In the Time of Dragon Moon (28 page)

“Oh.” I backed up. “Yes. I see. I'll return in the morning, then.” He winked at me before I left.

A smile leaped to my face as I hurried through the torchlit halls, greedy for a night alone in my own chamber, a full night of uninterrupted sleep. The Crow's Nest smelled faintly of huzana leaves. I lit the fire in the hearth, a luxury I rarely allowed myself, and sat cross-legged on the floor. The king and queen could be creating a new life even now. A child. An heir. Thank the Holy Ones I'd prepared a jar full of virility powder before my medicines were stolen, and given it to King Arden. I'd mixed the remedy all at once partly to avoid the work of grinding more leaves, partly to skip the embarrassment to both of us each time he had to renew his request. I slipped off my shoes and warmed my toes before the fire. Tonight, at least, I would let myself hope. I was too tired to do much else.

I draped the woolly Euit blanket over my shoulders, pressing my cheek against the owl woven in the corner. The blanket was barely big enough for two. Jackrun and I had had to lie very close together to soak in its warmth the night he confessed what he'd done to his sister, the night I admitted how I'd sabotaged Urette, the night he called me Adan for the first time.

“Jackrun,” I whispered into the woolly owl's ear. “When will you come home?”

My fingers found a hardened spot. I looked closer. Dried blood. I did not know it was a sign of things to come. I folded it over, hiding the red stain.

Pendragon Castle

Dragon Moon

October 1210

T
HE
NEXT
MORNING
, I set the queen's elixir on the side table a moment, tossed a handful of breadcrumbs to her songbirds, and watched them flutter down in a riot of bright colors. “There is plenty for you all,” I said through the cage, but they did not think so. I left them squabbling amongst themselves.

The sentry in the presence chamber on the second floor leaned on his pike at the base of Queen Adela's private stair.

“Is Her Majesty alone?”

He nodded. I climbed the stairs to the bedchamber, stepped inside, and shut the door. Her Majesty sat with her back to me in her rumpled sleeping gown. The room was in shambles. Gowns and small clothes hung half across the chairs or lay on the floor by the smoking fire. The queen's four-poster canopy bed was mounded with covers; tangled sheets lay in the corner on the floor.

Her Majesty mumbled something and I stepped a little closer.

“Witches,” she hissed, holding her glass eyeball in her open hand. “I had to be a virgin, you see. Satan's sacrifice.” She looked up at me. The empty eye socket on the left side of her face was wrinkled as a wasps' nest.

Her voice changed to a growl. “See the curse?” She aimed the glass eye at the corner, showing it the tangled sheets. “My husband abandons me.”

The news struck me dumb. What happened last night? Did the king do his duty? Or did they only fight, ravage the room between them? I had to know, but how could I ask her when she was raving?

She moved her hand, aiming her glass eye at me. “Who is the witch?” she asked, tipping her head, her voice seesawing from harsh to musical as if she were speaking to a young child. “We know she joins her coven in secret places. We know she tortures innocents.”

She'd never called me a witch before, but then, I wasn't sure she was even speaking to me. I blinked back disappointed tears. Only last night I thought the bapeeta was healing her madness at last.

Sick inside, I picked up the dirty sheets as she chattered on. “See the witch?” she asked the eyeball in her palm. “She's a woman with a devil's heart.”

I called to the sentry down below. When the chambermaid ran up, I met her on the landing. “Take these sheets away. Bring me clean linen and get a breakfast tray up here for Her Majesty, now!”

Green-faced, she darted back downstairs. I bolted the door, took up the golden ewer, and filled the washbasin. The queen had placed her eyeball on her vanity and was pulling the gray strands from her brown hair. “An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. Silver hair, where is your youth? Gone, gone,” she sighed, pulling more gray.

“I will clean this for you, Your Majesty, shall I?” I dipped the eye in the basin.
Queen Adela owes us for her glass eye. If we had left her marred, she would have never wed King Arden. Remind her of it.

King Onadon expected me to speak to someone in her right mind, not this queen. Not as she was now. She hummed her strange tune behind me.

