They had even stooped to attack her laundrywoman. The charge-of sorcery-was absurd. But it had effectively isolated her. Without knights or squires or any ladies she could trust, she had no word from the outside.
The archbishop might have been shocked to know that the Queen scarcely troubled herself about any of that. She allowed herself to worry that Diota might be killed, or Blanche taken. Beyond that, she expended not a whit of her powers or her thoughts.
Instead, she bent most of her conscious thought to the dark thing that dwelt in the palace foundations. Or perhaps merely visited them.
Somehow, it was her enemy. She had known this the moment she touched it, deep in the old corridors where Becca Almspend had taken her. Its enmity was as familiar as the touch of a lover. She wondered if she had awakened it with her touch, or Becca with her hermetical studies. Or whether it was always there. Some days it seemed completely to be absent.
She bit her lip. Her outward self almost lost the thread of the passage she was reading aloud-she fought down a wave of petty pains-her breasts, her hips, her back, her knees.
Any thought of her husband hurt her to her core.
Almost, she could accept the charge of adultery. Because in one short year, she had come from love to something very like hate. A cold, menacing hate. A hate that chewed at the edge of her waking mind and threatened her powers and her confidence and her very awareness of herself as herself.
And again, as surely as old Harmodius had banished the daemon, she banished her thoughts of her husband and locked them away.
And followed the thread of black that ran from her rooms down into the depths of the palace.
No one had ever taught the Queen to walk free of her body, but it had seemed perfectly reasonable to her, since she was very young, that if one could invert the normal, ordering one’s palace, one could walk free through a door in that palace and out into the waking world. And as was often the case for Desiderata, the thought was the action, and she had attempted it.
Now she walked the winds almost at will. And hence this gentle and pious deception-the ladies all watching her in amazement as she spent her days in prayer. Her careful practice-it could be quite painful to be interrupted when walking abroad.
With a last, inward check and a mental sigh, she released her hold on her temporal body and drifted clear.
Lady Agnes was kneeling with her ample behind firmly seated on a stool hidden in her skirts. This did not amuse or disturb the Queen-she merely noted it. She had noted before that the world of colour and high emotion that was her life in the real was muted when she let her spirit walk the winds.
She allowed herself to sink through the floor.
She knew from experience that many parts of the palace were warded-indeed, almost every home, even the lowliest peasant’s cot, had wards to protect the inhabitants against ghosts, not-dead and wind-walkers.
Oddly, many such wards were placed on doors but not walls, on windows and not on floor joists. She knew-with some bitterness-that she could not escape the bounds of the palace. It was a warded fortress, and what was in would stay in just as surely as that without would stay out.
But inside much of its confines she could move at will, if she kept her concentration pure. She felt the extreme cold of stone that never saw the sun, and then she was warmed-a floor below, the Royal Chamberlain saw to the King’s chamber as his clean sheets were set to his bed.
She did not linger to see what sign there might be of other women. She needed no further proof of who the King was. Or what he had done.
Almost, that scrap of thought was enough to destroy her concentration. But Desiderata’s will was a pure, hard thing like eastern steel, and she went down, and down again, bands of light alternating with darkness as she went into the old halls below the palace, always following the black thread that she had found in her own fireplace.
But when she entered the deep corridor-the old path, or road, that Lady Almspend had first showed them-it was like returning to a house from a trip to find that mould and rot had set in. The corridor was so full of the black ropes of the twisted thing’s sorcery that she was almost entangled.
She was not quiet enough.
The blackness was everywhere-and she hovered above it, unwilling to touch it even in incorporeal form. But she could see it with a true sight, and see how much of it there was-enough thread to make a hundred carpets, piled in loops and whorls throughout the deepest corridor, and there, where she had stopped it with Almspend and Lady Mary, stood a wall of black.
Twice before, Desiderata had come here and driven the walls back to their origin, the stone set in the oldest wall of the castle.
Now it knew her.
The threads came at her, all at once-an infinity of black silk flying through black air like a dark net.
Desiderata set her aethereal form on the level with the floor and allowed the silk threads to permeate her non-being.
Whatever had prepared this trap had expected a more solid body.
She felt its hate.
She took in a great breath, and as she exhaled, she made her breath the very spirit of spring, filled with sun and light, love and laughter, green leaves and new flowers and the smell of grass in the sunshine and lilacs in the dark.
Her conjuring drove back the threads as easily as a good sword would cut through snow-more, as the threads melted as they contacted her force, withering, retreating and unmaking as she advanced.
She spread her incorporeal hands.
Between them a great globe of glowing gold began to form.
“Give us the babe!” whispered the ribbons of black.
She gave them the globe, instead. And it floated forward, like a sun, a veritable sun, burning and lighting with a brilliance that no mortal eye could tolerate.
It passed the wall of black-and illuminated it.
A mighty pulse of power struck at her, like a child swatting a fly, and she rose on the energy and retreated before it, her own casting burrowing like a woodworm into the coils of her adversary.
Once more it struck, this time with a ravening dog of many heads and teeth-a slavering horror that emerged from the wreckage of the black aethereal curtain-to savage nothing but a ghost.
She felt the entity respond-and understand.
It lashed at her with pure ops.
The ramifications of the blow flung her out of the corridor and almost as far as the living world.
Only then did Desiderata begin to know fear.
But fear usually made her stronger. She controlled the flight of her incorporeal form and steadied it-laid a trap in the aethereal for any immediate pursuit and saw with savage satisfaction that her guess was correct.
And still the entity was incapable of quenching her initial casting.
She fled to the real, hoping that her work was done.
In the real, her aching body was still kneeling, and her lips still moved. Saint Ursula. She knew the tale all too well. Her consciousness snapped back into the body in time to prevent a collapse.
She could not prevent her head from falling forward over the book.
Far beneath her, she could feel her great praxis moving, like a living thing, into the very heart of her adversary’s darkness.
“If your grace is done praying,” Lady Agnes said, her voice a whine of accusation, “I’m sure we have tasks before us!”
Whatever else might have been said was interrupted by the chamber doors being flung wide.
There, framed in the doorway, was the Archbishop of Lorica. At his shoulder was the King’s new chancellor, the Sieur de Rohan, and behind them-almost in shadow-the King.