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Authors: Katya Reimann

Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles (22 page)

BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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“I don’t need to talk to you about these things,” Gaultry said hotly. “I need to talk to my sister.”
“To me?”
Gaultry swung to the door, tremendously relieved, but what she saw there wiped the smile from her face, replacing it with uncertainty. Yes, it was Mervion who stood at the door, but she was not alone. By her side was a short, birdlike wren of a woman, wizened, with powerful hands and intense dark eyes. “Tamsanne!” Gaultry had not known that her grandmother had arrived in the capital—certainly Benet had not told her. A belated wariness overtook her. Why had the Prince not mentioned Tamsanne’s arrival?
She wanted to throw herself into Mervion’s arms, but with Tamsanne present as well as Coyal, she hesitated. Should she make introductions? No, she could see from the way Tamsanne nodded to Coyal as she entered the room that the two had already met.
Tamsanne offered Gaultry a dry cheek to kiss. This, at least, was familiar. Despite her strong love for her granddaughters, the old woman was seldom physically affectionate.
Gaultry paused. She wanted very much to kiss her grandmother’s cheek, but so much had passed since they had last seen each other. “Grandmother,” she said hesitantly. That, not least, was a part of her hesitation. The last time she had seen Tamsanne, she had believed that the old woman—her sole guardian and Mervion’s, through all their childhood—was only her great-aunt. Tamsanne had concealed so much, trying to protect them from the dangling sword of the Brood-heritage.
Tamsanne, hesitating in her turn, took Gaultry’s hands in her own. Her eyes flickered to Coyal, as if reminding Gaultry that they were not alone. “My beautiful granddaughter.” Her strong fingers clasped Gaultry’s hands, a little hungrily. “You have grown and gained in every way since I last laid eyes upon you.”
Gaultry kissed her warmly, wishing Coyal would sink into the floor. She had so many questions—not all of them pleasant.
“Gaultry. We heard that you had arrived. We were wondering when you would make your appearance.” Mervion came forward and gave her a light hug. She smelled smoky and aromatic, as if she had just come from attending a fire. Gaultry hugged her back, burying her face for a moment in her sister’s hair. They were exactly of a height, the hug close enough that Gaultry could feel the accelerated pounding of her sister’s heart. Had Mervion been as nervous of this meeting as herself? Of course. When her sister had vested half her Glamour-soul in Tullier, she must have imagined the gift would only be temporary. She could never have imagined that Gaultry would take him and run off to Bissanty for nigh on six weeks.
What had it been like to wait in court, through the waxing and the waning of the past moons, wondering if Gaultry would even realize the sacrifice she had made?
“I—I came as soon as I’d cleared the dust of the road,” Gaultry said. “Tullier—the Sha Muira boy—is with me.” She loosed her sister and looked fiercely into her eyes, willing Mervion to understand the depths of her feelings, her regrets. “I know that you and he have unfinished business.”
From the relief that passed across Mervion’s features, Gaultry could tell that at least some of her message had made it through to her.
“I know you were not sure whether it was right that we should save him,” Gaultry continued awkwardly. She glanced again at Coyal, wondering how deeply Mervion had taken him into her confidence. She herself certainly wasn’t ready to trust him with Tullier’s secrets, let alone her own. But what to say to Mervion, here, now—Mervion, to whom she owed an explanation? “But Tullier is more important than he first seemed. I’ve just made my report to Benet, and he’s given me—us—his blessing for what we did.” There—that was adequately discreet.
“He did?” Mervion looked surprised, then suspicious. “What exactly did you tell him?”
Gaultry would have given almost anything to have been alone with Mervion then, sharing all that she had been thinking since the day she had discovered what Mervion had risked—the loss of half her magical strength—to keep the young assassin alive. “Everything that was important.” She flushed. She had hardly thought of Mervion throughout that interview, and certainly the idea that she might need to put in a good word for her sister had not passed her mind.
“Did my name even come up?”
