Heart of Stone (16 page)

25.

King Marcus

En Route, Gemmes

That woman never stopped surprising him.

              After he told her the worst, darkest secret of his life she still accepted him. It hurt him to hear her say “I forgive you.” He didn’t want forgiveness. He wanted revenge. He wanted hate. He wanted boiling anger.

              He wanted the old Cozette back.

              Instead he was met with compassion. Love. Courage. Strength. A woman who saw him as he was. Flawed in his humanity.

              He left her in her chamber, knowing she wouldn’t join him on his hunt … but that also, she expected from him one thing and one thing alone. That he return with their child.

              He would oblige.

              It pained him to know he would find this girl only to watch her die. Only to take the stone from her flesh, but there was no other way.

He would do this for his wife. He told Cozette that perhaps it would be better to never see the girl’s face, if she laid on death’s bed, but Cozette begged. She needed to see the girl, flesh and blood.

She would continue to pace the Palace halls, to plan the upcoming ball. She would continue on with an incessant thumping in her heart, a hopeful longing he knew she felt because he felt it too. Even if he’d made so many terrible choices, maybe this would be the path to redemption.

The future of Gemmes was on the line. Cozette held him as he sobbed and he knew that Gemmes wasn’t the only thing on the line. What sort of ruler was he if he couldn’t care for his family? What sort of man was he if he’d never wondered this before?

He thought on this as he rode on his stallion, through the woods, toward the North. They were headed toward the place his informant last saw this cocky Gem Tracker.

Perhaps he could fix this mess. If he found the boy and then found the girl. If he found the
devins-guérisseur
and if he found another spell. Maybe then. Then it would all be fixed.

They travelled for a full day. Marcus’s resolve grew the more he rode, the deeper in the woods he went.

“Halt, Légion soldiers ahead my King!” Drake called, letting Marcus know they were meeting with one of the groups he had sent the day before.

He had hoped to work on two things at once.

That plan went out the window the moment he was stopped in his tracks.

It wasn’t Légion soldiers, up ahead, as Drake had called.

It wasn’t anything of this world.

It was the before and the after and Marcus knew that, somehow, without knowing. It was the truth.

“Who goes there?” Marcus shouted. If keeping a secret buried for seventeen years had taught him anything, it had taught him this … some things need to be brought to the open.

The figures on the beasts came out of the iridescent smog that wafted between the trees of the king’s forest. They were divine creatures, glorified humans. They weren’t beautiful, neither were they monsters, although they were so much to take in Marcus was forced to look away. They were everything and nothing.

“Your Majesty, stay back!” yelled Drake, and for a moment Marcus held still. Seeing the closest thing to a friend ride ahead of him, made him regret bringing him here at all. Marcus wanted this battle for himself. He was looking for his own demons to slay.

He couldn’t let Drake do this part for him. He realized with disgust how little he’d ever done.

He picked up his pace and bolted past Drake and the twenty other men in his party. He knew Drake was on his heels, and that was all right. But he needed to be first.

“Who goes there?” he bellowed once more, as he came upon the group of riders. He stopped in the clearing where they were gathered, mounted majestically. Mounted in ways that made him feel small. His own horse was a strong and gallant animal, still, it had four feet planted firmly on the solidity of the earth. The creatures before him were not tethered to the same soil.

He knew when he saw them they were from the Hedge, a place as full of lore as the
Trésor de L’espoir
itself. Fairy tale dreams explaining the afterlife, and the in-between. To see them was to believe.

“We mean you no harm,” a man called to him. “We come through the mountains claimed by you, and we travel to mountains claimed by other men. We come from the Hedge, and we only seek to find.”

Marcus shook his head, maddened by their ambiguity, but also recognized the respect they chose to show him. The heads of all twelve riders bowed, silvery strands of air wisped around them. Equal numbers of men and women sat on the beasts, and Marcus looked behind him at his Légion of men, narrowing in.

They did not compare.

“Why have you revealed yourself to us? What business are you on?” Marcus asked, taking in the fact that they were seemingly unarmed. He calculated quickly the artillery his men carried. A sword carried by each soldier, a bow or an axe tucked away, times twenty. Overtaking these creatures was possible if need be.

“We are on business that matters not to you, or your country of
Gemmes
. We come from the Hedge, and answer to the Hedge alone, as Riders for the lair beyond.” The man’s voice boomed with reverberation, crossing through the trees, echoing off them all.

“You must answer to me, I am king!” Marcus’s face coiled at the man’s refusal to oblige.

The man grasped the hand of the woman next to him, and instead of speaking, he nodded his head. The beast he rode on moved to the side closer of the woman, parting a way down the middle of the eerie assembly.

Another woman, seemingly small in her humanity, next to the creatures from another realm, stood in the place where they had moved.

