Garrett Investigates (16 page)

They’d remained fast friends until her flight to America. And this was their first reunion since.

She waved him impatiently at the chair until he relented and sat.

“I understand you saved some of the Library,” he said.

“The Enchancery still stands,” she said, not as tiredly as she felt she should. “But how many of the Crown’s Own live?”

“Four or five,” he said. “The youngest in his fifties.” He pressed his hands together, palm to palm. “Maybe one or two more in hiding somewhere on the Continent who has not yet found a way to contact the King. And the King is not eager to let us back in to the Enchancery. As if it could be broken by so simple a thing as a few squads of
Zauberer
s.”

She closed her eyes. It did not keep her from seeing the revelers moving around her. “Less than ten of us. That’s not enough.”

“And so many of the younger students may be corrupted by Prussian ideals…” He let his voice drift off. He shrugged. “There will have to be significant intervention. And they will need to be closely observed.”

Garrett lifted her chin as if he had challenged her. “Have we traded one police state for another?”

Before he could answer, the Russian ambassador, war hero, and once-homicide detective reappeared at Cuan’s shoulder. He set a glass before the Crown Investigator, a second before Garrett, and kept the third for himself after setting down the plate of pastries that had been balanced across its lip.

He extended his newly-freed hand to Cuan. “Sorcerers are always hungry, aren’t they?”

“And thirsty,” Garrett said, picking up the vodka tonic Dyachenko had set before her. “Yuri, please meet DCI Sean Cuan. Sean, this is Ambassador Yuri Danylevich Dyachenko. But don’t let the fruit salad on his breast pocket fool you; when I knew him he was a homicide dick like any other.”

Dyachenko extended a hand. “Always nice to meet another old copper. Did you think we’d live to see this day?”

Hesitantly, Cuan returned the clasp. “As an Irishman, I have somewhat mixed emotions about English rule,” he admitted. Garrett leaned forward, unwilling to reveal just how much of this conversation she was navigating by lip reading. “But I will grant King Phillip this, sight unseen. It would take a damned lot of work to be worse than the Prussian bastards.”

“Even if he wishes to disband the Enchancery?” Dyachenko asked. He looked down at his drink, as if the question had burst out of him unconsidered.

Garrett rocked back in her chair, wicker creaking with the suddenness of her movement. If they had heard of the new King’s intentions via the grapevine…

“Would he?”

Dyachenko shrugged. “There are rumors,” he admitted. “Perhaps it is too damaged to preserve? Perhaps he distrusts sorcerers—just a little?”

She tilted her head and squinted at him. Something about him seemed off. Was he lying?

But he stared out at the dance floor over the mouth of his glass, and she could not read his expression. If an expression he could even be said to wear.

***

The royal couple danced one dance together, for display, and then parted to spread their attention among the eager guests. The room was awash in pale English faces—weak-chinned, snub-nosed, framed in fine waves of fair or auburn hair.

They didn’t really all look alike, Sebastien reminded himself. It just seemed that way when you took a lot of them together without having made their individual acquaintance first.

Despite the hundreds of people swirling through the palace’s great ballroom (and in this room, at least, every attempt at fitting furnishing had been made), Sebastien managed to keep some fragment of his attention on both Phoebe and Abby Irene, while reserving the bulk of it for the king and queen. Mary, he noticed, shadowed one or the other at all times. She was acting as a bodyguard, but anyone who noticed her would see only a tall Negro woman, dressed impeccably, and perhaps wonder if she was an Algerian diplomat.

After some time observing, Sebastien contrived to come near her when she crossed the room. He touched her arm, as if in a chance encounter, and waited for her to turn her ear to his lips. He spoke softly.

“Abigail Irene has agreed to examine the Queen,” he said. “But it cannot be done without the Queen’s participation.”

Mary’s cheeks creased around her frown. “I will see what I can do,” she said. “She is American.”

And Americans were notorious for their distaste for all things magical. It was, Sebastien thought, the Puritan heritage.

He nodded, though, and withdrew to seek Phoebe or Abby Irene.

Phoebe was in intense discussion with a gentleman novelist who Sebastien recognized from his book-jackets, so he joined Abby Irene. She held court at a table near the dancers, Dyachenko and another white-haired gentleman seeming to hang on her every word. But she looked up as he approached, and smiled to welcome him.

