Wulfyddia (The Tattersall Trilogy Book 1) (18 page)
Read Wulfyddia (The Tattersall Trilogy Book 1) Online
Authors: Steele Alexandra
“Then
you’ll do it?”
“I will
try to get an audience with the Queen,” Daphne promised. “And if I can’t, I’ll
pass the book on to Dimity or Arthur.”
“Thank
you.” Spencer said gratefully. He realized that it was the first time he had
ever thanked Daphne. It was the first time she had ever given him cause for
thanks, and she nodded stiffly in response.
“I’m
going to fetch the Book. No, Lorna, you stay with Spencer and continue our
research.”
“We
should go with you,” Spencer said, startled that Daphne was willing to return
alone to that wing of the dungeon after what had happened there.
“I’ll be
fine,” she said. “The beast only stalks at night.”
“Yes,
but—” Spencer stopped. Daphne was already walking away, and he feared to press
his luck with her. At his side, Lorna wrapped her arms around herself and gazed
unhappily after her sister.
“I hope
we’re doing the right thing.”
“Me
too.”
Chapter
16
Her wrists were smoking, and the flesh was
red and swollen. She had singed the marks from her arms, breaking Felunhala’s
binding on her. The witch knew of only one reason why her apprentice might do
it, and when the girl raised her head and looked up at her with eyes that were
perfectly dry, and almost inhumanly clear, she knew that Melisande knew.
“Melisande,” Felunhala began, and then
stopped. The girl was staring up at her wonderingly, as though she were looking
on Felunhala’s face for the first time. “Melisande, perhaps we should have a
discussion.” She broke off again, a thoroughly unexpected fear growing in her
gut. She had considered what might happen if Melisande learned the truth, but
she had never expected to fear the girl. Then again, Felunhala also hadn’t
expected to face an unbound Melisande, one who was free to use her powers as
she pleased. And there was something ghastly about the way the girl was staring
up at her, with the wide eyes of a child, even though this was not a child’s
sorrow and it was not a child that had seared the bindings from her skin.
“No.” Melisande said. Her voice was very
high.
“I would like to talk to you about—”
“No. I think you are finished with talking.”
Melisande said clearly. It was the only warning she gave before she struck.
***
When
Daphne entered, there was no sign of the Queen. Dimity sat in an armchair by
the window, gazing pensively into space. Her fine brown hair was swept into a
smooth chignon, and she wore a fine dress of red and black brocade. She looked
like everything a royal granddaughter should be: refined, thoughtful and slightly
austere. Daphne sighed. Getting past her grandmother’s watch dog would likely
prove quite difficult.
“Daphne.”
Dimity greeted her with some surprise. “I didn’t expect to see you. What are
you up to? And where is your partner in crime?” Dimity asked with her usual
faint disapproval.
Daphne
had no patience for her sister’s reproaches today. “I’m here to see
Grandmother. It’s quite important. May I see her now?”
Dimity’s
brows drew low over her eyes in surprise. “You know Grandmother is terribly
busy. You must make plans to see her well in advance.”
“I know
Dim, but I have to see her.”
“Well,
I’m afraid I can’t help you. Arthur is the one who manages Grandmother’s
schedule, and she has no time for visitors today. Even family.”
Daphne
scowled. She had expected as much. “There’s something I have to give her.”
“Oh? And
what might that be?”
Daphne
held up the book with its gleaming cover. It was hard to say if it was having the
desired effect on Dimity, who was always so reserved, but Daphne thought she
might have caught a faint gleam in her sister’s eye. Daphne had used the book
before to get what she wanted, on that rainy morning in the Haligorn with
Spencer. Now it would get her an audience with the Queen.
“If I
can’t see her right away, will you give the book to her, and tell her that I
want to discuss it with her?” Between the sign of the royal archives stamped on
its spine and the obviously magical nature of the book, Tryphena would likely
summon her granddaughter for an audience the minute she received the book.
