Queen Rhiannon had been in that tower a week now, with no visitors except for the staff and no contact with the outside. Not even Phil had been to see her, since that would give the wrong appearance. No date had been set for her trial, but Phil would have to announce it soon.
I let the night’s wind blow through my hair. I could just make out the top windows of the prison tower, visible over the peaked roof of the king’s main audience chamber. I thought I saw a figure move across one of the windows, but it was too far and too dark to be sure. My first glimpse of this mysterious Queen Rhiannon?
The next morning I got down to work.
I pushed open the nursery door. The hinges, well-oiled as everything else in the castle, made barely a peep. The door swung slowly back and bumped softly against the wall. I stood on the threshold, absorbing the scene for a long moment before I finally entered the room.
I wasn’t sure if this was the “official royal nursery from time immemorial,” but Phil had been nursed in this room, and Janet. One of my earliest memories was of Phil and me repeatedly slamming our thick little skulls against the slats of his crib. Now the room was empty, the lamps unlit, and the smells of smoke and dried blood still hung in the air. The light through the window fell on the scene of the crime like the blazing finger of some god.
The cauldron had been removed, and the brazier, but the designs chalked on the floor remained, and the big red stains. I carefully walked around them, remembering that moon priestesses cast their spells clockwise. They wrote in a symbolic language I couldn’t quite translate, but that usually had some sort of common theme. For instance, almost every symbol might feature a bird, if the spell had something to do with the primary magical element of air. But these designs meant nothing to me; one featured a bird, the next two a dragon, and the one after that a mermaid. To me, and I suspected to any real moon priestess, it was gibberish.
I walked to the window and looked out. Vogel’s report had been accurate; the bars were close enough to keep any small inquisitive bodies from accidentally tumbling through, and the wall beneath the window was sheer straight down to the courtyard. I shook the bars and examined the corrosion around the bolts that held them in place; they were anchored into the stone as securely as the day they’d been installed. No one, or at least no human being, had entered through them.
A soft knock and cleared throat got my attention. I turned to see a tall, portly man with a long mustache standing at attention in the door. “Thomas Vogel, Sergeant of the Palace Guard,” he announced stiffly, “reporting as ordered, sir.”
“At ease, sergeant,” I said. “I’m a civilian.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, and clasped his hands behind him in military at-ease. He was about as relaxed as the bars over the window.
“Come in and close the door,” I said, and he did so, standing in front of it. I sat on the window ledge. “Your report was very thorough. I didn’t ask you here because I found any fault in it, I just wanted to walk through the scene with you. Does anything look like it’s different now?”
He took a slow look around, moving his head from left to right. “The cauldron and brazier are gone. The linen on the crib’s been changed. The cushion on the rocker is different. And one of the pictograms is smeared.”
I smiled. I’d deliberately smudged the corner of one drawing with my boot to see if he’d notice. “Damn,” I said softly, “why are you just a sergeant?”
“I notice things,” he said flatly.
I nodded. “Okay, help me out now. Where was the queen, exactly, when you came in?”
He stepped forward and pointed. “Kneeling here, in the middle of the circle. She was facing the door. The cauldron was in front of her.”
“And she was naked?”
He actually blushed a little. “Yes, sir, she was.”
“Where were her clothes?”
“In a pile right there. As if she just undid them and let them fall.”
“Including her shoes?”
He squinted with thought. “Yes, sir, her shoes were under the pile.”
I nodded. That was odd; a formal gown around your knees would make it hard to then step out of the kind of shoes a queen would wear. I hadn’t yet met her, but the Rhiannon I’d heard described seemed far more graceful than that. “What did she do the moment you opened the door?”
“She looked up and gasped.”
“In surprise?”
“No, sir. More in satisfaction.” He took a deep breath and went “ Ahhhhh, ” imitating her response.
“Did she protest the interruption?”
“No, sir, she seemed intoxicated.”
“How long did that last?”
“Until the king arrived. Then she seemed to sober up.”
“He does have that effect on people.”
“Yes, sir.”
I walked around the circle. “Did you find the chalk she used to draw this?”
“No, sir, we did not.”
“How do you explain that?”
“Two possible explanations, sir. One, she used all the chalk she had for the designs. Two, she threw the chalk out the window, and it shattered below. I found no fragments, but the courtyard has a lot of traffic. They could have been thoroughly crushed before I was able to search.”
I nodded again and returned to the window. “Sergeant, is there anything, any detail, that was left out of your report? I know it might seem inconsequential, but you never know what might be crucial.”
He stared straight ahead, resolutely formal. “I’m aware of that, sir. My report is as thorough as I can make it. I wrote down everything I observed. The questions you’ve asked me here are more matters of interpretation.”
“True. And you’ve been invaluable, thank you.”
“Will that be all, sir?”
“Mostly. Except… do you think the queen did it?”
“ ‘Think,’ sir? I’m a soldier. I don’t think.”
“You must have an opinion.”
“As do we all, along with a certain orifice.”
Vogel clearly was not going to commit himself; perhaps he had done just that at some point in the past, which explained why he was still a mere sergeant. “Yes. Well. Thank you again. And please keep this conversation just between us for the time being.”
“Of course, sir.” He bowed and left with the same precision he’d arrived.
I looked down at the bloodstain on the stone. I knelt and ran my finger across it, then smelled my fingertips. It was blood, all right. Something had died in this room. But that was the only thing that might truly be what it seemed.
Nursemaid Beth Maxwell was a cheery, round young woman who would no doubt make a good mother herself, should she ever run across a man whose tastes ran to acres of rolling white flesh. She wore a neat, spotless uniform and a little cap over her tight brown curls, and looked up at me with guileless eyes. Phil let me use his office for these interviews, which conveyed a lot more authority than I’d command on my own.
“I appreciate you seein’ me on such short notice,” I said, exaggerating my country accent so she’d feel less threatened. “Just want to ask you a coupla things ’bout that night in the nursery.”
She shuddered at the memory. “I’ll never forget a thing from that night.”
“That’s what I’m hopin’. When the queen came in from the dinner party, did she seem upset or anything?”
“No, just the opposite. She seemed almost silly. I assumed she’d overindulged a bit on wine during dinner, although that wasn’t like her, especially since Diri was born-that was our nickname for the prince, you know. The king called him P.D., but he was our little Diri.” She sniffled and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “But she certainly didn’t seem depressed.”
“Did you say anything to her?”
“Just reported that Diri had spent a quiet evening, and had only just begun to fuss because he was hungry.”