ICO: Castle in the Mist (41 page)

Ico steadied his breath, senses alert, but the only thing he noticed was a white mist drifting through the room. Ico breathed a quick sigh of relief and turned to see Yorda standing at the entrance by the strangely adorned archway, slowly shaking her head.

“What is it?”

Ico walked closer to her and noticed she was crying.

“This is the queen’s chamber, isn’t it?”

Yorda nodded, her head hanging.

“Was this her only chamber? Is this where she managed the affairs of the castle? Where else might she be hiding?”

In response to the barrage of questions, Yorda lifted her face and walked briskly past Ico’s side to the throne. She was almost running as she clambered up onto the dais, straining with the effort.

What’s she doing?
“Is something there?”

The rubble behind the throne seemed like an easier route to the top of the dais, but by the time Ico announced he was coming, Yorda had already finished the climb and was standing next to the throne. A teardrop sparkled on her chin.

Gingerly, Yorda touched one of the armrests. To Ico, she looked like a hunter maiden, reaching out to touch the fur of a sleeping savage beast, not wanting to wake it and yet overcome with curiosity.
Stop,
he thought instinctively.
Let sleeping dogs lie.

Holding her breath like a swimmer about to plunge into the water, Yorda slid onto the throne. She brought her slender legs together and rested her arms at her sides.

“Wait,” Ico said through the thickening mist. “Was this your throne?”

He looked around. The mist was streaming into the room now, making it a sea of white fog so thick it was hard for him to see as far as the throne.

Ico walked quickly up to the dais, waving his hand to sweep away the mist. He felt like he was swimming.
Is this the queen’s doing?

“Yorda!” he called out, but there was no reply.

The figure on the throne was no longer Yorda.

In his surprise, Ico jumped back and let the point of the sword drop down to the stones with a loud clang.

On the throne was seated a female corpse wrapped in black robes, a black veil over her face. Her slender body was tilted, leaning up against one of the armrests, one arm dangling over the edge so far the withered fingertips almost touched the floor.

He could see the corpse’s face through the flowing veil, the strong line of the nose, and the tightly closed, bloodless lips.

Ico blinked.
It’s the queen,
he realized.

Next to the throne, he saw two tall figures standing side by side, facing away from him—one with horns clearly visible through the flowing mist.

Ozuma!

He held a sword that glowed with the blessing of the Book of Light.

“Behold, the queen of the castle,” a low voice echoed in Ico’s mind. He listened, his feet rooted to the floor. “She is our greatest enemy, herald of darkness, child of the Dark God himself.”

Is that Ozuma’s voice?
Ico wondered.
Who is he talking to?

Now the other figure stepped off to the side, showing his face in profile. He wore a slender golden crown upon his head, an elegant doublet, and a battle cloak trimmed with leather. In his hand, he gripped a crystal scepter of the sort that priests from the capital used during ceremonies.

It was the priest-king of the Holy Zagrenda-Sol Empire.

“It is she,” said the trembling voice of a young girl from somewhere in the mist. “These are my mother’s remains. This is the queen of the castle.”

The priest-king hung his head and closed his eyes for a moment before looking up again. “The body is cold. She must have taken her own life and the lives of her ministers when she realized she could not stand against the power of the Book of Light.” The priest-king lifted his crystal staff and turned toward Ozuma. “Hers was a foolish, pitiful life. Now, Ozuma, end it. The battle has been won.”

“As you say, Your Excellency,” Ozuma said quietly, his eyes fixed on the queen’s remains.

The two men took a step away from the throne, and Ozuma raised his sword, his chain-mail vest creaking with the movement.

“The queen is finished!” the priest-king declared as Ozuma’s sword swung down through the air. There was a flash of brilliant light, and a moment later, the head of the corpse sitting upon the throne separated from the neck and fell to the floor, trailing the long black veil behind it.

“This castle has been purified in the name of Sol Raveh.”

The priest-king made a gesture in praise of the Sun God, lifted his scepter high, and looked up toward the heavens. The white mist swirled upward, concealing his form. Thick and deep, it swallowed Ico whole—

Yorda had witnessed it all. The head dropping from the queen’s body. The corpse upon the throne. Ozuma and the priest-king returning to the castle to declare the end of her mother’s reign.