Gaultry did not know how to answer. An awkward pause grew between them. Her sister’s cool face hid whatever it was she was thinking. She looked, as always, beautiful and composed. None of the distresses Coyal claimed for her showed on her face. Yet Gaultry, for all she disliked the young knight, could not imagine why he would lie to her. “Mostly Benet spoke to me of the future, not the past.”
Mervion took a step backward. “I have missed you, Gaultry.” The sentiment would have felt sweeter if she had not taken another step away, and reached for Coyal’s hand. “Now that you are here, I’ll move my things, so you will have your privacy.”
“You’re not leaving?” With him, Gaultry wanted to add, but she was shy of saying such a thing in front of Tamsanne.
“You take over a space.” Smiling to lighten the criticism, Mervion stooped behind the forgotten tub, and picked up her crumpled robe, straightening it across her arm. “You will feel better for having more room.”
“Where’s Tamsanne staying? Won’t you all be staying here?” Gaultry turned to the old woman, beseeching. She had imagined that her family would share the same small suite of rooms—just as they had shared Tamsanne’s tiny cottage for so many years, in the borderlands of Arleon Forest.
“I have found a place in the palace grounds that better suits me,” Tamsanne replied. She would have continued, but a light knock at the door interrupted.
“Come in,” said Gaultry unwelcomingly.
It was Martin. The number of people greeted him unprepared. “I see I’ve come at a bad time,” he said, lingering outside. “I’ll come back later.”
“Twins’ blessing on your safe return to Princeport,” Mervion said. “Please do come in. We were just going out ourselves.”
“I’d rather not disturb you. I know how Gaultry has been longing for this reunion. I’m interrupting.”
Everyone was interrupting. Gaultry did not know whether to shout or cry. These people—Coyal excepted—were all the people she most dearly wanted close to her. But privately, not en masse. What she needed to say to each of them, to ask—these were matters that needed to be teased over confidentially before being shared, even with each other.
“I missed you at the concert tonight,” she told Martin.
“My grandmère is very unwell,” he said. “So unwell—I know I should not have disturbed you so late, but it could not wait. You must come to see her.” He glanced uncomfortably at the chamberful of her relations. “First thing in the morning. You must not delay.”
“Does she have something she needs to tell me? Is it about Tullier?”
Martin cast an unfriendly look at Coyal. “No,” he said. “It’s not about the boy. Look, Gaultry, you’re busy, and this is important. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
With that, disappointingly, he was gone. Worse, on his heels Tamsanne and Mervion made their departure, accompanied by the detestable Coyal. She realized then that Mervion and Tamsanne both must share her wish to speak only privately, but could not control the stab of disappointment
at this abandonment. “Mervion,” Gaultry whispered in her sister’s ear, giving her a final hug before Coyal reclaimed her. “You must come and meet with Tullier and me privately. As soon as possible. Tomorrow, no later. Can you slip away and find us at Martin’s townhouse?”
“So soon? It will be hard to arrange. In the evening?”
That would get Mervion there after the Prince’s visit. Gaultry shook her head. “Earlier? I have an appointment at sundown. And I want …” She wanted Mervion’s Glamour-soul out of the boy and safely back inside Mervion where it was supposed to be, before Tullier had his interview with Benet. “Mervion—Tullier wants you to have what is yours. What could be more important than that?”
An inscrutable look flickered on Mervion’s face. “Earlier then. I will see what I can do.” Turning from her sister, she once again took Coyal’s hand, and went away with him, Tamsanne on her other side, carrying a large cloth bag stuffed with her things.
Gaultry slept restlessly in her own bed, miserable and lonely. Thoughts of Kingship scarcely impinged upon her. She dreamed of her family, of the deep woods in Arleon Forest, of the days she had spent alone with her sister, through long snowy closed-in winters and bright joyous summers.
When she woke, the first thing she thought of was Coyal. Of the way Mervion’s eyes had lit when he had touched her.
