The Councillor Read online

  Her thoughts had been mercifully occupied as she considered the rose. Now, she stared out at the crowd, not hearing the noise.

  “All the gifts in the world cannot make up for . . .” She did not need to finish the sentence to know that Raden could hear the ending.

  The last two weeks had slipped by. She felt the weight inside her, the same force she had endured through the funeral and now the swearing-in ceremony. It was as if the waves of sorrow had ceased pounding her, leaving a raw edge where they had struck.

  “I miss her just as much,” Raden said, quietly.

  “You know we can’t talk about what happened.” Lysande dropped her voice. “If you finish cleaning up the capital, I’ll owe you a barrel of red from Queen Brettelin’s store.”

  “I’d have done it for a goblet. Have to warn you, though, it’s not a merry show out there. Not everyone believes the story that Queen Sarelin died of her hunting wound.”

  They love her, Lysande reflected. She had known it as a child, and she had learned it anew yesterday, when Raden’s women and men had returned from their ride through Axium. There had been looting over the past fortnight, but yesterday there had also been doors kicked in, people dragged into the street and blamed for the Iron Queen’s death. Raden had reported mutterings about the Old Signs—about cairns, ivy, and carvings on bark. Yet although Lysande had ordered the Axium Guards to take tempero handcuffs when they rode out, they had not found any magical rebels to use them on. She was not sure if she should feel guilty or pleased. Was it wiser to feel remorseful about failing to catch any criminals, or glad about avoiding any wrongful captures?

  Tempero controls them, but only a blade ends them, Sarelin had said.

  If she had pushed harder, if she had persuaded Sarelin to reach out to elementals, maybe the queen would still be alive. Even as Lysande permitted the thought, she recognized it as fantasy. Sarelin had once chopped the hands off an elemental woman who had used her fire-power to burn an effigy of the queen. I didn’t save my throne so they could slash away at its base, Sarelin had declared, that night.

  “You might need company, to spread the word,” Lysande said, turning slightly toward Raden.

  “Five legions of guards is more than enough company,” Raden said, glancing at her staff. “The steward keeps nagging me to tell you that the advisors will meet you at midday.”

  The women and men closest to the crown. They would be sitting upstairs, talking to her in the Oval. If everything had not turned into a gray morass in her mind since Sarelin’s death, she might have been nervous. But she could keep moving, working through the list of things that needed to be done. It was when she sat still that grief crept up.

  Lysande passed the Councillor’s staff to Raden, trying not to look at Lady Scarbrook, who was staring at her with the intensity of a falcon circling a mouse.

  “Skewer the bastard who did this,” she said. “Those were Sarelin’s words, as she lay choking. I may not be much of a skewerer, but I know how to investigate when no one else bothers. She trained me to research in old manuscripts. All I need is a morning in Axium.”

  “What shall I tell the advisors?”

  “That I look forward to hearing their best ideas for the realm, at midday.” She patted him on the gauntlet.

  “Lysande.” He kept his voice low. “Take care to look over your shoulder. Some of the populace do not mind who is cut down, right now, so long as they never get up.”

  The road between the palace and the capital could be traversed in half an hour, and Lysande was not stopping for anything today. The wind buffeted her hair as she rode, and as she galloped into Axium the bells were ringing, four chimes on the hour: one for each of the goddesses, a toll that reminded every citizen of the queen’s passing. It echoed inside her, a dirge of blood and memory.

  Prayer-houses across the capital bustled with queues that extended into the street, and Lysande slowed her pace at last, skirting around the crowds. After tethering her horse to one of the few vacant posts, she fastened the hood of her cloak. She had half a mind to stride through the group of people in velvet doublets that was thronging around a bust of Sarelin, casting off her cloak as she did so. Queen’s foundling or gutter-born, their looks would say; perhaps even traitor, today, if they had decided on a goat for the scaping.

  Instead, she wove through a mass of women and men in rags, keeping her eyes fixed on the other side of the square. She knew, through long practice, how to focus on one goal, as she had learned to focus on the translation of a phrase or the conjugation of a verb.

