Almost staggeringly tired, and with a long afternoon still stretching in front of her, Briony walked back to the throne room from Merolanna’s chambers through the Portrait Hall, for once her guards didn’t have to hurry to keep pace. Although she had seen the pictures of her ancestors in their finery many times, so often that she scarcely glanced at them most days, today it was easy to imagine that they were looking down on her with disapproval, that Queen Lily’s kind eyes were full of disappointment, that even the portrait of mournful Queen Sanasu looked more desolate than usual.
It had only been a matter of a few months since Kendrick had been murdered, Briony told herself, and far less than a year since her father himself had last sat on the throne, yet what had happened? The kingdom was tottering, and that was more than just a fancy, as had been proved today most emphatically. It was difficult not to believe the trembling earth was the anger of the gods made manifest, a warning from heaven. Briony knew she could not escape a heavy share of blame: she and Barrick hated to be called children, but what else had they been? They had let what was given to them to protect fall from their fingers, left it out to rot like a discarded toy. Like the body of a murdered man in a field.
So grim were her thoughts that when the black-clad figure stepped out of a side corridor her first unsurprised assumption was that one of her dead ancestors, perhaps Sanasu herself, restless and discontented, had come to point a finger of shame at her. It was unsurprising, though, that in such times her guards’ first thoughts were more practical they clattered to a stop around her and leveled their pikes at the veiled woman.
“Is that you, Princess?” the figure whispered as she pulled back her veil.
The superstitious prickle on Briony s skin subsided, but only a little, as she recognized the face. “Elan? Elan M’Cory?”
The Tolly sister-in-law nodded. Her young face wore the mark of a terrible grief—a grief that Briony recognized, as powerful as that which had seized her after her brother’s death. “Gailon is dead,” the girl said.
Briony waved the guards back. For a moment she thought about saying the politic thing it was early yet to be certain, after all. Nobody had seen the body who had known Gailon well. But the look of misery in the girl’s gray eyes—eyes that were nevertheless bone-dry—touched her in that place of understanding, of shared sorrows. “Yes. Or at least it seems so.”
Elan smiled, a strange, grim little tug at the corners of her mouth, as though she had been confirmed in something larger and longer-lived than just a fear for Gailon Tolly’s life—reassured in some bleak view of all existence, perhaps. “I knew it. I have known it for days.” The eyes fixed Briony again. “I loved him, of course. But he had no interest in me.” “I’m sorry . .”
“Perhaps it is better this way. Now I can mourn him for the right reasons I have one more question. You must tell me the truth.”
Briony blinked. Who was this girl? “I must answer only to my father, the king, Lady Elan. And to the gods, of course. But go to—ask your question.”
“Did you kill him, Briony Eddon? Did you have it done?"
It was shocking to be asked so directly. She realized, in the split-instant between hearing and answering, that she had become used to deference— more used to it than she had known. “No, of course I didn’t. The gods know that Gailon and I did not agree on everything, but I would never. She stopped to catch her breath, to consider what she was saying and doing. Standing a couple of yards away against the wall, the guards were trying to hide their fascination. After a moment she decided it was too late for anything m this particular case except the truth. “In fact, and you may hold this against me as you wish, Elan M’Cory, Gailon wanted to marry me—but I didn’t want to marry him.” “I know that.” But she sounded coldly satisfied. “For his ambition.”
“I do not doubt you are right. But that was not enough to endear him to me.The gods may bear witness that I’ll have no husband who thinks he can tell me where to go, what to say, how to…” She stopped herself again. What was it about this girl that had made her say so much more than she intended? “Enough. I did not kill him, if he is truly dead. We do not know who did.”
Elan nodded. She pulled her veil back over her face. “Neither you nor any other woman will have him now.” For the first time there was a muffled noise that might be a sob. “I wish you heaven’s mercy,” she said quietly, then turned and walked away without a courtesy or farewell.
It was indeed a very long afternoon, and as the news of the murdered men found in Marnnswalk began to circulate, along with speculation about their identities, the day threatened to stretch without end. The news impinged directly on Briony only slightly in her royal duties—questions and quiet asides from Brone, a perfunctory meeting with the hedge-baron in command of the Marnnswalk muster who was enjoying his moment of fame and attention, and an expanded set of concerns from Nynor, who had to decide whether to house these particular Marnnswalk troops with all the others brought in to garrison the castle or try to keep them separate—but she also saw speculation in the faces of almost everyone who passed through the throne room. As if things had not been bad enough after her outburst at Hendon Tolly! It was so grueling that the appearance of Queen Anissa’s maid was almost a relief.
“Selia, isn’t it?” With Barrick gone it was hard to hold onto her resentment toward the young woman. “Tell me, how is my stepmother?”
“Well enough, Highness, with the baby so close, but she has concern not to see you.”
Briony’s head hurt and she had trouble making sense out of the girl’s foreign diction. “She wants me to stay away?”
Selia colored very prettily. Like all else she did, it seemed an affront to any woman who wanted to do something other than make men sigh—or at least so it felt to Briony, whose dislike of the maid was already returning. “No, no,” the young woman said. “I do not speak so well. She wishes very much to have talk with you before the baby comes.”
“I am quite busy, as my stepmother knows…”
The young woman leaned forward and spoke quietly; Brone and Nynor worked harder to pretend they were not listening. “She fears you are angry with her. This is bad for the baby, for the birth, she thinks. She was too ill for talking with you before, and now your brother has gone, the poor Barrick.” Selia looked genuinely sad, which only made Briony less sympathetic.
That’s my brother you’ve set your cap on, girl. Aloud, she said,”I will do my best.” “She asks that you come and take a cup of wine with her on Winter’s Eve.”
Sweet Zona, that’s only a few days away, Briony realized. Where has the year gone? “I will do my best to come to her soon Tell her I wish her only well.”
“I will, Princess.” The young woman dropped a graceful courtesy and withdrew. Briony caught Brone and Nynor watching the maid as she walked away and was disgusted that even old men should still be such lechers. She tried to keep it off her face as they all returned to work, but not as hard as she might have.
The day’s business dragged on, as what seemed like almost every living soul in the castle came before her with a complaint or a worry or a request, with problems ranging from the crucial to the ridiculous. What she didn’t see was Hendon Tolly, nor—after her meeting in the Portrait Hall with his sister-in-law—any sign whatsoever of the Tollys or their faction.
“They are doubtless trying to decide what this discovery means,” Brone told her in a quiet aside. “I am told they were out and about as usual this morning, but when they heard the news, they beat a retreat back into their rooms.”