Chapter Six The Lady in the Cauldron #2
Without thinking, she seized a broom in the corner and started to sweep. This wasn’t even her job. She wasn’t a scullion, but they couldn’t succumb entirely to chaos.
Forge watched Emer and Lia. “Never imagined I’d hear anybody criticizing Key’s way with knives. Unless they were on the other end of Key’s knife.”
Lia tried to adjust some dead flowers standing in an intricately worked metal vase, gave up with only a handful of black petals for her pains, and waved a stained hand dismissively. “It matters not who sits the throne. What matters is snatching my sister out from the throne’s shadow.”
“But – if Key is the Emperor, surely… surely everything’s all right now.” Emer’s voice faltered with her sweeping. “Key’s our friend. He won’t hurt us. We can go back home.”
Silence followed her stammer, broken by the hiss of abyss fires.
Emer had lived in the Palace on the Edge for years, but even at the edge of the dread ravine the palace walls were thick and the windows expensive glass.
It was easier to pretend away the ominous sounds and smoke of endless fire in the palace.
Emer was several years older than Lia, and Forge might be older than Emer, but not by more than a couple of years. Lia and Forge had no right to stare as if Emer was a hopelessly misguided child.
“Key has reason to be angry with Rahela,” Lia said at last. “Would you trust a furious man with endless power?”
Forge gave a curt nod. “You haven’t seen him since he rose. He’s… he looks… I let him use my forge – if he swore neither he nor his dead puppets would ever darken my door again.”
She shuddered. This woman who nothing seemed to faze, who liked Key enough to open her door for him while the sky burned, could not find words to describe what she had found on her doorstep when she did.
“Key’s probably killed the woman you’re concerned about by now.” Forge didn’t sound overly concerned.
Lia said, “No. He will keep my sister alive. Mercy is doubtful. Vengeance is certain. I grew up with a wicked stepmother, so I know. Men do not forgive the women who wronged them. No man lusts for a woman more than they lust for revenge.”
Forge stared at the huge anvil, tipped on its side.
Emer imagined the relentless dead crowding in and shoving over its great weight by sheer force of numbers.
Worse, she imagined Key hurling the anvil by himself.
On the first night they met, Key had murdered men in front of her.
She’d held up her skirt to keep from being stained by the blood.
Emer was covered in blood now, and Key was the Emperor.
Lia and Forge were right. She didn’t need to see Key to know that much. She had been trained by Lia’s wicked stepmother as well. She didn’t trust the temper of a scorned man. Enough men harassed Emer, thinking she would be grateful for a tumble despite her mark of sin. It was only… Key never did.
Key always believed they were friends, just because they worked together and had done each other a few favours. Emer knew better, but she missed him after he was killed. She allowed herself to get sentimental about dead men. They couldn’t hurt you.
It seemed dead men could hurt you plenty these days.
Lia let the blackened petals of the flowers she’d been attempting to arrange drift from her palm to the rough-hewn tabletop. She crossed the floor to lay her lily-soft hand on Forge’s extremely muscular arm.
“Please, you must help us.”
“I let you in. Let that be enough.”
Forge’s tone was gruff, but Emer knew better than to believe her. She had let them in, hadn’t she? Lia would get her way. Lia always did, in the end.
Forge escorted them up a rickety flight of stairs, painted a cloudy, even red with ruddle, the stuff they dug out of pits to mark sheep fleeces.
Emer’s skirt brushed the rough wall as she climbed, and came away ochre red.
The stain did not look so different from the blood already there.
Curled scraps of half-burned paper, like fallen petals made of pages and ash, lay scattered over the steps. Emer was too weary to ask why.
Weariness fled in terror when Forge flung open a door. In the small room beyond lay an untidy pallet, sheets half on the ticking and half on the floorboards.
Forge addressed Lia. “You know your way to the bed. Don’t suppose you two will mind sharing.”
The door slammed behind Forge. The echo rang in Emer’s stunned ears as mortified heat washed up her neck in a flood, crashing through her cheeks to engulf her brow.
