“How did she get my pattern?”
“She obtained something of yours somewhere, somehow, perhaps at court: a few hairs from your brush, perhaps. A napkin you had used to wipe your mouth at dinner. That’s all it would have taken.”
“But you helped me defeat it!”
“I can’t explain that. Perhaps the machine she used is faulty. It must be very old. The ones we found in Tingawa were very old. Or perhaps she did not understand how to use it correctly.”
They had not known then that the machine had made copies. They had not known then that defeating the duchess once meant nothing—they would have to defeat her hundreds of times.
When they learned this, Precious Wind had cried, “We can defeat it again. You can go back to Tingawa! Far enough she can’t follow you.”
“Xulai has to be here! Everything says she has to be born here and live here. I stay here for Xulai. She is too important to us to do anything else.”
Still, they had fought. They found things to disrupt the vortices. If the princess mixed her saliva with the blood of a chicken or the foam from the back of a horse, then applied this mixture to the back of a mirror, then bits of that mirror set in windows attracted the vortices and the varying patterns in those mirrors trapped them, weakened them. When the mirrors were melted, the energies were dissipated, that copy was defeated. Even different genetic patterns could distract them. A sprig of yew the princess had breathed on, a line of chalk she had held. The patterns could be weakened by those who had some understanding of what was happening, but they could not be stopped without the machines. They could not stop the duchess without risking Xulai. They could never risk Xulai.
Nor could they learn anything about the duchess except what everyone knew: The duchess was Mirami’s daughter, Falyrion’s daughter. She had been given the duchy by the king. They could learn nothing about the Old Dark House except what everyone knew: The Old Dark House had been owned by the Old Dark Man. He was not there anymore. He had been there when Mirami was a child, but he had gone away or died. He had been called a wizard, a monster, a vampire. People had feared him and still feared him even though the Old Dark Man must have died long, long before Alicia was born.
In Tingawa it was said that the Old Dark House must be totally destroyed, burned to the ground with every device that could be found within it. That would certainly be done, some way, some time. But not today.
Here at the Vulture Tower, Precious Wind had learned nothing new; she had only verified assumptions she and the princess and Justinian and Lok-i-xan had made long ago. There were still riddles piled upon riddles, and it was not a conundrum Precious Wind could solve now. Her story to the abbot and the prior required that she spend at least two days more away from the abbey, and it would be wise to stay somewhere other than the Vulture Tower. If she could get archers here in such a short time, she might send them with the thing, the vortices, to go looking for Jenger. If they searched for cells of his body, there would be plenty of them where the mirror was now. Her own hair was, as usual when she was on a mission, tightly braided, smoothed down with oil, and covered. Long hair was a disadvantage in combat and a disadvantage if any hair, long or short, fell into Alicia’s hands. Precious Wind had worn gloves and used her handkerchief to hold things. She had not put her mouth to anything. She had not used the privy. She carried a little folding shovel among her supplies and was neat and hidden as a cat about her own droppings. She remembered her surprise at Xulai hiding the privy, that morning when they left Altamont lands. Who had taught her that? Well, it didn’t matter. The only cells anyone had left in the Vulture Tower had been Jenger’s, and possibly the bowmen’s. Jenger, so far as Precious Wind could see, was nowhere to be found.
In the wagon inside the dilapidated house hidden in the forest south of the abbey, Abasio was tending to Xulai. She had worn the library helmet almost constantly for the last several days, and he had to take it away from her from time to time to be sure that she ate something. Each time, she seemed better, less haunted by whatever it was that had happened. He had decided he would wait and find out what had happened to her from the helmet itself rather than make her talk about it. He had done so, finding the memory but not the truth hidden in the memory. She didn’t know what she had done. She couldn’t remember what she had done. Ollie could not help him. Understanding would have to wait.
