Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles (20 page)

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Authors: Katya Reimann

BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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“The Climenses are loyal to Tielmark,” Elisabeth said stoutly, though her eyes, as she met Gaultry’s, revealed ill-shuttered doubts. “My mother called me to court to manage her affairs while she builds her defense. I was supposed to have another year at home, so I am a little unready. I can only hope that I stand for her as loyally as—as you have just done for your sister.”
Gaultry shrugged, disconcerted by the girl’s effusive praise. “As I presume you have already learned, Ronsars does nothing without a motive. I’m sure he left me by you intentionally, guessing we would speak.”
The girl patted the tamarin again, avoiding Gaultry’s eyes. “I see. It does you no credit to be seen talking to me, I suppose.”
“None at all,” Gaultry said tiredly. “If being mistaken for a Bissanty traitor concerned me, I’d distance myself from you right now, and give you as nasty a leave-taking as I’m able.” She knew as she spoke that she would not be able to muster the energy for that leave-taking, branding the girl, as so many others must already have done, as confirmed in her mother’s guilt. “Prince Benet is right to hate the Bissanties and their collaborators,” was all she could think to say in consolation.
“The High Priestess cannot prove that my mother has done wrong,” the girl said loyally. “I will stay here at court until our name is cleared.”
“Well spoken,” Gaultry said. If she spoke truly, Elisabeth was braver than she looked. Gaultry did not think she herself could bear to linger at court while under a cloud of suspicion.
Around them, the room shuffled and resettled. On the dais, the musicians were taking up their instruments, plucking at the strings to adjust the fine-tuning. Through the crowd, Gaultry caught a fleeting view of the Princess, her head turned as she spoke to one of her attendants. “Who is that woman at Princess Lily’s shoulder?”
“Which one?”
“She’s talking to her just now.” The attendant, a pretty, stressed-looking woman with protuberant teeth, was very obviously with child. The rabbit, Gaultry thought. The pregnant rabbit from the puppet show. The flash of recognition dismayed her. She knew less of this diminished court than the crowd in Princeport’s busy streets. She could scarcely remember the parade of puppet-figures, let alone match them with the people in front of her now.
“There was a weasel,” Gaultry said aloud, trying to think through the cast of puppets. “And a song-bird with a cuckoo-child-was that Julie?”
As the girl started to ask her what she meant, the Majordomo called for quiet.
Dame Julie nodded from the front of the dais. The music began.
There were five musicians: three players and two singers. From the first note it was clear that Julie not only led the others, she controlled them. She stood to the left of the stage, her posture stiff, like a sibyl offering prophecy, though the notes that emerged from her mouth were sweet and harmonious. As the music progressed, her voice rose above the string instruments like a gathering wave, sweeping the other players with her. The sounds crossed, countercrossed, harmonized, broke harmony. Dame Julie’s voice was beautiful, but hidden within the beauty, like a fast approaching storm, was curling, lashing rage.
Gaultry, sucked into the swell of sound with the rest of the audience, found herself accepting that her first judgment had been woefully lacking. Although Julie covered her power with the polish of a courtier, beneath that surface something deeper surged.
Each of the seven original Brood-members had possessed magical strength which manifested as a creative force. Old Melaudiere was the artist, touching and forming metal, glass, and clay. With Tamsanne it was the deep forest magic, the opening flowers of spring, the sharp closing of harvest. With Julie—
With Julie it was the seductive power of her music.
Elisabeth had said in innocence that the musicians shared one soul and mind. She’d been partly right: Julie, as she sang, projected her magic outward into the other musicians, amplifying the message of her song. Gaultry glanced around the attentive crowd, gauging the reaction. The music was not a dynamic spell. Julie was making no attempt to coerce or influence her audiences’ feelings. But despite this, as she sang, everyone in the room leaned in, entranced. They experienced the pain of the Common Brood’s blood-bond. They felt, in the music, the pain of abandonment, of power lost and gained, of tragic bonds and unfulfilled promises.
The last movement was bright and sprightly, an unexpected dawning of hope. The youngest player, a too-thin girl with fragile wrists, was suddenly thrust to the lead, and Julie’s voice fell to a whisper, then dropped away entirely. This child, playing the second big fiddle, was so intent on her own music that she did not appear to notice as the other musicians stilled and fell quiet around her. Her music was the stuff of air, untouched by pain. A rebirth. Gaultry stared at the girl’s pale hair, a silver white like Dame Julie’s, with only a hint of blondness.
