Cobweb Bride (7 page)

And the Duke again began to laugh, starting out soft then harshly, his perforated body whistling with air.

The messenger nodded his head in a crisp salute, and turned his horse and galloped away to relay the message, quickly disappearing into the bluish-shadows and the sweeping line of the Chidair army in the direction of the lake.

Hoarfrost raised his gauntleted hand, stiff and creaking as a frozen haunch of meat, and the stalled army once more resumed movement.

They were heading North, home.

T
he Winter Palace of Lethe echoed with the death rattle of the old Queen Andrelise. All night it resounded, into the dawn hours and the following day. It filled the mind of Prince Roland Osenni and—he had no doubt—the mind of his wife Lucia.

No matter what room he entered, Prince Roland could just hear it at the edge of his auditory sense, the endless breathing, in and out, as though an anvil lay upon his mother’s chest. The weight was pressing down, down, choking her, and yet she breathed.
 . . .

He could no longer be in that chamber of unending death.

Being
there
made him want to scream and do violence to her, to himself. Nor could he concentrate upon any other daily routine.

Instead he walked around the halls and corridors aimlessly, startling the Palace serving staff. Or else, after locking himself in his personal quarters for most of the waking hours, he paced like a caged beast back and forth along a narrow long stretch of room.

Princess Lucia shared two of his meals this day and they ate in grim silence, served by a cadre of impeccable servants who moved in such a funereal hush so that not even their trays clanked; nor silverware or bone china.

Finally, during supper, Roland could not stand it. He opened his mouth, but his wife preceded him.

“What—does Your Highness think?” Princess Lucia said, raising her gaze from the contemplation of a plate of sawdust-tasting soufflé before her. “Was that creature, that man-apparition in her chambers, really . . . Death?”

“Hell be damned if I know,” the Prince replied, watching his own plate of beautifully presented delicacy that tasted like dried straw. Was it soul-sickness and a trick of the senses, or had food indeed become unpalatable?

Her Highness might have dropped her patrician jaw at such language in the dining room at any other occasion. Today she merely observed him.

“I don’t know,” he repeated. “I only know this is interminable. And it sounds callous for a son to say such a thing, but I wish Her Majesty would pass along already. She is in agony, my mother is.”

“I agree.”

The Prince looked up. His wife was looking at him, and her eyes glistened, were full and dark with moisture, reflecting the bright candlelight.

“There must be . . . something that can be done,” she continued.

The Prince frowned. “What do you suggest?”

“Oh no, God in Heaven, no!” Princess Lucia hurried to negate any notion of acts of a dark nature that her words might have planted. “I would never imply such a horror as you might
think
I mean, no. Indeed, how could Your Highness think I ever could? I love her as much as you, with all my heart—”

“Then what?”

The Princess took a deep breath so that her lace quivered around her décolletage. “Your Highness will not like it, I expect. But—I must say it. You must send for Grial. She is the only one who can help, give us guidance.”

Prince Roland put down his silverware with a clank. “I will not tolerate the endless chattering and malodorous concoctions of that witch! Not here, not ever again!”

“She’s not a witch! She saved your son, Your Highness. He would not have been born living, and you know it.”

“The priests at Holy Mass and my physicians saved my son!”

“No. Without Grial, he would never have passed out of my body safely. I would have been dead too.” The Princess’s expression began to take on a feverish intensity.

“Lucia
 . . .” he said at last, this time softly. “I do not want her here. I know you and everyone in this blessed world likes her, and it may be uncharitable of me, but—what she is, everything about her disturbs me. It is unnatural—unholy.”

“My beloved, it is merely very old. Please, I beg you. She is harmless, a truly good woman. Let her come and speak to us. You already have your priests reading the Mass, and surely the Lord in Heaven is magnanimous enough to allow a genuinely kind woman’s folk ministrations down here on earth alongside the holy prayers of his priests.”

There was a long pause of silence, during which Prince Roland could surely hear his mother’s agony-rattle twelve rooms away, drilling at his mind, his sanity. He could hear it resounding in the china and the polished stone of the floor.

“Well, then. Let her come tonight,” he said while ice settled in the back of his throat. “Only this once.”

G
rial was shown into a small room of the Palace. She was a middle-aged townswoman with very lively dark eyes, dressed in what could easily be described as unwashed rags, with unruly and brittle witch-hair—ash and silver and black all intermingled into an uncombed mess barely contained by a knotted multicolored kerchief—so it was no wonder the Prince considered her an unholy sorceress from the forests. However Grial was merely from the depths of another sort—the narrow refuse-alleys and cobblestone streets and grimy filth of poverty.

Grial had prospered somewhat in the recent years from her unusual midwifery and healing skills, and not less from her even more uncanny ability to foretell events and interpret signs of things to come. But to admit need for such extreme services was not easy—most came to her in clandestine supplication, and she assisted with matters that were deemed beyond hopeless by the doctors and clergymen. Healing warts and easing women’s bleeding was rote; healing the mind and easing sorrow, now
that
was a real feat. They paid her well enough so that she could first open her own stall in the markets of Letheburg and then buy a storefront and put up a shingle—though she never seemed to manage a new dress or pair of clog shoes.

Anyone else in her position would have been driven out of town. But Grial was not the typical fortuneteller or herb-and-sorcery woman who spoke in cryptic omens, scowled, and kept to herself. Indeed, Grial was an oddity because, except for her dandelion mess of hair and infernally grimy clothes, she was so
normal
—a cheerful and sociable personality, a gossip, and seeming to be in all places at once over town, friendly to everyone and with an impossible memory for human detail. Wherever you turned in Letheburg, there was Grial, in the markets, sticking her nose into bake and tobacco shops and taverns and arguing with the old and young men who lined up around alehouses, chatting up priests and merchants, waving in good cheer to whores and fine matrons alike whether they knew her or not, and acting in general as if all of the city was a tiny village of no more than ten folk and she knew them all as good neighbors.

