The Duke In His Castle (6 page)

“Most probably in his study. Would you like your—ahem—
box
, now? Would you, perchance be considering a departure?”

“Almost, my good man. First, the box, and then our Duke. Or rather, first the Duke, and the box will ensue, reasserting itself.”

“As you wish.”

She follows Harmion and his solitary candle down several corridors, stopping before a somewhat familiar door.

“His study,” says the butler. I believe the
thing
you inquire about is within.”

“The Duke is within? Oh, good.”

“His Grace is not a thing. I refer to the remains of Nairis. And His Grace might also be present. Shall I inquire—”

“No, thank you. And—do you have a sense of play?” she suddenly adds, watching with amusement.

“Only with my Lord I do. For others, only sarcasm,” Harmion responds with dignity, and turns away, disdaining another word.

“Stop,” she says. “Come closer, yes, here. Now put that candle down on the side table here, yes. No, do not stare at me so, just do as I ask, please.”

Frowning, the butler obeys. The candle holder is deposited with tremulous arthritic hands upon a narrow table in the corridor.

“Now walk. Back and forth in the patch of candlelight.”

Harmion stares at her for once as though she is genuinely addled. And then he slowly begins to pace where she indicates, while she in turn watches him.

“That will be enough, Harmion, thank you.”

“Anything else. . . ?” At this point he is prepared to be unsurprised if she requests him to stand on his head.

“Yes,” she says. “Duke Rossian, come out of his shadow.” And without looking back, she enters the study. Rossian steps within immediately behind her.

Inside the room, the single observation window with its well-worn elbow ledge shows the sun fading in a red coal sliver at the horizon. Air pours with cold into the chamber, while the sky is a mass of indigo twilight and splotches of rust. Soon, the shutters will need to be drawn for the night.

“Not too bad,” he says. “Only four minutes and a dozen seconds. However, as a proxy of your Cousin, you have lost the round.”

She stands with her back to him, a silhouette against the fading light. “I did, didn’t I.”

It is the strangest thing she has said yet.

For one instant Rossian almost feels sorry for her, but the feeling is supplanted by wary confusion. “My Lady, you are so very peculiar,” he says in a blank voice. “Why? What is this, all of this, really for you? What kind of game are you playing with me? You practically set yourself up for defeat, and I am unsure why. I don’t understand you—though, only moments ago I thought I did—and it’s making me disillusioned about our game. Is that what you want? Or have you been sent here by your Duchess to drive me insane with uncertainty?”

He pauses, watching her for any reaction, but she still has not moved, standing with her back to him, which is unnerving.

“Well, then,” he continues. “I say we call it a foul and start again. My sense of justice does not allow me to take such an advantage of you—even if you
are
an annoyance, or even a malicious Ducal toad.”

Izelle turns at last, to look at him. Her mutable eyes are an unsolved puzzle in the semi-dark. “Don’t you want to find out my Cousin’s secret?” she asks earnestly. She does not blink, or at least he does not see a movement, for the room has grown too dark.

“Not in particular . . . I would rather simply play.” His response is in turn more earnest than he wants to admit. It simply comes out of him as an exhalation of breath. Words laden with twilight.

His manner is suddenly exhausted, apathetic in the usual way, and inside him the game is over. Out there, beyond the window, the sky has turned into a pit of darkness. The sun is gone. The room is now a morass thrown into interminable gloom.

“Harmion!” he calls without using the bell pull, as though the old butler has preternatural senses and can hear him—mayhap he does, lurking patiently outside his door. “Harmion, some light here! A candle, please.”

“That’s all you want, isn’t it, to play? Why don’t you care the same way as all the rest of them?” Izelle says. “I thought you were dying because you couldn’t be free.”

“I am . . . tired. Of futility.”

“But you never even tried! Not as the others try, constantly!”