When the child laid her bow aside at last, there was utter silence. The beauty of her music, after Dame Julie’s song, was somehow even more painful.
“That’s Dame Julie’s granddaughter,” Elisabeth whispered. “Rumor has it she will be a greater musician even than Julie one day.”
Gaultry stared at the blond girl. Julie Basse-Demaine had a reason to be angry. Fifty years past, when she had been a scrappy gutter-urchin, barely aware of the burgeoning power of her own voice, she would have had no idea that her blood would birth this prodigy, this musician of pure talent.
It would be a crime against the gods to taint such a child with bloodlust, with the politics of protecting a Prince and his realm.
But Julie, like all the other members of the Common Brood, like Gaultry’s own grandmother, had forged a prophecy that could not be broken merely by will.
The path of the Prince of Tielmark will run red with the blood of the Common Brood.
Unless the Brood-blood found some way to paint the Prince’s path crimson with the sweet power of independence, of Kingship, the red that ran so freely on the Prince’s path would continue to be that of the Brood and its children.
The Prince had seen her after all, but the concert had ended and the
crowd was breaking up before he sent someone to find her. Gaultry had reached the head of the screening stairs and almost given up hope of an interview when an impassive footman with a soldier’s cast to his features tapped her shoulder.
“The Prince will see you now, Lady.”
He ushered her back into the inner chambers and brought her to a paneled door, leading into a cramped, austere salon. The royal couple, along with Dame Julie, were already ensconced within, the Prince and his wife seated in tall wooden chairs, Dame Julie on a high-backed bench beneath the room’s single window. A single branching candelabra illuminated the room; even with only that small collection of flames, the space felt uncomfortably heated.
The room was silent as Gaultry entered. Princess Lily’s lips were set in an angry line; Benet and Dame Julie studiously ignored each other. The footman, breaking his air of detachment just long enough to cast the young huntress a speculative look, made a shallow bow in the prince’s direction and withdrew.
Prince Benet’s voice cracked the silence as the door shut. “I asked you to give me one night of entertainment,” he said sharply. “Was that so onerous a request, from a prince to a player?”
Gaultry hovered by the door, tempted to retreat. She had anticipated that the Prince would greet her with some form of reprimand, but nothing had prepared her to expect it to fall on Dame Julie’s shoulders. The singer
was an elderly woman of great power and dignity. Why would Benet have called Gaultry to witness this rebuke?
“Answer me!” Prince Benet said. “I won’t have your silence!”
“Others would say the music was appropriate to the occasion,” the old woman said crisply. “I am too old to chirp unthinking of pleasures, during time of war.” Dame Julie sat half-cloaked in the darkness. From outside, the rising moon touched her profile with silver light, hiding her expression in shadow. “I have been at court for more than a month, my daughter and granddaughter with me. We are wasted here—and your request that I fill my time entertaining your court with light-hearted caroling is little more than an insult. Let us serve Tielmark where we are best suited. My daughter is a soldier. She should be at the front. My granddaughter—Joia’s too young for court. She should be at home. As for myself—I’m ready to go home too. I’m an old woman and I miss my hearth.” Away from public performance, Dame Julie looked tired and faded, but also angry and more willing to show the strong character that lay beneath her composed performer’s bearing.
“I need you in Princeport,” Benet said through his teeth, “and if you have been here so long, it is in part because Tielmark suffered unexpected departures.” His eyes swept the shadows where Gaultry waited, and a faint frown passed over his face. “Your impatience is no greater than what I myself have suffered these past weeks, and with less foundation. If I asked you to help speed that passage of time with entertainment, surely it was not beneath you, as my sworn servant. Surely it cannot have escaped you that with my High Priestess charging treason against the highest of the land and the lowest alike, I have not been free to ride with my knights for the border, even as every Tielmaran with soldiers there has been clamoring for me to go.”
“It has not escaped me, my Prince,” said Dame Julie, infinitesimally less brusquely.
Benet smoothed the front of his silver-threaded tunic. “Tielmark needs to leave off the witch-hunt for anyone who ever took coin from a Bissanty-man and concentrate on ousting the Lanai. In this, my High Priestess stands against my will. I need respected counselors at my side to balance her. You dislike Dervla. I would have thought that you of all people would support me against her prosecutions.”
“Save for this last month,” Dame Julie said dryly, “I’ve been absent from this court for nigh on fifty years. My songs have gathered magic enough to build me a seating of power in Basse-Demaine, but here in
your capital, a different warp and weft make power’s cloth. If you want to rein in your High Priestess, you must look to someone whose magic meshes more closely with the power that dwells within these walls.”
