Tomorrow's Kingdom (7 page)

“You look a little peaked,” frowned Mordecai. “Have you been eating your greens?”

Lifting up the hem of his cozy, fur-trimmed velvet robe, he used the toe of his crumpled left foot to nudge a silver platter heaped with fresh grass and clover closer to her. It was a little jest he'd thought up months ago, and though he'd been compelled to add regular rations of mouldy bread to keep her from starving to death before he'd finished having his fun with her, he'd left standing orders that she should receive fresh “cow food” on a daily basis.

When the dead king's formerly fat nursemaid failed to respond to his question about eating her greens, Mordecai sat down in the armchair he'd had placed just beyond her reach. Leaning back and sighing loudly to show how comfortable the chair was, Mordecai said, “I lied when I said you looked a little peaked. In truth, you look disgusting, and you smell worse. But I didn't come here to give you a lecture about your personal hygiene. I'm afraid I have some tragic news. The king—”

“Is dead,” rasped the nursemaid, her colourless eyes flicking toward him. “I know. I heard.”

Mordecai felt a hot stab of disappointment at her reaction—or, rather, at her lack thereof. “What do you mean ‘you heard'?” he snapped. “Who could you possibly have heard it from?”

The cow shrugged her bony shoulders.

Mordecai eyed her malevolently, wondering if he
ought to beat the answer out of her. Deciding he did not wish to give her the satisfaction of thinking he truly cared what she heard from whom, he hastened on to impart the second bit of information he'd been looking forward to sharing with her.

“I wish I could tell you that he died an easy death, but he did not.”

The nursemaid said nothing for a long moment. Then she cleared her throat and said, “You smothered him, then?”

“The gods smothered him—drowned him in his own stinking juices,” replied Mordecai, wrinkling his nose to emphasize how nauseating the king's bloody phlegm had smelled by the end. “And do you know what else? Aside from informing me that he was content to let you die in agony if it meant furthering his own pathetic little plans to defeat me, the king never once mentioned you. Not in casual conversation, not during his fever dreams, not even as he gasped out his final, tortured breaths.”

The cow did not seem the least bothered by the revelation that she'd been sacrificed and forgotten. On the contrary, she actually seemed to glow at the knowledge that her beloved king had fought the enemy of his people to the very end.

“His Majesty was kind
and
brave,” she said with quiet satisfaction. “I hope he was given a proper state funeral.”

“He was, but only because the great lords insisted upon it,” replied Mordecai, his mood darkening dangerously. “If it had been up to me alone, I'd have dumped the fool's naked corpse onto the slag heap and been done with it.”

“And what of His Majesty's twin?” asked the nursemaid, her chains clinking softly as she shifted upon her bed of rotting straw. “Does she yet wander the kingdom seeking the healing pool, or did the poor thing return empty-handed only to watch her brother die?”

At the mention of the healing pool, Mordecai's dark mood vanished, and his spirits soared. Clutching the locket that contained the miraculous leafy sprig that showed no signs of wilting, he said, “The queen returned to watch her brother die—but she did not return empty-handed.”

“Perhaps not empty-handed—but not with a map to any healing pool,” guessed the cow.

“Oh?” said Mordecai, striving to sound nonchalant. “What makes you so sure?”

“Besides the fact that you're still crippled, the queen loved her brother,” replied the nursemaid. “If she and her Gypsy lover had found a pool of waters with the power to cure his cursèd cough, His Majesty would be alive today.”

Mordecai's dark eyes bulged with outrage. “How many times do I have to tell you that the cockroach is not … the queen's …
LOVER
!” he shrieked, kicking out at the silver platter so hard that it overturned with a clatter, scattering grass and clover across the muck and slime.

Startled, the cow jumped; in the shadows, unseen things scuttled about, squeaking in distress. Pushing himself to his feet so violently that he wrenched a muscle in his back, Mordecai snatched the cow's own crochet needle from the pocket of his robe and started toward her. She turned her head and shrank against the wall, but it was no use. With the aid of a nearby bar of iron, Mordecai
knocked her over. Then, grunting with exertion, he knelt heavily upon her bleeding temple and pressed the crochet needle against her fluttering eyelid.

“And even if the queen
has
defiled herself with the cockroach,” he hissed, his guts twisting with the hateful knowledge that she almost certainly had, “it matters not because she will soon be mine, and he will be
DEAD
!”

The cow started to struggle. “What do you—?”

Her words were cut short by a hideous, high-pitched scream from a nearby corridor.

“Do not be alarmed—it is only the sound of General Murdock delivering instruction to a certain red-headed imbecile on the subject of what happens to servants who fail to take proper care of the belongings of their betters,” soothed Mordecai as he ground his knee harder into the side of her head. “Between you and me, I confess that I once doubted Murdock's loyalty and had thoughts toward destroying him, but that is all behind me now—for the moment, at least. Now, what were you asking?”

“I was asking … I was asking what you meant when you said that the queen will soon be yours,” stammered the cow, panting with pain.

“I meant that within the hour I shall board a ship that will take me to her,” explained Mordecai. “On the very day of our joyful reunion, she shall take me as her wedded husband in a union so ironclad that even the great Lord Bartok will not be able to tear it asunder.”

“And … and if she will not take you?”

