Chapter 52 #2
At Rosemarie’s request, Bernard had escorted her back to Roseland, despite her diminished health. Oddly, she had been unable to find her new maid Nan in order to bring her back with her, but she’d had no time to wait. She urgently needed to deal with Evoldo.
Also at her request, Bernard had informed her when her husband was to leave the cottage and where he would be heading, and so now she waited behind the trees that overlooked the crypt, a newfound strength growing in her as she knew her child was well.
She stayed there until her husband entered the crypt.
Only then did she move, slipping across the lawn in her scarlet cloak.
How many years had it been since she’d last stepped inside? The memory was too painful to honor, even now.
Inside, the stone sarcophagus shifted, revealing the hidden passage, and below that lay the tunnels that had long been sealed, guarded by her father’s and grandparents’ bodies. She took a breath and descended the stairs.
A rancid stench rose from below. She pressed her cloak to her nose and mouth and swiftly quickened her pace to match Evoldo’s distant scraping footsteps down the stairwell.
Emerging from the spindled stone steps, she gasped.
Bones and shattered tombs lay in heaps before her—her family, discarded like refuse.
At the sound of her inhale, Evoldo turned sharply.
Behind him yawned an enormous hole in the crypt—the tunnel that burrowed deep into Roquat’s domain had been reopened.
“Rosemarie,” he said, and though he looked foolish, he retained his arrogant bearing as he approached her.
“Do not come near me,” she warned, trying to catch her breath.
“Dear, this is…”
“Do not bother. Do not lie to me. I know, Evoldo.” Rosemarie felt an anger stirring that radiated in her chest. “What has he offered you? What has he made you believe?”
Evoldo exhaled, his composure faltering for the first time.
A shadow of frustration flickered across his face.
“You don’t understand, my love. He is the reason we have the emerald to export, and this deal keeps him below ground.
” He tried approaching again, and Rosemarie backed to the stairwell.
“I’m protecting you; I’m protecting all of this!
” He gestured, but in his foolishness, his hand swept toward her father’s crumpled remains.
“You cannot think me so dim. What did he promise you?” she asked as hatred boiled within her. Evoldo shuffled with his mouth partially agape. “Tell me!” she roared, and the startling sound caused him to flinch.
“Life eternal,” he said in a sheepish voice, and Rosemarie burst into a laughter that was sharp and humorless.
“We nearly have life eternal.”
Evoldo seemed desperate now. “Nearly. But not quite. We will die. You will eventually die. And then I will have my time.” His words were poisoned. He was poisoned. It was a side of him that, though she’d assumed in some way had existed in him, he had never shown. She wished she had not seen it now.
“You have made a deal to serve Roquat so that you may outlast me?” Rosemarie didn’t want to believe the words she was saying.
“So that I may be your equal! You are so powerful, but you do not use it! You have been given a gift that came from him, and you deny it! Together… we could rule, but with both of us in true power.”
“How trivial and egotistical the gains are for this unconscionable betrayal. And how delusional you are, Evoldo,” she said as a shift passed through her like a storm cloud blotting the moon.
How small he looked. How petulant. “You are no king, Evoldo.” Her voice fell cold.
“He will grant you immortality, yes—but you will serve him until the end of time, bound to the dark beneath the earth. No one will reign. You have not bargained for power. You have sold your soul for slavery.”
She turned.
“Rosemarie!” Evoldo called. “If you refuse me. I will tell the Emerald City who you truly are.”
Rosemarie took a breath, and just as she was ready to turn and face him, a voice as deep and threatening as the low rumbling of the ocean waves shook her. “You will do nothing of the sort.”
She turned, and behind her husband, stepping from the gaping hole in the crypt, was Roquat. In the damp dark of the crypt, his eyes illuminated like silver torchlight.
“My Lord.” Evoldo kneeled before him. Rosemarie watched in horror as Roquat, who nearly met the ceiling in height, walked past Evoldo, his servant boy, to approach her. She wished to run but could not.
“You are as beautiful as your mother. You look so much like Nasrin,” he said, his enormous hand reaching toward her face.