  The hawkers shouted their prices at her as she arrived at Abacus Street, and though she had a hankering to hear the current cost of grain and leather, to pick out ordinary details that would make the extraordinary more bearable, she elbowed her way across and into the first laneway. There, she passed merchants’ premises with spiderwebbed windows. Every second or third pane had splintered, and some shops had been painted with a black E for elemental. It did not feel like justice. At last she found the mouth of an unmarked lane and slipped through. A sign outside a shop declared Foreign And Exotic Beasts—For Hire Or Purchase. She stepped into the interior, blinking.

  Lamps around the room gave out globs of gold, just enough to illuminate the cages lining the walls; some of these pens shimmered with masses of dark fur, while others held horns, or teeth that seemed to float in the gloom. Spearfish from the Lyrian delta shared a tank with a puffing-snake, swimming among shining pebbles. Lysande tiptoed down the right wall. She could feel dozens of eyes watching her from the cages, and heard a growl emanate from further along, yet she could only think that the last time she had been here, Sarelin had been alive.

  She heard a smash from the street, followed by a tinkle of glass. Clutching her saddle bag, she hurried along.

  One eel’s description promised “pleasingly quick paralysis,” and at the back of the room, a sign proclaimed “panther: Pyrrhan, with lethal bite and excellent speed.” She drew closer to the cage. The animal stalked up and down behind the bars, pausing to regard her, narrow eyes glittering in its black fur like chips of emerald sewn on velvet.

  “Interested?” a voice at her side ventured. “A rare animal, for a swearing-in jubilee, perhaps? That one’s a hundred cadres, forty mettles, and twenty-six rackets.”

  Lysande nearly bumped into a man in a brown merchant’s doublet as she turned. She steadied herself and began to unfasten her hood. “It’s your colleague I’ve come to see, Signore Perch.”

  While Perch disappeared into the back room, Lysande watched a spearfish goring something vigorously at the bottom of its bowl. The merchant returned bearing a ring of keys, and Lysande followed him into a chamber overflowing with paper. His knock on the far door brought a woman’s head out. It was set with a sharp chin and eyes that were shadowed; the rest of the woman followed, in a doublet almost as ink-flecked as Lysande’s own.

  “Signore Owl,” Charice said. “Still quick-thinking.”

  “Signore Fox,” Lysande said. “Still quick to bite.”

  “My favorite palace-dwelling, carriage-riding scholar. Come to ask for something, I assume.”

  “Just a horse, not a carriage, today.” Lysande smiled. “As for asking, you can always deny me, you know.”

  “If only that were true.”

  They clasped each other by both hands, with wrists crossed—the movement easier now that it was chosen, not enforced by the orphanage headmistress—and Lysande’s tongue loosened at last, giving Charice the news of the funeral and the swearing-in ceremony. A tide of pain rose inside her, lapping higher and higher. She circulated through the little room, picking up new scrolls and running a thumb over gem-imbued parchment, asking about the price of violet ink and the availability of silverfowl quills. Details helped, in the absence of scale. The fine points of facts kept the big picture away.

  That Charice was tenser than usual, Ly
sande noticed at once, mapping the lines on her friend’s brow. Charice had never asked for help in all the years they had been acquainted. The two of them had revealed enough of their secrets to know how the other coped with life’s most incisive darts; how each managed when the world rested upon her shoulders. You could share a bed with someone, as the two of them had done, lips speaking without words, but the real intimacy came when you saw your lover crying at the news of an execution, stifling sobs with their palm, or shaking and retching over a basin until the last of a bad dose was gone.

  Seeing her frown, Lysande knew that Charice would have burned her sprigs of heather today. Glass tinkled in the street again. They both pretended not to hear it.

  Lysande navigated Charice’s questions about Sarelin, steering them away from anything that touched on grief, aware of the pricks of recent memories under her skin. She was well aware, too, that she had less than an hour to ask her real question.

