Chapter 24 The Tower
THE TOWER
Sometimes, when Diana’s ring warmed her finger, it felt like a kiss. Temple’s kiss. And in those moments, despite the dim lighting, the dust, the inhospitable furnishings, and the bad food, she felt safe. She felt hope.
A rare commodity, that, when she’d been locked up and left alone, only a guard to keep her company. And he would not speak to her. She’d tried. Multiple times a day for all five days of her confinement. Sometimes she spoke to him simply to speak.
Mostly, she sat at the window, looking out at a world she might not ever rejoin and thought about lightning.
Had it been real? Or illusion?
What had been real? She’d called lightning from across the sky. She’d commanded it by drawing its light nearer and nearer. If the dukes and marquesses and earls knew how to do this, they would want everyone to know it.
They didn’t know. Or they couldn’t do it.
But she could.
Only she couldn’t think of how to use this particular trick to escape, to run and hide.
The question that truly plagued her was… Why could she do it if they could not?
Possibly because, unlike other transcendents, she’d been forced to learn to wield her talent, to figure out how it worked and how she could control it.
The others had been trained by men who’d come before then, given advice on what to expect.
If she’d been able to speak with Apollo, or anyone with the gift, or even allowed to read a book, her talent might have taken a much more predictable course—the course that had been hewn over centuries, like a drop of water carves a rivet into a rock, drip by drip over ages and ages of time.
She’d felt as if the lightning were in her skin, tingling and taut.
She’d felt like the bolt that had struck with uncanny precision between Temple and Apollo had been her doing, and quite, quite real.
She grasped the bars on her window and looked up at the sky.
So very blue, so very open and beyond her reach.
She sighed. She couldn’t make lightning.
She didn’t think. She needed a storm, then she could… guide it.
Likely, she should be more worried about that development.
She was more worried about Temple. He might… miss her. Now and… later. After. But he would have his family, and he could marry again. A woman who was not as complicated as herself.
She scowled, her hands itching to become fists, to punch that hypothetical bride. She did not want to share Temple. Even if she died. And she didn’t care if it was selfish. She loved him and wanted him to be hers. Always.
Life had given her so little, and she’d asked little of it in return. It could at least give her that. Temple never marrying again.
It would condemn him to a life of loneliness, though.
Because even if she escaped, she would not go to him, would not ask him to leave the family he loved so dearly.
If he ran away with her, he would never enjoy another evening at Nickleby House.
Never introduce his parents to their grandchildren.
Sybil would marry without her brother to fret about the groom.
Ajax would become a man without another single soggy cookie laid upon Temple’s palm. Or Diana’s.
She leaned against a stone wall and sank down, down, down, until she sat upon the stone floor.
She’d cried up all her tears days ago. None left.
But she couldn’t shake the heavy dampness in her soul, the aching pain her chest. She’d found a family.
And lost it. Would be wiser to feel grateful for the time she’d been given with them.
But a greediness had claimed her. She wanted more.
Of life, of Temple, of the Grants. She wanted to learn more about her talent and continue learning potions with Lady Guinevere.
She wanted to help Temple break into the Alchemist Guild and steal more books and—
Hopeless to want more. These stone walls were all she had for now. Perhaps forever.
And forever might not be that long for her.
The sound of the lock creaking shot Diana to her feet. The door opened. Had they allowed Temple to visit her? Oh, she hoped so. She would kiss him and hold him, and he might have to live there with her until the end because she would never let him go.
But it was not Temple who entered. Not even a man.
Diana sank into a deep, deep curtsy, her heart thumping madly.
“Rise,” Princess Victoria said.
Diana did but then had no idea where to look. She’d seen the princess from a distance a few times. She was, surprisingly, shorter than Diana, though they shared brown hair. The princess’s spine and shoulders were straight and serious, but something mischievous winked in her golden eyes.
“You are the lady I’ve heard so much about,” she said, hands folded primly over her belly. She wore a white gown with a blue shawl, her hair sleek and perfectly arranged in a coiffure of braids and loops.
Diana nervously smoothed a hand over her unwashed hair. It had been a chaos of knots and tangles for days, but she’d managed to braid it into something like messy submission. “I suppose I am, Your Highness.”
“You possess talent?” The princess raised a brow.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Show me.”
Was she allowed to? She was here for possessing talent, so surely practicing it would be a crime. But then again, she was already imprisoned. So, why not?
Diana took a steadying breath, pushed the hair too short to fit inside her braid behind her ears, and held her hand up.
Gray light rolled through the window, and she imagined wrapping it around her hand, tugging it, shaping it.
Gold like the hot summer sun and jewels like leaping flames, then—in her hand appeared a crown.
She lifted it toward the princess and sank into another curtsy, staying there.
“For you,” she whispered.
Princess Victoria gasped, the slightest little thing.
Then, hesitant and wary, but with something like avarice curving her lips, she reached out for the crown.
Her hand pushed through it, the illusion flickering against her skin.
She yanked her hand back and laughed, pressing fingertips to her lips. “It looks real. You are good.”
“I’ve had to teach myself, Your Highness.” Diana rose from her curtsy and banished the crown.