“There is no one else,” Benet said. “Dervla is using the Great Twins’ magic to bully cooperation from even those most loyal to my wishes. She’s abusing the powers the goddesses gave her, using them as a weapon, not a gift. I need the other witches of the Common Brood to balance her excesses. My duchess Melaudiere has played that role for thirty years. But she is fading now and I need someone to fill her seat.”
“That won’t be me,” Dame Julie said. She self-consciously touched the papery skin of her throat, where age had loosened her flesh. “Please understand, my Prince. I mean no disrespect. But Gabrielle of Melaudiere cut her teeth on political meat from her cradle days. When old Princess Lousielle formed the Brood Coven, there was never any doubt but that the original circle of seven would include the young Duchess of Melaudiere. She knew the ins and outs of court even then—it had been necessary for her survival.
“As for me—I was not even a woman when my music’s magic elevated me from ragged wharf-urchin to the old Princess’s notice. My power would prove as strong as that of any Brood member—but Lousielle had no expectation that the members of the Brood would be interchangeable. I was not chosen to join them because Lousielle mistook me for a leader.”
“I can’t offer you a choice here,” Benet said. Once again, his gaze flickered over Gaultry. “Someone must draw the Brood back together. Your fate is tied to Tielmark’s. Split in factions, you are at once too vulnerable and too powerful. I can’t risk Tielmark’s fate for your squabbles. Look what happened to Destra Vanderive and her young family. Look what happened even to Martin Stalker. Bissanty has taken notice of the Brood’s powers, and you can be sure, they’ll happily pick you off one by one if I allow it.”
“Do you propose some exalted mission, then, to draw us back together?” Half-hidden by shadows, a grim smile flickered on Dame Julie’s lips. “One might be forgiven for imagining that the protection of Tielmark’s God-pledge should have been enough to focus any Tielmaran’s loyalties, yet factional politics split the Brood from the day the old Princess called us to serve. You can hardly expect things to be different now.”
“The Brood has yet to fulfill its pledge,” Benet said harshly. He rose from his seat, candlefire sending glints flickering from his silver tunic, as though a deeper fire had touched him. “It’s stalking you even now. Do
you think you can avoid it forever, burying yourself out in Basse-Demaine? The Brood-prophecy offers two choices: your own blood shed for my line’s protection, or Tielmark raised to a Kingship. Even if you have forgotten your duty, rest assured, the Bissanty have not. What do you imagine Marie Laconte’s great-grandchildren were thinking, when the Bissanty assassins came to cut them down? Would you consign your own granddaughter to such a fate?”
There was an awkward pause. The candles flared.
When Dame Julie spoke again, her voice was subdued. “Your Highness, Kingship is a high cause indeed, but the price is higher still. Perhaps it would be better for all the Brood to lie buried beneath the ground than for Tielmark to risk crying to the gods for the red of Kingship. That attempt could mean dangerous new God-pledges, your own body made one with the land—or it could utterly fail, taking your life with it in a vain sacrifice. In the old days, when the gods were close, a brave man such as yourself could freely pledge himself to the land, and the gods could be depended to bestow either him or his heirs with the red crown of a King. Now—the Great Twelve do not confer Kingship so easily.”
“To rise from Principality to Kingdom would sunder Tielmark for once and always from Bissanty’s imperial claims,” Benet said stubbornly. “What we—what I—have suffered from Bissanty in these past months—I would not see that repeated, nor wish it on my heirs.”
“The price for Kingship is high,” Dame Julie said grimly. “The gods will never make it lower.”
Gaultry, still standing in the shadows by the door, shivered. Throughout her childhood she had been told and retold the old stories of Kingship. Every tale was bloodier than the next. Kingship was like old Sieur Jumery’s land-tie, only deeper.
“Tielmark’s soil is more than my wife,” the Prince said. “I would die for her.” His dispassionate calm was more compelling than if he had blustered. “What I have experienced in the past months has shown me how mercilessly the Bissanty pursue us. Fifty years from now, I don’t want my grandchild or my son to sit upon Tielmark’s throne, facing some new Bissanty cruelty, sent to bind and destroy all he cares for. Prince to Emperor is ever as child to father. A King—before the gods, a King holds his land freely, to rule as he will. I want that freedom for my land—and for my people, my grandchildren among them. If my life need be offered in sacrifice—so be it.”