  A silence fell between them, and Charice took Perch’s ring of keys and rolled up the hanging of Sarelin on the wall, revealing a small door. Lysande caught Charice’s look and nodded.

  The hidden chamber seemed colder than usual. Perhaps it was the glass of all those vials and bottles, or perhaps it was the unlit fireplace, but Lysande found herself clutching her upper arms as they entered through the little door. Colored powders on the left shelf sparkled in their vials. She knew each hue of that rainbow: blackseed, snakeseed, seed of bliss. She did not like to recall why she remembered each drug so clearly.

  Beside the powders, she recognized bottles of gold liquid, stoppered with blackfoot oak. Down it after nights spent in intimate company, Sarelin had instructed her, a long time ago. With men, I mean. You won’t need it with women. Lysande had wondered how Sarelin had known that she had moved through a few lovers, both female and male.

  Best not to think of Sarelin, now.

  “The usual?” Charice said.

  Lysande nodded again. Her eyes picked out pale green dragongrass, suspended in a jar, and the uncomely burnt-hazel powder of second-century gryphon talon, collected in a thin bottle.

  Dragons and gryphons. Echoes of another time . . . all those marvels of nature wiped out by non-magical people as they waged war on elemental rulers, and then the chimeras, feared for their strangeness as well as their power: snuffed out. A waste, she had always thought. She had known not to voice her opinion, however, except in this chamber.

  She watched Charice open a box with a key and take out a jar, holding it up to the glow of the torch on the wall. The sight of the blue flakes should have had less effect. Like bottling up the sky, Haxley had written, but even that did not capture what she felt when a new batch of scale lay before her, its sheen promising stimulus to the body and calm to the mind. Lysande handed over ten silver mettles. Her fingers brushed Charice’s, cold against the other woman’s warmth.

  “Two more jars,” Lysande said. The tremor in her hand almost subsided.

  When Charice shut the box, Lysande could not resist a glance at the large drawing of a chimera on the right wall, taking in the curvature of the horns, the elegant shape of the lioness’ head, the point where fur gave way to scaly hindquarters, soft and smooth textures melding into the dragon-like wings, preceding the almost-calligraphic line of the tail. She resisted the urge to walk over to the artwork, yet as always, something moved inside her at the sight of it; something that she felt should have stayed still.

  “Do you really think you should be displaying a magical beast?” she said.

  “Do you really think you should be buying a magical drug and strolling straight into Axium Palace with it?”

  Lysande inclined her head. “I should know better than to question the orphanage wit.”

  “Tread carefully. That’s all I suggest.”

  “Shredded chimera scale is not a drug, you know. Some priests use it in ceremonies, for prayer,” Lysande said, twisting her sleeve into a finely scrunched pattern.

  “You’re not exactly a convincing worshipper.” Charice’s voice was not jovial. “Don’t take it awry. Even in the old days, I could never have kept you from yourself. I would warn you about a cumulative effect—about what happens when one spoonful of any drug becomes two, or three, or five—but I don’t think a lack of understanding has ever been your problem.” Charice’s stare passed over the jars. “Have you thought about how you will explain . . . this, when someone catches you?”

  Lysande looked across at the drawing, as if she suddenly found the arc of the chimera’s back fascinating. “A scholar may study anything, in theory. You should take care, Signore Fox.” She returned her gaze to Charice. “I can only clean up the riots, not change the law, with the whole court set against elementals.”

  “There are people one can seek out. Adaptation is a necessity, for some of us.”

  They looked at each other for a moment.

  Lysande was sensible, in the pause that followed, that she owed more to the woman who had swum through the seas of adolescence with her. Their trip into the countryside with the orphanage class returned, so clearly that it could have been illuminated in the book of her mind: the dense forest of beeches, in which she and Charice had lost their way, and that night under the stars . . .

  But she had not come here to reminisce. Nor had she convinced herself, despite her best efforts, that this was purely a visit of acquisition.

  Looking at the drawing again, she crossed the room and ran a finger along the animal’s body, tracing her way to where fur met scales.

