Thorn (40 page)

The Lady returns, sitting beside me, a needle and thread in her hand. She holds my arm down and silently begins to stitch the edges of the cut together. I do not mean to complain, but I cannot help the whimpers that lodge in my throat. She winds a bandage around my arm, then bandages my chest.

“Why are you doing this?”

Her hands come to rest on the bed sheet. When she speaks her voice is thoughtful. “You interest me.”

“Interest you?”

The Lady smiles faintly. “Yes.” She stands up, brushing out her skirts in a gesture so common to all women that I am left stunned. But I should not be, I think. She is not just a sorceress following a bloody oath.

“Wait,” I call after her. “I don’t understand.”

She pauses at the foot of my bed, looking down at me, “When you speak to Kestrin, I hear both your voice and mine.”

She looks to me like and yet unlike my first vision of her, and I find myself speaking dreamily, “When I looked into your eyes for the first time, I thought I saw my death there. Perhaps I did. Now I only see your pain.”

Something flickers in her face, but I cannot say whether it is an emotion winging past or only a weakness of my sight. She turns and leaves, taking the light with her.

***

The Lady returns with the morning, escorting me once more to the square. Despite the rest, I am exhausted. My wounds and burnt wrist ache when I am still and flare with pain at every move.

I sit down facing the stone prince and look up at the Lady. “When you send me this time, will my cuts remain bandaged?”

“Yes.” The Lady glances towards the statue. “If you wish to return to Tarinon, you may. I will not force you to this last test; the first two have weakened you.”

“Would you release the Prince?”

“No.”

“Then why do you ask?”

The Lady purses her lips, watching me. A breeze wanders through the garden, touching a wisp of hair that has escaped her braid. I think she must have been beautiful when she was young: the kind of beauty that warms hearts and brings smiles to faces. “I do not like to send you to your death,” she admits.

“Hasn’t he proved himself yet?” I ask. “He saw his greatest enemy unarmed and let her go. He saw her attacked and defended her. Her saw her wounded and helped her. What more could you want?”

She looks away from me to Kestrin, kneeling before us. “I want him dead,” she confesses.

“Then you are what you accuse him of. Let him go, Lady.”

“Why do you fight for him?”

I pause, remembering that even when Kestrin had played his games with me, he had stopped short of ever hurting me. In the pity I had glimpsed in his eyes, before he found me out, there had also been regret. “I did not believe he would fail your tests.”

“He has been very close often enough.”

“He has.”

“You did not doubt him last night?” she asks with a slight smile.

“I knew if I could make him pause long enough to think, he would not harm me. I do not doubt the power of his anger and hatred, but I believe there is that in him which is better and stronger.

“I do not know what your third test will be, Lady.” I close my eyes. “I have tried to imagine it, and I think the only way he would fail is if he reached that pitch of helplessness and rage I saw in him last night, and then was called upon to save me rather than let me go. I think perhaps he would let me die, tricking himself for those few moments into believing he did no wrong. But I do not doubt he would regret it, even if he never learns who I am. That is the only test left which he might fail.”

I look back at the Lady. “Which of us has not made mistakes when faced with more than we can handle?”

“Go back, child,” the Lady says gently.

“I am not a child to be sent home, Lady. I will not go without the prince.” Her hands flick over her skirts, then come to a rest clasped together in front of her. “Lady?”

“He is yours,” she says, her voice heavy with weariness. “I will return him to the plains.”

“What of the third test?” I whisper.

“You are right,” she says simply. “So I will test him with his life. Let us see what he has learned these last few days. I put him in your keeping, princess.”

“And then?” She raises an eyebrow in an eloquent, arched question. “What of the rest of the Family?”

“You will not give them up, will you?” She smiles wryly.

“They are as innocent as Kestrin.”

“You know what your king has planned for Valka.”

“I know.” I look down to the gravel walk. “They say it is justice: she has been found a traitor and passed her own sentence.” I swallow hard. “It is the law that a traitor must die, Lady. And it was you who made her into that traitor; made her so convincing that the king would not have suspected her. No doubt, one by one, she would have given them over to you as she could. For that, she cannot hope for forgiveness … it is justice, but a cruel and ugly justice. I wish that it were tempered by mercy, that she might have an easy death.” I think of the Lady herself, her mother’s death. Perhaps, had the woman been cleanly executed, far from the eyes of her child, the Lady would not have become who she is.

“Do you argue for the lives of men who cloak cruelty in the guise of justice?”

“Lady, you condemn them without fair trial. You saw the taint in Kestrin, but when he was put to the test, he passed.”

“What trial shall I set them, princess? Will you put yourself into my hands to pose them their tests?” She raises her hand quickly, “Do not offer. I am sending you home because in this case you are right, and I do not want you dead because I wish Kestrin dead.”

“Lady, you will not give them up because you are afraid to.”

“Afraid?” Her lips curl in amusement.

“What would you do if you had no more princes and kings to hunt down? You’ve been fighting for this one thing so long; what will you do when you achieve it? There’s no one here with you, is there? You’re alone, and without your oath you have no purpose. You’re afraid of that.”

“Enough.”

“No, Lady. Do you think I can’t see how tired you are? You are weary with the things you have done and seen. Can’t you let go?”

“It has been too long,” she says quietly. “I have been living this oath since I saw my mother die. I hardly remember anything else. What is there for me but this?” She gestures towards the garden, the myriad hidden squares with their stone people.

“Go back to your people, Lady.”

“No, Alyrra. The time is too far past for settling down on some quiet mountaintop.”