Daphne would only have to wait.
“Of
course.” Dimity agreed. “It’s quite an odd book, isn’t it?”
“Don’t
open it.” Daphne advised her sister as she handed it over.
“Hm.”
Dimity smoothed her hands over the cover, and then glanced up at her. “Of
course not. I never pry in grandmother’s affairs.”
“Of
course not.” Daphne muttered. She would have liked to have a better
relationship with her middle sister, but Dimity was so
tiresome
in her
perfection. “Well, I’ll go now. Make sure she gets it immediately.”
“Yes. Stay
out of trouble, sister,” Dimity called after her.
“Indeed.”
Daphne didn’t look back at her sister as she left the room.
***
It was only by pure chance that she had
entered the room ahead of her advisors, ahead of Arthur, and seen the locket
first. If they had entered before her, if they had caught sight of it first….
If nothing, she reminded herself. She was
queen, and they would not dream of handling an item from her private chambers.
It was unlikely that they would have taken much notice of the locket at all,
except perhaps to think that it did not seem their queen’s style, but rather
like a piece of jewelry for a much younger girl. Which it had been, many years
ago. The locket was only remarkable when one took into consideration the
inscription and the miniature; otherwise it was merely a trinket of beaten
gold, hardly startling in and of itself. Almost as disturbing as the
reappearance of the locket itself was the fact that the priest, the man
undoubtedly responsible for the delivery of the locket, had somehow snuck into
her audience chambers, right under her very nose.
“I have to get ahold of myself,” she
murmured, and the whisper seemed condemningly loud to her ears. Many guards had
been reassigned following that bizarre incident involving the kitchen staff and
the court jester. It was very likely that interruption of the castle’s usual
routine had provided an opportunity for the priest to enter unseen. Meanwhile her
hunter had been on the job for several days. It was unlikely that the priest
would survive the night. Very likely he would be dead by morning, and her
problems with him. That thought should have eased the tightness in her chest,
but still Tryphena felt as though she could not quite breathe. For years she
had been holding the great wound of her past closed, staunching the bloodletting
and hiding the stains from prying eyes. Now, it was beginning to weep, and
rivulets of black blood, the fruit of dark deeds, threatened to mar everything
that she had worked for.
If she lost her grip, all was lost. She could
rely only upon herself in this matter, and it was imperative that she remain
calm and reasonable. However tenuous her grasp of the situation was beginning
to seem, she had to remain calm and reasonable. All she had to do was wait;
that old man could not possibly outrun her hunter. She just had to outlast him.
The Queen pressed a hand to her forehead— her free hand, not the one from which
the locket dangled, deceptively heavy in her grasp— and she waited for her composure
to return.
When she unlocked her door there was only her
granddaughter waiting. Dimity was standing by the window, with half her face in
shadow and half illuminated by the unexpectedly bright sun. She waited silently
at attention when her grandmother entered. “I have something to attend to,”
Tryphena told her, taking some comfort in the fact that Dimity never asked
questions or pried when it was clear that her grandmother did not wish her to. “You
will remain here.”
“Of course.” Dimity curtsied, a formality
that Tryphena expected even of her relatives. She spared the girl a nod before
moving to leave, but as she turned to go she realized that she was not behaving
as she normally would, and that it was essential for her to behave naturally.
She could not allow that dreadful man to unhinge everything.
She turned back to her granddaughter. “Any
news? Have I received any guests?”
Dimity shook her head, eyes lowered demurely
to the ground. “No madam.” She glanced up at the Queen, and today in particular
she looked strikingly like a young Tryphena. “None at all.”
Reassured by her granddaughter’s cool
certainty, Queen Tryphena nodded and swept from the room.
Chapter
17
Daphne rejoined them in the western
courtyard. The day was still quite bright, but if he breathed deeply enough
Spencer could taste rain. “You gave it to her?” Spencer asked.
