It became so dense that Blanche had a hard time penetrating it. She couldn’t have said when she went from being a laundry maid of some distinction to the Queen’s last handmaid, but when she understood what Edmund and the apprentices planned, she had slipped out of Master Pye’s house in her plainest clothes—her hair covered in an old wimple. She’d watched older women often enough to pass for one, although it hurt her pride. She bent her back a little, and waddled a little, and bound her breasts so that they were flat against her, wrapped her blaze of bright blond hair in a piece of clean old linen, and was transformed from the magnet of every male’s attention into an old thing of no interest to anyone. It troubled her how quickly she could be ignored, as an old woman.
She spent Easter night in a shed next to the palace. She made it into the laundry without being questioned because most of the Guard was away fighting the Occitans, and it was from Goodwife Ross that she learned that some of the King’s Guard seemed… different.
Twice now she’d visited the Queen—she’d become a poor creature who seemed broken into madness, except when you looked into her eyes.
So—at any rate—on Tuesday morning, Blanche was pushing through the press of the commons with a basket on her head. The press was so thick she might never have gotten to the ring around the Queen except that one of the King’s Guard saw her and smiled.
“Let her through!” he called in a Hillman accent. “Here’s a woman come to serve the Queen. Let her through, with God’s good grace.”
And the commons moved aside like the parting of the Dark Sea, and Blanche slipped past them to the barrier around the Queen’s seat—ducked under it and came to the Queen.
She bobbed a deep curtsey. “Your grace?” she asked.
The Queen turned her head. Her eyes focused.
She smiled. “Blanche,” she said.
Blanche hadn’t been sure until then that the Queen even knew her name. She curtsied again. “Your grace, I’ve brought you soap, water and some food.”
“She hasn’t eaten in four days,” one of the King’s men muttered.
The Queen put a hand to her throat. “I might try… to eat,” she said huskily. “The sun—has been so kind—”
The guardsmen muttered among themselves. She looked so… crazy, Blanche thought.
She looked even worse as she began to eat, seizing a loaf of bread and ripping pieces from it. Blanche had eight thick slices of bacon from a guardsman’s fire and a slice of very questionable pie that had cost her a copper and a kiss. The kiss had been greasy, too.
The Queen tore through it with wolfish intensity, glancing up from time to time—like a dog, Blanche thought. Or something that feared a predator.
Blanche had a soldier’s canteen over her shoulder—a heavy object of fired clay. She’d stolen it, in the first outright theft of her life. She handed it to the Queen, who drank off the entire contents without seeming to breathe.
She looked at Blanche and her eyes narrowed a fraction. “You should run,” she said. “You’ve been seen.”
Blanche curtsied. “Your grace, I am here for you. You should know that—”
“Run,” said the Queen. “I will not have your blood on my head. Now.”
Blanche ducked under the barrier, abandoning the basket and the canteen. The Queen’s intensity communicated itself to her.
But the press was still thick—and there was shouting. Men were moving, and suddenly she had a lane, and like a flash—
She was caught. There were four of them, big men in the archbishop’s purple livery. They knocked her down.
One said something, and the other three laughed, showing a mouth full of blackened stumps of teeth.
She expected help from the crowd, and when the men in purple reached for her, she screamed, but the peasants were cowed by the armour and the spears. Black Teeth slammed the top of his head into her forehead, so that the world spun. He laughed and pushed her again.
Her wimple came off, her glorious yellow-gold hair blowing in the wind.
There were fifty of them, the purple spearmen. They’d killed a man, and the crowd fled them, leaving them alone like an island of stone in a rising tide. A woman was screaming, and another man was trying to hold his guts in with his hands.
Her head hurt so much she wanted to throw up.
“It’s the Queen’s little bitch!” laughed a Gallish voice. “I’d know that hair anytime.”
“It’s been on every pillow in the Guard’s hall, or so I hear,” said another.
Hard hands closed on her arms.
She screamed again.
“Secure the person of the so-called Queen,” ordered a new voice. “Who is this tall slut?”
“One of the Queen’s women—”
“So-called Queen’s women. A lady?” asked the voice. She got her eyes open. It was de Rohan—she knew him from the corridors. “I think not.” He nodded. “Bring her.”
“Why?” asked the archbishop. Blanche knew him, too. She’d never heard him speak, but there he was, young and fat as a capon, with short-cropped hair almost exactly the colour of her own. “What do we want with the slut?”
De Rohan sighed as if he was surrounded by fools. “Your excellency, in an hour or so, when we lead the so-called Queen to the stake…” He paused. “We may experience some difficulties with her, and with the canaille. I would love to have a lever with which to move the so-called Queen.”
Blanche was pushed along. Hands fondled her—she was bruised by a vise-like grip on one of her breasts as a dozen soldiers pushed her to where de Rohan stood. They laughed.
He laughed.
He was standing at the gate to the barriers around the Queen. Two rather sorry-looking guardsmen stood there—not, she would have thought, the men who had been there a few minutes before. Both were slack-jawed and slack-eyed—possibly drunk.
The Queen, on the other hand, looked considerably better.
