“Good or bad?” Finnikin asked.
“Unlike the queen’s or Tesadora’s experience, it was usually peaceful for Vestie. Tesadora was somehow able to keep the darkness away from her. But during the time of Vestie’s unrest, which we now understand to be the time of the massacre in Sarnak, I remember praying to the goddess Lagrami to protect the queen. And so our goddess sent her to Sendecane, where she was safe and at peace for a time.”
“So you knew it was the queen all along?” Finnikin asked.
She nodded. “Vestie’s only word for a long time was ‘Isaboe.’ But you had best ask Tesadora about the connection between Vestie and the queen. There are things about the curse and magic that I will never understand.” She looked up, sensing Finnikin’s gaze on her.
“So you spoke to the queen?” he said quietly. “Just yesterday?” He had not seen Isaboe since he placed her on Tesadora’s cart. “Yet the Guard has not been allowed inside the cloister.”
“Tesadora will not allow men near the girls.”
“We would never hurt them, Lady Beatriss,” Sir Topher said.
“The damage is already done, Sir Topher. Boredom made monsters out of the bastard king and his men. They went for the cloister of Lagrami first. It was close to the palace, and the novices had no protection. On the night the impostor’s men attacked, not one of them was left inviolate, not even the priestess. One night, they all disappeared, and although I suspected that Tesadora and the novices of Sagrami had taken them into their protection, it was many months before I knew for certain.”
“Wouldn’t the impostor king have known where the novices had disappeared to and attacked the Sagrami cloister?” Finnikin asked.
“Oh, he knew,” she said bitterly. “But if there was one person in this kingdom the bastard king feared, it was Tesadora. Her mother had cursed the kingdom and there were stories that the daughter was even more powerful.”
As he had many times in the past week, Finnikin wanted to tear someone apart with his bare hands. He wanted to be like Trevanion and Perri and forget protocol. Yesterday his father and some of the senior guards had entered the palace dungeon to question the impostor king and his surviving men. Finnikin knew that few words had been exchanged and that the howls from the prisoners could be heard all over the palace. He remembered the look on Sir Topher’s face when they later saw the blood-splattered dungeon walls. Horror, certainly. But mostly satisfaction.
“If I could make a request, Finnikin, on their behalf. Could you ask your father to remove some of the guards from around the cloister?”
Finnikin shook his head. “Not as long as the queen is within those walls,” he said firmly. “Tesadora will have to let them in soon. The queen’s yata and the Mont people will want her with them for a short while before she returns home.”
“Her yata is with her now.”
“Lady Beatriss,” Finnikin said, trying not to let his frustration show, “can you not see a problem with the fact that the queen’s First Man and the captain of her Guard have to obtain information about her well-being from you?”
She gave him a piercing look. “I do believe, Finnikin, that the queen would be happy to speak to you if you were to visit.”
“Has she made such a request?” he asked quietly.
“Does she need to?” This time there was reprimand in her tone.
“Finnikin will speak to the queen soon,” Sir Topher said. “After he follows his father’s example and has his hair clipped and looks . . . presentable.”
Finnikin stared at his mentor in disbelief, a stare that Sir Topher studiously ignored.
“It’s what the people of Lumatere expect from the one they believe will bond with their queen,” Sir Topher continued.
“What?”
Sir Topher sighed. “Finnikin, I know I can speak of such things in front of Lady Beatriss. The people of Lumatere will want the queen to choose a —”
The snarl that came from Finnikin stopped Sir Topher in his tracks. “The people of Lumatere are trying to rebuild their lives, Sir Topher. The last thing they’re thinking about is who the queen chooses to bond with.” Yet Finnikin knew it was a lie, for he had been asked a number of times during the past two weeks if the rumors were true.
“How wrong you are, Finnikin,” Lady Beatriss chided. “The queen is everything to our people. She’s the leader of our land. As a single woman she is vulnerable. When Lumatere celebrates our reunification, our people will expect her to be settled so she can carry on with running the kingdom. Ever since the word on Vestie’s arm hinted a return, the talk has been of you.”
