Chapter Twenty-Nine
Twenty-Nine
King Richard of House Roet was born lucky, under Jupiter, like every crown prince of Alvion before him.
—THOMAS FEYDON, A HISTORY OF MAGIC IN ALVION
The sky stormed. The dark castle trembled.
Never had I walked the halls so freely as myself. No doors stopped me—I carried Roland’s signet ring. Every fawning courtier knew I was in his bed.
I halted outside the king’s apartments, raising my candle. “The lord chancellor asked me to attend His Majesty.”
The guard’s grip on his blade slackened. How quickly loyalties shifted, how quickly he stepped aside to let me pass.
Wyatt Francis sat at the king’s bedside, nursing an entire jug of mulled wine. He glanced over at me as I set my candle on the table.
“Roland says you may go to supper,” I murmured. “I am to watch over the king.”
“He only sleeps and shits,” complained Wyatt. As if on cue, King Richard rolled over and scowled in his sleep.
I smiled, offering him no teeth. “I’ll manage.”
Wyatt sweated in his heavy coat and furs, his ruddy complexion not helped by the stuffiness of the king’s bedchamber.
He fluffed himself, nodding, relieved to be out of the darkness of the sickroom.
He had no love for Roland, or for me, but if Roland allowed him to stay at court, I sensed he was the kind of man to shut his mouth and be grateful.
He swept out the door. I closed it behind him.
Locked it.
My candle flickered eerily in the gloom. I sat on the edge of the king’s bed until he stirred. He blinked several times before I came into focus.
“Has Roland sent me a gift?” Stretching out his hand, he palmed my breast.
“Yes, I am here for you, Your Majesty. I am a gift.”
A swipe of his tongue across his lip. “I’ve always wondered what a Moonborn would taste like. It is a variety of magician I’ve never had.”
I traced the curve of his cheek.
“Sweet Roland,” the king said. “He always knows when I need cheering.”
“He does indeed. But first, I must tell you a story. Or rather, show you a story.” His palm fell away. I reached over to his bedside table and lit a second candle with the first. Our faces pulsed in the flickering light.
I took a deep breath—I was shaking. The king didn’t notice, but a sharper eye might have. “Four years ago, I was an apprentice to Prospero, here in the palace of Redhall.”
A hiss. “Prospero. Is he here?”
“All I had in the world was my master, the study of magic. But there were two boys in the palace with me, who became my friends. My only friends in the world. Well—” I broke off, eyes falling to my lap.
“They perhaps didn’t see it like that. I wanted to be their friend far more than they wanted to be mine.
But we were thrown together, all lonely in our own way. ”
Three children, laughing. The two boys racing in front of the small, white-haired girl, carrying wooden play swords.
She tripped on a root, tore open her knee, but that didn’t deter her.
She kept running. “One of the boys was Roland, the lord chancellor. The second was your son, Prince Henry. Hal. Your son was better than us. He was not corrupted by hate or fear. Roland and I were jealous creatures back then, but Hal was good.” I took another breath.
“He was good. And I loved him. I loved him far more than I loved myself. He tried to help me see that I was worth something. That was his gift, Your Majesty.”
I did not glance at him to ensure he was listening. This story was not for him—it was for me.
I twisted another memory through his mind.
A boy and a girl, now fully grown, on the steps of a winding staircase, wrapped in each other.
He had pinned her back against the stone, and she was laughing as he pecked her face with kisses.
“Marry me,” a kiss to her nose, “marry me,” to her chin, until he fell to his knees on the step before her, burying his face in her skirt.
The girl glanced around, panicked. “Hal, get up.”
“Marry me, Bianca.” He smiled up at her, entirely calm.
She scraped a hand across his stubble. So tenderly, he closed his eyes. “If I were someone else, I would,” she said.
“No,” he insisted. “As you are.”
“What are you doing to me?” cried the king.
“Hush. These are only my memories, Your Majesty. Haven’t you ever imagined what it is like in someone else’s head besides your own?