“To Dimity,” Daphne confirmed. “My sister will
give it to her immediately. When my grandmother realizes that this was the
stolen book, she will want to know everything. She’ll summon us to speak to
her, and then we can tell her everything.” Daphne brushed a piece of hair out
of her face and squinted in the midmorning sunlight. She sounded confident, but
he could read her nerves in the way she stood, arms crossed tensely over her
chest.
“And you’ll leave me out of it?”
“Of course,” Daphne assured him.
They had no way of knowing how exactly the
Queen was likely to take the bad news, but since Spencer was of common birth
and therefore little more than fodder for the executioner in the eyes of the
Queen, the sisters had agreed to cut him out of the tale as much as possible.
That way, if the Queen decided to blame them, she would be limited to her own
granddaughters, whom she would be hard-pressed to hang. Not that it had stopped
Cornelia’s mother, Spencer thought blackly, wondering once again how a woman
famed for her benevolence could have executed her own daughter. But those were
dark thoughts, ill-suited to a morning that required both hope and courage.
“There goes Melisande,” Lorna remarked
softly. The witch’s apprentice crossed the courtyard ahead of them, apparently
oblivious to their scrutiny. She looked entirely preoccupied, and Daphne chewed
on her lip as she watched her friend.
“Daphne,” Lorna said warningly, but her
sister had already taken a step forward and called out to the witch’s
apprentice.
Melisande spun around at the sound of her
name and seemed startled to see who had called it. Her gaze flicked once,
anxiously, to Spencer and Lorna, and then shifted back to Daphne. She slipped
slowly into a curtsy, and it seemed automatic. She looked dazed. “You’re well,
I hope,” Daphne began, and Spencer wondered if it was as painfully obvious to
Melisande as it was to him that there was something on the princess’s mind. But
Melisande’s eyes were dreamy, and she seemed miles away. Daphne’s eyes
narrowed. “I suppose Felunhala has heard about that cook who was killed.”
Melisande jumped at the name of her mistress.
Spencer watched with some concern as she tugged anxiously at one of her long,
flowing sleeves. “I suppose.” Melisande agreed.
“How has she taken it?” Daphne asked
probingly.
Melisande glanced over her shoulder. “What do
you mean?”
“Well, she is in love with the Fool, isn’t
she?”
Melisande stared dully back at her. “The…
Fool?” Words were slow on her lips today, and Spencer could not quite pinpoint
why, but the unutterable emptiness of her eyes was frightening him in the same
way a naked dagger or a nocked arrow might.
“They were, ahem, seeing each other, weren’t
they?” Daphne glanced back at Spencer, as though seeking his confirmation that
Melisande had told them so not long ago. He nodded.
“Before he disappeared.” Spencer clarified.
“No.” Melisande said shortly. “No. She had
stopped seeing him before that. She found out about him.” She sighed sharply
and turned as if to move around them.
Daphne stepped to cut her off, brows drawn
low over her eyes. “She stopped seeing him? What did she find out about?”
There was a kind of agony in the back of
Melisande’s eyes, as though every moment she passed with them caused her pain.
“He was seeing someone else. Felunhala didn’t think she could compete with
royalty, so she refused to see him again. Then he disappeared.”
“Royalty? What royalty?”
Melisande blinked. “Your sister Dimity.”
Silence reigned.
This time, Melisande was able to successfully
pass Daphne, who stood, stricken. Her dry lips silently mouthed something, but
Spencer couldn’t tell what. His own heart was pounding in his chest. There was
a vise at his elbow, and he realized that Lorna gripped his arm.
His mind seemed unbearably slow, unable to
quite catch up with his pulse, which was thundering away. Melisande’s skirt
swirled in the breeze as she vanished into the castle, leaving horror in her
wake. “But,” Lorna murmured, “but Dimity doesn’t like the Fool.”
