Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
“ C arinthia,” Rudolf said. “He’s the one behind it all.”
Melisende stared at him. “The Duke of Carinthia? My sister’s husband?”
Rudolf winced. “And my cousin, by blood. But that means nothing in the face of his ambition. Heed my words, Melisende. He knows you are looking for the patent. He knows if you find it, you will have the rightful claim, and if you marry me, I will be safe at your side. He means to do away with the both of us.”
Beside her at the small table, Philip stirred. “She is already married,” he growled.
They sat in the solar, the broad, open room above the great hall where in decades past the ladies of the house had withdrawn to tend to their embroidery and childcare while the men saw to the castle’s defense. Philip wanted to be high, where he might see out the leaded windows if attackers were approaching and have several avenues of escape. Rudolf had wanted to confer in the kitchens, but between the pampered princeling and the spy, Melisende decided to trust the spy to arrange their meeting. She would trust Philip’s judgment over her cousin’s every time.
Gin struggled a tray of food up the stairs with a muttered curse and banged it on the table. “Yer schnapps,” the urchin groused, slapping tumblers of polished pewter on the wooden table. “And I dunno why ye wouldn’t want good English ale in yer bellies.”
“You are a scrawny wench,” Rudolf observed, pouring himself a healthy dose of the liquor. “Are all English maids so surly?”
“Gin’s not a—” Melisende paused and looked at the youth, who raised a chin and glared back at her. Gin had a gamine face, with a broad brow and pointed chin, shaggy self-cut hair, and a wiry body that had only in Melisende’s employ begun to look nourished. The clothing was that of a boy, and the features could be taken for a pretty boy or a boyish girl. The child’s age fell anywhere between infant and manhood, but the gray eyes stared back at her, determined, mutinous.
This was a mystery to pursue later. “Thank you, Gin,” Melisende said. “Is Bruyit on his way with supper?”
“Dunno why you mean to feed the one as meant to kill ye.” Bruyit lumbered in the door, bearing a yet larger tray, one laden with crockery and wafting the scent of roast meat and potatoes. He eyed Rudolf with suspicion.
“Thank you, Bruyit. You may take Gin back downstairs with you. We’ll ring when we have need.”
“And leave you here so the Kraut can slip a blade betwixt yer ribs?” Bruyit said indignantly. “My lady, I hope you think me smarter than that.” He glared at Rudolf, who glared back, not understanding the English exchange but quite able to read the hostility in the assorted gazes turned upon him.
“My cousin won’t take me by surprise when he has a full stomach,” Melisende said. “And Philip is here.”
She glanced over her shoulder to see Philip and Bruyit exchanging some wordless communication, Philip holding up fingers and making circular motions. Bruyit signaled something back, nodding his head in affirmation.
“Are the two of you countermanding my wishes?” she asked, striving to keep a pleasant tone. She could not let Rudolf see any weakness among them, especially on her part.
“You must trust us to see to your security, my love.” Philip gestured to Rudolf. “While you see to diplomacy and other important affairs.”
Rudolf tucked into the food like a starving man, but kept his eyes on the others as he served himself large helpings of Leisl Huber’s shepherd’s pie. “You married a commoner?” he questioned Melisende in German. “Didn’t your father have objections?”
“Circumstances made it the best option for Philip and I to marry,” Melisende said coolly. “Are you angry that I didn’t accept your hand?”
“You were a fool not to. It would have secured your place without having to concern yourself with your father.”
“I’ve no doubt you would have relegated me to the women’s quarters and I would never have a say in matters of state. And, oddly enough, I do concern myself with my father,” Melisende flared. “Since he has loved and supported me these twenty-six years, and the throne you’ve taken is his rightful place.”
“I haven’t dared take my own throne in months.” Rudolf gathered more food onto his platter, not seeming to care if the others wished to eat as well. “I bulked up the guard around me to a twenty-four-hour watch. I drafted every man I could into the militia, every farm hand and shepherd and merchant my father had not already called up. And still Carinthia’s men managed to slip by me. I swear he’s using Italian assassins trained by the Medicis.”