“Madame,” de Rohan said. “Are you prepared to meet your fate?”
“Is it not rather the fate that you have made me, my lord?” she asked. “Nor is it yet noon—the hour appointed for my Champion.”
“Any time from the first hour after matins until the middle of the day, madame.” His arm suddenly shot out and he took Blanche by her ear—the pain was incredible. She screeched.
“Do you know this pretty slip, Desiderata?” he asked.
“Yes,” said the Queen, sadly.
“Good. If you’d like her to live out the day—and not be the bedfellow of my servants for the next few weeks, until her spirit is a little less brazen—then you will obey me.” He shrugged.
The Queen’s eyes were gentle pools of brown looking at Blanche’s. “This is low even for you, de Rohan,” she said. “And I suspect that no matter what I promise you will inflict your child-like will on poor Blanche, who is guilty of no crime but loyalty to me.” To Blanche she said, “You should have run, child.”
Blanche found that she was crying. She wanted to be strong—as strong as she’d been for a week—but she felt helpless and abandoned and she knew what was to come. She knew it, as every woman feared it, and she couldn’t keep her tears and despair at bay.
“How I hate you,” she managed to say to de Rohan.
He didn’t even turn his head. “I expect—” His warm hand found her jaw and his thumb was suddenly under her chin, probing deeply into the side of her neck until the pain made her rise on her toes and scream. “I expect you’ll hate me more later,” he said, dropping her. “To much the same effect, really.” He looked at Desiderata. “Women are too weak for any purpose but to make babies,” he added.
“And even when we do that, you kill us,” the Queen said. “You might want to look, my lord. Your doom is nigh.”
For the last half hour, the fog had been reduced to a blinding glare of haze. Now, with nonnes not far away, there was a sudden flash of metal and scarlet in the middle distance.
De Rohan looked a moment and gestured to the archb
ishop. “The so-called Queen is safe enough,” he said.
“The canaille would save her, if only to spite me,” the archbishop said. His chairmen grunted under him.
“We’ve dispersed them,” de Rohan said. “And caught the go-between the Queen used with her lover. Let’s go and tell the King.” He motioned to his own black-and-yellow-clad retinue, and then he moved toward the King with something like unseemly haste.
“Hurry, de Rohan,” Desiderata called, her voice fey. “Hurry to your end.”
Twenty of the purple guardsmen remained. They used their spear points on anyone in the crowd who came closer than a spear’s length to the barrier. Men cursed them, but none had the spine to resist them.
Amicia left the column as they rounded the last bend in the road. The lists were clear to see, even in the odd hazy light. The heat was stifling, the damp oppressive, so that in two layers of linen she felt she might wilt.
But she had Gelfred with her. He rode with her to an enclosure full of horses. There were two Royal Guardsmen there who seemed to think very little of his dismounting with a beautiful woman.
“You won’t be leaving this way,” he said. He smiled. “God be with you, my lady.”
She handed him her reins, bobbed her head, and began to walk towards the back of the royal box above the stands. There were a dozen Royal Guards here at the back, and a small mob of other liveries—servants in almost every conceivable heraldry, with trays and bottles and linen towels over their arms, and a double dozen of various soldiers all eyeing each other with malice.
Amicia entered her palace and began to work. It was a simple enough beguiling—few men wanted to stop a beautiful woman from going where she would, anyway, and those who would stop such a woman were even easier to dissuade, their lust a weapon with which to deceive them. Her beguiling was subtle and strong. She watched her body move over the grass, and saw them notice her and saw men smile, one to the other…
She passed the guards. Behind them were two sets of wooden steps into the royal box, equidistant to right and left. But under the box was a small chamber—a retiring chamber that Amicia suspected had been placed there so that the King could be moved out of sight—if required.
She passed into the chamber as if it was hers by right.
“Bless you, Gelfred,” she whispered.
She stood as close to directly beneath the King as she could manage.
She sighed. The wood was too dense, and blocked her aethereal sight completely, or at least too much for such a delicate working.
She passed back through the curtain, and past the guards. Men looked, and saw, or did not see, but now she passed among them, her will adamant, her face radiant.
One man sighed, and another groaned. But no one moved to stop her.
It was fifty paces to the end of the tall bleachers. She walked all the way, painfully aware that she had the eyes of a dozen men on her slim back. But no one shouted.
She passed the end of the bleachers. Out here, away from the pavilions and the enclosure for spare horses, the noise was greater. Above her in the stands, hundreds of ladies and gentlemen sat, eating morsels and drinking wine.
She turned and began to climb the steps. She climbed until she was parallel with the royal box. She could see a man in red who was probably the King, but long rows of people separated them, and his head bobbed back and forth.
The whole path from her position to the King was blocked with seated spectators.
She took a deep breath, and steadied her working. Then, to the first woman in the row, she said, “I’m sorry, I need to get to my father.”
The woman stood to let her pass, frowning.
“There’s someone coming,” her husband said. The man was short, and wide, and wore too much gold. “By God—it’s a whole team in red. Is it the King’s men?”
Amicia couldn’t help herself. She turned and looked.
