Chapter Twenty-Two #2
“Yes, precisely,” he murmured, circling me.
Though his pallor was of a corpse, his breath was sweet.
“Most of my specters are angry, Bianca Mortlake. Resentful. They spurn the living. There are those who do not want their husbands and wives and children to see them so diminished. And there are those who are furious they have no hands with which to kill, who seek revenge with no means to take it. Tell me: What is it you seek from your old master Prospero? Or are you here for…” He returned to his throne, stroking the stone with a pale, delicate finger. “Someone else?”
His look was oddly knowing. As if he saw how I’d survived on memories of the dead, cut into small morsels, hoping they might sustain me. But Hal wouldn’t want me to seek out his ghost; he’d have me remember him as he was.
“I have suffered many losses,” I said.
“And you will suffer more.” Balthasar slid through the air again, landing mere feet away.
“Look to Saturn,” he explained, glancing up, as if he could see through wood and through stone, to the celestial bodies above.
“This will be a time of great change. We are standing here, just before the future opens wide.”
“You speak cryptically.”
He chuckled under his breath. “I do not know any other way to speak.”
I felt the crumpled paper against my breast. Prospero’s star chart.
“Perhaps I’ve come to see you, Your Grace.” I reached into my bodice and handed the torn parchment over to him.
As he unfolded it, recognition sparked in his eyes. And then his face paled. “Where did you get this?”
“I found it.”
Eyes narrowing in disbelief, he measured me. Holding the parchment far away from himself, between two fingers, as if it were scalding. “This is drawn in my master’s hand.”
Now I was circling him in turn; we drew ellipses around each other. “Who was your master?”
“His name was Faustus.”
Faustus. Author of The Legend of Oberon and The Far Planet. Prospero’s secret correspondent. “Saturnborn?”
He bowed his head yes. “Prospero was his apprentice before me, you know.”
“I did not.” I knew so little about Prospero’s youth. Only that he had been fostered as a boy with King Richard.
“Interesting. Hmm. Prospero spent years under his tutelage. Together, they sought to open a university for magical and astronomical study, but every king was too frightened of the idea. Magicians, serving their courts? Very well. But gathered together, expanding their knowledge as one?” His dark eyes glittered. “A frightening nexus of power.”
Roland’s idealism rose within me. “Imagine us,” he would say, “existing for ourselves, not for our kings and their petty squabbles. Not bound by oaths.”
A university. What might I discover—beyond exaltation, beyond the known limits of magic—if I had the means to put my mind to it?
But would I even be able to study at such a place as a woman?
Would the magicians lean over their armillary spheres and their astrolabes and their tomes, while I waited outside, crouched at the door?
“What happened to Faustus?” I asked.
“He died,” Balthasar said, his tone patronizing, as though it should be obvious.
“How?”
“How do most powerful sorcerers die, Bianca Mortlake? They are executed as soon as they become a threat.”
“Aren’t you afraid for yourself, then?”
He chuckled under his breath. “Oh, no. The emperor is well sated. He relies on me utterly. Faustus, on the other hand, served no one. He predicted the age of kings would end. He wrote pamphlets, dangerous texts. All burned, of course. I saw his body burn, too. I heard his screams. Beheading him was considered too painless.”
I nodded toward the star chart in his hands. “So, what does it foretell?”
Balthasar’s smile widened. “It is called a Final Breath. It shows the planets’ alignment at the moment of a spirit’s passing from this world to the realm of the dead. Faustus calculated someone would die in roughly four days’ time.”
The world shifted, nearly cracked. All I saw was Roland’s face. “Who?”
“I have no idea.” He took a step, and the air trembled. He’d sliced through it again, emerging on his throne.
“How is the prediction made?”
“The secrets of Saturn are well protected for a reason. When I lay eyes on a person for the first time, I know when they will die, just as you sense emotions. It requires only a single glance. Now, for example, I see the date of your death.” He crumpled the paper in his fist. “But Faustus was the one who met this poor soul, not me.”
His grin was too wide, unnatural on his sharp face. I couldn’t fathom the horror of such a power—to look into someone’s eyes and know when they would close forever.
He leaned forward, gloating. “Would you like me to tell you?”
“No. Nothing good can come from such knowledge.”
“Very wise.” He nodded to himself. “I’d warn you: Do not try and meddle with the future. Nothing will change; the course is set. Your actions will only aid it in coming to pass. Though, I admit, I’m intrigued who this death belongs to.”
