Wulfyddia (The Tattersall Trilogy Book 1) (5 page)

***

Black
hair drifted in the cold water like seaweed. The hands were white, chilled,
slack. The woman was suspended in the green water of the lake like a specimen
in a jar, and she was just as still. Then one finger uncurled, fernlike, and
the eyes opened, wide and livid, staring at Melisande. The lips, the awful pale
lips, stretched into a grin. The hands flailed wildly, churning the frothing
water as the woman thrashed through the lake, coming for Melisande, who was
frozen, suspended just as still as the woman had once been. 

With a
soft cry Melisande jerked awake. Her eyelashes fluttered rapidly as she took in
her surroundings, haunted by some lingering fear which had followed her from
her dream. She was safe, sequestered in Felunhala’s study with only her
mistress’s polished skull for company. There was no floating woman. Melisande
shifted in her chair, wearily rubbing her face as her eyes went to the
grandfather clock that loomed against the far wall. It was already mid-morning.
Felunhala and the Fool had to be sleeping in; otherwise her mistress would
certainly have come for her. Felunhala did not approve of sleeping late, even if
Melisande had been awake and working into the early morning.

She
stared down at the mess of papers that had served as a pillow while she dozed,
willing herself to remember which project she had been working on when she
drifted off. She glanced at a sketch of a lake, and some of her confusion
faded. Of course. She was working on the Lady’s Lake. It was called that thanks
to a Queen of several centuries ago, interred at the bottom of it after her reign
came to an end. Why royalty would be buried at the bottom of a lake it was hard
to say, but it was many centuries ago, after all, and things had been quite
strange back then.

The
current trouble with the Lake had nothing to do with its long-ago brush with
royalty. The issue was far less sensational, though deeply troubling. The water
was rising. Inexplicably, after years of maintaining the same level, the water
was creeping higher with every passing day. Delwyn, son of Tryphena, who had
been tasked with handling this matter by his mother, had immediately come to
Felunhala hoping for some magic. Felunhala had summoned Melisande, and turned
the project over to her, with instructions that no one was to know that
Melisande, and not Felunhala, was handling the task.

It had
been that way ever since Melisande was first brought to the castle. Those were
the terms under which she had become Felunhala’s apprentice. The witch had
discovered Melisande when she was just a child, still recovering from the death
of her parents, casualties of a royal rebellion.

Delwyn,
Tryphena’s son and heir, had a bastard brother, Blaxton, fathered by King
Malachai Lucretius years before he had plucked Tryphena of Wollstonely from
relative obscurity, married her and made her Queen of Wulfyddia. The rumors
were that Tryphena had hated Blaxton from the day Malachai first brought her to
the castle, though the Queen publicly claimed that she had never been anything
but kind to her husband’s bastard. Whatever the case, though Blaxton was the
eldest son of the late King Malachai, he was not legitimate, and thus the crown
had passed to the King’s widow, Tryphena, and was destined for their son Delwyn
upon Tryphena’s death. The Princess Anise would rule after Delwyn, and Blaxton
and his children were cut out of the inheritance entirely. After Malachai’s
death, Blaxton had rebelled and attempted a coup, which was hardly an unusual
move for an illegitimate son. He had been routed, and his last stand before he
fled for the border was made in the hilly province of Arkestra, Melisande’s
birthplace.

It was
at that point that Blaxton, otherwise a faintly sympathetic character, lost
Melisande’s support entirely. In a moment of vicious spite which Melisande
would never understand, Blaxton had burned Melisande’s village to the ground
and killed every occupant. Melisande was the only survivor of his brutality,
simply because she had been visiting her sickly grandmother when the massacre occurred.
She still remembered her return home to a field of ash and blackened bones,
where her parents’ remains were indistinguishable from those of the soldiers who
had fallen around them. She had vowed then to make Blaxton suffer for the
atrocities committed against her family, but had been too much of a child to
have any clue how to go about seeking revenge. She had lived with her
grandmother until the old woman died, and soon after, Felunhala had appeared,
as if summoned by the force of Melisande’s thirst for vengeance. The witch had
brought Melisande to the castle, to work for the one family in Wulfyddia that
hated Blaxton as much as Melisande did.