She had hair pulled back tightly, with homespun clothing hanging off her tiny frame. The thin cloth of the dress she wore rippled behind her in the wind created by the Hedge Riders.

A man was beside her, but he mattered not. Marcus looked at the woman and knew.

He clenched his jaw in an effort to hold back everything; things he didn’t know he needed to retain. A cry rose from his chest anyways. Pushing away matters of the heart doesn’t work when there’s a fierce wall built within, a wall crumpling all at once.

“Aghhhh,” he cried in agony, his face flushed red, his brow creased heavily down the center. The ghost of his past had come back to haunt him. The woman he had stood beside so many years ago, carving out his child’s heart, irrevocably carving his own as well, stood before him once more. The past had come to haunt him.

She trembled, her narrow lips spread tight across her delicate face. Barely more than a child when he saw her last, and young she looked still.

“You!” he called, lunging toward her, vengefully. He saw in this woman the past he was denied and the future withheld.

He needed to know where she took his daughter.

The princess.

              The heir of Gemmes.

The girl near death, the only way to bring his wife back to life.

The woman held, in her hands, everything. Yet she remained silent, and still.

“Where is she? Is she with you?” Marcus took quick strides across the dead leaves rustling in the forests floor. Full of intention, full of fear.

The healer drew back in effort to regain her strength. As Marcus inched closer, close enough to see her face, she realized strength wasn’t what she needed to salvage. She was already strong. She was looking for vengeance.

“She’s not here, and she’s nowhere you should be,” Tamsin said clearly. The man next to her looked pained at the situation, like too much was happening that he didn’t understand. The beasts surrounding them kicked the earth and pressed in on Marcus.

“Where did you leave her? She is my child, I deserve to know!” Marcus bellowed again. Drake came behind him, not understanding the king’s connection to this woman.

“What child, My Lord?” Drake asked quietly. Marcus had told him they were in search of a girl who had the garnet they needed, and that they needed to gain custody of this Gem Tracker– the rest he kept to himself, and Cozette.

“The girl we are looking for is my child.” Everyone heard Marcus’s words as they trailed to the Légion men behind him, in whispers.

The king had a child, now everyone knew.

He regretted his choice immediately. Why did he tell Cozette, or anyone, if he may not be able to make good on any of it?

“You have no claim over her, you have no claim on her life!” Tamsin spoke harsh words to the man she should kneel before.

Marcus didn’t stop her, though Drake pulled his sword from its sheath, ready, as always to defend the honor of His Royal Highness. Marcus halted Drake’s movement with his hand, knowing he needed to hear more from this woman if he wanted to find the girl.

“Tell me where she is! Where did you take her? You must remember!” Marcus demanded again, desperate to fix things with Cozette. Seeing this healer brought him back to the bedchamber where Cozette nearly died the night of the babe’s birth. He saw, with such force, the love he had for her. The love he let slip away over the years as it became engulfed in his shame and her grief.

He needed answers, a trace of hope at a life filled with more than shortcomings and half breaths. He wanted more. He needed to fix this if he wanted a chance at that. A chance at life with Cozette. Her forgiveness would work in his favor if he brought back the child.

“I will tell you nothing!” The woman cried, a fierceness covering her face, not giving in to the king. She had to know where she had taken the girl, at least that much. Maybe more, especially if the Hedge was working with her.

“I could have you killed, right here for treason. Making dark magic in my woods!”

He had no time, no desire to partake in a round of hide and seek. The king was not used to playing petty games. He took what he wanted.

“No.” She didn’t quiver. She didn’t shake. She looked him in the eyes and repeated her word, “No.”

              Marcus pointed to the beast to his right, a silvery creature with the wraithlike man sitting atop it. They were regal in ways Marcus couldn’t compete. He cared not for power gained from magic; he wanted power gained by force.

“Kill this beast.” He demanded his men, now rallied behind him. If she didn’t want to speak, he would force her too, one death at a time until all that remained were the two of them. He had forced her before, in his wife’s chamber, the night his daughter was born. He wasn’t above doing so once more.

Drake used his sword, and did the king’s bidding.

26.

Henri

Vallee de Gemmes

More wagons circled, and as Henri peered through the trees, trying to muster the courage, she came from behind him.

“What the Hedge?” he yelled, as a pair of hands covered his eyes.

“You have returned!” Emel said, spinning Henri to face her.

“So I have.”

“Are you over that rotten friend of yours?” Emel asked, before thrusting herself in a story. Henri listened, wide-eyed and increasingly annoyed. Who was she to talk about his Sophie anyway?

“So, Beznik returned from dropping her off in the North, and he kept waxing on and on how she was, in no disrespect, a bit too much of a hussy for him. Apparently she recounted the many men she’d bedded. Beznik is a bit
inexperienced
if you know what I mean. He can’t handle that much woman.” Emel laughed, not realizing how this story caused Henri’s face to blush and heart to race.