Introductions were quickly accomplished, and so Sebastien learned that the new gentleman—Sean Cuan—was one of the Crown’s Own. “If,” he said, “there are even going to be such things in the long run.”

“Don’t be foolish,” Abby Irene said. “We’re British. When have we ever let a tradition die?”

“You mean like burning witches?” Sebastien offered.

Dyachenko touched his throat, where the high collar concealed it. Sebastien could not avoid his gaze. Nor the flash of understanding in Cuan’s expression as he looked from the ring glittering on Dyachenko’s gnarled finger to the one that Abby Irene wore.

As for Abby Irene, she glared at Sebastien, but she could not maintain it for long. “As if there weren’t fools in white robes dancing around Stonehenge every May Day, without even consulting the lunar calendar for the proper alignment,” she scoffed.

He covered her hand with his. “Touché.”

Whatever he would have said next was interrupted, as Mary bent down between them. “The queen,” she said, “requests your presence, Lady Abigail Irene. And that of Don Sebastien as well.”

Dyachenko looked up, stretching out one hand as if to stop them. But then he put his hand down and smiled.

“Your pardon,” Abby Irene said, as Mary took charge of the handles of her chair.

***

Garrett was unsurprised to find that the queen had not gone far. Mary led them just a few feet down the hall, to a little retiring room with a quite medieval character. The stone flags here were softened by rush mats, and the furniture was solid and simple and dark. If it had not started that color, centuries of polish and oxidation had sufficed to change it.

Garrett imagined it was stuff that had been stored under the palace in some forgotten cellar, spurned by the Prussians, until the returning king’s household had found a use for it in desperation.

In any case, the young queen—she could not be more than twenty-five, considerably her husband’s junior—sat behind a small table, her hands folded on its surface as if she were a partner at some firm, reviewing a miscreant employee.

“Come in, please,” she said, when Mary held the door for Garrett and Sebastien. “Mary tells me I need to speak with you.”

She glanced at the wampyr as she spoke; Mary stepped into the room and made the door shut with a definitive sound. “Your Majesty,” she said, deferentially. “We have reason to believe that some sort of hex has been laid upon you. Probably without your knowledge. Most likely by people who do not mean you or your royal husband well.” She gestured with one hand to Garrett. “Lady Abigail Irene believes that she may be able to identify the nature of the sorcery, and perhaps lift it.”

Queen Sofia looked at Garrett steadily. Garrett met her gaze, aware that she did so with the rheumy, clouded eyes of the ancient, and that the queen would be well within the realm of reasonable responses to laugh in her face and say,
This old wreck? What can she do?

But after a long and doubtful moment, the queen nodded. “Will you need sorcerer’s tools? We might be able to find some around the palace. I think there’s a wizard or two who’s followed my husband home.”

“Thank you,” Garrett said. “I’ve brought my own.”

She reached under the seat of her wheelchair and drew forth the threadbare blue velvet bag that dwelt there, its hinges cracking, its clasps the worse for wear. She should have replaced it years ago, she knew, but she kept thinking it was likely to hold out as long as she did, and it would be a waste to replace it with something new when she’d get so little use out of it.

“Mary,” Garrett said to the queen, “has noticed that you have an unnatural hunger for salt.”

Queen Sofia looked at Mary in surprise. Mary nodded. “It does seem,” the queen admitted softly, “that no chef, of late, can season worth a damn.”

“That may be a good sign.” Garrett began laying out her tools upon the table, starting first with the black bag of crushed sea salt. “If you have any thaumaturgy in the family—if you have a spark, as we say—you may be instinctively drawn to a substance that protects you from some aspects of the sorcery. Salt is a common cure for curses.”

“Oh,” said the queen. “What shall I do?”

“Hold still,” Garrett said. And laboriously, feeling the horrid pain of her crabbed and gouty feet pressed against the floor, she grasped the table edge and hauled herself out of her chair.

Mary rushed to support her elbow; Garrett would have waved her back, but the look that Mary gave her silenced any protest. Sebastien stood back, guarding the door, one hand resting on the inside of the knob as Garrett cast her circle round, painfully hauling the table out of the way to do it.

