I lay down and let dreams wash around me while the stars came out in force and the hills throbbed with the song of crickets serenading the night. My grandmother’s war had swept us up, me, Snorri, Kara, the boy, Tuttugu, all of us—her sister had set us on the board and they played us. The Red Queen making her moves from the throne about which I orbited, slung north, slung south always seeking to return, and the Lady Blue watching from her mirrors, her own pieces upon the gaming table. Was Kelem hers too, I wondered, or another player?
All day, since near-choking on the blood that Kara’s punch brought flooding from my nose, the dream I’d escaped had continued to run its course, whispering at the edge of hearing, painting itself on the back of my eyelids if I blinked. Now I closed my eyes and listened hard. In my time I’d been both a player and been played. I knew which I liked best, and I knew that learning the rules is a vital first step if you intend to leave the board. One more yawn and the dream devoured me.
• • •
The banqueting hall of the great palace at Vermillion lies below me, though grander, more full, and more merry than I have ever seen it. I’m standing in the musicians’ gallery, a place I’ve crept to before to spy on feasts when I was too young to attend them—not that Grandmother is given to hosting such things, save for the great mid-winter banquet of Saturnalia, which she holds mainly to annoy the pope. Uncle Hertet on the other hand will honour any festival, pagan or otherwise, that gives an excuse to broach wine casks and summon his proxy court to the palace so they can all pretend the queen has died and play out their roles before age diminishes them further.
The hall below me however has more nobles shoulder to shoulder than Uncle Hertet ever attempted to dine, and on the walls garlands of holly and ivy festoon in profusion, berry red upon glossy emerald, chains of silver bells, and displays of swords and pole arms fanning out enough sharp iron to equip an army. I look left, then right. Alica stands to one side, a child of eleven or twelve, Garyus and his sister to the other, with me occupying the gap the twins have put between them and my grandmother. The girls stand, gripping the carved mahogany of the banister; Garyus sits, resting his ill-made legs.
The glittering crowd below hold my eye, the finery of a departed age, a fortune in silks and taffeta, each lord glittering with wealth displayed for every other. Hardly one among the hundreds would be alive when I woke, claimed by age, the children beside me old beyond my imagination. For the longest time I’d believed my grandmother had come into the world creased and seamed, carrying her wrinkles from the womb, the iron grey in her red tresses as ancient as the lichen on statues. To see her young unsettles me in ways I can’t explain. It tells me that one day it really will be my turn to be old.
The feast is almost over, though food still mounds the platters and servants scuttle hither and thither to refill and replenish. Here and there are empty seats, a lord stands, unsteady, bows toward the host, and walks toward the great doors with the overly careful gait of a man in his cups. Elsewhere guests are flagging, pushing back plates. Even the dogs at the margins of the hall have lost their enthusiasm for dropped bones, barely prepared to snarl their ownership.
At the head of the great table, presiding over fifty yards of polished oak near hidden beneath silver platters, goblets, candelabras, tureens, and ewers for wine and water, sits a man I know only from paintings. His portraits are rare enough to make me wonder if the Red Queen burned them. Gholloth, second of his name, a blond giant of a man, sits there—red-faced from the drink now, his tunic elaborately embroidered and blazoned with the red banner of the March, but wine-stained and straining at the seams. On canvas they paint him forever young and glorious as he looked on the beaches of Adora, or was imagined to look. They show him at the start of the invasion that was to tie the dukedom to the Red March throne. The War of Barges they called it because he took his forces on river barges across the sixteen miles of sea to reach Taelen Point. Now he looks to be fifty or more and wearing his years poorly, as old when he sired my grandmother as his own father had been when he sired him. Where the elder Gholloth might be I can’t say, dead perhaps, or a toothless ancient hunched upon his throne with a bowl of soup.
The twins aren’t watching their father though: the Silent Sister is staring at someone with unusual intensity, even for her, and Garyus follows her gaze, frowning. Alica and I join them. We’re watching a woman about halfway along the table. She doesn’t stand out to me, neither old nor young, not pretty, more motherly, modestly covered, her gown a lacklustre affair of black and cream, only her hair sparkles, raven-dark beneath a web of sapphires held on silver wire.