“None of them were successful, I gather.” Melisende noted Rudolf’s hunger, too strong to be reined in by etiquette. His coat was torn and stained, his waistcoat dull with dirt, and his breeches suggested he’d been sleeping on dusty floors for some time.
“I was in the tower for weeks, hiding,” Rudolf said, seeing the direction of her gaze. “As soon as I heard the attacks in London had not yielded the book.”
Melisende startled. “That was Carinthia’s man? And I suppose the one in Luxembourg City as well?”
“They all were. I caught one of the men who came after me, finally, and tortured him. He’s been trying for over a year now to do away with you, as soon as he realized you were following that old legend to find the patent.”
“The attacks started in Lyon,” Melisende recalled. “Shortly after my father denied your offer that I marry you. I thought the attack following your letter meant my uncle wished to be rid of me by other means.”
“We were trying to save you, foolish girl. If you came back here and married me, and brought your father as well, we could have joined forces against him. We could have had a chance.” He stared at his plate, where the innards of a third helping of pie leaked from the golden, flaky crust. “My father might still be alive.”
“Carinthia killed him?” Without thinking she reached out and clung to Philip’s knee. He wasn’t following the German conversation, but without hesitation his hand covered hers, warm and firm, anchoring her.
“How?” Melisende whispered.
“Poison, I assume. It looked like a heart seizure, like he passed in his sleep. But the boy who’d been tasting his food disappeared that night also.”
Melisende crossed herself. “Rudolf. I am so sorry. May he rest in peace.”
“May he be damned,” Rudolf said fiercely. “ He wanted this. The duchy. The throne. He thought it unfair that your father inherited all and he had nothing but a tiny castle. They paid no note to him in Vienna. He had no stature, no wealth. He was nothing. He hated your father for that. And when my mother passed, her father, the old Duke of Carinthia, he cut us off completely. No more pension, no more funds. My uncle grew desperate.”
“So he deposed my father.”
Rudolf grimaced. “And then the new Duke of Carinthia, who is even more avaricious than his sire, tried to depose my father as well.”
That explained the swelling of Merania’s militia, when they had been, for centuries, a peaceful realm. “So Carinthia sent the men to stop me from proving our claim.”
“Not stop you. Take what you found. He wants the patent, bird-wit. Your father barred him from inheriting Merania when he married Magret and chose you as his successor. Carinthia doesn’t want to take the duchy by force and lose his allies, like my father foolishly did. So he plans to use the patent to claim he was the rightful heir all along, as the husband of your sister. And if he has to remove you or your father from his way, he will. The man has no soul.”
“And my sister is married to him,” Melisende said, her heart cold with fear. “What of Magret? What is her part in all this?” Melisende had been kept out of the row that that preceded her sister’s departure from their country. Their father had had reservations about marrying his daughter to the heir of Carinthia, but Magret was determined to have him; unless a Habsburg prince or archduke came along, there was no one higher.
“What can she do?” Rudolf shrugged and broke off a piece of Leisl’s soft bread. “Carinthia doesn’t need her alive to make his claim once he has the patent. She is in her castle with her children being a dutiful duchess. She does not entertain. She does not go out much among her people. She is rarely seen at state functions, so my spies tell me. I think she does little but sit in her tower and write letters.”
She had never written a letter to Melisende. The picture Rudolf painted was so at odds with the active, bossy sister Melisende had known, but wife- and motherhood was bound to change a woman.
Melisende’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth with a bitter glue. “Does Magret want me dead, too?”
Rudolf shrugged. “It’s likely she wants what her husband wants. When is your father due to arrive? Together we can make a stand against Carinthia. He would not dare go against your father on his own, I think.”
Melisende swallowed bile. “My father cannot travel at the moment. He is recovering in England.”
Rudolf’s shoulders sagged, his face bleak. “Then we are doomed.”
“Perhaps you are,” Melisende said sharply. “I mean to find the patent and make my claim before Vienna to have my father reinstated. You shall not stand in my way, Rudolf, and Carinthia shall not, either.”
Rudolf looked at her with pity. “You are nothing but a woman.”
