The catamounts pushed their faces through her hair—they drank in its color. As she continued to stroke them, one batted at her hair with a paw. When she straightened up and tried to move forward, the mountain lions impeded her progress; one lay down right in front of her and rolled over showing its belly, while another elaborately stretched out its front shoulders and a third wrapped its two front legs around her side. Stahlia heard her laughing at the animals’ antics.
At that moment, the bells started to chime. First the bell in the palace church where Percia was married yesterday, then a bell farther away, then all the bells around the city, joining in joyous chimes.
Stahlia’s hands flew to her cheeks, but instead of being shocked into silence, words poured out of her.
“Birdie is the Nargis heir! Birdie is the princella. Oh, Waters! I made the princella clean our chicken coop!” she cried to Tilim and the sergeant.
Stahlia absorbed the scene: the tan cats fawning over the newly revealed princella, the beams of light refracted through the stained glass ceiling winking on the floor, and the tumbled blue hair lying against the white shirt. The cascading water on the dais, flowing first in a waterfall and then in a solid curtain. In the midst of her astonishment, she tried to memorize every last detail.
“Oh, Nargis! What a tapestry this scene would make! ‘Cerúlia and the Catamounts.’ This will be my greatest creation.”
5
A close-by church bell broke the early morning silence with a single chime. Ding. Then again. Dong.
“Go!” shouted Gunnit, as bells throughout the city picked up the reverberation, so that the first bell spread from one church to another, throughout all of Cascada. DING, DONG; ding, dong; ding, dong; DING, DONG.
Captain Yanath and Shield Pontole rammed their shoulders into the small wooden door, breaking the latch in their first attempt. The corps dashed through the small entry, Gunnit bringing up the rear. They sprinted across the large ballroom, where the leftover disarray from yesterday’s party flashed at them from the mirrored walls, heading for the nearby Throne Room. Ahead, the boy heard shouts and the clash of swords.
A furious combat between palace guards and the New Queen’s Shield commenced both around the exterior of the Throne Room and inside the hall. Gunnit saw Pontole struggling to overmaster a burly soldier, their swords crossed in a stalemate between their chests. Pontole broke the standoff by butting his enemy in the forehead. A mariner swung a mace that shattered the sword arm of another guard. Branwise already had a bloody nose, but he hacked the legs out from under a foe. In moments the Throne Room guards all lay dead, injured, or on their knees with their hands in the air, taken by surprise by the fierce attack. Nonetheless, reinforcements—many in various states of dress—poured in by the score, brandishing their weapons as they came.
Nana had told Gunnit that the palace boasted more than two hundred guards; the troop he had just ushered in hadn’t a prayer of defeating them by force. They needed reinforcements.
Gunnit slipped into the Throne Room through an open side doorway. Around the room, blue capes crossed swords with white or red sashes; he was surrounded by the clash of metal on metal, grunts of effort, and shouts. A sword that had been knocked loose from someone’s hand flew through the air, and Gunnit ducked. He ran after it, picked it up, and, steeling himself, cut the ankle tendon of a nearby palace soldier from behind.
In the midst of all this mayhem, Gunnit spied Water Bearer. She held a kitchen knife at the throat of a soldier who stood very still in her grasp. And Nana was not the only person using an improvised weapon: Gunnit saw footmen brandishing pokers and maids swinging brooms. The palace workers had joined the fray. Were they the needed reinforcements? The fight was so chaotic, he could not tell which side a given servant favored.
Called by the bells, scores of people of all stations continued to scurry into the Throne Room, including administrators and gentry. The gentry appeared mostly in their nightshifts, thronging above on the first and second balconies. A few soldiers appeared on the balconies too, including archers who took advantage of their strategic height to skewer the New Queen’s Shield whenever the surging combat gave them a clean shot.
Heedless of all the chaos around her, Cerúlia walked to the central dais, flanked by four mountain lions. She climbed up the six steps.
At that moment, Lord Matwyck, half-dressed, burst through a door onto the second balcony. “Shoot her! Shoot her!” he shouted. “A fortune to the man who shoots her!” An archer near Matwyck aimed at Cerúlia, but his arrow flew wide. The lady seamaster with the New Queen’s Shield raised her own bow, and an arrow blossomed from the enemy archer’s stomach.
Gunnit saw Lord Matwyck wrestle the bow from the dying man.
“Shields!” Gunnit yelled, pointing at the danger.
The instant Matwyck turned back to face the floor, Pontole let fly; his arrow caught the lord in the meat of his thigh. The Lord Regent bellowed and staggered from the blow, but held himself upright by grabbing on to the gallery’s banister.
There, thought Gunnit, that was why the Spirits sent me here.
Cerúlia now stood next to the Fountain and the Basin.
She raised her hands over her head and shouted, “Cease!” When the fighting continued, the four catamounts roared as one, a horrific noise that echoed off the walls.
The fighting paused, midstrike. Two or three hundred people stared at the small figure on the dais.
“Though I have gone by many names, I herewith claim back my true identity,” she called out in a ringing voice, stretching her arms wide. “I am Cerúlia, the daughter of the late, brave Queen Cressa the Enchanter and the heroic Lord Ambrice.
“I. Am. Your. Queen.”
A chorus of shouts rang out, but Gunnit couldn’t tell if the speakers were joyful or dismayed.
“I order all of you to cease this fighting.”
An under-footman yelled, “But yesterday, you was a village wench from Wyndton.”
Another voice yelled, full of reproach, “If you’re the queen, where have you been all these years?”
“Yes,” shouted a man Gunnit recognized as Matwyck’s secretary. “No one should accept her just at her word. And even if … Well, Cerúlia deserted us, while the Lord Regent kept us safe.”
“Listen,” Cerúlia commanded. “After Matwyck the Usurper tried to assassinate my mother, I kept in the shadows, hiding from him and his powerful allies. I grew to maturity in Androvale. As Fate would have it, I was sheltered and protected by the very Wyndton family this palace feted yesterday.
“I was forced to flee the Eastern Duchies when the Lord Regent’s hunt for me came too close.”
She turned to address Matwyck directly and pointed up at him on the balcony. “Your relentless pursuit caused the death of my foster father, Wilim, the peacekeeper of Wyndton, who—once my mother’s Enchantment weakened—sacrificed his own life rather than betray my secrets. This is just one of the multiple crimes I will demand you answer for.
“Since I left the realm,” Cerúlia continued, her voice growing stronger with each sentence, “I have pursued retribution. I traveled far and fought Weirandale’s enemies.
“I will hide no longer. I have come to take my rightful place on the Nargis Throne.”