Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles (47 page)

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Authors: Katya Reimann

BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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“If the Lanai penetrate this far, that will be the end of their night camping,” Tullier said.
“Tullier,” Gaultry said. “There’s something I need to tell you. Remember the children’s story about the pine-witch?”
The boy nodded, his eyes lighting with scorn.
“They were telling the truth,” she said. “We’ve come miles out of our way. That river we camped at last night was Tielmark’s south border.”
“That’s not possible,” Tullier said. “You must be mistaken.”
Gaultry shook her head. “I’ll admit, yesterday it did not seem I could have found my route along the High Road at noontime on a summer’s day. But in this, I know I’m right. Something strange is going on. Something strange that’s fuddling our route-finding.”
Tullier looked suddenly grim. “Are you sure?”
“On my heart,” she said.
“That’s not good news. Tomorrow is the Ides. Weren’t we supposed to find someplace safe to hole up, coming onto that day?”
“We were,” Gaultry said. “Now … now I don’t know.”
THE MOON IN ANDION’S SKY
THE IDES AT THE LIGHT OF DAWN
Elisabeth rapped on Princess Lily’s door. “Your Highness?”
she called. “My lady?” She exchanged a glance with the footman who had escorted her to this inner sanctum from the public rooms of state. The footman, a slender man with wispy red hair and an annoying complacent manner, shrugged, indicating that she should knock again. Elisabeth shook her head, refusing. She’d gain nothing by badgering the Princess or her bed-servants, and from what little she’d observed of the young Princess, she was not a woman who enjoyed being hurried by those born her social superiors. Too many of the older noblewomen used this as a subtle means of bolstering their own position.
Lily would not still be abed, requiring the summons of a door to wake her. She would be in the garderobe or delayed by some detail of dressing—or by some other likely inconvenience that occupied both herself and her bed-servants. When she had worked as a laundry servant, Lily had risen before dawn every morning to start her chores. This was not a habit she had left behind after her marriage. Benet, after all, was an early riser too, often for his sailing, but also for official business.
Elisabeth waited awkwardly, trying not to let the footman see her anxiety. She briefly closed her eyes, screening out the footman’s fidgets—impatience, she was sure, he never would have dared express in front of her mother.
Patience. Elisabeth almost shook her head. If even a footman was free to jitter and prompt, why must she be compelled to patience?
The past days, the past week, had passed in a confused flurry of …
boredom. Whether or not her decision to take Gaultry Blas into her confidence had served to protect the Climenses’ honor, there had certainly been a price. Elisabeth had had no suspicion of what it might entail, drawing herself to the attention of the Common Brood. First the horrible Tamsanne—and then the imperious Dame Julie.
Before the night she’d run to Gaultry’s rooms, Elisabeth had been intrigued by the hushed whispers about the Brood’s secretive contract with the Prince. The contract was said to give them power beyond that of the realm’s highest peer, but little of this power had been in evidence. The old Duchess of Melaudiere; the High Priestess; Gaultry Blas with her Glamour-soul-of course these women had the Prince’s ear. But as for the others … She had not suspected, until the horrible moment when the old witch Tamsanne pierced her with her eyes and asked her such terrible questions, that that power of the Brood might be turned to affect
herself
.
By noon of the day she’d run from Gaultry’s chambers, the Princess called Elisabeth to her private chambers. For the first time Elisabeth had been escorted past the formal reception rooms into the privy chambers. Her first thought had been that Gaultry had betrayed her mother to the Princess, but she knew at once, looking into Lily’s friendly but mildly puzzled face, that this could not be correct. “My dear tamarin-keeper,” the Princess had welcomed her, smiling. “You have been reassigned. I am informed there is important work that needs you.”
The Princess’s gaze had flickered over Elisabeth’s shoulder. Turning, Elisabeth saw that Dame Julie, the Common Brood musician, had come noiselessly into the room.
“I have been told you have a talent,” Dame Julie observed curtly, coming up to her. Elisabeth had not realized that the old woman was so short. The top of her white head barely reached Elisabeth’s shoulder. But for all that, her hazel eyes were fierce. “I have requisitioned your services to help me in a search.”
“A search for what?” she asked, bewildered.