When the fey eye was rinsed clean, I approached her vanity table. “Here, Your Majesty, if you tip back your head a little.” Opening the upper and lower lid, I gently slipped the glass eyeball back inside the socket. She blinked a little. Stood unsteadily, then sat again. I grabbed a brush and ran it gently through her hair. A few gray strands still silvered the long, dark tresses. She peered at her reflection; her eyes in the glass were blue as hyacinths. Both seemed lost as desert oases within her vacant face.

There was a furtive tapping at the door. I took the clean sheets and breakfast tray from the chambermaid on the landing, bolted the door again, and encouraged the queen to eat while I made the bed. Once again I'd have to keep vigil. No one could be allowed in her room until my treatments dispelled her delusions.

She had eaten some of her pudding and drank her elixir. She'd need a stronger dose of bapeeta. I hated to leave her even for a moment when she was this way, but I'd have to run to the Crow's Nest for it. “I will be right back, Your Highness.”

The sentry watched as I came down the stairs. “The queen is unwell today,” I said. “She must have complete rest. I will attend to all her needs. Do not let anyone other than me inside.”

In the tower, I shut the herbarium door and leaned against it. The Adan should be slow to prepare medicines, paying close attention to each detail. But in the past week I'd felt the queen's lunacy seeping into my work. My breath was unsteady, my hands damp with sweat as I scraped bapeeta powder from the undersides of the leaves. Father had used bapeeta on the old people back home so long ago, I could not remember the traditional Euit chant for the herb. Was that why its powers had failed? Or was it the poor decisions I'd made regarding how much I should use?

Father hadn't had time to teach me more about bapeeta before he died. What secrets had died with him? I leaned against the table and cursed the thief who'd stolen my remedies, and worst of all, the book Father had put his life's knowledge into.

I had nothing and no one to guide me here.

I was alone.

I found Queen Adela conversing with her reflection when I returned. “Why did he shout at me?” she said. “What have I done? Why won't he love me?” She wept into her hands.

“Your Majesty?”
Did he
sleep with you before you argued? Did you come together as man and wife last night?
Questions fought to climb out of my mouth.

She raised her head as I approached with the silver platter. I'd made a decision to follow my own way, mixing the bapeeta powder in the sweetmeats as I'd done in the past, two for now, two for later—the last two hidden in my waist pouch. This way I could give her what she needed without running off to the herbarium to mix another dose. The queen ate one. By the time she consumed the second and licked her fingers, her mood began to soften. She called me Uma again, put out her hand for me to kiss her ring, and did not call me witch.

I ordered a bath set up next door in her changing room. When it was ready, I sent the woman out, and brought the queen in myself. Helping her out of her robes and into the copper tub, I sprinkled the water with the sweet herbs, and gently washed her body and her long, dark hair. She hummed as I poured the water through her tresses. I dried her off and took her in her robe back to the larger bedchamber, where I built up a blazing fire so I could brush out her damp hair by the hearth.

As the day passed I fed her when she was willing to eat. Her mind seemed far away, like a ship adrift in some dark sea. I cared for her body as her mind lost its mooring, hoping I could do something to bring her back. She looked at me and took my hand.

“I'm afraid,” she whispered, part of her knowing how lost she was.

I put my arms around her. “I won't leave you. I'll stay with you.”

I rocked her as she cried. Her tears melted me. What could I do for her? How could I help her? She needed so much more than Father's rules, so much more than herbs. But there was nothing in his treatment store for this.

Mother had been a midwife, a healer. Women bathe the sick, rub sore muscles, offer food, and sing pleasant songs. My father would never do such things. I had to walk far beyond what my father the Adan would have done to ease the queen's suffering. In the passing hours, I mined stores I'd buried deep inside myself, a woman's knowledge I did not even know I had. I sang to her, rubbed her back, fed her, moved her from place to place to make her more comfortable.

Slowly the raging winds within her calmed.