“Who is she?” Alica asks.
“Lady Shival, minor nobility from one of the Port Kingdoms, Lisboa I think.” Garyus frowns, raking his memory. “Has King Othello’s ear, an unofficial adviser of sorts.”
“Elias is watching her,” Alica says, and Garyus blinks, looking across the room to where a man stands by the wall in the shadows, away from the diners, ostensibly filling his pipe. There’s something familiar about the fellow. It’s in the swift and restless movement of his hands. He reaches up to light a taper from the wall lantern and his upturned face catches the glow.
“Taproot! By Christ!” They don’t hear me of course. I’m not here, just a dreamer floating in the memories my blood carries. It can’t be Taproot. This man is in his forties, and the Dr. Taproot I know can’t be past his fifties. Besides, how would my great-grandfather’s courtier be traipsing across the Broken Empire at the head of a circus? This must be an ancestor of his. But just observing him, seeing the quick and bird-like motion of his head as he scans the tables, always returning to our lady beneath her net of sapphires, I know it’s him. I know when he opens his mouth I’ll hear “watch me” and restless hands will conduct the conversation.
“Elias will—”
“This woman is beyond him. —— says she’s here to kill . . . someone.” Garyus cuts Alica off, waving her away with irritated jerks of his over-tight arm. Again their sister’s name escapes me, just a silence where it should sound.
“I didn’t hear her say anything,” Alica says, peering at her sister who is still fixated upon the woman below, her gaze unwavering. “Who is this woman to kill?”
“Grandfather,” says Garyus, half a whisper. “She seeks to change the destiny of our line.”
“Why?” It’s not the question I would ask, certainly not at eleven. I’d be asking where we should hide.
“—— won’t say,” Garyus replies.
The Silent Sister breaks her staring at the woman below to glance my way. For an instant I’m sure she sees me—I’m transfixed by those mismatched eyes, the blue and the green. She returns to her study.
“She doesn’t know?” Alica asks.
“Be quiet, child,” Garyus says, though he’s just a boy himself. He looks serious now, old beyond his years, and sad, as if a great weight has been laid upon him. “I could have been king,” he says. “I could have been a good king.”
My grandmother frowns. She hasn’t it in her to lie to him, even this young when the whole world is half make-believe. “Why are we talking about that again?”
Garyus sighs and sits down. “—— needs my strength. She needs to see, or this woman will kill us all before we can stop her.”
Alica’s frown deepens. “——’s done that before . . . hasn’t she?”
Garyus’s nod is slight enough to be missed. “Even before we were birthed.”
“Don’t do it.” Alica is speaking to them both. “Tell Father. Set the guards on her. Have her thrown in—”
“—— needs to see.” Garyus hung his head. “This woman is more than she seems. Much more. If we don’t know her before we act, we will fail.”
The Silent Sister leans over the balustrade now, staring at the woman with such intensity that it trembles in each line of her over-thin body, staring so hard that I almost expec
t to see the path between them light up with some recognition of the energies being spent. Garyus hunches in on himself, a slight gasp escaping his lips.
Unseen forces mount. My skin crawls with them, and I’m not even there. Down below the sapphires in the woman’s hair seem to return more than the light of lanterns, sparkling with some inner fire, a vivid dance of blue across the blackness of her hair. She sets down her goblet, and looks up, half a smile on wine-dark lips as she meets the Silent Sister’s gaze.
“Ah!” Garyus cries out in pain, limbs drawn tight to him. The Silent Sister opens her mouth as if to scream but, though the air seems to shake with it, there is no sound. I watch her face as she stands, her gaze still locked with the woman’s. For a second I could swear there is steam rising from the Silent Sister’s eyes . . . and still she won’t break away. Her nails score the dark wood as some invisible pressure forces her back, and finally, like a branch snapping, she is flung back, reeling, arrested only by the wall behind her. She stands bent double, hands on thighs, pale hair about her face, drawing in shuddering breaths.
