| |
Ari had been lied to. This wasn't a dinner; it was a political summit and costume ball rolled into one.
Celeste directed her to a chamber floored in polished marble that shone like ice and decked in chandeliers of witchlights that changed color in slow waves of pastels. It was filled with people. So. Many. People. Wearing more velvet than any one room should contain. Their voices rose and fell in a steady buzz. Ari froze as dozens of faces turned in her direction.
She picked out Captain Gorva on sight by the way he wore his uniform and the brilliant blue sash layered over it. Cylian's colors. Clustered around him were others in varied military dress with the same ramrod straight posture. They were the first to turn at her entrance and also the first to disregard her and return to their own conversations.
Celeste was right. There was something unlikable about Gorva. Ari couldn't say exactly what it was, but she distrusted him on sight. Maybe it was his ridiculous mustache. It made him look like a villain in a cartoon.
Not far from Gorva's entourage stood Virgil, still elegantly robed, still elegantly frowning, ringed by even more elegantly robed people, a few of whom seemed to be elegantly frowning at her for diverting Virgil's attention. Ari wondered how much of their talk was court gossip and how much was heavy handed flirting. She guessed it to be an even split. She hated to admit it but Virgil had turned into an attractive man. He knew it. Everyone else knew it too.
Good for him at least.
With a quick wave, Ari turned in the opposite direction and attempted to disappear into the scenery, blending with the potted plants and marble pillars. Virgil's glare burned through her back. She ignored him harder. The dress he'd sent was ungodly uncomfortable. The high neck hadn't stopped itching since Celeste laced it up. That alone merited spite. Virgil knew how much she hated dresses and parading around. Cylian had tried to get her to do it once before and she'd barely held in the urge to punch him, mostly because she wasn't very good at punching. Swords were more her thing.
She was saved from any great need to socialize now by the chime of a bell which hung from the ceiling. Ari looked up. A little invisible hand squeezed down on her appetite. Virgil had done something to alter its appearance and probably its purpose, but there was no hiding the Iron King's hand in the construction of the dark metal bell. His magic ran through it like black ivy. She had seen similar bells scattered about the castle town and grounds. They looked like alarm bells, but she had never heard them ring before.
The chime sounded again as the announcement of dinner was made. Guests filtered out of the room. Ari gave the bell overhead a wide berth as she followed as though it might drop down and devour her. Which was silly. Probably. But Ari had learned to be cautious around magic she didn't understand. Nothing qualified as much as the constructs of the Iron King.
The head of the table sat empty, awaiting Cylian's return, with Virgil seated at his right hand and Ari to the left. Cylian's chair was larger than the rest, the back carved with his crest and dotted with flecks of gold leaf. The velvet cushions were worn in the shape of his absence, the arms polished by his touch.
Virgil stood, sweeping a long sleeve back with grace as he lifted his glass in one hand. "To the King's eternal health. Long may he reign," he said in a clear voice. The toast echoed along the tables as glasses were raised and quickly drained. It had the mechanical cadence of long practice, all ritual and no feeling.
Ari studied the faces visible from where she sat. No one seemed concerned by Cylian's absence. Gorva dabbed soup from his mustache before leaning in to whisper something in a fellow's ear. Decorated nobles gossiped. Someone hid a laugh behind their napkin, their eyes straying to Virgil, oblivious at the head table. Who among them would actually mourn Cylian? Would any of them? Or would they let him wither away in his cursed sleep and consider it the regular working of things?
***
"AT THE SPEED WITH WHICH you were eating I feared you might choke. Are you on your way to a clandestine affair or might you have a spare moment to speak with me?" Virgil asked, interrupting any hopes Ari had of escaping the hall unnoticed after dinner. "You've been avoiding me."
She spun to face him. "Yep."
"Well. That was a much shorter answer than I was expecting. Usually people feel the need to explain themselves to me."
"That's because you're Mr. Fancy Robes with your flashy magic and I bet you've threatened to turn at least a few of them into toads."
"I keep telling you, Ari, there's no spell for that. And even if there were, amphibian transmogrification sounds like an incredible waste of resources."
"That's because you lost your sense of humor. And if you must know, I'm avoiding you because I'm mad at you." And if there was a layer of guilt down there at the bottom, he didn't need to know about that. Not before his spy network caught up with her. "You set me up with that trip to the dungeons. You knew he wouldn't tell me anything and you made me go anyway."
