Beyond the Pale (62 page)

Grace shut the door of her chamber, leaned against the expanse of wood, and let out a breath that was half relief and all exasperation.

“No more nobles,” she said to the empty room. “No more nobles, no more nobles, no more
nobles.
”

She heaved herself from the door, farther into her room. Strange, but not so long ago this chamber had seemed like a prison. Now it was a haven she all too rarely had the chance to enjoy. A glint of purple glass on the sideboard caught her eye. She aimed herself toward it. Wine. Yes, some wine would be good. She filled a pewter cup and flopped in the chair by the fire.

The sky was on fire outside the window. The Council of Kings had lasted the entire day again. After that initial session of the council, Grace had thought her attendance was no longer required. She had slipped into the council chamber for an hour here and there, to listen to the various rulers make their reports, but especially after her fictional altercation with King Boreas it seemed best to stay removed from the council and to let the other nobles seek her out. It seemed more mysterious that way.

All that had changed three days ago, when Boreas barged into her chamber. Grace had hastily thrown a kerchief over a mortar and pestle on the sideboard. She had been in the act of grinding dried herbs, following Kyrene’s instructions to make a kind of medicinal tea. A
simple
, the green-eyed countess had called it, one to calm a nervous spirit in small
amounts. Or, in stronger doses, to induce a trance, and to make the subject malleable and prone to suggestion.

The dusty-sweet scent of herbs had drifted on the air, and Grace had thought Boreas would surely notice, but he had not. He must have just come back from hunting along the eaves of Gloaming Wood, because he wore only breeches of black leather, tight around his lean hips, and a white shirt unlaced to reveal a wedge of hard chest. A metallic scent had drifted from him. Grace knew it well: blood.

Without preamble Boreas had backed her into a corner, as if she were his latest quarry. For some reason she had wondered if he would try to kiss her, and if she would try to resist if he did.

“Alerain and I are to begin making our presentation to the council tomorrow,” the king had said. “You will attend, Lady Grace, and listen for me, to hear what others say about Calavan while Alerain and I are speaking.”

She had glanced past his heavy shoulder at the covered mortar. How hard would it have been to offer Boreas wine, to slip a few of the herbs into it as she did? No, despite Kyrene’s lessons, she was no huntress. She had forced herself to meet Boreas’s gaze and had acquiesced.

Luckily, Boreas’s task for her had been easier than she thought. Still believing her at odds with the king of Calavan, a veritable parade of nobles had occupied the stone bench beside her at the council and had whispered in her ear.

Boreas was a warmonger, they said. Or Boreas was the only hope for the Dominions. Or Boreas was mad and trying to destroy them all. Eredane would never go with Calavan. No, Eredane was only holding out for concessions from Calavan and would switch its reckoning at the last moment. Even Perridon was about to defect from Boreas’s camp. On the contrary, Perridon was the most loyal to Calavan and had almost convinced Embarr to go with it, only King Sorrin was daft, and danced in his chamber at night, naked and holding a sword, working terrible magics of blood and fire to cure the wasting disease that consumed him.

Before long the whispers had filled Grace’s mind and tangled together like a seething knot of gray serpents.

Eminda held a secret love for Boreas. No, Boreas cared nothing for women, was glad Queen Narena was dead, and
spent his nights buggering young men-at-arms in his chamber. What was more, Boreas had killed his own brother Beldreas to gain the throne of Calavan, and now Boreas’s bastard son Beltan was going to do the same. And had Grace heard how Boreas’s legitimate son, Teravian—who was being fostered at court in Toloria—was the reason for Queen Ivalaine’s abstentions? Yes, everyone knew how the queen of Toloria had seduced him, although he was only fifteen winters old, and planned to defeat Boreas at the council and place Teravian as her puppet on the throne of Calavan.

A knock on the door jarred Grace from her thoughts, and she nearly spilled wine on herself. “Come in,” she said as she stood, then she smiled at one of the few nobles she was always glad to encounter.

“Grace, it’s so good to see you,” Aryn said.