She could imagine her sinner’s mark blazing like a beacon.
For a time, she had been Lia’s maid and not Rahela’s.
Emer had been sent to spy on Lia in a wicked scheme of Rahela’s devising.
It was all pretence, but there was one thing Rahela never designed or dreamed of.
It wasn’t usual for a lady and a maid to share a bed, if the occasion called for it.
It was unusual for a lady to turn to you with her luminous eyes, and offer you her mouth.
You should comb a lady’s golden hair a hundred times, not grasp a golden handful in your fist and pull to bare her throat for a kiss.
You should undress a lady for a satin nightgown, not for yourself.
It had all happened under the cover of night and silken sheets, Emer barely daring to make a sound louder than a breath.
Nobody would ever believe Emer, if she told them. Emer had always been painfully aware she might as well have imagined every moment. For all it could affect either of their lives, it might as well be a dream. Nobody could ever know, but the two of them.
So she’d thought.
“You know your way to the bed? What did she mean by that?”
Lia avoided Emer’s gaze. “How did you think we knew each other?”
Emer could never have possibly imagined, yet there could be no other reason. It was obvious. Both these women, the rough blacksmith stranger and the lady she thought she knew better than anyone, were right to treat Emer like a fool.
Emer was a fool for kissing Lia tonight at the edge of the Cauldron, kissing her for the first time in the open and thinking that made the kiss different. Emer was the fool who had killed for Lia.
She got into bed at the very edge of the pallet, pulled a corner of the sheet up over her shoulder, and turned her back on Lia.
Lia’s voice drifted to her across the pillow. “I know all this must seem strange, but to get Rahela out of the palace, we will need numbers and we will need power. Trust me, this is where we can get it. We need to wait for the right time. When it comes, follow my lead.”
This did all seem very strange. Emer wished Lia would explain what she was planning, but while Lia could simply tell Emer to follow, why should she tell her secrets? It turned out Lia had so many.
“As you command, my lady.”
There was a pause. “Are you angry?”
“I’m not angry. I’m sleeping,” Emer hissed angrily.
Eventually, Emer did sleep in this strange place under a sky quivering with lightning.
Her last thought was born of habit, trained into her over years.
If a servant was loyal and obedient, when you died your master buried you under a divine stone so you would not rise.
No lady’s maid worth a tombstone would ever rest without knowing how fared her lady.
Emer had been raised to serve Rahela from the cradle.
Of late, Rahela seemed lost to her, as if the woman she knew had been replaced by a different person entirely.
Emer’s mind couldn’t entirely encompass the strangeness and sorrow of that idea.
She didn’t know what to make of Rahela’s replacement, the woman who asked Emer to call her Rae.
Her wicked lady had let Key be whipped without a word, when Key would have done anything in the world to please her. When Key died for her.
Died for her, climbed out of a grave for her, and set the sky on fire for her sake. What would Key do, with a sword in his hand and the dead at his back, once he had her? He was a killer. But who was Emer to judge him for killing? She was a killer now herself.
Emer had blamed her lady for Key’s death.
Emer remembered the light going out of his face before he died, when he realized her lady lied to him.
Nobles never truly cared for you. Nobles always lied.
If Key’s bitterness was as deep as the abyss, his resentment as high as the rising fires and his rage as hot as the sparks that flew upward, Emer could understand.
Lady Rae never intended Key to get hurt. She did her best to save Emer and Key both from the king’s wrath by professing her indifference to servants and her love for Octavian. But her schemes resulted in Key’s throat being cut as Emer’s lady kissed Key’s murderer.
And had Lady Rae been lying? Emer’s lady certainly loved the king, before she changed. Before and after she changed, Emer’s lady was arrogant, making plans to benefit only herself no matter who else was hurt through her actions. Sometimes she acted as if she was the only real person in the world.
Emer couldn’t blame Key for being angry. Emer could understand Key wanting revenge.
Yet habit was second nature, stronger than the first, and Emer didn’t know how to rid herself of the habit of caring. Before she dropped into strange dreams, Emer hoped Lady Rae fared well.