Though still out of his head, Paulo groaned at her every touch.
“She’s killing him.” The princess had moved to my table and was making short work of the apple-like fruits sitting in a wooden bowl. “You seem to think of nothing else but him, yet you’re letting her torture him. And there’s a dead creature… excuse me, a dead man in the room with us, and probably more of them on the way, and you stand there like a post.”
Paulo moaned again. A trickle of blood rolled out of his mouth. Zanore was kneeling by the bed, and the woman motioned to him to hold a basin close to Paulo’s face.
I grabbed the woman’s wrists before she touched Paulo again. “Have you done this before?”
“Oh yes, great king. Many Singlars are given punishment, and such injury as this is not rare. The tree milk draws the blood together in his belly so he can be rid of it. Perhaps it would be better if you would leave us for a while. Come back before unlight and see the change. I care for him as if he was yourself.”
“She wants you to go so she can steal from you,” said the princess, who’d come to peer over my shoulder. “You should set someone to watch her. Anyone who won’t show her face is up to no good.”
I released the woman’s wrists and watched her work. Her hands moved carefully and gently, not at all unsure. Paulo groaned and brought up more blood along with a pinkish milky liquid. The woman bathed his face tenderly.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said to the healing woman. “We’ll leave you alone for a while. Zanore will stay close and fetch you anything you wish.”
“I will apply the yellow root oil to his hands as you have instructed me,” she whispered, lowering her eyelids. “I bless you for your trust, Majesty.”
“Why don’t you speak up?” said the princess. “You’re hiding something… fooling this boy, so that his friend will die, and I’ll never get out of here.”
In a move so quick I couldn’t prevent it, Roxanne snatched away the woman’s veil.
With a moan of quiet distress, the woman crossed her arms and held them up before her face, but not before we saw that which made the princess run to the washing basin and vomit. I fought one of the hardest battles I’d ever engaged in not to do the same.
The Singlar woman had no face, nothing but bone and cartilage below her eyes. What little skin she had was almost transparent, a thin layer over strips of muscle that allowed her jaw to work. No lips, no cheeks, no nose… she was paralyzingly horrid.
The woman stepped backward toward the door. No wonder, that. She might as well have been stripped and flogged. What could repair such an act?
“Tell me, have you a name that you desire? I need something to call you. You are one of my Witnesses, and I promised you a name.”
She shook her head, keeping her arms curled over her face and her tear-filled eyes cast down. But she stopped moving away.
Swallowing my gorge, I pulled her arms down. Carefully, I took the trailing ends of her veil and wound them around her head as she’d had them. “Near my home, very far from here, grows a rare plant called nithea. It is very plain, no flower, only thorns. But if you dig deep, you discover that its root is bright red, long and silky - quite beautiful. When you open the root and spread it over a wound, it takes the pain away and makes the wound heal with no scar. If you would permit me, I would give you the name Nithea.”
She sank to her knees, her head bowed.
I raised her up quickly. “Take care of my friend, Nithea. Send Zanore for me if he wakes.”
Then I took the pale princess by the arm and propelled her into the passageway. “If you ever again lay your hand on one of my people without my permission, I will cut it off. Do you understand me?”
She tried not to answer, but I held her tight until she nodded her head.
“Paulo was right. I am the king of this desolation, and I plan to get you out of it and back where you belong as soon as possible. But until then, you are my guest, and you will behave like it whether anyone is paying attention to you or not. You will treat every servant, every beggar, and every person, no matter what their appearance, with the respect you expect for yourself. This is not Leire.”
She remained silent, her pale face rigid, her lower lip trembling.
We found Vroon, and I dispatched him to install Roxanne in guest apartments as befit her rank, leaving instructions that she was to be clothed and fed and allowed to go anywhere she liked, but that she was never to be left unguarded. The rest of the day I spent securing my position in the Blue Tower.
I had Vroon interview all the tower servants, weeding out any who demonstrated too much loyalty to the Guardian. The maintainers I dismissed entirely, forbidding the Singlars to exact revenge on them for their crimes in the name of the Guardian, but threatening to revoke that protection at the least provocation. In their place I installed twenty Singlars that Vroon designated as trustworthy, men and women who had stood witness in the audience hall. I granted these Witnesses their names along with their duties and believed, somehow, that no sovereign would ever enjoy troops so loyal as these. By “unlight,” the hour when the lamps went down, I’d done all I could do.
I returned to my apartment to check on Paulo and found him sleeping peacefully under Nithea’s eye. I bade the woman good night, but before I could find a new bed of my own, a servant brought an urgent message from Vroon, asking me to come to the Guardian’s rooms. I hurried up the stair to the third level, through an open foyer, and down a passage toward several Singlars, who stepped aside and bowed when I arrived. My leathery friend Ob stood just inside the doorway. With a thud that shuddered the walls, he dropped to his knees, crossing his thick arms across his chest. His voice boomed in massive distress. “Failed.”
“Failed… Has the Guardian escaped?” My mind was already racing to the Source. Would the Guardian damage it? Set it against me with lies?
But Ob shook his red-tufted head. “Dead.” With Ob’s word, the world itself mourned. His wide shoulders were trembling.
I squeezed past the bulky Singlar into the Guardian’s large, sparsely furnished bedchamber. Evidently the Guardian had decided he would rather be dead than give me a decent answer. He lay on his bed, wearing his gold circlet. His blue robes were smooth and orderly, his hands folded primly across his chest, holding the ruby-studded key. The only discordant note in his presentation was the black swollen tongue lolling out of his mouth.
The untimely death of one’s adversary was not the best way to begin a reign. I had wanted to expose the Guardian’s misdeeds to all the Singlars before deciding what to do with him. But hiding his death would be very difficult. I picked up a small gold flask that lay on the floor beside the bed and sniffed it. The faint odor was sickly sweet. Moving closer to the dead man, I bent over and sniffed his mouth. Not at all nice. “Handle this carefully,” I said, giving the flask to Vroon who had followed me into the room.
He took it gingerly, scrambled around the floor until he found the glass stopper that had rolled under the bed, and closed the flask. Ob knelt by the door, head bowed, quivering in shame.
“Vroon, how do you dispose of dead bodies here?”
“We dig them into the ground, Majesty. Under a tappa field, so they are still part of the Bounded.”
Though I left the gold circlet on the Guardian’s head, I removed the ruby key from his cold hands and dropped it in my pocket. Then I turned to the leathery man.