Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles (19 page)

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Authors: Katya Reimann

BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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“I don’t need a sponsor,” Gaultry said firmly. “I am not a petitioner.” Ronsars had no right to delay her, but she did not, after a six-week absence,
wish to greet her Prince with an aggrieved warder dogging her. The court maze was complicated by slyly opened and closed doors of access. If she openly challenged Ronsars in front of these petitioners, certain other doors would quietly close to her. “I must apologize, Sieur. But there has been a misunderstanding.” It was a struggle to keep her voice cool. “I have an urgent presentment to make to their royal Highnesses, and the only delay here tonight can be for me to wait upon their pleasure in the concert chamber.”
Ronsars tucked his hands into his ornate belt, momentarily concealing his expressive fingers. “I was not given to understand that the Prince had called you.” Someone had bribed him—or ordered him, if they had sufficient authority—to hold her there. The patrician face, as always, communicated nothing, but the hiding of his hands—hands so eloquent in covertly offering a desperate petitioner hope, or denying for once and for all the possibility of passage, told Gaultry he was suddenly uncertain. He could not tell if he would best protect his prestige by continuing to hold her there, or by allowing her through.
Heat rose to her cheeks. Under the cover of the tamarin’s fur, her own hands flexed angrily. “Goddess-Twins! However the Prince chooses to reward my actions, I can guarantee to you in all the Twelve’s names that he will want to see me. If your understanding is otherwise you are sadly misinformed.”
Ronsars’s face revealed nothing of his feelings as he digested this little outburst; then, coming to a quick decision, he swung his hands free and saluted her. “I will escort you in personally.” He offered her his elbow.
Gaultry tried to smile as she shifted the tamarin into the crook of one arm. “Elianté will bless your courtesy,” she said, laying her freed hand on the warder’s sleeve.
A thin man lounging dispiritedly at the side of the landing snorted. “A better coin than mine, it seems.”
Ronsars, on firmer ground here, answered him with a dismissive cast of his fingers. The man, taking the warning, melted back into the crowd.
“You are fortunate,” the warder told her, as the footmen opened the door at the top of the steps. Bright candlelight spilled down into the light-colored tile of the dimly lit stair. “The Prince himself was late tonight, so you have missed only the first movement of Dame Julie’s piece.”
“Was his Highness’s ship late reaching harbor?”
“The Princess was indisposed,” he said dryly. “Even Dame Julie must wait on the Princess’s will.”
The long salon, with its pale blue tapestries and iron chandeliers, was as empty as Gaultry had ever seen it. War and summer farming had thinned the court’s ranks. Clusters of young, uncomfortable-looking men and women, dressed in ill-tailored livery, stood beneath the rings of lighted candles. The more polished courtiers Gaultry had come to recognize were away from Princeport, conducting the serious work of the summer months. One boy refilled his partner’s glass from the carafe on a server’s plate before the server could move and do it for him. Ronsars, seeing where Gaultry’s eye had fallen, allowed himself a subtle shudder.
“One of Ranault’s boys,” he said. “There are six sons there, this one the youngest. He’ll become accustomed to accepting service before the summer’s out.”
Gaultry bit her tongue, having seen nothing out of order in the boy’s comportment.
Beyond the crimson corridor, the grand salon blazed with candles, brilliantly colored raiment, and rising voices—the core of the court that surrounded the Prince and his ministers. Glowering over the crowd was the battlefield window showing Briem on his horse. From inside, with oncoming darkness behind it, the colored glass gave the appearance of flat black panels. The window leading had been gilded so the outline of Briern on his horse was the only visible part of the image. But that simple gold outline, Briem with one arm upraised, the horse with its churning hooves, was in its own way as impressive as the bright colors seen from outside.
The Prince and his young Princess sat on tall chairs far across the room. Benet, a smooth-featured man with straight dark brows and flowing, wheat-colored hair, was surrounded by courtiers, a carefully neutral look on his face. Lily, seated closely by his side, showed little more expression. A cowl of white lace covered her dark hair, casting her face in shadow. The young Princess looked sad and tired, not at all as though she had been enjoying the night’s performance. Gaultry’s gut lurched. At their root, every struggle and hardship she had endured had been for the sake of this young couple, for her faith that Tielmark’s fate lay bound with theirs.
