Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty-One
The Lionessians tell tall tales of their first king, a merman who fell in love with a Venusborn sorceress. So infatuated were the two that they met each day at high tide, until a miracle occurred: The Venus found her beloved had grown legs.
—FABIAN DE TEMPES, THE MORNING AND THE EVENING STAR
The sun circled the windows, the sea broke roughly against the rocks below, a shard of Moon rose. In a week’s time, it would enter Virgo, and the sky would mirror the star chart we’d found. Still, he didn’t return.
I knew Roland needed time, but I also knew there was a part of him that hoped to be searched for.
So, I went looking.
The Lionessian court held an afternoon banquet in the gardens, tables laid with white tablecloths and the usual array of silver platters.
Trails led to a grotto blanketed in dry leaves and a thin coating of moss.
A mermaid rose up from a clamshell, water pouring from the fluke of her tail, down her naked breasts.
Marguerite sat at the high table beside King Philippe, whispering beneath her hand.
Seven men—each representing a planet—staged a dramatic swordfight on the lawn.
Roland was dancing a galliard with one of Marguerite’s women, dressed in a striking coat of vermilion silk, and when I stood at the floor’s edge to watch, his bloodshot eyes leapt to me, then away.
His mind was murky, difficult to grasp. His emotions both heightened and loose at once. He was drunk.
Damn him.
I want to talk to you. I need to talk to you.
If he heard my desires, he ignored them completely.
Applause rang out: The victor of the swordfight was Venus, of course. The other men lay limply in the grass. Marguerite offered the winner a kiss on the cheek while the king looked on, and the dancers lined up again for another sweep across the floor.
Roland was forced to guide his partner by me. He looked straight ahead, but I whispered to him as he passed. “Listen, I know you’re angry—”
He lifted his arm, spun away from his partner. “Angry? I thought you, of all people, would know that I’m not angry at all.” He let an emotion slip out, and I closed my eyes when I felt the depth of his pain.
I desire nothing more than to speak with you. Now.
From the agitation in his movements—usually so graceful and poised—I knew he wouldn’t relent. Not yet. Born under the sign of the bull, he was more obstinate than most.
The music faded. After bowing to his partner and sweeping the hair from his eyes, Roland snatched a goblet of wine and disappeared into the topiary.
Marguerite tutted, loud enough for me to hear. “So sensitive, my Roland.”
In the bedchamber, the sheets were still rumpled from Roland’s restless night. Bess removed the plaits in my hair and handed me a candle. “Where will you go, Mistress Bianca?”
“To the library. Enjoy yourself, Bess. I’ll be gone all afternoon.”
This time, when I stood before the library doors, I yearned for the past. The simplicity of the years before Roland and Hal and I wove these patterns around each other. When we had stood in the mud of the riverbed, daring each other to jump in.
I remembered it so clearly, how I’d leapt in first to impress them.
I was covered in such thick muck that I was weighed down as I tried to scramble up the banks.
I’d managed to smear Hal across the face, but Roland had shuddered and darted away, climbing a tree to avoid me.
“You menace!” he called down. “Hal, get away from her!”
Hal swiped mud off my cheek instead and threw the clump up at Roland.
“Traitor! If one speck of mud touches me, you’re both dead.”
When I whispered my desire to the door, it clicked open. I set my candle down in the dim aisle, so much more at ease here than I’d been at the banquet.
I ran my fingers along spines as I walked. They stalled on a book I’d never seen in Alvion: The Far Planet, written by Faustus himself. I pulled it out, curious. There was no mention of exaltation, as far as I could tell, but my eyes caught on a passage.
It is unknown how the first tear between the dead and the living was made, only that it was Saturn-cut.
A doorway, like any other. It soon became clear that ghosts will fade in our world, and we the living perish after too long in theirs.
A Saturn master knows this intimately. Several have explored the realm of the dead and never returned.
The solution was the creation of otherrealms, pockets between the two, where the living and dead are able to converse for a short time.
Ambrose’s words, before his own death: The experience is like wine—you’ll lunge for another sip right away.
I snapped the book shut and returned it to its slot, continuing along the shelves.
The Morning and the Evening Star was a history of the rulers of Lionesse.
Of the mythical first king, a supposed undine who had walked from the sea and into his Venusborn lover’s arms. The crown passed down to fish-kings thereafter, most born under Pisces, as Philippe was.