Harmion enters, his candle flickering, shadows swinging wildly. He does not need to be told and approaches the work table with its dust-strewn clutter of books, and finds the oil lamp. The candle dips precariously into the open neck, makes contact, and the wick inside catches on fire. With a spark the lamp ignites, and the glow it casts around the room is full and rich, unlike the small elemental flicker of the candle.

Next, Harmion proceeds to close the shutters, and the cold from the outside is now kept out, contained.

There is enough cold left within this room—cold expressions, cold words, cold beating clockwork of hearts, fueled with frustrated anger.

“It is precisely why I stopped trying,” the Duke says. “Because I see them thus, so despicable and vulgar, so desperately selfish, coming here trying to wheedle this thing out of me. I am not like them. I may be selfish and wicked but at least I’m not a vulture.”

Harmion exits, closing the door soundlessly behind him.

Izelle sighs. She walks to the table where the infamous box with the remains of Nairis stands as it has been originally placed. She ignores it and instead watches the lamp, its steady orange glow that suffuses the room. It is the only source of warmth.

She inhales deeply the air that has received a fragrant effusion of the lamp oil. The scent is a pleasing mixture of roses and wild sage.

“Then—why don’t you simply
tell
them—tell me!—what the essence of your secret is, out of plain mercy?” she whispers. “
You
at least, could be noble where they would not.”

“I don’t have mercy for them. They are obscene, dirt. Besides, it would make no difference.”

“I suppose that makes me dirt also.”

She looks at him, searches for any reaction.

The Duke pulls up his chair and sits down. He puts one foot up over the other, folds his arms in a stubbornly comfortable pose. His beautiful face limned with golden glow is impassive.

“Well, then,” she carries on. “I don’t think we should continue this game.”

“I thought we were done playing some time ago.”

But she ignores his matter-of-fact sarcasm, his veneer of boredom. “Since in the name of the Duchess I have lost, it would only be fair that I tell you her secret now, as we’ve agreed.”

“You what?”

The Duke is immobilized. Even his breath fades, and for a moment he is a dead thing bereft of existence. And then he allows his lungs to resume their cycle, to expand and billow with life-breath, while his heartbeat is marking time.

“Why are you doing this?” he says. “Enough with your contortions and sleight of mouth. What exactly do you
want
?”

She shrugs. “Answer my question first: do you care to find out the secret power of the Duchess of White? Would you like to
know,
my Lord?”

He stares, and an indescribable thing appears in his expression; he is transfigured and cast far away from here; he is vacant and wandering in a place of hope, and is living in a different moment than she. “No,” he says at last. “I actually don’t want to know. I don’t care what the devil it is, not a whit.”

“Then why are you so unwilling to part with your own secret?” she exclaims.

“Because, damn you, I don’t
have
one!”

Silence. They stare at one another.

“Yes . . .” he says then, quietly. “My grand secret is that I don’t have a secret. At least not one of which I am aware. And neither was my father—or any other blessed ancestor—aware of any secret power, only of being senselessly imprisoned within this hateful place.”

Izelle exhales. “Oh. . . .”

And now the Duke gets up and begins to pace restlessly, knocking his chair out of the way with one angry movement of his foot.

“Well? How do you like my revelation, my Lady?” he says, spitting the words out. “Like it or not, it is a fact. We have all tried to take a step outside the gates countless years, countless number of times, yet—there is
something
out there, something preventing us, every time. Unlike our supposed powers, it is a genuine physical force, it is
real
and hard and strong. I’ve tried myself, repeatedly, and—” He throws up a hand in resignation.

“How did it feel?” she asks, speaking in an odd manner while looking ahead of herself, not at him. “How did it
feel
when you tried to
pass
the boundary?”

“How? It felt like hell’s bowels; always does. At first, there’s an iron wall invisibly pressing, and yet molding against you somehow—not as true metal but as something that’s similarly firm and cold and smooth—and this something does not allow you any further movement. And then, if you press on further, struggle against it—as I’ve done—there’s a sort of darkness. And then your will and your mind goes blank.”

