Chapter Three
Three
I have decided to send Roland away, to Lionesse.
He is not ready to be oathed, though it is custom for a magician of his age.
The king was cross, and we argued for many hours over it.
He’s taken a liking to the boy. Yet Roland requires additional discipline and teachings from a Venusborn herself.
For how many lords and ladies have come to me in hysterics to say their husband or wife is in his thrall, or in his bed?
He is twenty-one years old, and whispers name him whore.
—PROSPERO THE ALL-KNOWING, DIARIES, UNDATED
Roland recoiled from the blade. His eyes flared, the refined beauty melting from his face. “How dare you.”
I trembled. He knew I had no conviction, no true desire to harm him, or else he would have called for his guards.
“How dare you,” I spat. “Where is his head? Is it still rotting on a spike? Does it hang as some trophy on your wall? Where is it, Roland?”
I couldn’t master myself—for these past few months, I’d practiced what I’d say to him when I finally got the chance. Every night I’d rehearse, and my argument was pristine. Now I had forgotten it all. The knife clattered to the floor.
Roland kicked the blade under his desk. “The king sent Prospero to the Tomb, not me.”
I rounded on him. “But who gave him the idea, Your Grace? You whisper into his ear at night and in the morning, it is made law.”
“Prospero fell from favor because he couldn’t satisfy the king.”
“And you can?”
Roland inclined his head to the doors. Holding a finger up to his lips, he mouthed spies, his pearl earring flashing in the light as he turned.
“I am trying,” he hissed then, his voice lower than before.
“And you cannot imagine what it’s costing me.
So, is this why you returned to court?” He indicated the knife in the shadows.
“For revenge? For dear old Prospero, who always loved you more? He spoke of you at the end, you know. Right before his neck hit the block, he said your name, not mine. Well, I serve the king, and his moods, and he wanted a head. Prospero promised him a son, and the king grew impatient. That’s the trouble.
The king thinks a magician will solve everything for him.
And when we can’t deliver—” He dragged a finger across his throat.
His eyes didn’t leave mine. Yet I felt his attention lingering on the knife. “Prospero was my father,” I said.
Roland snorted.
“He was like my father in every way,” I insisted. “He was all I had in the world. I would have knelt on the scaffold in his stead, if it meant he was safe.”
“How valiant of you. I want to live,” he spat. He was breathing hard, shining with sweat. His eyes wide. All that careful, constructed cruelty was gone.
“Is that all? Truly, Roland?”
He recoiled and slumped into a chair, grasping for his carafe and filling a goblet with wine. He swirled and swirled the drink around, watching it shudder and still in the cup. “Why are you here?”
“A letter.”
“From whom?”
“You. You wrote to me.” Studying him now, even in the dim candlelight, I could see the love marks on his neck, some with serrations in the shape of teeth. “You offered me a place in the new queen’s coronation tournament and my old rooms in the palace.”
“No, I didn’t. Where’s the letter?”
“I burned it.”
He stared at me, blinking several times. “Convenient.”
“I was instructed to burn it.”
Something mouthed under his breath. Of course you were, it might have been. As he traced the rim of his pewter cup, I took the seat opposite him. “Are we to be civil now?” he asked. “Or shall I shout for my guards?”
I stole his goblet. Sniffed before I drank, a habit from growing up at court, though poison would dissolve—tasteless, odorless.
“You were a fool to trust the invitation.” He was eyeing his wine, deciding whether to snatch it back. “Someone wanted you at court. I’m sure they hired a Mercury to replicate my hand. So. You’re here now, we’ll endure it, but I won’t pretend I’m glad to see you.”
Yes, I felt very much the fool. I was alone with the most dangerous person in the kingdom.
And I had regressed back into childhood again, always chasing after him.
He was irresistibly charming, even when he was infuriating.
It was essence, his power, which drew others toward him. Others, I told myself. Not me.
“I wanted to believe you would invite me,” I admitted. “You convinced Prospero to send me away, to the Staffords, and I wanted to believe you regretted it.”
“It was Prospero’s idea, Mouse,” he said calmly. “I wasn’t here. I was still in Lionesse, banished for my—” He hesitated, chewing his lip. “My transgressions. Or do you not remember?”
