The Dark Remains (4 page)

Durge stepped forward. “If the ladies’ absence has caused trouble, then you may lay the blame for it upon me. It was I who accompanied them from the castle.”

Aryn grimaced. That wasn’t right. It wasn’t because of Durge they had gone to see the Mournish; it had been her idea.

“Why does the queen want us?” she said before she could consider the wisdom of the words.

The guardsman started to make a crude gesture with his left hand. Then, as if remembering in whose company he stood, he hastily changed the motion and straightened the yellow sash slung over his shoulder instead. “It is not my place to suppose the mind of Her Good Majesty.” His voice was overloud, as if he believed it might be overhead.

“Of course,” Lirith said. “Thank you for this service, guardsman. We shall attend the queen at once.”

Aryn felt a firm tug on her left arm as Lirith pulled her through the gate.

“What is it?” Aryn whispered. “Do you think she knows that we went to see the Mournish?”

“Don’t be foolish, sister. Ivalaine doesn’t have a magic mirror. There’s no way she could know where we went. If she is displeased with us, then it is merely for answering late to her summons. So let us make haste.”

Aryn swallowed, wishing she could be as confident, but she said nothing more as they hurried through the castle. Unlike the dark, smoky corridors of Calavere, the vaulted halls of Ar-tolor were airy, lined with slender arches and rows of high windows that let in the silver-gray twilight.

“My ladies,” said a rumbling voice behind them.

The two women skidded to a halt, then turned to gaze into somber brown eyes. Aryn winced. They had completely forgotten about Durge.

“If my assistance is no longer needed, I believe I shall retire.”

“Of course, Durge,” Aryn said breathlessly.

The Embarran gave a stiff nod, then started to turn away.

“My lord,” Lirith said, halting him with a touch. “Thank you for accompanying us today.”

He nodded, then disengaged his arm and walked down the corridor, his sooty form melding with the gloom.

Inwardly, Aryn groaned. Why hadn’t she thought to thank Durge? After all, she was the one who had dragged him to see the Mournish against his advice. Now, if they got into trouble, it was likely the blame would fall on him. How could she be so cruel and forgetful?

But perhaps it was not so unusual after all.

You have forgotten about one who bore pain for you
.…

It was true, there were those who had suffered for her sake, but Aryn had not forgotten them. She would never forget dear Garf, who had died trying to protect her from a mad bear. Or the brave and broken Sir Meridar, who had sacrificed himself to save Tira and Daynen, and to prove himself worthy in Aryn’s eyes. And certainly she would never forget Leothan.

A chill stole through her, as it always did when she thought of last Midwinter’s Eve, when the handsome nobleman she had fancied had drawn her into a side chamber and kissed her. For a moment it had seemed all her dreams had come true. Until he had forced himself against her, revealing himself as an ironheart. Then had come the fury, and along with it a power she had never known she had, flowing from her and turning Leothan’s brain to jelly. She had always believed evil was something that dwelled in the hearts of others; never until that moment had she known it resided within her own as well.

No, she would never forget that night—
could
never forget it. More likely the old Mournish woman was simply daft.

Then what of the card, Aryn? It was just the same as the vision you saw when Ivalaine bade you look into the water that day in Calavere. How could the old woman have known about that?

Before she could think of an answer, she felt a hand on her shoulder.

“Come sister,” Lirith said. “The queen is expecting us.”

As servants lit torches, filling the passages with warm light, the two women hastened through the castle.

High, bubbling laughter rang out.

Aryn and Lirith skidded to a halt as a gangly form clad in yellow and green sprang from an alcove, turned a flip in midair, and landed before them with a chiming of silver bells.

“Master Tharkis!” Aryn gasped.

The scrawny man flashed rotten teeth in a grin, spread his arms, and bowed so low his pointed chin touched the floor. “Two evening birds, one brown and one blue, fly to their lady’s nest.” He straightened, and a sly light crept into his permanently crossed blue eyes. “But will they flap or will they sing when they must take her test?”

Lirith recovered quickly, drawing herself erect. “Fool, we have no time for this. The queen awaits us.”

