Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles (38 page)

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Authors: Katya Reimann

BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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“Gaultry!” Someone shook her, hard, banishing the vision. “Gaultry, you’re having a nightmare! O Llara—wake up!” Tullier, come into her room from his sleeping-place in the salon. Despite the interruption, the nightmare mantle that bound her did not release. A red veil of torment blinded her. She whimpered, succumbing—
A painful blow rocked her back into the mattress. With that cleansing shock of pain, she came abruptly awake.
“Gods save me,” she gasped. Her eyes opened to blackness. For a moment she could not be sure she was truly awake, until she felt Tullier moving next to her on the bed, hesitating before hitting her a second time.
“Gaultry.” His voice was a frightened whisper. “Are you awake?”
In the dark, she became gradually aware of her surroundings. Wetness sheeted her. Her bedclothes were wrapped around her body like winding sheets, an echo of the nightmare vines. Her room, except for the high dim squares of its pair of transom windows, was black as a pit, suffocatingly warm. Her body quivered with unreleased tension. The spectral press of thorns against her temples seemed to bite her still.
“Get a candle,” she quavered, regretting she’d spoken for the fear her voice revealed.
“What happened?” Tullier blundered over something in the dark as he searched for the tinderbox. “I smell blood.” He groped for her in the dark.
“I’m fine.” She realized even as she spoke that this was true. Nothing was wrong save for the wet of the sheets. “You want to know what happened? I can barely guess myself.”
All answers are found in me
. The voice from the hill rang as clear in her mind as if she heard those words spoken afresh.
As she came more fully awake, splintered images intensified rather than faded. That distant, reverberating voice. Likewise the unseen stalker who had driven her up the stairs, the enemy who had waited outside her door as the vines strangled her in her own bed. Neither the moment when she had invoked her power to break free from the palace of dreams, nor the subsequent moment in her own bed when she had panicked and failed to invoke it, had been figments of her imagination. “Someone set a spell against me as I lay asleep. It tried to trap me in my dreams. Or, that failing, to leave me dead.” Despite the room’s heat, she shivered with reaction. The gods had been watching out for her. When her own efforts had failed, they had brought Tullier … .
She did not want to believe that. She could not believe that. The gods kept their own counsel. They would not have intervened. She could believe—she would believe—that Tullier had heard her calling to them, but nothing more. To imagine more—that begged divine rebuke.
“Wait,” she said, as Tullier came near with the light. She fumbled for her shirt. “Now come.”
Flickering candlelight touched the bed, revealing carnage. Her stomach heaved, and only an aggressive swallow saved her the humiliation of puking. Blood, not sweat, had caused the wetness all around her on the sheets. Tullier almost dropped the candle when he saw her. “You’re soaked in blood. Where are you cut?”
In feverish moments, they determined that she was bodily unharmed.
Yet the blood on the sheets and her skin could only have been her own.
Gaultry, harrowed, leaned against the bedstead. “This is ghastly. And now we’ve got laundry to clean. We can’t leave it for the morning woman to find.” For one hysterical moment, she imagined calling Lily to aid them. This was, after all, the area of her expertise.
Your Highness
, she could say.
Won’t you help us, please, with our dirty bedclothes?
Tullier set to work tearing the soiled sheets off the mattress. “How did you know it was a spell?” he demanded. “Even before I brought the light?”
“The thing holding me couldn’t have been anything but magic,” she answered. “I kept on breaking through parts of the spell, even if I couldn’t wake myself up.” Parts of the spell. That was not right. Spells. The dream had been in separate parts, with at least three distinct focuses of enmity. The fantastical pursuit, driving her deeper into the intricate palace-maze, had been clearly distinct from the grey encounter with the figure on the distant hill. The last part, the violent attack on her person—that had been something else again. The color signature of the vine, so dark green and angry, came to her once again. Three spells? Three attackers? She fought to suppress a second round of shivering.
“I did a conjuring to save myself,” she said. “That I’m sure was real magic.”