“And then?”

“That’s all. I’ve found myself losing consciousness every time, and waking up lying on the ground, within the boundary of the castle. Either that, or Harmion would drag me off to bed, and when I came to, would hover over me with the physician, the two of them fussing like a pair of laying hens.”

He grows silent, for there is little else to say. Then he sits down again on his chair, first moving it away from the work table, away from her, into the corner of the room.

He closes his eyes. Moments line up into armies and pass by in regimental regularity. The oil lamp continues to cast its warm glow, beginning to smoke slightly when a tiny flying insect enters the top of its neck, flitters, and eventually capsizes in hot lipid death.

“Will you please leave now?” he says softly, turning away from her, from everything. “Now that you have what you came for. I’ve told you the truth. I’ve sworn to it, haven’t I? Despite the fact that I won the imbecile round of an imbecile game of ours, and you lost, I’ve told you. Because—for a few moments, I must admit—you’ve given me a reason to breathe, and entertained me with a children’s game. I’ve never really—
played
with anyone in such a way. Thank you.”

And then he lets himself sink, submerging into a kind of separate private consciousness, locking the world away, not caring for anything, unaware of his own body, except for the dark waves of depression; it is entering him at each psychic opening, coming up from the nether places in the earth that run deep beneath the castle. . . .

Except that when next he becomes aware of the surroundings, coming to himself who knows how long afterwards,
she
is still there, standing small and grotesque a few feet away.

The candlelight seeps in an even glow from behind her silhouette, a halo of a saint who’s stepped out from one of the tapestries—except the bright corona encompasses all of her.

And in that glow, she approaches.

She draws near; is leaning to watch him, serious and
different
(something new is indeed there; he has never yet seen this beatific aspect of her), and her eyes are liquid with compassion.

And in that, she is terrifying.

“Rossian . . .” she whispers.

“What? Still here?” he says harshly, straightening in his chair. “My Lady Izelle, has
anyone
taught you common courtesy, ever? I told you, I
told
you the truth! Now, begone, little demon! I’ve even thanked you—hah!—thanked you for sickening and annoying me in a novel way, unlike those other Ducal dullards, to the extent of actually bringing me enjoyment, an odd moment or two—”

“Coming from you, it is complimentary, I suppose.” She speaks matter-of-factly, still leaning over him, her unearthly gaze never leaving his face. And then she says something else, a thing so deep and serious that breath catches in his throat.

“What would you say to me if I showed you a way of escaping your ageless prison?”

“You
what
?” he whispers. He is completely stricken, and rendered inarticulate.

“You don’t believe me, do you? That it can be done? That a Ducal Heir can simply get up, completely resolved to accomplish it, and walk out of his or her castle? Well, Sir, it has been done, already. A certain Duchess of White decided she’s had enough, plainly disgusted with her lot. And so she just walked through the gates, and out of her land.

“That Duchess is I, my Lord, as you might’ve already guessed in a moment of clarity. I am Janerizel of White. And I’ve come here to help you.”

He stares at her coldly, unblinking, and then mutters. “I knew there was something fishy about you, something not quite right, that stank of deception and tomfoolery. Why didn’t you simply tell me all of this in the first place, why all the lies? What
am
I supposed to believe?”

Her rosebud mouth curves into a little sad smile. “Ah, my Lord, a Duchess alone has to be careful. But then so are you—careful and alone. Indeed, it’s always this way, isn’t it? Never trust a soul. This way, even now, you’ll not be a bit surprised.”

“Of course not,” he says. “I wouldn’t be surprised until I believed you. And how can I? You claim impossible nonsense.”

“It is
not
nonsense! I am the Duchess of White, you fool, idiot and imbecile! Mistrusting, dry-souled wretch! A frog in your own swampy filth is what you are, decaying and rotting in this blue blood hole! I am
here
, in your castle, and how do you think I got here?”