Maid of Wonder (3 page)

This is not true, I know in an instant. The old woman certainly could not have been promised gold or goods for herself, as close to death as she was. But there are many ways to repay a service such as she performed. Who would need to send a messenger like this, with such terrible words for the Queen?

In my mind's eye I see Mistress Maude again, grinning in the Lower Ward. Then, beyond her, hunched in a shawl, I see another bent form, her body twisted with age, her face gnarled and as ancient as time itself.

“Why not ask Mother Shipton to explain her prophecy?” I am startled to realize that I am the one speaking, and all eyes in the room quickly shift to me. It is not my way to assert myself, but now that I have begun, I must finish. “Can we not send a brace of guards to escort her here, or at the very least petition her to clarify the prediction?”

“Mmm,” Beatrice offers in a tempering voice. “That would seem ideal, Sophia, but from what I have heard, Mother Shipton is not famed for her gentle nature.”

I grimace, recalling the same dozen or so stories, handed down through the years, of the old woman's harsh treatment of those who sought her out. “But mayhap if the men didn't offend—”

“Enough!” The Queen's sharp word cuts across the room. “I will send guards, of course, and with strict instructions not to inflame the woman. They will withdraw the moment they feel anything is amiss. I have no interest in having more curses thrown down on my head. But in the meantime I will seek my own answers.” She scowls at me, and I sense the danger in her glance. “Consider this your chance to prove yourself, Sophia. It is beyond time that you served me to your fullest ability, so that all may know that my strength extends beyond the might of my men.”

“Your G-Grace?” I stammer.

The Queen draws herself up, lifting her chin. And in that moment I see her both for who she is now and for who she will become. Tall, with a bearing she has perfected over long and careful years, Elizabeth is strikingly beautiful, with flowing red hair, fair skin, an aristocratic nose, and a firm jaw.
However, it is not her lovely features that will beguile the generations to come, but the legacy of her strength. Her soul shines so brightly, it will be honored evermore.

“The greatest minds of our age will be summoned to Windsor in the coming days,” Elizabeth announces, “put to a simple task. And you, my own Maid of Honor, shall be put to that task as well. I pledge you against mystic and mathematician, alchemist and sage. Because one of you, by God,
will
tell me what I seek.” She nods, warming to the picture her vivid imagination is painting for her. “These few most worthy souls will gather, and each shall be asked, who will die next at Windsor? And when, and how?”

She leans forward then, intent. “And should anyone learn of this fell prophecy, they shall also learn that England's Queen was not caught unprepared. That she is neither weak nor foolish. If it is a death that we can prevent for the good of the people, then by my troth we shall prevent that death.” She grimaces. “But if it is a death that is in accordance with God's will, a course so set in the stars that man has no place diverting it, then we shall mourn the passage of the individual's soul and bury him or her with all due honor. And either way, this nonsense will be done.”

A long silence follows her words.

Finally, Cecil, as if seeing no advantage to arguing, bows to Elizabeth. “Of course, Your Grace. We will begin at once, but quietly,” he says. “There is no need for word of this to get out. Who shall we bring together? And how long shall we bid them tarry within the walls of Windsor?”

Elizabeth taps her chin with a long finger. “The list of
able men is short enough,” she says. “And their answers will be shorter. We will not need much time.” She smiles then, though there is no warmth in it, and turns once more to me. “Would that my own maid succeed where they cannot.”

I feel the weight of her stare, the awesome responsibility she is laying at my feet.

But it is the next words of Queen Elizabeth Regnant, Gloriana most high, that inscribe themselves into my very bones:

“I do not pretend I am greater than the Almighty, to believe I can stop a death that He has sanctioned,” she says. “But though death may come to Windsor, it shall not come for me. I defy God, the heavens, and the devil himself to take me from this throne.”

CHAPTER FOUR

That night, well after the castle has sought its rest, my fellow spies and I sit upon our pallets, unable to sleep. In less than a fortnight I must pit myself against the most revered sages in Christendom, to name which soul at Windsor has been marked for an untimely death. And though this burden lies squarely upon my shoulders, it is one that all the other maids wish to help me carry.

“Sophia, you must take care,” Beatrice says, sensing my distress as she watches me from across the room. “You can see only what you see, as it is revealed to you. If you push too hard, you'll get sick again.”