“What . . .” Garyus’s voice is weak and croaky—more the voice I know. “What did you see?”
There is no answer. The silence stretches. I’m turning back to see what the woman is doing when suddenly the Silent Sister straightens up. Her hair parts and I see that one of her eyes is pearly blind, the other darkened beyond any memory of blue skies.
“Everything.” The Silent Sister speaks it as though it is the last word she will ever utter.
“We need to do something.” Alica, seeming a child for once, states the obvious. “Get me close enough and I’ll stick a knife in her.” The illusion evaporates.
“It won’t be easy.” Garyus doesn’t raise his head. “—— saw enough before to poison her drink.”
“And?” Alica turns back to observe the feast.
“The man slumped on the table beside her? He’s dead. She swapped goblets.”
I don’t ask myself how the Silent Sister had known hours before which goblet to coat with venom, or where she’d obtained such a thing, silent and young as she is. She knew the same way the woman below knew to exchange with her neighbour. Both of them carry the same taint.
“Jesu.” Alica leans against the banister, eyes hard. The woman hasn’t moved: she picks a last sweetmeat from her plate as she talks to the man beside her—the one who’s not dead. She laughs at whatever he just said. “So if not poison, then what?”
Garyus sighs, an unutterably weary sound, and lifts his head as though it weighs a man’s weight. “The men I have around me—they’re mine. I replaced Father’s with hires of my own, expensive, but they’re mercenaries of the highest quality, and their loyalty runs as deep as my pockets. We’ll wait for her in the Sword Gallery and . . . she won’t leave.”
Alica raises an eyebrow at this piece of information. A moment later she hastens to the door and raps against it. A man in palace livery enters, pushing a wheeled chair. He’s a solid fellow, watchful, a thin white seam of scar below his right eye as if underscoring it. I’d like to say I would have spotted him as more than a flunky, but I don’t know if that’s true.
The Silent Sister helps Garyus into the chair and he waves to be wheeled out. He’s weaker now, more twisted. It’s more than exhaustion—his sister has spent his health to buy what she needed. A second hard-man waits in the chamber beyond amid the instruments too large to be taken away with the musicians, a harp, drums, long tubular bells. He helps carry the chair down the stairs. Any aristocracy who are staying at the king’s pleasure will be housed in the guest wing, and to reach that from the royal banquet hall requires you walk the length of the Sword Gallery. If the woman is planning murder she must have been invited to stay the night, or else she is cutting things fine.
I wonder for a moment that neither of Garyus’s men are armed—but of course he’s unlikely to have permission to have his own hires wearing blades in the king’s house, relative or not, especially not as a displaced heir. The mercenaries may be paid well enough to risk concealed knives, but they’d have to be damn small to pass unnoticed. It seems unlikely that my great-grandfather or his sire are so lax as to not have regular inspections—certainly Grandmother has become very keen on them in later life. Still, the pair of them could strangle this woman with a cord swift enough.
We walk through the palace, Garyus trundled ahead, rattling in his chair, taking familiar passages that have changed remarkably little in sixty years. Just before we reach the gallery Alica pauses, then the others, then me. The Silent Sister has stopped some way behind us, beside a black oak door. She’s pointing.
“What does she say?” Alica asks her brother.
“I . . .” He seems lost. “I can’t hear her any more.”
The message is clear enough without words, silent or otherwise. We go through and find ourselves in a tall but narrow chamber lined with cabinets, each fronted with thin sheets of Builder-glass, and each sporting a score or more of butterflies, speared through with pins to keep them in place. In dusty legions they haunt the room, the brilliance of their wings muted through neglect, a dozen lost summers impaled behind glass. I’ve not been in here before, or if I have the insects have been removed.
“Did we miss her?” Alica ventures, pulling a small but wicked knife from the pleated folds of her cream skirts.
The Silent Sister shakes her head.
“Gwen! Is she safe?” Garyus tries to straighten in his chair, remembering their little sister. The one who Alica will put an arrow through from the walls of Ameroth Keep six years from now.
