The Element of Fire, Martha Wells [books for new readers .txt] 📗

cross the garden toward the gate behind the hedges. Kade didn’t know Denzil very well. He had been presented to court shortly before she had left. He had attached himself to Roland shortly thereafter.

There was nothing she hated more than people who didn’t take her seriously.

Falaise sat down on the edge of the fountain, heedless of what the moss would do to her silk damask skirts.

This near to the Queen, Kade was suddenly conscious that the climb on the bastion’s ledge and her fall into the leaves hadn’t done her dress any good. But her grubbiness was bound to aggravate Ravenna, and she resolved to let her clothing degenerate as far as modesty allowed. “Where are your guards?” she asked Falaise.

Falaise shook her head slightly. “This is my private garden. When I give audiences here they wait beside the gate. I bribed my ladies to go down to the grotto.”

“Why didn’t you call them back?”

“That wouldn’t do any good.” Her face was bleak,

Falaise had the calm of someone who has been miserable for a long time and expects to go on being miserable. Kade

Shifted uneasily. “It’s difficult for someone to make advances when there are a lot of men standing around looking at him as if they want to kill him. They’re Queen’s guards; even Roland can’t order them away when they’re protecting you.”

Falaise looked away wearily, the wind playing with her curls and ribbons. “It isn’t that sort of advances.”

“It doesn’t matter what sort of advances. It always worked for Ravenna’s ladies when…” When my father… “when they needed it,” she finished, but Falaise didn’t notice the lapse.

“He wouldn’t let me call them.”

Kade snorted. “Do it anyway.”

“It’s easy for you to say.” Falaise gestured helplessly, the puffed sleeves of her gown almost hiding the movement.

Kade watched her a moment, then sat on the fountain rim beside her. “Not always.”

But Falaise opened the book on her lap and turned the pages distractedly. By craning her neck Kade could see it was written instead of printed, and by a hand not as fine as a professional clerk’s. Poetry, she guessed, and it would hardly be from Roland. Falaise slammed the book closed and said abruptly, “What do I call you, Katherine or Kade?”

“Kade.”

“Kade. Did you ever turn yourself into a bird?” Her expression was wistful.

Kade lifted her brows. “I thought about it, but I decided I wanted to live.” It came to her that Falaise wasn’t really much of a coward. Denzil must have browbeaten her thoroughly. Possibly most men in authority over her had browbeaten her thoroughly. “Human sorcerers can’t shape-change, not if they ever want to turn back into themselves. Most fay can, but I never had to badly enough to make the experiment. “

“That’s a shame.” Falaise fingered the book again. “It would be wonderful to just turn into something and fly away.”

They sat in the quiet a moment, with not even birds to interrupt the fountain’s bubbling. Then Kade remembered something and asked her, “What did you mean when you said Denzil wasn’t making that sort of—”

A man came running around one of the yew hedges toward them. He threw himself at Falaise s feet so enthusiastically Kade had to scramble out of the way to avoid being tumbled into the fountain.

More graceful than the sorceress, Falaise kept her balance and said in exasperation, “Aristofan, please—”

The young man kneeling at her feet was handsome with russet hair and eager brown eyes. He was dressed for court in blue and gray and had lost his feathered hat in his run across the lawn. “It was him, wasn’t it? That was why you didn’t want me to come to you today. You must tell me what he wants from you.”

Kade looked down at herself to make sure she hadn’t inadvertently faded from sight.

“No, I can’t, I told you.” Falaise spoke firmly, but then she stroked his hair. “Really, it’s all right.”

“Don’t mind me,” Kade said. “I’ll just stand over here, shall I?”

Aristofan clasped the Queen’s hand ardently. “Don’t you trust me? I’d do anything for you.”

Falaise smiled fondly. “Sometimes I almost think you would.”

One of the men following Kade appeared at the top of the wall, spotted her, and waved back to his companions. “Well,” Kade said, “I have to leave before they decide I’m holding you prisoner and roll in a couple of cannon.”

“Please.” Falaise looked up at her. “You won’t say anything?”

“I don’t know anything.” Kade started away, then stopped and looked back at the other woman. “If you’re going to tell someone, tell Ravenna.”

Falaise looked down at Aristofan’s head, her expression drawn and troubled.

To avoid Falaise’s guards, Kade left the garden by going over the wall behind the battlement hedge. She was still not quite ready to be followed again, and she rejoined the path that led away from the Queen’s garden only when she was out of sight of the garden gates. The path wandered past walled herb gardens then abruptly opened out to the paved area below the terraces of the Gallery Wing. The smooth stone of the Gallery Wing’s walls was butter colored and would glow like gold in the full sunlight. She climbed the steps and walked along the terrace, looked at the view of the rolling lawn, the trees, and the artificial temple ruins, and wondered about Galen Dubell.

I’m not going to sit like a lump while he fights this Bisran bastard Grandier single-handed. Does he honestly expect me to do that? No, he couldn’t, she decided. It was incredible. If she were going to behave in that ridiculous fashion to one of the few friends she had, then she might as well have stayed in the convent and saved years of trouble. Galen isn’t an idiot. Grandier trapped him once; he might do it again. He knows he needs help; he just can’t ask for it.

