The Measure of the Magic (16 page)

“Oh, I don’t think there’s any real danger of that. Everyone seems to have accepted my story about your relationship with your father. I tell them all the same thing. You are a delusional, marginally sane young girl who needs help with her afflictions. Of course, your insistence on refusing to accept responsibility for your actions makes it rather difficult for anyone to feel sorry for you. Some are beginning to consider the possibility that your acts were deliberate and you ought to suffer the consequences.”

“We both know who ought to suffer the consequences of my father’s murder,” Phryne replied, eyes locked on the other. “Come close enough and I’ll show you what I mean.”

Isoeld laughed. “I think I’ll stay where I am. I prefer to keep my distance from someone as disturbed as you obviously are.”

Phryne actually considered the possibility of launching herself at her stepmother and tearing out her eyes. She measured the distance between them and decided that if Teonette weren’t standing beside her, she might well try it.

“Why are you here?” she asked finally, turning away. “What do you want?”

Isoeld brushed back her long blond hair and shrugged. “I’ll say it again. Would you like to get out of here? Do you want your life back? Because I can make that happen. I can arrange for you to be placed under house arrest. I can make your life a whole lot more comfortable, if I think there might be a good reason to do so.”

“Yes, we’ve covered that ground. Assuming for the moment that you’ve lost your mind, what would it take for you to do this? I admit I am marginally curious. Is there someone else you want dead? Someone else for whose killing I am to take the blame?”

“No. Accepting responsibility for your father will suffice. You will admit you killed him in a moment of madness. You will tell the High Council that you acted out of an ungovernable rage, but that now you realize how wrong you were. You will show remorse. If you do that, I can keep you from being put to death. I can have you sentenced to something less final.”

Phryne could not believe what she was hearing. “You actually think I might agree to accept the blame for my father’s murder? That I might even consider for a single second removing all chance of seeing you pay for what you did.” She laughed. “I’m not the one who’s insane, Isoeld. Not so long as you talk like that!”

“Tell her the rest,” Teonette snapped.

Isoeld clasped her hands behind her back like a satisfied little girl and leaned forward, clearly enjoying the moment. “You didn’t ask me what I expected from you in payment for my generosity, Phryne. Don’t you want to know?”

“I don’t care what you want. It doesn’t make any difference because I’m not doing what you want.”

“Not even to save your grandmother’s life?”

Phryne went pale with shock.
Mistral!
If she could have managed to move she would have attacked her stepmother on the spot, but she was frozen in place by the implied threat contained in the other’s sly words. It took everything she had to stay calm, something she sensed instinctively she needed to do.

“What have you done with her, Isoeld? She’s an old lady, and she has nothing to do with any of this. She barely spoke to my father after Mother died. You know that. What point is there in threatening her?”

“The point should be obvious. I want you to do what I ask.”

“Well, I won’t. Not even to save her. She wouldn’t want it. She would hate me for it.”

Her stepmother glanced at the first minister in a decidedly conspiratorial way. “If they should decide to put you to death in the Elven Way—an act I will try to prevent, but may not be able to—you will wish you had been less difficult. But what if they put Mistral Belloruus to death, as well? What if evidence were to surface that she conspired with you to kill the King? What if it became known that she encouraged
it, and she did so knowing that you, only a step from madness already, would act on her suggestion? Her fate would be sealed. Think about it. Death in the Elven Way is not something you want to face at any age. Let me see. They bind you securely and then they bury you headfirst in the ground. But they construct an air pocket around your head so that you have sufficient time to contemplate your bad behavior before the air runs out or the insects start feeding on you. You and Mistral would be placed side by side. Perhaps you could hear each other’s screams before your hearts gave out.”

Phryne lost all control in that moment and flew across the room. She managed to reach Isoeld before Teonette could stop her. Screaming in fury, she raked her stepmother’s beautiful face with her nails, leaving bloody furrows down both cheeks. She got in a few good punches, as well, and then Teonette hauled her away, stood her up, and backhanded her so hard she was knocked all the way across the room where she slammed up against a wall. She tried to rise, her head spinning, but he was on top of her again, hitting her over and over.

“Stop it!” she heard Isoeld scream at him. The words rolled and echoed behind a wall of pain and bright colors. “If you kill her, we’ll never find them! We need her alive!”

The pummeling ceased, and she heard Teonette mutter something as he moved away. She tried to speak, to call them the names that were right on the tip of her tongue, but her mouth was full of blood. She lay where she was and listened as their footsteps receded and the storeroom door opened and closed again.

Then she was alone.

I
T TOOK HER A LONG TIME
to gain enough strength to sit up straight, bracing herself against the wall, her head still spinning, her body racked with pain. Everything hurt, especially her face, which Teonette had battered with both fists until she was barely conscious. She touched it experimentally and flinched. Wasn’t a good idea to do that, she told herself. Shouldn’t look in any mirrors for a while, either.

She desperately wanted something to drink, but the water pitcher had been toppled in the struggle and its contents spilled on the floor. She thought about lapping it up from the stones, but decided she wasn’t quite ready for that. She would be soon, though. She could feel a sense of desperation creeping in, and it wasn’t only about the water. Thoughts of her grandmother crowded her mind, and she imagined all sorts of terrible things that might have been done to the old woman. Mistral Belloruus was a tough old lady and a match for most, but sheer numbers and brute force might have been enough to overwhelm her.

