Chapter Five #2
Eyes shut, lying limp on the ground, I was hoisted into a man’s arms and cradled close to his chest, tucked beneath a cleft chin. Something stirred, a warmth in my stomach when the man pulled me close, his fingers digging into my waist.
“Well, I’ll just have this one, Jupiter,” the man said, and I longed to stopper the warmth before it spread, because it was Roland’s voice, Roland’s body I was pressed against.
As strings fluttered for a basse dance, I squirmed, silently screaming, I want to be set down. I want Roland to set me down. I desire to be set on my own two feet right now, this instant.
Chuckling to himself, he obliged me. With mounting dread, I realized we were already standing in the middle of the floor, and we’d be partnered together by proximity.
When the dance began, he pranced forward, lifting me up so we were eye to eye, trawling my body against his chest. He set me down again, we skipped to the right, we spun.
He hoisted me up again by the waist. Over his shoulder, I saw the queen, dancing with her brother, eyeing us as if she’d cast a net and drag me away from Roland. “Cecily is watching you,” I said. “I think she’d like to kill me.”
I was set on the ground, and again we skipped. “She’d like to do something rather different to me,” Roland whispered, his dawn eyes shining.
I wrenched my hand from his. His smirk vanished. “The Guildfords are meeting in their chapel tonight. Is that what you wanted me to find out?”
“I’ve never had ears inside of that room. They don’t let Joan inside, but I’m sure they wouldn’t notice a mouse.” I spun beneath his arm and was tugged to his chest. He breathed, “I’d like to know every little thing they say.”
“I’m not your ears,” I protested. “I’m there to learn about Hal.”
“You can do both, can’t you?”
“My interests take priority over yours.”
The music faded. Fulke Roet insisted on playing a composition he had written himself. By the tittering of the court, this was a common occurrence. Roland lifted a hand and motioned for him to play on. The gentle pluck of Fulke’s lute meant a slower dance. A pavane.
Roland took my hand in his again, leading me down the length of the floor. “You forget you are here at my pleasure,” he said from the corner of his mouth.
As I opened mine to protest, there was a piercing scream.
Our heads whipped around.
Beside the banquet table, a body lay at a strange angle. Blood frothing from his lips, flopping up and down like a fish struggling to breathe. His golden eyes had rolled back into his head. Just this morning, he’d laughed beside me at that very table.
“No,” I gasped. Though I was in disguise as Joan, I still ran to him, knelt beside him, and pressed my cheek to his heart.
It was beating sluggishly, so terribly slow, and his mind was already furling in on itself, closing up.
All I could feel was his anguish, his fear.
As I gripped his hand tighter, his rings dug into my palm.
Calm yourself. There is nothing to be afraid of.
He smiled up at me serenely, then his heart shuddered, and the sand of his life slipped through my fingers.
I fell back from his body. The blood on Ambrose’s doublet trembled with reflected moonlight.
The orbs of his eyes, once so vibrant, now emptied of light.
The queen and her ladies clutched each other.
Wyatt Francis declared his masque ruined.
And Fulke Roet stood at the fringes of the gathering crowd, asking what happened, saying how terrible, is that a magician on the floor?
Yet his was the only mind not stumbling about in shock.
Ambrose’s body was rolled beneath the banquet table. The blood was soaked up by Roland’s magic, and dancing resumed. The court was too accustomed to gore, too hardened to death, to end the festivities early.
While I lay in my bed hours later, watching the Moon carve up the darkness in my room, my hands shook. The terror, at least, was proof I was not yet cold-blooded.
Soon the Guildfords would be plotting. Listen close and the halls echo with Guildford prattle, Roland had said.
I slipped out from my sheets, the air crisp, my thin chemise a poor guard against the chill.
I needed to be small, quick. I transformed into a mouse as Roland had suggested, despite the nickname I so despised, and scurried into the hall.
The Saturn who spelled the doors hadn’t considered mice—or Moonborn magicians.
On the west side of the palace, the queen’s apartments were quiet, though two guards now stood outside, toying with their swords.
I slipped around their boots, through a gallery, and into the nave of the queen’s private chapel.
The Guildfords sat in the pews while the patriarch, Charles, stood at the stone altar. There was a fist-sized red marble resting beside the chalice of wine; they had been praying to their patron planet Mars.
One figure was hooded. I climbed up onto the ledge of a stained glass window and peered at her in the scattered light. When I finally saw the gleam of the stranger’s eyes, I shrank lower. Darted back into shadow.
