The nightingales had forgotten how to sing. Ead lay on her side on the truckle bed, listening to Sabran breathe.
Oftentimes since the wyrm had come, she had drowned in dreams of what had happened that night. How she had carried Sabran to the Royal Physician. The hideous barb he had drawn from her belly. The blood. The cloth-wrapped form they had carried away. Sabran unmoving on the bed, looking as if she were on her bier.
A breeze wafted through the Great Bedchamber. Ead turned over.
Though she had watched Doctor Bourn and his assistants to ensure they first boiled everything that touched Sabran, it had not been enough. Inflammation had taken root. Fever had ravaged her, and she had lain on the brink of death for days—but she had fought. She had fought for her life like Glorian Shieldheart.
In the end, she had clawed herself from the edge of the grave, drained in body and soul. Once her fever had broken, the Royal Physician had concluded that the barb he had pulled from her had come from the High Western. Fearful that it might have given her the plague, he had sent for a Mentish expert in Draconic anatomy. What she had concluded was the unutterable.
The Queen of Inys did not have the plague, but she would never bear a living child.
Another draft rushed into the room. Ead rose from bed and shut the window.
Stars dotted the midnight sky. Beneath them, Ascalon flickered with torchlight. Some of its people would be awake now, praying for protection from what the commons were calling the White Wyrm.
They did not carry the same knowledge that haunted the Dukes Spiritual and the Ladies of the Bedchamber. Aside from the Royal Physician, only they knew the most dangerous secret in the world.
The House of Berethnet would end with Sabran the Ninth.
Ead trimmed the wick on one of the candles and lit it again. Since the White Wyrm had come, Sabran had only grown more fearful of the dark.
Fragments of historical evidence from the world over agreed that there had been five High Westerns. There were likenesses of them in the caves of Mentendon and the bestiaries made after the Grief of Ages.
According to that evidence, none of those High Westerns had possessed green eyes.
“Ead.”
She glanced over her shoulder. Sabran was a silhouette behind the see-through drapes around her bed.
“Majesty,” Ead said.
“Open the window.”
Ead placed the candle on the mantelpiece. “You will catch a chill.”
“I may be barren,” Sabran bit out, “but until I breathe my last, I am your queen. Do as I say.”
“You are still healing. If you perish from cold, the Principal Secretary will have my head.”
“Damn you, obstinate bitch. I will have your head myself if you do not do as I command.”
“By all means. I doubt I will have much use for it once it has bid my neck farewell.”
Sabran twisted to face her.
“I will kill you.” The cords in her neck were straining. “I despise all of you, overweening crows. All any of you think about is what you can peck from me. A pension, estates, an heir—” Her voice broke. “Damn you all. I would sooner throw myself off the Alabastrine Tower than I would swallow another spoonful of your pity.”
“Enough,” Ead snapped. “You are not a child. Cease this wallowing.”
“Open the window.”
“Come and open it yourself.”
Sabran let out a small, dark laugh. “I could have you burned for this insolence.”
“If it rouses you from that bed, I would gladly dance upon the pyre.”
The clock tower chimed once. Shuddering, Sabran lapsed back into the pillows.
“I was meant to die in childbed,” she whispered. “I was meant to give Glorian life. And yield my own.”
Her breasts had leaked for days after her loss, and her belly was still round. Even as she tried to heal, her own body kept opening the wound.
Ead lit two more candles. She pitied Sabran, so much so that she thought her ribs would break apart with it, but could not pander to her fits of self-hatred. Berethnet sovereigns were prone to what the Inysh called grievoushead—periods of sadness, with or without a discernible root. Carnelian the Fifth had been known as the Mourning Dove, and it was rumored at court that she had taken her own life by walking into a river. Combe had charged the Ladies of the Bedchamber with ensuring Sabran did not wander down the same path.
To be a moth on the window of the Council Chamber tonight. Some of the Dukes Spiritual would be arguing that the truth should never come out. Padding under gowns. An orphan child with black hair and jade eyes. Some of the council might contemplate such notions, but most of them would not brook the idea of bowing to anyone but a Berethnet.
“I was certain—” Sabran clenched her fists in her hair. “I must be beloved of the Saint. I drove away Fýredel. Why am I abandoned now?”
Ead forced down a surge of guilt. Her warding had fed into the lie.
“Madam,” she said, “you must maintain your faith. It does not do to dwell on—”
Another joyless laugh interrupted her. “You sound like Ros. I do not need another Ros.” Sabran tightened her hands. “Perhaps I should think of lighter things. Ros would tell me so. What shall I think of, Ead? My dead companion, my barren womb, or the knowledge that the Nameless One is coming?”
Ead made herself kneel and stoke the fire.