Where was I? Yes. You decided Hal would marry the princess of Bastian.
Someone of noble birth, someone who could stand by his side and give him heirs.
I was unsuitable in every way. I would never, ever carry his child in my belly.
” I hung my head, tears clinging to my lashes.
“Still, I loved him. I allowed myself that. For several months, we were happy. As happy as we could be given the differences in the way we thought. When we thought there might be eyes on us, I wore stolen faces so Prospero wouldn’t know. ”
The girl’s face shifting in a mirror, her hair darkening to raven black, the boy leaning down to kiss her bare shoulder.
All the blood had drained from the king’s face, his eyes unfocused as he watched the scenes play inside his head.
“Sometimes I was a maid of honor,” I told him. “Other times I was a servant I’d noticed walking through the palace. The courtiers assumed he was with a different woman each night. All of them were me. But somehow Prospero found out about us, and he manipulated me.”
The girl standing before her father, their luminous eyes clashing. “You are nineteen,” her father said. “So I will not treat you like a child.”
“Yes, not yet twenty-one. I should have years left with you.”
“The Staffords are an old family, and they will care for you. I have taught you all I can.”
And the girl thought, as the tears gathered in her eyes, that to be a woman was to bow in gratitude for all that brought her pain. “No.”
Prospero tore his hands through his hair. “Planets be damned, you will go, Bianca. I have kept you longer than I should have.”
“Why?” Her eyes were shining.
“Because I have loved you. And by doing so this long, I’ve surely subdued you. It is time for you to make your way.”
A nagging thought pressed against her mind. “Have you chosen Roland over me? Did he somehow convince you he was worthier than I was?”
The king endured all of my emotions. He bellowed into the palm I used to quiet him, brushed away tears, clenched his fists.
“Your son—he—” I rubbed the heel of my hand across my eye.
“I broke his heart when I left. And I left because I was ashamed, convinced I was not for him. For Alvion, or for you. I thought I was saving him. I said he should marry the Bastian princess as was agreed, because he so wanted to make you proud.”
Hal, chasing after her in the meadow. “You’re agreeing to this? Swear allegiance to me instead. Be my sorcerer. Live here, with me.”
It was the wrong thing to say. He knew it as soon as he saw her face. His hand dropped from her arm.
Divine my future. Be the instrument I wield.
“What if we will only feel more than we do now?” the girl said. “What if it will only become more painful?”
“I lived with the Stafford family for a season until I realized I had made a terrible mistake,” I continued.
“I’d acted out of fear. I felt it writhing in me, Your Majesty.
This terrible fear, and my own doubt. I wrote Hal a note, begging his forgiveness.
A fortnight later, I ran to the messenger as soon as I heard the hoofbeats over the drawbridge.
I truly thought it was his reply, that I would see him again as I’d dreamt for months and months, but it was not.
It was not. It was a letter from my old master Prospero, telling me that Hal was dead. ”
Slowly the awareness spread through her body.
There was no disbelief—for disbelief, there had to be a thread of hope.
There was no hope. She knew it was true: Hal was gone.
He was gone, and far too many courtiers would smile when they heard.
And so what rose in her was a snapping, snarling need for vengeance.
“I would have done anything to throw myself into a grave instead of him.” A wracking sob, a wrench of my chest toward the bed. “Anything. The story of his death didn’t satisfy me, you see.”
My pale eyes, reddened by tears, cut to the king’s. Understanding played across his features. He scrambled away from me on the bed, grunting from the effort.
“But I could do nothing. I was still bound by my oath to the Staffords. I was not even permitted to attend his funeral. Years passed. I waited patiently, and my patron finally died. I felt as lucky as a Jupiter; I was free to return to court. I heard Your Majesty was throwing a magicians’ tournament to celebrate his new bride.
I knew that was my opportunity. My one chance.
I sought the truth of Hal’s death, as if the knowledge would take away my pain.
But nothing can take away my pain, Your Majesty.