“And was I ever to have a choice in the matter?” He was furious, but Beatriss did not seem fazed.
Sir Topher looked exasperated. “Finnikin, you have loved her from the moment you climbed that rock in Sendecane.”
“When she was a novice, not a queen.”
“Oh, I see.” There was disappointment in Lady Beatriss’s eyes.
“I don’t think you do, Lady Beatriss.”
“If you were king and she were a mere novice, would you have chosen her to be your queen?” she asked.
This time he could not lie. Not to Beatriss. “Yes,” he said quietly.
“Yet the queen cannot choose you?”
Suddenly he felt as if he were eight years old and Beatriss was reprimanding him for tying Isaboe to the flagpole by her hair.
“If this is about power, then perhaps you are not the right person for our queen after all, Finnikin.”
“The prince of Osteria has expressed interest,” Sir Topher announced.
“I’ve heard he’s a strapping boy,” Lady Beatriss responded pleasantly as she disappeared into the other room. Finnikin kept his hooded stare on Sir Topher, who yet again chose to ignore it and turned instead to Lady Beatriss as she returned with a large book in her hands. She placed it on the table before them.
“Here are the dead,” she said, opening to a page. “Marked next to each name is how they died.” She turned to another page. “Here are the arrests. Here are the attacks on our property, although we stopped recording them after the first two years.”
Finnikin pointed to the names marked in red ink.
She stared at him. “Informants.”
“Traitors?”
She shrugged. “Whatever it is they did or said kept them free from any type of punishment. I’m ashamed to say that the nobility were the worst. We could have done with Lord Augie and Lady Abian. And I would have imagined the same noble behavior from Lord Selric.”
“Your actions were beyond reproach, Lady Beatriss,” Finnikin said. “Your name has often been praised these past weeks in my travels. You went beyond the duty of a citizen.”
“Circumstances present themselves, and at times we have no choice. I had no choice but to work for the good of the people. Perhaps if I had been presented with different circumstances, I would have taken the path of my fellow nobles.”
“How is it that you survived, Lady Beatriss, when all exiles believed you to be dead?” he asked gently.
“Perhaps Lady Beatriss would prefer not to speak of such a time, Finnikin,” Sir Topher said.
Finnikin held her gaze. “My father mourned your loss for ten years.”
“Finnikin,” Sir Topher warned.
“The births,” she said quietly, leaving Finnikin’s question hanging in the air. “There are one thousand, nine hundred, and twenty-three of us, last count. It is hard to determine with the Forest Dwellers. There were some who survived, perhaps hidden by our people during those days. I have never seen them, but Tesadora has hinted of their existence in the woods beyond the cloister.”
“Yet Tesadora allowed you to be part of her world with the novices,” Finnikin observed.
Beatriss nodded. “But she was secretive all the same. There were so few of them in the end that they trusted no one.” She leaned forward to whisper. “We were very lucky to have her hide the novices of Lagrami, and later the young girls.”
Finnikin took her hand gently. “The impostor king and his men are no longer in power. You have no need to fear. So we must learn to speak with loud voices rather than in soft whispers. That, I know, is what the queen wants.”
She nodded. “The crops.” She turned another page. “The days of darkness.” She pointed. “The days of light.”
“Did that happen often?” Sir Topher asked.
She nodded. “The first five years were the worst. Some weeks there was day after day of darkness and we feared the crops would fail and we would starve. Even the surviving Sagrami worshippers had no idea how to control it or what it all meant. The answers seemed to have died with Seranonna.”
She pushed the book across to Finnikin and stood to refill their cups. Sir Topher walked to the window and peered outside. “Is that Gilbere of the Flatlands, Lady Beatriss?”
“My cousin, yes.”
“We studied together as children. Will you both excuse me?”
“Of course.”
Sir Topher left, and Finnikin began to copy the recordings from Beatriss’s book into his own.