It was not perfect, but it did not need to be. It closed Queen Sofia and Garrett within, and the blood without, and that was the thing that mattered. “Is that quite safe?” Mary asked. “You’ve shut yourself up in there with whatever comes out of her.”

Garret shugged. “I have to be able to touch it.” Besides, it was unlikely to be any worse than the last exorcism
she’d attended.

Leaning heavily on on the table, Garrett fumbled her ebony wand from her left sleeve. The queen’s hazel eyes widened, showing chips of green. “You were armed in my presence?”

“I swore once to defend you,” Garrett said. “Or to defend the Crown. And you are one half of the Crown, your Majesty. I have never been released from that vow, though the Crown’s to me was abrogated.”

The queen sat still in her magic circle. Her back straightened. She was no fainting flower, then. “Do what you will, magician.”

It was consent. Garrett lifted her wand and began to trace the spirals in the air, first chasing the negative energies away from the queen and then pinning them against the barrier of salt to disentangle and dispel them. It was slow, painstaking work, exhausting, requiring great care because the energies were intricately linked with the queen’s own body and generative force. It was a booby-trap of sorts, in its intricacy: hasty work would have ripped the queen’s own life-force to shreds, with results that could range from an explosive event to the reduction of the queen to a mewling idiot.

Garrett thought it was nice work. The effort of only a half-hour, however, for her to disassemble.

Before she was quite finished, someone pounded on the door. It could have been disastrous, because she was engaged in a particularly delicate manipulation, fingers crabbed and forehead slick with pain, but she kept her concentration on the work at hand, and trusted Mary and Sebastien with her back. And indeed, when the door knob rattled, it rattled against Sebastien’s iron grip, and Sebastien held it firm.

Garrett unwound the last bit of barbed and chancrous energy from the Queen’s person, and ground it out against the slender line of salt upon the floor.

“There,” she said. She scuffed the circle open with one pain-stabbed foot, and heavily made her way back to her chair. “That was hairy. But that should repair things. Sebastien, let that in, whoever it is.”

Unceremoniously, the wampyr removed his hand from the door. Mary moved to intercept whoever barreled through; the arm her hand closed on was that of Yuri Dyachenko.

“Abigail Irene,” he gasped. “You must not touch that sorcery—”

“It’s trapped,” Garrett said calmly. “I know. Journeyman work, but quite solid. I dealt with it.”

Dyachenko gasped. He leaned back against the doorframe. “I thought we were all dead of backlash,” he said. “I came as soon as I realized what you intended.”

“But why would anyone poison the Queen of England? Except the Prussians,” Mary amended. “Are you a sorcerer? How do you know that?”

Dyachenko sighed. “I know it,” he said, “Because I am the Tsarina’s emissary, and sometimes diplomats know things. Like where to grow the best plants, for example. Did she send it herself?”

“I didn’t recognize the sorcerer’s energy signature,” she said. “Your Tsarina?”

The Russian nodded, lips thinning. “She’ll kill me now.”

Sebastien reached out a hand and laid it on Dyachenko’s arm. “Only if you go home.”

***

When she was no longer pale and shaking with release, and the cold sweat had been dabbed from her brow, Queen Sofia took Mary and left Garrett and Sebastien alone with Dyachenko while she went to speak with her king. When she returned, Phillip was with her. Mary remained at their side.

Phillip paused within the door, crowding the little room with the weight of his presence. He held his wife’s hand in his own white-knuckled one. When he came before Garrett, he bowed, shocking her.

He glanced at the queen. The queen nodded.

“Lady Abigail Irene. Once again, at great personal risk, you have been of service to us.”

She slipped her wand into her sleeve, aware that his eyes followed the gesture. But he said nothing about it, just continued, “Mary explained what you accomplished here tonight. You have saved my queen, and quite possibly my kingdom. And it seems to me that I have been churlish in my appreciation of your prior acts, when they have prevented my kingdom being passed to a collateral relative.

“You have also kept safe our royal libraries once housed in the Enchancery. We understood this before, but we did not understand fully what it implied. We are given now to understand that those books you preserved are priceless and irreplaceable relics of the Crown’s Own. For this great service, we commend you. And furthermore we find that the position of Crown Investigator was unduly stripped from you, and we would reinstate you to that organization, under the rank of Commander of the Crown’s Own.”