I stiffened. “De Lena?”
“Do you know Toris de Lena?”
“He’s a Tribunal magistrate. I can hardly picture him welcoming Achlevan ships to his port unless it somehow furthered his ambitions.”
“Perhaps his ambitions include gaining influence in Achleva.”
A dreadful thought. I catalogued the information: Toris de Lena, magistrate, bearer of the Founder’s blood . . . making secret trade deals with Achleva? “Well, if you find out anything, let me know,” I said. Toris’s voice was ringing in my ears. Mabel Lawrence Doyle, you have been tried and found guilty by fair Tribunal for the distribution of illicit texts and have been condemned to die . . .
Maybe adding a bit of tarnish to Toris’s sterling reputation would be my parting gift to Renalt. If the truth was bad enough, it could cost him a place at the magistrates’ table. Or, even better—it could gain him one in a cell. Or on the gallows stand.
Maybe this time Toris had put the rope around his own neck.
4
When I got back to my room following my time “in worship,” my maid, Emilie, was already there, sweeping up what looked like bits of broken glass. She had a round, rosy face and was probably a year or two younger than me, though she was just as tall. She’d been working for me for several weeks now, which was quite a long while, considering that I went through waiting maids like the dancing princesses of my childhood storybooks went through shoes: they rarely lasted more than a day. Occasionally I’d come across my former maids elsewhere on the grounds, mucking out horse stalls or emptying chamber pots or removing entrails from chickens in the kitchen yard. I’d march past them, head always high until I was out of sight. Sometimes I’d cry, knowing they preferred chamber pots and entrails to me, but only if no one was around to see.
“Begging your pardon, m’lady,” she said, hurrying to finish sweeping glass bits off the floor. “I’d hoped to have this done before you returned.”
“Let me see,” I said.
Reluctantly, she held out her dustpan. Amongst the pieces of glass was a large rock painted with ward symbols. It bore a single word: Malefica. An old word, most often interpreted nowadays to mean witch. I’d seen it a couple of times in the torn remnants of spell-book pages, or scribbled in archaic notes in the margins. In all those sparse mentions, however, it never felt like a description. It always seemed more like a name.
Apparently, someone thought the moniker suited me.
“I’ve already arranged to have the window replaced, m’lady,” Emilie said. “I’d hoped to at least have this cleaned up before you got back in, so you wouldn’t have to . . .”
“So I wouldn’t have to see it?” I frowned. “Have there been other things you’ve fixed up before I got to see them?”
She looked at me shyly from under her lashes.
“There have been?”
“I didn’t want to frighten you, m’lady. Just the work of pranksters and superstitious villagers. Nothing to be worried about, I’m sure.”
Emilie scurried to put the stone and shattered pieces of glass out of sight while I situated myself by the broken pane. My private inner room had a good view of the barracks and the stables, so I spotted Kellan easily. He was leading Falada, an exquisite white mare, across the yard to the round pen. I observed them wistfully. The Greythorne family and their horses were renowned, and Falada was a rare Empyrean, perfectly tempered and trained. Kellan had raised her himself from the time she was a foal. Watching them together, I found it easy to believe that the divine Empyrea would have taken such a form when she came to earth, as we’d been taught. There could be no nobler, more beautiful creature in existence.
I should have been glad that Kellan had a moment to get out and ride her before returning to duty for the banquet that evening, but I was jealous instead. As if sensing the brush of my thoughts against him, Kellan turned his head up to my open window, and, seeing me, he gave a salute. Then he mounted Falada and reined her away.
“What would you like to wear to the banquet, m’lady?” Emilie opened the wardrobe wide to let me inspect my options.
“You choose,” I told her, as I always told my waiting maids. The girl surveyed the dresses with enthusiasm, sweeping a gown of green satin from its hook after less than a minute of looking. I was surprised, seeing her holding it out for my approval, that it wasn’t black. The other waiting maids never chose anything but black.
“You don’t like it?”
“No, no, I do . . . just . . . what made you pick that one?”
“Emerald was my mother’s favorite stone,” she said, lifting my day dress over my head before helping me step into the gown. “She had an emerald ring that looked just this same color of green. She always told me that it’s a stone of wisdom and foresight.”
“Does your mother know very much about stones?”
The girl was threading the laces of the bodice. “She did, yes, m’lady, before she died. She liked those twisty knot braids, too. She taught me a few fancy ones.” She lifted a section of my hair. “I think it would look nice. Would you like me to try?”
I shrugged. “Why not? Your mother . . . she must have been young. Was it the fever epidemic last winter?”
“Not fever, no. She was burned for a witch four years ago.”
I felt the coil at my center tighten. Emilie couldn’t be more than fifteen or sixteen—which meant she was only eleven or twelve at the time of the execution. Motherless and alone at that bewildering brink between girlhood and womanhood . . . I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for her. And Emilie’s mother was just another of the countless number of men and women killed for the practice of witchcraft. Innocent or guilty of the charges, it didn’t matter; I raged at the unfairness, the vicious pointlessness of the loss. “I’m sorry,” I murmured, my voice tinny. I didn’t know what else to say.
“As am I.” She stepped away to give me a look-over. “She was a good person,” she said, quieter. “What they call witches—most of them are just regular people, nice people. The evil ones are those that hunt and hurt others, witch or no.”
I snagged her hand and held it. “Thank you,” I said. It was a brave thing to say aloud, even to someone like me.
* * *
Most days I took my meals alone in my rooms. Not because I had any particular aversion to eating with my brother and mother and the rest of the court but because of the dead man at the bottom of the staircase that led to the banquet hall.
The stairs were steep, and his fall down them must have been terrible, because his neck was bent at such a deeply unsettling angle. Shades like him were often pinned in place by the memory of their traumatic death, burdened with a compulsive need to share it, even reexperience it . . . And if he touched me, I’d be forced to watch it happen again. Often the spirits’ memories were so vivid that I could not distinguish them from reality. I relived them as if they were happening to me in real time. And right now I could not afford to collapse, blind and screaming, in such a public place; I’d be dragged away to the gallows before I ever hit the floor.