“As you, yourself, have come to learn, obedience can come easily or with great difficulty,” murmured Mordecai, applying so much pressure to the crochet needle that he could feel the eyeball beneath getting ready to pop. “The queen will take me—one way or another. And then she will
take
me—and she will do so with vigour and enthusiasm, or I will know the reason why.”

“I pray the gods help her,” whispered the cow as a single tear squeezed out from under her eyelid.

Mordecai laughed loudly. Then he leaned very close and said, “Save your prayers for yourself.”

Later that same night, while the rest of the palace's inhabitants slumbered, Murdock rowed Mordecai out to a nondescript vessel that had quietly sailed into the royal harbour less than an hour earlier.

As the rowboat came alongside the hull, Mordecai stood, grabbed the rope ladder the soldiers had let down and awkwardly began to climb. By the time he reached the top (having almost slipped twice), he was trembling so hard that one of the soldiers had to drag him over the deck rail by the back of his robe. Tight-lipped with rage and humiliation, Mordecai said not a word but lurched after the captain to the cabin that had been prepared in anticipation of his arrival. It was stuffy and small and not nearly as sumptuously appointed as the living quarters to which Mordecai had become accustomed.

“Will there be anything else, Your Gr—”

Mordecai closed the cabin door in the captain's face. Exhaling heavily, he let his head droop and gave his aching neck a useless massage. Then he shuffled over to the tiny window. As he pulled open the shutters, he heard the captain quietly calling out the orders that would see the ship on its way.

Mordecai felt the cool breeze upon his hot face; he watched the starlight play upon the rippling water of the open sea.

Absently lifting his hand to the locket about his neck, he decided he would not think about how he'd just been dragged over the deck rail like a useless cripple. Nor would he think about the nursemaid's haunting assertion that if Queen Persephone had truly discovered the healing pool, the king would yet be alive.

Instead, he'd think about the woman he'd shortly take as his bride. He'd recall how she'd made him feel in those first heady days after he'd found her hiding in the alley pretending to be the intrepid Lady Bothwell—how she'd tantalized him by flaunting her unusual appetites and treating him as a man like any other. He'd remember the sight of her being forced to the floor at his feet and the way her breasts had heaved as she'd struggled and begged—even if it was for the life of the cockroach. He'd savour the memory of how she'd promised him that she'd do
anything
—and he'd indulge himself in imagining that she'd willingly do anything and
more
, once she could be made to see how much the two of them actually had in common and how great they could be together.

And he'd believe that Queen Persephone had found the healing Pool of Genezing and that the only reason she'd not saved her brother, the king, was that she'd returned to Parthania too late to do so. He'd believe that the royal fool who'd thought to thwart him had thus died in agony, knowing that if he could've clung to this world for just a few days more, the long life of health and happiness he'd ever dreamt of would have been his.

For the sake of his beautiful bride-to-be, Mordecai hoped this last part was true.

For if it was not, not even the gods themselves would be able to save her from his wrath.

TEN

A
FTER SEVEN DAYS
on stormy seas, the ship on which Persephone was sailing finally dropped anchor in a deserted cove.

Flinging open the door of the small cabin in which she'd been imprisoned, Hairy ordered Persephone to follow him. When she refused to comply until he told her where they were going, he shoved her face first onto the bunk and sat on her while he bound her flailing hands and kicking feet. Then, ignoring her threats and insults, he carried her up the steep stairs to the ship's deck, tied a rope around her and lowered her down to Tutor's waiting arms. By the time Tutor had gotten her safely stowed in the bow of the small rowboat, Hairy had made his way down the slippery rope ladder that hung from the ship's rail. Throwing off the rope that tethered the rowboat to the ship, he seized the oars and rowed through the choppy water until they slid up onto a sandy beach. Tutor immediately reached for Persephone, and when she tried to bite his hand, he slapped her hard across the side of the head.

“You shall pay dearly for that someday,” she vowed in a voice that she hoped was dripping with menace.

In response, Tutor dragged her out of the rowboat by the scruff of her neck and—whistling cheerfully—hauled her over to a waiting carriage. Dumping her onto the bare floor, he slammed the door, consigning Persephone to the gloom. She felt the carriage lean sharply to the side as the two New Men climbed up onto the driver's seat and then, with the crack of a whip, they were off.

The road along which they travelled was so badly rutted that Persephone had to clench her teeth to keep them from rattling. It wasn't long before, company notwithstanding, she longed for the moment they'd stop for the night. They didn't stop for the night, however, but travelled onward through the gathering darkness and the ever-deepening chill. Cold, hungry, thirsty, fearful of what Mordecai had planned for her and haunted by the lonely sound of the wind that never stopped blowing, Persephone slept fitfully. Sometimes she dreamt. Mostly these were nightmares—fleeting images of a tiny blue baby lying discarded on a dirty tabletop with its translucent hands clutching its raggedly cut umbilical cord, or flashes of auburn curls sodden with blood and blue eyes that stared unseeing at the screaming black carrion birds that circled overhead.

Once, though, she dreamt that Azriel was not dead but as alive as he could be and lying on his side right behind her. The dream was so real that Persephone could feel the weight of his strong arm holding her close against his broad chest, could feel his warm breath tickling the
back of her neck. With a soft sigh, she felt the tension and apprehension begin to leech out of her, felt herself responding to his nearness.