Princess Victoria remained fixated on the patch of air where the crown had been, her intelligent eyes hiding whatever questions or machinations whirred behind them. She was young. So very young.
Her gaze snapped into focus, and she looked about, studying the dank room and making a circle about it, keeping her arms clasped firmly about her waist. When she returned to stand in front of Diana, she said, “I will assume you are an informed sort of woman and that you have heard that my uncle, his majesty the king, has not yet chosen his heir.”
“I am aware of that.”
“I am next in line to inherit the crown.”
“Yes, I am aware, ma’am.”
“But he hesitates to hand over the country to someone with no transcendent talent.”
“I have read such speculations in the papers.” Diana chose her words carefully, interested in extending the conversation, to see what destination it meandered toward.
“You understand, then, why I am here today? Why I find you of such particular interest?”
Diana understood perfectly.
The little princess wanted to be a queen.
And Diana offered a key to achieving that.
Diana swallowed, wet her dry mouth. “I have my guesses.”
“Lovely.” The princess’s smile was bright and true. “It is good to be in conversation with someone who understands me so well and without such fuss.”
“A rare occurrence.”
“Indeed.” The princess looked down, scowling at her foot, which tapped beneath her skirts. “Can you tell me anything? About how it happened? Were you born with talent?”
“Not at all. It was quite shocking.” She paused, trying to find the words. She’d never told anyone but Temple, and he made her feel so safe, it had been the easiest thing in the world. But this was a princess, a potential queen.
“Well? How did it happen?”
And an impatient little thing. Diana began to pace the small room, picking at her fingernail to keep her nerves subdued. “We did not know he was going to die. If I had known I wouldn’t have been there.”
“Of course not.”
Only the heir was allowed to be present at his predecessor’s death.
“It all happened so fast. I acted as his nurse, and I was there, tending to him. He and I realized what was happening at the same time. He couldn’t breathe.
He clutched his chest. He began to call for my cousin, but his voice was not loud enough.
I ran into the hallway and called him. A maid heard and ran, and not thinking, I returned to my grandfather.
I’d always tended him. It had become impulse to do so.
I knelt by him, and he clasped my hands.
He was saying ‘thank you, thank you’ and I was crying.
He had not been my favorite person, but he had been my person.
My only person. And he had cared for me in his own way, as I had cared for him in mine.
And then Apollo showed up. My cousin. The heir.
He swung into the room as our grandfather’s hands tightened on mine, as his eyes went wide.
I remember thinking… that is it—the last spark of life leaving him.
“But then he inhaled a breath, and he looked to Apollo, grasped Apollo’s hands.
He demanded that my cousin marry me. Apollo kept shaking his head, his face pale, but my grandfather insisted.
He was crying. It was then I realized that I felt…
odd. I felt… light, brighter than air. My veins crackled with electricity.
And my grandfather kept gasping and saying between gasps, ‘You must marry her, it is my dying wish,’ and then we were nodding and agreeing, swearing to do as he asked.
He looked at me one last time… I’d never seen him look so sad.
Then… like a candle extinguishing on its own at the end of the night…
his eyes dimmed and went dark. Entirely empty. ”
Diana stopped mid-step, feeling that lightness again, that cracking, that fear.
“And I felt entirely too full. The crackling electricity along my veins settled into my bones, and I knew something had gone horribly wrong.” She started pacing again.
“Apollo jumped to his feet and he looked about, looked at his hands, wildly looked at his body, shaking his head, muttering that something was wrong. I knew he was right. I felt it too. It wasn’t until the next day that Apollo admitted to his mother what had happened, that he had not received his transcendent inheritance.
“It took some time for my grandfather’s glamours to vanish. Weeks. And my cousin held out hope that the magic was somehow stored in them, that once they dissolved, the magic would move into his blood. It never did.
“One evening, I happened to glance into a looking glass and realized that the glamour my grandfather had made me wear—the face I had been living with all my adult life—was not my own. He had been glamouring me, and it was gone, and I was so startled that the face from the old the glamour appeared again, the illusion sweeping across my body all at once. My veins were on fire. But it passed. The glamour dropped, and I knew it had been me who’d made it. ”
She was not shaking. She’d been able to tell the story with a sort of detached calm she’d never had before. Facing death had odd effects. She exhaled and faced the princess. “I believe it came to me at the moment of my grandfather’s death. But how, I do not know.”
“Fascinating,” the princess said with more enthusiasm than Diana felt.
“If you are telling the truth, and”—she held Diana’s gaze—“I believe you are, then you had nothing to do with it. And that is the big question at court. Did Lady Knightly steal her cousin’s talent.
It is clear to me you did not. But how…? ”
“That I cannot answer. I do not think my grandfather gave it to me purposefully. He seemed panicked, and now that I consider it, he might have been asking me and Apollo to wed in order to keep what had happened in the family.” To keep Diana safe.
“There is much to consider.” She looked to the open door, to the guards standing sentinel on either side of it. “What do you think, Uncle?”
With a stern, unreadable face, the king stepped into the chamber. “Lady Knightly.” She sank into her lowest curtsy as he spoke her name. “It is time.”
Her legs collapsed, and she free-fell into darkness and a silence empty, even, of a beating heart.