Sabran had spoken little for days, but what she had said had been meant to hurt. She had barked at Roslain for being too quiet. She had taunted the maids of honor when they served her meals. She had told a page to get out of her sight, reducing her to tears.
“I will be the last Berethnet. I am the destroyer of my house.” She gripped the sheets. “This is my doing. For spurning the childbed for so long. For trying to avoid it.”
Her head dropped forward.
Ead went to the Queen of Inys. She moved the drape aside and sat on the edge of the bed. Sabran was half-sitting, huddled over her bruised abdomen.
“I was selfish. I wanted—” Sabran breathed out through her nose. “I asked Niclays Roos to make me an elixir, something that would preserve my youth, so I would never have to get with child. When he could not,” she whispered, “I banished him to the East.”
“Sabran—”
“I turned my back on the Knight of Generosity for all that he had given me. I resented having to give just once in return.”
“Stop this,” Ead said firmly. “You had a great burden to bear, and you bore it bravely.”
“It is a divine calling.” Her cheeks glinted. “Over a thousand years of the same rule. Thirty-six women of the House of Berethnet bore daughters in the name of Inys. Why could I not?” She pressed a hand to her belly. “Why did this have to happen?”
At this, Ead took her gently by the chin.
“It is not your fault,” she said. “Remember it, Sabran. None of this is on your head.”
Sabran shied from her touch. “The Virtues Council will try everything, but my people are not fools,” she said. “The truth will out. Virtudom will collapse without its foundation. Faith in the Saint will be destroyed. The sanctuaries will be empty.”
The prophecy had the ring of truth. Even Ead knew that the collapse of Virtudom would cause turmoil. It was part of why she had been sent here. To preserve order.
She had failed.
“I have no place in the heavenly court,” Sabran said. “When I lie rotting in the soil, the Dukes Spiritual, whose blood comes from the Holy Retinue, will each lay claim to my throne.” A breath of humorless laughter escaped her. “Perhaps they will not even wait for me to die before the infighting begins. They believed in my power to keep the Nameless One shackled, but that power will now end with my death.”
“Then surely it is in their interest to keep you safe.” Ead tried to sound reassuring. “To buy themselves time to prepare for his coming.”
“Safe, perhaps, but not enthroned. Some of them will be asking themselves, at this very moment, if they should act at once. To choose a new ruler before Fýredel returns to destroy us.” Sabran narrated this in hollow tones. “They will all be asking themselves if the story of my divinity was ever true. I have been asking myself the same question.” Her hand slid back to her belly. “I have shown that I am only flesh.”
Ead shook her head.
“They will press me to name one of them my successor. Even if I do, the others may challenge it,” Sabran said. “The nobles will each raise their banners for one of the claimants. Inys will divide. While it is weak, the Draconic Army will return. And Yscalin stands poised to aid it.” She closed her eyes. “I cannot see it, Ead. I cannot see this queendom fall.”
She must have feared this outcome from the beginning.
“She was so . . . delicate. Glorian,” Sabran rasped. “Like the tracery of a leaf. The frail after the green has left it.” She gazed into nothing. “They tried to hide her from me, but I saw.”
A different lady-in-waiting would have told her that her child was safe in the heavenly court. Roslain would have painted her a picture of a black-haired baby swaddled in the arms of Galian Berethnet, smiling forever in a castle in the sky.
Ead did not. Such an image would not comfort Sabran in her grief. Not yet.
She reached for one icy hand and warmed it between hers. Shivering in the vastness of the bed, Sabran seemed more of a lost child than a queen.
“Ead,” she said, “there is a pouch of gold in the coffer.” She nodded to the chest her jewels were stored in. “Go into the city. The shadow market. They sell a poison there called the dowager.”
The breath went out of Ead.
“Don’t be a fool,” she whispered.
“You dare call the last Berethnet a fool.”
“Of course, when you speak like one.”
“I ask you this,” Sabran said, “not as your queen, but as a penitent.” Her face was taut, and her jaw trembled. “I cannot live knowing my people are doomed to death by the Nameless One or civil war. I could never be at peace with myself.” She took back her hand. “I thought you would understand. I thought you would help me.”
“I understand more than you know.” Ead cupped her cheek. “You have tried to turn yourself to stone. Do not be afeared to find that you are not. Queen you may be, but you are flesh and blood.”
Sabran smiled in a way that broke her heart.
“That is what it is to be a queen, Ead,” she said. “Body and realm are one and the same.”
“Then you cannot kill the body for the realm.” Ead held her gaze. “So no, Sabran Berethnet. I will not bring you poison. Not now. Not ever.”
The words came from a place she had tried to lock. The place where a rose had grown.
