Chantress Alchemy (23 page)

The scrying hadn’t told me much, but thankfully it hadn’t done any harm, either. Which meant that I could trust Sybil’s good intentions. She wasn’t working black magic through me; she was truly trying to help.

What I wanted to know now was this: Did she have any other magic to offer me? Something stronger than scrying? Something that would help me foil Wrexham’s dreadful plans? Something that would allow me to clear Nat’s name?

First thing tomorrow, I would find Sybil and ask.

Exhausted in body and mind, I eventually sank into a deep sleep. When I woke, it was almost noon, and Margery was out. Given her distress at my wanderings yesterday, I suspected she wouldn’t be gone for long. But if I was quick, perhaps I could dash out to see Sybil before she returned.

I hurried into my clothes—the blue woolen skirts and bodice that I had worn on my travels, now cleaned and pressed. But when I slipped into the vestibule and tried to open the outer door, it wouldn’t budge.

Outside I heard voices.

I pounded on the door. “It’s the Chantress. Let me out!”

Metal clanked. The voices grew louder. But no one answered me.

A good quarter hour later, I was still calling for help when the door opened sharply, almost knocking me down.

“My lady Chantress.” Wrexham’s enormous frame filled the doorway. Behind him, out in the corridor, stood a line of men with
pikes and swords. I stepped back, and he pushed the door shut behind him. “I hear you have been making trouble for the guards.”

The mere sight of him filled me with loathing. “I want to go out.”

“You will stay here until Walbrook is found.”

So Nat was still free? Relief washed over me—and then fear, for this was only the first day, and the hunt was far from over.

I have to get help from Sybil.

“And you will have no visitors,” Wrexham went on, “until we are certain the danger is over.”

No visitors? “You mean you’re locking me away?”

“I am protecting you, Chantress. The Council agrees with me on this: you are young and confused, and for your own safety we must guard you until all danger is over.”

“And the King? Does he agree too?”

“The King is not well, but I have explained matters to him,” Wrexham said carefully. “He agrees we must keep you safe.”

His eyes didn’t quite meet mine, and that gave me hope. Perhaps the King did not know that I was being treated as a captive. “I want to see the King myself.”

Even this small protest made anger flare in his eyes. “I have already told you, Chantress: you will not be seeing anyone.”

“I insist.”

“You will do as you’re told!” His fist flew past my face and slammed into the wall beside me.

His rings splintered the wood. They could so easily have scarred my skin. Shaken, I backed out of his reach.

He took another step toward me, fists still bunched, the
knuckles on one hand bleeding. “My wife will not disobey me.”

My wife.
The words made me sick. But I did not want those rings to split my face. Though it made the bile rise into my throat, I bowed my head to him. “Yes, my lord.”

His breath rasped. “That is better.”

I must not raise my head. I must not look him in the eye.
Instead, I stared down at his huge hands, at the blood on his knuckles, at the golden hairs on his fingers, at the gaudy rings that glinted in the light. And that’s when I saw the truth: Only one of his rings—the pearl one—bore a conventional jewel. The other stones, though beautiful, were something else entirely.

They were the stones of dead Chantresses.

My breath stopped.

I shut my eyes. The crazed pattern of cracking on the stones was unmistakable, and so was the odd way that the light refracted inside them. I’d only seen such a thing once before, in Lady Helaine’s stone after she died, but I had never forgotten it.

It was all I could do not to reach for my own ruby, slung under my bodice on its long, thin chain. It, too, had a crack in it—a different pattern, signifying that I had lost the power to do Proven Magic yet was still living. Would it, too, decorate Wrexham’s fingers one day?

My head was still bent when I heard Wrexham heave the door open. At the sound, I sprang forward, hoping to catch the door before it closed.

Wrexham was too quick for me. The door slammed in my face.

“Bar the rooms shut!” he commanded the guards. “For her own safety.”

The bar came clunking down.

†    †    †

I was pacing the room, caught between fear and fury, when the door opened again. Margery walked in past the guards, an enormous bundle of bloodred cloth in her arms. The moment she was through, the guards slammed the door shut again.