I smile ruefully. She speaks of an experience I cannot recall, a frenzied dash through the grounds of her ancestral home a few weeks ago, where I ended up in a wild group of Travelers, Egyptians who were illegally living on Beatrice's family estate. There, while I was quite out of my mind with delirium, I was given the obsidian stone that now dangles from a chain around my neck. Since I've had the stone to ground me, I haven't fainted dead away while trying to
invoke the Sight. My eyes become glassy and grey, it is true, but that is an easy enough thing to hide. Usually.

Still, Beatrice is correct. I have already begun to sense a curious pain that builds inside me when I stay too long within the angelic realm, when I demand answers that the angels are unwilling to give. It is almost as if my brain grows too big for my skull and, desperate for relief, tries to push its way free. That cannot end well.

“And you do have time,” Meg says. “It will be another several days more before these few ‘great minds' gather and you must produce the victim's name. Perhaps it will come to you before they descend on our doorstep, and we can send them cheerfully on their way.”

“Perhaps,” I agree, but I have my doubts. I asked the dark angel who would die at Windsor, and received only riddles in response. There is nothing to suggest its answer will change merely because my need is great.

After the Queen's proclamation, my fellow spies and I were summoned to Cecil's chambers and given a new, intriguing task. It appears that both of Elizabeth's advisors suspect that, along with the Queen's invited guests, a raft of hangers-on and villains will descend upon Windsor once they hear whispers of this convocation, frauds fully prepared to predict a dire murder they will then attempt to bring about in return for both the Queen's gold and her favor. It has fallen to the Maids of Honor to keep track of this score of strangers who are expected at the castle, that we might ensure that each of them is watched at all times. Accordingly, Anna and Meg must sharpen their wits, Beatrice must sharpen her wiles, and Jane must sharpen her knives.

And I must sharpen my Sight, that I might see what must be seen—with confidence—in time to prevent disaster.

“It's Maude who has me worried in all this,” Anna muses from her pallet. She is working another of the puzzle boxes given to the Queen by my “uncle” John Dee, gifts of which Elizabeth has long since tired. Anna has solved each of them at least a dozen times, and now she has taken to doing so with her eyes closed. She speaks thusly, her face as serene as if she were sleeping, yet her voice is clear and strong. “You say she was standing at one of the carts that was topped with ravens and trailing boughs of yew. What service is it to her to kill the Queen's horses, though? Yes, we suspect her of brewing poison, but her focus seems primarily to be on her teas, tonics, and potions. Even Jane here has toyed with her wares.”

“Which failed,” Jane says flatly. It is all I can do to hide my grin as Beatrice mischievously catches my eye. When last we were in Windsortown at the herb mistress's stall, Maude gave us a potion to try, which Beatrice boldly presented to Jane as a tonic to ward away men. In fact, it was some kind of love tea, and in the wake of applying it liberally to her person, our resident assassin has never been more popular with the guards. “Once I get my hands on—”

“Nevertheless,” Beatrice cuts in smoothly, “Anna is correct. Maude has hidden her darker nature well to date, but her presence in the Lower Ward today cannot be an accident.” She glances at me again. “You say her cart was part of this strange oppression? That kept everyone trapped together in the Lower Ward?”

“It was like this,” I say, picking up one of the pencils we are constantly stealing from Cecil's office chamber. I move to the wall, not wanting to waste precious parchment, and draw the scene I saw so clearly within the Lower Ward. “There were five carts, scattered around the edges of the Lower Ward, which would be nothing terribly surprising, except that when I viewed them with my Sight, they all seemed positioned to hem everyone in, with Maude at a place of power, farthest out into the Lower Ward.” I mark the locations of the carts, underlining Maude's. “And then, through the center of it all, leading away from the King's Gate and on up through the Lower Ward, there was this . . . thick trail of energy, dark and horrible. I felt quite clearly that this line marked the passage of—well, of evil.”

“You can't get more cursed than that,” Jane says from her corner. Having been born in Wales, she is more familiar than the rest of us with the old ways. “An' now the old woman who spoke to the Queen is dead for her troubles, which is eviler still.”

