Closer to the Chest (15 page)

Anyone who had been expecting decadent luxury in the Royal Suite would have been profoundly disappointed. The furnishings were the very best, and the tapestries warming the walls were works of pure art, but there was a definite patina of daily use on everything. In fact, the King hadn't changed a thing after he'd inherited the title and the rooms. The colors were all muted by age, leaving the visitor with the
impression that these rooms were part of an extremely comfortable, wealthy, if old-fashioned, country estate.

The cool, damp, morning breeze came in the open windows; to take the chill out of it, a small fire burned cleanly on the hearth. The clever folding table that usually stood against the wall of the sitting room had been unfolded and set with breakfast dishes.

It was just the King and the Prince seated at the commodious table, eating breakfast this morning. The Queen was probably still abed; she was not a morning riser. Lydia was, but she was in the first months of her first pregnancy, and at the moment, she and breakfast were bitter enemies.

“Sit,” Kyril said, gesturing with a fork. “We'll eat first. I'd rather not ruin my appetite with what you're going to show us.”

Amily was in complete agreement with that sentiment. They joined the other two in making short work of the dishes that had been set before them.

Only when the servants had cleared everything away and left, did the King indicate that he was ready to hear what they had to say.

The Prince was silent through all of Mags' report, but questioned Amily closely about what Dia had told her concerning the letters she'd been given. They both pored over Mags' notes, and the letters, with no comments except to each other, for the better part of a candlemark.

Finally the King put all the documents back in the case with a sigh. “I wish I could say that this looks like nothing more dangerous than mean-spirited mischief,” he said reluctantly.

“But it doesn't,” Amily replied.

“No, it doesn't,” the King agreed. “There is definitely malice there. And right now, it
looks
as if it is limited to attempts to—” He looked as if he was at a loss for words.

“Put uppity women in their place?” Amily suggested, delicately.

“A little more forceful than that,” Kyril replied, steepling his hands together thoughtfully. “In fact . . .
intimidate,
would be closer to what I have in mind. Intimidate in the case of the Order of Betane, but
shame and intimidate
in the case of those letters. . . .”

“And denigrate,” the Prince added. “Let's not forget that. This is someone who hates women.”

“Could it be a single person at work here? We thought not, given that whoever it is would have to have access to and knowledge of both the Hill and Haven,” Amily said, doubtfully.

“It's certainly possible,” Sedric opined. “If Mags' little adventures with the Sleepgivers taught us anything, it's that it's not that hard for a stranger to walk around to deliver things around the Hill and have no one take notice, especially if it's something that looks innocuous, like messages. All you have to do is wear Palace livery. We've
tried
to keep better track of all the suits of livery, but . . . if someone purloined a set of livery out of the stores just long enough to make his deliveries, then put it back, no one would notice anything.”

“So someone comes up with a delivery, slips off, borrows the livery, drops off messages, changes again, and goes back down into Haven and no one's the wiser?” Amily asked.

Sedric shrugged. “We tried locking this place up like a fortress after Mags was kidnapped. It lasted about a week before everyone up here was in revolt. It's just not going to happen. So, yes, it could be a single person.”

“Uneducated?” Mags hazarded. But Amily shook her head.

“It's easy for an educated person to pass themselves off as uneducated, especially in writing,” she said. “And a couple of the allusions in the letters, the ones describing the women the letters were sent to as Mantids and Aura Spiders, aren't the sort of thing most uneducated people would know about.”

The creatures she was referring to were female insects that killed and ate their mates after mating with them.

“So, it must be someone educated.” Mags tilted his head to the side, then frowned in thought. “That still doesn't narrow things down any.”

No, it doesn't. It doesn't even eliminate one of the Order. I am sure there are educated women among them. The Prioress, for instance . . . and we have only her word about
when
she came back to the Temple.

“The letters, even the desecration, aren't the problem,” Kyril said into the silence that followed Amily's statement. “The problem is . . . that he's gone from letters targeting individuals and delivered privately, to the very
public
desecration of a Temple.”

“You think he's not getting enough entertainment by bullying individuals—” Mags said, hesitantly. “But the desecration wouldn't have been all that public. Hardly anyone uses the Temple except the Order—”

“Yes, but instead of individuals, who have been concealing their letters and their hurt or fear, he meant to show up an entire group at once, catching them off-guard.” Kyril drummed his fingers on the table. “That's an escalation. He's not content merely knowing he must be causing distress, he has to be
sure
he is causing it by exposing an entire group of victims to his abuse at once.”

Mags frowned. “So you think he's going to get more . . . active?”

