Chapter Eight Vina #2
Vina bowed, and after a moment Simran followed suit, as the entire hall rippled with genuflection. There was a long silence. Then the Queen leaned forward with a rustle of silks, a coo of delight.
“We have not seen you for decades, witch,” the Queen murmured.
Her voice was rich, musical. “To see you alongside my dear knight, to know your tale is safe in the cradle of our hand… it is glorious, truly! How well you suit one another!” Her gaze fixed on Simran.
“We have seen this knight many times, and marveled at her womanliness and exotic blood—why not a witch of similar oddness?” She laughed, and her women rustled, clinking with teeth-gritting laughter along with her.
“Strange. But incarnates are incarnates, are they not? They do not adhere to traditional morality, we understand.”
She crooked a finger.
“Step closer,” she commanded, and both Simran and Vina did so. “Closer,” the Queen urged, and one of her ladies-in-waiting drifted down from beside her throne to guide them to the Queen’s feet.
The Queen placed one pale finger beneath Simran’s chin, raising her head to examine her. Simran stared back, transfixed.
“Has your tale begun? Has the knight hunted you yet, dear witch—bow in hand, arrow cocked?” Her eyes creased into a blue smile.
“I don’t understand, Your Majesty,” Simran said, voice tight.
“No, then,” said the Queen. She released Simran abruptly, waving her hands about in an airy fashion. “You will stay with us. You will dine with us. A week of feasting! You will entertain me, regale me with tales—and then, a ball.”
The courtiers cheered, clapping merrily. The Queen smiled back at them, beatific.
“I—I can’t,” Simran said, but the sound of clapping courtiers had turned her voice small. “I need to leave. My friend—”
Vina touched Simran’s arm. Simran’s head whipped to face her.
“You can’t question her,” Vina whispered. “Not here.”
The look Simran gave her was viperous—and betrayed. But Vina stared back, unflinching. Simran had to understand her. This was a warning. Vina had lived in this Palace since she was young. She knew what the Queen was capable of.
When Vina was first placed before the Queen as a child, and felt the Queen’s rose-scented hands on her chin, she had been entranced.
She’d wanted to love the Palace. Laura had told her to love her purpose, so she’d tried.
That had lasted until the day a courtier had displeased the Queen—traitorous words written to a lover had been discovered by archivists who sifted through letters just as they examined coffeehouse papers and books.
The courtier had been brought before the Queen, where he’d begged and groveled, and kissed her dainty slippers.
And she had smiled at him, beautiful as ivory and rose, and told her wyvern to eat him feet first.
It had.
Vina did not often think of it. It had been horrible, to be sure. But there was no escape from it. Her tale was her cage. It was a nice cage, as they went. And the bars of her tale would follow her no matter where she tried to run.
The Queen clapped her hands before Simran could say anything more. The Queen stood, and her audience bowed as one as she and her women left the room in a rustle of silks and perfumes.
“Lavinia,” said the Spymaster, when the Queen was gone, and their audience had risen from their bows. “With me.”
Simran was being led away by a guard. She didn’t look back at Vina.
Vina turned and followed the Spymaster. He took her to a small salon, decked in powder-blue settees. The windows were open onto the black night. He shut them officiously, then turned back to her.
“Now,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”
She told him everything—everything, apart from how she’d almost let Simran go. That had, indeed, been a foolishly noble impulse. Better to keep it secret.
“What did you tell the archivist?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Good, good. She’ll report your every move to Roland, of course, but at least the damn man won’t have your words.”
“Sir,” said Vina. “The killer of incarnates—what is to be done about him?”
“Nothing that concerns you.”
“A woodland died because of him,” said Vina. “Two tales I know of have been lost, but I know there must be more. This is an emergency, sir, a catastrophe for the Isle. If I can help—”
“You can help, Lavinia, by doing what the Queen wants, and keeping your thoughts to yourself,” the Spymaster said coldly. “Do you understand?”
A beat. Vina inclined her head.
“Apologies,” she murmured.
“Your father has sent you a message,” he added. “It will be in your room. Head there directly. When you’re not dining at the Queen’s pleasure, that’s where you’ll remain.”
“Understood,” said Vina. She’d go mad being so inactive, but what could she do?