“How are their Highnesses enjoying Dame Julie’s music?” Gaultry asked, hoping Ronsars would miss the depth of her feelings if she kept him talking.
“It does not please them.” For some reason, the warder seemed gratified.
“They wanted songs to lighten their mood. But there’s no looking to Dame Julie for lighthearted music.”
The Prince had been out in the sun much since Gaultry had last seen him. His wheat-blond hair was streaked with sun-silver, heightening the severity of his straight dark brows. For a moment, Gaultry thought his eyes were on her, then he turned to the man at his shoulder and she decided that he could not have seen her after all.
The crowd surged, and she momentarily lost sight of him.
“Where is old Melaudiere’s cortege?” Gaultry asked, failing to spy either Martin, her sister, or any of her few court acquaintances. She wondered if the Duchess’s health could have taken another turn for the worse. Where else could Martin be? “If they’re not here, I’d like to stand where I could speak to the Prince when the music is done.”
“I have already escorted you further than you deserve,” Ronsars answered, his manner abruptly hostile. He circled her around to a cluster of young people, in a position oblique to the Prince’s line of sight.
Gaultry answered him with a blank stare. Her obvious innocence of whatever breach of protocol she had just committed only stoked his hostility.
“We will teach you manners,” he muttered. “Just as we taught your sister.”
He turned abruptly and would have left her, but Gaultry closed her fingers on his arm. “What did you just say?” she asked sharply. “What lesson has my sister learned?” In her worries for Martin, in her worries for herself, Gaultry had not been thinking of her sister. But Mervion was never clumsy in matters of protocol. If Ronsars and his cronies had interfered with her, it would not have been for benign purposes.
Ronsars, trapped, stood stock-still, disbelief drawn across his features. He could not pull free without attracting attention to his effectively helpless position. Gaultry herself could hardly believe her effrontery—restraining the Prince’s own warder before the core of his court!
But she would not allow a threat which touched Mervion to pass unchallenged.
“I don’t know what your words mean,” she said softly, “but if I discover that you have pursued any course of action tending to my sister’s discredit, you will come to regret it deeply. I swear this on Elianté and Emiera together, no lower than my duty to Tielmark and my Prince.”
“Benet is my master as he is yours,” Ronsars stammered.
The tamarin, responding to Gaultry’s upset, let out a fierce sound and
made as if to bite. Gaultry loosed the warder’s arm to prevent it from succeeding.
Ronsars clicked his heels primly, the gesture allowing him to step back without overt retreat. “Your servant, Lady Blas.” His eyes shone with dislike in the closed mask of his face. “I will remember your words.”
“Your servant, Sieur.” Gaultry curtsied politely, equally cool. “Know you well, my words promise action. Keep that in mind, if you would meddle with my family again.” If the man had done anything to harm Mervion, he was already her enemy.
The warder turned sharply and retreated toward the long salon.
“Filthy spider,” Gaultry muttered. “Go tie someone else in your webs.”
“You gave him quite a shock,” a soft voice said, almost in her ear. “Perhaps he’s finished for the night.” Gaultry glared as she swung to face this new assailant, then forced herself to soften her expression. The voice’s owner was a slender girl with jet-black hair, pale skin, and a sumptuous yellow dress. She had eyes like dark topazes and hard, even features, chiseled to a beauty that would have seemed arrogant but for her mild expression. She was staring now at the tamarin, obviously intrigued. “What a beautiful animal,” she said. “What is it? Would it really have bitten him?”
Gaultry, mollified by the compliment, ruffled the tamarin’s fur. “He’s harmless, if you don’t provoke him. You can touch him if you like.”