“I'd bet on it,” the King said grimly. “The more especially as the Prioress discovered the desecration too early, and you handled the cleanup so efficiently, Mags. The impact, the shock, the revulsion, the horror at having their sanctuary violated, that won't be present. Instead, the returning members of the Order will find the delightful surprise of their Temple newly redecorated and cleaned. Their reaction will not be what he wants.”

Amily bit her lip at that. “Do you think he'll be watching?”

“Without a doubt. But unless Mags was willing to go down there and violate perfectly innocent peoples' minds by reading
the thoughts of everyone close enough to see what happens when the Temple doors are flung open, there's no way of finding him.” Kyril crushed her hopes of a simple solution with a single sentence.

“And that's assuming he hasn't already found out the Temple's been cleansed,” Kyril pointed out. “I wouldn't bet on that. He's already proven himself to be very clever. Or she . . .”

So there it was, the thing that Dia, the Prioress, and Amily had all been dreading. The King had pointed out the possibility that this could be a woman, the horse was out of the barn and there would be no getting it back in again.

“It would be easier for a woman to move about the Hill,” she said reluctantly.

“And much easier for one to enter the Temple,” Sedric pointed out. Then he said the very thing Amily had been thinking. “We only have the Prioress's word as to
when
she returned, after all. By her own word, she didn't actually check with her underlings, she only assumed that because all was quiet, no one was ill or had died to account for her premonition. She could have desecrated the Temple herself.”

“You don't really believe that, do you?” Mags asked, looking aghast.

“No, of course not,” Kyril replied, dismissively. “She has nothing to gain by it, and honestly, even in Palace livery she's a very distinctive woman. Someone would remember her and ask what she was doing there. But if I can think of it, so can someone else if this becomes public.”

“We can't let this become public,” Sedric shook his head. “Even though I am sure that is what this lunatic wants. The damage would be considerable. Reputations ruined, that would just be the start of the havoc. People would be at each other's throats in no time. The Court would be in chaos.”

They all sat staring at each other in glum silence for a long while. “I think we should warn other religious houses,” Kyril said at last. “This might be the work of a fanatic believer.”

“But that would only let the Poison Pen know his work had been effective,” Mags objected. “I thought we didn't want to do that. And so far, everything says to me that this person is a woman-hater, not just a religious fanatic. Religion might be his excuse, but that's all it is, an excuse to terrify and abuse.”

They all looked at Amily. She bit her lip. This was
exactly
the sort of decision the King's Own was supposed to make, but she was of two minds. “We can't
not
warn them,” she said. “But Mags is right, do we want to reward whoever this is by letting them know they've made us scramble to undo what he did? If you warn every Temple and religious organization in Haven, it will be impossible to keep this quiet, and people
will
start pointing out that the Order is all female, and they
will
wonder if there is some hideously repressed maniac in their own ranks.”

“A compromise,” Sedric said finally, “We
discreetly
warn only those institutions that are exclusively female. There aren't that many of them, they are quite used to keeping secrets, and I think we can rely on their own good sense to see what this means if people start making unpleasant inferences.”

Amily pondered that, as did the King. Evidently they came to the same conclusion, but the King spoke first. “It's not the best solution,” he said, “But I believe it's the only thing we can safely do. At least for now.”

T
he rest of the morning, Amily fulfilled her normal duties, while Mags carried very carefully worded messages by hand down to every exclusively female religious organization in Haven. In some places, he was met with bewilderment, as the women there simply could not comprehend why
anyone
would choose them for a target of such abuse. “We've harmed nothing and no one!” the High Priestess of Birana the Flower-Crowned exclaimed in dismay, fluttering her hands as if she could shoo the terrible idea away. “We are an order of peace and harmony! Why would—”

“Because whoever is doing this is clearly insane, my lady,” Mags replied, trying his best not to feel impatient. “One cannot hope to fathom the mind of the insane. One can only do what one can to guard against him.”

“But—what can we do?” she cried, baffled, fluttering even more. It was clear that his message had done nothing except to throw her into confusion—and who could blame her? The worst that the votaries of Birana had ever had to cope with
before was a sudden killing frost that destroyed their blooming gardens.

And so that proved to be his most important task of the entire day; to come up with answers to that question. It was not that these women were stupid; on the contrary, some of them were so brilliant—like the Order of Saint Hitia, who had the biggest library in all of Haven and devoted themselves to scholarship—that they made him feel like an ignorant schoolboy. But they were not accustomed to turning their minds to the subject of self-defense. And the idea that anyone would hate them so much was utterly foreign to them.