The younger sister still seemed confused, but
Daphne must have leapt immediately to the same conclusion as Spencer. “No. No,
no, no.” Daphne’s murmured denials were fervent and anguished. “No, no, no. Dimity,
no. Please no.”
“She has the book!” Spencer remembered
suddenly, as the full extent of the disaster became apparent to him. He could
only hope that Melisande was lying. If she wasn’t, and Dimity had allied
herself with the Fool, then thanks to him she was currently in possession of
the very book they had been trying to keep out of the wrong hands.
“I don’t believe Melisande,” Lorna said
definitively. Daphne, for once, seemed beyond words. She stood, swaying,
exactly where Melisande had left her. “Of all of us Dimity is closest to my
grandmother. She is her right hand.”
“That’s the safest place for an assassin to
be.” Spencer said.
“My sister is not an assassin.” Lorna insisted.
She looked to Daphne for reassurance, but the expression on her sister’s face
gave her none.
“Maybe not,” Spencer said, mindful of the
fact that a commoner accusing a royal of treason risked execution, “but you
must find her and make sure. You can’t deny that she stands to gain much. There
are only three people ahead of her in line for the throne.”
“Father.” Lorna whispered brokenly. “Anise. Eudora.”
“We have to get the book back,” Spencer said
urgently. “Where is Dimity now? How do we find her?”
***
The priest did not realize his mistake until
it was too late. He should have noticed immediately upon his return that the
door of his rented room was not locked, but he was preoccupied, and he had
taken several steps into the room, wasted several precious seconds, before his
mind caught up with his body and he realized with absolute certainty that he
had just walked into a trap. The blade was in his back before he could curse
his own carelessness.
His mouth opened soundlessly, and he dropped
to his knees. There was a steadily spreading warmth on the outside of his
tunic, but the rest of him was suddenly quite cold. It was only then that the
man revealed himself, stepping in front of the priest with calmly calculative
eyes. He did not look triumphant, or even particularly evil. His expression was
perhaps closest to that of a baker in the midst of kneading dough, or a
shoemaker fashioning a sole. He looked in his element, preoccupied by his work.
The priest fell face down, and somehow the
pain of his crushed nose was worse than the feeling of his life slipping away.
He struggled to right himself, to roll over so that he could at least stare up
into open air as he died, but before he could gather the strength he was gone.
There was no last thought, only the urge to roll over and then nothing.
The queen’s hunter stared down at his latest
quarry curiously. For an old man— and a priest at that— this one had been
unexpectedly elusive. He was careful to cover his tracks, acted anonymously,
and blended easily into a crowd. Ultimately, it was his dogged surveillance of
the castle that had proved his undoing. His constant prowls along the outskirts
of Castle Wulfyddia had made him predictable, and therefore vulnerable.
Whatever the old man had been waiting for, he had not lived long enough to see
it come to pass.
Or had he? The Hunter thought not, but as he
searched the man’s body, he could not find the possessions that the queen had
described. There was nothing on the man but a simple purse and a small knife.
The Hunter collected both of those, determined to bring every personal
possession back to Tryphena as the queen had commanded, but he felt quite sure
that neither the knife nor the meager sum in the purse were what Tryphena had
expected him to find.
Perhaps they were somewhere in the priest’s
room? The Hunter searched the little chamber, as well as the hall outside and
the even the street beneath the man’s window, but he could not find any papers,
nor indeed anything that could have conceivably upset the queen so. It was a
mystery, and not a particularly pleasant one. Despite the fact that he had
followed the queen’s instructions to the letter, she would be furious if he
returned without the papers he had sworn to bring back to her, and if she lost
her temper he was likely to lose his life.
Eventually, he had to concede defeat and take
steps to be sure that the priest’s remains would never be discovered. But
before disposing of the body, Fane stared down at him for a moment, musing, and
wondered that these unassuming remains could possibly be all that was left of a
man who had threatened the Queen above all others.
