At Faith's End Page 9

  The Empress was one of those simple creatures. Yet in the months since the burning, her need for escape became paramount. The Empress’s moods were not solely whimsies of materialistic drive. She had taken a darker complexion since her return, proving prone to spouts of depression. Or madness, if the keep’s whispers were to be believed.

  It was hardly surprising. Death was always a shock to the privileged, but this was a woman that had suddenly seen the whole course of her life unsaddled. Soldiers had delivered the three of them—the Empress, Princess Sara, and the young prince Lothen—from harm, but one child remained beyond their grasp, still locked in the viper’s nest that was Anscharde.

  Rosamine. The name twinkled in every tear the woman shed, and rightly so. No one had made their move as yet, but when the new emperor was crowned, all knew what little Rosamine would become: hostage, bargaining chip, and outright threat. Emperor Matthias’s other heirs had little need for this empress’s children, but she and they alike were a threat to their stability. As of the moment, Rosamine was their only means to get to her.

  Thus the Empress walked the streets of her new home with Charlotte and her mother as guides.

  Fürlangen was a hold town. With the figure of Vissering Castle looming over it and thick, low walls surrounding the old, inner city, it was a respectable specter of a profitable past. Iron once ran rich in the veins beneath its earth. It grew fat on those profits, and had, in another age, commanded great respect for it. Though those particular prospects had since moved far to the west, Fürlangen kept up appearance well enough. It was a marketing haven, far from the largest in the Empire—it lacked the river or sea access that could have made it so—but large enough to remain as the capital of Usteroy.

  At least, until the Cullicks decided to make some other city their hold. If her father ever got his wish, and Cullick blood drifted back into the Imperial capital, Fürlangen probably would not last more than a few years.

  She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

  A glance at the two women with her saw yet another terrified jeweler drape a broach across the Empress’s neck. Charlotte’s mother shook her head at some indiscriminate flaw, face scrunching distastefully at her royal cousin. Karlene Cullick fussed more than the Empress. She always had.

  More sisters than cousins. Odd, considering how many years it had been. Both carried their Banurian heritage through their pinched faces, soft skin, and altogether bright hair, traits which, pinched faces aside, Charlotte herself had gratefully inherited. Yet neither still had the accent. Surelia had been away from her homeland for more than a decade, and Charlotte’s mother, Karlene, since her first bleedings. Up until the last year, Charlotte had never even met this so-called relative.

  Yet people had a tendency to cling to the past. Charlotte supposed that had something to do with the women’s sudden fondness, but she also suspected more than a little of it was built with pity as its mortar.

  First impressions had painted Surelia Durvalle as nothing more than an air-headed, excitable woman of eccentric tastes. Since she had returned to Vissering Castle in the snow and the slush, the Empress had grown somewhat more…demure. On that day, that first, bleeding look she had spared Charlotte had nearly turned her stomach.

  Pity was not something she felt for that woman. But Charlotte did feel a touch of her pain. She had caused it, after all. They all had. Clueless woman that she was, Surelia likely never could have wished those dead men ill, no matter what they might have done to her in life. Flower of a thing. Outside of executions, she had probably never seen death up close.

  Fire, Charlotte understood, did terrible things to one’s looks. Not to mention the smell.

  This was to say, it probably made the former heir apparent as grim on the outside as he had always been inside. With luck, he was still roasting in the abyss.

  “No, no I’ve quite enough of these. Come, majesty, to Nissa. You’ve been too long without a new gown, and my girl is simply the best.”

  Karlene snapped her fingers as if she were empress, and the guardsmen snapped with her, pressing into the crowd. Surelia only nodded, sedate as a cow, and shared a whisper with her cousin. Normally, she flourished in numbers. Now she shied from them.

  Fortunately their guards were as the prow of a great ship, cutting the crowds as waves before them. The only sound to compete with the vendors’ howls were the Empress and her cousin, yammering at this and that like each were nothing but a pound of flesh. Empress or no, few bowed—only inclined their heads or averted their eyes and went about their toils.

