I shook my head.
“She killed her own child. Pretty brutally, from what I hear. The king’s got to do the right thing by his people, or he’ll lose ’em. He’s only the king because everybody acts like he is.”
Terry’s political insight, while accurate, didn’t help me much. I turned over the known facts in my head, looking for ways they might connect. So far, though, the threads eluded me.
I threw out a wild card. “You ever heard of anyone named Epona Gray?”
He thought it over, and his response seemed genuine. “Nope.”
Something else nagged at me, another of those small off-kilter details, but this time I couldn’t catch hold of it. The wine unsurprisingly didn’t help, although I made sure I thoroughly explored that option before I left.
I was a little wobbly by the time I excused myself from Terry’s hospitality. I had to hug each of his five mobile offspring in turn, while the baby settled for a simple kiss atop his fuzzy head. Terry’s wife was even more attractive once I got some alcohol in me, so I knew I’d picked the right moment to leave. As I rode away, Terry stood behind her nuzzling her neck, which made her smile. I wondered how soon she’d be pregnant again.
The best view of the sunset anywhere in Arentia was from a certain part of the castle roof, where you could see for twenty miles in any direction. The roof was higher in other places, but in none of those could you also drink yourself stupid in peace. Phil and I had used the spot often as teenagers, and now we sat with our backs against a chimney, two empty bottles beside us, and a third destined to join them.
Phil took a long drink then passed the bottle to me. “I can’t do it, Eddie,” he said. His eyes were heavy, but otherwise he betrayed no sign of the fact that he was almost, as they say in the provinces, too drunk to fish.
“You gotta,” I repeated. We’d gone around this issue for nearly the entire three bottles, and I was at the end of my patience. “You’re only king because everybody acts like you are, you know.”
He ignored my stolen wit. “Could you do it?”
“I could if there was a good reason. Think about it, man. If you don’t let whoever did this think they’ve succeeded, then they’ll just try something else. This way, they’ll be off guard.”
He looked at me seriously. “Ed, that’s my wife you’re talking about.”
That made me mad, and yet again I almost told him about Epona Gray. Each time, though, Rhiannon’s words about love rang in my head, and somehow this made me keep it to myself. “Hey, y’know, you’re the goddamn king. You don’t want to take my advice, then I’ll just pack my stuff and go home.”
“C’mon, Ed, I’m serious.”
“So am I!” I was drunk enough to take his resistance as an affront to my professionalism. “You asked for my help, you know. I didn’t come bustin’ in here sayin’, ‘Oh, Phil, you must listen to me!’ I can go back to my old job and be quite happy.” I started to get to my feet.
“Whoa, man, sit down,” Phil said. He grabbed my arm and pulled me back hard against the chimney. “I didn’t mean anything by it, it’s just… how do I sentence my wife to prison when I know she didn’t do anything?”
I met his eyes as well as I could. “I wouldn’t say she hasn’t done anything. I don’t think she’s been honest with us, for one thing. But I’ll bet my left nut she didn’t kill your son.”
He took another drink. In a small voice I’d never heard from him before, he said, “I miss him.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
“Losing Janet was tough,” he continued. “And you’d think it would somehow, I don’t know, prepare me for losing P.D. But it didn’t.”
I took a long drink from the bottle.
“You ever think about her?” he asked me. “What she’d be like now?”
“Nope,” I lied.
“Think you would’ve married her?”
“Nope,” I lied again.
“Mom and Dad never blamed you, you know. Never. Neither did your dad.”
I stared at him. “You talked to my dad about it?”
“After you ran off, I felt bad for him. I used to visit him while he was sick before he died. He wanted me to tell you, if I ever saw you again, that he regretted all that stuff he said.”
“That a fact.” You failed to protect the goddamn princess of the goddamn country, he’d roared. If you’d died too, then maybe we’d have some dignity left, but you couldn’t even do that right. “Well, he always tended to speak before he thought.”
“Something I noticed you don’t ever do.” He took another drink. “What do you really think happened, Eddie? To my wife, to my son? Please, man.” The pleading was so honest it damn near broke my heart. I never expected to hear Phil beg anyone, let alone me, for anything.
“I think,” I said carefully, “that your wife knows more than she’s telling, and that someone from her past, from before you met her, is out to get her. I don’t know why they picked now, and I don’t know why they chose this particular way.” I took another drink. “And that’s why she has to go to jail. I have to do some poking around outside Arentia, and that may take a while. I need all the cover I can get. The best cover is to let whoever did this think they got away with it.”
“But I can’t even tell Ree.”
“ Especially not Ree.”
“She’ll think I hate her.”
“And so will everybody else, which is the important part. She has to believe it, or no one else will.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“As long as it takes me to find the answers, or at least find better questions to ask.” My sympathy got the better of me. “I’ll go as fast as I can, Phil. I promise.”
We stopped talking then, but kept drinking. Eventually we staggered downstairs, gave each other drunken hugs and stumbled off to our respective rooms. Mine kept spinning whenever I lay down, so I paced for a long time, trying to burn off enough buzz to get to sleep.
I snuck back out and made my wobbly way to the royal portrait gallery, where paintings of the Arentian rulers and their families had hung for generations. I wanted one look, just for a moment, to see if my memory had embellished itself or if she’d really been as beautiful as I recalled.
The gallery was dark, of course, since it was the middle of the night, but the moonlight shone through the huge windows and illuminated the paintings on the opposite wall. I’d entered on the far end, where the legendary founder of Arentia, King Hyde, began the progression. I quickly moved down to the most recent paintings.
And there she was. Dark hair cut shorter than was fashionable at the time, framing a face that was still a little too round to be striking. And yet she was still the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Never mind that she was a child when this was painted, barely two months before her death; I’d been a child, too. Both of us sixteen, full of the certainty of our own immortality. And the moonlight in the painted eyes seemed an especially cruel reflection of the trust I’d once seen in them, a trust I failed in the most horrendous possible way.
Hell, Janet, I wanted to say. I did the best I could. I’d do it all so much better now.
The painting was too high on the wall for me to touch. I stared at it for a long time, marveling at how accurately the artist had captured her smile, the cocky tilt to her head, the way she’d lean her weight onto her right hip as if readying for a scrap. We should’ve had a lifetime of scraps; but we never even had time for one.
I fell asleep fully dressed, and dreamed the worst dream ever, of Janet screaming for me to save her while the men who’d killed her laughed at me. I hadn’t had that dream in years, and hoped the wine would dull my head enough to avoid it now. I awoke in tears, but luckily no one was there to see it.
ELEVEN
I left Arentia before dawn, two days after my interview with Queen Rhiannon. I slipped out of the castle with the morning garbage detail, and waited at the dump outside town for an hour to make sure no one had followed me. My adversary, whoever he was, clearly had his fingers on a lot of spider webs. I wanted to make sure mine didn’t quiver.