King Roland Osenni turned a frustrated face at Fiomarre and glared at him. “Enough! How dare you, Marquis!” he said. “You forget yourself. Your presence here is tolerated only as a favor to Her Imperial Highness. Your opinion is neither heeded nor wanted.”
Vlau bowed his dark head curtly before the King, then straightened and looked him directly in the eyes with an indomitable gaze. “I will not speak again. And yet—Her Imperial Highness cannot go out there alone. Indeed, she will not last up there long enough to say a single word!”
“Well, in that case I suggest you do something to make sure that she does!”
“I will stand at her side and shield her . . .” Fiomarre replied.
“Excellent! And now, be silent!” The King went furiously silent himself and then looked from one to the other, the young man and the dead young woman. His dark frown eased when he noted the tragic sunken eyes of the Infanta and the fragile look in them. “My dear child,” he said. “Again, I deeply regret the necessity of this, but we have run out of options. And so far we have not heard from either His Imperial Majesty, your illustrious Father, or anyone else whom we contacted for aid against the enemy.”
Claere nodded slightly, moving her delicate neck like clockwork. “There is no need to explain, I understand what is required of me.”
The King nodded. “Good, good. . . . I am glad you see the necessity behind this. For obvious reasons, Your Imperial Highness being as you are, there is hardly any chance of additional harm coming to you, and we will take all necessary precautions to keep you guarded, naturally. . . .”
“Yes, I thank Your Majesty.” Her voice was steady and gentle, with no indication of reproach.
And yet, the King felt a momentary crawling sense of cold draining his cheeks followed by a flush of chagrin, and he again considered her, this tiny slip of a girl-child, this pitiful thing, nothing more than a dead upright corpse—
“A carriage awaits downstairs,” was all he could mutter. “If you would take a few minutes to get ready, of course—”
“No,” she said. “I am ready now.”
And the Infanta threw a single empty glance at the Marquis Fiomarre, nodding to him. She then walked out of her chamber, following the King of Lethe and his guards.
His pulse racing wildly, Vlau Fiomarre came after her.
The ride through the city was brief and uneventful. The well-appointed royal closed carriage took Claere and her silent companion Vlau Fiomarre down the long driveway of the Winter Palace into Lethe Square and then along Royal Way lined with rows of filigreed brass street lanterns, and eventually through the winding lesser streets of Letheburg. There was little traffic other than the military convoys and formations of infantrymen moving to and from the city walls. There were also the endless carts carrying the wounded. . . .
Claere watched through the carriage window the nature of the fading daylight, a deepening blue of the sky as early evening came into being. Soon, the scalding golden glow and noise of flames from somewhere ahead, signaled the proximity of the city walls. When they arrived at the walls and the carriage stopped, she paused only to allow Vlau to take her gently by the arm and help her down onto the snow-swept ground of the pomoerium, the wide empty space just before the great walls began.
Overhead, the battlements were silhouetted black against a blazing red-gold inferno that was burning just outside of the city—it was their main line of defense.
The Infanta stood with her fabric shoes in the snow, her dead flesh knowing no sensation of cold, wearing only a light velvet cloak given her by the King to cover her thin plain dress. And she looked up at the crenellated tops of the parapets, the flickering torches, the shadows of running soldiers . . . all eerie wild movement, a constant roiling overhead.
Vlau Fiomarre stood at her side. His hand continued to hold her arm, to steady her, since as always her brittle dead body had a hard time keeping balance.
There were several guards accompanying them, and a pair of trumpeters. They came forward, with one captain ahead of them. The captain bowed before the Infanta, and in the thickening dusk she barely saw the liquid glitter of his eyes, the vapor curling on his breath, and his wary cool expression—for he was not particularly trustful of the dead, even the friendly ones, and yet it was perfectly understandable.
“This way, Your Imperial Highness.” The captain pointed at a narrow stairway that was carved directly into the wall, rising parallel to it all the way up. He started walking up the stairs, and the Infanta followed, with Vlau directly behind her. He had released her arm, but was close enough to be her shadow, and to catch her if she lost her fragile balance and started to fall.