Down at the entrance to the stands, fifty feet below her, there were ten knights and ten squires, all in brilliant steel armour—plate over maille, often edged in laten or bronze or brass.
She could see the Red Knight and the Green Knight, too. And Ser Tom.
The trumpeter was there as herald, dressed in the company scarlet with the lacs d’amour on his tabard.
Everyone in the stands was on their feet. Whether luck, fortune or God—she had her moment, and she scrambled along, no more interested in stealth, with the instinct of the pickpocket when a distraction is made available. She pushed and pressed almost recklessly.
The marshal strode across the lists. The crowd hushed.
Amicia pushed on.
The Red Knight’s herald raised his trumpet from his hip, and it unfurled with the white dove on a sun-in-splendor of the Queen.
The crowd roared.
The sound was so loud that it startled Amicia and she almost let her working fall. Her heart was pounding—
She wondered in the calm fastness of her palace what it was like to be in a closed helmet with nothing but the fear and all that sound, and all the hopes of thousands of people on your armour-burdened shoulders.
She reached out in the aethereal with her sight, and saw.
First she saw the Queen. The Queen burned like a small sun—bright gold, un-alloyed, undimmed. She was in a sort of pen at the base of the stands, and the wood of the barriers surrounding held a working on it—a curious and not particularly stable working.
Nearer at hand, she saw a group of men moving quickly—a young fat man with no talent whatsoever, and by his side a grey man who flickered with potency.
“Ah, yes,” she thought.
She glanced at the King, who was warded—ten times warded. He was covered in wardings, like a prisoner draped in chains. Amulets and sigils, runes and bindings were on him layer after layer. She had never seen anything like it, and suddenly—for the first time—she felt overmatched. For some reason she had expected a single, potent work—an internal mirror or a secret working that locked the target up as surely as a prison. Both Harmodius and the Abbess, in her head, remembered such working and had remedies.
But this tangle of cluttered thaumaturgy, with superstition, blind chance and careful science all mixed…
She looked again. It was like looking at the tangled remnants of a skein of linen after a kitten had attacked it.
Nor was she sure that the King’s will was in any way affected by it all.
He was merely… warded.
Nicholas Ganfroy had practised for a year for this moment. His trumpet rang out, loud and clear, piercing the tumult of the crowd.
Into his split second of crowd-silence, he roared the Red Knight’s challenge.
“He who styles himself the Red Knight bids defiance to any wight so craven as to pretend that the gracious Queen of Alba, high Desiderata, is other than the King’s own wife; loyal, faithful, and true. And he offers to prove this assertion on the body of any so bold in his blood or wanting in brains that will maintain her unfaithfulness, or will offer to exchange blows. And the Red Knight maintains he offers battle for no pride in his own prowess, but only to see justice done. And if no knight will offer to uphold the charges against the gracious lady Queen, the Red Knight demands her instant release by the law of arms, the Rule of Law of Alba, and also the Rule of War of Galle.”
Ganfroy’s lungs were as brazen as his trumpet, and he’d practised, shouting into basements and wine cellars. His words carried clearly.
There was obvious consternation in the royal stands.
Amicia was no more than an arm’s length from the Archbishop of Lorica, unnoticed in the press. The archbishop, and the Sieur de Rohan, had just returned, hurriedly climbing the steps to the royal box—Amicia was interested to note that the archbishop was already sweating. She had also marked the thin, threadbare man in the badly dyed scholar’s scarlet as a hermeticist—his person carried two wards and a sigil.
Amicia was an observant woman, and she noticed that he wore a third device around his neck??
?a complex net of thin strands of dirty linen. It held no power, but the King wore a similar such amulet.
“Send the guard and have him taken,” shouted the archbishop. His words were received with hoots and catcalls from all the gentry seated nearby.
De Vrailly was grinning as if he’d just won a prize. “It is the mercenary—the sell-sword. The Queen must have bought his services.” He shook his head. “I understand him to be a good man of his arms, and his harness seems good.” His handsome face split in a wide grin. “Ah, God is good! An answer to my prayers. God has sent him that we may have a fair trial.”
De Rohan was trying to burrow through the close press towards the King. “Your grace—your grace!” he called.
Amicia was six feet from the King, below him, caught up amidst the press of Galles and Albans who followed the court.
Someone groped her.
She ignored her assailant and entered into her bridge. There, she was interested to find, she wore the same kirtle in the aethereal that she wore in the world.
She found the King in the aethereal. She saw the welter and tangle of his protections and wards and curses and she bit her aethereal lip in frustration.
She prayed. And curiously, as she prayed, she thought of her Abbess, that towering figure of wit and good sense, power and character—the old King’s mistress, and a potent magister.
What would she have done?
Amicia moved her focus back, looking over the crowd around the King. She was looking for a link—a thread of gold or green that might connect any one of them to the King.
She didn’t see any such.
It was possible, of course, that the King was acting of his own accord. The Prior didn’t believe that though, and neither, apparently, did Gabriel.
She sighed, completing her prayer, and tried another tack. She looked at the King not as a hermetical practitioner, but as a hermetical healer. As her Order taught.
As quick as thought, she was praising God inside her head, and acting.