But
there had been conditions, and Melisande still wore two of them circled about her
wrists like shackles. As it turned out, the crown had many uses for Melisande’s
power, not just to defeat Blaxton, but to protect the realm, to run the Castle,
even to keep the royal family healthy. The two black rings that encircled her
wrists were not ornamentation, but rather the means by which Felunhala helped
herself to Melisande’s power. The witch relied on the force of Melisande’s
magic when her own was not quite sufficient to complete a ritual or cast some
spell ordered by the crown. It was worth it; anything was worth the opportunity
to strike back at the man who had taken everything from her, even the mornings
when she woke crying from the pain of having Felunhala constantly plucking at
her power, stripping away Melisande’s life force whenever and wherever it
pleased her.

Melisande
could not keep a grimace from overtaking her face, and she rested her forehead
in her hand for a moment before forcing herself to straighten up. As she stood,
a book that had been open on her lap fell to the floor, the sound muffled by
the luxuriously thick furs that cushioned its fall. Melisande slipped on her
slippers and reached for the book, handling it gently for there was no knowing
how old it was. She couldn’t remember which book it was, until she flipped it
over to examine the cover. The lines on her brow eased. Ah, she recalled it
now. It was one of Felunhala’s bestiaries. Melisande had been searching for an
answer to the origin of those little creatures that had sprung so suddenly from
the flame.

She
stared down at the page, at the intricacies of the beautifully inked
illustrations. The information it provided was rather less beautiful. The
creatures she’d created were Salamanders, not those of rivers or lakes, but
those of fire. They could only be conjured, not born, and somehow, in some
moment of power burning over bright, she had accidentally summoned a clutch of
them into being.

She was
disturbed by her lack of control, by the evidence that she had not mastered
herself quite as well as she would like. She tried to separate herself from the
sorrows of her past, from the occasional anguish of her current existence, but
it was hard, and sometimes her emotions trampled her constraints. But all of
this was irrelevant. It was late in the morning, and there were a slew of tasks
that needed doing. Salamanders or not, nightmare or not, there was a long day
ahead of her, and a temperamental witch to appease. But, before she started on
the day’s tasks, she wanted to test the cabinet.

Given
Melisande’s vital importance to the Castle Witch, she had free reign throughout
most of the witch’s chambers. She was permitted to browse Felunahala’s entire
library, including the oldest and the most delicate of the books. She had
access to most of her mistress’s equipment, from the most powerful of the wands
to the most fragile of the crystals. Felunhala’s dependence on Melisande’s
skill had forced her to share much with her apprentice. There was, however, one
cabinet standing in the corner of the witch’s study which was entirely
off-limits to her apprentice. It was rather unassuming in appearance, a simple
gray cabinet with a single lock which was always fastened. Melisande knew
because she tried the handle on a regular basis. It had become a regular part
of her morning routine, on the days when Felunhala wasn’t hovering over her
shoulder. In the morning, Melisande washed her hair, lit the hearth, and tested
the cabinet to see if it was unlocked. So far, Felunhala had not slipped up
once.

Melisande
wasn’t sure what she expected to find in the cabinet. She hadn’t the faintest
idea what she
hoped
to find. Yet, as vague as her suspicions were, she
could not help but test the lock every morning. Lately she had begun having
nightmares about that small wooden cabinet and the contents within. Last time
she’d dreamt of a deathly pale hand, fingers bony, nails sharp, which reached
out of the cabinet and straight for her throat. The memory still gave her
chills, and it was almost enough to keep her from testing the lock this
morning. But somehow, despite her trepidation, she found herself drawn to the
cabinet. Her fingers closed over the handle, and she twisted her wrist to turn
it but it would not budge. The lock was engaged.

It
wasn’t the lock itself which kept her out. It was the charm which was activated
when the lock slipped into place. Despite the power of the spell, Melisande had
no doubt that she was strong enough to fight her way through it, but Felunhala
would know the minute that she tried, and Melisande feared the wrath of her
mistress. The two witches were ill-matched as mistress and apprentice.
Melisande would have thrived under a gentler hand, and Felunhala did not know
how to mentor without the employment of harsh criticism and angry outbursts.