There was a loud thud, and Ico jumped back as though he had been slapped across the cheek. He blinked. The white mist was gone, vanished, or perhaps it had never been there at all.

Yorda had slipped from the throne and was lying on her side at its foot. Ico ran up to the dais, leaping to the top in a single bound. “Yorda!” Reaching down, he lifted her shoulders off the floor.

Yorda’s eyes were closed tightly. Even still, tears ran from beneath her eyelids, streaking down her cheek. Ico tapped the side of her face, stroked her hair, and gently shook her. “Wake up. Wake up!”

Yorda’s eyes opened. They were swimming with tears.

“I’m so sorry,” Ico said. “I didn’t know she was dead. I didn’t know Ozuma killed the queen.”

Yorda’s face was blank, her eyes unfocused. Ico was not even sure if she knew he was there.

“It’s all right, it’s all right,” he whispered.

Gradually, strength returned to Yorda’s body and she gripped his hand. Ico gripped back. Yorda sat up on the floor, but her eyes were still distant.

Suddenly, Ico felt cold. A chill emanated from Yorda’s body as he held her in his arms, as though she were a pitcher that had just been filled with ice water. He had the sensation that something else was inside the girl, pushing aside the Yorda he knew.

Her head turned, and she looked at him, her eyes sharp like a hawk focusing on its prey.

“If the queen has died, then how can she be here now?” Yorda asked, her lips like flower petals in spring, the space between them forming an ugly scar.

The voice was wrong.
This isn’t Yorda.

“How is it that I still rule this castle, when the sword took off my head?”

Ico recoiled, but Yorda moved quicker, arms wrapping around his head and chest, holding him tight. Their faces came close, until he could feel her breath against his cheek. Their eyes met. Not Yorda’s eyes, but the queen’s. Bottomless pools of darkness, black as the abyss.

“Tell me, young Sacrifice. How am I here?”

The queen’s cruel smile spread across Yorda’s face, but Ico saw nothing but those dark eyes staring into his.

[5]

ICO TRIED TO
think, but his mind had lost its moorings, and he couldn’t seem to hold on to any thought for long.

“No answer, Sacrifice?” Yorda’s delicate lips spat out the cold words. “Then I’ll tell you: I am everywhere. I can do anything. The Castle in the Mist is me, and I am the castle.”

Even while Yorda’s body spoke with the voice of the queen, he could still see the true Yorda deep within the pools of her eyes. But her back was turned to him, and she was drawing away, sinking deeper inside.

“You’re the castle?” Ico asked, struggling for breath. The queen tightened her grip on him, squeezing out the air. He felt his ribs about to crack.

That meant that all of the madness, all of the killing that had come when the enchantment fell had been happening inside the queen. She had enveloped the slaughter within herself, absorbing the screams and the bloodshed—all of it.

She loosened one arm from around Ico’s shoulders, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and raised his head up till they were eye to eye. The true Yorda was nowhere to be seen. There was nothing but void, dark emptiness swirling with madness and the sparks of wild laughter.

“Tell me, Sacrifice,” the queen said in a voice like honey, “did you really think that the child of the Dark God could be defeated by a mere inconvenience to her mortal body?”

“But you couldn’t face the power of the Book of Light!” Ico said through clenched teeth. “Yorda drove you back with the book! She broke your enchantment!”

“Indeed she did,” the queen said, a smile spreading across her face. “But I was not defeated. The only thing I lost when my enchantment was broken was my human form. Just a mask. By destroying my enchantment, Yorda freed me to become what I was destined to be! And the Book of Light? Why should I fear that? No paltry scrap of ancient spell can hope to defy me!”

The book didn’t rob her of her strength. Her strength grew!

If the queen was the castle, then no matter how great an army marched through her gates, they would be nothing more than ants in the palm of her hand.

“But wait,” Ico said, “if you weren’t here anymore…then who was beheaded on the throne?”

The queen laughed low, until Yorda’s body shook with her deep, rolling mirth. “Men are weak and easily deceived. They see only what they want to see. And if the phantasm before them takes the shape of their hearts’ desire, they believe it all the more. Not even a priest-king is immune.”