Once again she wished she were wearing a sword. “I am a woman with resources. I am the heir my father acknowledged before his place was usurped. It would be different if Merania were better off under your rule, Rudolf. If the duchy were prospering and all would were better than in my father’s time, I might not fight you. But this—” She waved a hand in the air, encompassing not just the castle but the land beyond, the people dependent on their rulers for wise management and prosperity. “I have heard the stories. They do not cast you, or my uncle, in a good light.”
“What could I do?” Rudolf whined. “I was in hiding for my life. I’ve been living in this cursed tower for a fortnight, stealing food from the cowherds.” He made a face. “I will choke to death if I have to eat one more wheel of cheese.”
He looked with new interest at Philip, pointing at the other man while shoveling food into his mouth. “Can he help us at all? The commoner?”
“There is nothing common about him, and he has a name,” Melisende said sharply. “It is Philip Devlin. His father has a property, and a castle, in Ireland.” She turned her palm up so the back of her hand rested on Philip’s knee. He threaded his fingers through hers, and the warmth that ran through her drove the coldness away.
“No doubt he will be a great help in locating the patent.” Rudolf snorted. “Since you could make him a grand duke, if you wished.”
Melisende’s foolish heart squeezed. She wouldn’t make Philip a grand duke because she would be releasing him from their marriage when all this was over. Her concerns aside, he had a career and plans back in Britain. His family was there. He loved his work gathering information. She had interrupted his life, dragging him from the green rolling hills of his country to the soaring snow-tipped Alps, and he would want to go back to that life when he was done with her.
The ache would be unbearable when he left.
“What do you want from me, Rudolf?”
“Your promise not to do away with me, first and foremost.” Rudolf poured himself a mouthful of schnapps, not offering the bottle to anyone else. “I won’t have you simply shunting me off to the countryside. Merania needs me, and you need me, too.”
“I’m not certain I see it that way,” Melisende said.
“How close are you to finding the patent?”
“Close. Very. The books contained a map, with a separate key for decoding the symbols. I’m a day away from finding the location. If the documents are still there.”
Philip narrowed his eyes at her. He might guess at a German word here and there, might sense that, lulled by the blood connection, she was telling her cousin more than she ought to. She shrugged in reply. It was impossible to think of this starving, ragged man on the bench as any threat to her, no more than the braggart boy who had once had a fit because, on a processional through town, Melisende’s gelding was larger than his horse and she sat higher than he did.
“Can he make use of the patent if he finds it first?” Philip asked in English.
“He won’t find it first,” Melisende said. “And you would stop him before he could take it from me.”
His slow, amused smile raised a flutter in her belly that was not hunger. Awareness skittered up her arm like the tracks of tiny mouse feet.
“I appreciate your faith in me.”
She nodded tightly, telling herself not to feel guilty for the lie. She trusted no one but herself, would rely on no one but herself. The example of her parents, much as she loved them, had taught her that little more than her wits stood between her and the cold wind of the world. Her beloved, beautiful mother had not been able to save her children when the plague came, no matter how much she prayed. And her father had won nothing but empty promises as they moved from town to town, seeking allies while Melisende searched out the books. Her friends grew and faded on the strength of what she could offer them, not for any merits of her own.
Everything, for one of her rank, was a diplomatic negotiation. She wasn’t allowed the affectionate ties that ordinary people could enjoy.
And as for Philip---this was an arrangement, an exchange of skills. She would see that he was richly rewarded when his service was complete, and that would be the end of their attachment.
“We can make up a room for you in one of the chambers over the larder,” Melisende said as it appeared Rudolf was at least nearing the end of his meal. “Or in the keep, if you prefer.”
“The keep has rats,” Rudolf spat. “A decent chamber, if you please, with a fireplace.”
Melisende had already taken the one bedchamber with a fireplace, as he must know, if he’d explored the castle at all. But perhaps he hadn’t; by his own report, he’d been in the castle the several nights they’d been there already, and she’d never guessed, never sensed his presence, spying on her. Too wrapped up, during the days, in her quest for the patent.
And at night—there was no denying it—she was too wrapped up in Philip to think of much else.
“Will he be an ally, do you think?”
As she’d guessed he would, Philip wanted a full accounting of their conversation after Gin led Rudolf away to a proper bed for the night, with Bruyit hovering over them like a gigantic shadow.
