Wooing the Witch Queen (Queens of Villainy #1)

Chapter 16

16

The next morning, all of the visitors in their pomp and finery climbed into their carriages—or onto their riding gryphons, as the case might be—and set off for their own busy cities and palaces, leaving Kadaric Castle as silent and nearly empty as before, surrounded only by vast, boulder-strewn mountain peaks and sky. Within the next few days, almost every domestic routine fell back into place as neatly and easily as if none of the wild spectacle or emotional tumults of Winter’s Turning had ever taken place.

Felix wished that he could forget so easily.

His own duties, of course, remained unchanged. As the days passed and snow began to fall outside the window of his tower room, he rose every morning to eat a hot breakfast, pull on his concealing black half-mask and cloak—which he appreciated even more as the temperatures outside dropped further into winter’s icy clutches—and walk, under Oskar’s noisy, busy chaperonage, down the familiar winding stairs to the library, where the fire would be lit and waiting for him… along with the seemingly endless quest to learn how to do his own job.

Each new discovery he uncovered about a previously unknown aspect of magic necessitated a full reconsideration of all of his careful sorting systems. He tried not to consider it a failure every time he was forced to overhaul them. After all, each new amendment to those systems counted as progress, painful though that might feel.

It was the only sort of progress he was making.

He still jumped at every new creak of the door… because one singular routine had changed since Winter’s Turning.

Queen Saskia, who had visited at least once a day in the month before that ritual, had been nowhere to be seen ever since. She wasn’t avoiding the library itself—Felix knew that much from the books he found waiting for him every morning on the study table, accompanied by scrawled notes in her spiky handwriting, thoughtfully alerting him to their original locations.

No, she was clearly avoiding him. Apparently, whatever incomprehensible impulse had overcome her on the night of Winter’s Turning— hot, demanding lips and teeth at his throat, passion and power and glory —had been dismissed by the next morning. Whether it had been her First Minister’s horror at Saskia’s choice or simply the light of a new day that had reminded her of how much better she could do, her reaction now was unmistakable:

Regret.

Felix’s hand tightened convulsively at the thought, and his fountain pen twitched, black ink spattering across his tidy notes.

Damnation. Blowing out his breath, Felix closed his eyes for a brief but intense moment of self-flagellation. Then he carefully wiped off the nib of the pen. He was just setting down the handkerchief he’d used when the door to the library opened… and the pen fell helplessly from his hand onto the papers beneath it, uncapped, as he lunged to his feet, forgetting everything.

But it wasn’t Queen Saskia. Instead, Mrs. Haglitz stood in the open doorway, her long arms crossed, her many shawls draped around her shoulders, and her head unveiled as she frowned at him.

“I… madam.” Felix jerked into a belated but respectful bow. Under the pressure of her examination, he felt stripped bare, despite all the layers of his own clothing and the half-mask on his face. Guiltily, he cast a quick glance at the table beside him, but he didn’t spot any uneaten meals that could have caused her ire this time. “May I help you?”

“Tsk! Even worse than I’d expected.” She shook her head at him, setting the dangling mushroom by her left ear wobbling in disapproving accompaniment. “Well, then. Best put away that fancy pen of yours, lad, and come with me.”

Felix blinked. “Where—?”

But she was already leaving, so he scrambled to cap his fountain pen and hurry after her with Oskar flapping in his wake.

This time, she led them not to the small, oak-paneled dining room where Felix had eaten several times before, but down a meandering set of steps to a vast underground kitchen paved with ancient-looking flagstones, with at least a dozen different cookstoves set against the plain stone walls and fragrant sheaves of savory herbs and dried meat hanging from the high ceiling. An opening in one corner served as a fountain, shooting a steady stream of water from an underground stream into a broad stone pool. Felix shivered reflexively at the realization of just how deep they must be inside the mountain.

Still, the air felt remarkably warm, with fires crackling cheerfully inside two different fireplaces at opposite ends of the room. A plain wooden table sat before the closest fire, with long, sturdy benches laid on either side. Two of the goblins sat at one end, munching charred treats that Felix tried not to recognize as toasted rats; at the other end of the table, Morlokk sat with a delicate porcelain cup of tea in one massive hand and a newspaper spread out before him. He looked up at first with only polite acknowledgment—and then he saw Felix, and his thick eyebrows shot upwards as he pushed himself to his feet.