"I didn't know for sure—" he began but stopped at the look on her face "—though I suspected."
"He offered to send me home."
She'd surprised him. His eyes went wide and for one second he didn't say anything at all. When he finally found words all he said was, "Oh."
Ari folded her arms over her chest. "And I believe he can do it."
"We should speak somewhere more private."
"Then lead on."
They ended up in a disused room full of old scrolls and a complicated looking globe which bore an impressive coating of dust just like everything else in the room.
"What is this place?" Ari spun the globe and her finger left trails of bright color in the dust layer. All the continents were unfamiliar. Callaria was an odd shaped blob. If it hadn't been for the familiar triangle of the Torlahn Range, the Frosted Lake, and the castle (marked with a tiny, gold flourish instead of a dot) she wouldn't have known which it was. She bent close to look at the names on the other continents and groaned. The spoken language might be the same here but the alphabet was most definitely not. It was so easy to forget. She jabbed a finger at a spot on the globe. "What's this one?"
"Thelon."
"It looks mountainy. I didn't know Callaria was practically an island." She walked the distance from the castle flourish to the nearest ocean with her fingers, wondering how many miles it was. "Do you even have a navy?"
Virgil nodded. "We do. And it was once the terror of the seas, but that was long ago. Before the war. Things are handled much more diplomatically now. Much less cannon fire than in the old days. Though the paperwork is less exciting, I imagine."
"Oh, I'm sure." Ari eyed him. "You seem to like playing King's Wizard. I thought you wanted to be an adventurer."
"I did my adventuring with you, Ari. And do you know what I realized?" He flicked a finger and the globe spun beneath her touch, spinning, spinning, as if under its own power instead of his invisible one. She pulled her hands away. "I didn't enjoy it, the danger, the scrounging day to day. I like it here. No more worrying about my next meal or running because I stole from the wrong person. After Cylian I am the highest law. Someone else washes my clothes and darns my socks and I haven't had to prepare so much as a cup of tea in years. I can barely even remember what it felt like to go hungry. Why would I give that up?"
She watched the globe do another full rotation. A whole world of places that she had never heard of.
"Aren't you going to ask me about what the Iron King and I talked about? His offer?" she asked when Virgil did nothing but spin the globe from across the room. Show off.
Virgil shook himself out of whatever reverie he'd fallen into. "Ah. Yes. That. Did you accept it?"
There he went, testing her resolve not to smack him. "Of course I didn't, Virgil. What the hell kind of question is that?"
"It's a logical one." His dark eyes measured her in the still room. There was no judgment there. "Were I in your position I would have given it some thought at the very least."
And just when she thought he couldn't shock her anymore. "What? Really?"
He raised an eyebrow. "You made your feelings on the matter perfectly clear earlier, just before you attempted to break my crystal. So, no, I wouldn't fault you for considering your options."
"Still..." Ari shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable with the idea. She hadn't planned to take the offer, but the more Virgil talked about betraying them to the Iron King as though it was a legitimate choice the guiltier she felt. Feelings probably weren't supposed to work that way.
Virgil smiled. "What else did the Iron King say to you? Did he seem at all surprised by your presence?"
The change of topic caught her off guard. She had to replay the question in her head before it made sense. "How am I supposed to know that, Virgil? He seemed... menacing." Her brow furrowed. Menacing and yet oddly compelling. Maybe that was a byproduct of having all that magic in his veins. "But no, not particularly surprised. He said he knew why I was here. But did he say that because he really knew or because he wanted me to think that he did? He wasn't exactly making a whole lot of sense."
Virgil nodded. "Anything else?"
She began to lean back on one of the shelves of scrolls but thought better of it when she remembered the dust carpeting everything. "I told you: nothing. A little rambling. A joke at my expense—that was a low blow by the way. If he knows anything he's not going to tell me. That's why you should've gone. Does he even know about Cylian? You said it was a secret, but it seems like no one is surprised that he's not around."
"It is and they wouldn't be. Cylian was rarely social and he withdrew even more after—well, suffice to say, the only way the Iron King, or anyone else for that matter, should know anything is if they're directly involved. The Guard are sworn to utmost secrecy. I would know if they had broken their word."