In the
early days of her apprenticeship, Melisande had promised herself that as soon
as she avenged her family she would free herself from Felunhala’s binding and
return to the countryside where she belonged. But as the years drew on,
Felunhala’s binding had taken root in her soul, coiling around her heart so
tightly she found it difficult to imagine living free of it, and somehow, she
still wasn’t any closer to destroying Blaxton.

It would
help if he would return from exile, Melisande thought, casting an anxious
glance at Felunhala’s scrying crystals. She had wasted many an evening peering
into the misty depths of the largest crystal, trying to discern some image of
Blaxton, some flash of his location or his plans. But he remained hidden from
her, too far away for her power to be any use, and in the meantime there were a
hundred demands on her time, a thousand inane tasks to finish, and always with
Felunhala snapping at her heels.

In the morning they came for him, soldiers
with torches that gleamed off their brass buttons. The men reached for him and
hauled him upright, binding him and forcing him along with them. His legs would
barely hold him and he stumbled over his own feet as they led him up, and up,
and up, out of the dungeons. As he realized that they were taking him out of
that ninth circle of hell he began to scramble to keep up, and when the first
rays of daylight touched him from a window far over his head, he began to
laugh, and laugh. He was still laughing, with tears in his eyes, when he was
brought before his Queen.

The wild-eyed young lunatic she saw before
her was not the man Queen Tryphena had been expecting, and she felt a flutter
of some foreign emotion – was it fear? Regardless, she stifled it and gave no
sign of her discomfort. She was not accustomed to being discomposed and refused
to appear so in front of her entire Court. Not that she was the center of
attention at present. The young man in question had drawn all gazes his way
with his grating laughter.

“This is the man you found beneath my tower?”
When the guard answered in the affirmative a muscle in her face jumped, though
she remained otherwise unmoved. The prosecutor read the charge, an accusation
of Malicious Loitering. One of Tryphena’s first moves as Queen had been to make
loitering both malicious and a felony. It gave her police cause to arrest
almost anyone, and as a result her subjects had grown substantially more
respectful.  

When the time came for Rathbone to present
his defense, the man rambled horribly, devoting much of his speech to some
creature he claimed to have encountered in the dungeons. At the Queen’s side,
her granddaughter Dimity raised a dainty lace handkerchief to her lips and
coughed delicately. Dimity was the only one of Delwyn’s daughters that the
Queen had any use for. Unlike the others, Dimity followed orders consistently
and to the letter. Delwyn had once commented that she, his third daughter, was
desperately lacking in spunk, but that was exactly what Tryphena appreciated
about her. At the moment, Dimity looked particularly appalled by Rathbone’s
graphic and nearly incoherent ranting. The beast was complete nonsense,
obviously a smoke screen devised to distract them. However, what the Queen was
able to discern from his the rest of his less than articulate speech was
displeasing. The young man claimed to have entered the square just as an
elderly man left it. He seemed to think that he had been arrested in the elder
man’s place.

The Queen sniffed, a new and particularly
distasteful explanation for this confusion presenting itself to her. It was
possible that the revolting creature who reeked of her dungeons was actually
speaking the truth. Her gaze drifted over the heads of her courtiers, fixing on
the stained glass window opposite her and the delicately shaded light that
filtered through, staining the air in pastels. Even Dimity, right hand of the
Queen, could not tell what was running through her grandmother’s mind at that
moment, and she shifted uneasily. Nine days out of ten she was secure in her
place as her grandmother’s pet, but on the tenth, she trembled.

Shaking off her reverie, the Queen’s gaze
snapped back to the unfortunate, deranged Rathbone and the royal guards. An
admission of her error was unthinkable, and for a moment she was split between
executing him just to keep things tidy, and making a great show of clemency and
releasing him. Clemency wasn’t quite her style, but the Castle executioner was overbooked
as it was. “He’s a physician, you say?”

Arthur bowed quite low, “yes, my Queen.”

The Queen sighed. “Very well,” she said quite
loudly, not about to miss this opportunity to make much of her rare mercy. “We
are in need of more physicians within the Castle. This young man may well serve
the crown better acting in his capacity as a physician, than wasting away
behind bars.”  Arthur’s eyebrows quirked upwards unexpectedly, and a hushed
murmur traveled through the spectators. Pardons were much more exciting than
punishments. They saw punishments all day every day.