She stopped, drew a toe meditatively over a pattern in the paving stone. She was tired of being followed.

Kade closed her eyes and pulled glamour out of the damp air and the dew on the grass, wove it with the afternoon sunlight filtered through the clouds, and drew it over herself like a concealing blanket. If anyone saw her she would appear as another courtier, a servant, whatever they expected to see.

She would help Dubell, and she had an inkling of how to go about it.

*

“Well, that’s been a waste of time,” Thomas told Lucas.

They had just finished questioning the last of Dr. Braun’s apprentices and servants and had elicited nothing but a tearful confession from the sixty-year-old chamberlain about a few pennies’ worth of misappropriated household funds.

During the questioning, Lucas had been entertaining himself by flipping a small boot dagger from hand to hand, and now he sent it into the table with a thud. “So, who killed the poor bastard? The chamberlain?”

The room was damp and too warm, despite the open window. Thomas stood up from the table piled with papers and moved restlessly to the room’s little balcony, unbuttoning the top of his doublet. From here he could look down onto the hall where servants wandered, off-duty guards gathered, and the main life of the Queen’s Guard House was concentrated. He leaned against the rough pillar in the corner of the balcony and said, “He’s too short. Braun was sitting at a clerk’s writing desk and the stool was a foot or so taller than an ordinary chair. Whoever cut the good doctor’s throat was at least my height. The way that old man’s back is bent he’d never have been able to reach him.”

On the stone-paved floor of the hall below, some of the men had discarded their doublets to practice swordplay on wooden targets and one another. Constant work was required to keep in top form for the real duels, which usually lasted no more than a few moments, depending on the relative skill of the opponents, and often ended with a death or a crippling. All used their regular dueling swords rather than the blunt-tipped weapons often employed for practice, and it was only due to the skill of the combatants that so little blood was being shed. There were not as many men off-duty as usual; all the guardposts and duty shifts had been doubled since last night.

All this morning Thomas had noted a tension on the wind that hadn’t been there yesterday. Everyone knew the danger of dark and deserted places, but the palace had always been safe ground from any but human opponents. Two Cisternan guards had been sent back to their families in boxes today, the first casualties in a new and uncertain war. The rest of the court had also finally bothered to notice the danger, and today there were complaints, mild hysteria, and loud questions about why someone wasn’t doing something.

“If you’re going to be clever about it, we won’t be able to arrest anyone,” Lucas pointed out.

The pillar Thomas leaned against still bore the nine-year-old bullet hole that had signaled the end of his predecessor’s career. He picked at the splintered area thoughtfully and said, “We’re looking for a throat-slitter who takes an unprepared man from behind but who still scruples at robbery.” Braun had been wearing a respectable amount of court jewelry, including a diamond-studded presentation medal from Lodun and several gemstones given to him by past wealthy patrons. All had been left on the body. “That eliminates most of the servants but certainly throws suspicion on every member of the nobility in the palace. And Grandier.”

Lucas tipped his chair back against the yellowed plaster wall. “Always Grandier. What did Braun have that Grandier would want to kill him for?”

“Information.” And thinking of information, Thomas wished the clerks would hurry with the translation of the documents chronicling Grandier’s trial in Bisra. They knew so little about the man, and he wanted to take advantage of every resource, no matter how sparse it might be.

Lucas nodded. “You think Braun saw something someone preferred he didn’t…”

“Or remembered something. He tried to talk to me last night but we were interrupted by Denzil.”

“Coincidence?” Lucas lifted his brows in speculation.

Thomas glanced back at him. “Which coincidence? Braun wanting to tell me something or Denzil interrupting at the opportune moment?”

“We’re not going to get anywhere if you keep inventing new questions.” Lucas glanced briefly toward the window, which opened onto the narrow alley between the house and the stone wall of the old armory. “Half the palace is saying that it was the sorceress.”

“Not a bad suggestion, except she was already in the gallery performing bad Commedia in front of everyone who matters in the city when I saw Braun alive. The body was long cold by the time she left.” Thomas shook his head. She was also too short. “Today she lost her guards in the Queen’s garden. One of them reported it an hour ago.”

“What was she doing there?”

“Talking to the Queen, apparently.”

“Odd.” Lucas frowned, looking puzzled at the idea that anyone might want to talk to Falaise. Possibly because they were all so used to discounting her influence, it was hard to remember that she had any power in her own right at all. “What’s going to come of that, do you think?”

“Not much.” Thomas smiled. “They can’t banish Falaise.”

Lucas was silent a moment, watching Thomas. “Your great friend High Minister Aviler is implying it was a Queen’s guard.”

Thomas’s lips twisted in annoyance. “What a helpful suggestion. How in hell did he come up with it?”

Lucas shrugged uneasily. “The usual way. There was some loud muttering about Braun, some of the men blaming him for his