The Queen's Necklace (10 page)

Am I going mad?
The question occurred to him again and again, yet he was desperately determined not to believe it. He was only reacting to the heat of the crowded ballroom, the intoxicating scent of
the girl's perfume. To cover his confusion, he tried to make conversation.

“Do I know you—mademoiselle?”

Though it had not yet been established that she came in with some foreign dignitary, how else to explain that uncanny something about her, the occasional odd inflection when she spoke, the merest hint of a lisp that he found so fascinating? He had heard that accent before, or one very like it, when travelling in the south many years before.

“Did we meet here in Tarnburgh—or somewhere abroad? But no, that's impossible. You must have been still in the nursery when Francis and I were touring the continent.” Whenever their fingers touched in the course of the dance, a delicious shiver passed over his skin.

“Surely that would be for Your Majesty to say. I wouldn't presume to claim an acquaintance.” She lowered her eyes demurely, but a smile played about the corners of her mouth. “Perhaps I merely
remind
you of someone. I have been told I am very like your late—” She broke off with a faint blush, as though suddenly conscious of an error in taste.

Jarred tried to see it. He tried very hard to trace a resemblance to his beautiful Zelene in that sharp little face, since that would explain the attraction. But there was no similarity beyond her size and her coloring, and the coincidental choice of the color of her gown.

“You are certainly very lovely. But that doesn't seem to be it.”

The music stopped and she curtsied very low, going down almost to the floor in a welter of grey taffeta and rustling petticoats. “If we might be alone for a moment. I will show you something which may explain everything.”

Why he should be so quick to oblige, he did not know. Keeping his grip on her hand, he led her into a curtained alcove between two long mirrors. With his free hand, he drew the heavy curtains of gold brocade together behind them.

“I don't even know your name,” he said with an embarrassed laugh.

He could hear the sudden buzz of comment out in the ballroom, the flurry of startled speculation.
But let them wonder and speculate
, said a new voice in his mind.
I may be a widower, but
I'm
not the one who is dead and buried
. And again he was shocked at his own disloyalty.

Somehow, her hand slid out of his grip. “My name is Ys, Your Majesty. You will not find it familiar, but perhaps you recognize this.” She drew a string of—pearls?—out of her bosom and held the necklace invitingly before him. Something that looked like a heart cut out of ice glowed in her palm.

“Perhaps I do,” said Jarred, reaching out. Viewed so close, he could see the necklace was made up of polished white stones, as lustrous as pearls, but lit with a cold internal fire. And he had handled something like them before, certainly, but the harder he tried to remember, the harder it became for him to think at all.
The fire of the milky stones was burning him in places he had not been touched in a long time, creating in him a craving, a deep body hunger that—

“Look into the crystal heart,” said Ys. And mindlessly, Jarred did as she told him.

Once he did so, he could not turn his gaze elsewhere. He felt a curious sensation at the base of his spine; every nerve in his body was thrumming like a lute. There was a voice speaking inside his head, the same voice which had prompted him a while before, so softly he had mistaken it, then, for a mere echo of his own thoughts, his own desires. But now it was speaking with a penetrating clarity which was like
her
voice, though with a strange quality infinitely sweeter. It was offering him the most alluring blandishments, promising him the most impossible pleasures, if he did what it said, if he did everything it wanted him to do. There was an edge to that sweetness which made him distrust it, which made him try to resist it, but
with every struggle of his, the sweetness of that voice shivered along his nerves in a way that was half pleasurable, half painful. In the end, he knew that he had no choice but to obey.

As soon as he acknowledged this, the voice grew quieter, its tone became nearly matter-of-fact. No longer alluring, no longer hurting him, it simply told him what he must do.

So Jarred listened. As the voice continued to speak, a series of vivid pictures appeared in his mind and began to spin through his brain, faster and faster.

“Do you understand? Will you do as I told you?” The words, when at last she spoke out loud, sounded harsh in his ears.