“It’s because she returned to fulfill her mother’s request to save me,” Lady Beatriss said after a while.
Finnikin put down his quill. “Tesadora?”
Lady Beatriss nodded. “She’s very frightening when you first see her, isn’t she?”
He smiled, abashed. “She’s half my size, so it might be slightly humbling for me to admit that.”
“Well, I will admit it for you,” Beatriss responded with a laugh. Then her face grew serious. “Seranonna and I were locked in the same dungeon cell. The day before the curse, she was permitted a visitor. A novice from the cloister of Lagrami. The novice was there to give a blessing to the Sagrami worshippers so they could repent before death. I remember feeling ashamed to hear such piety coming from a novice of my order. But it was a deception. The novice was Tesadora, her hair shorn, dressed in the stolen robes of a Lagrami novice. She gave Seranonna a blessing in the language of the ancients and pressed into her mother’s hand a potion concealed in a tiny vial. It was a substance that would render her mother unconscious; she would be dead to all who saw her. But Tesadora knew enough to be able to revive her.”
Finnikin paled. “Seranonna gave the potion to you instead?”
Beatriss nodded. “We have never spoken of it, but I cannot imagine how Tesadora felt that day, watching the guards drag her mother into the square to be executed. When Seranonna screamed out that I was dead, Tesadora knew the words were meant for her. A message to retrieve my body and bring it back to life. I drank the potion after I gave birth, praying that I would not regain consciousness. I have no memory of what took place during the curse. All I know is that Tesadora took advantage of the confusion and came to find me. She said I was still holding your sister, Finnikin.”
Tears sprang to his eyes before he could stop them.
“She lived for only a few moments, and in those moments, I said her name out loud so she would one day be able to shout it through the heavens. I knew she could not possibly survive, because she was too tiny. I had carried her for less than six months. But she knew the important things before she died. That her father’s name was Trevanion, her mother’s name was Beatriss, and her brother’s name was Finnikin. I called her Evanjalin after Trevanion’s beloved mother, and when my precious Vestie was born five years later, I swear I heard her cry out that name when she first entered this world. As if somehow the spirit of Evanjalin lived within her. You may think I sound like a mad woman for believing such a thing, but there are moments when I see qualities of your father in Vestie, Finnikin.”
“I’ve learned to accept the unexplainable and not consider myself mad,” Finnikin said.
“When Tesadora revived me in the dungeons, I begged her to let me die. I was frightened. I knew the bastard king would come for me again. But she refused to leave me there. She half carried me out of the dungeons, both of us sobbing. Hers were tears of fury, mine of fear. How strange and unnatural a day it was, Finnikin. The palace village destroyed, the streets empty except for the dead who had been crushed under cottages. I could see people wailing against the kingdom walls, pounding them with their bare hands. On the road to the Flatlands, we passed those who looked like the walking dead, muttering about curses, claiming there was no way out of the kingdom. It was Tesadora and my villagers who buried my child. Down by the river.” She shook her head, lost in her thoughts. “I think I buried your father that day as well.”
“But he’s alive,” Finnikin said bluntly.
“One day I want you to take him down there, to the grave,” she said. “So he can begin to heal. I see so much hurt in his eyes.”
“Why can’t he heal with you?” Finnikin pushed.
“Because I am not even half the person he once loved.”
“Some things don’t change, Lady Beatriss. Can you ever bring yourself to love him again?”
“Oh, Finnikin,” she said with great sadness. “After everything that has happened, how do any of us begin to love again?”
Later, Finnikin traveled the road to the palace with his mentor.
“Did she speak?” Sir Topher asked.
Finnikin looked at him, surprised. “You left because you believed she would?”
“No, I honestly did want to see my childhood friend,” he said with a smile. “But I could tell she needed to talk, and I learned years ago, Finnikin, that people divulge things to you that they would not divulge to anyone else.”
“A good skill for the apprentice of the queen’s First Man?” Finnikin asked.