“Unless she was just that!” Meg stirs in protest. “An old woman, weak of body and confused of mind.” Meg grew up on the streets with her traveling theatre troupe, and is ever defending the common soul to those of us more used to life inside of walls than out. “Nobody among the courtiers recognized this goodwife, and we've not yet had a chance to ask the villagers of Windsor.”

“You'll get no answers there.” Jane shakes her head. “Those people aren't fools. That old woman scared the Queen; not even Cecil and Walsingham deny it. Her own
family would disavow her rather than be called into question by the Queen's men.”

Meg frowns in the gloom, but we all know Jane is right. Elizabeth is both infuriated and frightened, and that spells danger to any who might be held accountable. But there is something more to this we are not seeing, I am sure of it.
Follow the doves,
the dark angel told me.
Follow the doves.

“We must go to Windsor and see for ourselves,” I say, wondering if I can find the dove seller again, or if she has done what her own birds could not, and flown away. “Surely there must be something there that will shed some light on these riddles.”

“And there are three riddles, yes?” Anna asks, opening her eyes to focus on this new subject. “The first, most simple: follow the doves. Well, you did that.”

“But they went nowhere.” I sigh. “Just round and round the Lower Ward, and then back to their owner.”

“And to Seton's horse,” Jane says. “For which I'm sure he's grateful.”

We pause, considering today's tragedy in the Lower Ward. Seton's horse alone survived the poisoned yew. More intriguing, the collapse of the other guards' steeds, even as the old woman was dying on the rushes of the Presence Chamber, sent all of the Lower Ward into scattered flight, villagers racing to get their carts out of the castle before anyone could blame them for the anguished screams of the horses. By the time the chamber guards reached the Lower Ward to question any villagers who might have seen the old woman as she'd entered Windsor Castle, the place was deserted.

So, I was correct. The horses
were
poisoned deliberately. Their violent illness and death created the distraction needed for Maude and her fellow goodwives to slip away from Windsor unseen.

Guards have been dispatched to the town, of course, to see if they can track down any carts adorned with yew, but not even the Queen's men believe they'll find the stall-keepers who brought such a deadly poison inside the castle walls. And I can't point the guards to anyone, save Maude. Worse, I did not see the yew trailing from the herb mistress's cart with my own eyes. I saw it with my Sight, which oftentimes sees both past and present as one. More than likely, Maude hid away the yew once the horses had nipped its deadly branches, and now it is long gone.

“Leave off the doves,” I say. “The other predictions are more important. ‘Death plays your Queen in a game without end. It circles and crosses, then strikes once again.' What can that mean? Will the Queen be attacked during some sort of dance?”

“Or a country game,” muses Meg. “But some sort of entertainment, surely.” She glances up. “The only festival we have coming up is Samhain, but that is nearly a fortnight away.”

“And Mother Shipton's prophecy seems more imminent as well,” I say. “‘A royal house defeated, disaster unforeseen. Death comes to Windsor to court the maiden Queen.' The part about death coming to Windsor, I . . . I saw that too, today. When I was scrying.”

I have not told my fellow spies that I can actually speak with angels. They have seen only that I fall into a sort of
trance where I receive visions and messages. The idea of a true conversation with angels is too odd, verily, for anyone who hasn't done it. It's odd even for me, and I have.

“Ha! Scrying. I knew that was where you were off to.” Jane's words ring with satisfaction. “Next time I'm coming with you. I've had enough of languages and books.”

“Were you scrying outside the walls, Sophia?” Beatrice asks, but I wave off her concerns. She is always so worried about me!

“I was very careful. But don't you see? The words I received in the angelic realm were exactly the same as those the old woman used in her prediction to the Queen. That
has
to mean the angels are finally giving me something I can use—actual information, instead of messages that are little more than a rhyme wrapped in a riddle strung together with a cipher.” I sigh. “What I could really use, though, is a
name
. Then my Sight would at last be an asset to the Crown.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” Beatrice says gloomily, and her words set a pall upon the group. I grimace, grateful for the long shadows in the room that hide my frustration. She means well, they all do, but this is exactly why I haven't told them of the final prediction I received today, that the death I should actually be worrying about is one that befalls a “seer.” They would simply assume the seer is me and try to keep me safe.

But I know the truth of it. None of us will be safe until we know where death will strike next at Windsor.

And perhaps not even then.