Sophie was Sophie. She’d been with guys from the Vallee; he knew this, but none of his friends. Sophie was off limits. Sophie was his.

At least he’d thought.
              He bit his lip, reconsidering the choice to come all this way. Maybe Emel wasn’t the person to bring along. Maybe this was something he needed to do alone.

“So you snuck off from the bakery? Here to chat it up with the crazy gypsies?” she asked, still smiling pleasantly. She
was
pleasant, Henri noticed. She was fun and dramatic and silly and strong. She had put Sophie in her place, after all, forcing Beznik on her.

“I need to leave, too. I wanted to know if you’d want to come with.” Henri asked her.

Emel’s eyes glowed with happiness.
Merde
, Henri immediately thought. The impact of him asking was too big. She probably thought he thought of her like
that
.

The way he still, irrevocably, thought of Sophie. He was not over her, not even a little. Not even a bit.

He loved her.

“Where do you want to go?” she asked excitedly, already pulling him by his hands toward the wagons circling.

“That’s the thing,” he said, hesitating. “I need to find Sophie. I think she’s in trouble.”

Emel let go of his hands and threw hers up in the air.

“Are you serious? You want to chase after her?”

Henri nodded his head, knowing it might be foolish to try and find her, but also knowing the look on the faces of the King’s Légion. They were looking for her. He knew it.

“She basically told you she thought you were pathetic and there was not a chance in the Hedge that you’d ever be with her like
that
!”

“But--”

“Henri. Listen. I will go with you. I mean obviously I like you. You know that, right?”

Henri looked at her blankly.

“My people don’t hang out with your people. Why do you think I was okay with you coming here and visiting the first time? Or the next?”

“Because you were bored?” he tried.

She shook her head, “Why do you think I kicked Sophie out with my brother?”

“You’re nice?” Henri tried.

“Oh Hedge, you’re such a boy. A boy infatuated with Sophie’s ridiculous good looks and haughty indifference.”

Henri looked at Emel, who was exquisite in her own exotic, handspun sugar, sort of way. If Sophie was dark chocolate, Emel was meringue.

“Sophie and I have history. She’s like the butter to my croissant.”

Emel started laughing and didn’t try to pretend she wasn’t.

“I am not pathetic. Well, that croissant thing was pretty pathetic, but usually I’m pretty great. I just happen to really, really, really, care for her. She’s been my everything for forever and I think she’s in trouble. Can we ask Miora?”

“She’s dead.”

“What?” Henri asked incredulously, this was impossible. She was here, alive enough to be reading stones, terrifying him and Sophie with her omen. Now she was dead?

“I know. But she was exceptionally old, like over two hundred years old-old.” Emel said this quite matter-of-factly.

“That isn’t possible. It’s like against the law of nature.”

“See, this is why I like you. You are so scientific. Does this help you when you bake? Like, with calculated measurements?”

They were standing outside of Miora’s wagon, or her old wagon. Henri didn’t know what to think. His first thought was that he wanted to tell Sophie about Miora.

“She died? After talking to us? Did she … I mean, I know Sophie was pretty mad at her for the reading….” Henri didn’t want to think it was possible. Sophie was mean, but not a murderer.

“It wasn’t Sophie. It was something else. Maybe old age, but I was with her when she was leaving. She kept mumbling about a Hedge and a garnet stone and blood red.”

Emel shook her head, as she leaned against the peeling yellow paint of the wagon. Henri watched her, knowing how hard this must be for her.

“I don’t know what the words meant. Magic affected Miora different. She liked the concreteness of stone readings; it seemed more solid than the creepy, old, dark magic of the
devins-guérisseurs
of Gemmes. When she died, she was on shaky ground that I didn’t understand.”

“I’m sorry,” Henri said.

“Thanks, but it is what it is. Miora lived a long, beautiful life. That’s all we can hope for,” Emel spoke with eyes still bright; though she’d lost someone she loved too.

“So what happens to you? You were her apprentice, right?”

“I’m the new Miora,” Emel said, giving Henri a curtsy, and then swinging open the door of the wagon.

“You’re moving up in the world. No more bunking with Beznik,” Henri said laughing.

“Exactly.”

“You can’t go with me then, you have, like, a fancy job. Duties to your people,” Henri said.

Now it was Emel’s turn to laugh. They walked inside the wagon, a curtained space musky and dark.

“Henri, you know nothing about anything.”

“Enlighten me.”

“The main benefit of being a
Bohème
is that you don’t have to answer to anyone. I am my own person. This is my wagon. It has wheels. I go where I want.”

Henri’s mind flashed to Sophie again, how before Miora’s reading this was all she wanted. A set of wheels.

“So if you’re the new Miora, can you tell me where Sophie is?” Henri dug a jasper from his pocket, setting it on the table.

“A mere jasper will only buy a tiny hint.”

Henri emptied his pockets.