The prisoner was gone.
Surela stared at the empty cell and turned to the guards who’d led her into the catacombs, her guards, in her livery, men she’d been sure were at very least competent at their duties. “Has he been moved?”
“No, my Lady,” her guide said, his nervousness palpable. “He was here when last we were informed.”
She glanced down the corridor, hating the chill and the damp and the moisture that gleamed on the floor and made her small, tidy heels feel unsteady beneath her. “You there,” she said, spotting a priest in the Lord’s dark robes. “What has happened to the prisoner?”
“I cannot say, Your Majesty.”
“Cannot say?” she asked, astonished. “You deny knowledge to your own Queen?”
“Your Majesty,” he repeated, impassive. “It is not for me to say. The High Priest has sealed the matter.”
“Oh has he,” Surela said, lips drawing back from her teeth. “You may go.” To her guide. “We return.”
Her mind roiled with frustrations as they mounted the stairs leading back into the palace. Hirianthial gone! Where? Had Baniel killed him already? She had given him to the priesthood, of course—a mind-mage could not be suffered to live, much less one that consorted with mortals—but that was before she’d understood him to have knowledge that she needed. She wondered suddenly if Baniel had known about these things, and if that was one of the reasons he wanted his brother dead so quickly? She paused on the stairs, and her guards halted immediately, waiting on her pleasure.
A foreboding came to her then. “Take me to Liolesa,” she said to the guards. No, surely she was wrong… Hirianthial had been Baniel’s to dispose of, but the Queen—the former Queen, she reminded herself angrily—had been her prisoner. Baniel would not have touched her—
There were no guards waiting at the suite. She flung the door open and stared at the empty room. To search it would be futile, she knew; Liolesa was gone. But she ordered it done anyway and returned to her study while they worked, and there she brooded and grew more and more wroth until they delivered the inevitable report that the Queen was gone.
“Get me Baniel,” she hissed.
He arrived—in his own good time, she noticed—and by then she was so infuriated she didn’t even wait for the guards to close the doors before saying, “What did you do with her?”
“I beg your pardon, Your Majesty?” he said. How she hated his urbane manners and the cold green glitter of his eyes! Would it be worth it to throw him in his own cell for a while? Could she keep him there? Except then who would conclude the transaction with the mortals and send them away? She would have to sully herself with the arrangements.
“Where is Liolesa?” Surela said. “And Hirianthial? Or did you kill him already?”
“He was mine to kill.”
“This sidesteps my question. Where are they? Answer me!”
“Gone, Your Majesty,” Baniel said. At her expression, he finished, unperturbed, “Escaped.”
“Escaped!”
“Off-world, in fact.”
She stared at him, shocked that he could admit to this catastrophic failure with such equanimity. Did he truly think himself beyond punishment?
“That is all you have to say for yourself,” she said, the words black with anger. “You have allowed our enemies to escape—and to the mortal worlds, where they can gather aid and return to crush us—and you have nothing more to say? ‘They’re gone’? Really?”
“You are overwrought, Your Majesty,” Baniel said. “We are in no danger, I assure you.”
Despite herself, she felt a faint fascination at this continued evidence of his delusion. “Go on. I would like to hear how you have derived this conclusion.”
“They have gone to seek aid. But they will not find enough to win back the world.”
“And how is that possible? Do not these mortals have thousands of their own vessels?” she asked, trying not to grit her teeth.
“Ten vessels, a thousand, a million… the numbers are meaningless, Your Majesty, if they cannot be deployed.” He smiled. “It is a matter of mortal politics. I assure you I am well versed in them, and I can say with certitude that the Alliance will not have the resources to devote to our little… fracas.”
“And if you are wrong?”
“But I am not. Fear not, Your Majesty. I have the matter well in hand. Though if you like, I could educate you on the matter? I can send for our mortal allies and have them explain at length. I am sure they’d be pleased to meet a Queen, see a royal study. Drink sweet almond liqueur. Such opportunities come infrequently to people of their quality.”
The thought of letting such creatures into the palace proper made her shudder. Bad enough that they were presumably wandering the catacombs. And yet, to trust him with the entire future of her endeavor… what would it matter if she succeeded in winning Liolesa’s former allies to a sulky acceptance of her reign if the woman could return on some spacegoing warhorse and depose her? And too, the matter that Araelis had spoken of… she knew so little. They had consorted with mortals to make her coup possible, and to her all mortals seemed alike. Did that mean that these mortals were allied with the ones Araelis suggested were interested in pillaging their world?
Who had Baniel made his deal with?
Could he be trusted?
“Your Majesty,” he said, softening. “I know you are concerned. But I would not let harm come to you, when you carry all our hopes for a world free of the interference of mortals. Most of them will be departing this evening to protect our interests abroad. They will bar Liolesa’s way, I pledge you. Let me continue to be your obedient servant in this so that you need not soil yourself with the details.”
“Departing,” she said, wary. “Do they mean to return?”
“Only once, to collect their pay. I cannot pay them of course until they fulfill their contractual duties. These mortals can be led by their love of money, Your Majesty: dangle it before them, and they are completely predictable. No, they are well in check. They will take care of Liolesa and my brother, and then they will come for their money, and then they will be gone and we may continue in peace.” He tilted his head. “What will you do about the rebellious Houses?”
“I will have a talk shortly with the Delen Galare,” Surela said. “And after that…” She looked out the window. “We will see. I may ride forth to demand allegiance from them.”
“And the hostages?”