It occurred to Claere that if she fell down those stairs, tumbling down many feet from any point along the rising stairway that had neither rails nor handgrips, she could simply lie there in the snow, feeling no pain, knowing only a possibility of broken limbs.
No, she told herself, I will not fall.
And Claere Liguon slowly and gingerly took each step up the slippery iced-over stones, until she had reached the upper landing.
Vlau, a few of the guards, and the royal trumpeters, came after her.
Up on the battlements, the blazing golden-orange inferno was terrifying. The crackle of the flames, the black stifling smoke, the stench of gunpowder and coppery tang of blood, all of it filled the senses.
Good thing she was dead and could sense any of it only through the distance of a thick veil of cotton. . . .
“This way.” The captain’s voice was gruff. He was moving along the walkway in front of her, stepping over and around seated wounded soldiers and fallen weaponry, past embrasures at which tired marksmen sat, holding longbows and dipping arrows into tar and pitch, setting them ablaze and then letting the arrows fly into the distance. Every few feet there were skirmishes as ladders were upturned and grotesque silhouettes of dead men tossed back over the walls.
They came to a wider area of the battlements just before a large bulwark.
Here the trumpeters moved forward, past a mess of overturned supply wheelbarrows and stacked kegs of gunpowder next to a stockpile of large round iron cannonballs.
“Wait here, Your Imperial Highness,” the captain said loudly, over the din around them. “But not too close to those barrels of black powder, they are flammable. Indeed, let us have you move in this direction, right here, yes—”
Claere obeyed, taking a few paces in the direction shown.
In the same instant there was a blast of trumpets directly behind her.
The two trumpeters of the King of Lethe lifted their regimental instruments and played a bright parade fanfare of extended major notes that was somehow more terrifying than the sound of the artillery fire or the crackle of the inferno below the walls. And then in the resulting momentary pause of silence, they raised well-trained heraldic voices to call out into the airy expanse:
“Ahoy there! Heed this now, Duke Ian Chidair, known as Hoarfrost! Cease fire and come forth to parlay with the Imperial Grand Princess of the Realm!”
Their voices rang with echoes and a well-practiced long range.
They repeated the parlay call three times at least, before a deep rude voice was heard in reply, coming from somewhere below, off in the distance of at least fifty feet. It seemed to be powered by bellows.
“So, the King of Lethe sends out a little girl to do his dirty work? Ahoy there, little girl!”
If Claere had a living heart, it would have been beating wildly right now. Instead, she made the effort to pull in the freezing air into her own lesser bellows of lungs, and then she stepped forward to look over the parapet wall at the chaos below.
Vlau Fiomarre immediately lunged forward to stand before her, blocking the outside, shielding her with his living body from view of the enemy.
But she put her hand up and placed it on his chest, and pushed him backwards slightly, away from the edge of the parapet. “No, Marquis . . .” she mouthed the words without remembering to u
se the held breath within her lungs to make her speech audible.
Vlau frowned but allowed himself to be directed backwards, and his handsome face, infernal in the firelight, was a study in repressed agony on her behalf.
Claere saw his look, but did not acknowledge it. Instead she turned her back on him with a strange proud movement that was both mechanical and somehow reminiscent of grace.
And she looked out past the parapet at the scene below.
At first glance there was almost nothing distinguishable, nothing to see past the raging wall of orange flames of at least twenty feet in height, and beyond it, the pitch black moving shapes of dead men—an infinity of them, crawling like ants before the walls.
And then she saw him. Unlike the others around him, he stood motionless, a giant, thick as a stump, with a barrel chest and a wild tangle of hair and beard, all of him frosted with ice and cast into demonic shadows by the flames.
“Duke Hoarfrost!” she uttered, and her voice creaked and broke at first, then became louder, stronger. “I am Claere Liguon, Grand Princess of the Realm and I am here to speak with you. Will you speak with me honorably?”