Tullier held a sheet in front of the candle. The light shone weakly through the coarse material. Backlit, the blotting where the material had touched Gaultry’s body showed as a bright color, crimson red. “There’s not a dangerous amount of blood here,” he said analytically. “Despite how it appears.”
You should know
, Gaultry thought.
You’ve had plenty of training on the detail work of corpse disposal.
She said aloud only, “The last part of the spell was supposed to kill me.”
The boy hesitated. “Maybe. But the blood here could be your body’s own reaction, casting out the invader’s spell, and you do not seem otherwise harmed.” He stared for a moment into the darkness, then his face lit. “Llara in me, I’ve seen you bleed this way before. Your clothes were like this the day you reclaimed your Glamour-soul from my body. Were you calling your Glamour to escape the dream, or just your hunter’s strength?”
“My Glamour,” she said shortly, uneasily wondering if this child who had never been a child could be right. She had consciously owned her Glamour power for such a little time, and for so much of that time, that
power had been inoperative, or split into weakened pieces. Having at long last fully reclaimed it, she was frightened to use its power. The physical cost of drawing on her Glamour-soul unnerved her. She could toy and play with the edges of her golden strength, but to attempt to use it in a serious way—no: its strength rushed like a storm to the point of her will, terrifying and dangerous. Would it continue always to overwhelm her when she reached to use it, or would she learn to master its full strength? “I used my Glamour, yes, but I’m still certain that at least part of the dream had the power to kill me.” She shuddered. “In my sleep, I don’t think I had power enough to turn it from me. If you hadn’t woken me …”
Tullier’s eyes looked large in the candlelight. Large, young, and full of sudden doubts. Concern mingled with pain spasmed on his face before he could turn away. “I don’t know what woke me,” he whispered. “I barely heard you. Gaultry, if you had died—”
Turning abruptly, he busied himself with the bed.
Watching him work, stripping the layers from the castle-made bed, she pictured the tendrils of creeper that had bound her, rustling against those sheets. The spell had been very strong. So strong—an idea came. Pushing Tullier aside, she grabbed the edge of the last bedsheet.
“That’s clean,” he protested, as she yanked it off the bed.
“We need to look inside the ticking.”
The mattress cover fastened with coarse buttons. Clever interlayered lining contained even the sharpest points of the straw within. Another of the palace’s luxuries to which one grew so easily accustomed. Opening the buttons, Gaultry began to pull out big handfuls of straw.
“Shouldn’t we put down a sheet?” Tullier said, holding his end of the mattress closed to slow her. “Mix up this clean hay with the rushes on the floor and we’ll have to get all new hay for the mattress.”
Gaultry, starting to nod agreement, paused as something hidden within the mattress bag caught the candle’s light. “Tullier,” she breathed. “Please go stand by the door.”
Protecting her fingers with a handy pillowcase, she reached to part the last cover of straw.
A crown of thorn-covered vines revealed itself, twisted and heavy with black-green magic, lodged just under where her head would have lain on the pillow. It was small, sized for a manikin or doll. Small but potent. Stinging prickles of power touched her through the material of the pillowcase as she teased it free.
“What is it?” Tullier asked. Ignoring him in her concentration, she slid the horrible thing into a fold of the pillowcase. It blacked the cloth where it touched it, a sort of heatless scorching. Holding it away from her body, she hurried through to the fireplace in the salon and shook it out on top of the firedogs. The little twist of vines glistened malevolently in the grate. It spat evilly and flared, as if consumed by flames of invisible hate.
Bile rose in her throat. “In my dream, that thing was large enough to fit on my head.”
“What is it?” Tullier asked again. As they watched, fascinated, the circlet of leaves twitched angrily, almost turning itself over. Gaultry tentatively pinned it down with the fire shovel. To her great relief, the touch of cold iron stilled its movement. “Who put it into your mattress?”
“That I don’t know. As for what it is—it’s a fetish of some sort. Powered with the same magic that broke up Sizor’s Bridge, the same that possessed that poor soldier Siànne that night at Martin’s townhouse.” She morosely prodded the circlet with the poker. So much for her hope that the magical attacks would cease after Benet formally extended them the protection of his court. “The question remains: Who was this spell sent to destroy? This crown was in my bed—did they imagine that was where you slept, or was I the intended target?”