She halved the remaining pie and placed a piece on a plate for him. “I trust Rudolf, invariably, to do what he believes will best benefit himself. For now, that means placing himself under our protection.”
He raised a brow. “Our?”
She noted how easily the word had slipped out. “Yours and mine?” she offered.
He tucked into his pie, and she felt a small bolt of pleasure at the domestic scene. Look at her, like any Hausfrau , feeding the people she loved.
Loved . She pushed that word from her mind.
“I have vowed to protect you,” Philip said. “Among other things. I don’t see that I owe anything to your cousin, even if he hasn’t been the one sending the assassins after you.”
“Still, I can’t let Carinthia kill him. Rudolf is convinced the duke already murdered my uncle, though he has no proof.”
“All I care,” Philip said, “is that he not murder you .”
He leaned forward, drawing his face toward hers, and Melisende met his lips, warm and firm. The man was a splendid kisser. Her heart filled with that familiar flutter, as if her shoulders wanted to separate from her chest. How could she bear to lose this —him, and everything that went with him, including that bone-deep sense that he had been put in her way in London because he belonged to her?
“Come to bed,” he murmured against her lips.
Oh, how she wanted to. In bed with him she could forget the disappointment that her search had so far yielded nothing. She could forget the sense of guilt at the sight of her cousin, as if she were somehow to blame for his condition. He was the one usurping her position, yet this was her country, her place, her duty to make things right.
She wanted more than anything to escape the knowledge, hanging over her head like the sword in the fairy tale, that her own brother by marriage was trying to kill her family, and he had her sister at his mercy. She couldn’t allow the thought to touch her mind that Magret might be joined with him in this.
Magret, who had combed and braided Melisende’s hair at night before bed. Who had relayed to her the talks over the council table and dinner when Melisende was too young to join the adults. And when Melisende was old enough to attend state dinners, Magret was the one who showed her how to water her wine so she didn’t become tipsy and careless in conversations where the fate of countries was at stake.
Melisende loved and admired her fragile mother, but it was Magret she went to when she needed rags for her menses. Magret who believed her when the prince-bishop of Brixen’s illegitimate son had cornered Melisende in the stables on a state visit and tried to convince her they should “marry,” with intimate relations predating the ceremony. Whatever Magret had said to the insolent brat, he had never approached Melisende again.
It was Magret who nursed Melisende when fever struck the palace. Magret was the reason Melisende had survived.
Melisende cupped Philip’s cheeks with her palms, rubbing her hand along the scratch of his evening beard. It made him look dangerous, faintly piratical. A man at ease with deceptions, with secrets.
A man who would steal a woman’s heart, and keep it.
“I have to find the patent now. It’s imperative.”
“Not alone. That cousin of yours could be waiting to ambush you. Whatever plea he is making to your soft heart, he has hard eyes.”
Melisende looked into Philip’s eyes, deep blue shadows in the dusk of the room. Were his eyes hard? Not when he looked at her. For her, his gaze was molten, promising passion if she would but give in.
She ran her thumb over his lips. How she adored that mouth, and all the ways he had kissed her body.
“Philip,” she murmured, “mein Lieber . You must know by now my heart is not soft.”
He promised to send Bruyit to look after her when she sent him to their chamber for some much-needed rest. The man was at her side most of the day, and watched over her at night, fearing another attack. Melisende delivered their dishes to the scullery, where the maids smiled shyly at her, still unaccustomed to a grand duchess who would wait on herself. Then she took up a candelabra and roamed the halls of the castle, insulated by thick stone and an endless supply of tapestries.
She was too restless to lie blissfully in Philip’s arms, enjoying his heat and warmth and the sheer power of him, and the way his touch lifted her out of body and among the stars, when she harbored this knowledge that she must eventually dismiss him. They’d had a lovely interlude, but with her cousin here, her purpose was all the clearer. She must find the patent and put an end to Carinthia’s mission before he could hurt anyone else.
She found herself again in the chapel, dogged by the sense that what she sought was near. She didn’t need to unfold the map to know it would bring her here yet again. But to what point? She’d been in the chapel a half dozen times. She’d searched every alcove and embrasure, peeked behind tapestries, tapped the spare wooden furniture for the sound of hollow chambers.
