The Witchwood Crown

  Lillia hadn’t forgotten about the woman Pasevalles had brought into the castle, but Auntie Rhoner had worked hard to keep her away from the woman’s bedside until Lillia had given up trying to see her. Was that where the Lord Chancellor was now? Lillia was torn between fear of whatever disease the ill woman had and a sudden desire to see what she looked like. Was she bony and weeping, like some of the beggar women in Erchester? The princess stood, hopping from one foot to the other as she tried to decide. Everybody said she should leave it to another day, but tomorrow was St. Savennin’s Day, which meant the fair might soon be gone. That knowledge—and her curiosity, which never stayed quiet for long—finally pushed her up the stairs of the residence, past her family’s chambers and up to the third floor.

  The guard who was almost certainly supposed to be on duty at the top of the stairs was instead talking to a maid; the girl was laughing so hard at something the guard had said that she had turned a rather deep shade of red. It was not very difficult for Lillia to walk past the couple without being noticed.

  When she reached the hallway it became fairly obvious that the maid she had seen was supposed to be watching over the ill woman, because the door to one of the rooms was wide open and there was no one inside except for a slender female shape stretched on the bed, her body covered by a thin blanket. As she approached, Lillia saw that the woman was tied down, which made her stop just inside the doorway, suddenly frightened. The sick woman must have heard her, because her head slowly turned until she could see Lillia.

  Something truly was wrong with the woman—something frightening. Lillia wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but it was more than just her tangled silvery hair and her hollow cheeks. Her eyes were strange, a bright, catlike yellow, and the shape of her face seemed wrong too.

  Lillia gasped. She had never seen anyone like this. The woman only stared back, eyes not quite centered on Lillia’s, as if she were only half awake. Then the strange woman’s lips pursed, as if she would say something.

  “P . . . p . . . p . . .” Nothing else came out of her, no word, only the soft popping noise. “Puh . . . puh . . .”

  “Princess!” said someone behind her, startling Lillia so badly she squeaked and jumped. She turned around to find Brother Etan standing over her, his eyes wide, his face red and scary.

  “I’m sorry!” she said. “I didn’t know! I’m sorry!”

  “You don’t belong here, Princess,” he said, but he sounded more worried than angry. A moment later, the maid who had been out on the landing came hurrying up behind him, flustered and clearly very frightened.

  “I didn’t mean to leave her! It’s only that Tobiah the guard asked me a question, and she was sleeping, so we went out of the room. . . .”

  Etan was standing beside the ill woman now. He put his fingers against her neck, then moved his hand to her forehead. The woman had stopped trying to talk and instead followed Brother Etan’s hand with her wide, not-quite-human eyes. After a few moments, he turned his attention back to the maid.

  “You.” His words were clipped and abrupt. “Go back to your mistress and tell her I want another maid here. She and I will talk about this later.”

  “But I only—!”

  He silenced her with a look. “Just go. I make no judgments, except that I want someone else here this morning.”

  The maid turned, face red and eyes wet with tears, and hurried away.

  “As for you, Princess Lillia,” Etan said, “I’m afraid this is not a good place for you to be, either.”

  “Is that lady sick?”

  “After a fashion. Who is watching you today?”

  Lillia knew when she was being treated like a child. She stood straight. “No one. I don’t need someone to follow me around all the time. I’m not little.”

  “That’s not . . .”

  “She was trying to say something. She kept saying ‘puh, puh,’ but I don’t know what that means. Was she trying to say ‘princess’?”

  “Possibly, but not likely, Highness. I doubt she knows who you are. At the moment, she doesn’t know much of anything. She has a bad fever. Now, I beg pardon, but away with you, Princess Lillia. A sickroom is no place for a healthy girl like you.”

  “But I want to help!”

  “The best help you can give me right now is to let me tend my patient.” He looked at Lillia’s face and his expression softened. “Perhaps you can help me another day, Princess. For right now, this woman needs rest and quiet. I’m going to leave too in just a moment.”

  “Well . . .” Lillia considered. “I’ll go away if you tell me who she is. Why does she look like that? Is it ‘cause she’s ill?”

  Brother Etan frowned, but Lillia could also see that she was going to get her way: She had a great deal of experience with the signs of defeated adulthood. “We don’t know for certain who she is, Princess,” the monk said, “but she is a Sitha.”

  “A Zither?” Even saying it was fearful and exciting. “You mean she’s a real fairy?”

  “Sitha. Yes. She was sent to our court as a messenger from her people. But someone attacked her.”

  Lillia felt a sudden chill. “Really?”

  “Not here inside the castle,” he said hurriedly. “A long way away. No one can hurt her here. And Lady Thelía and I are doing everything we can to make her better. So will you please let me get on with my task?”

  Reluctantly, Lillia assented. “But I’ll be back,” she promised both Etan and the ill woman, who didn’t seem to hear her. “I’ll come back and help you take care of her.”

  Brother Etan rolled his eyes when he didn’t think Lillia was looking, like that wouldn’t be such a good thing.