Grace studied her friend. The baroness looked older somehow, more mature. Aryn was wearing an indigo gown Grace had never seen before. The bodice was fitted tight to her slender waist and cut revealingly low. A small cape of white rabbit fur draped her right shoulder, as if cast on casually and not to hide the withered limb beneath.

“I had a feeling you’d be here,” Aryn said.

Grace raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Is Tressa teaching you something you haven’t told me about?”

Roses bloomed on Aryn’s snowy cheeks. “That’s not what I meant, Grace. It was just a feeling, that’s all.”

Grace gazed down at her hands, at her own fingers coiled around the cup, long and slender. “I’m beginning to think there’s no such thing as
just
a feeling.”

Aryn cast a nervous glance at the door, then pressed it shut. She turned back around, her blue eyes wide and earnest, nineteen years old again.

“I’m beginning to think the same thing, Grace. Or maybe I don’t know what to think.”

They sat on the window bench in the failing light.

“I’m not sure I can stand this, Grace. Tressa tells me to do things, but she never tells me why. It’s maddening. But I do them, because I want to know, because I
have
to know, and sometimes … sometimes …”

Grace made a slow nod. “Sometimes you
do
understand.”

Aryn met Grace’s eyes, then gripped her hand. “What are we doing, Grace?”

Grace gazed out the window at the castle below in all its sprawling, muddy grandeur. “I don’t know, Aryn. But I’m not sure I can stop now that I’ve started. The things Kyrene has shown me, about the Touch and the Weirding. It makes me feel … it makes me feel so …”

What, Grace? What does it make you feel? Powerful? Sensual? Alive
? It was all these things, but more. She couldn’t find the word, but a squeeze on her hand let her know Aryn understood.

Grace turned her gaze back to the young baroness. “I think we should tell Boreas what we’re doing.”

Aryn snatched her hand back, her face an oval of terror. “Grace! Please tell me you’re making a jest. Boreas will have us drawn and quartered if he finds out. He’s a disciple of Vathris. You know how he feels about the Witches.”

Grace let out a troubled breath and nodded. Aryn was right, of course.

Now Aryn’s alarm turned to concern. “What is it, Grace?”

“I’m not sure, Aryn. It’s just that I’m supposed to be King Boreas’s spy at the council. Only now we’ve started studying with Queen Ivalaine. I know she has some agenda at the council. But I can’t even get close to finding out what it is.”

The words came faster as Grace’s mind raced, piecing together all the clues and innuendoes she had gathered in her observations of the Council of Kings.

“And I don’t think Ivalaine is acting only as queen of Toloria. I think she’s here at this council as a Witch as well. I
know
it. The Witches are up to something, Aryn. Kyrene keeps dropping those smug little hints of hers.” Her lips twisted in a wry smile. “Yes, I know you have to take everything Kyrene says with a grain of salt, but it’s still clear something is going on at this council, something deeper than what’s on the surface. And the Witches are part of it.”

“Watching,” Aryn said.

Grace cocked her head.

“Ivalaine is always watching. I see her during the council. It’s like she’s watching for something, and waiting.”

“For what?”

However, if they had known the answer to that, they would not have been in this predicament.

Aryn glanced at the window, then gasped and leaped to her feet. “I’m late, Grace. Tressa will be waiting for me if I don’t hurry.”

“Go,” Grace said. She rose and guided her friend to the door.

“What about you?”

“Kyrene said she couldn’t meet with me tonight. No, it’s all right. She gave me some herbs to work with, for making some simples, and I need the practice.”

Aryn gave her one last grateful look, then was out the door and running down the corridor. Grace watched her go, then shut the door, alone in her room once more.

She moved to the sideboard, lit a candle to warm the blue light of evening, then looked at the cloth bundles that contained the herbs she had picked in the garden. She tried to recall the recipe Kyrene had recited to her.
Take five leaves of redcrown, three leaves of hound’s vetch, and a strip of dried willow bark as long as your finger.…

Grace frowned. Or was that
three
leaves of redcrown and
five
leaves of hound’s vetch?