“What shall we speak of, little girl? Tea and biscuits? Terms of your surrender?”
“First, I would know what it is you want with this city.”
In response came a bark of mechanical laughter.
“I want to take it, naturally!” Duke Hoarfrost exclaimed.
“But why?” said Claere. “It is not yours to take.”
From below came more laughter.
“And neither is it his to keep! Letheburg falls to me now, little girl, because I will have it. And no living man or dead one shall stand before me! Tell that to the King who hides from me! Tell him, I will come for him and drag him by the beard through the streets of his city! I suggest you open your gates now, and spare yourself the trouble of the long and ugly siege! How much longer can you last? Your fuel will come to an end, your fires will go out, long before your measly food runs out, and then, what will you do? Because I promise you, by the time I am done with you, you will wish for a much quicker death!”
Claere pulled in a deep breath and replied. “I am dead already, Duke. And you are a villain, forsworn to your Liege Lord.”
There was a brief pause.
“Dead, you say? So, you are dead too, little Princess?” he said. “Ah, I see how it is! In that case, my sympathies to you on your own untimely demise. But it is not so bad now, is it? No more pain, no more needs, no troubles of any sort, eh? Come now, admit it, girl! We are better off this way, you and I!”
“If there are no more needs,” Claere said, “then why do you need Letheburg?”
“Ha-ha-ha! I like you, clever little Princess! Little Imperial whelp who would do your Emperor Papa proud! I see why old Lethe sent you here to talk, why you’re a sharp one, aren’t you! But clever words will not be enough!”
“Duke Hoarfrost, you have not answered my question.”
In reply, he suddenly roared. The peculiar mercurial change in his manner was terrifying. “Answer you? Answer you? Why should I do anything now? I am dead! A goddamned dead man, and so are all these poor bastards around me, and so are you! What answer needs there be but that we’re all dead, and death is everywhere and nowhere, and we are all rotting in our meat carcasses, biding our time—this extra impossible time given us—and I’ll be damned if I don’t take each precious fool moment and use it to the fullest! Now what say you to this, Your Imperial Highness?”
And suddenly several arrow shafts zipped through the air, one of them moving right past Claere’s head, a hairsbreadth away.
But the Infanta did not even flinch. The arrows clattered on the top of the battlements, and only Vlau’s startled exclamation a few steps behind her quickly cut short was any indication of their acknowledgement.
“No, no, damn you, don’t shoot!” exclaimed Hoarfrost, waving angrily at the archers in his ranks. “Don’t shoot just yet, boys, for the girlie and I are not done talking! Don’t want to make a pincushion out of her just yet—that can come later when we sack the city—”
“Your words are overconfident,” said Claere, looking in his general direction, looking down blindly into the fire and darkness below, because the rising pitch and black smoke were causing the film of ice on the surface of her frozen eyes to melt and cloud over, so that suddenly she could barely see anything. “Why are you so sure you will take Letheburg?”
“Ah, because I know something you don’t!” He cackled suddenly.
A strange cold sense came to her, moving inside, entering her past her thickness of cotton, past the layers of distance formed from the fabric of her dead flesh. Claere felt a strange pang, a moment of true fear.
“And what is it that you know?” she said, her measured voice ringing out brightly against the constant crackle of flames.
“I know that even now someone comes who will make sure that the gates of Letheburg fall open. . . . And once they do, the city is mine. It has been promised to me.”
“Who is it that comes?”
“Ah, but it is a surprise! You must wait and see, girlie!”
“I must do nothing of the sort,” Claere said. “You are bluffing. And even if you have reinforcements, so does the King of Lethe. My Father, the Emperor of the Realm is on his way here even now, and he will put down your rabble army—”
“And who is bluffing now, Your Imperial Highness? You know very well no one is coming—no one will rescue you. Your Emperor father has enough to occupy him, and soon, he too will fall! Death! Death will come to all of you, all of the others still breathing within these walls!”
