Beneath Ceaseless Skies #138 Read online

  “My dear Lady Fehle,” he said. “I am but a servant of the king’s will.”

  “So modest, Lord Darren.” The ghost of my living self danced on my tongue. “I’ve heard so many things about you, but no one ever mentioned your modesty. Perhaps they were being polite. It’s an ugly virtue.”

  Darren shifted his weight, considering. Eventually he said, “You have a proposal for me?”

  I counted that as a minor victory: I’d intrigued him enough to make him move first.

  Now I turned towards him. Despite my anger, the familiarity of his face was a shock to me.

  “A petition,” I corrected, “for the king. Brau, to be returned unharmed to his family. And Gaven’s body, returned so that we may bury him in the mountain way.”

  This, I thought, would be what my father wanted, what the dead wanted. To have a family member killed was no great matter, but to lose their body to a traitor’s interment in the Iron Tower—that would be a loss indeed.

  Darren pursed his lips, pretending to think. “Or?”

  “Or.” I smiled. If I’d had a living heart it would have been thudding furiously. “Or I go before the people of this city and testify to your crimes. Your hand in the execution of Queen Asilt, for example. Our present king was rather fond of her.”

  Darren laughed; a long, low sound that unspooled too easily from his chest. “My lady,” he said, his eyebrows raised, “That would hardly help your case. Your own kin were far too... involved.”

  “The dead care little for their reputations,” I said softly, “and the living are fond of vengeance. Your enemies will pay a great deal for my secrets.”

  “Your secrets, assuming you have any, are worth nothing without proof. So tell me, Lady Fehle, what incriminating letters did your father leave in your hands?”

  When I said nothing, he cocked his head to one side. “No letters? Of course not.” His tone became kindly. “He spoke of you sometimes, you know. A foolish child, dull and unpromising. He rather wondered if you were his. Now that would be an interesting rumor to revisit, wouldn’t it? If we’re in the business of digging up old rumors.”

  If I had been Fehle, I think Darren’s words would have gashed me open. As it was, I glared at him, feeling an almost-living fury simmer under my skin. I’d forgotten how good he was at this: cruelty, veiled threats, and lies, confidently delivered.

  “Your father wouldn’t have trusted you with his secrets.”

  He paused, baiting me. I said nothing.

  Hiding his disappointment, Darren continued: “And even if you have some scrap you think is evidence, what of it? Your papers will be declared forged, and you will land in a madhouse if you aren’t careful.”

  “I am touched by your concern. But I think they will believe me.”

  The silence between us was blade-sharp. I could feel Darren balancing on the edge of it, deciding whether or not to call my bluff. Lord Gaven was dead, and there were other ways of exerting control over my house than holding Brau. But Darren was a man who liked his victories absolute.

  “The wife of an executed traitor? I think not,” he said. “No lord will take your accusations seriously.”

  “That might be true,” I mused, “if I were the Lady Fehle.”

  There is a certain satisfaction in springing a trap, Darren used to say. Seeing the look that crossed his face, I almost understood what he’d meant.

  But Darren was not a man given to remorse, or fear. Ashen-faced, he rearranged himself.

  “Ah,” he said, his color returning. “Lady Rehlite. I must apologize for not recognizing you. Death has not favored you, my dear. Not at all.” The thin, cruel smile returned to his lips and perched there like a wary bird. “So, the mountain legends are true, then. Interesting.”

  My sense of satisfaction was fading. I plunged ahead: “You know exactly what I can reveal,” I warned him. “And I will.”

  “You always did care too much, Rey,” Darren said, “about what people think. It’s what they do that matters.

  “Let’s say,” he continued, “that you tell them everything. I have power— swords, land, coin, and knives at the chamber-lords’ backs. And power, my dear, counts more than all the moral indignation in the land.”

  “You can’t be sure of that.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I can.” He leaned forward. “Now,” he said, “I am going to give you an ultimatum. Renounce your petition, or I kill the boy.”

  “Kill the boy and the dead will make you pay for it.” The lie sprang easily to my tongue; my living self would have been proud.