“I know it was you. Somehow you influenced him, sent him a letter. You wanted me out of the way. You wanted to be exactly where you are now. Because ever since I arrived at court, you resented me.”
“Or,” he countered, leaning forward, “Prospero sent you to some barren, wet corner of the kingdom to be rid of you.”
“Prospero loved me.”
He nodded in agreement. “And so your father saw you utterly and completely. You are adept at magic, yes, but not at this.”
“At what, exactly?”
“Something you can’t learn from books, Mouse: other people.
Do you think it’s easy to manage the king?
Do you think I spend my days in leisure?
No. I tell him when to wake and when to shit, when to eat, what to dictate to his secretaries.
I tell him who watches him from the corner of her eye just so, in a way that might catch him.
‘Does she desire me?’ he’ll ask, and I will lie and say, ‘Yes, oh yes, Your Majesty’ because kings must be lied to.
And the new queen, too, every single Guildford—my spies tell me every word they say.
All of these are pieces I move around, a little to the right, up toward center.
Do you truly think you could do what I do? ”
I opened and closed my mouth, then opened it again. He used the opportunity to take his cup back.
“Tell me what has happened since I left,” I said. “Tell me exactly. Only piecemeal gossip reached me in the north.”
His voice was strained, his frown deepening. “Well, you had been sent off to the Staffords. And then—” He broke off.
And then Hal went riding and dropped dead in the woods. The very rooms we sat in finished the sentence for him.
“Queen Gertrude was past her time. Sheets white each month,” he continued.
“There would be no more heirs from her, and so the king had her executed. False charges, of course.” He waved a hand.
“When the king married Eleanor Guildford, Prospero promised she would give him a strapping, healthy boy. A new son to replace Hal. He chose the wedding date himself because he saw it would be auspicious.” Roland clicked his tongue. “He chose wrong.”
“Why did you return from Lionesse?”
A shrug. “Prospero summoned me after Eleanor became queen. I thought it strange. He finally wanted me back, after all this time? But he said I’d learned enough, that it was time to come home. So I did.”
He fingered his neck, as if remembering the blade I’d pressed against it.
“The king is like a hound. Steering him elsewhere when he’s already caught a scent is impossible.
Still, for weeks I whispered in the king’s ear, I begged him to save Prospero and Eleanor’s lives.
I said, ‘You’ll have a new son, Your Majesty.
Just be patient. These things take time.
’ I was on my knees. Do you truly think I was not devastated by this? ”
“How could I know what you felt? I wasn’t near you.”
He tapped a finger against his chin thoughtfully, candlelight gilding his hair and lashes. “Hal and I, we ignored you.”
I must have made a sound of protest, because he held out his hand. “When we pushed you away, you pressed even closer.” He laughed quietly. “Do you remember the day you were Oswyn?”
I stared into my lap. Of course I remembered.
I saw a boy in the stables and took on his likeness, so they’d let me play with them.
At first, no one in the palace suspected.
Why would they? Only Moonborn magicians could shift their appearance as I could.
I called myself Oswyn. And for a few glorious hours, I ran beside them, my lungs close to bursting, climbed trees with them, strung a longbow.
Only Roland discovered the ruse by suppertime.
“It was your eyes that gave you away. You always had trouble with them.”
I sighed. “Prospero always said eyes were the most difficult bit.”
As I studied him over the rim of the cup, he grinned. He liked the attention and seemed to expand. Gone was the ruler who coolly surveyed his courtiers, gone the chiseled marble of his beauty. The mask slipped away, just for a moment. He was familiar to me again, the boy I once knew.
“Tell me, will you swear an oath to serve another family?” he asked.
I would avoid it for as long as possible. But untethered magicians were fires to be contained. Some were of the opinion that their magic use should be forbidden entirely. “I earn enough in a year to live comfortably. For now. Gregory invested well.”
“Ah.” He understood I had invested Gregory’s money well. “And was he a good man?”
“No,” I admitted. “But he’s dead. Speaking of dead men, where is the king now?”
He was mid-sip and nearly spit out his wine. Coughs wracked him. Once he’d swallowed and gathered his breath, he whispered, very quietly, “Not quite dead. Nearly, though.”
I kept my face neutral as a wave of shock rolled through me. I gestured out to the hall.
“Yes, the entire court suspects. And if he dies today, the crown will pass on to Fulke Roet.”