The Kingdom of Little Wounds (46 page)

They speak. They talk some stories, they think they know me. Outside the palace, even.

So here is what I think as Ava Bingen pull me down an alley that end with a bridge:
There can be no more freedom Outside than in the palace.

F
OR the first time in her life, Isabel experiences solitude. Savors it, rolls it over her senses, and gets its flavor. Sweet, bitter, slightly charred, with the metallic tang of sacrifice . . . She is alone, without a lady-in-waiting or a maidservant, a fellow regent or a husband or a physician or a sister or a friend: she is alone.

Isabel Lunedie, formerly Isabelle des Rayaux.

It is a strange sensation to be by herself, and Isabel feels the rush of heat and color returning to her fingers and face while she considers how to put it into words. Funny how she can name flavors but not feelings. To be alone today is to be weak, certainly, but that is because of the — No, she will not think about whatever-it-is she glimpsed before dark Elinor tucked it away.

Instead, she studies the glob of wax that Elinor finally returned to her, once they agreed to the plan put forth by that sharp-faced maid. The wax has gone soft in her clasp, easy to reshape. She works on it earnestly for a while. First she gives it a pointy fish-nose, then rubs that down to almost nothing. With the nose flattened, the cheeks become wider, giving the little thing the appearance of a sheep. That cannot be allowed either, so she works on the cheekbones, giving them more definition, making them look less like a baby’s and more like Grand-mère’s when she gave young Isabelle the sapphire ring that vanished when her fingers swelled for this last child.

Nothing has value,
said Grand-mère,
until it is given away or stolen.
Isabel does not know what’s become of the ring since then.

She rounds down the cheekbones again.

The sorrow-child’s waxen face is getting grubby, gray and pink. And yet it also grows translucent, glowing like amber, hinting at what’s underneath — nubbins of bone, fine strands of hair twining around themselves in order to grow.

Isabel’s breasts ache. She feels a burning itch and a trickle in the part of her that just split open. She remembers that she is diseased. She thinks, also, that there is something wrong with that sharp-faced maid, something familiar — if only she can name it.

When Lady Isabelle des Rayaux arrived in Skyggehavn, she was fourteen years old: fresh, beautiful. Excited.

Already she felt it. From the moment that the lips of the bay closed around the French ship’s hull, as she passed rocky islets too inhospitable for even a clump of moss or a stray ant, she knew this place was her destiny in a way that she hadn’t imagined back at her father’s sun-drenched court. Gulls swooped around the ship and left their pearly droppings as the palace materialized through wisps of mist. It was a dragon crouching, kneeling (she thought) in submission. The spires were elbows, spine, and head. Then came the towers and the long, low body of walls. The gates gaping like an open mouth. Skyggehavn was taking her in, and she realized she needed to be swallowed, wanted, courted, and coveted in just this way.

Her long dark hair whipped in the sea wind. Her soft red heart fluttered in her chest. She knew that, in surrendering herself, she would conquer.

“My lady.” Attendants brought Isabelle below deck to braid her hair. She gazed into a mirror and knew that she looked lovely.

She went up on deck again when her ship anchored in the bay. The royal barge glided out to meet her. She was helped on board and presented to her almost-husband, a thin and sallow lad with sad eyes. Curtsied to his stout mother, exchanged pretty speeches in French as the barge maneuvered around to the long pier.

“Merci,”
she said several times.
“Grâce à vous et au bon Dieu . . . J’admire votre beau paysage et votre belle ville principale . . .”

(
God,
she thought,
for I am such a young thing! . . .
)

In the middle of such a sentence, Isabelle’s father-in-law-to-be — much taken with her, some said to an unseemly degree — swept her into his arms and leaped from the barge onto the pier, where she sank very properly to her knees and thanked him for arranging her marriage.

He bent down and whispered in her ear, tickling words incomprehensible in the accent of this place although they came in her native tongue.

The courtiers applauded.

She will have the most beautiful children,
they agreed.

Isabel, alone, is growing weaker. She has some notion that she should heave herself out of bed and hide this heavy sorrow-child, but she cannot.

She hears cheering outside.

Her last moments, and she is not so alone after all. The court, at least; that vague glistening thing — it will always be with her.

Ava explain that this city be all ways in change, that she have not stepped out in it for months and so it be a-stranged to her. A bridge have fallen here and a new house were built there. Much of our walking is returning to a place where Ava knows some other way to go. Untangling also the moon which move her self in journey over the roofs.

After some time we come up on a long stone bridge that lead to a church. There the walls moan
No Hope
and wind turn to whistles in the spire. Filths fall from Elinor’s shoes while we cross toward it, garbage drop to the water and feed the rats that swim.

No body share the footpath here. They all may be in the palace crowd or in the moaning tower and this be ever a dark place. Ava know her way now.

The moaning grow stronger, then it fade.

We walk through filth again to the house that Ava have sought, tall but not taller than the neighbors, dark and with a tear of black cloth that blow from a high window. A head of stone hangs sculptured by the door, with yellow wires twisted round the neck and bits of glass in shatters on the ground.

This be Ava Bingen’s home.

She tries the door and it is locked. Ava look up at that black cloth and breathe quick in greater fear, but she make a fist and pound upon the door.

“Gerda!” she shout. “Sabine!” Though I should guess that persons with a house marked out by broken glass will not come for shouting.

