When they reached the second floor, they followed the guard down a dank narrow corridor until he stopped at the first of two doors.
“Yours,” the guard said.
“Mine?” Both Gargarin and Froi said at once, exchanging looks.
“Both of yours.”
“Both?”
They stared at each other again. Froi couldn’t imagine that his expression was any less horrified than Gargarin’s.
“There’s been a mistake,” Gargarin said patiently.
“No mistake, sir.”
Gargarin made no attempt to enter the room. Instead he studied the ornate design of the timber door, a bitter smile on his face.
“What’s your name?” he asked the guard.
“Dorcas, sir.”
Dorcas would have been around Rafuel’s age. He had a look Froi knew only too well. The look that said he understood nothing if it was not spoken as an order.
“Well, Dorcas, I think it’s best that you place us in separate chambers, and I’d prefer not to have this one,” Gargarin said.
“Not my decision to make, sir.”
“Bestiano’s idea, I suppose?” Gargarin asked, and Froi heard a quiet fury in the question.
“My orders are to take you to this room, sir. Both of you.”
Dorcas walked away, and Froi waited for Gargarin to enter the room.
“Bad memories?” Froi asked.
Gargarin ignored him and finally reached out to open the door. “It’s not your place to ask questions that don’t concern you. It’s your place to do what you’ve come here to do.”
“And what is it, according to Gargarin of Abroi, that I have come to do?”
The cold blue eyes found Froi’s. “If you want a demonstration, I would advise you to go down to the stables and watch what the serving girls get up to with the farriers.”
Gargarin entered the room, and Froi followed. It was small, with one bed in the center, doors leading outside to a balconette and nothing else. Froi hated being cold and couldn’t imagine a guest room in Isaboe’s palace without a giant fireplace and rugs warming the chamber. Gargarin poked under the bed with his staff and pulled out a straw trundle mattress.
“You take the bed.”
“No, you take the bed,” Froi said. “I do have a conscience, you know.”
“And I prefer to sleep on the floor,” Gargarin snapped. “So plunge that fact into your conscience and allow it to rotate for a while. Until it hurts.”
Froi walked to the doors that opened to the balconette. Across the narrow stretch of the gravina, the outer wall of the oracle’s godshouse tilted toward them.
“Is it that they don’t like me or that they don’t like you?” Froi called to Gargarin inside.
Beside their own balconette was another that belonged to the room next door. After a moment, the girl with the mass of awful hair stepped out onto it. She peered at Froi, almost within touching distance. Up close she was even stranger looking, and it was with an unabashed manner that she studied him now, and with great curiosity, her brow furrowed. A cleft on her chin was so pronounced, it was as if someone had spent their life pointing out her strangeness. Her hair was a filthy mess almost reaching her waist. It was strawlike in texture, and Froi imagined that if it were washed, it might be described as a darker shade of fair. But for now, it looked dirty, its color almost indescribable.
She squinted at his appraisal. Froi squinted back.
Gargarin appeared beside him and the girl disappeared.
“I’m presuming that was the princess,” Froi said. “She’s plain enough. What is it with all the twitching? Is she possessed by demons?”
“Lower your voice,” Gargarin said sharply.
“Does she know what they think of her out in the provinces?” Froi continued. “That she’s a useless empty vessel and that they call her a whore?”
After a moment, the girl peered out from her room again.
“Well, if she didn’t before, she certainly does now,” Gargarin muttered.
That night, the great hall was set up with three trestle tables joined together to accommodate at least sixty of the king’s relatives and advisers. Froi had met most of the advisers, each titled according to their rank.
“Why would you want to be the king’s Eighth Adviser?” he said to Gargarin as they were escorted to their chair by the king’s Seventh Adviser.
“Once upon a time Bestiano was the king’s Tenth Adviser,” Gargarin replied. “If you stay long enough, you get rewarded.”
“And what were you back then?” Froi asked.
“A fool,” Gargarin said flatly. “With a bond.”