The chapel was tucked into the side of the keep, the outside wall looking down into a steep gorge that cut through the side of the mountain. After all the castle had been built not for looks but for defense, to guard the mountain passes and the trade which kept Merania alive. It was the best place to hide a priceless document, and the damn thing might never be found.
She heard a scrape from the muniments room, beyond the high balcony. She’d searched that room a dozen times, sifted through the remaining trunks. There were household accounts dating back nearly five hundred years. But the letter she’d discovered years ago that had told her the patent existed, that alluded to a grant of sovereignty by the Holy Roman Emperor to invest the rulers of Merania with sole power over the duchy—that document was gone.
“Philip?” she called. How like him to reject sleep and come to help her. The man seemed able to function without rest, though Melisende could not. The long day was wearing at her.
Nothing answered her, not even an echo of sound, so she shrugged and went on her way, the candle dancing in a sudden draught. The rats, most like.
The trunk where she’d found the Bibles sat against one wall, the pine planks bound with hammered sheets of gold. It would make sense to store the priceless artifacts all together. It was time she paged through the books, if she were able to unbind the locks on each. Perhaps she should call for Philip after all. He had an uncanny ability to make a lock fall open in his hand. Much like his skill with women, which she?—
The premonition rose first, gusting over her shoulders with a frigid blast. The whisper of sound followed.
Then the cold steel of a sword swooping to rest on her shoulder, the honed blade turned toward her throat.
“You have been foolish, Melisende. In truth I expected it long before.”
No .
Not now. Not here. Not like this. He could not win .
She closed her eyes and cleared her throat, not daring to twitch lest she cut herself on his sword.
“ Guten Abend, Andrej. You could have come to the door and joined us for dinner. You are family, after all.”
She knew, kneeling before him, that behind her, his face wore an arrogant smirk. She heard the taunt in his voice.
“ Ja, and I’m sure we would have the most charming chat. Hello, how are you feeling after my men tried to kill you? Wondering how long your luck will hold?”
Where was Philip? Where was Bruyit? How quickly could they come if she screamed? Melisende kept her hands on the open box of the trunk, hardly able to breathe. If she moved, he could cut off her head before she’d completed the thought.
“Perhaps it wasn’t luck,” she said.
He snorted. She tried to gauge how far behind her he stood; she sensed, smelled him, sweaty leather and damp wool. How long had he been watching them, waiting for his chance?
Why was he here, directly after she discovered Rudolf?
“Would you hand over the document if I demanded it?” The sword shifted on her shoulder, as if his hand were twitching. “Are you that wise?”
“I do not have it.”
“But you will in a moment. Take it from the trunk. I want to see your face when you find it and then realize I am stealing it from you. All that work, all those years of searching by clever little Melisende, only to be outsmarted in the end.”
She cleared her throat again, forcing her voice to remain steady. She succeeded only in part.
“It’s not outsmarting me to wait until I find it. And remove your sword before you cut me. No one will be able to read the patent if it’s drenched in blood.”
He withdrew the sword, and she twisted to look up at him. He loomed over her like a gargoyle with a leery, stony stare.
This Duke of Carinthia wasn’t the handsome, charismatic man who had persuaded Magret to break with her family for his sake. His brown hair was cropped short, his hairline receding, his beard trimmed but showing gray. The skin of his face had tightened somehow, making his hawkish nose all the more prominent, but he’d gained flesh in his shoulders and chest. He’d become a sullen, angry man, and he looked as if he could kill without remorse.
“Time has not been kind to you, Andrej,” she said softly.
“But it has to you.” He gazed over her shoulder down the front of her gown, where her shawl had fallen away from her shoulders. “I demanded you, you know. It was clear you were made to rule. But your father wouldn’t allow it. Said you were too young. It was Magret or nothing, and he was saving you for something better .” He sneered. “How it must have killed him that you threw yourself away on a commoner. Not even close to a title, is he? Hasn’t the coin to pay his own executioner.”
He dared—this ingrate, this criminal —dared to insult Philip, who was five times the man in honor, in integrity, in his very humaneness. Not for the last time Melisende wished she were wearing her sword. She could rise, turn, and plunge the point into Andrej’s stony chest before he could finish his next insult.