At dusk a storm battered the windows with hail, as if Adela sent her tempest through the window to the greater world outside. We were both exhausted from the long day. At last she lay down on her bed in her clean gown, her hair neatly plaited.

Putting the rushlight by Adela's bed, I sang her an English lullaby my mother used to sing, half remembering the words.
Poppies and roses in her hair. She is queen of the May. Oh sing to her gladly and never sing sadly, she is the light of our day
. . . . I could not remember the rest, though I knew it named more flowers; there was lavender and mallow in one part. I sang the same verse over and over until I grew tired of it and made up a new verse with songbirds in it. Adela smiled with her eyes closed, her head on the silk pillow. She loved birds.

• • •

W
HEN
IT
WAS
very late and she fell asleep at last, I stayed by her bed, listening to her breath go in and out. My fingers smelled of potions and the scent of all my father's dreams and mine gone to ruin.

I would sleep in the trundle bed again tonight. I would keep treating her, keep trying to help her find her mind and have the child she needed, but would it be enough? Even now high above the storm clouds, Dragon Moon waxed toward fullness.

Pendragon Castle

Dragon Moon

October 1210

I
HURRIED
DOWN
the halls to the aviary on the first floor of the queen's tower, her morning elixir sloshing in its chalice. The birds flew wildly about as I rushed in, disturbed as if I were hurling gravel at them.

“What's all the fuss? It's only me. You know me well.” I would have turned for the stairs then if I hadn't seen movement through the ground-floor window. A man had just ridden into the muddy foreyard on a black charger. I pressed my face to the lattice, squinting through the glass.
Jackrun
. He turned his horse for the stables. My breath went out of me.

I had to grip the ironwork to keep my feet in place. I'd left the queen sleeping in her bed to make her brew and I'd already been gone too long. I didn't want her to wake up alone.
Soon,
I promised myself.
When Her Majesty's had her elixir and eaten a little breakfast.

The moment I entered the second-floor presence chamber, I knew something was wrong. The sentry had deserted his post. I'd told him to guard her when I left, to let no one but me upstairs. Where was he? A deep moan drifted down the dark stairwell. Not the queen's voice, a man's. My heart dropped to my feet. Leaving the curative on the table, I crept upstairs and pressed myself against the landing, well out of sight.

I could not look directly into the room from my hiding place. But I saw the image of the small crowd reflected in the queen's vanity mirror. The king was kneeling at his wife's bed. Weeping. Two guards flanked His Majesty. The woman praying at his side tucked a dark strand of hair under her veil. One of the guards stepped to the right. What I saw in the glass sent a pike through me. Queen Adela's face was a ghastly shade of green. Her head was thrown back from the convulsions she'd had as she died, her swollen purple tongue protruded from her mouth. Vomit ran down the side of her cheek. I made no sound on the landing as the bile washed up my throat. Adela. I'd only just left her. I'd only just . . . The floor swayed underfoot. I leaned against the wall, trying not to faint.

“Looks like someone poisoned her sweetmeat,” said one of the guards.

“Why weren't you with her?” King Arden demanded to the lady kneeling at his side.

“I have had a fever, Your Majesty. Uma warned me to stay away from the queen.” Her back was to the mirror, but I knew Lady Olivia's voice.

“Who else was . . . up here?” the king asked with a shudder.

“Just the queen's physician,” said the guard. “She said not to let anyone see her. I let no one else up the stairs but her, sire, I swear it. I only came up myself when I heard a strangled sound after Uma left, and I found the queen like . . . this.”

“Queen's physician must have done it, then,” said the second man.

No!
I screamed in my head. I ran down the stairs. Before I reached the bottom, I heard the king shouting, “Find her. Arrest her!”

I was out the door, racing through the long passage, the guards' distant footfall sounding loud as a cavalcade behind me. I skidded around a corner, running straight into a courtier, who took me by the shoulders and peered at my face.

“Queen's physician, what's your hurry?” he demanded.

I pulled away from him, ran again. My head pounded. If I could slow down, calm myself a moment, use the
havuela
chant to blend in, but I was too terrified. I couldn't think, couldn't stop running. My feet took me outside.