Froi was placed beside the strange princess, who was dressed in the most hideous pink taffeta dress, bunched up in all the wrong places.
“Good evening, Aunt Mawfa,” she called out, her voice indignant where indignance wasn’t required. “Good evening, Cousin Robson.”
No one responded to her greetings. Most belonged to what Finnikin would have called the vacuous nobility and droned on and on about absolutely nothing worthwhile.
Froi was hungry and before him were steaming platters of roasted peacock, salted fish, pastries stuffed with pigeon meat, and the softest cheese he had ever tasted. He had been warned about the flatbread of Charyn and watched the way the others gathered their food with it.
But what caught his attention was most people’s reaction to Gargarin. He seemed to be the man everyone wanted to speak to.
“Interesting talk in Paladozza, Sir Gargarin, of the provincaro’s plans to dig up his meadows to capture rain,” one man called out from the head of their table.
“Not a ‘sir,’” Gargarin corrected, “and not so strange at all. I was disheartened to see the outer regions of the Citavita today. I drew up plans for water catchment here long ago, yet they seemed to have gone astray,” he continued, his attention on the king’s First Adviser.
“Would you contemplate visiting Jidia to speak to Provincara Orlanda when you leave here?” another asked.
“No, he’s to visit Paladozza this winter,” a man spoke up from the end of their table. “Is it not what you promised the provincaro, Gargarin?”
“Indeed.”
Gargarin kept his head down. Something told Froi that Gargarin was making no plans to go anywhere. The talking had caught Bestiano’s attention, and he watched Gargarin carefully. Enviously? Was Gargarin a threat to Bestiano’s role as the king’s First Adviser? Gargarin hardly noticed. Once or twice, Froi caught Gargarin looking at the strange princess Quintana, while the princess blatantly stared in turn at Froi throughout the entire meal, with little apology or bashfulness.
As Rafuel had explained, the Charynites gathered their food with soft breads to soak up the juices and wipe their plates clean. The princess chose to share Froi’s plate. Froi liked his food all to himself; it came from years of having to fight for his own. Worse still, the princess made a mess around the dish. Her hair fell into the plate often, and Froi was forced to flick its filthy strands away more than once. She resorted to leaning over to grab pudding from the plate of a whining duke who had called the servant over four times already to fill his cup of ale, complaining in a loud whisper that there was wine as per usual on the other side, but not theirs. When Quintana spilled food for the umpteenth time, the Duke of Who-Cares-Where grabbed his cup and slammed it hard on the table, catching the tips of her fingers. “Beastly child.”
Bestiano excused himself from where he sat and walked down to them, tugging the princess by the sleeve of her dress. “Perhaps you can show Olivier to your chamber,” he hissed. “Make yourself useful rather than making people sick to their stomach, Quintana.”
One of the women tittered, putting a hand on Gargarin’s shoulder. “She’s no more useful in the bedchamber.”
Gargarin moved his shoulder away.
The princess smoothed down the creases in the awful gown and stood, beckoning with a gesture for Froi to follow. Froi stared at the food
before him, reluctant to leave it behind.
“Good night to all,” she called out. No one looked up except for Gargarin, and the noise of the big hall continued as though she had never spoken.
The princess continued her farewells down the shadowy narrow passageway lit only by one or two fire torches that revealed a guard in every dark crevice.
“Good night, Dorcas.”
“Good night, Fekra.”
“Good night, Fodor.”
Some muttered under their breath. No one responded. But she greeted them all the same.
Froi used the time to take in the various nooks and crannies and count each guard he passed.
When they reached their quarters, Quintana stood at his door and waited. He wondered if she was expecting him to perform tonight.
“I’m very tired,” he said. He yawned for effect.
“Do you not have something to tell us, Olivier of Sebastabol?” she asked in an indignant whisper.
He tried to think of what he should say. Was there something Rafuel had left out in his instructions?
“Perhaps tomorrow we can go for a walk down to the Citavita,” he said pleasantly. Dismissively. “How about that?”
