, she saw, to continue long with such a hatred of her. That hatred had served as a heavy anchor, weighted since the day she died to what little goodness there was of him, which passed for him as a heart; and since she had woken, it had been hardly less than a merciless vice. He seemed glad, now, to begin trying to loosen its grip; and Vaya was determined to do nothing to dissuade him from it.

She passed the rest of the day, never far from Ephram’s side; and probably the evening would not even have separated them, if not for an occurrence which whisked the latter away.

So now – for a string of events highly improbable, but nonetheless quite true. You will remember, perhaps, when we told you how since he came to Drelho, Valo had taken to spending a great deal of time with the castle guard. Now, on this particular night (just around twelve) he and said guard were pursuing a pair of Narken, which had been spotted near the boundary of the Northern forest, consuming the remains of a trio of Lumaria who must for some reason have been roaming the woods alone. Valo caught sight of the wolves, and ordered the guard to fall behind him. They began a lengthy chase, which ended in a goodly amount of fighting some quarter of a mile from the castle, where Valo was finally able to round up the wolves, after having driven them from the wood.

Of the two wolves, there was one considerably more spry than the other; and he somehow managed to escape the circle of the guard. But Valo, quick as ever in such circumstances, drew his short rifle, and took a shot at the wolf. He felled him on the second attempt.

Being so near to the castle, however, when he fired his bolt-gun, the heavy projectile of his first shot soared upwards, and through that small opening in the wall of the South-West tower.

Now, unlikely as it seems, this is what passed. The great metal bolt came through the window, whizzed past Golkin’s dozing head (after which, you may be assured, he was dozing no more), and blew a hole quite all the way through the door to Greyson’s cell. Atop of this, too, there was not a peep heard from the prisoner after the bolt had flown; and it almost seemed as if the near impossible had really occurred, and the bolt had found its home in his heart. If only for Anna’s sake, Ephram repaired immediately to the tower when he was called, to look himself into the matter.