The guards shouted “Stop her!” as I raced for the stable.

“Jackrun!”

He came out, blinking in the morning sunlight, saw the men chasing me and drew his weapon.

“Get behind me, Uma.” He raised his sword at the king's men. “Stay back!”

The blacksmith came out of the forge with the weapons master; others emerged from the kennels. The yard was filling up with those who were suddenly my enemies.

“Out of the way, Jackrun, the woman's wanted for murder!”

“Don't come near her or you'll feel the point of my sword.” Jackrun backed us toward the stable. I drew my knife and moved in unison with him, guessing we were going for his horse.

“We don't want to fight the king's nephew,” one man said. We were nearly to the stable door.

“Turn her over, Jackrun. We're to take her by King Arden's order.”

“Who accuses the queen's physician of murder?” Jackrun said, waving his sword as one man got too close. “Who died?”

“The queen is dead.”

I heard Jackrun's quick intake of breath. Men reeled with the news.

“God have mercy,” cried the blacksmith.

“Heaven help us!”

“Grab her!” called the weapons master, marching toward us.

“I didn't kill her,” I called to them from behind Jackrun. “I would never harm Her Majesty.”

“I believe her,” Jackrun said, inching us under the lintel. “This woman is the queen's physician. She was appointed by the queen herself. No man among you will touch her while I'm alive.”

Someone grabbed me from behind. Jackrun rounded on the head groom the moment I screamed. Already the groom had thrown a harness over me and held a hammer to my head. I tried to wriggle free, used my knife to slice the leather. He knocked the knife from my hand and threw a muscled arm around my throat.

“Now then,” he said, “let's do this rightly.”

“Let her go, Horace,” Jackrun said, putting his sword to the man's throat. “You're a good fellow, but bring that hammer down and I'll have to cut your throat. Uma's riding out with me. Boy!” he added, calling to a stable lad watching the action from one of the mounting blocks. “Saddle my horse. There's half a crown in it for you.” The boy hopped down and grabbed a saddle.

“Ready that horse and you're out on your ear,” Horace the master groom shouted.

Outside, I heard someone calling “Raise the drawbridge.” Jackrun heard it too and urged the stable boy to hurry.

More men had flooded in, swords all drawn at Jackrun. One sliced Jackrun's left shoulder, drawing blood. Jackrun didn't move from his spot, his eyes moving between me and Horace and the stable boy. He kept his sword point at Horace's throat. “You'll let her go and she will mount my horse now.”

I felt the master groom shifting on his feet, smelled his fearful sweat under Jackrun's blade. With a grunt he let me go and slowly backed away, his hammer still in the air. I threw the halter off my head and mounted the black charger. Jackrun tried to climb on after me, fighting the men off at the same time. He was halfway up. I was reaching for him when the king's men dragged him off. He slapped the charger's rear, sending him bolting out of the crowded stable, shouting “Ride Uma!” He'd made it out of the stable, clashing swords with the men as I looked back. I circled around for him, but the charger reared at the battling crowd. “Go, Uma!” Jackrun screamed as he fought. The charger understood even if I refused to leave him. He turned, galloping for the drawbridge and had to pull away again before smashing against the solid wood. The drawbridge was up.

• • •

W
E
WERE
MARCHED
back inside to the king's throne room. His Majesty's face was still white from shock. His hands shook on his armrests. A few favored councilmen stood near the throne along with the castle priest. None stepped near Queen Adela's empty throne. I swallowed another wash of sickness down as Jackrun and I were forced onto our knees on the square of red carpet at the base of the dais.

“The murderess, sire,” the chief guard announced. “Your nephew fought us out in the yard and tried to help the Euit woman escape.”

“Rise,” the king said. “And face me.”

King Arden did not look at me. “You dared cross my men, Jackrun? Didn't they tell you that this . . . this devil killed my wife?”

“They told me, sire. I didn't believe them. Someone else committed this terrible crime. Uma would never—”

“No one else went in or out of my wife's bedchamber this morning, Jackrun,” roared the king. He wiped his brow with a shaking hand. The throne room was hushed.