  Some of the guards held to Cullick’s colors—like Dartrek—but most bore the soft blacks and dull golds of the palace guard. They neither needed nor bore standards. Their full dress armor and carriage besides announced all that need be said. It was not as if the royals’ dalliance was a secret. The only question for most was how long they intended to remain.

  Wide streets allowed them easy movement through the market that formed the heart of the city. Colored tents painted the sunlit afternoon, butting up against old walls of slanting stone—the oldest parts of Fürlangen. Beyond the defensive wall lay newer homes, more shoddily rendered—mixes of wood and stone and even clay bricks, their roofs woven of sagging thatch, straw, or whatever else they could gather. Even inside, there were none of the ostentatious towers and domes some of the larger cities commanded, but the place bore its age with dignity, its vaulted roofs and gables only adding to its apparent size.

  As they headed west, out of the village of tents and stalls and into the old market proper, storefronts leapt alive in the daylight. Polished stone gleamed, glass panes of varying size and shape and color reflecting images of their little train as it meandered through lines of other figures, some in leather, some in cotton, coats and gowns and cloaks brushing against the cobbles. Theirs was the only carriage, however, its rich, ornate markings distinguishing them despite the fact that none of them rode within.

  Surelia smiled distantly as her eyes flitted from post to post, making her appear entirely out of place.

  “It is a lovely place, no? Not like Sayerne, not like Old Banur, but it is…home,” Karlene mused aloud.

  “It is so—” Surelia nodded vacantly. “Peaceful. Not at all like Anscharde. But tell me, where is the Church? The Circle?”

  “Just us, darling. Only us. They have their place here, sure as any, but I assure you this is home. Their people do not wander here.” Karlene patted Surelia’s hand. “Walthere is so sweetly thorough.”

  The shop they were looking for was near the westernmost edge of the district, the last building in a row. Little distinguished it but the dresses lined outside its door. Yet even through the window, one could spy the dangling silk. Outside was for the littlefolk. Inside was for the rest.

  A hunched man in mail sat on a stool outside the door, warily eying the racks of clothes and the women that walked them. They shied away from the approaching caravan. He stood and bowed his bald head to them.

  “Fine work as ever, Ebelard,” Karlene jibed as they stepped inside. The man smiled back at her, as few dared to do.

  There were certain perks one gained with a noble house’s favor.

  Charlotte, however, held little interest in the lot. As the guardsmen took up position outside the shop, she moved with Dartrek into a small corner of Tajiman silks and other gentle weaves—a place where she could watch the window and the streets beyond.

  She did not like the thought of this. Any of it.

  Day and night, it seemed, her father schemed with his attendants, and more and more frequently shut her out of the discussions. For more than an octave, her dear uncle and cousin had been abroad, dealing with border issues. The witch had been confined. Even worse, the matter of the Matair children had been left in Charlotte’s hands, as had many of the more local affairs, and she found herself increasingly hard-pressed for time, even when she wasn’t being dragged out for more baubles. Her father assured her it was good practice. It was not a tun
e she liked to hear. Quite the contrary, it worried her as to exactly what he was plotting.

  Worse still: Sara would not leave the castle, and her absence was a hole in Charlotte’s heart. That woman was earnest and gentle for all her sharp wits, in a way she had not expected of another noblewoman. Or she had been. Two months they had taken shelter in the castle, and for two months, Sara had hardly spoken a word to anyone.

  Her brother Molin, the white cloak said, had died in her arms. Tears reddened her face, though they never showed when Charlotte called on her. She went through the motions, but the spark—that inner fire of life—had snuffed itself. Even the Empress’s vaunted hope that Sara’s husband would come for her at that hour of need went unanswered.

  Walthere had been eager to add that count to his web of allies. But the man never answered a letter.

  Meanwhile, his wife sat mere stones away from her brother’s killer. That thought worked a chill up Charlotte’s spine like little else could. The mad woman who cut herself in the dark.