I looked at Margery. “So they’ll let you in and out, but not me?”

Pink-faced, Margery hugged the bundle closer to her. “I had duties to see to, my lady.”

Duties that included reporting to Wrexham, no doubt.

“And those men out there are only trying to do
their
duty,” Margery added. “My lord Wrexham gave strict orders to them. You’ll find he guards his possessions most carefully, my lady.”

His
possessions
? Did she mean me?

“When the Countess was alive, he never let her stir without guards at her side.” Margery spread the cloth out on the bed, her back turned to me.

I didn’t like what I was hearing. “You mean Wrexham’s wife? She never went out on her own?”

“No. And by the time I served her, she mostly kept to her rooms.”

“Was she ill?”

“No.” Margery’s hands stilled over the cloth. “Just . . . fragile.”

A fragile woman, completely under Wrexham’s brutal control.
Something made me ask the question: “Margery, you never told me: How did she die?”

“She had a bad fall, my lady.” She kept her back to me. “But we shouldn’t speak of such sad things. It will not make your confinement any easier to bear. Let us turn to more cheerful subjects.” She turned, tugging out a length of the cloth to show me. “Only look at this: the very best Venetian silk, and there’s enough to make an entire gown. My lord Wrexham gave it to me this morning—”

So she
had
seen Wrexham. And his hands, covered in dead Chantresses’ stones, had touched this cloth. I looked at the cascade of shining silk with revulsion.

Margery faltered as she took in my expression. “It’s a gift for your betrothal, my lady.”

“I do not accept it,” I said.

“But you must, my lady,” She fingered the cloth anxiously. “My lord Wrexham will be most offended if you do not. He says you must be properly dressed—”

“Because I am his possession?” I said softly.

The cloth fluttered down from Margery’s hand. Her face was carefully blank. “My lady, it is the very best silk. And the color suits you. Only allow me to make it up, and you will see—”

“I tell you I will not wear it.”

She looked at me for a long moment, her face drawn. Then the blank mask came down. Without another word, she scooped up the cloth and removed it to her room, out of sight.

†    †    †

When Margery returned, her hands were empty, and there was no more talk of Wrexham or silk or betrothals. Indeed, for most of the afternoon there was hardly any talk at all. Margery busied herself about the room, and I sat silently by the window, blindly turning the pages of a book, seeing Wrexham’s rings in my mind’s eye.

I listened to every sigh and sound and squeak in the room, willing them to become music, to become magic. If determination and desperation sufficed to summon song-spells, I would have had them at my beck and call. But it seemed that Wild Magic could not even be bothered to toy with me today. Just once, when I leaned my head against the drafty window frame, did I hear a single shaky note on the wind. And it was gone almost as soon as it came.

Worn out by listening, yet unwilling to stop, I lost all track of time that afternoon. I only knew that whenever I looked up, Margery’s watchful eyes were on me.

Something, it seemed, was bothering her, and the longer I stayed at the window, the more restless she became. Perhaps it was only the dress that was on her mind, but I found myself tensing, wondering what else might be in store for me.

“Won’t you eat, my lady?” she asked, not once, but twice, and then again.

Each time I turned her down. Even as the light began to fade from the sky, I continued to sit at the window, looking out at the garden, where soldiers paraded. Did their maneuvers have something to do with the hunt for Nat?

With my eyes I traced the boundaries of the garden and what I could see of the walls of Greenwich Park.
Let Nat escape
, I prayed.
Please let him escape. And let me find a way to reach Sybil. . . .

“You really must eat something, my lady,” Margery said once more as she lit the lamps. “Such a beautiful platter they sent up for you, and you haven’t tasted anything on it.”

The platter overflowed with delicacies from last night’s banquet. Merely glancing at it made me sick. “No, thank you.”

“Just a bit of the roast chicken,” Margery suggested, “or a few of the sugared grapes . . .”

“No, thank you,” I said again, this time more forcefully. “I don’t want anything.”

“But you must eat.” Margery looked pained. Was she hoping that food would sweeten my temper, and make me change my mind about the silk? “I remember the Countess—”

“Enough, Margery.” I couldn’t bear to hear another word about Wrexham’s first wife. “I’m nothing like your Countess. I’ll never be like her.”