  As she went back down the corridor, she was sad. Nothing in the castle would be anywhere near as interesting as the Zither-woman—suddenly even a dancing bear didn’t seem quite so fascinating. But she wasn’t going to be allowed to help make this odd guest feel better.

  “Nothing ever goes right around here,” Lillia said, mostly to herself, but loud enough for anyone nearby to hear. “That is the horrible, unfair truth. Princesses don’t get to do anything good.”

  As Etan was checking the Sitha-woman’s wounds, she opened her eyes wide again. She tried to sit up, but her bonds prevented it. “Puh . . .” she said. “Puh . . .”

  “Don’t speak,” he told her. “You must rest.”

  “Puh . . . poison!”

  “Poison? What do you mean? I have given you nothing but good curatives, herbs to help your wounds . . .”

  The maid sent as a replacement appeared in the doorway, but Etan waved her back into the hallway.

  The Sitha-woman tried to say more, but could not. She licked her lips. He gave her water to drink. “I . . . feel it,” she said at last in a voice like the rattle of dry grass. This was the first time Etan had heard her speak since he had helped Pasevalles hold her down and tie her limbs. “It rushes through me. I do not think I can fight it off . . .”

  “Do you mean your wounds were poisoned?”

  “The . . . arrows.” She strained until she could turn her head enough to see his face. “Do you still have the . . . arrows?”

  “By the Redeemer’s Sacred Blood, I truly don’t know. Lord Pasevalles and some soldiers brought you in. Most of the arrows were already broken off. I removed the arrowheads as best I could, but I don’t know what became of them afterward.” He couldn’t tell if she was listening—her face had gone quite empty. “Can you understand me?”

  She only nodded, as though her strength had left her.

  “Are you certain you have been poisoned? The wounds themselves have mostly healed. I have simples I could try if there truly is poison in your blood, but it has been days since we brought you here . . .”

  She only shook her head, loosely, as though her neck might be connected to her body by something less rigid than bones. “No
.” She managed to make her whispering voice forceful. “Find . . . arrows . . .” Her head sagged. Fearful, Etan climbed up onto the bed to measure her heartbeat, but was relieved to find that it seemed strong. He did not know enough about the Sitha—who did?—to be able to judge whether she was feverish or not.

  • • •

  Later, when the Sitha-woman was resting more peacefully, Brother Etan left her under the care of the second maid, a sensible young woman who calmly received the stern warnings that Etan knew might better have been given to her predecessor.

  He could not find Pasevalles to tell him what the Sitha had said, but left a message with the Lord Chancellor’s clerk before retreating to the only real privacy he had, the drawing office where the plans and models were being made for the new library. The chief architect, Seth of Woodsall, was visiting the marble quarry at Whitstan in southern Erkynland, but Etan often helped him with accounts, so his occasional presence drew little attention from the other engineers and builders.

  Since Etan’s own bed was in a dormitory hall in St. Sutrin’s that was shared by dozens of other monks, the drawing office was also the only place he felt safe hiding the terrible, banned book from Prince John Josua’s collection. Etan prayed daily that Lord Tiamak would come back before the chief architect returned so he could give the book to him instead of having to find another hiding spot. Tiamak’s wife, Lady Thelía, had not accompanied her husband north, but although he respected her knowledge of herbs and medicaments more even than his own, he still did not feel he knew her well enough to trust her with the Treatise on the Aetheric Whispers. She was a clever and in many ways extremely broad-minded woman, but she had once been a nun.

  The irony of his own position as a consecrated monk in one of God’s holy orders did not escape him.

  He closed the office door behind him, then went down on his knees to pray. At the end, he added a heartfelt request: Please, O Lord, bring Lord Tiamak back to Erchester safe and soon!

  Etan had spent much of his life in a monastery, surrounded by his religious brothers, and he generally yearned for solitude. When he was on his own he could read and think without distraction, and sometimes—he felt sure—even hear the voice of God more clearly. Now, that had changed. His worries about the Sitha woman would have been enough to make him desperate for someone to share his burden, but his fear of discovery was greater. The forbidden book from the dead prince’s collection haunted him every day.

  Prayers finished, he pulled the book from the chest full of old parchments where he had hidden it. As always, when he actually held the Treatise in his hands, he was reluctant to open it, as though he stood on the threshold of some dark and ancient pagan temple.

  But I cannot wait, he told himself. It was sickening just to know it existed, a book whose name was so black that even the library of the Sancellan Aedonitis kept it away from the rest of the collection, as though its pages carried some kind of disease.

  A disease of bad ideas, Etan thought.

  But did that mean that it had somehow caused Prince John Josua’s death? All who had attended him had said that the prince’s last days had been painful, terrible to endure both for the victim and those who cared for him. And even Tiamak, for all his experience and scholarship, had never been able to say what illness had killed the heir to the High Throne. A few had even whispered darkly of poison, though Tiamak had assured the king and queen he thought that highly unlikely, because the prince’s illness followed no course he had ever encountered in his library of apothecarial writings.