When Ava knock the door, the head shake as if it warning go away. There come more shouting too, from the place of howls that we just passed; so all the neighborhood does caution us.

Ava make a noise inside her throat.

She jumps up to grab the head. It is the leap of a mad woman. Last embrace of our last hope.

When I fall, the stone head falls with me. We crash bruisingly to the footpath.

Midi stares round-eyed. She clutches her ribs, panting; she can’t believe that meek Ava Mariasdatter — Ava Bingen — has torn a rock from its mooring.

More than that, now I heave the thing up with both my arms and bash it at the door handle. Bash, dash, crash again: the door groans open. I drop the stone head (let it shatter, I don’t care) and shoulder my way in, shoving against a chest and a chair set there to delay intruders. There’s not much in the chest, and even I can easily lever my way inside.

As I am about to step over the threshold, I reach back for Midi. I pull her in after, lest the Dark Countess change her mind and abandon me here.

“Come along — you helped hatch this plan too.”

We walk in together, fingers wrapped in fingers.

The hall is murky; nothing’s lit. It’s also cold. I shush Midi (who never needed shushing before) and whisper not to rattle her teeth; Sabine might think she’s gnashing to make a fight.

At the sound of my voice, there comes a noise above. A cry, stifled. Of a woman or a child? I remember the black cloth hanging from the old third-story window.

I pray that the sound is a baby, a live baby, as I head for the narrow stairs, dragging Midi behind me.

“Sabine? Gerda?” I call them again, though they didn’t answer when I stood in the street. Maybe they’ll recognize my voice indoors. “It’s Ava.”

I hear no specific reply, but the sounds do grow louder as we squeeze up the narrow stairs, winding ourselves around the central spindle and tangling Midi’s fine skirts thereby.

“I’m Ava!” I fairly shout, and hear it echo up and down the house.

There’s not much but a name left to the place, I discover as I tug Midi into the second-floor chamber. Where once Sabine and my father occupied a room full of bridal furniture and a tall, thick-hung bed, there lie now a few heaps of junk and a straw pallet by the fireplace, where a thick woman huddles beneath the scraps of a bed hanging that must have been too tattered to redeem against Father’s debts.

My heart sinks. Nothing of Father left in here; perhaps nothing at all.

The grate holds the feeblest of embers, and the room’s so cold I can see my breath in the orange light. I don’t bother to stop Midi from knocking her teeth anymore. We approach the heap by the hearth.

There we find not one woman but two, when Gerda detaches herself from my stepmother and sits, holding the old bed curtain protectively over both herself and Sabine’s gray head. She peers through the smoky light. “Is it really you, then?”

The place must be too dark for her to be sure,
I think at first — then realize that with Midi beside me, gleaming blackly, I might appear like some attendant in the company of Death herself.

I leave Midi, kneel down. I’m afraid of what I might find out. I touch Gerda’s arm. “Is Sabine dead?”

“No.” Gerda doesn’t move, either to embrace or to flinch away. She keeps both eyes on Midi, who stands as still as if she really is some dark, silent angel of mortality. “Weak.”

“I —” I hesitate, reluctant to make it seem we came only for the baby; but then I realize a good stepdaughter would inquire after a half-sibling, anyway. “I heard she had her child.”

“She did.”

“Is the baby well?” This and a thousand other questions crowd my tongue. It’s ominous that I haven’t heard a cry or coo since coming in. “Did she have a boy or a girl?”

Gerda clutches the curtain closer to herself. She’s shivering like a minnow. “A boy. Klaus, named as planned for his father, though the name might well doom him to the same fate. And us along with him,” she ends grimly, looking from Midi to me at last. “We hung the mourning cloth from the window so’s the neighbor boys would think the master dead and leave us alone. Not but what he’ll be dead soon enough — we hear the gossip coming from the street . . .”

Gerda rambles on, detailing her fears for the future, which are also my own. Midi hasn’t moved in so long that Gerda must have decided she’s just an apparition, an oddity of my life at the palace.

So,
I think,
I have a half-brother, another Klaus.
One of the four who died was, of course, a Klaus as well. But this one — I pray he not be dead. “Where is he? Is he safe?”

“He’s here.” Gerda indicates the heap beside her. “Was whining till he heard you bash the door in, then for some reason he stopped. The mistress must’ve stuffed him with her nipple — though she’s not moving much these hours and don’t have any milk. We’ve been feeding your brother what sugar there’s left in the crannies of bags.”

I clear my throat, delicate as a lady, and peel back the coverings. Cowering beneath the old drape lies Sabine, still blood-streaked and only half awake despite her fear, cupping her hand protectively over a curve that I must take to be a skull. It has been wrapped in a crude form of swaddling, with linen that was probably white in recent past.

“Health to your soul, Sabine,” I whisper as I reach a finger toward that little head. “And to tiny Klaus’s. Health and prosperity.” I touch the linen; it is cold. “I’ve come with a proposal.”

“Y
OU need a
goûter,
” he says, acknowledging her fatigue at last. “You’ll feel stronger once you get something inside you.”

Nicolas must have recognized long ago that Christina-Beatte has no strength left, is surviving only because her ladies and the bones in her gown are holding her up. There may be another princess waiting in the royal nursery, but this one is most likely to mature soon and grant him all he wants. So despite his own delight in prison blood, he will preserve her.