With a sigh she set the bundles down. She knew she should practice. So far all her simples tasted like dirt when she sampled them, and the only magical effect they had was to make her use the chamber pot with greatly increased frequency and percussion. However, the council had exhausted her. She was too tired for spells and simples.

She glanced out the darkened window and thought of the garden. She longed to feel that life again, that energy, to let it fill her emptiness. However, the sun had set, soon it would be too cold and dark to venture outside the keep, and there was nothing living in this room.

But who says you can only feel living things, Grace
?

A shiver coursed down her spine. The thought hardly seemed her own, although she knew it was. Yet it was a foolish notion. Inanimate objects weren’t alive, they couldn’t possibly have energy like the growing things in the garden.

Except you know that isn’t true, Grace. A scalpel can have a life of its own. And a knife
.

She crouched and slipped her hands to the knife tucked into her deerskin boot. Her fingers brushed the smooth hilt …

 … then pulled back. There was another knife she could touch, one that held greater mysteries. She rose, moved to the chair by the fire, and dug under the cushion where she had hidden it. With trembling fingers she unwrapped the cloth until it lay exposed in her hands.

“This is crazy, Grace.”

Even as she spoke she sat in the chair and rested the knife on her lap. It looked like a black serpent against the violet fabric of her gown, sleek and dangerous. In the garden she had sensed so much about the things she had reached out to with the Touch. What might she learn from this? About the hand that had carved the door with it?

Grace gazed at the knife and remembered Kyrene’s words. She took a deep breath. Then she reached out with her mind—

—and touched the knife.

Cold. It was so cold. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t feel anything. Only an icy wind streaming through the very essence of her being.
This is what it must feel like to be dead
. Then she opened her eyes.

The castle receded in the distance, fading in the blue half-light. Snowy fields and stone walls slipped beneath her. She flew through the frigid twilight, over the wintry landscape of Calavan. Tracks and bridle paths twined and untwined below. Villages appeared and vanished in an eye blink. More fields sped by, then a great swath of black flashed beneath her. She saw an arch of stone. By the time she realized it was the bridge over the River Darkwine it was gone.

Now the snow-dusted fields beneath her were barren, undivided by stone walls. They glowed in the last light of day and the first light of stars. She half expected to see her own shadow flickering across the hills and vales below, but she did not, and how could she? Grace knew, even at that moment, she sat in the chair by the fire in her chamber in Calavere.

Where am I going
?

The thought was dull with the chill, and even as it occurred to her a tangled wall rose up from the fields. The
edges of Gloaming Wood. The forest absorbed the lingering light, captured it in the net of its leafless branches, and refused to release it again. Was she being taken into the woods?

No, the ground rose up to meet her. She was sinking. Or something was drawing her down. She floated over a snowy hill, into a dell, and she saw it.

They stood in a circle, as if frozen in the midst of a thunderous dance. Nine standing stones. Each was twice the height of a man, and all were worn and pitted with time. They thrust up from the ground, black and sharp against the sky. That they were ancient Grace had no doubt. Perhaps not as ancient as the forest. But then perhaps they were. Did even the stones themselves remember who had placed them here?

She drifted closer to the megaliths. A tingling shimmered through her, along with the cold. Something was going to happen. Something important. Grace floated between two of the standing stones, and at once she knew this was what she had been drawn here to see.

There were two of them in the center of the circle. She could tell they were both men from their riding gear: leather breeches, woolen tunics, thick cloaks. One of them, the shorter of the two, stood with his back to her, so she could not see his face. The other faced in her direction, but the hood of his riding cloak was pulled forward and cast his visage into shadow. Behind them, on the edge of the circle, were two horses, their reins tied to thornbushes that had sprung up around the base of one of the standing stones. A crescent moon—sharp, pale, and curved as a knife itself—sank toward the still-glowing horizon.

“You’re late,” the tall man said.

Had she had the ability, Grace would have gasped. It seemed he was speaking to her. No, the other took a step forward, his boots crunching through the crust of the snow. It was to him the man in the hood had spoken.

“I came as soon as I could,” the shorter man said. “You know it’s not easy for me to get away from the castle.”

“That’s your concern, not mine,” the hooded man said. His words were low and gruff.