The Twelve Kingdoms: The Mark of the Tala (31 page)

Ursula shook her head, seeming to notice her cold hands for the first time, because she rubbed them vigorously together, then stood and paced to the fireplace, holding them out to the fire.

“She’s not wishing—she simply said what she believed to be true. Andi has changed. Whatever she’s gone through, she’s . . . more than what she was.”

“How?” My throat felt raw. It bothered me how much I ached to know. I’d hated that she’d been forced to marry that demon spawn, hated that she’d done it to rescue me. I didn’t want her to change. All I wanted was to go back and make it so none of this ever happened.

Ursula gave me a wry look over her shoulder. “She’s uncannily like our mother now.”

“I don’t remember her. You know that.” Hard to remember a woman who died giving birth to you.

“I do.” Ursula spoke softly to the flames. “And Andi has that about her now. Something witchy. I saw her do things . . .” She shook it off. “Hugh told her you were with child because she didn’t want to come with us and he thought that she would do that for you.”

I scoffed at that, but she ignored me.

“Then, after he . . . Afterwards, I told her it had been a lie and she got that look in her eye—you know how she sometimes did? Like when we argued with Father that Hugh was for you and not for me. And she said, ‘Pairing either of them with anyone else would be an exercise in futility. This is how it will be.’ ”

I remembered it word for word, just as Ursula did. Andi had always hung in the background, preferring to be invisible, but she’d stood before our father—who’d been so, so angry that my cursed face had distracted the match he’d planned for his heir— and told him what he wanted was futile.
Nobody
told High King Uorsin what he wanted was futile.

No wonder he’d been so angry with her.

He’d recognized her disloyalty to the kingdom and the family long before anyone else. Maybe he’d recognized her murderous heart when I had not.

“She was like that, only more now,” Ursula continued, as if I’d replied. “More confident. She said your daughter would bear the mark and—”

“Whatever
that
means.”

“Whatever that means,” Ursula agreed, “and that you should send the girl to her. That your daughter will need what she can teach her.”

“Is she out of her mind?” Ursula didn’t answer me, so I scrabbled off the high bed in a tangle of skirts and grabbed her by the arm. Her metal-embedded leather sleeve was still icy wet from the gale outside. “Why in Glorianna’s name would I trust Hugh’s child with his murderer?”

“I’m just passing along the message, Amelia.” Her remote calm made me want to grind my teeth, as it always did. Princess Ursula the Heartless, they called her. No man would ever have her because she loved her sword the most.

“Then tell me the third thing and go.”

“She said to find the doll our mother left you.”

“Doll? What doll?” I shook her arm. The whole thing enraged me. Why would she taunt me in my grief with all this nonsense?

Ursula looked down at me and gently peeled my clenched fingers off her arm. “I don’t know, Ami. She gave me the same message. Remember that horrible little hair doll Andi always kept, on the high shelf in her room?”

“No.” I spat it out, like I wished I could spit out all this rage. But I did remember. She’d let me play with anything of hers but that. It was ugly anyway.

“She took it with her, I guess.”

That surprised me. Andi had fled Ordnung disguised as one of my maids just after the Tala attacked. She’d been crazy acting, screaming about dogs howling. I didn’t think she’d taken much. She’d been so heartbroken, so afraid our father would kill her mare. She loved that horse. More than she loved me. If she’d ever loved me. I hardened my heart against the sympathy. I should be more like Ursula. Funny, since now I’d be a widow—my bed as cold as my spinster sister’s. So ironic.

“So?”

Ursula sighed, the hard smell of her impatience hitting me. She’d delivered her messages, done the requisite comforting, and was ready to be on her way.

“So, just that. Andi thinks our mother made each of us a doll and that we need them. She said to find yours.”

“Hard for a dead woman to make a doll.”

“I said the same thing, but I had a lot of time to think on the journey here.” Ursula turned her head and pinned me with a pointed look. “I remember now—her making it while she was pregnant with you. She spent months on it. Singing and talking to you. I know it’s a sorrow to you that you never knew her, and maybe I should have told you this before now, but she loved you and talked to you all the time. Maybe some part of you knows that, deep inside.”

“I don’t know that.” It hit me then, unexpectedly hard, and I sank to my knees, not feeling the warmth of the fire. I was all alone now, with no one to love me. Not my mother, not Hugh, not even Andi. The pain of them all mixed together and a high keening sound rose from my throat. The people of Avonlidgh might not cry out at the ravages of death, but I was a child of Mohraya, a daughter of Glorianna, and we do wail out our grief.

“Amelia . . .” Ursula put her hand on my shoulder.

“Just go. Leave me alone for a while.” I sounded like I was begging her. In fact, I was. I couldn’t bear for anyone to see me this way. So lost and broken. “Dulcinor can show you your rooms.”

Another person might have argued. Andi likely would have, as much as she hated my hysterics, but Ursula always respected someone’s desire to be alone. Without another word, she left, softly pulling the door to behind her.

I sat on the floor in front of the fire, my dry eyes baking while soothing tears remained in some distant, cutoff place. Alone.