“Sinistro?”

“Oh, do sit down,” Mrs. Haglitz said to them both, and gave Felix a firm push in the right direction.

Obediently, he sat down on the same side of the table as the two goblins, who greeted him with cheerful waves but continued their own low-voiced conversation in a language he hadn’t learned, a mixture of chirps and croaks and low whistles interspersed with uproarious laughter. Morlokk sank back into his own seat more slowly, his eyes on Felix’s half-masked face.

“I don’t wish to interrupt…” Felix began.

“And that’s enough nonsense out of you!” Mrs. Haglitz bustled over to a long counter covered with a variety of pastries and meals-in-progress and began to chop thick slices with decisive thunks of a sharp knife. “No one”— thunk —“ever has to be alone and lonely in this castle”— thunk —“even if some people have it fixed in their ridiculous heads that they’re doomed to be alone forever. Pah! ”

A clay plate slammed onto the table in front of Felix in perfect unison with her exclamation of disgust.

“Thank you,” Felix said meekly, and breathed in the fragrance of her gift. Gorgeous layers of flaky pastry surrounded the crisply baked apple slices on his plate, generously infused with cinnamon, vanilla, and nutmeg. The sight and smell made his mouth water even before Mrs. Haglitz set down a sturdy mug of thick, dark coffee to accompany it. Felix dug in with enthusiasm while Morlokk returned to reading his newspaper, Oskar dived headfirst into his own offered plate of kitchen scraps in one corner of the room, and Mrs. Haglitz went back to work on her various meals-in-progress, muttering irritably under her breath.

“This is truly delicious,” Felix said a minute later, as he forced himself to take a break, halfway through, and wiped off a lingering fleck of pastry from his lips. “Did you bake it yourself, Mrs. Haglitz? Or did Cook—? Where is Cook?” He glanced around, frowning.

“She’s off for the week visiting family,” said Mrs. Haglitz. “Deserves it, too, after all she did for Winter’s Turning. I thought she’d go into hysterics about some of those guests’ demands! They’re lucky she didn’t send any of her snakes slithering into their beds overnight, and serve them right. Still, to hear the way she fretted about taking any time away, you’d think our queen would starve to death without her. I told her, I did all the cooking for our Saskia for years, not to mention feeding this fellow.” She nodded at Morlokk, who turned a page in the newspaper with a discreet rustling of paper. “The day I let anyone in my household go without a meal…”

Morlokk gave a weary sigh but didn’t look up from his reading material. “You do know she didn’t mean it as an insult.”

“Hmmph!” Mrs. Haglitz whacked her rolling pin hard onto a towering pile of dough.

Sensibly, Felix ducked his head over his plate and chose not to enter into that particular argument.

He’d never sat on a plain wooden bench to eat before, but he found that he quite liked the sensation. It felt friendlier, somehow, to share the long, scarred bench with the two cheerful little goblins, even as he sensed Morlokk’s wary gaze regularly shifting between the newspaper and him, as if waiting for him to do anything suspicious. Considering what he’d gathered about the usual behavior of dark wizards, Felix wouldn’t be surprised if Morlokk were anticipating a literal explosion.

Still, the warmth of the room, the sweetness of the pastry, and the undemanding companionship of the gathering all combined to make him feel better than he had in days. As his tension eased, he slowed his eating, trying to draw out every last mouthful… and his drifting thoughts finally caught up with Mrs. Haglitz’s earlier grumbling.

“Wait. What you said about people who thought they had to be alone forever… were you referring to me? Or to Her Majesty?”

“ Ahem. ” Morlokk cleared his throat and shook out his newspaper with a snap. “Mrs. Haglitz…”

“Oh, shush. You know just as well as I do that he doesn’t mean any harm to our girl. I’ll wager he came running here to hide from someone, but he’s no danger to her. Are you, lad?”

Felix, whose fingers had tightened convulsively around his fork at that too-keen analysis, shook his head. “I would never wish to harm Queen Saskia.”

“Of course you wouldn’t. Any fool can see that. And besides”—she looked pointedly at Morlokk—“there’s no point having both of them moping around all day long, filling up the castle with their misery, is there?”