  Darren’s eyes flickered, but he did not turn away. “You will be gone,” he said, “by midnight.” He bowed his head respectfully, as one would to a lady one had just met. Then he strode away, his pace hard and measured, the tip of his sword almost catching against one of the green-cloaked scriveners hovering nearby.

  * * *

  Panic comes at odd moments. The night following Asilt’s execution, for example; I hadn’t panicked then. Husked-out from my testimony, I’d watched Darren and Baylen argue as though they were strangers on a far-off shore. And when I turned my head, when I saw the frozen form of the scrivener’s apprentice hiding in the shadow of the bookcase, I hadn’t felt anything. I’d raised my finger to him—hush—and turned back to see Darren, his face gone still and hard. “Is there anyone there?”

  “No.” The lie had slipped off my tongue the way an ivory box can slide into a wall. With lethal ease.

  It was only as we were leaving the city that the panic had hit me, raw-mouthed and scrabbling. I may have killed us all, I’d thought, remembering the apprentice’s bloodless face. If that boy tells anyone what he overheard. Or if Darren finds out.

  The panic that clutched me now was similar. My gamble had not paid off, and now Darren knew. He knew.

  Recklessly I plunged myself into the maze of stone. Where was Darren? Footsteps across flagstones. He hurried towards the House of Flame, and I could feel the young crimsons scurrying out of his way as he approached.

  The Craftsmen. Of course.

  Alarm pushed me off the floor. I raised an awkward arm to signal one of the scriveners. “Send word to my Steward,” I said, “I need to speak to him.” The man nodded; anything to get away from my voice.

  Alone again, I cast my thoughts through stone, to the palace’s walls and the city’s bustling streets. I searched for Brau but couldn’t find him. I strained to reach past the city gates, down the faint roads to the cold underlands of the mountain dead. But the valley was thick around me. I couldn’t even feel the mountains, let alone touch the barrier that separated me from the deadlands.

  I curled back, exhausted. If I was undone, what would become of Brau? I needed allies.

  Again I pushed myself against the iron wall that entombed Lord Gaven. Are you there? Listen to me.

  Perhaps, I thought wildly, if I spoke to him in the language of the dead.

  I turned inwards, plunging deeper than I had yet gone into my unmemory. I grasped at the edges of a word. My mouth shaped its jagged consonant, but the word itself rebelled. Its barbed vowels stuck in my throat. Nothing dead wishes to be dragged into the world of the living. Exhausted, I let it go.

  The Steward, I thought, the valley air pressing down on me. Rogan will have to save the boy.

  I let my breath out and was surprised at the warm liquid that ran from my mouth. I touched my fingers to it—the pain of the half-spoken word still throbbed my mouth—and I saw scarlet. Quickly I pressed my hand to my chest—but I had no heartbeat.

  Confusion filled me. Had the word punished me by making me feel as the living felt? Or had it temporarily brought me back into alignment with the world?

  I had to let my hand drop. The servants were staring.

  * * *

  Darren did not wait until midnight. My father would have approved: “Strike early,” he always said as he moved his red sword-piece across the board. “Strike last.”

  In the Hour of Stars, Lor
d Darren’s crimson priests came for me. Their incense burners clanked heavily on brass chains, filling the halls with thick sweet smoke. I laid hold of my defenses—the ropes of thought and memory I’d stretched around the bones of the palace—and pulled them taut.

  “With the Flame,” a crimson said, “we drive forth the dark.”

  “With the Flame,” another said, “we purify this place.”

  Before, it had not hurt to think of the Flame. Now it did, and each word these men spoke was like a torch casually tossed in my direction.

  “With the Flame, we drive forth unquiet spirits.”

  I could feel the dark core that filled my bones diminishing. My skin was damp with sweat or snow melt. I slipped, then caught hold of the palace, and I clung tighter.

  “With the Flame”—they were very near now—”we bid you leave.”

  Almost I felt myself come undone. But I was not some unquiet spirit to be kicked like a beggar from their door. I was the Lady Rehlite, and I would not move.