“My husband won’t let you harm me,” Melisende said, praying her voice sounded calmer than she felt.
Carinthia laughed, a sound like old iron grating over stone. “He couldn’t lift a finger to save you even if he wanted, which, given where you’re going, I doubt he would.”
“Where is Magret?” Melisende asked, fear strangling her.
“Enough stalling.” He prodded the sole of her foot with his boot. “Find my prize.”
The locks, though old and lined with rust, gave to her hand. The ink of the Bibles still looked dark and fresh, through the vellum pages had bunched and crinkled over time. The Latin, the oldest, was illustrated with woodcuts and looked to be early print, perhaps one of the first to come off the press of Gutenberg or his imitators. The Italian and German Bibles were manuscripts, written by hand, their illuminations bright and astonishing. These would have been hidden because illegal, any translation of the Holy Book into a vulgar tongue forbidden for centuries and punishable by death. How like her family to skirt the law; the Meinhardins had always been of independent mind, and prided themselves for it.
“There is no document here,” Melisende said finally.
The duke pushed her shoulder with the hilt of his sword. “Look again.”
“It’s not here, Andrej! Don’t you suppose I would have found it by now? I’ve been searching for days. I want this more than you do. The map is false, I tell you. There is nothing here .” She slammed the lid of the chest, angry with herself for her spurt of temper, but rage and weariness carried her judgment away.
So many years of hoping. Of searching. And to come so close—to have the map in her hand—and the precious document it pointed to disappeared.
He kept his sword out and pointed at her as she rose, the skirts of her gown shushing around her.
“So you have failed,” he said with a sneer.
She let her shoulders slump, something she’d learned never, never to do in front of another, especially not an enemy. Magret had taught her that. How to smile with her teeth in the face of danger, in the face of threat, in the face of famine and destruction and despair. A daughter of Merania stood with shoulders straight when the invading army rushed down from the mountain passes, and she raised her sword to meet them.
Melisende had let them all down. Her people. Her ancestors. Her father.
“Hmm.” Carinthia regarded her a long moment, his face carved in stark lines by the flickering light of the candle. Then he shrugged. “Just as well. If you disappear, I will inherit anyway.”
She snapped back her head. “You will not.”
“You think not?” He prodded the sword in her direction, forcing her to walk across the room toward the door. “Your father is ill. Dying, my spies tell me. His only remaining daughter did not even stay to tend him but rushed away from his side, following the light of his own ambition. Typical. You are a heartless breed.”
“My father will return,” Melisende muttered, stepping into the keep, an enormous hollow of dark. The leather soles of her shoes whispered over the stone as Carinthia pushed her to walk down the stairs.
“Doubtful. Your cousin is weak. I can manipulate him, or simply take the throne outright. He will be even easier to defeat.”
“I will not let you take Merania.”
She caught a whimper in her throat as they reached the bottom of the stairs, where two figures met them. One with a cruel face, wearing the duke’s emblem, held up a torch to illuminate a second figure, a giant sprawled on the floor. Bruyit, motionless, with a dark pool of blood seeping from his head.
“Bruyit,” she whispered, but he did not stir.
Melisende whirled on her captor. “You will not hurt my men. You will not touch my people!”
“I’ll keep them alive if you behave,” Carinthia snarled. “If you are a good, quiet little duchess and do exactly as I say.”
She curled her hands into fists, her body shaking with fear and rage. “What do you want?”
He widened his eyes, mocking her. “Has the clever Melisende not guessed? I am not so different from any man. I want your country. I want its wealth. I want what should have been mine when I married your worthless sister. Why would a man with only daughters set his unmarried youngest to inherit? Your father is a fool. I will set that right. And I want—” he bared his teeth in a rictus of a smile— “the respect that is due me. So.”
He prodded the tip of his sword into her stomacher. “I want you to say, yes, your highness. I will do as you say, your highness. How powerful and just you are, your royal highness of Carinitha and Merania.”
“You have not earned that title,” Melisende spat. “You do not deserve it.”