  Still, Charlotte had her own part to play. She nodded at her mother’s suggestions, parted with base words for the fineries brought before her. The Empress, meanwhile, stood amidst a flock of supplicants, blushing through their ministrations at a new gown.

  It was hardly the figure Charlotte had expected when she first turned up at their door. Walthere had sent a column of soldiers for her, and nary a letter for the crown. One of the white cloaks had forsaken them at an inn beside the road, taking half their men and both the bodies, and heading north for Anscharde itself. The other bore the tortured royals to them gladly, all the while speaking of fire and ash and sorcery on the wind.

  Godlessness. The man had shuddered through the thought. There is a devil on the wind. The aged knight brooked no other blade but his to guard the Empress’s son, and had not left him since their return. He guarded him still, somewhere back at the keep. Charlotte caught Surelia staring out the window more than a couple times herself, her eyes lost in the distance. Lost, undoubtedly, to her son.

  She had clutched him like a mad woman, on that day. Held him tight to her breast and would not turn away.

  A shout from outside drew Dartrek’s attention. “Rider,” the man grunted. Charlotte turned at that, sidling up for a better look and leaving her mother rummaging through a host of fabrics.

  The crowd jostled this way and that, needling out of the path of some unseen figure. One of her father’s bannermen, perhaps. Charlotte did her best to peek without demeaning her station.

  Sometimes, she longed for a peasant’s life. Rarely, but it did happen. A peasant was rarely cuffed for the simple crime of standing on their tip toes.

  “Charlotte? What do you think?”

  She tried not to. Without looking at her mother, Charlotte appraised, “A touch too bold, I think. Something darker, perhaps?” Only the frustrated gasp that followed turned her back from the shuffling crowd. She found her mother staring at her, hands on the hips of her dress and a sour look crinkling her cheeks. The dress Charlotte had thought she would be hoisting was nowhere in sight.

  Damn.

  “I say, girl. Really.”

  “Apologies, mother,” she said, fighting down her annoyance.

  The Empress, likely catching dignity’s fleeting scent, turned back to them with a dress in hand. She parted her lips to speak, but it was Karlene that continued. “Of Vande.” She hissed between drawn teeth. Charlotte’s own breath wavered at the name—for its implications to her brother. It was marriage, of course. Ten, twelve years off, with a war in between, and still her mother was set upon a purpose. “Highness, no, I’ll not hear words on this,” her mother added quickly, waving off her cousin’s pointed attempt to enter the conversation. In their brief time together, Surelia had already made her dislike of that particular child well-apparent.

  Vande’s parents—barons—had apparently snubbed Surelia at court before she gained the lofty title, and that was one thing that had never left the airy boundaries of her blonde head.

  Before she could answer with a lie, Charlotte found herself saved by the motions of the crowd. All eyes were drawn to the nearing figure of a man astride a gryphon, its feather tips colored to the Cullick shades. A messenger. The crowd flowed around him as he passed, nearer and nearer. Charlotte called out to him when he was close enough for her to keep civil tones, and he bowed his head in hastened subjugation.

  “His Highness requests your presence immediately, Lady Charlotte,” the man squawked when he was close enough. He hopped promptly down from his gryphon and stepped aside, brushing a hand along the saddle. “You are to take my beast, lady. Your man should follow as quickly as he may.”

  She spared a glance for her mother and the Empress. “Did he say what this is for?” But the man only shook his head. Apparently, her father couldn’t be bothered with whats. Letting out an exasperated sigh, she nevertheless tipped her head to the man and moved to the beast’s stirrups. She tried her best to ignore the smell. Gryphons, like camels, were grungy creatures. Dartrek helped her up, repeating the soldier’s note: he would follow as soon as he was able.

  “Should we return together?” Apparently no one had told Surelia that empresses need not ask the obvious.

  “It is probably Maynard. No doubt we’ve had a Lievklaus pecking at our grains again,” Karlene said drily. “Besides, we still need to see to your dress, my dear. Go, Charlotte, and you help your father however you may.” This last came out as a sort of gracious dismissal, and Charlotte very much wished to tell her she did not need the permission, though of course she did.

