Shadowheart (115 page)

“There are no secrets in a place like this—the servants and guards know everything, always.” He shook his head. “I can live without marrying you, Briony, although I will die if you marry another . . . but why must our love stay hidden? Don’t you feel the same for me?” He suddenly felt stricken. “You do, don’t you? Feel the same?”

“Of course, you wonderful, truehearted man—but I have more than my own happiness to think about. If Kendrick or my father had lived, things would be different. Even if Barrick had not changed so greatly ...” She shook her head, her expression darkening like a sky clouding over. “But an ordinary life is not what Fate has given me. I must keep myself aloof, or seem to. I’ll have to pretend no man has won my heart . . . but that any man might, if he brings a useful alliance to Southmarch. That’s how I’ll make policy. That’s how I’ll keep our country free from the influence of powerful neighbors.”

“Even Syan?” he said suspiciously.

She smiled, but it was a sad one this time. “Even Syan. Especially Syan.”

He crept closer to her. “Let us not talk of Syan any more. Kiss me.”

When they had done that and more for a while, he sat up.

“Don’t go,” she said, her voice growing a little slow and sleepy. “I take back what I said. The ladies can find beds in Merolanna’s chambers. Tell me more of what you saw down in the caverns. I can scarcely believe any of it. Did you truly fight a god?”

“Not me, no. Not even your brother did. The creature was too far beyond any of us.” He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it. It is still too close.”

She shook her head. “It’s hard for me even to understand. You say my brother this, my brother that—he fought a hundred men! He swung down on a rope! Some powerful magic must be at work—that is not the brother I knew, who couldn’t even cut his own meat without falling to cursing and knocking his trencher on the floor!”

Vansen smiled, but there was a touch of puzzlement to it. “Magic indeed. It’s as if he aged ten years in a few months. And his arm is healed! He’s changed so much that I hardly recognized him. When the stone-swallowing demons came at us, every last one of us would have died if Barrick and the Qar had not shown up ...”

“The stone what?” She had a strange, troubled look on her face now. “Stone-swallowing . . . ? I have not heard this tale before. Tell me.”

He pulled her closer. “Your maids and ladies . . . ?”

“Leave them be a little longer.”

He described the final battle in the Maze in detail now, of how he and the Funderlings gave ground until there was no more ground to give.

“So brave!” she said. “And not just you, dearest Captain Vansen. Chert’s people have astonished me.”

“All of us,” he said. “We did them a disservice for many years, it seems. But even they could do nothing when the Stone Swallowers came. I don’t know what they were truly called—there were three of them. But each one placed a stone in his mouth and . . . and then began to change ...” He hesitated, feeling her body grow rigid beside him. “Briony?”

“Are you certain they were men?”

He considered. “To be honest, I never saw them before they had already become those . . . things. ...”

“Tell me again. Tell me what the stones looked like.”

“I don’t know,” he said, laughing a little. “Perin’s Hammer, girl, we were in almost complete darkness . . . !”

“Tell me all you remember!” There was nothing of the sweet young woman in her voice now.

And Vansen did, marveling to find that all this time he had been kissing not just his beloved, but also a queen.

Steffens Nynor was wrapped in a heavy wool cloak, but his ankles were bare of hose and he was clearly feeling the cold. “Is it truly necessary to do this now, Highness?” he asked.

“I have learned a lesson.” Briony motioned for one of the guards to knock on the tower’s heavy front door. The booming sound echoed and died. She was just about to order him to do it again when a quavering, childish voice from behind the door said, “Who goes there?”

“It is the Princess Regent, to see Queen Anissa,” the guard said.

The door opened enough for the boy to peer out at the visitors, then the door swung wide. “But the queen is sleeping!” he said, as if the people knocking might not have realized that the time was well after midnight. “She is in mourning,” he offered next, but the guards had already pushed past him and he was left talking to Briony, Vansen, and Lord Nynor.

“Of course she is,” Briony told him, not unkindly. “And so am I. Do you see my black dress?”

He scuttled off up the stairs to the queen’s bedchamber as if Briony had frightened him. The guards on duty in the reception hall had dropped to their knees; she waved them to their feet. Several of them looked to their longtime captain as though he might explain why this ordinarily sleepy duty had been interrupted, but Ferras Vansen took his lead from Briony and kept his thoughts to himself.

Anissa and her retinue were long enough coming down that Briony had begun to consider sending the soldiers up to get them when she heard the queen’s voice preceding her down the stairs.
“But why? Why should she want to come here in the night this way? It frightens me!
” Now she appeared, accompanied by half a dozen women, one of whom held her little son, Alessandros.

Olin Alessandros,
Briony reminded herself.
My brother. My father’s child, too.

The sight of Anissa in her nightdress brought back dreadful memories—memories of fire and living shadows, memories of last Winter’s Eve when her entire world had been turned upside down—but Briony did her best to keep her voice even. “I am sorry to bother you at such a time, Anissa, but my sleep was troubled by a thought that you alone can answer.”

Anissa turned to Nynor with a show of confusion, but the aged counselor had no duty here but that of observer. He nodded respectfully to her but made no other sign. “What is it?” she said. “What do you want of me, Briony, that you frighten me so?”

“I want to know how it was that your maid Selia came to you. Do not turn so pale, stepmother. I have recently learned something about the Autarch of Xis and now I need to know this from you. How did your maid come to you?”