To some, he suggested hiring guards, and pointed out that both the Order of Betane and the Swordsworn Sisters were perfectly willing to
be
hired and certainly had capable ladies who would not disturb their quiet and peace, nor be a temptation to Novices. To others, he suggested guard dogs. Some, so far as he could determine, merely needed to be very vigilant about keeping all the ways into and out of their cloisters firmly locked. The Order of Saint Hitia was like that; they had so many rare and valuable manuscripts that it was probably easier to get into the vaults of the King's Treasury than it was into their walled and barred bastion of learning.

He was very careful to make his statements about the Poison Pen impersonal, but some of the more worldly heads of these organizations saw through his ploys. “So, already there are some who are sure it is a woman, eh?” said the Abbess of Saint Hitia, startling him. She shrugged at his surprise and screwed her mouth up as if she was eating something sour. “Oh don't think we haven't heard this before. Here, particularly, we get a lot of . . . vitriol. We're unnatural women, abandoning our proper places as wives and mothers of the race to go steep our unbalanced brains in learning we can't possibly understand. Sour old maids, hating the women who have what they can't, families and husbands. Twisted harridans, probably engaging in
unnatural behavior
behind our cloister
walls. And there are a few of our sisters who are extremely fond of each other, but what of it? As if something that occurs
in nature
could possibly be unnatural . . . Oh yes, young man, I've heard it all. You're wise to keep this quiet, but if it continues, it won't be kept quiet for long.”

“We'll keep it under as long as we can, Abbess,” he replied.

“And that's what will confound this . . .
person
 . . . whoever and whatever it is,” she said, shrewdly. “This is the one thing that a sick mind like that cannot comprehend. This mad creature imagines that we'll begin fighting among ourselves, scrabbling to discover who it is and offering each other up to the cold knife of public opinion in order to spare ourselves. A creature like this cannot imagine that we will hold to our loyalties to one another—it thinks that all women are ready to turn on each other. Nor will it understand
your
willingness, up there in the Royal Seat, to protect us. And that may well be its undoing, but not before things get much, much worse.”

Mags marveled at her intelligence, and hoped, as he left the Abbey, that she was wrong.

But he feared she was right.

•   •   •

One day passed, without incident. A second passed, and the members of the Order of Betane returned to find their Sanctuary redecorated. By all accounts they were delighted; they certainly sent a letter of great appreciation up to the Prince.

“They won't be so delighted when the Prioress calls the general meeting and tells them
why
we repainted,” Mags said to Nikolas, when word had generally spread of the Prince's “generosity” and the Order's response.

“No, they won't, but our perpetrator didn't get any joy out of it, either. Did your boys see anything unusual?” Mags had sent a half dozen of his messenger-lads down to the Temple when the members of the Order returned, ordering them to
watch for anyone who seemed angry or dismayed rather than surprised when the Sanctuary was opened for the Order to troop inside.

“Not a thing,” Mags replied, and sighed. “If our madman was there, well, he or she either was out of sight of my lads, or else was very good at hiding his or her reactions.”

•   •   •

“There must be something I'm missing here,” Amily said, putting her head on the back of her chair and staring at the ceiling. “I've gone over these letters until I could recite them in my sleep. I keep getting the feeling there's another clue here, something these women have in common, but it's completely eluding me.”

“Well, you know these women better than I do,” Mags pointed out. “So, let's try this. I'll say who a letter was written to, and you say the first, worst thing that comes to your mind.”

Amily couldn't imagine how that was supposed to help, but . . . anything was worth trying at this point. “All right.”

Mags picked up a letter from the pile, and read the name on the back. “Maegery Erenson.”

Amily made a face. “Tease. Leads boys on, then moves on to another, then when the first one starts to lose interest, goes after him again.”

“Lady Jemma Teal.”

Now she rolled her eyes. “The letter writer doesn't know about
half
of the things she's doing under her husband's nose.”

“Amber Larelen.”

“Flirt. Terrible flirt. And
will not
leave the lads who are pledged to other girls alone.”

Mags went down the list, putting the last of the letters on the pile. “I see the common denominator,” he said. “Whether or not the letters actually accuse them of it, these are all extremely attractive women and girls who are . . . rather free in
their ways, or at least give the impression that they are. Now, are there women in the Court who are, say, having affairs, who are
not
attractive?”

“I can name you half a dozen,” Amily replied, and gave him a sharp look. “Some of them are just lonely, some of them have cold husbands and just need a little warmth, and for some, well what personal attraction can't get, money can purchase, after all. What are you getting at?”

“None of
them
are in this pile,” he pointed out, patting the pile of letters.

“So?”

“If this was someone motivated merely by the fact that women were making free with their favors, or pretending to, it wouldn't matter if they were pretty or not.” He shrugged. “I hate to point this out to you, but the person most likely to single out attractive women for spite is another woman.”