“Despite the gravity of his crime— Malicious
loitering is not to be taken lightly— in this instance, it pleases me that he
be freed and released to take up his trade. This is, after all, what is best
for my subjects: another Doctor for the Castle.”

In the audience, a few of her subjects
glanced at each other doubtfully. It was hard to imagine an emergency dire
enough for them to turn to the lunatic on the stand for medical care. Regardless,
the Queen had made up her mind, and before he knew what was happening to him,
Rathbone was being escorted to the wide doors of the courtroom, and the
unexpected daylight seared his eyes.

In the row reserved for the royal family, Lorna
Lucretius watched Rathbone exit the courtroom with the utmost fascination. She
had seen all manner of men pretend to be insane in hopes of escaping the noose,
but the bit about the beast was a particularly inventive touch. There had even
been a moment when the Queen herself had looked taken aback, and that was
difficult to achieve. It had been a particular stroke of genius, adding mention
of the beast. Rathbone must have heard the gossip about that old dungeon. Local
folklore told of a beast that had once stalked the darkness, but no one had
claimed a sighting in decades.

The Queen sighed. “Who next?”

Arthur bowed. “The Librarian, madam.”

The Queen tsked impatiently. “Again? Show him
in at once.”

Lorna could tell from the set of her
grandmother’s shoulders that the woman was nearing the end of her patience with
the Librarian, and she wondered what the dotty old man had done to try the
Queen so. He seemed a largely inoffensive creature. As he hobbled into the
room, Lorna yawned and settled into her seat, fully prepared to be bored out of
her mind while the old man discussed some new cataloguing system, or perhaps an
infestation of insects. She could still remember how irascible he had become
during the paper louse infestation of the summer before last. Lorna stifled a
giggle at the memory of the paper lice. Dimity shot her a warning glance, but
it was the way her stiff-necked grandmother turned and blinked coldly at her
that chilled her to the bone. She pressed her lips together and sat back in her
seat to listen, hardly expecting to be moved by anything the old man had to say.
But as the Librarian restated his complaint, reporting in exact detail the
circumstances of the theft of a book from the royal archives, Lorna felt the
blood drain from her face.

***

The
Haligorn was perhaps least eerie at midday, when the bustle of the market and
the cries of the vendors drifted across the Chasm and lent a little life to the
tower that loomed still and silent. Seabirds circled overhead, calling a
raucous accompaniment to the harsh murmur of the Castle ravens, which roosted
in great numbers on the towers and turrets of the castle, though they avoided
the Haligorn.

Justine
lived for clear days. When the rain came down in torrents people retreated
indoors, and the steady stream of traffic on the other side of the Chasm died
down to a trickle and finally ceased altogether. Then she was left to read her
books by candlelight, or stand by the window and watch the world darken as if
it were the end of days. Those days were hard; she had to fight her way through
the loneliness and the slow, creeping despair that was always at her back. She
had been a prisoner, in one sense or another, most of her life.

All thanks
to Cicely, her deranged older sister. The one who saw things. At first, Cicely
had been the Queen’s favorite, a spoiled little prodigy. Then, on Justine’s
second birthday, Cicely had received a vision of Justine. Whatever Cicely had
foreseen, she’d gone straight to the Queen with the news, and Tryphena had
forbidden her from telling another soul. Cicely had withdrawn from public life,
isolating herself like a mad seeress. As if it wasn’t enough to have one hermit
in the family, Tryphena had also locked Justine away, without explanation,
seemingly without pity. Justine had grown up in a remote wing of the castle,
cared for by hired nurses and sequestered away from everyone, including her
parents and many sisters. Even then, the Queen and her wretched manservant had
done their utmost to make her as miserable as possible. Any nurse Justine grew
too fond of was immediately dismissed and replaced by an unfamiliar face. When
she had thought that the isolation couldn’t possibly get any crueler, her
grandmother had removed her from the Castle, and relegated her to the Haligorn,
a different complex entirely.