The man laughed, dancing a caper in place, the bells on his parti-colored cap bobbing.

Color touched Lirith’s dusky cheeks, and she opened her mouth for a reply. However, Aryn spoke first, affecting an exaggerated frown.

“Is that the best rhyme you can forge, Master Tharkis? I’m afraid it’s not much of a poem.”

The fool scuttled forward. His bony knees protruded from faded green hose, and his pointed shoes were scuffed and muddied. He tangled thin fingers, his wayward eyes bright. “And does my sweet spinstress, in so short a time, fancy she’d weave a cleverer rhyme?”

Aryn drew herself up. “I believe I could. In fact, I wager I can make a better poem out of your name than you can of mine.”

Lirith scowled at her, but Aryn ignored the look. Tharkis clapped his hands and grinned again.

“A game! A game!” He turned another flip in place. “How a fool loves a game. Pray, my lady, make a verse of my name.”

Aryn drew in a breath. Ar-tolor’s court fool had a tendency to interpose himself in one’s way at the most inopportune times, and playing his game seemed like the swiftest way past him. Only now she wasn’t so certain it had been a good idea. She frowned in concentration. Then, as if by magic, the words came to her, and she spoke them in a laughing voice:

Aryn couldn’t suppress a satisfied smile as Lirith gaped at her. It wasn’t a bad little poem, if she did say so herself.

Evidently Tharkis agreed, for the fool sputtered, pawing at his jangling cap so that strands of lank hair escaped.

“Come now, Fool,” Aryn said. “It is your turn in the game.”

“Must I beg it on my knees? A moment, spinstress—a moment please!”

Tharkis turned toward the alcove, back hunched, and muttered under his breath. Aryn didn’t waste the chance. With the way clear before them, she grabbed Lirith’s hand and dashed down the corridor.

They had already turned a corner when they heard a shrill howl of dismay behind them. The sound spurred them on, feet pounding on stone, until at last they were forced to stop and sag against a wall, gasping for breath and laughing.

Aryn wiped tears from her eyes. “Was he truly king once, as the stories say? It’s so hard to believe when I see him.”

Lirith smoothed the tight, black coils of her hair. “Indeed he was, sister. For many years Tharkis ruled the Dominion of Toloria. But one day while out hunting he fell from his horse and struck his head against a stone. When he awoke again he was like this. I fear his brain was addled without repair.”

Aryn had heard the tale. King Tharkis had neither wife nor heir, and after his mishap Toloria was torn by strife as various barons vied for the throne. Had it not been for Ivalaine—a distant cousin of Tharkis who, within days of reaching the age of eighteen, managed to unite all the barons—the Dominion might have been sundered forever.

“So Tharkis truly is mad, then,” Aryn said. “Yet it seems cruel to keep him like this. A man who was king should not be the court fool.”

“And would it be less cruel to lock him high in a tower where none might see him? This is who he is now. And I think, after a fashion, he enjoys it.”

Lirith was right, of course. All the same, there was something very wrong about Tharkis. The less Aryn encountered him, the better.

“Come,” Lirith said, “the queen awaits us.”

“In order to
berates
us,” Aryn said with a grin.

A guardsman bowed to them as they approached the door to the queen’s chamber.

“You may enter, my ladies,” he said.

Aryn and Lirith exchanged quick looks, their mirth vanishing as they stepped through the door.

“Such disobedience is not to be tolerated,” said a voice as clear and hard as diamonds.

Aryn froze. Was the queen not even going to greet them before chastising them? A hasty apology rose in her throat, but before she could open her mouth a voice spoke sharply in her mind.

Quiet, sister. Do not confess your crime when you have not been asked. It is not to us the queen speaks
.

Aryn bit her tongue. She still hadn’t gotten used to Lirith’s ability to speak without words. It was not a skill Aryn had mastered herself. However, her shock was replaced by relief as she saw that Lirith was right.