  “You see,” I gasped, rising to my feet. The language of the dead filled my mouth with blood and foam, but I spat the words anyway. “You see what they are doing to me? To one of your own.” I stretched my hands out to the valley’s sleeping dead, to the old queens in their mausoleums, to the beggars whose powdered bones filled the cracks between stones. To poor murdered Asilt, buried under an anonymous floor, and her harmless minstrels, and the other unlucky souls who’d gotten in the way of my family’s ambition. “Help me.”

  I wasn’t sure that the dead would listen. But they did.

  They rose.

  The screaming—one of the priests had started as soon as I spoke—soon echoed from all parts of the palace. Shadows were crawling up the walls. Vapor condensed into half-forgotten shapes. Hallways echoed with the slow tread of corpses intact enough to move.

  Darren might not fear the return of his secrets, but not everyone was like him. In every dwelling, some old, angry past was breathing up from a sewer, or unwinding itself from a grave-sheet.

  In the distance, the howls of dogs edged up until they broke in pain. The cage that hung by the judge’s table rattled as the songbird smashed itself against the bars.

  “You will hear us.” The rage of the dead flooded the mouths of the living and choked them with its silence.

  I swayed in the middle of the storm. A dead Craftsman in ancient robes crouched over one of Darren’s crimson priests, whispering. Another one of crimsons sobbed as he crawled away on his belly.

  I looked for Asilt, to see if she had come. There was much I wanted to say to her; apologies I wanted to make. But she had not come. Of course she would not come.

  At the far entrance I saw Darren stagger and fall in a writhing tangle of clothes.

  I walked over to him, each step lancing with wrongness. My heart gave a shuddering beat, an ugly sensation after all this time.

  Darren was clawing at his throat, caged-wolf eyes glittering hate.

  “Do you concede?” I mouthed in the words of the living.

  He tried not to. I could see the muscles straining in his neck as he gulped air that no longer seemed to fill his lungs. I could see the battle between anger and terror on his face, but in the end, even Darren wanted to live.

  He nodded.

  “He will listen,” I whispered to the dead. Warm air rushed back into the room, and with it the sounds of living people crying and muttering prayers.

  I closed my eyes. I felt very weak now, very thin. I did not need to see to know that the dead had left me. I was once again alone.

  * * *

  The living speak of victories as though they were entirely good things. The dead know better.

  As I passed through the Hall of Song I saw the gilded bars of the aviaries tufted with bloody feathers. On their cold metal floors the songbirds lay in tattered heaps.

  I had expected the king to look different than I remembered, but no. He wore the same flickering nervous look he’d worn as a prince. I expected that glance to dart my way. Instead he eyed the White Council, and Lord Darren, and seemed not to notice the rustle of whispers that followed me into the hall.

  “The Lady Fehle,” the Gatewoman said, and the prince nodded. I knelt and waited for my petition to be read. As the familiar words rang out, I could feel Darren’s eyes burning into my back. He was not a man who liked to lose.

  “And so,” the scrivener said, “she begs for the return of her husband’s body, and for the custody of her son.” For the first time, the king looked at me. But I saw no sign of recognition on his face. Lord Darren had told him nothing.

  “Of course,” the king said, and turned his head as though finished. One of the White Lords coughed and murmured something. The king nodded and swung his tired gaze back towards me.

  In that moment, I recognized his expression - it was the same look I’d seen in my horse’s eyes as I drove her down the mountain road. The king was afraid, but not of the dead.

  My dull skin chilled as I became aware of the machinery of plots around me: Lord Darren, angry but silent; the cluster of courtiers, some whispering about the strange omens of the previous night; some studying me, some conspicuously absent. And in the center of it all, the king, his face haunted by whatever the dead had told him yesterday.

  The king licked his lips - a nervous habit. He said, “For the sake of your family, I think it right to return the young lord to his lands. I will recommend him to the education of Steward Rogan, whose loyalty is well known to us.”

  Murmurs rose from Rogan’s end of the hall: whispers of congratulations, no doubt, and the odd, sharp intake of breath from those who saw a decisive move by some hidden political players. I resisted the urge to turn towards him, to try to read the truth on his face.