This was worse than I ever could have imagined.
“—we’ll put another Guildford girl before him,” Charles was saying. His dark, neatly trimmed beard was perfectly triangular, his fingers stacked with rubies and garnets. His palm was sliced open shallowly for Mars prayer and etched with older scars. “A third chance.”
Tom raised his head from its perch on his fist. “You would usurp your own daughter?”
Charles shrugged. “I have nieces. My brother has other daughters.” He nodded to a grim-faced, stoic man across the room, the late queen Eleanor’s father. “Young ones.”
“Roland won’t have it,” Tom said. “He chose Cecily. His success hinges on her.”
How different he was now to the courtier composing sweet sonnets on the riverbank. He slapped a palm against the pew in frustration.
I scrambled higher onto another ledge. From this vantage, the men seemed less imposing. But the sweep of their entire lifetimes, and their father’s lifetimes, was to maneuver their daughters into this position.
“Father,” Tom spat. “Punish her. Cecily needs to be reminded she has a duty to us, to her family.”
“Hush, Tom,” his uncle said, raising a hand.
“Soon she’ll stop visiting the king’s bed altogether!”
“Where is she now? Wasn’t she summoned?”
Tom scoffed. “I told Joan Rockford to bring her here, but the girl has the brain of a squirrel. I should have spoken to Cecily myself.”
The cloaked figure coughed and flicked back her hood. She had shaved her head, bald to the scalp, but I still knew what she was. Her eyes were hellfire, globes of fury. She’d be a master of pain, a wielder of discord. A Marsborn.
I had only heard rumors of one or two living magicians ruled by Mars, both men, and neither were in Alvion. The Guildfords had successfully kept her a secret until now.
“The boy is right,” the Marsborn said. Her voice was a serrated rasp. “Cecily is besotted with the lord chancellor. I could set her back on the king. I could rip through whatever bond Roland has made with her. All will be lost if she is not with child soon, and he cannot help us with that matter.”
Because Roland, like every magician, was barren.
“Shut up,” said Tom. The woman flinched. “Do you know anything? The suggestion alone is enough to hang us. No one enters any bed in this court without Roland knowing. His magic informs him. Cecily must have the king’s child, and the king must not have any reason to doubt it.”
Charles rubbed his wiry chin. “What of the Moonborn girl? Is she Roland’s?”
The woman shifted in her seat, those crimson eyes flashing with distaste. “She was raised here, at court, and fostered alongside him and the prince. My spies tell me she was sent away before the prince’s death.”
“But does Roland trust her?” This question Charles directed to Tom, who shook his head.
My tail twitched.
Charles clasped his hands in front of himself, fingers a constellation of jewels.
“Still, we must assume she’s Roland’s spy.
Or perhaps, if we’re lucky, she will strike against him before we do.
” His stare swept around the room. “There are more magicians here than ever before. Your minds are not your own.”
The woman’s smile was wry. “Indeed.”
“Roet was too impatient tonight,” said Tom. “Ambrose should not have died.”
“Ah, but did your father ever tell you stories of Sunborn sorcery?” said his uncle.
Tom shook his head.
“Look into my eyes.” He took his nephew’s shoulders in his hands.
“That man Ambrose could peer into your very soul. Your essence. He could see that you became a thief because when you were seven years old, you found you could steal with impunity, and at my house too, mind you, and my silver. You found you liked the thrill and taste of it so much you never stopped. Or if you are Fulke, that you hated your uncle, the king, with a startling depth, and every moment of your life you worked to undermine him. Every breath you took you wanted to steal from his lungs. So, you see, Ambrose was too dangerous to reside at court. Fulke was exposed.”
“Yet, so in the open—”
“To be a magician is to be a threat,” said Charles. “Ambrose shouldn’t have come here.”
No. And I shouldn’t have, either. I risked too much, and they had not so much as mentioned Hal.
I had arrived too late, or on the wrong night.
I had never felt so precarious as I did on that ledge, listening to the Guildfords wave away a magician’s murder, as they nodded and agreed that Ambrose’s death was an unfortunate tragedy. But no matter. No matter at all.
The birds began to commune and chime. The Guildfords dispersed into the hall. The Marsborn woman was last, and as I watched her slip her cloak over her head, I wondered if the midwife shuddered too when she was born with such eyes.
They would pierce me that very afternoon in the tournament. I knew she would try her very best to kill me.