"You know, it's really creepy when you say it like that."
"That is the point."
"Well, if the Iron King isn't involved, who's your next suspect? And who brought me here? Do we even have any other suspects?"
"I have another theory. You may dislike it."
"I've disliked nearly everything since I woke up this morning—this dress included. Please stop sending me dresses. You know I can barely walk in them, let alone fight. But please do go on." She waved a hand.
"Since I have your gracious blessing." He returned her gesture with a bow of his own. "I believe we have a spy in the castle, someone Cylian trusted enough to let them go unchecked. Someone who knew how to activate whatever curse was on that dagger."
"And I'm here because...?"
"Cylian."
"What about him?"
Virgil snorted like an irritable bull. "Come now. If you didn't wish, someone else must have. Someone like Cylian. You were his Champion once... and more than that." His mouth twitched into something half smile and half frown before he went on. "It seems natural that he might call out to you when he was in danger."
"You're right. I hate your theory. A lot. That's not what happened."
"Why do you deny it?"
"Because you're telling me that Cylian dragged me back here after over a decade to what, be his Prince Philip?" She glanced at Virgil and groaned. "Yes, I am aware that you don't know who that is. Next time I'll bring you the whole fairy tale collection so you can study, okay? But everyone told me that wish was supposed to be a one time deal. How would Cylian even use it?"
"Your guess, in this instance, would be better than mine as you've traveled atop wishes before and I have not."
Ari folded and refolded one of the gathers falling from the waist of her dress as she thought. Fifteen years was a long time. All her memories of that time were like pulling apart cotton candy. Fragile. Flimsy. Liable to fall apart under scrutiny. Okay, maybe that last part wasn't like cotton candy. "Are you sure we can't just blame the Iron King?" she asked. "That seems so much easier."
"We could if you're content to live out the rest of your life here."
"There's a thought."
That last argument with her parents, the one that had led to her storming out the door and winding up in Callaria for the first time, seemed like a part of someone else's life. After so long it basically was. Most of the detail had faded over time. The whys and hows before ending up in the park alone. What she had said. She hadn't known what she was doing at the time, hadn't known to pay attention. Just a flash of light and poof, her whole life changed, maybe not forever but for a while. It was harder to stay a new person than she had realized and even harder to stay that person when everyone still expected you to be the old one.
"The necklace," she said suddenly. "The one I used to wear. That sage we went to said it was the trigger. Some kind of old spell, right? I gave it to Cylian before I left. Does he still have it?"
"I do not know. He may."
"Where would he have kept it?"
"I don't trust that look in your eye."
"You're the one who wanted me to play detective. Don't back out now," she teased.
Virgil raised an eyebrow at the taunt, but the corner of his mouth quirked up into a familiar foxy grin. "Are you actually attempting to bait me into ransacking the King's private chambers?"
"Nope. I'm telling you to come with me while I snoop in Cylian's things. He's your king, not mine."
***
CYLIAN'S APARTMENTS had the dry, overstuffed quality of a Thanksgiving turkey. Every inch of the rooms were furnished and ornamented, with tables and elegant chairs and rugs piled upon rugs, with framed portraits of people she didn't recognize and landscapes of the surrounding countryside, with an entire table full of glass globes of varying sizes on stands, each one filled with a different color of sand that sifted down caught in its own miniature tornado. Everything was beautiful. She couldn't imagine Cylian choosing any of it.
"These are his rooms?" Ari peered around in the dim light. Virgil had insisted on doing this by the glow of a single magic wisp so they wouldn't be spotted and it was doing next to nothing to cut the gloom. She could barely see to keep from tripping. There must be some kind of lever—or a switch—something that would flip them from this set dressed room to Cylian's real bedroom.
"What is it you were expecting? Hay bales? Perhaps a couple of goats?"
"No! But..." Her attention caught on the portrait hanging over the mantle. It looked like Cylian's face with that half lost look in his eyes despite the formal pose, but it was hard to reconcile that with the cold room and the age around his painted eyes, the barely concealed grimace on his lips. Was she imagining that or was it really there? Cylian had been raised a farm boy, stashed there after the Iron King's ticking metal army took the capital city—this city, this capital. What would it feel like to sleep in a room once belonging to your family before it was possessed by the man responsible for their deaths? She shuddered and turned away from the portrait. "Did he actually live here?"