“I . . . I do not know. I do not remember!” Anissa looked around as if one of her maids might help her remember, but none of them would meet her eye. Many of them were themselves from the queen’s home in Devonis and knew themselves to be foreigners in the court, protected only by Anissa’s position, but they seemed curiously unwilling to speak in her defense. “She . . . was sent to me,” Anissa said at last. “I asked my mother’s chamberlain to send me a good girl, someone to be my bodyservant. That is all. I scarcely knew her! I had no idea she was a witch! But I have told you this already, Briony—why do you tax me with this now, when your father is dead and I am so upset?”

“Why indeed?” Briony shook her head. “You ask a fair question. Nynor, did you find the letter?”

The old man was looking at Anissa with an expression Briony hadn’t seen before. It took him a moment to realize she was speaking to him. “Oh. Oh, yes. Yes, it’s here.” He drew it out of the pocket of his cloak with a shaking hand. “I never throw anything away, and I am lucky that the fool who took my place did not change that.” He held it out to Briony, but she shook her head.

“Read it to us, please.”

“Let me ...” he squinted, scissoring his spectacles until he could fit them properly over both eyes. “Let me f ind . . . ah. Here. From a letter Queen Anissa wrote to me in Heptamene of last year, a few months after the king had been imprisoned by Hesper of Jellon and then ransomed to Drakava in Hierosol.”

 

 

Briony stared at her. “So which was she—a dear companion from childhood, or a servant you scarcely knew?”

Anissa took a few steps back toward the stairs. Some of the guards tensed—Briony could feel it; the air in the tower’s reception hall, large and drafty as it was, seemed to have grown tight. “How can I remember? I knew her, perhaps! That does not mean I had anything to do with what she did. I would never ...”

“I know now that the stone your maid used must have come from the autarch—it was one of the same magical Kulikos stones he gave to others during the last hours of the fighting under the castle, changing them into dreadful, demonic
things
. Captain Vansen saw one of them putting the Kulikos in his mouth.” She frowned. “No, not ‘his mouth,’ but ‘hers.’ The demons must have been women to begin with. Chaven said the stones only worked on women.”

Briony moved closer to Anissa. “So I can only suppose that the autarch, who had several of these Kulikos stones, and also had several spies in the Tollys’ Summerfield Court, gave one of these deadly talismans to your maid instead. But why? On the very unlikely chance she would use it to murder my brother Kendrick?” Just saying the words made Briony violently angry, but she forced herself to speak even more calmly. “Why? How would he know that Selia could be trusted, or would even do such a thing at all? Unless she was brought here with no other purpose in mind. Unless she was, perhaps, someone that had
already
been picked out for the task ...”

The maids and ladies drew back a little, some of them whispering anxiously. Anissa’s eyes were round. “What are you saying? That I knew? That is foolish! Why would I hurt Prince Kendrick?”

“I’m not certain,” Briony said through her teeth, “but let me guess. You can answer one question for me, though, Anissa—did the autarch’s servant first come to you before you left Devonis, or was it here, in Southmarch? My wager is that although you may have spoken to him before, when he finally approached you it was here, after you found out you were carrying my father’s child.”

“What do you say? I don’t understand.”

“This, Stepmother—although it galls me even to call you that. I think you
do
understand, all too well. I think that one of the autarch’s spies came to you and told you that the child in your womb was doomed if Kendrick or either of the two younger children—Barrick or myself—took the throne. He told you that if Olin died in captivity, Kendrick and the rest of us would not stand any rivals for the throne, that Kendrick would have the baby done away with, and probably you, too. Am I right? Is that what he told you?”

“No! No!” But she had the sound of a woman in despair, not one protesting her innocence.

Briony, with a cold, sinking feeling in her belly, knew she had guessed correctly. “Tell the truth, Anissa. I am not the Autarch of Xis, but I’ll not spare harsher means if I don’t hear the truth from you now.”

“Stop frightening me!” Anissa began to cry. For a moment, Briony almost felt sorry for the small, pretty woman who had brought her father such happiness, but she also remembered what had happened to her in Anissa’s chamber the night her exile began—the night when the maid Selia had put the stone in her mouth and turned into something otherwordly and deadly. Briony couldn’t bear to imagine what Kendrick’s last hour must have been like at the hands of that monstrosity.

“Guards. She will go to the stronghold now, I think.”

“No!” Anissa suddenly fell to her knees and scrambled forward, trying to throw her arms around Briony’s legs. Ferras Vansen stepped out and blocked her, then lifted her to her feet with surprising gentleness. “Do not do that to me, please, Briony!” her stepmother wailed. “I was terrified, so! He said that my baby would be taken and murdered! He told me I would never see my home again—that I would be poisoned here in Southmarch . . . buried in cold ground . . . !” She was weeping so hard now it was difficult to understand her. Briony looked at Vansen, whose face showed a complicated mixture of pity and disgust as he held Anissa upright.

“Who said that? Who approached you?”

“It was a man from my own country. A merchant. He told me he had news from home, so I let him come to me.” She could barely stand. “Please, please do not kill me! Do not hurt my baby! I did not want to do it, but they said that Kendrick would murder me and the child. I was so frightened!”

“So you helped the autarch kill my brother instead.” Briony felt as if she were a vessel full to the brim with caustic liquid, that if she spilled even a drop it would burn wherever it touched. “Lock her away,” she told Vansen.

“In the stronghold?”

“No. That is no place for the mother of my father’s child. She can stay here—under guard.” She turned to Anissa. “But you will not keep the boy.” She reached out her hands to the maid and took little Olin Alessandros while Vansen held the struggling Anissa. “He is something of my father, not of you.”