From the throne, he rolled the crumpled chart back to me, studying my face for any reaction. I gave him none. Still, my voice stalled in my throat. “What of payment?”
“I’d ask to know whose fate is predicted in this chart here, but you don’t know either, do you?
Hmm.” He tapped his chin. “You know, petitioners bring me gold and cloth, but my true wealth is the stories my dead tell me. Buried skeletons are not so frightening when you are already a ghost.” He peered down, an adder about to strike.
“For example. Prince Hal refused to marry the emperor’s daughter because of you.
True? A magician girl, nearly a princess of Alvion?
” Balthasar’s nails rapped against the arm of his throne.
Though his tone was gentle, he’d intended violence.
I understood why Prospero had shuddered whenever he heard Balthasar’s name.
What did people think when they heard mine?
For what were names but someone else’s idea of what we were, or could be?
Bianca, for my shock of white hair. Mouse, for my scurrying.
Princess of Alvion never fit, no matter how much Hal wanted it for me.
He believed I could wear such a title without becoming his shame.
“Who told you that?” I whispered.
“Your master. Did he lie to me?”
The idea that Prospero knew about Hal and me—impossible. We’d gone to such lengths.
His head tilted to the side. “You cannot imagine how I suffered when Prospero broke our treaty. The emperor was enraged. He planned to close all trade to Alvion, sent missives to Lionesse to declare himself their new ally. His daughter was bereft. She’d fallen in love with Hal’s portrait.
Carried it around wherever she went. All because a foolish little magician thought she might be queen one day.
I stepped in. Your master sent you away. ”
I shook my head no. No, no, no. It couldn’t be true.
“Oh, yes. You had to be put in your place. I did not want to see Alvion suffer for such a small, insignificant thing.”
“Why?” I managed.
“I was born in Alvion. It was my first home.” I had thought I had heard remnants of an accent. “But now,” he continued, “I have a new home. And it is not Bastian. You see, for a Saturn, death is not a state of being, Bianca Mortlake. It is a place.”
He gestured toward the door at the end of the chamber, the wretched old man carved above it.
Our audience, it seemed, was over. “Step into my otherrealm. Call for your dead. You have until high tide. And do not forget: The dead are in stasis. They cannot feel, cannot learn—anything you share with them that they did not already know in their lifetime will be forgotten by morning.” His eyes followed me, though he did not turn his head. “Oh—and Bianca Mortlake?”
“Yes?”
“I am most eager to see who arrives in my domain in four days’ time.”
I was spat onto a gray beach, the waves thrashing and cruel. Mist crawled down from the line of dunes. The scene was faint, as if conjured from memory, a piece of childhood chiseled away.
The stone archway leading back to Balthasar’s audience chamber hovered on the brink of the dunes, and the icy tide was already coming in, dragging back the sand beneath my feet as it advanced.
Somewhere, there must be another doorway that connected this otherrealm to the land of the dead. Prospero lay beyond it.
When I was a girl, he would urge me to try and sleep. After blowing out my candle and wresting the book from my lap, he’d tell me to kick beneath my sheets to tire myself out. After a quarter hour of kicking, I never tired. And now, I would scream and kick until he showed his face.
“Prospero! Prospero, I’m here! It’s Bianca! Prospero, I’m here!”
The horizon was still.
“PROSPERO! COME OUT! SPEAK TO ME!” I had never shouted as loud as I did then, thundering his name until my voice was hoarse. I gathered stones and threw them as hard as I could into the surf. “PROSPERO, SPEAK TO ME. PROSPERO, I’M HERE!”
My anger rose again, and I wiped away my tears, threw stone after stone into the water. I cupped fistfuls of wet sand and began throwing that too, once I’d run out of nearby rocks and shells. “It’s me. Prospero, you bastard. Was your plan for Roland to die for you? Prospero! I’m waiting for you!”
Roland was right. He wouldn’t answer. I tossed more sand, sinking first to my knees, then my heels.
Eventually, my voice gave out. “Father. Please, Father. Roland has taken your place, and he is surrounded by enemies at court. I don’t know what to do, not without your guidance.
Help me save his life. Prospero, please! Help me!”
He was either a coward or indifferent. And a small, wounded part of me wondered if what I’d mistaken for his love was merely a tolerance.