She jerked away. His eyes burned as they lowered to her stomach.
“And a child.” His voice rolled through her.
Rosemarie’s body began to tremble as she looked at Roquat, whose stone-like flesh radiated heat before her.
Roquat studied her, then leaned toward her.
His giant hand found her stomach. Inside her, the child spun and kicked at his touch.
“There will be a time when your people and those that want your throne do find out your secret. The time will come when they know you are my child, and when that time comes, and they threaten to remove you…” He leaned closer, his eyes shining with such intensity that everything else around them appeared black.
“I will be here to take from them. You will have a place in Oz when it is reborn.” Rosemarie shuddered, her breath catching as her pulse hammered.
Roquat stood erect, his promise of safety looming over her, its implied price—her surrendering to chaos. “Until then.”
Evoldo, still on his knee, watched nervously as Roquat returned to him.
“Bring him,” Roquat said, and from the blackness manic grey bodies with razor smiles gargled and snorted as they converged on Evoldo.
Rosemarie fled, her body numb and aching simultaneously.
She ran to the surface until sunlight blinded her eyes.
Outside, away from the crypt’s foul air, Rosemarie turned back to the grand structure of marble and glass.
The creeping roses that framed the mausoleum whispered her name.
Below the earth was the man she’d loved once.
He was the father of her child. There had been a time when she’d believed in him, in the man he could have been.
But that man had been buried long before today.
She knelt, pressing her fingers into the damp soil. If below ground was where Evoldo had cast his allegiance, then so be it. She could not let Roquat win. She could not let chaos out.
At her will, the roots beneath the earth twisted, the great roots that reached their way to the depths of land, and they pulsed, loosening the soil.
In her mind’s eye, she saw the ancient tendrils coiling deep, vast veins pulsing beneath her hands.
The ground trembled. A thunderous crack split the air.
The roots wrenched, churning the earth. Pillars buckled. Glass cracked, then shattered.
With a final, violent shudder, the crypt collapsed. Marble dust billowed around her; the ruin settled.
Rosemarie stood.
And then she walked away.
Languidere woke with Nan’s head resting on the arm of the Jin. He buried his face into the nape of her neck, his mouth upon the tender healing skin of the collar. “I’ve had the most incredible dream,” Languidere said. “A dream so vivid had I not woken I would have believed it to be real.”
His hands moved onto her body as he exhaled over her before climbing atop her. “Tell me.”
“I dreamed I was in Nan’s—no, Guinevere’s—home, a manor, of which I knew every detail.
I knew where it was. I could see and almost touch a wardrobe of the most luxurious clothing, and I knew I could have it all…
And Guinevere was not poor! Her mother is Queen Nasrin.
My maid is Rosemarie’s bastard sister. How rich is that? ”
“Where is this queen’s manor of yours?” the Jin asked, kissing down her sternum to her navel.
“London. Do you know it?” She stopped the Jin and pulled his head up to meet her eyes.
“I do, but to get there requires…”
“A mirror of lurlicite. There is one in the wardrobe of Guinevere’s mother’s closet,” Languidere said, startled at the swift recollection that came to her.
“You see! I know things. Can you find one here? I know that it is there in London that I will take the head of Alice!” Languidere pulled the back of his thick hair to yank his mouth from her stomach.
“And you will help me,” she demanded as he leaned against the rough hold she had on his hair.
He smiled before biting the wrist of the hand that held his head.
“I need to get her before that old hag Mombi does.”
“I have a way.” He bit her again, this time harder. The hair on her body raised at the sharp pressure. “Do you know what a chronex is?” he whispered.
She did not. But she nodded anyway.
“You really mean to take another girl’s head?”
“I will take the head of anyone I want to,” she said sweetly, kissing him. “If I have her, if I am her, then you have her, too.” She kissed him yet again. “I can be queen.” She smiled at the Jin, but he did not know that it was Roquat’s queen that she wished to be.
The Jin grabbed her aggressively, tossing her to the bed, bringing her arms over her head and pinning them with one hand. He traced the collar with his finger. “Off with her head.”