“Yes.” Once the promise was made, he discovered that he could shift his gaze. Yet he was shaken and confused; there was a deep sense of dissatisfaction, a baffled craving, as though something long desired had been denied him. What that something was, he did not know. Everything that had happened in the last few minutes was rapidly receding from his conscious memory.

Ys reached out, and wordlessly took back the necklace, and slipped it back inside the front of her gown.

“Then you may kiss me,” she said, turning up her face, which glowed faintly pearlescent in the candlelit alcove.

Tentatively, reluctantly, Jarred bent forward and touched his lips to hers. And that kiss was longer, sweeter, colder, and more terrifying in its way, than anything he had ever experienced before.

Hawkesbridge, Mountfalcon—

4 Niviôse, 6538

T
he hour was well past midnight, but the tavern known as the Leviathan was alive with clandestine activity. In the taproom, two highwaymen divided their booty; in a private parlor, someone plotted an assassination; in one of the chambers above, a young man of good family but diminished fortune sat down to drink himself to death with gin and wormwood.

In Sir Bastian's room Lilliana woke with a start. She had been dozing in a ladderback chair beside her patient's bed, when someone rapped sharply on the door. Jumping to her feet, she hurried across the room.

“Who is there?”

“If you please, ma'am, you be needed mortal bad on t'floor up above.” It was the voice of one of the Leviathan barmaids, and she sounded agitated. Lili opened the door a cautious few inches, saw that the thin, shabby female figure was the only one standing in the dark corridor, and opened the door a tiny bit wider. “We been told you and your aunt be doctors.”

Lili's heart sank. It seemed that her fumigations and her other precautions had not been sufficient; the Black Bile Fever had claimed another victim. Her hand went instinctively to the tiny mousefoot
soaked in camphor that she wore in a satin bag between her corset and her gown. “Someone is ill?”

“No, ma'am, not ill. There be a man bleeding to death near t'steps up above.”

Lili hesitated. What was really needed here was a surgeon, not a physician, someone skilled in the treatment of wounds and broken bones. But there would be no time to send for anyone now. “I will come at once.”

Stepping out into the corridor, Lili closed the door softly behind her. She followed the barmaid down the dark passage to the stairwell and there she went ahead.

In a pool of light at the top of the steps, the tavern-keeper was bending over what Lili first mistook for a pile of old clothes. But when the landlord straightened and moved aside to make room for her, holding high a cruet of burning fish oil which served him for a lamp, it came to her with an ugly start that what was lying at his feet was actually the battered body of a man, curled up on the floor in a tight ball of agony.

Lili went down on her knees in a rustle of petticoats. There was blood everywhere, the plank floor was already sticky with it; when she gently turned the body over, more came pumping out from a dozen different wounds. For a moment the world went grey around the edges; her vision blurred; Lili closed her eyes, struggling with a sudden nausea.

Coward! This is no time to grow faint or foolish
. With an effort, she made herself look, and gradually her patient came back into focus. Yet she scarcely knew where to begin, his case was so hopeless.

Someone handed her a dirty sheet; realizing that she would be offered nothing better, Lili began to tear the old, fragile muslin into strips. She worked frantically, she never knew for how long, applying tourniquets, bandages, doing anything she could to stop the bleeding. Even when his heart gave a last feeble beat and then was
quiet, even when the bleeding slowed to a dull trickle and then stopped altogether, she kept on—until she felt a hand on her shoulder and heard a familiar voice speaking directly in her ear.

“Enough, Lilliana. You have done your best, but the man is dead.”

Lili looked up at her great-aunt, wondering how long Allora had been there beside her. She blinked twice, feeling strangely disoriented. She had never lost a patient before; the idea was almost inconceivable.

Over her head, Allora was questioning the landlord. To Lili their voices had a hollow sound, as though she were hearing them from a long way off. “Was he murdered right here on this spot?”

“In his own room, most like.” The tavern-keeper made a vague gesture with the fish-oil lamp. “There be a trail of blood.”