  The King’s gaze met mine. Panic swam in his eyes; he saw the jaws of a plot closing around him, but what could he do?

  I nodded to him: I know, I wanted to say. The living like to pretend they have choices, but usually, they don’t. And neither do the dead.

  But of course I could say nothing. The king’s gaze passed from mine to his plotting counselors.

  “As to the body of the...traitor.” The king swallowed, and I knew he knew Lord Gaven had been no traitor to him. Indeed, the man had probably died because of his loyalty. “Lord Darren has, out of his fond memories for your late sister, requested that your family’s shame be consigned to the Flame. The body has already been burned.”

  Across the hall, Lord Darren’s eyes flashed malice. The king shifted back in his throne, puzzled, no doubt, by Darren’s sudden insistence on an honorable burning for a man he had almost certainly schemed to kill.

  I bowed my head in gratitude, seething with a fury so hot I felt almost alive.

  * * *

  “So Lord Gaven is dead,” I said to the Steward when we were alone, “and you get his wife and his lands.”

  Rogan lowered his head and glanced towards the room where Harmony was packing my sister’s trunk. “Lord Brau will inherit his father’s lands,” he said quietly. “I will merely see to his education.”

  “The boy had best meet with no accidents.”

  “Would it matter if he did? Whether it’s my child or Gaven’s, there will always be an Etrel at the Keep.”

  He was right, I knew. Providing that an Etrel held our lands, my family cared little whose child lived long enough to inherit.

  “It would matter to me,” I snapped. I sounded like a child, I thought. I sounded like Fehle.

  The Steward must have thought so too. “I do love your sister, you know,” he said. “Lord Gaven was a beast to her. You weren’t there. You didn’t see how it was.”

  I shook my head. “And will Lord Darren promote you when this King dies?”

  “Perhaps the King will have a long life,” the Steward said. “If he pursues his interests.” He shrugged. “As for myself, if Darren doesn’t promote me, others will. The mountains must be held, and I am liked by both the mountain and the city f
olk.”

  “You have worked hard to be liked.”

  “I have worked hard to be useful,” he corrected. He sighed and gestured to the door. “I must go,” he said, “and collect the young lord from the tower.

  “Am I not to see my nephew, then?”

  “And risk him wailing that you are not his mother? No. And,” he admitted, “others think it best that the lord travel back to the Keep in more trusted company.”

  “He and I must not talk of his late father, I suppose.”

  “Yes.” He paused. “I won’t have you poisoning his mind against me. I like the boy, and it would be better for everyone if there’s no strife between us.”

  “I understand,” I said bitterly.

  “I know you do.” He picked up his coat from the chair on which he’d hung it. A blue wool coat, worn at the elbows from accounts. Rogan was a man who preferred hard work to luxury.

  He paused at the door. “I am sorry not to have known you when you were alive, Lady Rehlite.” He touched his forehead in a sign of respect, then walked out.

  * * *

  At the Spice Gate a man came to greet me. He pulled a heavily-loaded mule behind him; it tossed its head and eyed me warily.

  “Lady Fehle,” he called. “If we could speak?”

  A broken wall disrupted the steady stream of the crowd. I followed him to the side where the winter sun pooled in crisp white patches.

  “My lady,” the man said quietly. “I know you do not remember me, but I remember you. From before.” He kept his head lowered like someone used to standing in the presence of superiors. A memory tugged at me—a flash, like a glimpse of red in a crowd.

  “You’re a scrivener,” I said. I recalled him now—the green-cloaked man standing at the back of the hall when Darren had come to threaten me. I remembered the look he’d given me.

  “You saw me in the Vault of Words, when I was just a boy.” The man gave an odd half-laugh. “I remembered you.”

  Now the pieces fell into place. “Yes,” I said. “The apprentice.” Is there anyone there?

  “It is true, my lady, that you wanted Lord Gaven’s bones?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But they’ve been destroyed.” Lord Darren, determined always to inflict damage, had seen to that.