Such was Grial. So, why then did the Crown Prince of Lethe find her so unpalatable, nay, terrifying?

The answer lay in himself. Roland Osenni did not trust things or people that seemed too good to be true. When Grial saved the life of his newborn son, he was grateful as any man would be and paid her handsomely as only a prince could. And yet, he had never forgotten the intense look of her dark eyes as she watched the mother and the child lying abed after the difficult birth. He remembered it because he did not understand it, was unsure what was underlying her expression. In that moment her eyes were so dark, so
other
, it seemed to him, despite her warm true smile. They roiled with deep shadows of the forest and old things lurking just underneath the surface. Later, when he considered what it was that he saw, he realized it was
power
, surging, barely contained.

Power that should not have been.

That was so many years ago. And now. . . .

When Prince Roland and Princess Lucia entered the room, Grial rose hastily enough to be respectful, yet Roland thought he saw a shadow of mockery in her movements, in the very slant of her back as she bowed before them and the posture of her wiry tall frame as she stood up.

Grial was not an old woman. Or, at least she appeared not to be. Despite having been around for as long as he could remember, she was ageless or stuck in the ripe middle years, with a rather supple figure and smooth albeit dirt-mottled skin of her face and throat. Her face could be called attractive (if he could forget the power surging behind the surface of those eyes). Her hair—he simply could not understand how it could be so frizzy, so unkempt, as though she knew nothing of a comb. Thank goodness she kept it covered, more or less.

“Grial!” Princess Lucia exclaimed, jolting the Prince out of his unsavory ruminations. The Princess approached the townswoman with sincere joy and took her grimy thin hands in her bejeweled own. “My heart is gladdened to see you, Grial!”

“And mine leaps in my chest, much like a wee baby deer, Your Highness,” Grial replied. Her voice was deep and sonorous. “And speaking of wee babies, how is the young Prince John-Meryl doing? What is he, seven years and ten months and four days now, Highness?”

“Oh, he is a fine and sturdy young fellow, yes, but how did you remember?” Lucia smiled fondly and in amazement.

“Indeed . . .” Prince Roland spoke for the first time.

Grial turned to face him. “Now, how could I forget that child?”

True enough, the Prince thought, slightly mollified. She would not forget assisting a royal birth.

“A child with such squinty but fine pale blue eyes when you could see them open and with silvery specks, and cheeks with four dimples no less, and that ruddy newborn skin with just a smidgen of jaundice around the neck and forehead which cleared up fast, all things be praised!”

Prince Roland felt a wave of cold fear wash over him, returning. . . .

“But I carry on so, forgive me, a doddering magpie, Your Highnesses,” Grial said with a faint smile. “Your son’s a precious angel to dwell upon, but I know you have something else to discuss here, and that’s why you called me over, not to hear my pretty voice, eh? So, out with it!”

No one else but Grial would have the crazed cheerful audacity to speak so to the liege Lord and Heir of the Kingdom. And no one else would get away with it.

Princess Lucia looked at her husband, and joy once more slid off her face, replaced by chronic anxiety. It was as though she was wondering which one of them should begin.

“It is Her Majesty, the Queen Andrelise,” he said, beginning to pace. “She is . . . my mother is dying.”

“Ah
 . . .” said Grial.

“The point of the matter is,” Princess Lucia said, taking a few anxious steps also, “she has been the same for more than a day now, the same unchanging state of severe near-death. I’ve never in my life seen anyone like that—someone who was so ill, so far gone, and yet who is still
 . . . here, in the world of the living.”

“Last night,” the Prince said, “there was a man here. No—not a man. A being. He was dark, all dark. Empty, like a void. And he appeared out of nowhere in Her Majesty’s bedchamber, just at the moment when she appeared to be going at last. But there was no sense of wickedness emanating from him, no deviltry. It seemed he was merely—
not there
.”

“He spoke
 . . .” said Lucia.

“Yes, yes,” Grial interrupted suddenly. “Death was asking for his Cobweb Bride. I know all about that.”

“How did you—” began the Prince.

“Oh, it’s all over the markets and the streets,” Grial said with a chuckle. For some reason such an ordinary thing as a chuckle seemed to lighten considerably the psychic thundercloud that had come to press upon them at the memory of the dark being of the night before.

“It seems, some guard or servant talked to their cousin or sister or two . . . or three. And now everybody’s talking about what happened in the Palace, Your Highnesses. Everyone’s wondering whether it’s really Death that he was, or merely a bad scary dream that somehow happened to a crowd of tired people gathered ’round a deathbed.”

“It wasn’t a dream,” the Prince said coldly.

“Oh, there’s no doubt it was real,” Grial said.

“So then
 . . . you think he really was there? Death was there in the mortal flesh?” Lucia said.

“Who else? Not the Headless Horseman, that’s for sure.” Grial snorted. She rubbed her nose with the back of one hand, then rubbed her palms together, and finished the gesture by wiping them on the apron front of her dirt-covered dress.

“Then what do you suggest we do?” the Prince said, watching her movements with distaste and irritation. “We have no understanding of his demands. I’ve asked my advisors, consulted with the archbishop himself. Who or what is this Cobweb Bride? Where is she? How do we satisfy him? And is it indeed true that he, Death, has somehow suspended the natural act of dying of Her Majesty?”

Grial arched one dark brow and craned her head to the side so that her mane of frizzy hair spilled forward along one shoulder. Still craning her head she raised a hand and suddenly pointed a finger at the ceiling. “What’s that?” she said.