  Despite telling himself that the little Wrannaman was the best judge of such things, Etan still could not bring himself to open the book very often, although it was not the fear of envenomed pages that balked him. Like most educated men, he had heard countless rumors about the book, though all he knew of its author, Fortis the Recluse, was that he had been a bishop of the church who lived in the sixth century on the island of Warinsten, in those days still named Gemmia and still part of Nabban’s extensive empire. The book itself was written in an odd mixture of both old Nabbani and the tongue of Khandia, a land that even back in Fortis’ time had been lost for centuries beneath the ocean waves. Nobody knew why Fortis had chosen that language, or where he had learned it, but church scholars had argued over the meaning of some of his most mysterious passages ever since.

  What almost everyone agreed on, however, was that the wisdom contained in the Treatise was very dangerous. Just the headings at the beginning, in a later hand than that of the Recluse, showed the sort of subjects it contained: Night-dwellers; Words of Power; History of Sin and Punishment; Gods of Nascadu and the Lost South. But it was the title matter that had caused the book to be banned, a description of attempts to communicate with the demonic creatures who spoke through the aether, and whom Bishop Fortis swore he could hear using nothing more than a scrying stone and the wisdom he had learned in, as he put it, “locations too disturbing to tell.”

  Even Bishop Fortis himself might have regretted at the last gaining such wisdom. It was said that he had simply vanished one night. One of his clerks had helped him dress for bed, but just before dawn another clerk came to wake him and found him gone without trace. The tales suggested that certain sounds had been heard during the night of his disappearance—sounds his staff and servants had been too frightened to talk about with the lector’s chief investigator, even under threat of excommunication. In any case, nothing more was ever heard from Fortis the Recluse, and the remaining copies of his book were put under ban by Lector Eogenis IV, collected, and supposedly all burned except for the censor’s copy retained by the Sancellan Aedonitis.

  A bad, dangerous, heretical book. Simply having it is sinful. Reason as you will, Brother, there is no getting around that.

  Etan realized that he had been staring at the heavy black cover for a long time, so long that the candle was guttering, making shadows move fitfully along the walls. He took a breath, then another, then finally threw back the cover and began leafing through the fragile pages.

  It had certainly been disturbing to find this infamous thing among Prince John Josua’s possessions, and frightening to think what would happen to Etan himself if he was discovered, but neither of those things were what had him so worried, poised on the knife-edge between waiting for Lord Tiamak or going immediately to Lord Pasevalles, the only person of high rank, currently at the Hayholt, whom Etan really trusted. Because if it was a mystery how John Josua had obtained the book, it was no mystery who had owned it before the dead prince.

  In one of the final chapters of Fortis’ opus, titled “Piercing the Veil,” someone had written a note in the margin, commenting on one of the Khandian passages. It was a simple, if cryptic, note in Nabbanai script; Etan had discovered it the first time he leafed through the forbidden book after taking it from Princess Idela’s chambers. It read, “With the proper tools, this veil can be torn.”

  The note seemed innocuous, but Etan had recognized the stark, impatient hand immediately, from long hours spent looking through the Hayholt’s old chancelry records while on various errands for Lord Pasevalles. The man who had written this note had been dead for more than thirty years, but there was not a person in the royal household who did not know of him, and few would even speak his name aloud for fear of his vengeful ghost. After his death, all his possessions had been burned and his tower sealed shut, its doors and windows filled with quicklime caimentos and walled over. But somehow, the book had survived. It was without doubt a very, very bad book, but the most disturbing thing about it was the handwriting in the margin, because it unmistakably belonged to Pryrates, the Red Priest—the madman who had tried to bring the undead Storm King back to life.

  19

  The Moon’s Token

  King Simon was in a good mood, Eolair noted, and that was a fine thing. The queen, too, was pleased that after months of travel, they were finally on their way home to Erkynland. In fact, of all th
e royal party, only Prince Morgan seemed off his feed—or off his drink, to be more precise, and Eolair had been told why: Binabik’s daughter and her man Little Snenneq had apparently exacted a promise from Morgan not to drink too much, due to an evening expedition they had planned. Unlike the illicit skating expedition, this foray had been approved ahead of time, although Queen Miriamele’s consent had been reluctant. The king had only convinced her by saying, “A bit of exertion will be good for him. You don’t want him to be a weakling king who can lift nothing heavier than an ale-cup, do you?”

  So as the Hand of the High Throne watched with qualified sympathy, the prince drank nothing but watered wine that was more water than wine.

  Outside the evening had finally grown quiet, although the wind had howled and the snow flown all day. Yet another surprise spring storm had caught the royal party in open land west of the Dimmerskog forest, forcing them off the Vennweg and onto the unsuspecting hospitality of one Baron Narvi. Narvi was an old knight of Rimmersgard blood, as attested by his name and the fair hair of his youthful portrait in the outer hall, but he spoke the Westerling tongue better than he spoke Rimmerspakk, and kept court at his tower house of Radfisk Foss in the spare, eastern Erkynlandish manner, with whitewashed walls and little ornamentation. The latter might have been as much due to penury as inclination—the Frostmarch borders were not rich territories at the best of times, and the salmon, on which the baron’s household made the largest part of their living, had not yet begun the year’s journey.