It also told of Raymondin the Lecherous, who, after slitting his king’s throat, dragged the throne of Lionesse into his own chambers and declared, “From this bed, power flows forth.”
But one footnote made me pause. A Venusborn’s greatest strength is his capacity to give. To offer what one wants most. His magic arguably drains him faster than any other magician, and his own love will be his ruin if it is given too readily.
Hadn’t Marguerite said something very similar?
I fiddled with the corner of the page. If Venusborn magic in its simplest form was a cut stitched, a wrinkle smoothed, then prolonging a life was its extremity.
Was this the secret of exaltation: our magic in extremity?
A Saturnborn, drawing a boundary between time itself.
A Venusborn, the fountain of youth from which her lover drank.
Perhaps Prospero was wrong to chase this. Perhaps the knowledge should have always slipped from his grasp. Since Marguerite’s revelation about his plans for Roland, he fell farther away from me. I had now lost my father for the second time.
I’d lost the great man I thought he was.
At sunset, I found Bess and the members of Roland’s household scrambling to pack our trunks.
“Where is he?” I demanded.
She curtseyed. “His Grace has gone for a walk.”
I chewed the inside of my cheek and set off through the palace. His mind—his bright emotions—my flare.
I found him sitting in the grotto, watching the sun burn on the horizon and tossing pebbles into the mermaid fountain. He brushed each rock with his thumb before he angled it. Frogs and turtles kicked through mucky green water. A courtier’s laugh pierced the silence, then fell away.
“Are we leaving?” I called.
He did not turn his head as he said, “In the morning.”
“Why was I not consulted?”
He swung around, eyes blazing. “Consulted? I’m the lord chancellor of Alvion, and tomorrow is Cecily Guildford’s coronation. I must be there. I’ve left them to scheme long enough.” He hurled another stone. “This mission was a waste of time. A dead end.”
The angles of his face were cut by the setting sun. For once, I was not afraid of his beauty. I stood between his knees and took his face in my hands, tears streaming openly down my cheeks. “Roland, you cannot be hard with me. I know how you’re feeling beneath it.”
“I feel nothing,” he lied.
“I am so sorry.” As I blinked away tears, I pushed my emotions into his mind, because an apology didn’t suffice.
“Hal and I lived in secret. In the months we were together, I never told a soul, and I only knew how to hide that part of myself away. It became easier. And when he died, it was easier still. I was lost in grief. I had my masks to cover it. When I first arrived at the palace, I couldn’t let you see me that way.
As this broken, shameful thing. I didn’t know if I could trust you.
But each day, as you and I grew—” I struggled to find what had changed between us.
“—closer, I was ripped apart.” Every word drew his eyes higher.
“I can feel how hurt you are. I wish I could take it away. I hate that I’m the cause. ”
He lifted his face at last. “When did it end?”
“When I made my oath to the Staffords. Prospero said it was time for me to be sworn to a family. I couldn’t—” A sniff.
“I couldn’t understand why he was sending me away years early, but I agreed.
I left. It was better that way. Better to go and be broken than to stay and eventually break someone else. ”
My hands roamed over his shoulders, his cheeks, as he struggled for words.
“I knew you wanted to tell me something. I had hoped—” His jaw worked suddenly.
“I see lines between people. I told you that. But there’s something else, too—a light inside of everyone I meet.
Some are brighter than others. I used to believe, when I was young, before I met Marguerite, that it simply was their—for lack of a better phrase—baser instinct.
But it wasn’t that. The light was how deeply they had loved.
And you glow, Bianca. You glow so brightly.
Perhaps, even though I never saw you two together, I should have known.
” Another flex of his jaw. “When you came to court, you were relentless for answers about his death. I thought it so strange. Were Bianca and Hal so close, I wondered?”
His head dipped again in my hands. Neither of us had been able to carry our grief alone. It was too heavy. By not confiding in him, by not sharing the burden, I’d only prolonged my suffering.
“The other night,” he said. “You were remembering Hal when you turned me away.”
“No, I was guilty, because for once, I was not remembering him at all.”
He twisted his ring, avoiding my eyes again. Rubbing the band as if to wear the metal down. “How can I think of him the same, knowing he kept this from me? He might have written and told me. I’m more betrayed by him than you.”