Xulai had asked for his sewing kit and made some arrangement with her clothing before letting him wash the things she had been wearing. In between feeding and cosseting Xulai, he carefully copied a map from a book the librarian had loaned to him, a large book, unsuitable for carrying on a horse. He also made over Jenger’s horse, giving it a shorter mane and tail and some large white spots on the chest and forehead. Doing it right took time, for he actually bleached the hairs rather than merely painting them. Blue was now black, which he deeply resented but understood. One afternoon, Abasio rode him south to fetch the mule he had bought, leading it back to the hidden wagon. As soon as Xulai was fit to travel, he wanted to be on the way south, and since he might have to stay off the road, it would be a slow journey.
He still had two pigeons and a sizeable sack of grain, but he couldn’t carry the birds on horseback, so he’d release them before he left. Perhaps it would be a good idea to send a couple of misleading messages in the meantime, and he spent time composing these, sending them two days apart. One, directed to Wordswell, said, truthfully, that Xulai was recovering from the shock of her abduction and asked him to send that information on to Hallad, Prince Orez, at Woldsgard. Winger would read it first, of course, but that was no matter. It would get to Wordswell and so would the message to the prince.
The next message, to the abbot, said Xulai was being sent to Woldsgard under the protection of men sent by Prince Orez. That would confuse whoever saw it.
The morning after the last message had been sent, they set out, two men on horses, leading a pack mule, one of the men quite young. The older man had reddish hair and a short beard and mustache; he rode a black horse with white blotches. His name was Bram. The younger man wore a large cap of a kind often worn by farm people of the area. His name was Chippy, and he rode a plain black horse. In midmorning, they met a group of riders coming from the east, a couple of traders and their families on their way to Merhaven with a number of hired men along as guards. Bram, being charming, received an invitation for him and his shy young brother to join them.
Chapter 7
The Old Dark House
The archers returned to the Old Dark House by the same route they had taken earlier, arriving early in the morning. The duchess had been watching the road from the tower, and she met them in the forecourt of the castle. Their leader dismounted and bowed deeply.
“We didn’t find him, ma’am. He wasn’t in the tower, and we didn’t find him anywhere near it. His horse was gone. The birds were gone, except for the ones that home there—”
“The prisoner?” she demanded.
“We didn’t see a prisoner, ma’am. We didn’t see any sign there’d been a prisoner. No sign of food or blood or . . . anything in the cell, ma’am. Usually, if there’s a prisoner, shackled, there’ll be . . . like . . .”
“Piss,” she said. “And stink.”
“Nothing there, ma’am.”
She glared. “Did you search the area, look for a body?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am. First thing we did. We didn’t have the manpower to make a search over all the forest, but we took a good look everywhere nearby. We found some old bones on a little shelf below the tower where he maybe gutted and butchered a deer, but the bones were just bits, brown, chewed. Nothing that looked human.”
“You brought back everything?” she asked in a razor-edged voice.
He said placatingly, “Everything but the furniture and the birds, ma’am. We didn’t have cages for the birds or a wagon for the furniture, but we can go back and get them at once if you want us to.”
“No,” she snapped, thinking that so
meone else would have to occupy the tower and the birds could be fetched then. It did not occur to her, as it had not to the archers, that caged birds would have no one to feed or water them in the meantime.
“Just carry the sacks downstairs for me.”
So they did, down the crooked flight of stones into a kind of anteroom where there was nothing to see, though the archers pointedly looked only straight ahead. No one worked for the duchess without quickly learning that curiosity killed in the Old Dark House. When they were gone, she emptied the sacks onto a workbench. A few items of clothing. Supplies for messages: papers, pens, ink, the little tubes the messages went in. A sack of food: dried meat, cheese, a few bottles, some stale bread. His personal things. A comb, a brush with several of his hairs caught in the bristles. Well. Upstairs in her bedroom she had several of Jenger’s hairs. He had left them on her pillow, and she had saved them carefully. These were fresher. She would use these.