“A search for
how
,” replied Dame Julie. “The Prince has set me a question. We are trying to understand the terms by which the gods might make a mortal man a King. Before month’s end I must find the answer. You have been chosen to aid me because of your unique talents.”
“What are these talents? And why does anyone think I hold them?”
“Tamsanne pointed me to you,” Dame Julie said shortly. “As to the rest, you must discover it for yourself.”
And that was all the explanation anyone had given her. Elisabeth did not see Tamsanne again and she was not sure she would have had the courage to question her if she had.
Every door is open to you,
the old woman had told her, those dark eyes burning so deeply into her own. What had she meant by that?
Elisabeth, rousing, knocked again on the Princess’s door. She hoped that Lily would send someone to the door soon, as her mother’s assizes-appearance was scheduled for noontime. Elisabeth knew she would need an hour at least to garb herself as befitted her mother’s child. Already her morning had been broken up with this unexpected errand.
The week of her service to Dame Julie had otherwise passed so monotonously … .
Before this past week Elisabeth had been unaware—blissfully unaware—that Tielmark’s history had been collectively entrusted to seven court bards who maintained a comprehensive archive of the nation’s verbal histories and ballads. These bards were an earnest lot and they certainly knew their songs, but they were unused to working under pressure—indeed, with the bulk of their songs committed to memory decades past, Elisabeth might even have said that they were unused to
working.
They were also completely unaccustomed to taking orders or following anything like regulated procedure.
All of which was at odds with the project that Dame Julie, on the Prince’s personal authority, now lay before them: Every song they had learned, every history, was to be repeated for Dame Julie.
Appallingly, much of this record had been preserved in oral form only. Four of the seven bards, assigned their posts during the latter part of Princess Corinne’s reign and that of her oldest son Roualt, had made attempts to commit their songs to paper. Indeed, since the election of the fourth of these bards, a quorum had finally been reached declaring that written copies of the most modern songs were to be considered desirable. But the three senior bards, two hoary old women and one ancient man with a beard that cascaded below the greasy buckle of his belt, had received their training back in the days of old Princess Lousielle. This doughty trio still argued sharply against writing any of their songs down, persisting, they insisted, in the pure oral tradition of the Harper-god, Leander. Elisabeth was enough her mother’s daughter to regard this as mere laziness, though their argument that words committed so to paper lost something critical to their power was a matter for which she could feel some hesitant respect.
Though Dame Julie had received a dispensation from the Prince
requiring
the bards to perform or share all their songs, the two oldest of the trio were not cooperating—or rather, their idea of cooperation was a dim one. Many of their songs had already been passed to their apprentices—but they querulously maintained seemingly infinite “lines of variation,” as yet incompletely passed forward.
For a full summer week, Elisabeth had labored inside, scratching song summaries into wax tablets, and staring with yearning at the pleasant weather outside the windows, wondering when her mother would come to save her from Dame Julie. The old woman’s life was not all music and play as Elisabeth had imagined it, observing Julie’s rehearsals. She kept four of them working like demons. Julie herself, her daughter, granddaughter, and Elisabeth were roused every morning at first light and set to listening to the bards’ recitals, teasing at them to remember variations. “What are we trying to find?” Elisabeth asked, as often as she dared. Many of the variants were repetitive in the extreme, yet Dame Julie insisted they listen to everything. “You will know it when you hear it,” Dame Julie told her. “If not, Tamsanne is wrong about the talents she claims for you, and the three of us will have to repeat your work.”
Elisabeth missed the tamarin. She missed the freedom she had not understood she possessed, to linger at court with few duties. She’d been assigned to Tyrannis of the magnificent beard, by a slim margin the least obstreperous of the three ancient bards. Listening for hours to his hollow croak, his voice long since lost to wine and age, made her head ache. She suspected Dame Julie had assigned her Tyrannis because she herself along with her kin, so keenly trained in music, could not bear his atonal cacophony.
With few exceptions, the old man’s songs were not at all the stuff of rousing legend. So far, the interminable “Ballad of Briern-Bold” proved the worst. Instead of describing feats of boldness, its verses numbered the dukes and counts who fought beside Briern in his final confrontation with the Bissanties. Back then the Climenses had not yet taken possession of Vaux-Torres’ ducal estates and the Climens ancestor who had fought in that battle had been an undistinguished horseman. Tyrannis’s account detailed men and women so far down the ranks that Elisabeth had almost expected to hear of his deeds.
