“Straight through. Angle right. The gardeners have been sorely lax. You’ll have to mention it to the lord.” My voice sounded harsh against the subtleties of the evening. Despite my resolution to be open-minded, I couldn’t hide my bitterness at the desolation this man had wrought.
The newcomer pushed through the branches until I could make out a shadowy figure at the far end of the arched bridge. Odd… Evard was never as tall as my brother, only average in height, much to his youthful disgust, but this person was not even as tall as me.
“Who’s there?” I said, retreating a few steps. “Speak or I’ll be away from here before you can blink.”
I listened until I thought my ears must crack and whipped my eyes from side to side, searching the gloomy plantings for any sign of stalkers, but I sensed no one else about. The figure moved closer, and I backed away.
“Wait. Don’t go!”
A woman! Her voice was low and mellow, yet bore such authority that my feet stopped moving of their own accord. My eyes stopped their suspicious search and riveted themselves to the slight form that followed the lantern beams up the arching span.
“The conditions of this meeting are not changed,” she said. “You’ve agreed to it, and I’ve endangered myself and others to come here. You cannot leave.”
She wore a lightweight cloak of the deepest sapphire, its full hood draped gracefully about her face, keeping it in deep shadow.
I walked to the foot of the bridge. “But the person I agreed to meet - ”
“Is unavailable tonight. I speak for him.”
“I cannot believe he would permit anyone to speak for him, especially… ”
“Especially a woman?” She set her lantern on the stone parapet. “Perhaps you don’t know him as well as you think you do, even after such long acquaintance. And, of course, you don’t know me at all.” With slender, pale hands, adorned with a single, slim band of sapphires that gleamed in the lamplight, she lowered her hood. On her brow she wore a gold circlet, graven with a dragon and a lily - the crest of the Queen of Leire.
CHAPTER 7
Mariel Annalis Karestan Lavial, Princess of Valleor, had been a child of eight when her father’s kingdom fell. She had witnessed the beheading of her father and brothers, and the rape and execution of her mother, who had vowed to lie with the first Vallorean man she could find and so produce a new heir to rival the Leiran conqueror. Princess Mariel alone was allowed to survive untouched, secured in the virginal captivity of a remote temple school in case the Leirans ever found a use for her. She was the living symbol of Valleor’s subjugation. I, as so many other Leirans, had never thought of her as having any other identity, even when she was brought from her childhood seclusion to wed the Leiran king.
“I’ve wanted to meet you for a long while” - the queen raked cool green eyes over me as I sank into a genuflection I would not have offered her husband - “the Lady Seriana who threw away a kingdom for a sorcerer. The woman to whom I was forever being compared and beside whom I was always found wanting… by my husband, as well as everyone else at court.”
“Your Majesty, I - ”
“I decided early on not to hate you. After all, you’d given me a life. If you’d married him, I would have been dead by seventeen. And even if you’d never existed, he would not have cared for me in the beginning. A Vallorean princess was no more to him than a looted castle or captured horse. But he doesn’t speak of you in that way any more.”
The queen’s light hair was piled on her head in smooth coils, and her features were ivory in the lamplight, an impassive courtier’s mask that revealed little of the person beneath. Though her face was too long and angular to be called beautiful, and her stature unimposing, she carried herself with assurance. Her age would be somewhere near five and thirty.
“Why am I here, Your Majesty? How did the king know I was alive?”
She moved a few steps closer. “As you surely know, our people have suffered some… disturbances… of late that have left them in great fear. No science or philosophy offers any explanation. And so my husband’s thoughts turn to other unbelievable tales he has heard. To sorcery. To you. Who else in this land knows anything of magical beings or would be bold enough to speak of such to her king?” Her manner was businesslike, her voice clear and intelligent. “And, despite his many faults, Evard is not a fool. He said he would not believe you were dead unless he saw your corpse.”
But I refused to allow her easy manner to dilute my caution. “To speak of sorcery is forbidden, my lady. By His Majesty’s decree, I have been pardoned of my earlier offenses, but I would not bring the hand of the law around my neck again.”
“I’m not here to entrap you, Seriana. I know everything you told my husband: about this other world and the magical passage between us, about the sorcerer prince and his enemies and their war that somehow affects our own lands. If I wished to arrest you for speaking of such things, I’d not need to come to this wilderness and set about playacting. When I tell you the whole of these matters, you’ll understand why the king seeks your advice.”
“Well, then… ” She hadn’t left me much to say. “You, of course, may speak of whatever you please.”
She sat gracefully on the parapet next to her lantern, the light-beams dancing on the crystal beadwork of the riding gown visible beneath her blue cloak. “We heard the first reports more than two years ago,” she said, “whisperings among those bold enough to touch on forbidden subjects in the presence of the king: a commander with reports of a maimed soldier who disappeared in the middle of one night… a duke’s vanished mistress whose legs were crippled by a disease in her bones… a military governor investigating accusations of witchcraft. My husband thought little of these incidents until a man named Maceron demanded an audience, claiming he had evidence of an invasion from the world of the sorcerers.”
“Maceron!” I almost left the garden right then. The murderer Maceron, the despicable hunter of sorcerers who had exposed Karon’s secret to my brother and the king, who had served the purposes of the Zhid when they tried to use the Prince of Avonar to destroy the Bridge, the mundane henchman of the Lord Ziddari. “Madam, Maceron is a vicious, lying scoundrel.”
“Yes, you have every reason to despise the man. But you must hear me out.” She motioned me to sit beside her. “Maceron brought us a list of more than three hundred disappearances from all corners of the kingdom. Tales of disturbing dreams, fantastical visions of roads or doorways or impossible landscapes, almost every one of them including mention of three odd strangers with mysterious powers. Magical powers. These sorcerers were said to be most bizarre in their aspect: one of them huge with a beast-like hide, one black and emaciated like a creature of charred bones, one a dwarfish man with only one eye, crude in his speech and action. They were blamed for thievery, for tormenting of beasts, and for every manner of mischief and ruination. Strangely enough, almost every person who had disappeared was also deformed in some way, lame or blind or otherwise afflicted.”
The queen’s hands rested quietly in her lap, pale against the dark blue folds of her cloak as she posed her query. “One would never have believed such a history. Yet identical descriptions of the three villains originated from every region, from people who had never left their villages and from people who had traveled widely and were little amazed at any oddity. And the ruffians had been seen in places hundreds of leagues apart on exactly the same day! Though we hold no admiration for this Maceron - indeed he is a repulsive villain - his evidence is compelling. So, tell me, Seriana, are these beings from the other world? If not, then who are they?”