She unlocked the door to the room with the machines and went to the fatal-cloud maker. The angled receptacle went in with a tiny click, and she noticed once again how much the receptacle resembled a skull, rounded on one side, angled like a jaw on the other, with a row of little protrusions that looked like teeth. This always amused her. When the device had finished and extruded its cylindrical capsule, she stroked it for a few moments. It had been foolish of Jenger to run from her. His horse had gone, so obviously he had run from her. Well, between her seeker and cloud machines she could deal with Jenger no matter how far he had run. Unfortunately, she would have to use the seeker to find Jenger before she could use the capsule. But then she said to herself, “Vengeance deferred is often sweeter! The capsules will keep almost forever!” The Old Dark Man had told her that a long time ago, his own bony and deep-set eye sockets seeming bare and empty as a skull.
In one corner of the secret room, behind a huge square pillar, the Old Dark Man had lined a stone cubby with narrow shelves on which his “very important books” had been ranged. The cubby was too small for him to enter, but his huge hands at the ends of his long, ropy arms could pluck out whatever book he needed. When Alicia had come to the Old Dark House as its owner, she had found the book alcove empty. It made a perfect repository for her most precious things, however, and the cubby was not too small for her slender body. She went there often to admire and caress her memorabilia: her father’s gold ring with the sapphire seal lying upon a tiny satin pillow; a lock of his hair; a tiny ivory easel with a miniature of the duke Falyrion in gilded armor on his favorite horse. She had taken the ring from his finger while he lay in his coffin, his initial carved into the seal inside a ring of laurel. The lock of his hair was tied with a bit of the ribbon that had trimmed his shirts. He had given it to her when she asked for it. The miniature was a copy of a large portrait that had hung in the hall at Kamfelsgard. Mirami had been away at court when Alicia had hired a traveling artist to paint the miniature, paying for it with a ring she had stolen from Mirami’s jewel chest, a ring Mirami had never worn and had never missed once it was gone. Beside these things, she kept a book she had made when she was only six or seven, several stiff pages of pressed flowers and leaves from the hidden place above the pool where her father swam and a linen undershift he had worn against his skin. She had taken it from his room long before he died. She believed it still smelled of him. He had given her the little gifts on the same shelf: a brooch, a lace shawl folded into a neat packet.
On the shelves below were other things, necessary but ordinary things: a bottle of ink and a few writing brushes; the written instructions for using the slaughterer, the seeker, the mirror maker, and the sender; a card with the key-code for the doors written on it, in case she forgot; a shallow tray that until recently had held a dozen copies of the cloud she had made to kill the princess. Once she knew the princess was dead, she had thrown them away. Now she labeled Jenger’s capsule with a J, dipping a brush into ink to do so, and placed it in the tray. If she ever made any capsules for other people, it wouldn’t do to get them confused.
When the Old Dark Man had brought her there as a child, not only these shelves had been packed with books, but there had been hundreds more in the rooms upstairs. When she returned there from Ghastain after becoming the Duchess of Altamont, she had been able to get into the room without trouble. She had remembered the key-code that let her open the door. She could swear no one else had been in that room, but all the books had been gone. The devices had still been there: the slaughterer, the seeker, the mirror maker, the sender—though that disappointing device was useless now. There were other devices here, of course: the big machine in the corner that watched her through its red eyes, the one that showed her where her servants were, their lights shining in the dark, their innards making small, satisfied noises: click, whiz, purr. All of them had been there. The doors had still been tightly locked, no one had disturbed the place, but she had found no books in the Old Dark House at all.
Mirami didn’t have them. Mirami hated the Old Dark House; she had never come there after the Old Dark Man had died. Besides, Mirami did not care for books, and Falyrion’s books, her father’s books, were of a different kind. He had collected books about battles and hunting and the keeping of game and dogs and horses. He had some about swordplay, too. Fencing. He had been an excellent swordsman. Alicia had wanted to learn the skill, but he had told her no, it was only for boys. Girls needed their beauty, he said. Men were only made more interesting by a few scars, but it would never do to have her pretty face scratched and ruined.
