Chapter 34
Thirty-Four
How could I rule this land when I could not even govern myself?
I would because I must. ’Twas compassion had made me a killer, and the mortal love I left behind still haunted my dreams.
But I alone remained of Queen Una’s line, and there was no one else who could take my place. The land had been without a ruler for years and, in the words of my chatelaine, it did not thrive.
In the morning it rained, pattered softly against the palace walls. The carnage of roses I dreamt up was quickly consumed by the carpet, and new blooms draped from the bedposts and canopy overhead.
Faery takes from death and returns beauty and life.
Mother Mab forfend that Faery should ever starve.
The rain pounded harder, and distant rumbles spoke of storms approaching. I wrapped my arms around myself and willed it all to go away. Willed myself to vanish, too, into Bess in Eamon’s household, forgotten by priest and family alike. She was weak, but at least she had her powers under control.
My chatelaine and I broke our fast together in my chambers, dining on bannocks sweet with honey and melting butter, jewellike fruits, and rich nectar. I bit into a plum dark as shadow, and the sweet juice ran down my chin.
“What a repast you serve,” I told Lileas. “I may never resort to pottage again.”
I will never have to resort to pottage again. That was enough to put a smile on my face.
At my feet a circle of red campion flowers sprung up, curling around my ankles like an affectionate cat.
Lileas smiled and dabbed my lips with a silken napkin. “The land provides its bounty. It is—we all are—grateful you are here.”
Truly? My brow lifted. I brought the storm. Took the life of a fae without thinking. Branches blew in the wind outside, scraping against the palace walls.
Yet Lileas could not have spoken of Faery’s gratitude were it not true.
I took the napkin from her and wiped my mouth, gazing out the leafy window. Its pale green rendered the twilight sky a deep aqua, as if we swam together in some enchanted sea. Under Lileas’s gentle ministrations, my inner passions quieted, and the storm clouds disappeared.
“Truly, I could sit here all day.” I helped myself to another piece of fruit. It tasted of sweetness and content.
“You it is who controls the day.” Lileas smiled and nibbled upon berries that turned her soft lips red as a rose.
“If you do not wish the hours to pass, they need not.” She leaned back, and her hair spilled upon the bedclothes.
Her green gown slid off her shoulders and became diaphanous; she licked away the juice and an invitation shone in her eyes.
I stared at her, sorely tempted. Why risk leaving the palace? Why venture anywhere that might raise the storm inside me, bring forth the lightning I was struggling to contain? In here was safety, calm, and everything else I might need.
Fruit ripened on my bedposts, and a golden pear landed in my hand.
I sighed deeply, and one of the red campions sagged upon its stem. “There is business for me to attend to.”
Lileas straightened, and her gown crept back up her shoulders, growing thicker and plainer.
Her yellow hair braided itself into a practical tail.
She tugged a silk napkin over the rest of the bannocks and concealed the fruit beneath a silver dome.
“I had thought you might choose your council today, Your Majesty. Will you be keeping your mother’s advisors and staff? ”
Can I trust my mother’s advisors and staff? Someone, possibly one of them, may have done my mother harm. “Were you among them?”
Lileas shook her head. “’Twas more than eighteen years ago, and I had not yet taken up my palace service. But Lyel served as Queen Una’s page.”
I grinned, imagining the handsome knight as a youth in bright livery, with a jaunty bonnet on his silky hair. “Well, I shall keep you both among my advisors, if you so desire.”
Lileas turned to me as a heliotrope towards the sun, relief spreading across her face. “I do desire it.”
“You will have to help me with the others. I have no clue whom I can trust and whom I cannot.”
Amadan being chief among the latter, I supposed.
Another campion withered and lost its head. I stamped it down before Lileas could notice.
“Some of Una’s council have since retired, and some, no doubt, will not suit your personality.” Here she shifted in her seat, staring down at her entwined fingers. “You may also find some of them predisposed against you, I’m afraid, those who faulted the queen for bearing a child to a mortal.”
I frowned. “But surely that was the queen’s business, and not theirs.” I recalled the handsome Aos Sith who had asked me to dance, how complicated the matter had been. Was the queen permitted any business that was all her own?
Lileas shrugged. “’Twould have been different had she already borne an heir.
Half-mortal offspring can be useful, often better able to stomach iron and the rountree than true bloods, and frequently underestimated.
But for one’s only child to be half-mortal, permitting it to take the throne .
. .” Her pretty cheeks went rosy with shame, and her gaze dropped to the ground.
“Not my sentiments, Your Majesty, of course.”
I patted her hand. “I take no offense. Your candor is worth more to me than petty reassurances would have been.”
She gave me a wan smile, then her brows dipped into a frown. “I have heard nothing ill of the others, although . . .” She trailed off.
The wind battered against the walls. The leaf windows grew thicker, less translucent in response.