Those days of togetherness with her sister were over. A door had been shut between them. She desperately wanted it reopened.
The Melaudieres’ ducal chambers overlooked the sea from the roof
of the manse that flanked the west wall of the palace complex. The enormous suite was a little palace unto itself, built onto the roof of the older building, with its own narrow staircase leading up from north court. Even with one and a half stories taken off the climb by the height of the yard in the north court, Gaultry arrived a little breathless, wondering how the old woman had managed the stairs for so many years. A solemn-faced Martin met her in the antechamber.
“It won’t be long,” he greeted her, exhausted. Daylight revealed stress lines in his face. He almost reached to touch her, then thrust his hands into his pockets, as if touching her right now would be a mistake. “Come in. The vultures are hovering. But she’ll be glad to see you. Gavin should be here,” he blurted. “And Mariette.” Between the Lanai summer wars and the Brood-pledge, Martin’s cousin and his sister were the only other surviving members of the family. “Damn Haute-Tielmark’s border for being so far away. They won’t even know for weeks!” The swift changes in his tone alarmed her, but, even seeing her reaction, he turned away without explaining.
The room beyond was airy, full of astonishing light reflected up from the sea, so far below. The effect was ethereal, oddly illuminating the downturned faces of those crowded within.
Indeed, the room was so crowded that at first Gaultry could not even see the figure on the bed. There were almost as many clerks with papers
as there were nurses and priests. A duchess in illness was not granted privacy.
Someone moved, clearing Gaultry’s view to the bed, and giving her a terrible shock.
She knew at once that she had come too late. The air left her lungs, and for a moment her sight darkened, the force of her reaction was so strong. She had been expecting—she had been expecting the Duchess, lying limp and weak, but offering wisdom and considered words, offering stern yet tender counsel.
But the body that lay before her on the bed would not be issuing any counsel. Not today—or ever again. Gabrielle of Melaudiere was shriveled and small, reduced almost to nothing beneath the sheets. Her color was already gone. A smell struck Gaultry’s nostrils unpleasantly as she moved closer—the appalling smell of a body lost to life, yet not gone from among the living.
Something clenched inside her. When Martin had told her the Duchess was ill, she had not understood. Because he had spoken in front of Coyal, he had inadequately explained—or perhaps he himself had been unready to face the truth.
Gaultry took another step forward, then hesitated. The old woman was surrounded by busy and important-looking people, most of them carefully not looking at the bed and its pitiable contents. If Martin had not been at her side, she certainly would have retreated. In one small mercy, Dervla was not present, though, almost as bad, one of her acolytes was there to fill her place—Palamar Laconte, heir to the warrior-countess Marie Laconte, one of the original brood seven. Gaultry shifted uncomfortably at the sight of Palamar, and nodded an uneasy welcome, which Palamar politely, if uneagerly, returned.
The acolyte was a plump, helpless-looking woman, with protuberant front teeth. It had been Palamar’s sister, and her sister’s sons, whom Tullier’s Sha Muira master had murdered. A wave of guilt by proxy swept her, and Gaultry was relieved when Palamar herself found some excuse to turn away. Gaultry very much did not want to talk to Palamar—she wanted to see Melaudiere.
The great Duchess lay silently, staring at the carved white plaster of the ceiling.
“Go to her,” Martin said hoarsely. “Never mind the others. She asked to see you last night. The verger made her rest. I thought there would be more time, but this morning she can barely speak.”
Gaultry went shakily forward. The serving woman sitting near the Duchess’s head, a bowl of water in her lap, motioned for Gaultry to take the empty stool at her side. With the rag in her hand she gently moistened the old woman’s lips, and, more horribly, the unblinking eyes.
“Lean over her face,” the woman said. “She’ll see you if you lean over.
The old woman’s hand protruded limply from the bedclothes. As she leaned in, Gaultry took that hand gently in her own, terrified by the papery feel of the skin, the brittle delicacy of the bones. “Your Grace,” she said, bending close to the old woman’s face, “I’m here.”