Her father had no scars, but he was wonderfully interesting even without them. He was beautiful. His hair was sun gold, his eyes were sea blue, his skin was copper, all over, face, body, legs, arms. Those were his colors, the ones he wore, gold-and-copper-plated armor and a blue and gold tabard and blue trappings on his horse. He was tall, and strong, and wore wonderful clothing with lace and jewels on it. He rode like a . . . like a centaur. There had been instructions for making a centaur in one of the Old Dark Man’s books. Half-man, half-horse. She was glad her father was only man. When he and his men went swimming, they stripped from their clothes and Alicia, hiding in the glen above the pool, could admire his body. Falyrion’s body was beautiful. All men were made alike, all men thought their pricks were beautiful, Mirami said. It might be true that they thought that, but it wasn’t true in fact. They had the same parts, maybe, but the parts could be ugly or beautiful and the assemblage of all the parts of a man could be very, very different from one man to another. There was no man in the world as beautiful as her father. Each time she came into this closet she felt again what she had felt when she lay there in the grass above the pool, wondering what it would be like to be held by her father without all his clothes in the way—without all their clothes in the way.
She had always known that Mirami killed people. She had not known Mirami was going to kill Falyrion. She would have warned him if she had known, but she hadn’t known. Mirami had poisoned him. She poisoned people all the time. People who were in her way. People who offended her. She had many different poisons. The Old Dark Man had taught her about them when she was young. She knew poisons that couldn’t be detected, poisons that had no smell, poisons that would lie inside one for days before acting, poisons that would simply stop the heart and others that would weaken people and take whole seasons to kill them. And when they died, Mirami was never there, never anywhere around.
Mirami had poisoned Alicia’s father, and when Alicia learned of it she had shut herself in her room for days, raging, weeping. At last she had calmed herself by remembering the Old Dark Man’s words about balancing the accounts. She stopped grieving for her father where anyone could see her. She was mute. She listened politely when Mirami told her what the family business was. Mirami said she had killed Falyrion because she and Alicia and Hulix were destined to take all the lands of Norland that didn’t belong to the king and give them to the new king, who would be Mirami’s son and a new brother for Alicia! To do that, howeve
r, Mirami had first to marry the current king and bear him an heir. And, to do that, she had to be a widow.
But they would then be the mother and sister of the king of Ghastain! Mirami said it as though she were giving Alicia a present.
Alicia had listened to all this, not only to the words but to the voice, the tone. Her father’s death was in the words. Her own death was implicit in the tone. Raging at Mirami might well have meant her own death; Alicia did not want to die, so she did what the Old Dark Man had told her to do—nothing. She had been unresponsive, which Mirami had not understood at all.
“Aren’t you excited at the idea of ruling a great country?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You don’t show it.”
“I think maybe it’s better if I don’t. Show it, I mean. You don’t want people to know about your plans, do you? So I shouldn’t look . . . excited, should I?”
Mirami had given her a long, thoughtful look. “No, Alicia. You’re quite right.”
Mirami had been giving her long, thoughtful looks ever since, but Alicia had managed to stay out of real trouble by staying as far from her mother as she could. She and her mother had gone to Ghastain as soon as Hulix became Duke of Kamfels. It wasn’t hard to stay away from Mirami in Ghastain. Mirami spent most of her time at court, where she would be seen by the king. The king liked to have something going on all the time, festivals, and parades, and dramas, and tableaux. The king liked to get dressed up; Mirami liked to get dressed up; being dressed up meant endless hours with wigmakers, dressmakers, jewelers, and shoemakers, looking in mirrors. They both liked to look at themselves in mirrors, and they found endless fascination in trying things on, so it was easy for Alicia to be otherwise occupied. After her mother married the king, it was even easier. Alicia had her own quarters, her own maids. And then Rancitor was born, and as soon as he was weaned from his wet nurse, Alicia decided she would be his friend. The Old Dark Man had told her that friendship was even better than love as a way to use someone, so she made a friend of Rancitor, and he loved her, more and more the older he got, especially when she started teaching him some of the more pleasurable things the Old Dark Man had taught her. Rancitor did not mention these things to others, because it was a secret. And when he was six (without telling Mirami, because it was a secret) he asked the king to give Alicia the title to Altamont.