The girl let the tamarin sniff her fingers. “His fur is beautiful,” she said. “So soft. Would you like me to hold him for a moment? You see, there’s a piece of foil in your hair, and it will spoil if you don’t pull it out carefully—”
Gaultry hastily handed the tamarin over. Her hair was tied up simply, with a single cluster of flowers, and her fingers soon discovered the object to which the girl was referring—a disk of gold foil, stamped with the face of a grinning sun. “I came in through the lower court,” she explained. “These things were exploding out of the bonfires. Perhaps you would like to have it?” She reached and took the tamarin back. The little animal was getting heavier by the moment, but she didn’t think she should take advantage of the girl’s good nature by leaving him too long with her.
The girl accepted the piece of foil, and smoothed it out. “Benet ordered these to be put in the fire for luck,” she said. “He had a sun-priest come to bless them. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Gaultry said. “I hope it brings you good fortune.” Her own experience with Andion Sun-King’s priests was limited to a
single unsettling episode, some months back. Andion-priests invoked a power that was raw and fiery.
“Were you here for the first part of the music?” Gaultry asked. “Was it good?” She did not recognize any of the instruments on the musicians’ dais. Two were oversize fiddles, a third a stringed instrument so large the performer would have to sit and clutch it between her legs.
“It was wonderful.” The girl sighed. “When they play they share a single mind and soul. Dame Julie trained them in Home Hall. That’s her manor in Basse-Demaine.”
“Which one is Dame Julie?”
The girl pointed to a tiny woman dressed in robes of a supple, faintly shimmery blue material. Dame Julie had been barely fifteen when she had led the song that had focused the spell at the cycle’s last closing. That made her threescore and five now, but there were few clues in her appearance to hint at her advanced age. Her pale face was delicate and unwrinkled, youthful blondness lingered in the mass of her softly curled white hair. She was exquisitely dressed. Gaultry’s heart sank. “She looks very well kept.” She had not expected Dame Julie, who she knew had not been born to a title, to look the part of the consummate court lady.
The girl missed the inflection of Gaultry’s doubt. She nodded enthusiastically. “She’s wonderful. Wait ’til you hear. I would have given my eye teeth to have trained with her!”
Gaultry, a little astonished at the girl’s eagerness, gave her a closer look. There was something mismatched in the girl. Even in a callow summer court, her open eagerness for animals and music made her too young, too unguarded. Her sumptuous yellow dress only served to emphasize the discrepancy. Certainly she was beautiful in it: cut by a master tailor, the dress made a sophisticated display of her body, from the smocking of velvet ribbons at the waist to the gauzy half-cape that framed her pretty shoulders. But the girl inside the dress was too raw for the sophistication; whoever had put her in it hadn’t bothered to match it to her girlish manner.
It occurred to Gaultry suddenly that Ronsars must have had some reason to leave her at this innocent’s side. “We have not been properly introduced,” she said, trying to brake the girl’s enthusiasm.
“But I know who you are,” the girl said. “Everybody knows. You’re one of the Brood-blood twins from Arleon Forest. The one who got Prince Benet to marry Lily. You look like your sister—thinner, I think, but you
have the same face. I am Elisabeth Climens. I was not at court when you were here before. That is my mother, standing at the Prince’s side.”
Gaultry’s eyes narrowed. Climens. She did not have to see where the girl pointed to recognize that name. Haute-Tielmark had given her that name, the morning she attacked Sieur Jumery. The girl’s mother was the Duchess of Vaux-Torres, Jumery Ingoleur’s liege-lord.
“I do apologize,” the girl rattled on, looking faintly guilty. “I assumed you would know … . Perhaps you won’t want to speak to me now.” A strain of loneliness underlaid the girl’s candor. “At the moment, not many here will give me their company, for all my mother’s power. Dervla is investigating my family, you see, and the Prince himself views us unfavorably. I would not have taken the liberty to speak, you see, but after you cut Sieur Ronsars …”
“I had not heard of your family troubles,” Gaultry said. Haute-Tielmark had said that the letters he’d found concerning the Duchess of Vaux-Torres had been suggestive, but not compromising. Had Dervla discovered a more damaging correspondence? “Elianté in me, I trust the investigation is unfounded.”

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