Who are you? The killer wondered. What hold
did you have on her?
And, most importantly, who had the evidence
now?
***
Of
course, she thought with a small smile, there was her own magic. She had begun
teaching herself several years ago, in secret. It had become apparent to her quite
quickly that she had no natural talent for it; just as she had no right to the
throne as Delwyn’s third-born daughter. Nothing had ever come easily to her
save deception. But she had put in the hours anyway, long, painstaking hours
under cover of night. Her progress had been frustratingly slow, but she knew
enough for this. It was her own blood, Lucretius blood, that had bound the
slayer within the pages, and now it was her blood and her power that would
release it. Oh yes, she knew enough to free the imprisoned one, and when it had
scourged the castle of those who had so long stood in her way, she would put it
back where it belonged and when the dust settled, she would be the eldest of the
survivors, the new heir to the throne.
She
hadn’t the stomach to kill them herself. She’d thought she could, but on
midwinter’s night, after the Fool was lost to her and all hope seemed dead, she
had followed her sister out into the snowy forest, with every intention of putting
a blade in Anise’s heart. But she had faltered, and it had become apparent that
she needed the book to achieve her end.
Now, as
she drew her curtains and lit her candles, she had never been more certain of
her purpose. She would not grow old and die as right hand to one Lucretius
Queen after another. She would not allow her inferior to rule her. And she
would see Anise dead before she would see her crowned Queen.
She had
been practicing the spell to release the queenslayer for many months, and now
the words came easily to her lips. Slicing into her own flesh was somewhat
harder, but she bore the bite of the blade and let her valuable blood drip onto
the cover of the book. Initially there was no sign that the spell had taken,
but then the scarlet drops vanished from the cover as though they had been
sucked into the book. There was a faint sound, like a high pitched whine. At first
Dimity thought it was coming from the square beneath her window, but she
realized that it was the book itself, which seemed to be moaning like some
grievously wounded animal. The sound grew in pitch until Dimity could not bear
it. She crouched over, hands pressed to her ears; the pain was excruciating. Just
when she thought her head might burst, the sound died away and the pages of the
book stirred. The creature that emerged was not corporeal. It was mist; it was
smoke. It bubbled forth from the pages, spreading like a stain. Then there was
a voice in Dimity’s mind, high and cold.
You
are of the Lucretius bloodline.
“I am
your savior. I have released you so that you might have your vengeance.”
There
was a form, deep in the mist, a figure that seemed to be attempting to emerge,
but every time was sucked back into the fog.
I
need a body.
“Then take
one.”
***
It was
malice. It was vengeance. It boiled down the great staircase, seeking, longing.
It passed close over the heads of three courtiers in the hall, and they felt it
not, though the rats in the walls were stifled by the force of it. On the
pitched roof above, the castle ravens took flight, feeling a strange and deadly
heat in the stone under their talons. It rushed on, past the vapid courtiers
and their shallow souls. It sought depth; it sought sorrow and the pain of a
secret.
Locked
in her tower, sequestered away but sheltered from nothing, Cicely started and
pricked her finger on a needle. Blood dripped, unheeded, onto white damask as
the all-seeing one froze, eyes rolling back in her head as she was seized by a
vision. Down at the docks, the breeze faltered, then failed altogether,
stalling over an ocean that was deathly in its calm. Mollfrida shuttered her
windows and let the cat in, drawing the beast to her chest, her wrinkled cheeks
white beneath the rouge, tattooed fingers plucking anxiously at his fur. In the
bowels of Castle Wulfyddia, the Beast threw his head back and roared, as the
ghost whirled around him in panicked circles, her fear closing in on him and
provoking feelings he had never known. Her pain was too much for him, too
overwhelming. The Beast pressed grotesque, clawed hands to his face and wept.
And still the darkness hunted, scenting for nearby souls, reaching greedily
into the chests of everyone it passed, seeking a certain kind of heart.