I see that now. I see I must live with it forever.
Because on a clear morning, three years ago, you inducted Hal into your council to rule beside you. ”
The king had begun to make the frantic sounds of a dying animal.
“You told him to say the oath in a holy place, alone. I thought, once I learned this, that a privy councilor had used the opportunity to assassinate him in the quiet of the forest. Prospero, perhaps. I looked right past you, Your Majesty. For why would you kill your own son? Your legacy? The very thing you coveted above all else? You were never in my sight. Not remotely. But you changed the words of the oath. I know because he showed me his memory. He said, ‘give my future.’ The oath is ‘offer my future.’ Such a little slip. Barely noticeable. One word. But now I know, because I’ve spoken to a Mercury, how meaningful that one word is.
To give versus to offer. An offer denotes a choice.
You couldn’t anticipate, of course, that I would speak to Hal’s ghost and see the very moment he died.
That I alone would know you gave your own son a blood cipher. ”
The king, shaking his head frantically, had begun choking on his own phlegm.
I grasped his mind. He calmed instantly, sinking into his pillow. “Tell me why, Your Majesty. Help me to understand. They say you went mad with grief when Hal died. But you were mad with guilt, weren’t you? Mad because Prospero, who promised you a long life, had failed you. You may speak now.”
He gaped like a fish.
“I said, speak.” I whipped my knife from my sleeve and held it to his throat.
Death was so close. Now he knew it. He saw it against him, a quick flick of my wrist. “Henry was no son of mine.”
That confused me. “He looked just like you.”
“No,” he spat. “Not a bastard, you bitch. He betrayed me. She said so. As sons went, Henry was soft besides. He was good and kind, as you say. But Prospero insisted it is better to not rely on sons. Sons can die. So many of my sons have died. He said I would live for years, and he was close to uncovering the secret.”
“She? Who is she?”
He whispered the name. I shook as I exhaled, but my knife remained steady against him. “What did she say Hal did?”
His eyes flashed as he told me. And I knew he was truly psychotic, mad, insane, once I understood the gravity of what he’d done.
“I see the guilt in you,” I whispered. “The regret. The self-hatred. That’s why you have been desperate to recover what you so easily threw away. Prospero failed. You are not immortal. You are not young, or beautiful, or good—all of the things your son was.”
I leaned the knife into his throat. But it would not cut. The air shimmered with the oath, the quicksilver words falling before my eyes. I was sworn to protect the king, had sealed my promise with my own lips.
“Aha,” he said, laughing as he convulsed. He tumbled off the bed, his black tongue flickering in his mouth as he cackled.
So I knelt before him and slid the knife into his hands. My grip on his mind tightened as I led him down the endless corridor of his guilt, opening the doors to his own evil.
I showed him how he reveled in using people.
The gleam in his body when they hurt. The numbness when they cried.
The inability to question how they felt.
I guided his ghosts to him. Gertrude, who pleaded with him for her life, grasping at his heels as he dragged her down a hallway.
Eleanor, flinching from his slap, after she told him another child had been lost. Alice Seton, Alice most of all, who haunted him more than his own son did.
I saw that when her head hit the hay, he ordered it sent to his rooms, and he stared into her dead eyes for hours, stroking her dark hair.
Now the king was wrecked on the floor, clutching the knife to his chest.
When he drove it into himself, I looked away. I closed my eyes.
The blood spouted across my face. His body twitched, then stilled. I clenched and unclenched my fists, then curled up beside him on the floor and wept.
I lay in the pool of the king’s blood, heart pounding, trembling with the weight of what I had done. He was always meant to die today. He was always meant to die because of me.
The bells rang for high noon and the beginning of Roland’s council meeting. He would wonder where I was.
I thought of what to do. Paced and paced. Washed the blood from my hands and face in the basin.
It may have been minutes or hours later when the stone wall behind the king’s body disappeared. The candles snuffed out, the tapestries billowed.
A Saturn doorway had opened.