“Why must there be death? Why must you persist in this evil? What happened to your oath and your honorable word given to serve the Realm?” Claere was speaking, but she knew with every word it was a lost cause.
“My oath?” the Duke roared. “My oath of allegiance to any mortal man has died alongside me! Enough blathering now, girl! Begone from your walls before I change my mind and rain some pretty fire of my own in your direction! Now, run to your coward King and tell him to expect guests very soon—the whole lot of us! Tell him to prepare a Great Feast!”
But she was no longer listening. Her hollow eyes dark with despair, Claere turned away from the edge of the parapets. She moved with awkward motions—her face glistening with the sheen of melting rime from the hot smoke that had been bathing her, but the joints of her body frozen stiff in those long moments she had been standing still—and she walked directly toward Vlau Fiomarre.
He stepped forward, reaching for her arm automatically, and his gaze was aflame. “Your Imperial Highness—you did all you could. . . .”
“Aye, that she did indeed,” said the captain who had brought them here. He had been silent all this while, together with the other soldier guards and the trumpeters. But now he gifted Claere with a look of honest approval.
“Yes,” said the Infanta. “I am done speaking with him. Take me back now.”
And the captain complied.
Back inside the Winter Palace, with the evening fully upon them, Claere and Vlau were delivered to the Infanta’s own quarters, and then the King returned briefly to hear what had happened between her and Hoarfrost. Claere spoke evenly, telling what had come to pass in as neutral a language as possible.
“Unbelievable! What a madman! He is a blackguard and villain indeed to have insulted Your Imperial Highness and the Imperial Crown so damnedly!” King Roland muttered. Shaking his graying head, he paced the room before her, helpless and impotent in his complex union of terror and rage.
“He is not going to relent, I am sorry, Your Majesty,” Claere said gently.
“No, he is not; yes, yes indeed, we see that now.” The King stopped pacing, rubbed his forehead. “As for the surprise he is referring to, it is of course the war with the Domain. We have received some terrible news this morning, carried by Imperial birds, news that the Silver Court has shut its gates and fortified its
own walls, and that the Sovereign of the Domain has invaded the Realm. Morphaea is razed and they have entered Lethe.”
“War? What—what is happening, then? What does that mean for Letheburg?” Claere’s attention focused for the first time.
The King glanced up at her with a gaze that did not fully meet her eyes. “I am afraid, my dear child, that Your Imperial Father may now be delayed and preoccupied at home, and Heaven only knows when any assistance from him can be expected. Unless Goraque comes to our aid, we are on our own.”
“I—see.” Claere uttered.
“Well, yes, then, and so it goes. Meanwhile, you have done well, Your Imperial Highness, as well as can be expected, out there. If any more news is forthcoming, you will naturally be informed.” The King ended the conversation, and then left them in a chamber having grown dark with evening, and not a single candle lit.
As soon as the last guard and footman exited, taking the candlelight with them, and the door was closed, Claere paused in the twilight and then again approached the window. There, the lights of Letheburg were a sprinkling of golden dots in the distance, and the sky was still not fully black but an interim shade between heliotrope and deep indigo.
Vlau stood silently, watching her slim silhouette.
“Marquis . . . it is late, and you should have something to eat,” she said suddenly, without turning to look at him.
“I—” he said, his voice cracking, for her words reminded him that he was indeed hungry and parched—or at least that he should have been, for he genuinely did not remember the last time he ate or drank at all. “I am not—”
“No,” she said. “You are.” And then, with one brief glance in his direction—and he saw only the glass reflection of her eyes while all else was silhouette—she moved to the side-table near the wall and rang the bell to summon a servant.
When a maid arrived a few moments later, somewhat startled by the summons, for in the last few days the servants had grown accustomed to the Infanta never seeming to require anything of them, Claere requested candles and a proper fire to be lit in the fireplace, and then a hot supper service “for the gentleman only.”