“We-e-ell…” Morlokk winced. “Perhaps not, but I still don’t think—”

“What do you mean?” Felix stiffened. “What’s amiss with the queen?”

Was she ill? Was that why she hadn’t visited him? He set down his fork, legs tensing in preparation to stride off in search of her. Did she really think he wouldn’t want to help in any way he could?

“Why do you think I brought you down here? Someone needs to sort you two out, for all of our sakes.” Mrs. Haglitz gave an impatient huff as she sank down onto the bench opposite him, cradling a large clay mug of coffee in her other green hand. “Now, here’s what you need to understand about Her Majesty,” she began.

“ Must he?” Morlokk grumbled under his breath beside her. “Really?”

“Shh!” Mrs. Haglitz placed her elbows comfortably onto the table to either side of her mug and continued, “I’ve known our girl longer than anyone else in this castle. The first time I met her, she was a babe at her mother’s breast, and she had quite a temper then, too, I can tell you! But she was the sweetest little creature, big eyes taking in everything around her without a jot of fear.

“She came along on all of her mother’s field trips, even then. She must’ve been rocked to sleep by a dozen different kinds of aunties before she ever learned to crawl. And the way she’d giggle whenever anyone played peekaboo with her, no matter how sharp their teeth or long their claws—! Well. ”

Mrs. Haglitz paused to take a long sip of her coffee, lowering her eyelids swiftly… but not quite swiftly enough to hide the sudden, telltale moisture inside them.

Felix held his tongue in respectful silence, but she gave him a fierce look as she set the cup down with a thud. “Her mother, the late queen, was a fine woman, no matter what nasty rumors got spread around after her murder! I knew her for years, and I can tell you, I never saw her be anything but respectful and good-hearted to everyone she met.”

“She was an excellent scholar, too,” Felix said quietly. “I’ve been studying her work in the library. It’s astonishing, and it deserves to be more widely known.”

“Hmm.” Morlokk raised his gaze from the newspaper to study Felix, his gaze unreadable. “Many dark wizards wouldn’t agree.”

Felix frowned, but Mrs. Haglitz swept firmly past that conversational detour. “I didn’t know her husband myself, but I know she thought the world of him, and that was good enough for me. Creatures all over Kitvaria mourned their passing… and life got worse for all of us, too, with that villain trying to make himself a big man by cozying up to the Empire and stomping down on everyone he could.

“I can’t count how many times I thought of little Saskia and worried over how she might be doing… but when she finally showed up at my door, seven years later, fleeing to the only folk in the kingdom she could trust?”

Mrs. Haglitz shook her big eyes slowly, the lines in her face looking deeper than ever. “That bright, brave girl didn’t only lose her parents. She had to listen again and again to her uncle telling all the world that she was a monster and to blame for their deaths—that he’d had to kill them to protect the kingdom and stop her from inheriting and tainting it with her wrongness.”

So that was where all those rumors of her monstrousness had come from! Felix breathed slowly and evenly through his teeth, fighting to control a rage he hadn’t felt in years.

How had he not known about this? He was two years younger than Saskia, it was true; he would have been only five at the time of her parents’ assassination—but if he’d been trained to be a true Imperial Archduke rather than a mere puppet, the recent upheavals of Estarion’s closest neighbor would have been included in his earliest lessons. Even if he’d simply been allowed to read all the pages of the damned newspapers once he was an adult, like any other citizen of the Empire…!

His fingers flattened against the table, pressing down hard enough to hurt. It wasn’t enough to quell the roiling in his gut.

“She’ll do anything to protect the folk she loves,” said Mrs. Haglitz. “She’d burn down the world for any of us—but she’ll never, deep down, believe she deserves any real happiness of her own. And that’s what you need to understand about Her Majesty.”

Beside her, Morlokk let out a low, unhappy huff of air… but this time, he didn’t disagree.

“Thank you,” Felix said, and meant it. Nausea still twisted inside him, but deeper still, a core of certainty was beginning to form.

If Queen Saskia genuinely didn’t wish to repeat the intimacy they’d shared, that was entirely her prerogative. But if, instead, she was avoiding him because she believed that raw, exhilarating pleasure and affection were joys that she, of all people, didn’t deserve?

Well, then, Felix was going to shift his area of focus in this castle and become a most disobedient servant.