“Although?” I prompted.
“There was some question surrounding the queen’s death. Her palm was marked with a puncture wound, and an iron nail was found under her bed. Only someone very close to the queen could have done it. Most suspected the mortal midwife, but . . .”
A tree limb slammed across the window, tearing even the thickened leaf with its clawlike branches.
My pulse raced and my mouth went dry. “But . . . ?” I could not credit that Mairi Grieve would ever do such a thing; it was inconceivable for her to harm a patient so.
Lileas shook her head. “I do not believe she did. Her own child was held as hostage for her good behavior. It makes no sense.”
Bess Grieve. Mairi would not have risked Bess by doing harm to the queen, not the Mairi I knew. And if she had wished to kill Queen Una, she knew enough of herbs and plants she could have done so far more subtly, without pointing the blame in her direction.
Mairi lost her child anyway. Too much of mortal guilt remained inside me at the thought, and there was still that abrasive sense of wrongness from Bess and me being too close to the same place.
I recalled the moment Mairi had taken ill. I saw a long hand with slender fingers reach for the side of her face. I watched her eye slacken, and those fingers coax the corner of her mouth to droop.
No mortal illness had struck her. Someone among the fae had taken Mairi’s life.
Heaviness filled the room, like smoke from a poorly vented fire. My throat felt thick, constricted by the rose-shaped torc I wore; my vision blurred.
“Your Majesty looks troubled. If there were aught I might do to comfort ye . . . Wait! There is.”
I blinked in confusion, and my vision began to clear.
Lileas walked over to the bedroom wall or at least what I had taken for one. At her touch, it parted like the slow unfurling of blossoms with the warmth of spring, opening onto a small landing, where stood a basin of marble upon a slender stand.
“I found it when we were readying your chamber,” she explained. “Queen Una’s scrying pool, where she came to see what visions she might upon the water’s surface.”
Like the well at Carterhaugh. I stepped out onto the landing.
Ferns curled all around us, and the scent of gorse and bluebells reminded me of the forest near my mortal home.
My attention, however, was on the surface of the water.
It shone clear now, reflecting nothing but the sky overhead, thick with clouds.
I looked to Lileas. “Is there some trick to it?”
She examined me for a moment, then brushed the hair back from my brow. All at once she pulled a strand out, causing me to cry out in alarm, then clutch my scalp.
The air crackled, like a cat’s fur in the night.
“Forgive me, Your Majesty, but the pain does increase the effect.” And she dropped the hair into the scrying pool.
I watched it float, blood red and curved like a serpent, then sink to the bottom of the pool.
The water went dark and cloudy at first, then revealed the figure of a woman, a peasant from the state of her clothing, many layers to cover up worn edges and holes.
A wimple covered her head and at first concealed her face.
In her arms she held a small bundle, a babe in swaddling clothes.
She looked around, eyes darting about.
The woman was Mairi Grieve.
And the child—it was me.
Mairi’s face was drawn and worried. “’Tis none but I can do this for you,” she said. “An’ I hope I am doing ye right. The things I saw do not bode well for ye, and yer mother did command me to keep ye safe.”
Commanded her to keep me safe. Warmth blossomed in my breast for both my mothers at the thought.
The infant—I!—shook her tiny fist. A curl like a blood-dipped rose sat upon her forehead.
Mairi cooed and held me close. “I would protect ye all I can, for yer mother’s sake and yer own.
” Her eyes darkened; traces of green were smeared around them, like some sort of ointment or salve.
“They were all so ready to believe ye dead. And who was I, a mere mortal, to contradict ’em?
” She smiled with such mischief and trickery, it might have belonged to one of the fair folk themselves.
“But for the mortal blood inside of ye, it might have been true.”
Iron is poison to the fae, even to be in its presence had ever made me ill. But ill is not the same as dead; as a cunning woman I knew that well.
Behind Mairi, I saw a shadow, hunched over and so stooped it barely retained even the fae semblance of human form.
My eyes would not focus upon it, but I had the impression of something hideous, misshapen, glistening like wet blood beneath darkened skies.
And all at once, its long arm shot out towards the infant, and clawed fingers raked against Mairi’s clothing and hair.
The water grew cloudy and I let out a cry of dismay.
Rumbles in the distance, or was it all in my head?
Lileas put her hands on my shoulders. “I am sorry if the vision upset you, Your Majesty.”
“Did you not see it?”
She shook her head. “These visions are not for a mere chatelaine like me. They are for the queen alone.”
Then the vision was further proof of my legitimacy as Una’s heir. “’Twas what I needed to be shown.” Because even now, though she had passed, I trusted Mairi Grieve as I had trusted no one else. She had revealed to me what I very much needed to know before choosing my council and personal staff.
Someone close to Queen Una had wanted her dead.