Tullier set down the candle, hiding his expression. “The woman who takes care of the rooms knows where I sleep. It would have been a little thing to glean that from her.”
“Just because you sleep there doesn’t mean people don’t think you spend time in my bed,” Gaultry told him, embarrassed. “I’m sure your Bissanty Envoy thinks it, if no one else.”
“Gaultry—” Tullier began shyly. “I know you and Martin—” He stopped.
The two of them stared at the fetish for a self-consciously long moment, pondering its intent.
“What are you going to do?” Tullier finally asked. “Burn it to ash?”
“Not yet.” Gaultry stood and wiped her palms. “Tamsanne should see it first. Her magic—it runs to plants. She may be able to determine the vines’ source. If whoever made this fetish was foolish enough to use material from their own garden, Tamsanne should be able to track that.”
“Now, or tomorrow?”
“Now. This thing is so angry it may destroy itself by morning. Tullier, would you please run and find a servant who can fetch her? Tell whoever
you find they should look for her in the orchard, not her cottage—she collects most of her plants by starlight. I’d go myself, but … I think I need to sit down.” That was no exaggeration. The room seemed to wobble as she spoke.
He cast her a concerned glance. “Of course. You rest. I’ll find someone”.
Once he was gone, she weighed the fetish with the poker for good measure. Then, not wanting to linger alone with it, she escaped out onto the terrace.
The warmth of the night, the great bowl of stars overhead, the small gentle sounds of the crickets were as soothing as a familiar embrace. Trying to relax, she steadied herself against the metal terrace rail.
The confusion of spells and counterspells continued to whirl in her head. She had not been conscious enough to act fully rationally. Even now, she did not understand her own actions. What pathetic self-control did she possess, summoning Martin to her in the heat of her defense? Had it all seemed like a dream to him, or had her summoning brought him partly awake? Considering his response, she quirked a wavery smile. No, Martin had known it was more than a dream. But would he remember it when he awoke? Would what she had done have left him physically damaged? Remembering the vulnerable beat of his heart, so loud, so strong, so
present
, she could not help but be concerned for his fitness. A spell that pulled the mind across a distance, bringing in its wake a body’s shadow—that was dangerous indeed. Would he recognize what she had done and be angry?
By the time Tullier returned, she had fallen into a dull reverie, considering the many faults of her actions.
“I found someone to go for Tamsanne.” The boy joined her on the terrace. “He wasn’t overeager when I woke him, but he went. I insisted that it was urgent.”
“It
is
urgent.” Gaultry’s voice went shrill, but there was no help for that. Something more was needed to lay to rest the unease the spell had left in her. Something was required—a prayer, a sacrifice—to purge her heartsickness. “How can we stay here at court if we can’t sleep safely in our own beds? And if we can’t stay here, where can we go? Should we try to hide? Should we try to keep moving? I don’t know what we should do. Tullier—I couldn’t gather my own strength as I lay within that dream. I made so many mistakes—it should have killed me.”
“That thing didn’t get into your mattress by itself,” Tullier said softly.
“And it didn’t kill you, either. Whoever put it there was the one who made the mistake tonight. Whoever sent it tipped their hand. They used soldiers to do their dirty work earlier—now they’re acting on their own account. We must be getting closer to the source. We should know who’s behind this soon. That’s dangerous—but also to the good.”
“It doesn’t feel good,” Gaultry replied glumly. “It feels like I almost died in my own bed.”
They stood, each buried in their own thoughts, and listened to the crickets. Beyond the outline of the palace towers, the rim of the moon showed itself: low, already in its descent toward the horizon. The pale twin-stars shone nearby, a little to the east, their triple diadems barely visible in the bright corona light of the moon. Looking at those stars, the special constellation of Tielmark’s high deities, Gaultry felt a little steadied. “I wonder how long it’ll take your man to find Tamsanne. I hope we haven’t sent him chasing a wild goose.”

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