Lili stood up, and in doing so experienced an intense vertigo. She took several deep breaths until the corridor stopped spinning and the walls settled back into place. The voices of the others came closer.

“It's impossible such wounds were self-inflicted,” Allora was saying sharply. “Did no one hear anything? Have you no idea at all who is responsible?”

The landlord shrugged. “Can't even tell you this feller's name; he didn't give none when he took a room. But he did have a meeting in t'taproom wi' another young gentleman, all very quiet-like in a corner by theyselves—'til it come to harsh words. Don't remember when they come upstairs.”

There was blood on Lili's hands, which she wiped on her skirt. The dress was ruined anyway, so streaked with dirt and soaked with blood that it would never be clean again.

“And the other young gentleman—can you describe him?” It was dangerous, Lili realized, to even ask. Common prudence in a place like this, to say nothing of her own reasons for being there, argued that she should leave any investigation to the proper authorities. And
yet, considering the dead man's fine linen and his velvet coat, considering something vaguely familiar about his face, she could not banish a suspicion that the murder of such a man in this particular place might be somehow related to her own business here.

“A stranger, same as this one.” The landlord's expression was sullen. “His hat were pulled down to cover his face, and he wore a long cloak.”

In fact, Lili realized, the whole story of the quarrel might be a lie, meant to avert suspicion from the tavern-keeper and the people he employed.

“'Tweren't no Man at all.”

Everyone turned to stare at the barmaid. She flushed and went on. “He did
look
like a man in his fine clothes, but I see he do have a kind of hump t'back of his neck. He were one of they Goblins t'other side of town.”

The landlord drew in his breath sharply. “A Goblin—in my house?” He favored the girl with a sour look.

Lili was intrigued and also a little frightened. The presence of a Goblin in this terrible business—and no ordinary Ouph or Padfoot, either, but one of the rare, reclusive Wrynecks—was ominous to say the least.

“It would be best, I think, if my aunt and I were to look over the place where he was actually murdered. If you will give me the lamp—” Lili held out her hand with such an air of quiet determination, the landlord yielded the light without question and even stepped out of the way to let her go past.

With the dish of burning oil held high to show the way, Lilliana and Allora followed the trail of blood down the narrow corridor and into a cramped bedchamber at the far end.

Inside the small bedchamber, blood spattered the floor, the threadbare rug, the peeling walls, and the furniture. “Good Heavens!”
said Allora, pausing shocked in the doorway. Then she shook herself and added briskly, “He put up a struggle, that much is certain.”

“Yes,” said Lili. “And nobody in any of the rooms on this floor or the one below heard a thing. Or else—which is worse!—they ignored what they did hear.”

Putting the lamp down on a table by the door, she made a swift survey of the room, taking note of anything that might bear examination. The bed was unmade, the chamber was cluttered with clothes and toilet articles: two large wigs on a wicker stand by the door; patch boxes, curling tongs, razor and shaving brush; a collection of milk-glass and crystal perfume bottles on the flimsy dresser.

A man of fashion
, thought Lili, wrinkling her nose. Two of the bottles were broken and the perfumes mixed unpleasantly with the lingering odors of blood and sweat. Yet again there came that faint nudge of familiarity at the back of her mind.

She began to explore the room. The fireplace had been raked out and a handful of sticks and some pine logs thrown carelessly on the grate. Behind them, in the sooty maw of the fireplace, she discovered a small pile of ashes on the bricks, a scrap of scorched paper, and some candle drippings, as though someone had burned a letter after the old fire was raked out and before the new one was laid. She gathered up the ashes in a clean white handkerchief.

Rising to her feet, she glanced over at her great-aunt. “Will you look through his clothes? I am going to try and discover the contents of this letter.”

Allora nodded and went straight to work, picking up a coat of straw-colored satin lined with muskrat and turning out the pockets. She did not ask how Lili meant to reconstruct a letter that had been so thoroughly burned. The gift which had allowed Lilliana to trace the movements of the papyrus scroll across so many miles had other applications as well.