She was followed by a guard to her room. When she closed the door she waited a breath by the entrance until she heard the telltale click of a key. She was locked in.
The message from her father was on the table.
It was on his official stationery, headed with the sigil of Parliament.
The letter was a simple thing: an admonishment for how her behavior had harmed his standing.
A minister cannot have an incarnate child who strays from their duty.
It urged her to remain on State grounds.
You could have come and told me yourself, thought Vina.
There was also a letter from Laura. This was neat, delicate script on flower-scented paper.
Her letter was softer, cajoling. Don’t be hurt by your father, dear Lavinia.
He was terribly frightened for you. Look after yourself. I’ll keep him safe.
She placed the letters back on the table.
She lay back down on her bed and thought of phosphorescent deer, and a pale-eyed man, and Soren, dead. What a curious and dreadful business. Someone had to find answers, if the Queen and Commons alike were unwilling.
She could bide her time. She was good at that.
The dinners were excruciating. Long mahogany tables were laden to the point of ludicrousness with lush feast after feast, honey apples and suckling pig, cockentrice sewn together with neat thread—but no less grotesque because of it—and roasted rabbit, garnished with apricots and pearly onions.
Courtiers filled every available seat, elbowing one another for space in their ridiculous finery.
No other knights or incarnates were invited so Vina and Simran were on their own, seated on opposite sides of the table where they could look but not speak.
Fantastic, truly. It left no way for Vina to explain herself. She was trapped staring at Simran, who refused to look back, and instead picked at her food in stony silence.
The Queen, in the largest seat with her wyvern curled about her, was the one who spoke the most, regaling them with tales of her nigh-on-immortal adventures.
Simran sat to her far left in a stiff-necked borrowed gown, her hair bundled into a gable hood, pearls wreathed around her throat, and her expression a rictus of simmering rage.
She had a lady-in-waiting on each side, guard dogs in black masks.
She’d tried to run, then. Vina hadn’t expected any less.
Vina, in her doublet, her resignation, could only stare at her and say, Wait, wait, bide your time with her eyes alone.
That night, the Queen was relating how she had crossed paths with the Laidly Wyrm, a small incarnate tale she had crashed into on a fox hunt.
“It was Apollonius’s predecessor who warned us the wyrm was no simple beast, but part of a tale that breathes life into an array of crags in the north.
And to think we would have cut her down!
” She laughed merrily. “Poor girl, ensorcelled into the form of a wyrm until her brother could break the curse upon her. Certainly our lance would have been no replacement for his brotherly kiss! What would we do without our dear archivists to advise us?”
“Her Majesty would have seen the truth a mere moment later, of this I’m sure,” Apollonius protested, oily and smiling. “Her Majesty is, after all, the greatest of all incarnates—her vision and knowledge are unparalleled.”
The Queen smiled graciously as if to say yes, this was indeed true, and Apollonius was correct to say it. A great tumult of compliments followed.
Buoyed up, the Queen continued boasting.
“Indeed, we have hunted far greater prey since. You cannot envisage what we were at the ritual of the royal hunt: garbed in armor that shone like moonlight, high upon our white horse.” She sighed, reminiscing.
“It was the winter solstice. The spirits were high—we sought a wild hunt,” she said, naming a ritual hunt that fell at the liminal times of solstices and equinoxes, when the magic of spirits and fae was at its greatest, and renowned hunters sought out mythical prey in order to feed upon their power.
“We hunted a whisper: of a great beast prowling the ancient primordial forest, a cockatrice perhaps, or another form of wyrm whose venom and wickedness filled the minds of all who gazed on it with ugly terrors. It is the duty of a monarch to hunt great beasts, and so we did. All night we chased… but we found only our dear wyvern, no venom in her, though her teeth are sharp indeed. We fought, but we chained her to our will soon enough. And now she is our dearest companion.”
She petted its great head, nestled on her lap.
Its eyes were dull, its scales glossless.
It made no sound, and did not move at her touch.
Not for the first time, Vina felt pity well up in her heart.
How trapped the creature looked. How sad, to see such a beast at the Queen’s feet.
She looked away, gaze sliding toward Simran once again.
With a start, a shock, she realized that this time Simran was looking back at her. They shared a moment of perfect understanding—the same pity, the same frustration, the same disgust. Then Simran’s look hardened with judgment.