“But that’s just it, my lady.” Margery’s voice was sharp with anxiety. “You
are
like her. She used to stand by the window, just like that, and she wouldn’t eat either. That’s how she became so frail. She wasted away, my lady; she had no strength to stand up when he—”

She stopped abruptly.

“He?” I repeated. “You mean Wrexham? He did something to her?”

She shrank back. “I oughtn’t to have said anything, my lady. Please, please don’t tell him what I said.”

The dread in her eyes horrified me—not only for what it told me about Wrexham as a master, but also for what it told me about myself. In all the time that I had feared Margery, I had never once stopped to think that she, too, might be living in fear. I had never tried to step into her shoes, never wondered if she served Wrexham because she had no other choice.

“I promise I will not say anything, Margery.”

The naked relief in her face shamed me.

“Would he punish you, then?” I asked. “If he knew?”

A mute nod.

I took a deep breath and left my post by the window. “Then we’ll have to do everything we can to keep you safe from him.”

Her mouth trembled. And then, impossibly, my stoic maid began to cry.

“It’s Mam I worry about,” she choked out, so soft I could barely hear her. “Mam and the girls. My lord Wrexham said they’d be fed if I pleased him, but he’ll see them starve if I don’t. And Mam’s been ill, and the girls are so young, and I haven’t known what to do . . .”

My own throat tightened. I had thought myself powerless, but Margery was vulnerable in ways I hadn’t even dreamed of. I felt as if I were seeing her for the first time. Behind her implacable mask was a girl who was younger than I’d thought, perhaps even younger than me—young and scared and worried out of her mind.

The painful whisper went on. “And he hasn’t been happy with me as it is, for I haven’t had much to report—” She shot me a panicked look. “I mean, I—”

“Never mind,” I said. “I already know.”

“Know w-what?”

“That you’re Wrexham’s spy.”

Her face went an ugly red.

“One of his spies, that is,” I added. A spy who had been forced into the job. A spy who I might have turned into an ally, if I’d been wiser and more compassionate. But maybe it wasn’t too late. . . .

“I expect it wasn’t a job you much wanted,” I said. “But never mind. Your secret is safe with me.”

She gaped at me.

“Tell me,” I said. “Have you had anything to eat today?”

“N-not much. But—”

“Then let’s both eat.” I broke off some of the sugared grapes and handed them to her. “You’re right: we need our strength. And while we eat, we can talk.”

“Talk?” she said faintly. “About what?”

“Well, about the cloth, for one. The silk.” I took some grapes myself. “Will Wrexham be angry with you if I don’t wear it?”

“Very much so, my lady. I’m to see that you are turned out correctly, so that you are a credit to him. And I was told particularly to have the silk made up for you right away.”

“I see. Well, we can’t have him punishing you for that.”

“You mean you’ll wear it?”

I popped a grape into my mouth, savoring its sweet coating and tart juice while I considered the matter. “I’ll have it made up, at least. That should satisfy him.”

“Yes, my lady.” She hesitated. “At least—for a while.”

For a while, and what then? I saw again Wrexham’s fist whistling past my face. If he became my husband, I might not last as long as Margery’s Countess had.

I must not let that happen.

“Do what you can to see the work goes slowly,” I told Margery. “Now, about your mother. I want to help you there—”

Hope suffused her face. “With your magic?”

What could I say? It was impossible to tell her the truth, not when there was a risk she might turn around and tell everything to Wrexham. “Yes.”

“You would help her? Truly?”

I nodded, praying I wasn’t building up false hopes. “I’ll do everything I can, Margery. I give you my word.”

“Oh, my lady.” She was trying to keep back tears. “You aren’t anything like he said. You’re not high and mighty, or mad for power, or anything like that. It was all lies, wasn’t it?”

“That’s what Wrexham told you about me?”

She nodded. “And I believed him. But you’re not like that at all.”

“I should hope I’m not,” I said lightly, trying to conceal my distress. How many other minds had Wrexham poisoned against me?

Something clanked on the other side of the door.