“Tomas, you’ve heard nothing I’ve said.”
“I’ve heard enough. This is an entirely new situation. Evard must be told that taking care of the sorcerer is insufficient.”
“Tomas!”
“You’ll not burn. You’ll not die. You’re still of the house of Comigor, and Evard has sworn to me. But you’ve consented to evil beyond my imagining, and it will be undone.” He stormed out of the room, leaving me alone in the library.
Sometime in the night I was taken to the palace and locked in a bare, cold room, such as scullery maids might live in. My locket and my wedding ring were taken from me, and my bloodstained green silk was replaced by a muslin shift and a plain black dress. I would not weep. I would not.
CHAPTER 18
The morning dawned cool and gray, as did most summer mornings in the Uker valley, but the rising sun burned off the fog early. I awoke cramped and tired from the night on the dirt floor of the charcoal burner’s hut, and the lingering disturbance of my dreaming was hard to shake. Stars of night, why could I not be rid of it? Perhaps if I could get the unpleasant prince and his annoying servant on their way, I could go back to Dunfarrie and bury it all again. Yet I wondered. My cottage now seemed as remote as D’Natheil’s Avonar.
Tennice and Baglos were quiet that morning, too, brows furrowed and shoulders tight as we passed around chunks of dry black bread, spread with a paste of beans and leeks that was long past fresh. D’Natheil showed no interest in breakfast, but sat in the open doorway, intently scribing his wood chip with the point of his knife.
“What is it he makes?” I asked Baglos, as I smoothed my still-damp clothes into some semblance of order.
“I’ve asked, but he does not respond.”
“Is he well? He looks ill… or, no, maybe thinner somehow.” The growing sunlight revealed a tracery of lines around D’Natheil’s eyes. I’d not noticed them before.
Staying out of arm’s reach, Baglos questioned the Prince. D’Natheil shook his head, but rather than lashing out at the Dulcé as was his morning habit, he graced Baglos with his smile, the smile that was everything of good humor and unsullied delight.
The smile was the only constant in D’Natheil. I had never known anyone to change so rapidly, not only in the seasons of his mood, but in his physical appearance as well. I could no longer envision him as he had been on that day he appeared naked in the woods behind my cottage, but I would swear by everything I valued that it was not as he looked today or yesterday or a week ago. I had thought him little more than twenty, and from the Dulcé‘s tales I judged that close to accurate. And yet on this morning he looked almost of an age with me, as if these past days had laid brushstrokes of years and care on the canvas of his face.
Baglos denied it. “He is as he is, woman. Anything else is only your imagination.”
I told him that my imagination had been unused for so many years it wouldn’t know how to invent such a business. But, then, after a fortnight without, the Prince had shaved his face this morning. Perhaps that was the difference.
It took me a while after entering the gates of Yurevan to decide what had changed about the city since I had last visited. The mottled stone buildings of the University still dominated the city from its hilltop site, their cloisters welcoming the brightest thinkers from all the Four Realms. The winding brick streets were marked only by time, not war. Ironwork of intricately designed flowers and beasts still ornamented balconies and walls, and the flowers still bloomed in their charming niches. Quaint, tall houses peered down on passersby like old grandmothers inspecting their children’s children. It was the people were different, I finally decided.
In the past every street corner had been occupied by a speechmaker haranguing the populace about excessive taxation or the indenture of children, or a student debating society arguing points of history or the origins of the universe. No tavern had lacked an aspiring poet to serve up verses along with his ale, and no sausage cart had failed to employ a young philosopher ready to argue about whether your sausage truly existed beyond your desires. And everyone had taken time to listen.
No more. Now the citizens of Yurevan hurried about their business with averted eyes, and vendors offered no word beyond your transaction. Only on one corner stood a wild-eyed, shabbily dressed man, preaching that the stars foretold the doom of Leire and the coming of a philosopher-king. Mothers pushed their gawking children past the man quickly, and while Tennice and I bought sausage and cheese to take back to D’Natheil and Baglos, green-clad guardsmen dragged the man into the street and beat him silent.
“Yurevan’s no different from any Leiran-ruled city any more,” said Tennice, hurrying me through an alley to avoid the guardsmen, who were laughing as one of their fellows relieved himself on the crumpled body of the madman. “Evard has set up his own man to run the University. He claimed rebels were using it as their lair, disturbing the freedom of the academics. He’s come near ‘protecting” the place to death. Ferrante wouldn’t lecture there any longer. One of his friends after another disappeared when rumors of sedition touched them, and he decided it was safer to take only private students at home.“
“I had no idea.” Conquerors had always paid deference to the University, even when the cultural centers in other cities were looted and burned, even in the death throes of the Vallorean kingdom. I had come to think it was some deep-rooted yearning to share in the wisdom tangible in its cloisters. “I always imagined that no matter what madness enveloped the rest of the world, Yurevan and the University would be exempt from it.”
“That belief is what brought me here. But we were wrong. The madness is everywhere.”
Thinking that four together would be too conspicuous, Tennice and I had come alone to seek out the J’Ettanni woman. We’d left our horses at a hostelry and made our way through the narrow, twisting streets that climbed University Hill. Tennice stopped at a bookshop that he frequented and asked the owner if he knew where he could find gymnea, a medicinal ointment used for failing eyesight. The bookseller directed us to an herbary two streets west and four streets north. They had a good selection, he said, though the shop was run by a “right prickly sort of woman.”
Halfway along a bustling lane we found the tall, narrow shop with a wooden sign over the door that read herbs, teas, medicaments. The storefront sported two windows, each with its wooden planter box crammed with aromatic flora, and when we opened the shop door, we were almost bowled over by the hodgepodge of scents. The tiny room was filled floor to ceiling and on every wall with row upon row of shelves, each crammed with neatly labeled glass jars and tins and paper bundles. Two worktables crowded the rest of the room so that it was almost impossible to move. On one table was a stack of thin paper, a ball of string, a mortar and pestle, measuring cups and spoons, and a small brass balance. On and under the other table lay heaps of plants, stacks of jars and boxes, and innumerable trays of roots, leaves, stems, and flowers spread out to dry.
Two well-dressed women stood by the weighing table chattering about the ague and the grippe, and the annoyances of servants who forgot themselves enough to get laid up. A small, dark-haired young woman measured a quantity of black seeds into one pan of the balance. She transferred the seeds to a sheet of paper, briskly folded the paper into a small packet, and exchanged it for a coin. “Anything else, Madame LeDoux? Have you fenugreek tea for Nidi’s throat?”
“Plenty for now. Perhaps next week if she’s no better.”
“Good day, then.”
“Good day, my dear.”
The two ladies fluttered out the door, and the girl turned to Tennice and me. “What do you need?” Her dark hair was cut short, and it hung straight, framing her high cheekbones and light eyes. Her well-defined chin and short, straight nose complemented her blunt manner. She could be no more than eighteen. When the girl stepped around the table, eyeing our disheveled clothing impassively, I was astonished to note that she wore trousers. I had thought my own split skirt bold.