Chapter Seventeen #2
Wyatt flinched, retracting his hand as if it had been slapped, and the men rose in one motion from their seats. Every beady eye trained on me.
“Councilors.” Roland’s rich voice was layered with command.
He raised his hands, an order for everyone else to sit.
There was a chorus of groaning wood as the men settled.
“The coronation will continue as planned, despite the treasurer and comptroller’s complaints.
I’ve decided to direct the funds from their households, so we can celebrate our new queen as lavishly as the king wishes. ”
The treasurer, Nicholas Martin, blanched. “Why not raise taxes again?”
“The people want to celebrate their queen, too. What a way to stifle her popularity.” An eye roll. “Raising taxes.”
“Lord Chancellor,” sputtered Martin, “the way the Crown is spending for this coronation, just a few years after Eleanor’s—”
Roland raised a hand. “The king will have his way.”
Treasurer Martin and Fulke Roet both scowled, heads pressed together. His name might be forbidden, but Prospero the All-Knowing’s influence lingered still. It was unspoken: When he was lord chancellor, the treasury swelled.
Then Fulke spoke up. “May I remind everyone what aid Jupiter might lend to us? I have two such magicians in my employ.”
Fear writhed in Roland, but his expression was composed, if slightly irritated.
Smiling without his teeth, he clapped his treasurer on the back.
“Martin is more than capable of managing our supply of mint, thank you, Fulke. Oh, don’t be so glum.
Look. We have a new member. I’ve named her …
master of spheres. I’ve sworn her in, assured of her loyalty to our king, and she’s rather better to look at than most of you. ”
Heads swiveled to me again. Roland beckoned me to stand, and I glared at him.
He knew how I didn’t like to speak in front of people.
But if he noticed my cry for help, he ignored it.
He lounged back in his chair and steepled his hands together expectantly.
From every direction came distaste, wariness, loathing, a swirl of ugly, malevolent color.
“I—” I broke off, looking to Roland. He nodded in encouragement. His mind was the only soft thing in the room, full of an emotion I couldn’t place.
After a moment, I realized what it was.
It was belief. Belief in me. It shined bright as a torch, and perhaps I could let it guide me. “I was the ward and adopted daughter of Prospero. He was a great magician. A great man.” Scandalized muttering broke out. “It is an honor to serve the king and Alvion as he did.”
I curtseyed and smoothed my gown, but Roland’s eyes narrowed. “And I—” I exhaled. Breathe, Bianca. Calm yourself. “I’d like to bring you to court,” Prospero once said, so long ago. “You will make my councilors very afraid.”
This room was the sun of power—a light so bright it touched everyone in this kingdom, every farmer and merchant and fisherman, every daughter of an innkeeper with red knees.
My gaze swept across the table. “I see the flicker of doubt in your minds, and I see your suspicion. I cannot know when you lie for certain as a Sunborn can, but I can sense when your heart beats at a rapid clip, when your palms sweat, when you look the lord chancellor in the eye as you speak but inside you recoil. I’d remind you, once again, that I am Prospero’s true daughter, in ability, if not in name. ”
Several councilors squirmed in their seats. Fulke Roet and Charles Guildford caught each other’s eyes across the table, and Roland hid a smirk by scraping a hand over his jaw. He nodded his approval, then gathered everyone’s attention again by clapping his hands.
“In a more pressing matter, I have received a note from Ambassador Hoo that the Lionesse are gathering men on the coast again. They must assume our king is weakened and frail, that we would leave them be to flex their muscles.” A lie.
Since we had defeated Lionesse years ago, they had slunk back into their castles.
“A new treaty must be drawn with King Philippe. I will go at once, as I know the kingdom well from my time in their court.”
“What of Queen Cecily’s coronation at the abbey?” asked Wyatt, taken aback that all his careful planning could be so easily brushed aside. “What of the final round of the tournament?”
“I will return the night before,” Roland told Wyatt. “I trust you to see to all remaining preparations.”
I didn’t understand. Cecily’s coronation was days away. How could we travel to Lionesse and back in such a short time? But the councilors didn’t seem to question it—they were grumbling about Lionessian ambition, Lionessian pride.
“Why not let Ambassador Hoo spearhead these negotiations?” asked Fulke Roet. A fair point.
Roland smiled. “And trust a matter as important as this to someone else? No. The king would like me to go myself, as his envoy. Our new master of spheres will accompany me, as I’d like insight into the moods of Philippe and his court.”