He pricked the stiff fabric with the tip of his weapon. “Silence from you. If you cooperate, I will let him—” he pointed to Bruyit— “and your little band of ragtag misfits live. I will let your husband live. I will let your sister live.” He tilted his head to the side. “Of course, they’ll never know what happened to you. They will think you have abandoned them. But it will hardly be a surprise. Clever, favored Melisende has thought only of herself all along.”
Melisende’s heart sank into a cold pool of bile in her belly as he prodded her down another set of stairs, beyond the main floor of the keep. The scent of foul dank rose up to meet them. The light of his torch danced madly as the passage narrowed and the air thickened.
“No.” Melisende shrank away as they faced the door to the dungeons, sealed off for centuries. Carinthia’s lackey fought the ancient iron key rusted in the lock. “Not here.” Not in one of these cold, dark rooms, where the light never entered, where the chill was perpetual. “I’ll go mad.”
He laughed. “Convenient for me. Have I at last found the one thing to break you? Being shut in the dark, when threats to your loved ones did not move you a whit. Somehow, I am not surprised.”
Melisende could not move her feet as the door swung open, the hinges an ominous creak. “Not here,” she said, her voice cracking. “Andrej. Lock me in the scullery. In Meran’s Tower. Anywhere else, I beg you.”
He lifted his brows, relishing her fear. “You think you will get a cozy little cell? Oh, no. You are going to the oubliette.”
The lowest, dankest crevice of the ancient keep, the medieval torture reserved for the most hated prisoners. Melisende closed her eyes, fighting a hot rush of tears. “No .”
He pushed her to the far end of the dungeon and, with a grunt, his man heaved up the iron grate set into the floor. Melisende stiffened, poised to run. She knew there was nowhere to go, but unreasoning fear flooded her. She could not be cast into that pit. She would not survive.
Sensing her panic, Carinthia closed his fingers around her wrist. “No one will know where you have gone,” he hissed. “They will think you disappeared. Left them. Went off to live in some foreign court in wealth and ease.”
He chuckled. “Your sister will mourn you a little, I expect. The news will kill your father. Your husband?” He shrugged. “No doubt he will have some fresh maid in his bed before he completes his journey out of the Alps. He seems the type.”
Against her will, she shrank towards him. “You need me alive. I have the map. I can find the document. We can reach a compromise.”
“You really are a fool, aren’t you? I’ll never compromise.” He pulled her toward the dark opening, glistening with damp, yawning like a mouth.
“I’ll give it to you!” Melisende shouted. “I’ll give you the patent. You can have Merania. Just don’t—” Her words ended in a scream as Carinthia pushed her into the pit.
The drop wasn’t far, but she landed hard, crashing onto her knees. She bit back a whimper as her hands scraped rock. She wanted to scream and scream, but she could not let the madness overtake her so quickly.
“When you are ready to tell me where the document is,” Carinthia called, “I may release you.” He snickered. “I may, at the least, entertain the possibility. Till then, my dear sister, contemplate where your pride has brought you, and may God forgive you for your sins.”
His man dragged the iron grate back into place. Their footsteps echoed, hollow and ringing, as they left the dungeon, the last glow of light receding. The heavy door creaked shut. In the silence a slow drip of water rang like a death knell, tolling the end of her dream.
She had failed.
She stayed there on hands and knees, struggling to breathe over the skittering beat of her heart.
She had lost.
Her father would die alone in a foreign country, banished from the land he had been born to rule. At least he would never know what had become of the prosperous country he had built and guided into the enlightened age.
She would never see Magret again. Or Josepha. The friends she had left scattered all over Europe, even London. They would never know what had happened.
She would never rule Merania. She would never sit on the stone beneath the canopy and have the crown set on her head by the archbishop. She would never walk into the chamber of state and take her throne to hear supplications from her citizens and visiting guests. She would never have the satisfaction of watching her country and its people thrive, happy, healthy, free to pursue the lives they dreamed of.
She would never again hold Philip, touch Philip. Kiss Philip. She would never be able to tell him she loved him, madly, unreasonably, against all sensible advice. She craved him as she craved her next breath, and she would never again rest against him, feel the rise of his chest and his breath against her cheek, his hand stroking her hair. She had found the one man she would choose above all others and she would never see him again.
It was that which finally broke through the haze of terror. Melisende lowered her forehead to her hands and wept.