I looked at the many faces turned on me with anger, terrified to speak, terrified not to. “Your Majesty,” I said, curtsying, head bowed. “I did not poison her. Someone must have—”

“So you know she was poisoned! How would you know that? Did anyone in my guard say she died of poison?” he barked.

“We said the queen was dead, sire, that's all.”

“I . . . saw!” I cried out. “I came up the stairs and saw you kneeling by her bed. I saw what had happened. Then I ran. I didn't—”

The king snapped his fingers and a guard clamped his hand over my mouth.

“Jackrun, if you continue to side with this murderess, you are no nephew of mine. Step away from her.”

“You're wrong about her, sire. I won't step away.”

A shiver of anger passed through the king's body. The councilmen and priest leaned forward, ready to help him as he stood slowly to his feet, pointing a finger at Jackrun. “Lock him in the tower.” Three men dragged Jackrun from my side.

“And that . . . that,” King Arden said to the guard whose hand was planted on my mouth. “Throw that devil in the dungeon.”

• • •

I
WAS
LEFT
alone in my small stinking cell for hours. At nightfall they hauled me to the torture chamber. The large cell smelled of sweat and blood and fear. Would they burn me with the pokers leaning by a lit brazier, hang me from one of the many ceiling hooks, stretch me on the rack, force me into the chair with hundreds of three-inch nails poking from the seat and from the back?

The jailer stepped in rubbing his hands together. “King said to rack her, men.”

“Please, I didn't do it. I didn't kill her!” The innocent spit boy confessed when they stretched him on the rack. I was terrified I'd do the same.

I struggled, but of course they were too strong for me. The jailer gave me a brown-toothed smile as the men manacled my wrists and ankles. “We'll stretch a confession out of you soon enough, Euit devil.” His eyes shone with excitement. I hadn't screamed or cried when he'd whipped me in front of Prince Desmond. The man seemed to be looking forward to some real entertainment now.

“Crank her,” he said, stepping back and resting his hand atop the nailed chair. Men at the top turned the handles of the roller bars. The first few cranks didn't hurt too much, but the pain increased as the rope attached to the manacles pulled my arms and legs tighter and tighter.

Another crank tore a moan from my mouth. I broke into a sweat. “Holy Ones, help me!”

“Holy Ones,” said the jailer. “Who are they?”

I focused on the ceiling, trying to see beyond the heavy hooks. I knew just outside Pendragon Castle, Dragon Moon looked down on us, surrounded by sparkling stars, but I could not feel the light as the intense ripping pain shot down my arms and up my legs. “Stop! Please!”

“Are you ready to confess?” asked the jailer.

Yes. Anything to stop the pain.
“No! I didn't harm the queen!”

“Again,” he said.

The cuffs bit into my ankles and wrists. Wrenching pain stabbed my shoulders, the sleeves ripped under my arms. Cracking sounds came from my spine. I clenched my mouth. Screamed into my teeth.

“Ah! That's it now,” said the jailer, pleased.

Sobs came up my throat. They would wrench my arms from my sockets. “Have mercy!”

“Confess?”

I screamed, felt myself breaking till there was an explosion of light behind my eyes. Sunburst. Agony.

“Stop before you kill her. The king wants her kept in one piece so he can watch her burn.”

White-hot fire. Searing pain. Darkness.

• • •

I
AWOKE
CURLED
up on the floor in my cell, every joint in my body throbbing with excruciating pain. I buried my face in the rushes, moaning. The rushes smelled like my herbing basket. The memory of Mother singing as she wove it came to me. For a moment she was in the cell.
Poppies and roses in her hair
. I could almost see her, almost hear her song. I tried to breathe, sobbed. My wrists throbbed, my shoulders, my ankles, my hips. The stabbing pains were as deep as if someone were attacking me with icy knives.

Move your arms.

I can't. Poppies and roses in her hair. She is queen of the May. Oh sing to her gladly and never sing sadly, she is the light of our day.
The song faded and I was lost in dark again.