What Phryne couldn’t quite understand was why Isoeld thought that making her grandmother a prisoner would be worth the effort. Word of a seizure of this sort was bound to leak out—through those old men who were the old lady’s consorts, in all likelihood—leading to rampant speculation. Mistral could hardly pose a threat to the Queen. She hadn’t been all that fond of Oparion in the first place; his killing would affect her less than most. If he hadn’t married her daughter, they probably wouldn’t have had any relationship at all. So to lock her away out of fear of what she might do, an old woman living by herself on the outskirts of the city, what sort of sense did that make?

Holding her head in her hands, bent forward so that the pain seemed to lessen somewhat, Phryne pondered the question. Did Isoeld really think anyone would believe that wild story about her grandmother encouraging her to kill her father? It was patently ridiculous. Isoeld must have known that Phryne would never agree to take the blame for her father’s death simply because of threats made to her grandmother. Doing any deliberate harm to someone of Mistral Belloruus’s stature posed great risk in a tight-knit Elven community where everyone knew the history of the royal families.

No, something else was going on here. But what?

Phryne didn’t know. She couldn’t think straight. She wanted to lie down and go to sleep, but she knew that sleeping after a beating like the one she had taken was not wise. Concussions could kill you in your sleep. She needed to stay awake and wait for things to settle down. She thought about crawling over to the door to ask for water, but she had every expectation of being refused, and she didn’t think she could bear that just now.

So instead, she stayed where she was, breathing slowly and deeply, searching for slight shifts of position that might help lessen the pain and slow the spinning.

She was still engaged in that endeavor when she heard the snick of the door lock. She raised her head high enough to watch the door open and a pair of young women enter the room carrying cloths and basins of water. They came over to where Phryne was sitting and knelt beside her. Saying nothing, working in silence, they cleaned her wounds and daubed at her bruises, using the cold water in the basin to bring down the swelling and warm water in the other to wash away dirt and blood. Phryne let them work on her, grateful for even this little bit of help. She didn’t know these Elves and appreciated that in all probability they were under strict instructions not to make any attempt to converse with her. But at least someone was making an effort to keep her in one piece.

She wondered, though, who that someone might be.

When the young women were finished, they picked up the cloths and basins and disappeared out the door. Not one word had been exchanged.

Phryne went back to thinking about Isoeld’s offer. Was there some way that Phryne could turn it to her advantage? Maybe she should pretend to accept, wait until she got clear of this room, and then make a run for it. But she knew it wouldn’t work like that. Whatever sort of confession they extracted, they would put it on paper and have her sign it before they let her take a single step outside her prison. Besides, she knew she couldn’t make herself confess to killing her father; the very thought of such a thing was revolting.

Still, why had Isoeld threatened her with compromising her grandmother’s safety? What was it that she hoped to gain?

She thought back over the words her stepmother had spoken, trying to remember them exactly, hoping for a clue. But nothing revealed itself, nothing seemed out of place. It all fit together nicely.

Except …

At the very end, she remembered suddenly. When Teonette was beating her to within an inch of her life, when everything was so crazy for those few seconds, what was it Isoeld had said?

If you kill her, we’ll never find them
.

Them.

Phryne’s triumphant smile would have been broader if it hadn’t hurt her face so much to stretch her mouth. Them. Isoeld had to be talking about the blue Elfstones! Nothing else made any sense. She would have known about them, of course—a valuable talisman, a legacy from the time of Kirisin Belloruus. How she had found out they were in the hands of Mistral, Phryne couldn’t imagine. But once her father was out of the way, her stepmother would have gone searching for them first thing.

Apparently, she hadn’t found them. But she seemed to know that they were destined for Phryne and might now believe that they were in her possession. Hidden, perhaps, but waiting to be found. Isoeld would be intent on finding and gaining possession of them so that her hold on the throne was more than mere words; it was backed by the power of Elven magic.

All this reasoning was something of a leap of faith, a broad extrapolation of a conclusion drawn from a raft of possibilities. Yet Phryne could feel in her heart that she was right.

But what was she going to do about it? She had to get out of this room before she could do anything, and just at the moment that didn’t seem like a very strong possibility. Or even a weak one, for that matter. Not unless someone outside the room chose to help her.

If she could just find a way to get word to her cousins!

She was considering various impossible ways to do that when dinner arrived. The storeroom door opened and the little serving girl entered with her tray, setting it down carefully just over the threshold before she backed out again and the door closed anew. Phryne stared at the tray and the food for several minutes, trying to decide if she was hungry. She wasn’t, but she knew she had to eat.

She climbed to her feet gingerly and crossed the room to the tray. She sat down again, too weary even from that little effort to try to take the tray back across the room. She would eat on the floor and then maybe sleep. It had been long enough now that she no longer felt concussions were a worry.

The tray contained a hard roll, some cold meat and cheese, and a cup of water. Reasonable, if not very exciting.

She began to eat.

She had just finished pulling the hard roll apart and was about to take a bite of one section when she saw the folded slip of paper that was lodged inside.

Something was written on the paper—three words in large block letters.

HELP IS COMING