Chapter Four #3
Roland’s frustration festered the longer I circled him.
“You still don’t believe me, do you, Mouse?
You truly think I could live with myself if I hurt him?
My best friend? You said you would lay your head on the scaffold for Prospero.
I would have done that for Hal. In an instant.
And if you had my magic, you would know it.
” He swallowed roughly. “You would know how I loved him. You would know that I stay in his rooms just to feel close to him!”
Our eyes met and held. “What?”
“The king’s chamberlain wanted to remove all his things and give the apartments to Cecily Guildford, and I said no.
The king wanted to forget Hal’s existence, the reminder far too painful for him.
But I couldn’t. Never, not once, could I forget him.
I hid his things in a chest, and sometimes I lay them out.
Sometimes, on bad days, I refold all his clothes.
Oh, you thought I stole the finest chamber for myself, didn’t you?
I saw how you looked when I brought you there.
” A strangled laugh. “Take my memory of the day Hal died. I’m eager to prove you wrong. ”
I hesitated. Memories were precious things. Yet if he was offering it so readily … I had always wondered if his agony on that day would feel like my own. If it was as deep, as brutal …
He emerged from a bedchamber and stretched his arms—no signet ring on his finger yet. The hallways were streaming gold. The gray, pebbled coast of Lionesse curved out the window.
Perhaps he’d seek out that handsome groom, or one of the queen’s ladies. Perhaps he’d paint. The day, as all days did, opened wide before him. In the gardens, King Philippe was taking a turn with his mistress, leaning on his cane as he struggled to keep stride with her.
Like all Venusborn, Roland could see the thick bond between them, more than twenty years of love and devotion.
He was just about to slip downstairs to find some diversion when a page boy arrived panting, holding out a letter. His hand quivered. “For you, Master Roland.”
He broke the seal. He read the note from Prospero. Hal was found in the woods, it said. Hal was carried into the palace. Pronounced dead.
Hal. His best friend, who forgave him anything. What is a friend like that worth? Everything, absolutely everything.
He read it again. Read it once more. And then he fell to his knees and screamed.
The memory shifted. He walked in a funeral procession. After so long away, he had forgotten the endless rains of Alvion, the solemnity of the sky. In a few days, he’d return to Lionesse and leave this horror behind.
Thousands of people lined the route. At first, he loathed them as they reached out to touch the chariot as it passed.
Then he saw an old man, rocking back and forth on his heels and weeping, and he realized Hal was not only his.
He belonged to the entire kingdom. The wheels of the chariot thumped harshly against the cobblestones, throwing Hal’s coffin into the air.
He repaired the road beneath it with his magic, each stone sliding smoothly into place, so the coffin—and Hal within—might rest. Under the lid, under all that wrapping, was—what?
How much had Hal already decayed? He tried to picture the details of Hal’s face.
His laugh lines, the scattering of freckles.
The entire way, he held his fingers against the corners of his eyes to dam his tears.
I unlatched my mind from his, shaking from the aftershocks of his grief.
I’d first sensed it long ago in the mind of my father, felt it linger bone-deep in strangers, and then, when Hal died, it found me. Changed me. It had changed Roland, too.
The mind was poured into a cast, and grief remade it. Quenched, tempered, and hammered it into a new shape.
Roland leaned down and brushed the heads of flowers.
Their color sharpened under his hand, any dull and drooping petals stretching up to the sky.
This newfound beauty might last for weeks until it faded—just like Roland’s attention.
“I need it to have been a terrible accident. I need fate to have played a hand,” he said, his voice gathering emotion.
“For how else am I to bear it? Let it rest.”
“The story is still far too convenient.”
A sigh. “If I was to entertain the idea that Hal went for a ride in the woods and was murdered here, do you have reason to suspect someone?”
“I suspect many courtiers wanted power enough to kill for it. The Guildfords had every motivation. Once Hal was out of the way, the king needed a new heir. Gertrude was too old to give him a son. And there they were, with two daughters ripe for plucking. And Fulke had every—” A twig cracked. We both spun.
Through the forest, I could hear the laughter of Roland’s friends, and when they emerged out of the darkness Tom Guildford swept into a bow, his nose almost brushing the tips of his boots. We had forgotten all about the hunt.
“We heard shouting!” Tom called. “Was that you?”
“Bianca tripped over herself!” Roland called back, grinning as soon as he saw my scowl. “I’ve fixed her up now.”
When Tom’s back was turned, I pointed to him with my chin. “Is he capable of it?”
Roland smiled at his friends. So quietly I could barely hear it, he said, “Of course he is. They all are. If you suspect the Guildfords, pose as Cecily’s maid Joan Rockford in the masque tonight.
Joan spies for me—and for them. They always tell her where they are set to meet so she can fetch Cecily.
See for yourself if they are worth your suspicion, and I’ll keep the real Joan out of your way. ”
Joan Rockford. The lady-in-waiting with the straw-colored hair and gossiping mouth, who’d spoken of Roland and the tennis court. I wasn’t surprised. The castle was full of opportunists, of loyalties grown and shed.
“Why help me now?”
He frowned, as if wondering that himself.
“Because I would adore nothing more than proof of a Guildford plot. Perhaps we can help each other.” His head turned, and he swore under his breath.
“They want to know what we’re talking about.
They intend to get closer to us, just to hear. So we’ll speak more of this later.”
He mounted his horse and nudged his flanks, leading him into the forest. I thought to him, I want Roland to remember our bargain.
This was something I’d learned to do as a girl; the more specific I was with my desires, the more easily Roland could sense them, if they were true.
Once, I spent an hour thinking on a loop I want Roland to admit he’s afraid of pigs until he turned red.
“They bathe in their own filth!” he’d finally shouted in the middle of our lesson, startling Prospero.
I grappled with my horse, guiding her by the reins and following Roland by foot into the tree line. He clasped Wyatt Francis’s shoulder. “There’s only one magician who hasn’t arrived yet for the tourney. True, Wyatt?”
Wyatt nodded, removing his cap as he ducked beneath a branch. “Your opponent, Mistress Mortlake, is most mysterious. She’ll even miss my masque tonight.”
She. I had never met another female magician. When we were born, our families often kept us quiet. We were unmarriageable. And there was a hint of discomfort, too, at a woman wielding any sort of power.
“Which planet rules her?” Roland asked casually, tossing a glance at me over his shoulder.
“No one will tell me,” Wyatt complained. “The king insists she’s to be a surprise.”
There was a strange disquiet within Tom.
I muttered to Roland, “You knew this when you made the bargain with me, didn’t you?”
He merely shrugged and said it was a pity, then recounted for Tom and Wyatt how the deer had slipped away from us. I could only hope the beast kept running, the woods closing behind it.
For a moment, I let myself linger. I stood at the edge of the meadow and closed my eyes. The past shook within me. I could hear the echo of our laughter—mine, Roland’s, Hal’s.
The only way out of the past, I realized now, was through it.