The queen’s antechamber was a spacious room, lined on one side by high windows that caught the reflection of the rising moon in a hundred small panes. Queen Ivalaine stood in the center of the chamber, towering over a slight young man who hung his head, his long, black hair concealing his visage. Beside him, her expression at once stern and motherly, stood Lady Tressa, the queen’s plump, pretty, red-haired counselor. It was the young man who had been the focus of the queen’s hard words.

“You were forbidden to enter the stables again,” the queen continued, her words precise as arrows, “yet you did so today, and by your pranks caused such agitation among the horses that one broke her halter and escaped. And in regaining her, one of the stableboys fell and broke his arm.”

“So I’m to blame for clumsy stableboys?” the young man said without raising his head. He was clad all in black, from tunic to boots.

The queen went visibly rigid. “It is not blame that matters to nobility, Lord Teravian. It is responsibility. Your actions gave cause to this injury. Will you not accept fault?”

The young man did not reply.

“Then I have no choice but to take the fault upon myself,” Ivalaine said, “for you are my responsibility. This is what it means to be a ruler. Lady Tressa, see to it that the stableboy and his family are duly compensated from my treasury.”

Tressa nodded, then bent to make a note on a parchment resting on a small table.

Ivalaine shook her head. “What shall I tell your father of this?”

Now the young man looked up, his hair falling back from the pale oval of his face. His features were fine, almost pretty, his eyes like emeralds beneath raven brows.

“And why tell King Boreas anything?” he said, a sneer twisting the soft line of his mouth. “I know he sent me here so he could forget about me.”

“You know nothing,” the queen said, her visage so icy that the young man took a step back, as if rethinking his insolence.

“May I go now, Your Majesty?” he said finally.

“I think you had best.”

The young man gave a curt bow, then turned and—with the litheness of a dancer—moved to the door. He did not even glance at Aryn and Lirith as he departed.

Aryn watched him go. She remembered Teravian well from her first years in Calavere. Back then, King Boreas’s only son had been a sullen, ill-tempered boy four years her younger. He had little to do with Aryn aside from occasionally tormenting her with pranks, such as the time he filled one of her bed pillows with wriggling mice.

Then, two years ago, Boreas had sent Teravian to Artolor. It was the custom for royal children to be fostered at a foreign court; this was one way alliances between Dominions were forged and maintained. Aryn remembered that Teravian had thrown fits the day he learned he was to be sent away, but she had heard little of him since that time.

A few days after their arrival in Ar-tolor, she had sought Teravian out, to greet him as a cousin. However, when she came upon him in the castle’s orchard, he had not come down from the top of a wall where he sat, and he had said nothing to her, save to laugh when she slipped on a rotten apple. It seemed Teravian had changed little during his years in Ar-tolor save to grow a bit taller and more cruel. Sometimes Aryn wondered how he could truly be the son of a man as good and brave as King Boreas.

The queen lifted a slender hand. “Where have I gone amiss, Tressa?”

The red-haired woman smiled, although it was a mournful expression. “He is a boy fighting a hard battle to become a man. One need not look for other reasons.”

“And yet there is another reason, is there not?”

Tressa said nothing, and Aryn wondered what the queen meant. However, Ivalaine spoke before she could.

“Come closer, sisters. Do not think I have not seen you standing there.”

The two woman hurried forward and curtsied.

It was often said that Ivalaine was the most beautiful woman in all of Falengarth. Her hair was like flax, her form slender and proud, her eyes the color of violets touched by frost. Yet Aryn knew there was one even more beautiful than the queen, someone who was a world away.

I miss you so much, Grace
.

Once again she hoped Grace and the others were well.

“It is good of you to come, sisters.”

“We hastened here as soon as we received your message, Your Majesty,” Lirith said.

Ivalaine’s eyes glittered as she studied the dark-skinned witch. “So you did.”

Silence filled the chamber, and a mad urge to start babbling about all they had done that day rose inside Aryn. Fortunately, Tressa spoke before she could give voice to her compulsion.

“Would you like some wine, my child?”

Aryn nodded, then had to force herself not to snatch the cup from the witch’s hand and gulp it down in one draught. The wine was cool and clear as rain. Aryn took small sips and felt her nerves grow steadier.