She shook her head. “We prefer not to leave the palace.”
“We?” Froi asked curiously, looking around. “We who?”
After a moment, she pointed to herself.
“What’s the worst that can happen if we go for a walk around the Citavita?” he asked.
“We could come across assassins, of course,” she said, as though surprised he wouldn’t think of such a thing.
“Of course.”
She studied his face for a moment.
“How is it that you don’t know much, Olivier of Sebastabol?”
He shook his head ruefully. “Exhaustion turns one into a fool.” He bowed. “If not a walk around the Citavita tomorrow, then a walk around the palace walls will have to do.”
He shut the door on her before she could say another word.
Early the next morning, a sound from outside the room alerted Froi. The mattress below was empty, and from where he lay, he could see out onto the balconette, where the sun had just begun to creep up. There Gargarin stood, staring across the gravina. Froi couldn’t see much in the poor light, but when he looked across toward the godshouse, he saw the outline of a man on the balconette opposite and suspected it was Gargarin’s brother. A moment later, Gargarin turned and hobbled back inside.
As Gargarin stood at the basin and splashed water onto his face, Froi stepped outside, curious about the priestling. He marveled once again at how the godshouse could sit so high on a piece of tilted granite, promising to plunge toward them at any time. Froi began to turn away, but suddenly he felt ice-cold fingers travel down his spine. He swung around, his hand grabbing at the fingers, and saw that it was the princess, leaning over the cast iron of her balconette and reaching toward him, standing on the tip of her toes.
Her stare was cold and it made him flinch, but he saw fear and wonder there, too.
“You are indeed the last born,” she said, her tone abrupt. No indignation now. “It’s written all over you.”
Froi didn’t respond. He could only stare at her. It seemed as though he was facing a completely different girl. She had the same dirt-colored hair and eyes, but her stare was savage.
“You’ll have to come to our chamber this night,” she said.
Froi could have sworn he heard her snarl in disgust at the thought before she turned and disappeared into her room.
“Our?” he questioned, and for the first time since he had left Lumatere, Froi wondered what he had gotten himself into.
The day went from bad to worse. Gargarin of Abroi was in a wretched mood, and they almost came to blows over an ink pot that Froi spilled on the man’s papers. Not that it was Froi’s fault. If it wasn’t Gargarin’s staff tripping Froi, it was his scrolls and quills laying everywhere or his muttering filling the small space of their chamber.
“Let’s make a pact, Gargarin. I keep completely out of this room today and every second day, and you do the same on the other days.”
“What are you waiting for?” Gargarin said, without looking up from his work.
Froi spent the rest of the morning avoiding the princess, who had returned to being the indignant girl who had escorted him to his room the night before. Everywhere Froi turned, the princess was there. Peering. Staring. Squinting. At every corner. From every height. It almost became a game of him watching her watching him.
Later that day, he hovered around the well, which seemed the perfect place for talking rot and finding out vital information from people whose ancestors had spent too much time breeding with each other. The king’s very simple cousin, for example, pointed out that the tower Froi could see from where he was standing was the prison and currently held only one prisoner. “The rest of the scum are kept in dungeons close to the bridge of the Citavita,” the man explained.
“And the king?” Froi asked.
“We try not to refer to him as scum out loud,” the cousin whispered.
“No, I mean, where is he kept?” Froi said.
The king’s cousin shrugged. “I’ve not seen him since the last day of weeping.”
Froi looked around hastily, not wanting to be obvious about his scrutiny. There were five towers as well as the keep. He had seen the Duke of Who-Cares-Where walk into the keep and knew for certain that if the man didn’t get wine at his table, then there was no possible way he slept in the same compound as the king. So apart from the tower Froi shared with Gargarin and the princess opposite the godshouse, and the prison tower alongside of theirs, that left the third, fourth and fifth towers as possible locations for the man Froi had been sent to assassinate. He knew that if he could get up to one of the battlements, he’d at least have a better view of the entire fortress. But as he excused himself from the king’s cousin, he walked into Dorcas.