  She did not wish to force her bodyguard to walk, however. “Might Dartrek borrow one of the men’s steeds? We shall be sure it awaits him in the stables.”

  Karlene wobbled her head back and forth and finally turned to Surelia, but the Empress’s face grew long with the request, until it seemed to pull her head into a most vehement shake. “I am sorry, dear, but then there would be only eleven horses, and you should not wish the men to look uneven.”

  Somehow, that undoubtedly made sense in Surelia’s head, and that was the frightening part. Charlotte did not push the point, but she did spare a sympathetic look for her dour shadow. The man looked away, but she thought she caught some crooked warmth in him.

  “Tell your father to send one of the boys out with some of that burgundy fabric, Charlotte. You know the roll. Nissa, here, she needs to see what we mean, for our Empress’s gown,” Karlene lectured as Charlotte settled into the saddle, pulling herself up by a bundle of the gryphon’s long feathers. “And if you see your brother, you tell him I shall be having a word with him tonight. That spectacle at breakfast this morning was unacceptable.”

  Charlotte flicked her mother the faintest of smiles, and bowed low for her and her cousin both as she drew the gryphon around in a broad circle. The street cleared for her. There was nothing quite so dangerous as a gryphon’s claws, and they did have a tendency to startle. It squawked once, and as the Empress’s shaking hands descended for a customary curtsy, Charlotte was already riding back into the crowd.

  When she was finally free from the thick of it, she gave the gryphon a tug of the reins and a sharp cry of enthusiasm that set it bounding. Horses had a longer stride—and rightly so, for most outsized their feathered compatriots by several hand lengths—but this creature had an easy sort of spring to its canters, and its clawed feet seemed to fling its momentum forward. Charlotte bent low to it, letting the wind rustle her hair with its feathers, and urged it to spread its wings. At the northern tower of the city’s watch, it sprang up and caught the stones by the mortar, and with a shout from one of the horrified guards, pressed off into the wind and cast itself afloat.

  On the plains, horses were unmatched, but in the woods, the gryphon was an unmatched beast. The way it could climb—one might almost call it a cat. Yet here on the plains was perhaps the only place one could truly bask in their ways of old. Charlotte closed her eyes and let her arms go slack, letting t
he hiss of the air carry her aloft. Flight was not meant for man, but one could steal glimpses. The gryphon held itself in a glide for perhaps twenty feet before the illusion snapped. Then its wings tucked and its feet cracked back into the dirt, and they were off again along the trail.

  How bitter the tragedy Assal wrote when he put men’s fates to ink. Instead of wings, he gave them thought and with thought came concern, worry, and doubt. That alone could have weighted down even the lightest of birds. These little moments were all she had now, and she paced them throughout her days, and cherished them dearly. Yet in truth they were all she needed. Glimpses of freedom kept the soul alive. Too much and one would float too high, and the sun would burn them up and leave them only ashes.

  Conspiracy had its bright sides, too.

  By the time she arrived back at the castle, there was a small gathering of gawking souls about the yard.

  Dismounting, she took her steed’s lead in hand and guided it toward the stalls, where the commotion seemed to settle. It was a smattering of littlefolk, mostly—a few loitering guardsmen, some servants, and a few of the stableboys. Among them, however, was a golden-haired figure cut from a knight’s old tale: the robust figure of Ser Edwin, one of her father’s knights. The man was always prodding around the stables, but for him to gawk as such—it leant a certain air to the already curious spectacle.

  She headed straight for Edwin. The crowd obliged her, though most merely angled around her, still hoping for a look at whatever lurked within the stables.

  Edwin smiled at her approach and dipped his head in greeting, beckoning with a call to “his fair lady.” Charlotte had always liked Edwin as a girl. Tragedy was that Edwin preferred the stableboys.

  She maneuvered alongside him and peered inside. The doorway was dark, though many small shapes clearly scurried within. “What are we looking at?” she asked, as the knight pulled a hand through her ride’s feathers. It shuddered affectionately.