She’d
had a view of the Haligorn from her last room, and Justine remembered thinking
what a lonely building it had seemed, so dark and distant from the clamor of
the castle. The Chasm had particularly captured her imagination. No one had
ever been to the bottom and back; though attempts had been made. Most
expeditions vanished without a single survivor ever returning to the surface.
The few who had made it back had all been certifiably insane upon their return,
and the Castle commoners had certainly dreamed up some truly outlandish rumors
regarding the creatures that lived within the Chasm, and the ghosts that
haunted it. Justine had once believed every rumor. Now she wasn’t so sure.

She had
only been in the Haligorn a few weeks, but the Chasm, once a source of mystery
and terror, was now as familiar to her as the palms of her own hands. Whatever
darkness lurked within it had never emerged, at least not in her view. Now, the
most interesting thing about it was the road that ran alongside it, and Justine
loved to watch the people walk by. Today was particularly busy. Some of the
travelers were likely refugees, fleeing homes flooded by the rising lake that
Mrs. Tattersall had told her about. The murmurs of war with Blaxton likely
weren’t helping either, adding to panic and bringing families farther east,
away from the threatened border.

Justine
didn’t especially care what brought the people wandering past the Chasm; all
that mattered to her was that they walked where she could see them. She was
desperate for people, she hungered for people the way others craved food and
water, air and light.

Today
one in particular caught her gaze. A single figure stood at the Chasm, charcoal
gray robes fluttering in the faint breeze as he stood and stared. It wasn’t an
unusual place for people to stop, but usually they were staring into the Chasm.
This man was staring at the Castle, and something about his figure, taunt with
repressed energy, with purpose, caught Justine’s gaze despite his great
distance from her window. And somehow, despite the multitude of other people
who wandered by, Justine could not tear her eyes from him until he finally
stirred and walked away.

***

“Madam,
there is a missive from Sir Iordano regarding Blaxton. He has heard a rumor
that Blaxton has garnered support during his exile in the East. He seems to
think that there may be an army massing on his behalf. Madam?”

Arthur
blinked at his mistress, unnerved to see her staring past him as though she did
not hear his words. That was unusual, most of the time she hung on his every
word as though waiting for him to make a mistake. For a moment he allowed
himself to hope that her senility was finally upon her and that she was winding
down like an old clock and would finally stop. Just,
stop
.

“I want Fane.”
Her voice was quite low, and he thought he might have misheard her.

“Who,
madam?”

“Fane. I
want my hunter.”

Her
title for Fane had always amused Arthur, in a sickly sort of way. Anise, the
Queen’s eldest granddaughter, was a huntress. She killed animals, birds and
beasts of all breeds. Fane stopped human hearts. The word hunter was perhaps
technically correct, but assassin would be still more accurate.

“Madam,
he hasn’t been to Court in many years,”

“Don’t
be inane, Arthur. I know how long it’s been.” The Queen turned to face him
fully. There was something about the way she stood that suddenly made her look
older than ever before. She seemed grotesquely old, almost staggering under the
weight of all of her years. “Rathbone’s arrest was a mistake.” She hesitated,
as though what she was about to admit next pained her, but when she spoke next
her tone was steady and confident. “There was another man in the square before
him. He was the man I intended to arrest.”

Arthur
thought pityingly of the poor, gibbering surgeon and his tormented eyes. Poor
man. Well, he wasn’t the first to fall in a trap thoughtlessly laid for someone
else by the Queen. Arthur felt a pang of guilt at his own role in the man’s
arrest, but reminded himself that he was a victim in this too, as they all
were. Still, he wondered how the man would fare, struck by lunacy as he was and
turned out suddenly onto the streets.

The
Queen was still watching him for some reaction, so Arthur cleared his
expression and blinked back at her. “So, Fane, Madam?”

The
Queen wheeled around, turning her back to him. “The man I was thinking of must
be caught. It is extremely important to me, and Fane has never failed me
before. Summon him here. At once.”

“Winter
is coming, madam, and as you know he dwells in the Ice Mountains now. It may be
some weeks before he arrives.”

“Send
for him.” The Queen’s voice was cold and imposing. She remained with her back
firmly turned to him as he bowed and then backed slowly out of the room.