“What did he look like, the prince?”
The king frowned. It was the queen who drew a locket out of the bodice of her gown, lifted its chain over her head and passed it to Moon. It held, not the costly miniature she’d expected, but a sketch in soft pencil, swiftly done. It was the first informal thing she could recall seeing in the palace.
“He wouldn’t sit still to be painted,” the queen said wistfully. “One of his friends likes to draw. He gave me that after … after my son was gone.
He had been reading, perhaps, when his friend snatched that quiet moment to catch his likeness. The high forehead was propped on a long-fingered hand; the eyes were directed downward, and the eyelids hid them. The nose was straight, and the mouth was long and grave. The hair was barely suggested; light or dark, it fell unruly around the supporting hand. Even setting aside the kindly eye of friendship that had informed the pencil, Moon gave the village girls leave to be silly over this one. She closed the locket and gave it back.
“You can’t know what’s happened to him. How can you let him go, without knowing?”
“There are many things in the world I will never know,” the king said sharply.
“I met a man at the gate who still mourns the prince. He called him the heart of the land. Nothing can live without its heart.”
The queen drew a breath and turned her face to her plate, but said nothing.
“Enough,” said the king. “If you must search, then you must. But I’ll have peace at my table. Here, child, will you pledge it with me?”
Over Moon’s right hand, lying on the white cloth, he laid his own, and held his wine cup out to her.
She sat frozen, staring at the chased silver and her own reflection in it. Then she raised her eyes to his and said, “No.”
There was a shattering quiet in the hall.
“You will not drink?”
“I will not … pledge you peace. There isn’t any here, however much anyone may try to hide it. I’m sorry.” That, she knew when she’d said it, was true. “Excuse me,” she added, and drew her hand out from under the king’s, which was large, but soft. “I’m going to bed. I mean to leave early tomorrow.”
She rose and walked back down the length of the room, lapped in a different kind of silence.
A servant found her in the corridor and led her to her chamber. There she found her old clothes clean and dry and folded, the fire tended, the bed turned down. The red-faced woman wasn’t there. She took off her finery, laid it out smooth on a chair, and put her old nightgown on. Then she went to the glass to unpin and brush her hair.
The pin was in her hand, and she was reaching to set it down, when she saw what it was. A little leaping frog. But now it was gold.
It was hers. The kicking legs and goggle eyes, every irregularity—it was her pin. She dashed to the door and flung it open. “Hello?” she called. “Oh, bother!” She stepped back into the room and searched, and finally found the bell pull disguised as a bit of tapestry.
After a few minutes, a girl with black hair and bright eyes came to the door. “Yes, ma’am?”
“The woman who helped me, who drew my bath and brought me clothes. Is she still here?”
The girl looked distressed. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t know who waited on you. What did she look like?”
“About my height. With a red face and wild, wispy hair.”
The girl stared, and said, “Ma’am—are you sure? That doesn’t sound like anyone here.”
Moon dropped heavily into the nearest chair. “Why am I not surprised? Thank you very much. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
The girl nodded and closed the door behind her. Moon put out the candles, climbed into bed, and lay awake for an uncommonly long time.
In a gray, wet dawn, she dressed and shouldered her pack and by the simple expedient of going down every time she came to a staircase, found a door that led outside. It was a little postern, opening on a kitchen garden and a wash yard fenced in stone. At the side of the path, a man squatted by a wooden hand cart, mending a wheel.
“Here, missy!” he called out, his voice like a spade thrust into gravel. “Hold this axle up, won’t you?”
Moon sighed. She wanted to go. She wanted to be moving, because moving would be almost like getting something done. And she wanted to be out of this beautiful place that had lost its heart. She stepped over a spreading clump of rhubarb, knelt, and hoisted the axle.
Whatever had damaged the wheel had made the axle split; the long splinter of wood bit into Moon’s right hand. She cried out and snatched that hand away. Blood ran out of the cut on her palm and fell among the rhubarb stems, a few drops. Then it ceased to flow.
Moon looked up, frightened, to the man with the wheel.
It was the man from the hay wagon, white-haired, his eyes as green and gray as sage. He had a ruddy, somber face. Red-faced, like the woman who’d—
The woman who’d helped her last night had been the one from the hay cart. Why hadn’t she seen it? But she remembered it now, and the woman’s green eyes, and even a fragment of hay caught in the wild hair. Moon sprang up.
The old man caught her hand. “Rhubarb purges, and rhubarb means advice. Turn you back around. Your business is in there.” He pointed a red, rough finger at the palace, at the top of the near corner tower. Then he stood, dusted off his trousers, strolled down the path and was gone.
Moon opened her mouth, which she hadn’t been able to do until then. She could still feel his hand, warm and callused. She looked down. In the palm he’d held was a sprig of hyssop and a wisp of broom, and a spiraling stem of convolvulus.
Moon bolted back through the postern door and up the first twisting flight of stairs she found, until she ran out of steps. Then she cast furiously about. Which way was that wretched tower? She got her bearings by looking out the corridor windows. It would be that door, she thought. She tried it; it resisted.
He could have kept his posy and given me a key, she thought furiously. Then: But he did.
She plucked up the convolvulus, poked it into the keyhole, and said, “Turn away, turn astray, backwards from the turn of day. What iron turned to lock away, herb will turn the other way.” Metal grated against metal, and the latch yielded under her hand.
A young man’s room, frozen in time. A jerkin of quilted, painted leather dropped on a chair; a case of books, their bindings standing in bright ranks; a wooden flute and a pair of leather gloves lying on an inlaid cedar chest; an unmade bed, the coverlet slid sideways and half pooled on the floor.
More, a room frozen in a tableau of atrocity and accusation. For Moon could feel it, the thing that had been done here, that was still being done because the room had sat undisturbed. Nightshade and thornapple, skullcap, henbane, and fern grown bleached and stunted under stone. Moon recognized their scents and their twisted strength around her, the power of the work they’d made and the shame that kept them secret.
There was a dust of crushed leaf and flower over the door lintel, on the sill of every window, lined like seams in the folds of the bed hangings. Her fingers clenched on the herbs in her hand as rage sprouted up in her and spread.
With broom and hyssop she dashed the dust from the lintel, the windows, the hangings. “Merry or doleful, the last or the first,” she chanted as she swung her weapons, spitting each word in fury, “fly and be hunted, or stay and be cursed!”
“What are you doing?” said a voice from the door, and Moon spun and raised her posy like a dagger.
The king stood there, his coat awry, his hair uncombed. His face was white as a corpse’s, and his eyes were wide as a man’s who sees the gallows, and knows the noose is his.