Ico’s mouth opened. “The chief handmaiden...”

The queen raised an eyebrow—Yorda’s eyebrow—and drew Ico’s face closer, so that their noses were practically touching. Her breath frosted on his skin. “Very clever, Sacrifice. But what difference?”

But the difference was everything. It meant that there was one person who would have realized the truth. When she stood there, looking down at the woman draped in black on the throne, one person would have known:
That is not my mother. That is not the queen. That is my pitiful handmaiden, now just a corpse who still trembles in fear of my mother’s power.

Yorda.

Ico knew from the vision he had seen by the throne that Yorda had been there when they found the body. She had seen everything.

She lied to them.

Ozuma and the priest-king had believed her, of course. Everyone else in the castle was dead. The queen’s fell presence had dissipated. There was no reason to doubt Yorda’s words. Had she not previously betrayed her mother, helping Ozuma steal the Book of Light in order to drive her away?

No one could have imagined that, even as the sword bit into a woman’s neck, Yorda was protecting her mother.

The queen laughed merrily, and it seemed to Ico that Yorda’s body was no longer hers at all, but the queen’s possession entirely. Ico trembled in the queen’s arms.

She laughed one last time, a high, derisive laugh, and then flung Ico away like a child throws away a toy. Ico flew through the air, landing on his back on the stones near the throne. His head smacked against the floor, sending sparks dancing behind his eyelids. He couldn’t move.

Yorda stood slowly and walked over to Ico’s side. Ico looked up at her, his eyes watering with tears. They were not for the pain, they were for Yorda.

Ico moaned. He could taste blood in his mouth. “You’re horrible. How could you make Yorda do that? She’s your daughter!”

“You poor thing. It is precisely because she is my daughter and I her mother that the bonds of affection between us are so strong. We protect each other, she and I.”

“Liar!”

The queen leaned down and grabbed Ico by the collar. She tossed him across the room again. This time he landed below the throne. Despite the pain, Ico looked up. “What lies did you tell Yorda?” he shouted. “How did you deceive her?”

“I’ve already told you,” the queen said. “There was no deception. Do you not recognize the love between mother and daughter when you see it? Why should it be strange for a daughter to want to save her mother’s life? Why would she need another reason?”

Yorda slid down the side of the throne platform and walked again toward Ico. She moved differently now. This was not the Yorda he had led through the castle by the hand, the Yorda who would wander aimlessly if he did not call out to her. This was the queen’s double, her puppet.

The realization led to another.
What if Yorda hadn’t deceived Ozuma and the priest-king of her own will?
The queen could have been controlling her the very moment she stood by the throne, looking down at the body of the handmaiden. Her own self could have been locked away inside her body, held in thrall to her mother’s wishes, just as it was now.

Fresh tears ran down Ico’s face. His back ached, his arms were numb. He couldn’t even reach up to wipe his eyes. Ico lay facedown, crying.

Yorda had been weak, an easy target for her mother’s spell—because she was the queen’s daughter, and she loved her mother.

At last Ico realized why Yorda had struck her own chest and insisted that everything had been her fault. Even though she could have had no way of knowing what suffering her actions would cause over the years in the dark castle, where shadows walked alone, she blamed herself for it all. The shades blamed her too.

“Why the tears?” the queen asked. “For whom do you cry?”

Ico shook his head for an answer. Getting his arms beneath him, he managed to lift himself off the floor. Sitting up now, he turned his tear-streaked face to look at the queen. “I don’t know my real mother,” he said. “My parents were taken from me after I was born. It’s part of the custom when you’re the Sacrifice.”

The queen stared at him. The glow given Yorda’s body by the Book of Light still shone, dim and low like a sickly firefly, as waves of darkness flowed from the queen’s heart into her veins.

“But I was never lonely. My foster parents took care of me. They were always there for me. They looked after me.”

An image of his mother rose in his mind. With a gentle hand, she reached out to rub his cheek, comb his hair, and put him to bed at night. She may not have given birth to him, but she nurtured his life. And she loved him.