Chapter Two Vina
Chapter Two
Vina
It was love. Love for Queen and country that brought the sword to his hands, and made him lay it against his love’s lily-white breast. Love, that made him pierce her through.
There’s no greater love, my brothers, than the one we have for this green and blessed land.
Source: Parliamentary speech of MP Edward Morgan
Archivist’s Ruling: Preserve. Publication permitted. No further action required.
When Vina was ten years old, she was examined by a scribe in her father’s study.
The fire was crackling in the stone hearth.
Her father’s hunting dog lay asleep on the rug in front of it, snoring volubly.
She stared down at her own feet, lifting and lowering her toes in her new brown brogues, the ones she’d begged for because she’d seen their thick golden buckles in the atelier’s window and fallen in love with them.
Up, down. Up, down. She was already starting to crease the leather. She had not even had the chance to wear them outside yet.
I should never have told anyone about the man crying in the orangery, Vina thought, aggrieved.
He’d been weeping a name over and over again.
Isadora, Isadora. Vina had thought he was a burglar, or mad, or maybe both, and looking at him had made her feel as if she were floating outside her body, so she had run for help.
But when she and the servants had returned, the man had been gone.
Through the crackle of flame and the dog’s snores, she could hear the clink of the scribe’s tools.
Ink. Needle. Compass. The scribe coughed and turned, his robes rustling around him.
Her father had assured her he was no back-alley skin scribbler, although she hadn’t understood what that meant.
This was a scribe from one of the best streets in Mayfair. He would look after her.
“Miss Lavinia,” he said. “May I?”
She raised her head. His eyes were very blue, set in a wrinkled face. He smiled like a doctor, impersonal and kind.
“I don’t know what you want me to do,” she said.
“Give him your hand, Vinny,” said her father. His voice boomed from behind his desk, where he sat in his large armchair. His forehead was pressed against his palm.
Vina held out her hand.
The scribe was an enormously tall man, and he loomed over as he leaned down and took her hand in his own. He held the needle aloft.
“Do you know what this is?”
Vina shook her head.
“Limni ink,” he said. “The most precious of all inks, my dear. Ground from stone touched by the first incarnates, mined from the bowels of the Isle, quite precious indeed and quite finite. This bottle was taken from beneath the cavern of a witch,” he told her, as he wetted his needle.
The ink gathered on it like black pearls, or like the caviar the cook served at her father’s dinner parties.
“With this, normal ladies and gentlemen—like yourself and I—may gain the magic of a story, for a price.”
With a light hand, he traced the needle in a swirl against her wrist. She tensed, expecting pain—but the needle moved so lightly it didn’t cut her skin.
It only left a tracery of ink behind it.
The ink was in the shape of music—little flourishing notes like the ones on the book kept on the grand piano in the library.
“If you’re a normal little girl, this will make you sing like an angel,” the scribe said. “Of course, your voice will shrivel in your old age and take your breath with it, but such is the price of the gift of a story, my dear, it gives and it takes…”
Vina had no chance to protest. There was a sharp pain, as if a dozen needles were sliding into her skin at once.
But there was only the one, driving hard into her wrist. It went in clean and oddly bloodless, as if the needle were passing through her and turning to smoke.
The ink around it pulsed, shining like starlight, then abruptly dulled.
The room itself seemed to hold its breath.
Vina felt a chime in her skull. A bell ringing between her ears. Then her hand began to burn again, the pain so sharp she couldn’t even scream. The ink glowed hotter and hotter, rising out of her skin—
It slithered to the floor like a ribbon and went still. The scribe leaned down and scooped it up in an empty vial.
“The tale didn’t take,” the scribe said, as if that meant something. “Congratulations.”
Her father gave a low groan.
“Oh hell.”
“Chin up,” the scribe said to her father, slipping his vial of ink back into his pocket. “Your seat in Parliament’s assured.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be sure, once the papers start digging,” her father muttered. He looked red and his face was damp with sweat. “Laura is going to murder me.”
Laura was her father’s wife. She’d always been nice enough to Vina, but Vina supposed there was probably a big difference between having your husband’s bastard in your house and the papers gossiping about said bastard. And they would, when they knew what the scribe thought Vina was.
“An incarnate child is a blessing and an honor,” the scribe said, reproof in his voice.
