Twenty-One - Felix
???
Isa wobbled, andI remembered the disorientation of being summoned through the castle. Perhaps I should have given her a chance to sit before asking questions. But I had kept Marc out of the archives for well over an hour, and she still had shown no signs of exiting on her own. I couldn’t have kept the secretary busy any longer without arousing suspicion.
I wanted to know if that meant she had found something. I wanted to know if the scroll held in her white-knuckled grip was the answer I needed.
With a swipe of a claw, I called in a mug of tea, making it appear at the edge of my desk, near the chair. “Sit, Isa. Have some tea.”
She sat, her eyes still glassy, but as she stared at the steam rising from the mug, she seemed to come back to herself. “Oh, no. The summoning spell didn’t leave my stomach behind, so I don’t think tea is a good idea.”
Maybe she wasn’t completely back yet. “Wouldn’t it be worse to drink tea without a stomach?”
“Given how I feel right now, I can’t imagine not having a stomach could make anything worse. Why didn’t you tell me how horrible being summoned is?”
“I found it a tad disorienting, but that was all. A moment of dizziness, then everything settled.”
“I am not settling.”
I got rid of the first mug of tea and called in a new one. “Ginger tea, then.”
This time Isa reached for the tea, only then realizing she still had a scroll in one hand. She placed it carefully on the desk and wrapped both hands around the ceramic mug.
I placed a paw on the scroll, but didn’t bother to unroll it. That was much harder than turning pages with a claw, I had found. “What did you find?”
She took a slow sip of tea, keeping the mug up near her face. “Signing a contract leaves a magical signature as well. If I listen to the power on one contract, I can find other contracts signed by the same person. The Truthholder who witnesses the contract doesn’t leave behind the same signature, however.”
“And this contract?”
“A Truth scroll. I’m not sure what to make of the power coming off it. It reminds me of pure node power, but it’s not steady enough. I didn’t get a chance to see if I could find the same magical signature anywhere else in the archives, though, because Marc came down right after I found it.”
“I stalled him as long as I could.”
She lowered the mug slightly and gave me a wan smile. “I know. That wasn’t a complaint, just a fact.”
I nodded and studied the scroll under my paw, trying to call up my magical sight. I could locate the strands I knew for Truths without trouble, but it was harder to scan my surroundings for magic in general. It required an odd mix of concentration and unfocusing of my sight. After a moment, though, I could see the power shimmering all over the scroll. It did look very similar to the power in the node.
I let the magical sight drop. “If the node is locked to Duke Valois’s magic, and he wrote this scroll, it makes sense that the power would look the same.”
Isa shook her head. “Valois didn’t write this Truth. It was signed by Duke Sebastien.”
I knew, from reading his journals, that Valois’s heir had been able to make Truths. He complained about the grandiose spells his father cast, which tested the limits of magic but ignored the most pressing practicalities.
If my father had invented enchantments to keep the entire castle tidy, I wouldn’t have complained about the fact that he forgot to put an exception on the nursery.
Especially if I could create my own Truths to handle any practicalities he overlooked.
I jumped to my feet, tugging on a strand of power and summoning one of Sebastien’s journals to the table. I flipped through the pages as quickly as my claws allowed.
“What are you looking for?” Isa asked.
“Sebastien could create Truths.”
Isa tapped the scroll. “So I gathered. That doesn’t answer my question, though.”
“He regularly created Truths that balanced out the ones his father made.” I found the passage and scanned quickly to confirm that my memory was correct. Then I spun the journal to face Isa. “Read this.”
“‘Father is so concerned with doing the impossible and making his own life easier that he never considers how his actions affect others. I found Eloise crying today because the doll she was playing with disappeared. She had left it on the floor, and the tidying Truth father had cast moved it to a shelf she could not even reach. I had to convince father to leave off his current experiment long enough to fix the problem. Once I wondered aloud what would happen if a toy disappeared while Daniel played, Father agreed the issue was more pressing than his experiment. The threat of one of my son’s tantrums is enough to make anyone act with haste.’”
Isa looked up. “If Sebastien could create his own Truths, why did he need to ask his father for help?”
Of course, she spotted the inconsistency immediately. I sank down on the desk, tucking my paws under my body. “That is the question. To answer a few more you may have: yes, Sebastien had written his own Truths by this point, and no, I don’t think he cared about showing his father the unintended consequences of his actions. From what I read in his journals, Sebastien resigned himself to his father’s inability to focus on practical matters while still a boy. He was the one who negotiated the letter of patent granting Valois the duchy.”
“He knew he couldn’t change a Truth his father created,” Isa stated the conclusion I didn’t want to contemplate.
I stared at the journal, then with an angry swipe of my paw, sent it back to the shelf. “I’m going to be stuck as a cat forever.”
Isa’s hand stretched out. For a moment, I thought she was going to touch me, but then she pulled back. “Just because Sebastien couldn’t alter one of Valois’s Truths doesn’t mean we can’t break the curse. There are too many variables to draw such a conclusion with confidence.”
“What other variables do you think might matter?”
“Well, there is still the question of how Cecily accessed node power at all. Plus, you are the primary tie-holder.”
“I can’t create Truths. I tried to use my node-tie to reverse the curse first thing. Nothing happened.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t create Truths. It only means you failed—on that attempt—to reverse the curse.”
“None of my ancestors since Sebastien could create Truths.”
Isa speared me with a familiar look, her eyebrow raised. “They weren’t able to, or they never tried?”
“No one who left a journal mentioned even trying, but Sebastien wrote about the fact that his children couldn’t create Truths.”
Isa held out her hand, palm up. “Show me.”
I blinked. “I don’t actually remember which journal it was in. Sebastien left quite a few. I only remembered the other passage because it was in the same journal that described the Truth that prepares food from a certain cookbook.”