  “What you said to me, once, about the scarcity of chimera blood . . . it still holds?”

  Not even a flicker passed over Charice’s face as she nodded.

  “Could there be more stock? A vial here, a bottle there, unaccounted for?” Lysande pressed.

  “Perhaps. But the only vials I’ve ever seen were headed north, a long time ago. And merchants . . . my kind of merchants . . . we talk among ourselves. Certain goods attract gossip more quickly than a bankrupt noble,” Charice said.

  Lysande thanked her, feeling the cogs and pulleys in her mind already moving. She was halfway to making her farewell bow when she saw the look on Charice’s face change. “What is it?”

  “They’re going to come for us, you know. All of them. The bakers, the smiths, the millers who smile at us as we pass, the cobblers who chat with us while they hand over our boots; the people we’re supposed to feel on an equal footing with. They’re already looking around to see who’s different—who they can blame. The queen is dead and their whole world is wobbling, so they can’t seem to find a stable place to stand. And that, my dear friend, is where the danger lies. They will put our bodies in the ground, and they will stand on us.”

  “You don’t know that,” Lysande said.

  “I know people.”

  “So do I.”

  Charice laughed. “You’re an owl on a perch. A fox runs on the ground.”

  Lysande’s tongue darted over her lip, dispelling some of the dryness. “Well, I won’t be running anywhere. If I stay in the palace, maybe I can work to change public opinion. Someone has to try.”

  “How long do you think that will take, amidst a sea of silverbloods vying for place?” Charice’s voice rose. “Do you think the ladies and lords of Axium’s finest manors will care what happens to an elemental merchant and a drug-addled scholar who was once an orphan?”

  “Still an orphan,” Lysande said.

  “You could have fooled me.”

  Lysande walked back into the main shop, where two green lights shone in the gloom. The panther lunged toward the bars of its cage, growling at the bag in her hand. She did not hear Charice call after her, and she did not turn to check if Charice was watching her leave.

  Every footstep rang like judgment. The points Charice had made dwelled in her mind, until she made a concerted effort to put them aside, for a time when
she could turn them over.

  As she walked through a labyrinth of lanes to her horse, her thoughts turned to her next task. Perfault had written that negotiation with silverbloods required confidence . . . “that high self-assurance” . . . and had she not read that chapter enough times when considering the qualities of an ideal ruler?

  The trick was not to move naturally, she thought, directing her observation to Sarelin. It was to appear to do so. Not to actually dance, like one of the earnest young men who had twirled ribbons for the queen, but to look as if you were leaping with such poise.

  White roses surrounded the base of the staff tower, their pale carpet sprinkled here and there with crimson buds. The spiral staircase seemed steeper than usual. Navigating her way through the piles of papers in her chamber, Lysande stepped between stacks of mathematical proofs and toppled the Guide to Eliran Wild Beasts. She paused at her desk, breathing in deeply.

  Language and translation. Those could soothe the most fractious thoughts, the poet Inara suggested. She reached for the thin vase she had borrowed from the kitchens, sliding it from the corner of her desk to right in front of her, examining the single black flower within. There were five names for a pure black rose, she was fairly sure, since each city had a different term: evenrose in Valderos, midnight’s bloom in Rhime, blacksalt rose in Axium, corpse-petal in Pyrrha, and inkflower in Lyria. Something about those names seemed significant. Her skill in selecting useful information, honed from years of assessing scrolls and books for Sarelin, was stirring into life, yet it only sent a vague and uncomfortable tingle through her.

  Lyrian silk. Just ostentatious enough to stand out, like the key to a puzzle, if you were looking for one. She counted them out again, the five names for a black rose, coming finally to inkflower—the name only used in Lyria—the kind of thing that only a scholar would know. Perhaps the Lyrian silk meant that Prince Fontaine wanted her to think of his gift as an inkflower . . .

  But why?

  She almost laughed out loud as she drew a line between the dots. It was hard not to appreciate the simplicity of it. For the palace scholar, the note had said, and if there was one thing scholars were renowned for, it was toiling with ink.