“Of course,” her father agreed hastily. “But I had no reason to ever believe—that is, I thought the knight was meant to be, ah…” Her father’s voice trailed off, but silence could have words in it too.
Vina looked down at her own hands. They were as brown as her mother’s had been.
“Yes,” the scribe said simply. “But there can be no doubt, I am afraid. Miss Lavinia is the knight who will slay the witch.”
It took two hours for the others to free Vina from the witch’s trap.
“Use a knife,” Vina said, when they began.
“We tried the knife already,” Matthias protested, as he rooted through his destrier’s pack, sweaty and cursing under his breath as he drew out one talisman, then another.
“It’s like getting a blade into the hinge of an oyster,” she said helpfully, as Edmund dropped his sword and started waving iron and silver coins and crosses at the toadstool ring instead. “You just need to get the angle right.”
They ignored her. She couldn’t be angry about it, particularly. Blaming the lads for being useless was like blaming water for being wet.
“We shouldn’t have let you come,” Edmund said, kneeling beside her and flicking a silver coin between his fingers. He was frowning. “If we hadn’t felt sorry for you—”
“I know,” she sighed. “I’m nothing but trouble. Stick the knife into the toadstool to the left just to humor me, hm?”
After a good hour more of cajoling, Edmund finally tried it.
Now, Edmund and Matthias clambered onto the barge waiting for them at the edge of the Thames, sullenly untying the rope holding it against the bank and lighting the barge’s torches.
Vina tied up their destriers, then stood on the bank and met her own reflection in the water.
Idly, she watched the way the water rippled, pushing her eyes and her mouth and her chin out of shape as the stomping of her fellow knights sent the water sloshing.
Edmund tripped lighting the last torch. He found his feet before he tipped overboard, which was a good thing. She wouldn’t have wanted to watch him try to swim in full armor.
“You’re an idiot, Vina, you know that?” Edmund burst out.
“Ah,” she said. “Eddie, you wound me. You truly do.”
Edmund gave an exasperated harrumph. “Fuck off,” he said.
He’d worked himself into a real lather. The knife incident must have really hurt his pride.
“You had to flirt with the thief, didn’t you?
Had to show off and try and get into her knickers, and look where we are now.
If the Queen decides we need our heads lopped off it’s your fault. ”
“She’s not going to touch my head,” Vina said. “I think we’ll all be fine.”
“Why? Have you seduced her too?”
Godsblood, you sleep with a man’s sister once, and he’ll truly never forgive you.
“She’s an incarnate,” Matthias said. He sounded thoroughly fed up. Under his helm, she could see the twist of his mouth, the red of his cropped beard. “She’s got to live to play her role.”
“If it comes to it, I’ll tell the Queen that I’ve vowed to live and die with you, or some rot like that,” Vina said, grinning at Edmund, who scowled back. “She’ll have to let you live, then. No need to fear for your precious neck any longer, Eddie.”
“Oh, shut up,” said Edmund.
“Get on here, Lavinia,” Matthias ordered, knocking his shoulder softly against Edmund’s. Peace. “The sooner we get the ink to the archives, the sooner we can go home.”
She climbed onto the barge. As soon as she was onboard, the torches flickered, shivering from gold to the white-and-rose of the Queen’s heraldry. The barge lurched, then began to move through the water on its own, the mirror-bright surface of the Thames splitting around it like pearls of mercury.
The city loomed around them in ripples of thatched roofs and smog-stained slate, white colonnades and stained glass windows. Usually Vina loved seeing the city like this. But tonight she wasn’t herself.
She touched her gloved fingers to the satchel at her side.
It didn’t feel lighter, but she knew the witch had reached into it and stolen the ink she desired. Maybe she’d only taken a single vial. That was all she’d asked for.
Vina hadn’t told the others any ink had been stolen. If there was trouble at the archives over it, Vina would take responsibility. No one expected any better of her anyway.
A sense memory stole over her. The brush of the witch’s breath. Her eyes, flatly furious under her own snapping firelight.
Maybe she hadn’t been the witch. If Vina kept telling herself that, perhaps she’d soon believe it.
Maybe the woman under that hood had been nothing more than a thief with a few enchantments to her name and fire in her fingertips.
Maybe she’d paid a scribe to mark her up with limni ink to get all the magic she had. Maybe, maybe.