The hand contracted feebly in her own. With a tremendous effort, the head turned a few degrees toward her. Melaudiere’s eyes were like sunken marbles—bright still, and startlingly alive in the pallor of her face. This was not a woman who was ready to be dead.
“Gaul-try,” she managed. But that was all. She was too far gone for more.
“She can hear you,” the serving woman unnecessarily assured her. “She knows you’re here.”
A impracticable, desperate thought rushed to her: She would send a runner to bring the Sharif, and then she would force the desert woman to mind-speak. With the Sharif, the Duchess’s physical weakness, her inability to talk, could be bypassed. Gaultry could get the answers she needed—
As quickly as the idea had come, it receded. The complexities of state were behind the old woman now. Ahead lay only the business of dying, and of trying to manage that well.
She dashed back tears. It was Martin’s place to cry here, not hers. She must do nothing to intensify this woman’s last painful moments, nothing to give her grief. Her mind was a horrible blank as she ran through the many things she had intended to say, to ask. Which of them were worth voicing? Which of them could be said in a crowded room, where undoubtedly there were unfriendly ears listening? What could she say to ease the woman’s passing?
Gaultry glanced down the old woman’s body; what she saw there made the pain in her heart stab clear down to her knees. Martin, taking a stool by his grandmother’s feet, had removed one of the old woman’s bed slippers and was massaging one shriveled foot, as though trying to keep her circulation moving. The expression on his face—she was torn
between retaining her hold of the old woman’s hand, and rushing dramatically to his side to comfort him.
One day I’ll marry your grandson,
she wanted to say. She wanted to shout it, to tell not just the old woman, but the whole room.
When his wife finally lets him go, and he is free to have me.
But Gaultry had little idea if this revelation would make the Duchess glad or angered. For fear of the latter, she would have to hold her peace.
Instead she would try to assure Melaudiere that her life’s efforts would not die with her, and hope that she would be right.
“The Prince asked me to help him follow the red path,” she whispered, her face hovering just above the old woman’s. “I agreed. Julie too. Now—if we can just get everyone else on our side, Gods willing, Benet will be king.”
The Duchess rolled her eyes to look at the serving woman, who took the cue and obediently daubed her cracked lips. The meager body strained beneath the covers, though all that effort was hardly enough to register as a flutter in her hand. “Don’t,” she managed at last, “hurt anyone. Too high, the price—”
“She strained herself last night,” the serving woman said apologetically. Briefly, Gaultry was angered at the interruption; then she realized that Melaudiere had already stopped.
“Who let her do this?” Gaultry said. “Didn’t they know she was ill?”
The woman shook her head. “She would not be stopped. She insisted on finishing the gift.”
Gaultry looked to where the woman pointed. A cluster of men with the Prince’s blue-and-white livery stood by one of the room’s large windows, bending over a cradle. She did not at first understand what she was seeing. The cradle was empty, even of bedclothes.
“Her last work,” the woman said. “She finished it at the midnight hour, when Midsummer was over.”
Gaultry realized then that she was supposed to be looking at the cradle, not the men. The former—as soon as she focused on it, she could see it was the Duchess’s own work, forged with the woman’s fabulous creating magic, her artistry.
Carved from a single piece of burl wood, the exterior was the likeness of a great foaming wave, the bubbles cunningly carved to match the grain of the burl beneath. Silver inlay traced the edges of the bubbles and also the scaly backs of two serpentine fishes that rode the edge of the wave, forming the cradle’s rails. During her past sojourn at the duchess’s grand
mansion, Gaultry had seen works in metal, clay, and glass—all mediums that could be flowed, molded, and mixed with a sorceress’s magic. This piece had been painstakingly carved. Without thinking, Gaultry thumbed the duchess’s lax hand. Even the calluses on the old woman’s hand seemed to have thinned and faded. How had she managed to hold the chisel? The serving woman, reading Gaultry’s thought, shook her head.