The Silent Sister nods, though there is a sadness in it, as if she now shares my knowledge.
Garyus turns his head with effort to look at the man beside him. “Grant, there’s a woman that needs to be killed. She’ll be coming down the Sword Gallery shortly. She’s a threat to me and to my family. When the deed is done both of you will need to leave the palace and my service immediately. You’ll be taking three hundred in crown gold with you.”
Grant glances at the man behind Garyus. “Will she be alone?”
“There may be others with her, but no guards, nobody armed. The Lady Shival is the only one who should die. The one with sapphires in her hair.”
“Blue lady. Got it.” Grant puts a hand to his chin. His fingers are blunt and scarred. “Three hundred? And you’re sure, my lord? Killing in the palace is no small thing. Not an end to be pursued without certainty. Unless your sisters can hide you you’ll be found at the scene.”
Garyus tolerates the questioning—it’s well meaning after all, if insolent. “I’m certain, Grant. Johan, is it a fair price?”
“It is, my lord.” The other man, darker, older, inclines his head. His voice, soft and high, surprises me. “The money will reach us where?”
“Port Ismuth. My factor there, Carls. Within two weeks.”
We wait in silence then, amid the dead butterflies, dry wings unmoving within their cases. Five minutes pass, ten . . . an hour?
The Silent Sister raises her hand. Grant and Johan go to the door, we follow them out, Alica pushing Garyus along.
Double doors lead into the Sword Gallery and here I see a difference between the present day and the gallery of sixty years before. Grandmother has hung the length of the hall with oil portraits of swordmasters practising their art. Her father had his art in iron rather than oils, with a hundred and more swords lining the walls, each pointing to the ceiling, each different. Grant breaks a fine example free from its restraints, a long sword with a blade of black Turkman iron, and hands it to Johan. He takes another for himself, a shorter but heavier sword in Teuton steel, and advances toward the double doors at the far end.
The doors open a second before the two mercenaries reach them. And there she stands, Lady Shival, behind her a maid in royal colours escorting her to her rooms. The lady seems entirely unsurprised to
see two men advancing on her with blades drawn. Her smile, on a face just a few years shy of being matronly, is almost a mother’s, reproachful but indulgent.
“Look at yourselves!” she admonishes, and lifts her hand revealing a small silver mirror.
Johan’s advance is arrested as if he’d walked into something solid. He lifts his off hand, grappling with something I can’t see. The muscles in his neck stand out, corded with the strain. To the left Grant finds himself similarly caught, horror crowding his face as he struggles, his sword hand trapped, his off hand trying to close on something. Lady Shival walks between the pair, leaving the maid standing stunned in her wake.
“Should you children be up so late?” She leans forward slightly to address the trio.
Alica doesn’t waste any time on small talk or threats, just springs forward, knife concealed at her side.
“No.” The lady is faster, a tilt of her hand and her mirror is aimed at the child, stopping her as effectively as it stopped both mercenaries. “And that leaves Gholloth’s twins . . .” She faces them: Garyus hunched in his chair, the Silent Sister beside him. She ignores the boy and meets his twin’s gaze. “We’ve met already, dear.” Again the motherly smile, though I see something harder behind it now. “Quite the stare you have there, young lady. But if you go looking in places we’re not supposed to look . . . well, let’s just say the future is very bright.”
The Silent Sister makes no reply, just stares, one eye pearly blind, the other dark and unreadable.
“This whole thing.” Lady Shival waves her arm at the mercenaries, still struggling, grunting with effort, making quick readjustments of their feet. “It’s very inconvenient. I have to move quickly now, so you’ll forgive me if I don’t stop to talk.” She moves her mirror into the line that joins her eyes with the Silent Sister’s. “It’s a hole,” she says. And it is. In place of the silver and reflections there’s nothing but a dark and devouring hole, sucking in light and sound and air. I feel myself drawn forward, drawn in, the very essence of me bleeding from my skin and pulling away toward that awful void.