“Just the person I was looking for,” Dorcas said, full of self-importance. “I have a message.”
“For me?”
“The banker of Sebastabol is passing through on a visit to Osteria,” Dorcas advised. “He would like a word. Apparently your families are acquainted.”
Froi’s heart began to thump against his chest. Less than a day in the palace and his lie was about to be discovered.
“Did you hear me?” Dorcas asked.
“You mean Sir . . . Roland is here? In the Citavita?”
“Sir Berenson,” Dorcas corrected, his eyes narrowing.
“Oh, you mean Sir Berenson the banker, and not Sir Roland the baker?”
“Since when is a baker a ‘sir’?” Dorcas asked.
“In my father’s eyes, he is,” Froi said, nodding emphatically. “‘Yes, yes, that man deserves a title,’ Father says every time my mother comes home with a loaf.”
Dorcas didn’t seem interested in stories about bakers. But Dorcas was intent on following instructions.
“He’s in Lady Mawfa’s sitting room in the third tower,” Dorcas said. “Run along.”
“The third tower?” Froi asked, eliminating it as the King’s residence. He had watched Lady Mawfa the night before whispering gossip to anyone who came close to her. He couldn’t imagine the king sharing his residence with such a parrot.
“Are you sure it’s not the fourth tower?” Froi tried. “Didn’t you say he was visiting the king?”
“I didn’t say that at all,” Dorcas said, irritated. “And he won’t be staying for long, so run along, I say.”
Froi had to think fast. Dorcas wasn’t moving until he did, and Princess Indignant had just revealed herself from behind the well, beckoning Froi with an impatient hand. Then he heard the tapping of Gargarin’s staff and saw the man limping toward the steps of their tower. Froi took his chance.
“The proud fool,” he said to Dorcas, clucking his tongue and shaking his head. “I’ve told him again and again to rest. Gargarin!” Froi called out, before run
ning toward him. He reached Gargarin halfway up the steps to their chamber and placed an arm around his waist to assist him, despite the fact that Gargarin neither wanted nor needed help.
“What are you doing?” Gargarin growled, trying to pull away. They both balanced unsteadily on the spiral steps.
“I’m here, nothing to worry about,” reassured Froi loudly, waving Dorcas away as the guard approached, looking slightly concerned.
“Do you need assistance, sir?” Dorcas asked Gargarin.
“Did I ask for it?”
“No, sir,” Dorcas said.
Regardless, Froi dragged a fuming Gargarin up the rest of the steps, causing them both to trip forward. Froi turned back to Dorcas, mouthing, “Too proud,” rolling his eyes, and shrugging haplessly. “I’ll take care of this, Dorcas.”
Dorcas watched them for a moment, holding up a hand of acknowledgment to Gargarin, whose teeth were gritted. When Dorcas descended the steps, Gargarin struggled to pull free of Froi with a fury that almost had them both tumbling down.
“Are you an idiot?” Gargarin hissed. “Let go of me now.”
“You look pale. Let me just get you to our chamber,” Froi said. So I can avoid seeing Sir Berenson the banker, he added to himself.
“I was born pale! I’ll die pale!”
At the top of the steps, Gargarin finally broke free and hobbled away.
“I thought the room was mine for the day,” he said as Froi followed him to the chamber.
“A decision I regretted the moment I left the room,” Froi said. “I can’t bear the idea of you staggering around tomorrow with nowhere to go.”
Gargarin stared at him coldly. “A decision I have not regretted agreeing to. Go. Away.”
Froi spent the rest of the day in the stables avoiding the princess, the banker of Sebastabol, and Dorcas. As Gargarin had predicted, he was given a lesson or two by the stable hand and scullery maid about mating, as well as picking up a few choice words that the priest-king hadn’t covered when he taught him the language of Charyn.
When he arrived back at his room that night, feeling anything but amorous himself, the princess was standing outside her chamber. Waiting. The cold stare was back.