“They are not hostages,” she said, irritated. “They are guests… guests, until they see reason.”
“Your guests, then,” he said, inclining his head. “Will they be staying?”
“What else? It’s the winter court.” She eyed him. “Almost I think you would have me kill them. Do all men have this bloodthirstiness? Is it inherent to the sex?”
“Oh, I would never suggest such a thing,” Baniel said. “Surely your way is the best.”
“Yes,” she said, still considering him. “Very well, then. You may go.”
“Your Majesty,” he said, bowing. “Thank you for the opportunity to assuage your fears.”
“Keep me better informed, Baniel. This is a command, not a suggestion.”
“Of course.”
She watched him go, uneasy. Her enemies hated her, of course, and would lie to her at any opportunity; she did not put it past Araelis to do such. But she began to wonder if Baniel was as much her ally as she’d thought. It had not escaped her that he had preferred to address her as ‘Your Majesty,’ which was a less intimate title than ‘my Lady,’ when traditionally the Queen was everyone’s liege-lady. Was this subtlety a rejection of his relationship with her… and the duties that came attendant?
Surela sent for Thaniet and a meal and went to sit before the fire and weigh her options. None of them seemed very appealing.
The coat the Tams had supplied Reese with did a good job of insulating her from the chill, but very little to shield her from the strangeness of feeling it outdoors. The Earthrise’s dry, recirculated air, vacuumed clean of any smell, had been artificial, something she could control. It was an entirely different experience to stand outside and know that she couldn’t wish away the weather. That it was moving according to some magical collection of variables that planets had and she didn’t understand well enough to predict. That it had a smell—floral and briny and wild—and a texture—moist and clinging—and that it would continue to have, and be those things no matter what one small human woman decreed.
Ordinarily, she would have found the idea appalling. But somehow she still liked the Eldritch world. She liked listening to the surf in the distance. She liked the crazy ramble of unlikely-looking roses. She liked the intransigence that seemed bred into the bones of anything that had to do with the species. Her crew would laugh, but it made her feel a little bit related to them; stubbornness, even in the face of approaching disaster, was something she could appreciate. Reese petted one of the flowers, finding the petals silky until the cold numbed her fingers, and then she hid her hands away in her pockets again.
And then there was the sky.
What had Hirianthial called it? Io… gev… something. The sacred caul. She stared up at it and wondered where he was, and Liolesa, and the rest of her crew.
“My Lady is melancholic.”
“Am I your lady?” she asked, waiting for Val to draw up alongside her.
“Point,” he said. “I have not offered and you have not accepted. But I like you, Lady Eddings. I haven’t met a human before. You have a presence.”
“Oh, do I.” She eyed him.
He laughed. “And you are unconvinced. That’s fine. I don’t expect otherwise.”
“Are you out here alone?” she said. “Did they really let you wander off like this?”
“Oh no. Yon tigress is following at what she believes to be a discreet distance.” He smiled crookedly. “Her thoughts are very busy with a fierceness of devotion.”
Reese smiled at that. “Yeah, I’m not surprised. So why did you follow me out?”
“To ask you to please make the attempt,” he said, surprising her with his sobriety. “I would very much like to help you.”
“You have a debt to repay,” she guessed.
“I do.”
She looked out over her castle—her castle! And said, “How do you say it? The roses. What are they called?”
“Me’enia,” he said. “Say each vowel separately, Captain… most of our words are that way. Meh eh nee ah. Roses. But these are special. They are lioyasea, white roses, the roses of sacrifice. They bloom only in winter, the cruelest season, and grow only by the coast where there are storms. And it’s said they were born of Elsabet’s blood when she died here.”
Reese looked at him. “Is it true?”
He cocked a brow at her.
“You know. If you’re the reincarnation of Corel. You’d know. Right?”
He smiled a little and leaned toward the nearest vine. With a twist of his hand he broke the branch off and presented her with the flower. She noticed a drop of blood on the side of one finger where a thorn had dragged through the skin. “We have to make our own legends sometimes.”
She took the flower, mindful of the thorns. “It’s dangerous.”
“Picking the roses?” he said—misinterpreting her willfully, she was sure. Wasn’t he? “Of course. But if you don’t try, then you have no rose.”
“You can leave them out here to grow on their own, and enjoy them from the nice, warm keep,” she said dryly.
“Ah, you could. But then you couldn’t smell them, wouldn’t feel the rush of having picked something yourself, and conquered your fears. What’s a scratch, after all, compared to that?”
“On a world with no real medicine?” Reese snorted. “A scratch could be worth your life.”
“Even on a world with medicine, death comes to us, and rarely expectedly.” He smiled. “And sometimes it doesn’t, no matter how intently you wish it.”
She glanced at him sharply, but before she could speak she heard Taylor calling. “Reese! Reese!”
“What is it?”
The foxine joined her, her breath coming in white pants in the deepening gloom. “It was Malia. They’ve gotten a coded burst: the pirate ship’s left!”
“Left!” Reese’s skin went cold. “They went for reinforcements.”
Irine joined them as Taylor said, “They must have. And we’re not sure when they’ll be back but we’ve got our window. If we want to get in there now, while there are fewer of them to fight….”
Reese clenched her free hand, far too aware of the thorns on the rose she held with the other. Crazy world, to have things like this in it. Gardens and renegades and too many challenges and a climate she couldn’t control and a future she couldn’t predict. And yet… hadn’t she already made the commitment?
“Tell Malia to come on through,” Reese said. “We don’t know how long we’ve got, so let’s not waste any time.”