At his side, Princess Lily, his young common-blood wife, the living
symbol of Benet’s land-tie, paled but remained silent. If she thought her Prince spoke madness, apparently it was a madness they had agreed to share.
“Would it be enough?” Dame Julie laughed, a sad cackle with no humor in it. “A man can offer his body to the earth for the King’s pledge just once, but who can say if the gods will accept it? Your own father died in battle while protecting his borders—and his brother before him. But they died Princes, not Kings, as did their mother and all their line back to Clarin before them. The gods took no notice. The secrets of making the Kingship sacrifice are long buried.”
“Old Lousielle believed that the Common Brood could recover the kingmaking secrets,” Benet said urgently.
“Those were desperate times, my Prince.” Dame Julie shook her head. “Bissanty sympathizers controlled Tielmark’s court. Lousielle knew that the Bissanties meant to see her out of the way before the cycle of rule closed, ensuring that they could have their way freely with her young daughter. Rather than raise their suspicions that she intended to defy them, she let them murder her—do you understand? All to ensure a better chance of the Brood’s success.
“On Prince’s night, the Common Brood crushed the Bissanty spells, and Corinne renewed the God-pledge. Kingmaking—it was discussed among us, but Corinne herself was not ready. After that, it was too late. The portents were not with us for making it happen.”
“You know the Brood should have done more,” Benet insisted. “It is not right that Tielmark remains bound to short cycles of rule, to an Empire that wishes to reclaim our land. The Goddess-Twins themselves blessed you that night, you were powerful—”
The old woman shook her head. “We were powerful, my Prince, but we were sworn to Lousielle, not to each other. Once we helped young Corinne meet the God-pledge, there was nothing more we could accomplish. Lousielle was dead. Without her strong hand, we could not work together as a united coven.” A shudder ran through Dame Julie’s body. “I cannot lie to you, my Prince. As that cycle closed, as Prince’s Night waned, an abortive attempt was made. We all wanted to make Tielmark stronger for young Corinne. But the path from Prince to King was not a clear one, Corinne was clearly unready, and we voted for inaction.”
“But you could have done it,” the Prince urged. “If not then, why not now? Andion God-King’s month is upon us. If ever the stars align to make a King—now must be the moment.”
Julie shook her head. “The Kingmaking secrets are long-lost, but it remains plain at least that it takes a great gathering of power to catch the gods’ attention. Some claim the Kingship sacrifice must be made with a certain ceremonial dagger. Others, that no forfeit of life is necessary, only a show of matchless bravery. How else, those believers say, can a man perform the Kingship ‘sacrifice,’ and yet live on to wear a crown?
“It is darkly spoken that a ceremonial substitute must be offered, and Tielmark, of course, has two princes to choose from—yourself, the ruler of Free Tielmark, and the shadow-prince Bissanty has raised to its land-empty throne. But no one truly knows.
“As for myself—there have been many songs about the King’s red. Perhaps I could have discovered something there. Perhaps Delcora, Dervla’s mother, could have delved into her archives, and found the key to it. She was clever that way. But we could not agree to act, and we lost our moment.
“My Prince—I am sorry to tell you this, but your eagerness to walk the red path has come too late. The prophecy has run to the path of the Brood’s ruin for too long. We are powerless to change that.”
Gaultry had listened to the old woman’s story, completely rapt. Her grandmother, Tamsanne, had hidden everything from her about her own role in the Brood’s business, and it was fascinating to be hearing at least a part of the tale from another Brood-member’s lips. But this resignation—she could not allow that to pass unremarked. “The Brood-prophecy affects more that its original members,” she said angrily, breaking into the conversation. “You have a daughter, and a granddaughter. How can you think to leave the Brood-prophecy to run its own course? When you accepted the Brood-pledge, you as good as slaved yourselves to the pursuit of Kingship. Not just yourselves, but your families too.” She stepped forward from the shadows, forgetting that she should be patient, should wait until Benet called for her.
“Tielmark broke from Bissanty to free itself of slave-bonds. Before I traveled to Bissanty, the urgency of that fight meant little to me. But in Bissanty—” Dark memories flooded her, and she could hardly speak. “In Bissanty, I saw a man cut off his hand to protect a friend from slavery. I saw innumerable hopeless people who would have killed themselves, save that the very slave-bond that held them forbid it. Yet you sit here, so comfortable, the key to your chains within your grasp, and you do nothing to make yourself or the heirs to your body free. I never thought to believe a Tielmaran so craven, nor a Bissanty so stalwart—”

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