“Way beyond the skill of an apprentice,” Sir Topher said solemnly. “Or the queen’s First Man, at that.” He sighed, looking around. “Where do you think our boy is?”
“Froi? Who knows? If he’s left the kingdom, I don’t want to be the one to tell the queen. I’ve sent Sefton and the village lads out to search for him.”
They heard the pounding of horses’ hooves behind them, and a moment later Trevanion and Moss appeared.
“Something’s wrong,” Finnikin muttered, his heart hammering in his chest. Trevanion and Moss pulled up beside them, their expressions grim.
“Isaboe?” Finnikin asked.
Trevanion shook his head, and Finnikin could sense his father’s suppressed rage. “It’s the impostor king and his men,” Trevanion said bluntly. “They’re dead.”
“Poisoned?”
Trevanion, Finnikin, Sir Topher, and Moss walked through the dungeons, covering their noses and mouths with cloths. The impostor king and his men had obviously suffered long and painful deaths. One had managed to batter his head to a pulp against the dungeon wall in an attempt to end the agony.
“How?” Trevanion asked, fury in his voice.
“We do not know,” the prison guard said quietly. “But we arrested the baker who supplied us with the loaves for the prisoners this morning.”
“He confessed?”
The guard shook his head.
“This could only be the work of one who knows their poisons, so I’m hoping we’ve removed the queen from Tesadora’s cloister,” Finnikin said.
“Perri’s already on his way,” Trevanion replied. “He will take the queen to the Monts until she is ready to return to the palace.”
“We must treat this with care,” Sir Topher said. “We cannot have a repeat of the past when it comes to those who worship Sagrami.”
“Agreed,” Trevanion said flatly. “But if Tesadora is responsible for what has happened here, she must be arrested.”
“Surely you are not suggesting she’s working with the Charynites to keep the impostor king from talking?” Sir Topher asked.
“We take no chances.”
It took most of the day to ride to the cloister at the northwest tip of the kingdom. On the way, they passed the cherry blossom tree that had been planted in honor of the dead queen’s youngest child, Isaboe. The cloister, where Perri had hidden Tesadora and the novices all
those years ago, was one of the most ancient temples in the land. It was surrounded by woodland, where Trevanion’s men were now positioned, some in the open, others concealed.
The cloister’s entrance was a covered walkway, which led into circular gardens where the novices worked and meditated. Surrounding the gardens were the living quarters. Tesadora stood at the entrance, staring at the men impassively. Light played through the arched opening, and it made her look almost ghostly with her strange hair and beautiful face. Finnikin could not help wondering how such a tiny woman had managed to carry the much taller Beatriss out of the dungeons that day.
“There seem to be a lot of angry men in the vicinity, Captain,” Tesadora said by way of greeting. “They are disturbing my girls.”
“I’m hoping you made Perri’s acquaintance this morning, Tesadora.”
“The Savage and I are well acquainted, as you would know,” she said coldly. “He had the queen removed from our cloister, much to the distress of both the novices and the queen.”
Trevanion looked to one of his guards nearby. The guard nodded to verify her story.
“We would like permission to enter,” Sir Topher said.
“I will not have my novices alarmed any further. I fear you will also have me removed from the cloister by force if I allow you to enter.”
Finnikin was sure that Tesadora’s only knowledge of fear was how to instill it in others. “Out of respect for the role you played in the survival of Lady Beatriss, my father will restrain himself, Tesadora,” he said.
She stared at him, as if seeing him for the first time in the midst of the others. “Leave your men outside,” she ordered. She turned and walked down the passageway. Trevanion, Sir Topher, and Finnikin followed.
“Do not speak for me again, Finn,” his father warned in a low tone. “A poor captain I would make if all my decisions were based on how my loved ones were treated.”
They walked through the gardens, aware of the stares from the novices. Those belonging to Sagrami were dressed in blue, those to Lagrami in gray. Most were young. “Finnikin of the Rock,” he heard one whisper to another. “He belongs to the queen.”