“The carving was done months past. It’s the spell she cast into the completed work that finished her.”
“But why?—” Gaultry looked again at the cradle, and its significance became suddenly obvious. She should have seen this the previous night: Princess Lily was pregnant. Newly pregnant. Which was why the heavily expecting court lady attended her—an old custom for luck—why Ronsars had said the Princess was indisposed, and why Lily had patted the curve of her belly as she had spoken of the future.
It also explained, to some degree, why Benet was focusing his vision so determinedly on his own legacy.
She turned back to meet the old Duchess’s eyes. “I understand,” she said, hoping that this was true. “But you don’t need to worry. I’ll protect the child too.” The mounting tears in her throat made it difficult to speak clearly.
With a sudden fierce pulse, the old woman’s fingers tightened in her own, exhorting her without words.
Gaultry kissed the withered cheek and floundered her way out of the room before she completely lost her composure.
I
t was simple bad luck that Gaultry met Dervla as the High Priestess mounted the stairs outside, and simply Dervla’s character that she could not let the young huntress pass unchallenged.
Gaultry was in no fit mood to talk. She had parted painfully from Martin, two minutes alone in a cramped side chamber, both of them with tears streaming uncontrolled down their faces. After that, she was not near ready to carry on conversation. Compared to Dervla, sleek, composed, her silver priestess’s chain looped over carefully brushed robes, she must appear a new-released lunatic inmate.
Unfortunately, her grief was so fresh and strong, the thought that Dervla probably preferred approaching her in this moment of vulnerability went only a little way to helping her pull together.
“She is going quickly, isn’t she?” the High Priestess said, unsparing.
“That is so, your Veneracy,” Gaultry managed. She was a step or so above the older woman, and could not help but use this to position herself to advantage.
“I trust you will support me not to let her dreams of Kingship die with her,” said Dervla, nettled, and coming up another step.
Gaultry glanced up to the open porch outside Melaudiere’s door. This was not a private place, and she was not sure how Benet would want her to answer. “Of course, your Veneracy,” she said apologetically. “But I have just now been in to say my good-byes to my Lady Melaudiere. It quite upset me. Perhaps we can speak of this another time?”
Dervla moved another step up still, putting the level of Gaultry’s head beneath her. “I want to know I can depend on you,” she said, an unfriendly glitter in her eyes.
Sensing a verbal trap, Gaultry shrugged, but did not answer. She would wait for a question.
“Much has changed since you departed Princeport.”
Again, Gaultry kept her peace. This was hideous—Gabrielle of Melaudiere had been so fragile, so near the edge. The young huntress had never seen an old person so close to death’s dark portal—and still so unwilling to let go. She was not ready to cross swords with Dervla, and wished she would go away.
But the woman persisted. “You may not know this, but in your absence Melaudiere and I stopped two more Bissanty attempts against the Brood. We recovered Destra Vanderive’s infant daughter before she could be sent into Bissanty, and prevented another attack here in the city.”
“That is happy news,” Gaultry said. She had not known that poor murdered Destra had children other than her slain sons. She hesitated. From Haute-Tielmark, she knew Dervla was pursuing real traitors. But still she could not quite trust her. If what the Prince said was true, Dervla was also using her powers as inquisitor to compromise those who would merely challenge her authority—Gaultry and her sister included. It was safer, she reckoned, to change the subject, than to answer the woman’s plea for her support. “It must pain you deeply, to be losing such a longtime ally as Gabrielle of Melaudiere. My own grief is sharp indeed, and I have known her only a short time.”
“Of course,” Dervla said. “My grief is deep.” Her hand went to her chain of office, turning the links over in her fingers. “But just at this moment, seeing you returned in such a timely wise, my hopes for Tielmark have become much stronger.” She ascended another step, then another,
increasing the disparity of height between them. “We will speak soon, Lady Gaultry, when we have both better collected ourselves.”
BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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