“Then what will you do?”

“I will send you back, and with you your prince.”

I rise to meet her as she walks towards me. “And what of his family? And you?”

“Let us both keep watch on them.”

“Lady?” She holds out her hand, and I clasp it in mine, ignoring the pain of my wounds. “What if I should need to speak with you again?”

“Call me by my name and I will come.” The gardens melt away, the hedges rising up into walls, the Lady illuminated by a fall of morning light through shattered shutters.

“Your name,” I echo.

“Sarait.”

I let her hand go and she fades into the sunlight.

***

The king’s mage-healer tends to me silently, his face still and stern, accented only by a small line running deep between his eyebrows. He asks no questions I cannot answer, and gives me only a cream for my burns and a strict admonition to watch my cuts for purulence. He promises to return in the afternoon, leaving me under the watchful eyes of a handful of women.

After the Lady returned me to my room, I had made my way out into the hallway, accosting a passing servant with a message for the king. The servant had run for all that he could not have understood it:
Look for the Wind on the plains.
It was only when I returned my room and caught my image reflected in a mirror that I realized his true reason: my shift was dark with dried blood, the front and sleeve stiff and black with the stuff. And so, the mage-healer.

I close my eyes when he is gone, lying back in the bed. I do not know who the women are, their names, their stations, why they are here with me. In a few moments, when I regain some small part of my strength, and before I succumb to the call of sleep, I will open my eyes and ask them. But first I will lie here, listening to the faint rustle of skirts as one of the women crosses the room. I will breathe slowly and lightly, so as not to wake the pain that slumbers in my chest, and I will remember all that I have lived, so as not to lose it in these first hours of wakefulness.

***

The mage-healer is true to his word, returning regularly to see to my injuries. They heal well enough, the stitches closing up without his help, the burnt skin slowly peeling away, new skin growing in pink and shiny.

“You do not have to see anyone until you are ready,” he assures me, and I let myself savor the solitude his offer affords me, sending away my attendants to stay in the adjoining room, coming only when I call.

But I cannot hide forever like a she-wolf licking her wounds deep within her den. So, after a handful of days, after listening to the murmured news passed among the women of the strange return of the prince, met walking back to the city by the king’s quad, I leave my bed. I call in one of the attendants to help me dress. It is not until I am ready to leave my room that I realize that these are the clothes from Valka’s trunks, left for so many months in my room in the stable.

My other attendants flutter around me, helping me to a low couch, spreading a light blanket over my lap. “I’m not dying,” I say, flapping my hands at them. “I’m getting better. Sit down and talk to me.”

They glance at each other surreptitiously. Of course. Attendants are meant to attend, not accompany. I try again, “I need to know what has happened while I have been ill—surely you can tell me the news?”

With widening smiles, they settle around me like a flock of jewel-hued songbirds and tell me the gossip of the palace. I listen until I can no longer think straight, then have them help me back to my room.

“Perhaps a change of rooms would do you good, Your Highness,” one of the attendants, Mina, suggests as I sink back against the pillow. I look at her in consternation. I had thought she had more sense than that.

“Why would that help me?”

“You are always watching the window here, Your Highness. I thought perhaps you would find greater comfort elsewhere.” Good sense and a keen mind; I wonder who holds her greatest loyalty.

“It can’t hurt,” I concede.

I am wrong. With Mina’s help, I move into my new apartments; they are Valka’s old ones. As with my last visit, I explore the rooms. The writing desk still holds the letters from my mother and Daerilin, though the portrait sketches and Kestrin’s notes are missing. All of Valka’s personal belongings have been removed, the chest of boards bare. I wonder what became of the clothes I had brought with me, the wedding dress and trousseau. In the wardrobe, folded on a shelf, I find a dark traveling cloak lined with fur; I lay my hand on it and know that I will wear it again come winter, showing my appreciation for this first gift from the king. For now I am grateful to leave it here, close the doors upon it and forget.

I sit on the bed wishing for the little room in the stable I shared with Laurel: the two small straw pallets, side by side, and the wooden pegs on the wall to hold all we need. The sheer volume of my new belongings oppresses me: the huge, empty bed, the veritable forest of chairs and tables cluttering each room. I will change it, I think. In a few moments I will join my attendants in the sitting room and decide with them what will stay and what will go, how to arrange the furniture so that I can think again in straight lines and clean curves.

I glance around from my perch on the bed and notice a small inlaid wooden box on the bedside table. I open it, then dump the contents into my palm: a thin silver chain looped through an oval pendant. I turn the pendant over, knowing already what I will see: a delicately carved rose. I close my fingers over the pendant and chain, holding them tightly. Kestrin had watched me very closely indeed. I wonder if Joa had sent the pendant directly to him, or if he had to send someone to buy it back from the knacker afterwards.

“Your Highness?” Mina stands in the doorway.

“Yes?” I ask, watching her. Though she stands straight, she somehow still manages to fade into her surroundings. Perhaps it is the way her face tilts down, how even when she reaches to pick something up, her manner is confident yet unassuming. I am not sure if it is humility or a great cleverness.

“Will you dine in company tonight?” she asks, as one of my attendants has asked every night since I first left my room.

I glance down at my closed fist. “Yes.”

The lords and ladies outdo themselves in their distress at Valka’s betrayal, and their ambiguous comments on my disappearances and injuries, speaking in shocked tones and shaking their heads. Only Lord Garrin approaches close.

“You seemed quite well the night the impostor was exposed,” he remarks. We stand in a tiled foyer, awaiting the last of the guests before proceeding to dinner.