We entered a small antechamber with a desk and two chairs. When the door shut behind us, it became almost invisible in the wall’s stonework. Another much more modern door was directly opposite the one we’d just used. A soldier, a major according to his uniform, sat behind the desk and looked up at us. When he saw Anders, he jumped to his feet and saluted. The man who’d opened the door stood at stiff attention beside it.
“As you were,” Anders said calmly. “Has the king been informed that we’ve arrived?”
“Yes, sir,” the major said. “He’s expecting you in his office.”
“Very good.” The soldier who’d admitted us leaped to open the other door.
I realized I was sweating, and my hands shook as we walked down the hallway whose every brick and tapestry was familiar to me. This was the passageway to the king’s private family quarters, and you could only enter through the secure door we’d used, or the two other hidden ones known only to the family and its closest friends.
We reached the big double doors at the end of the hall. Anders knocked. The door opened partially, and a white-haired man peered out beneath thick, still-dark eyebrows.
“Brought him,” Anders said simply, and stepped aside.
The old man squinted at me. I knew him, of course-Emerson Wentrobe, advisor to the king of Arentia for the last sixty years, the one great constant in Arentian government. Some uninformed wags always insisted that Wentrobe was the apocryphal power behind the throne; the rest of us knew that, while his advice was often heeded, he never made the final decision. At least that had been the case with the previous king; I couldn’t imagine Phil being any different.
Wentrobe had only been an advisor for forty years the last time I saw him, and his hair had been stone gray, not white. But his eyes were still as sharp as ever. “Young master Edward,” he said to me.
“Not so young,” I replied, and offered my hand. “How are you, Mr. Wentrobe?”
“Not so old,” he said with a grin. His grip was still firm, although not as bonecrushing as it had seemed in my youth.
He stepped aside, and this time I gestured for Anders to precede me. But the young man shook his head. “I’m just supposed to deliver you. This is where I get off. It’s been a pleasure traveling with you, Baron LaCrosse.”
I winced a little; it was the first time anyone had ever used that title in reference to me. “Yeah, well, you can still call me Eddie. Thanks, Mike.”
SIX
Wentrobe closed the door behind us. The office was decked out with all the gilt and glitter expected of a king, but for the moment we were alone in it. I dropped my saddlebags next to the door and hung my jacket on the coat rack. I felt seriously underdressed.
“Would you like a drink?” Wentrobe asked, moving to the bar.
“Sure. Rum if you have it.”
“We do indeed.” As he poured, he glanced at me. “You appear to have grown accustomed to hard work.”
“Yeah. Who’d’ve thought, huh?” I took the drink gratefully. “So. How are… things?”
Wentrobe sipped his own drink. “What do you know?”
“What was in Phil’s note, what Anders told me, and what I picked up from gossip on the way. Phil met some mysterious beautiful woman, married her, and now everyone thinks she killed their child.”
He nodded. “That’s what everyone thinks, all right. Almost everyone.”
“Is that what happened?”
He made a grand shrug. “Their son is dead. The queen was found with the body, covered in blood that wasn’t her own, inside a locked room. Those are the only facts everyone agrees on.”
“So the queen murdered the prince.”
He nodded and poured himself another drink. “There seems to be no other logical explanation.”
“But Phil doesn’t believe it.”
He looked down into the goblet. “No,” he said with the weight only a disillusioned elder can manage. “He doesn’t.”
I picked up a framed portrait from the big desk. About the size of my hand, it was a colored line drawing of a woman with wavy blond hair, blue eyes and a mouth that seemed about to smile. She had the look of fresh air and forests after a spring rain, probably because she wore a crown of flowers. “Is this her?”
“Yes,” answered a new voice. It had grown deeper, but I’d know it anywhere.
He stood across the room from me, in a casual jacket and shirt. He wasn’t wearing his crown, which for some reason surprised me, although I knew it was too heavy and uncomfortable to wear except on formal occasions. I guess I just expected him to look more royal, like King Philip, instead of so much like my old best friend Phil.
Phil. Fucking King Phil.
He grew taller than me when we were fourteen, and still was. His hair was cropped short, and touched with gray at the temples, but otherwise still had that annoying disheveled quality that made all the girls sigh. He wore a mustache, also shot through with gray, and there were deep lines at the corners of his eyes. He wasn’t fat, though, and he still moved gracefully.
Still looking at me, he said, “Pour me one of those, will you, Emerson?”
“Of course, Your Majesty,” Wentrobe said.
I put the picture back on his desk. “Not bad. Not as cute as that Danner girl you chased after when we were fourteen, but not bad.”
“The picture doesn’t do her justice,” Phil said. He took the drink from Wentrobe, downed half of it and then managed a small grin. “Remember when we stole that bottle of rotgut from your dad’s wine cellar and drank it in the woods, then tried to sneak back in without anyone noticing?”
“Yeah. I’m a better drinker now.”
“Me, too.” A real smile finally cracked his cool demeanor, and suddenly there was my old pal Phil, who’d once puked in my lap and set me up with his sister and taught me to play cards and was the worst dancer I’d ever seen. Something fell away inside me, too, and we grabbed each other in a long, intense bear hug that once would’ve embarrassed us both. A whole bunch of emotions I’d stuck in that dark spot under my stomach threatened to burst out, but with great difficulty I kept them in their place. Finally we broke apart and just grinned at each other.
“You smell like a pond,” he said.
“Where I live, everything’s been flooded for two weeks. You smell like a damn bouquet.”
“It’s called bathing. All the kids are doing it. So did you have any trouble getting here?”
“Not with that super-patriot you sent to find me.”
Phil nodded. “He’s a good one, for sure. I’ve had my eye on him for a while.” He swallowed the rest of his drink and handed the goblet to Wentrobe for a refill. “Well, I’ll leave it up to you. We can drink and reminisce first, or I can tell you why I needed to see you.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you want while we drink?”
“That works.” He gestured at an overstuffed high-backed chair. I sank into it while he sat on the corner of the desk and picked up the picture of his wife. “You didn’t come to the wedding.”
“Had a previous engagement.” In truth, I avoided information about Arentia so successfully that he’d been married for eighteen months before I even knew about it.
“Well, that was six years ago, anyway. We tried to start a family right away, but it took a while. Eventually, though, we did have a son. Last year.” He met my eyes. “We named him Edward.”
I must’ve had a great expression, because Phil only kept a straight face for about ten seconds. “No, I’m just kidding, we named him Pridiri.”
“Good, that won’t get him picked on in school.”
“Ree wanted it. She said it means, ‘relief from anxiety,’ and it was very important to her. I call him ‘P.D.’ for short.” I assumed “Ree” was what he called his queen, Rhiannon. Girls could get away with strange nicknames like that, especially girls who looked like the one in that picture.
“So what happened to him?”
“The official version,” he said with a glance at Wentrobe, “is that she killed him.”