“One of Sebastien’s more practical additions to his father’s more whimsical spells?”
I shook my head. “Valois wrote that one, actually. Being able to eat at odd hours and not dealing with a cook mattered to him.”
Isa looked over at the bookshelves lining the wall to the left of my desk. “If you don’t remember which journal, then we should both start skimming them. The faster we can find that passage, the better.”
???
“You are readingtoo much into a random comment.” My tail lashed back and forth as I stared Isa down.
She didn’t even look up from the journal in her lap. At some point while we worked, she had slipped off her shoes and curled her legs up under her on the chair. She looked at ease, a few strands of chestnut hair sliding loose from her braid, her body slouched at an angle that screamed comfort rather than propriety.
I liked seeing her that way in my home. My office. My chair.
Even when she argued with me over the most ridiculous things.
“He specifically said that Eloise saw the truth of the matter.” She looked up at me, her brows drawn together. “His daughter was a truth-reader.”
“I can say that someone saw the truth of the matter without meaning magically. She was insightful and paid more attention than her brother, that’s all.”
“Then why does Sebastien specifically mention Daniel’s lack of magic in the next sentence?”
“Fine. Let’s say you are right. What does it matter?”
“If she was a truth-reader, then the odds that she was also a truth-teller are minuscule. For Valois to have been a dual-power mage is already beyond belief. So, if I am right, neither of Sebastien’s children were truth-tellers. His father was. He was. Lady Cecily is.”
“You think that is the key to writing Truths?” Could it be that simple? “No. I know more of my ancestors were truth-tellers than just Valois and Sebastien.”
“But did they ever attempt to write a Truth?”
“Probably not,” I conceded, “but if we are working under the theory that you are right, I am also a truth-teller and I couldn’t write a Truth.”
“You couldn’t reverse the curse. That is a different problem. Did you ever attempt to write a Truth that had nothing to do with your curse?”
I hesitated, and that was all the answer Isa needed. She hummed, calling in the supplies she needed to write a Truth. Then she unrolled the scroll that had come out of the archives with her. To my surprise, she began copying the words on the scroll.
“How will it prove anything for me to make a Truth that already exists?”
“This Truth created a pen that doesn’t require an inkwell. We know the phrasing works—or at least we can assume it does—so it is a good test of your own power. You can create a new pen for me, since I can’t summon the old one thanks to it being made by magic.”
Once she finished the Truth, I signed it, and we made our way to the great hall. We only made it as far as the negotiation room before Marc interrupted us.
He entered from the other side of the room. “There you both are. I was beginning to think I was the only one who noticed the time.”
Isa and I both looked at the clock hanging on the wall, its pendulum slowly swinging back and forth. A quarter past noon.
With a twitch of a single claw, I sent the paper in Isa’s hands into the locked drawer of the desk in my private tower room. “Of course. I apologize for delaying the meal; we were caught up in a debate.”
I didn’t look toward the great hall as we passed the open doors, exiting the room instead on the far side, only a few doors down from the dining room. Marc had never before sought me out if I was late for a meal. I had skipped them without warning at least twice a week the entire time we had been alone together in the castle. It was the reason I had taught him how to summon his own food.
“What were you debating?” Marc asked.
This was certainly a switch in roles. Isa stayed uncharacteristically silent at my side while Marc asked questions. He normally limited his conversation with me to discussing his duties and small talk over the meals we shared.
“The relative usefulness of the various enchantments on the castle.” I told Marc, realizing why Isa wasn’t answering. She didn’t know how much I wanted to keep secret from Marc, nor could she lie outright. I needed to shift the conversation so that she wouldn’t be forced to talk around the truth. “Isa insists that the truth-telling enchantment is more harmful than not because it gives people a false sense of how honest everyone is.”
Isa looked down at me and continued the conversation as if we truly had been debating just that. “You look closer at a person’s motivations when you know they can lie. Those motivations don’t disappear because of a truth-telling enchantment.”
“But they are harder to hide.” Marc held open the dining-room door.
Isa paused as she stepped past him, leveling him with a flinty look. “Meaning that people put more effort into hiding them and therefore should not be underestimated.”
Seeing the look Marc gave Isa once she had her back to him, I decided not to step into this conversation. Since I had yet to master the magic needed to make the secretary answer my questions, relying on Isa’s talents might be wisest. She could get the answers I needed simply by pricking his pride.
“If you are so fond of honesty,” Marc said as he took his seat opposite Isa, “then tell us what you hide because of the enchantments of the castle.”
She leaned forward. “You forget, I had no motivation to come to the castle. I was forced here. I am more interested in your motivations.”
“I found His Grace after the curse struck. The discovery was frightening, and I wanted to set things right.”
Isa’s expression didn’t change, yet I could see the intensity building as she listened to Marc’s answer. His explanation sounded simple to my ear, but Isa clearly heard plenty that he didn’t say. She understood his words in a way I couldn’t. But instead of following up on his answer, she looked at me.
Perhaps, if I had still been in human form, I could have silently conveyed to her my willingness to let her question Marc. She might have read the press of my lips as admission that I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to force him to answer my questions. She might have seen a raised eyebrow as permission to rely on her talents and continue the interrogation.
But a twitched whisker and slow blink clearly told her nothing.
“His Grace must have appreciated your interest in helping.”
Because I understood Isa in a way I never had understood my secretary, I could guess at what she had left unsaid. She didn’t let on that I now regretted relying on Marc. She didn’t say he had actually helped me.
I didn’t think Marc heard those unspoken caveats. He once more thought he had fooled Isa’s truth-reading. As I summoned our meal, I regretted that Isa had respected my desire not to let Marc discover I had doubts about him. Next time, I wanted her to push. He might not have to answer her, but even so, she would learn so much more than I ever could.