Roland’s ear was drawn toward Tom Guildford. It was settled—we would go to Lionesse, and Roland would leave the court in the hands of those who would steal it out from under him.
When the councilors bowed to Roland, picked up their papers, and began filtering out the door, I was cornered.
It was a fair-haired man with gaunt, spindly face.
Fulke Roet.
His mind was as much of a horror as the king’s, though a different terrain entirely. If the king’s was a mountain range of emotion, Fulke’s was flat, a lake of apathy. Both unsettled me.
Fulke wiped his wet nose with his sleeve. His eyes, as always, were rimmed with red. Roland had told me once that Fulke refused his services to improve his looks. He was not vain like the king; he understood that if he was powerful enough, he would be flattered regardless.
“Master of Spheres, wasn’t it?” he said. “A word?”
“Yes, all right.”
He tugged me by the elbow into a twisting stairwell strung with lancet windows. “So, you do still speak. My spies say they haven’t heard you.”
“I speak if I have something to say, Your Grace.”
“More women could use that trait,” he muttered.
Beneath my sleeves, I clenched my fists. My knuckles white. Yet I smiled sweetly. “You are here to ask if there are cracks in my loyalty to Roland.”
“You are newly returned to court, so I shall forgive your na?veté on the current state of affairs. But the lord chancellor is a self-important fairy tyrant who shits like the rest of us, despite what he’d have the king believe.
A cell awaits him in the Archimago Tomb.
Soon this will be my court, and he will have no place in it. ”
“There is a reason Hal and Roland never wanted to be your friend, you know.”
“I don’t recall them wanting you around either. You think I cared to be Hal’s playmate? You think I cared for Roland’s friendship? No, Master of Spheres.” A smile slowly spread across his face. “I want enemies. For enemies prove we deserve to be feared.”
“By that logic,” I countered, “friends prove we deserve to be loved. But love is not a trove. Neither is fear. We don’t collect it only so we can flaunt our wealth.”
He cocked his head. “Fear or love. How to wield power. That is the question. Age-old. I say neither suffice. When your pretty ship sinks, I won’t hoist you onto mine. There are already holes in the hull, and the water is rising fast. You just can’t see it yet.”
When his argument didn’t move me, he clicked his tongue in disappointment. “I had thought you clever, mind-leech. Now I see you’re as silly and addled as the rest of his acolytes. He will drown you.”
There was a split in the channel, Roland explained, cut by a Saturn magician.
A ship could sail through it and emerge near the Lionessian coast in a single breath.
The passage had conditions sewn into the magic, like the doors in Redhall: The ship and cargo could cause no harm to the people of Lionesse, or else they would wreck during the crossing.
While Roland descended belowdecks, I rested my head against the railing, staring at the chop and the silver wake we carved.
I watched and watched Alvion disappear, felt the tremble in the air as we passed through the boundary.
The channel smoothed out, turned a brighter, cheerier blue.
Seagulls wheeled above white cliffs. The air was thick and muggy, and soon I was sweating.
I returned to my cabin to change gowns, and in the belly of the ship, the floor tipped from side to side.
As the ship challenged a surging wave, I was thrown backward, flung into a bulkhead.
I was still struggling into my thin shift when someone knocked on my door.
Roland peeked his head in. His gaze slipped down my body like a dropped stone. Though he quickly averted his eyes, his cheeks held one of the easy flushes I remembered from childhood. “We’re docking within the hour.”
I snatched my coverlet from the unused bed and wrapped it around my body. “I’ll join you in a moment.”
His head disappeared, then reappeared, this time with a grin. “Unless you’d like to wear that? It’s quite warm up there.”
“Out, Roland.”
I felt the flicker of his amusement as he closed the door.
Bess returned minutes later and said Roland had sent her to help me dress. She was unfocused and dazed, her mind scattered to pieces. Several times she pinned my sleeves in the wrong place.
Perhaps she imagined he’d find her later. Push her against the door, or a desk, and take her as the ship groaned and rocked.
As she clasped a necklace around my neck, she bit her lip. “Mistress Bianca?”
“Mmm,” I said softly, wary of her, of myself, of the heat crawling up my neck. “Yes?”
“I’ve been told in Lionesse, the men and women do not need chaperones to enter each other’s chambers. And even the maids of honor with no husbands take lovers.”
I glanced over my shoulder. “Do you want a lover, Bess?”
Her pert nose wrinkled. “I am engaged. To Lord Martin.”