“So what this means is that we need to look for a woman and give up on the notion that this is a misogynistic man?” she demanded, her voice a little shriller than she had intended it to be. And a good bit more accusatory. But . . . how could
he
suggest such a thing?

“No, it just means we can't
eliminate
a woman,” Mags sighed. “A woman can be a woman-hater as much as a man.”

There was a long and awkward silence. They had not quite had the start of a quarrel, but . . .

Before either of them could think of anything to say, a page tapped on the open door leading to the greenhouse. For one moment Amily had the wild idea that the page might have been given one of those wretched letters, and was delivering it to her—and all Mags would need to do would be to read the child's memory, and they'd have their culprit. Her heart was in her throat at the idea—because already she had nearly bitten Mags' head off, and if she could get angry with
Mags,
who hadn't actually said anything that was at all out of line, how much worse would it get if word of this crept out?

If only the gods had decided to take pity on them and delivered a lovely way to wrap things up and put a bow on them before anything unfortunate happened . . .

But alas, no. It was a sealed note on extremely expensive vellum, sealed with Lord Jorthun's crest.
“We have more letters for you. Would you care to join us for dinner?”
Amily read aloud.

Her heart sank at the idea of going over
more
of those horrible abusive letters. But Mags perked right up.

“Dinner with Steveral and Dia?” He licked his lips. “I wonder what they're servin'?”

•   •   •

“Dinner first. And we'll have a good wine to wash down the unpleasantness,” said Lord Jorthun, as he stood to greet them when one of the servants ushered them into the library. “I refuse to face that trash again without fortification. Shall we dine like barbarians here, or in one of the dining rooms?”

Amily and Mags spoke at the same time. “Which do you prefer, sir,” Amily asked, at the same time that Mags said, “Which is less work for the servants?”

Lord Jorthun looked at both of them with amusement, one of his heavy gray eyebrows raised slightly higher than the other. “Fortunately the answer to both your questions is ‘here.'” He rang for a servant. “Terun, tell her ladyship we'll be eating dinner in the library, and let the housekeeper know as well.”

Dinner and Dia arrived at the same time; to Mags' amusement, it appeared that Steveral had decided to copy the folding table from the Royal Suite with an addition; elegant folding chairs of an extremely cunning design.

The servants had the table set and the chairs arranged in no time. One of them remained behind to serve, while the rest left the quartet in peace.

Mags was utterly silent, the better to completely appreciate the food in front of him. After all those years of deprivation in the mines, whenever he was presented with an especially wonderful meal, it was a little like being transported to another world for him. For a while, there,
all
food had made him feel that way! Now it was only meals cooked by someone who was as much an artist in the kitchen as any master painter or carver that made him fall into appreciative silence and savor every tiny bite.

And Lord Jorthun's cook certainly deserved to be called an artist.

Dia, Amily, and Steveral kept up a steady stream of quiet conversation while he maintained his silence. Amily was used to this, but Dia and her husband kept glancing over at him as if they were uncertain about why he was so quiet. Finally Dia whispered something to Amily, who laughed, and said out loud, “It's quite all right. He's merely maintaining a respectful silence in the presence of greatness.”

Jorthun burst out laughing, Dia smiled, and they left him alone for the rest of the meal.

When the dishes were taken away, the table and chairs put back into discreet storage in a nook behind a tapestry, Lord Jorthun indicated to the servant that they would pour their own wine, and they all settled in comfortably upholstered chairs around a low table. Steveral brought out a leather document case not unlike the one Amily had brought with her.

“Well,” he said, taking out a handful of papers. “Here they are. The Handmaidens, once alerted, have been very busy on our behalf. They've rescued these things out of fires and waste-cans and have been very careful that they were not seen while doing so. Fortunately the ladies in question generally stormed out of the room immediately after disposing of this trash.” He pulled out a few that had been torn to bits, and reassembled on a backing of very thin, very tough vellum, with paste.

“I shall let you peruse these first, while I look over your existing documents, then we can discuss things further,” he said, reaching for Amily's document-case. Mags took about half of the letters, Amily the other half, and they exchanged them as they read them.

“Fundamentally the same,” Amily said at last, tossing her handful of poison on the table on top of the existing documents. “All that ever changes is the name and the details of affairs, flirtations, or . . . hmm . . . how do I describe a girl deliberately trying to charm a boy that is already betrothed elsewhere?”

“Poaching?” Dia suggested, with an arched brow. Her pretty face was clouded with an expression of concern. “But you're right. There is a great deal of repetition, and particular phrases stand out. The Handmaidens tell me that for the most part, the targets of these letters are angry rather than upset, but that a lot of temper is stewing in the Court. They think their rivals, or the girls they've poached on, or the girls' mothers are responsible for the letters. So far there have not been any confrontations . . .”