She had been free of the old man for one afternoon only. Dame Julie had taken over for his rendition of the “Love Story of Far Mountain,” which described in ponderous detail the dowry accorded Briern’s sister,
Briessine, whom Briem had given in marriage to the Lanai King of Far Mountain after the allied Tielmaran-Lanaya victory over the Bissanty. Some element of this pair’s marriage had confirmed the petty chieftain of Far Mountain to his Kingly throne—but what, the song did not say. The description of the dowry was followed by a lengthy paean to Briessine’s beauty, an endless roster of the Bissanty soldiers Algeorn Far-Mountain had smote in battle, and numerous verses describing the withdrawal of the Lanai troops from Llara’s Kettle, the lakeside battlefield where the Lanai traditionally descended to Tielmark’s plains. The song seemed no more interesting than any other of Tyrannis’s stories, yet Dame Julie stayed with the old man for hours, meticulously quizzing him over every line and its variants.
The next morning Elisabeth got Tyrannis back. She hated the old man’s stuttering delivery, his frequent breaks for water, the consequent breaks to relieve his bladder, his querulous complaints. She would have complained to her mother, but Argat was distant in the week leading up to her trial and always in ill temper.
Only on the eighth day of Elisabeth’s servitude, two days before Andion’s Ides and her mother’s assizes-date, did Argat’s spirits lift. On that day her mother greeted her return to chambers with the highest good humor.
“You’ll never guess what has happened,” Argat said.
Elisabeth looked at her warily. Her mother had been angry for so long, it was hard to credit this lightening of the clouds.
“Mother—tell me.”
“Today I crossed paths with Gaultry Blas’s assassin-boy. She’s been keeping him tight within her own chambers. I used a most clumsy ruse to gain access, even for that moment.”
Elisabeth’s heart went into her mouth. “Is he all right?”
“It’s the most astonishing thing. I had begun to suspect it was something unwholesome—the boy is too young to be kept so closely by her in such, shall we say, intimate circumstances.” Argat had rattled on, blind to her daughter’s apprehensions. Her mother had finally arranged the required abduction—
“Gods in me, the Bias sisters have played a merry game. It’s not
Gaultry
and the boy who’ve been holed up in their rooms this past week. It’s that errant young knight, the old Chancellor’s past-champion, and Mervion, the sister. The Great Ones only know how long Gaultry and the boy have been away. The court toads, Ronsars among them, have
spread a rumor that the pair of them accepted Lepulio’s offer of safe haven.” Argat snorted through her nose. “Myself, I don’t see that of young Gaultry. I think she’s gone west to put the boy under Benet’s protection.”
Elisabeth was speechless. Her pure relief made her mother smile.
“It’s true, it’s true,” Argat said. Behind her composedly amused façade, Elisabeth could tell she was laughing uproariously. “I wish you could have been there. Dervla High Priestess butted her way in on my heels to determine the boy’s true identity, and young Mervion was most delightfully cool in her greeting. Said it was no one’s business if she and her man had chosen to keep
couvert,
and what business did Dervla have with her sister, in any case?”
“But what does this mean?”
For just a moment, her mother cooled. “It means that when Dervla stands witness at my assizes two days hence, there is nothing she’ll be able to prove against me. She had intended to call some Bissanty witnesses, you know, but with the boy out of Princeport, my guess is they won’t stand to testify. You really don’t need to know all the details! What I say that day may prove hard for you, ma petite, but there should be nothing a Climens cannot weather.”
Elisabeth returned to old Tyrannis the next morning in such a glaze of happiness that the old goat softened to her, offering her a series of variants without even requiring her begging. With her mother’s news, the grind of the past week had been much leavened.
The footman, jittering at her side, brought her back to the present. Pretending not to notice that she had lost herself in thought, Elisabeth rapped again on the Princess’s door.
Still no response. This was unprecedented. Elisabeth was not sure what she should do. Though early still, she did not have the time for this business to drag out. She’d told Dame Julie that she could not work on Andion’s Ides, that she needed to be in court to stand at her mother’s back. Dame Julie had agreed to grant her a few hours of freedom to fulfill this duty. Then, when she’d reported to the library this morning, Julie had sent Elisabeth with this missive for the Princess, rather than starting her up with old Tyrannis.

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