"If you mean reside, yes, in the loosest sense. He was not overly fond of sleep these last few months. I suppose he's making up for that in a way now," Virgil said in a dry voice. It made it hard to tell if he was joking or not.
Ari shot him a look. "What happened between you two while I was gone?"
Virgil folded his arms over his chest, the long sleeves of his robes pulling back to reveal the bracelets knotted around his wrists, full of little dangling charms and flat stone coins. Beneath them lay a fine tracery of old scars and the long black stripe of a tattoo that ran up his forearm to the elbow. He had told her he'd done it himself as part of some spell, but she had no idea what it did. When he met her eye he didn't look away. "I'm sorry to disappoint you, Ari, but Cylian and I were never friends in any way but that which circumstance dictated even while you were among us. You don't need friendship to run a country, especially a small one such as this. You need authority and planning. He has one. I have the other." He paused. "I've shocked you."
"No!" she protested immediately.
"You're a terrible liar and you always were. I didn't attempt to assassinate Cylian if that's what you fear. Without his figurehead presence the country may well dissolve back into chaos."
"But you're not terribly broken up about it either, are you?" Her eyes narrowed into suspicious little slits. They were alone together and she was still unarmed so maybe it was a bad idea to accuse him, but it was too late to change the subject.
Amazingly, he laughed. It felt like the truest thing he had done all day. "No. Not as such. And it seems to me that it's more dishonest to pretend that I would mourn a man I've never loved. However that doesn't mean I intend to abandon him to this curse. That is perhaps the best consolation I can offer you. Is it enough?"
She considered his words in silence. They could be lies. All of it could be lies and, short of nefarious mustache twirling, she would never know. She didn't know this Virgil at all. But they didn't sound like lies. Whatever relationship Cylian and Virgil did or didn't have wasn't really her business either. She wasn't their friendship director. "Okay."
He nodded, satisfied. "Where shall we begin our search?"
***
VIRGIL'S PRESENCE MADE snooping into an elegant affair. Something about his sweeping robes and the swish of his long, braided hair that nevertheless remained untangled despite looking in closets and under ottomans was otherworldly. Meanwhile, Ari stepped on her own dress no less than six times. She expected the stitching to give way at any moment and each time she snagged the hem with her foot she glared at Virgil while he pretended to look elsewhere.
"Please tell me you've found something? Anything?" she asked, emerging from under Cylian's tropical island sized bed. The only thing she'd found beneath it were spiders and an efficient new way to whack herself in the forehead.
Virgil offered her a hand up before answering. "Nothing of any use to us, no. I might suggest moving your investigative efforts elsewhere but I've already been through every inch of Cylian's office and his audience chambers."
"You could have missed the necklace though," Ari pointed out.
"It's possible. You're welcome to go and riffle through his things to your heart's content if you wish. I'll let the guards know."
Ari glanced around the room while she brushed down her wrinkled skirts. It really was an unbearably cold room. If Cylian had anything he cared about, it wasn't here. "Don't you have some kind of spell to just—" Ari waved her hands "—locate the necklace for us? That seems like something you should be able to do."
"It is," Virgil said. He put up a hand to stop her before she could interrupt. "But I hesitate to use a tracking spell. This necklace of yours has the remnants of an older spell on it—that's how it was able to transport you. The results of my spell mixing it with it could be less than favorable."
"How unfavorable?"
"It depends. Do you enjoy having the use of both your eyes?"
"Oh."
"Yes."
"So where does that leave us?" Ari tugged the skirt of her dress to untwist it the rest of the way. Next time she would definitely lose the dress in favor of something more conducive to snooping.
"No better or worse than before. Though I do think the Iron King should be questioned again about the details of this curse that has befallen Cylian. At the moment he's our only link."
"Oh no. I'm not going down there alone again."
"You won't be alone. I cannot go—that would be too obvious—but one of my apprentices might."
"Great," Ari drawled. "But if your apprentice is going why do I have to go too?"
Virgil grinned at her, head cocked. The amusement on his face was insufferable. People probably dropped at his feet when he made that face. "Are you content to sit by and watch while another does all the work?"
Ari swore.