Sabran looked at her with an expression Ead had never seen. All the melancholy faded, leaving her curious and intent. Ead could see every splinter of green in her eyes, every lash, the candles trapped inside her pupils. The firelight danced on her shoulder. As Ead chased it with her fingertips, Sabran leaned into her touch.
“Ead,” she said, “stay with me.”
Her voice was almost too soft to hear, but Ead felt each word in her very flesh. Their lips were close now, a breath apart. Ead dared not move for fear that she would shatter this moment. Her skin was tender, aching at the feel of Sabran pressed against her.
Sabran framed her face between her hands. In her gaze was both a question and her fear of the answer.
As black hair brushed her collarbone, Ead thought of the Prioress and the orange tree. She thought of what Chassar would say if he knew how her blood sang for the pretender, who prayed to the empty tomb of the Mother. Scion of Galian the Deceiver. Sabran drew her close, and Ead kissed the Queen of Inys as she would kiss a lover.
Her body was spun glass. A flower just opened to the world. When Sabran parted her lips with her own, Ead understood, with an intensity that wrenched the breath from her, that what she had wanted for months now was to hold her like this. When she had lain beside Sabran and listened to her secrets. When she had stowed the rose behind her pillow. It was a realization that pierced her to the core.
They were still. Their lips lingered, just touching.
Her heart was too fast, too full. At first, she dared not breathe—even the smallest movement could sunder them—but then Sabran embraced her, voice breaking on her name. Ead felt the flutter of a heart against her own. Soft and quick as a butterfly.
She was lost and found and wandering, all at once. At the cusp of dreaming, yet somehow never more awake. Her fingers mapped Sabran, drawn across her skin by instinct. They followed the scar up her thigh, coursed in her hair, traced beneath her swollen breasts.
Sabran drew back to look at her. Ead caught a glimpse of her face in the candlelight—brow smooth, eyes dark and resolute—before they came together again, and the kiss was hot and new and world-forming, the flare of starbirth on their lips. They were honeycombs of secret places, fragile and intricate. Ead shivered as the night welcomed her skin.
She felt the wash of gooseflesh on Sabran. The nightgown slipped from her shoulder, farther, until it came to rest around her hips, so Ead could trace the pathway of her spine and fold her hands at the arch in her back. She kissed her neck and the naked place behind her ear, and Sabran breathed her name, head tilting back to bare the hollow of her throat. Moonlight filled it up like milk.
The silence of the Great Bedchamber was vast. Vast as night and all its stars. Ead heard each rustle of silk, each brush of hand on skin on sheets. Their breaths were hushed, held in anticipation of a knock on the door, a key in the lock, and a torch to bare their union. It would light a flame of scandal, and the fire would rise until it scorched them both.
But Ead called fire her friend, and she would plunge into the furnace for Sabran Berethnet, for just one night with her. Let them come with their swords and their torches.
Let them come.
Later, they lay in the light of the blood moon. For the first time in many years, the Queen of Inys slept without a candle.
Ead gazed at the canopy. She knew one thing now, and it blotted all else out of her mind.
Whatever the Priory desired, she could not abandon Sabran.
As she stirred in the depths of sleep, Ead breathed in the scent of her. Creamgrail and lilacs, laced with the clove from her pomander. She imagined stealing her away to the Milk Lagoon, that fabled land, where her name would never find her.
It could never be.
Slant light glowed through the Great Bedchamber. Gradually, Ead became aware of herself, and of Sabran. Black hair draped across the pillow. Skin on skin on skin. The sunlight had not yet reached the bed, but she felt as warm as if it had.
She felt no regret. Confusion, yes, and birds in her belly, but no desire to turn back time.
A knock came then, and it was as if a cloud had passed over the sun.
Katryen.
Sabran lifted her head. She looked first at Ead, heavy-eyed, then toward the doors.
“What is it, Kate?” Her voice was thick with sleep.
“I wondered if you might like to have a bath this morning. The night was so cold.”
She had been trying to coax her queen out for two days. “Draw the bath,” Sabran said. “Ead will knock when I am ready.”
“Yes, madam.”
The footsteps withdrew. Sabran turned back, and Ead met her unsure gaze. Now the sun was up, they took the measure of each other, as if they were meeting for the first time.
“Ead,” Sabran said softly, “you need not feel obliged to continue as my bedfellow.” Slowly, she sat up. “The duties of a Lady of the Bedchamber do not extend to what we did last night.”
Ead raised her eyebrows. “You think I did it out of duty?”
Sabran drew her knees to her chest and looked away. Nettled, Ead got out of bed.
“You are wrong,” she said, “Your Majesty.” She pulled on her nightgown and retrieved a mantle from the chair. “You ought to get up. Kate is waiting.”
Sabran gazed at the window. The sun turned her eyes to the pale green of beryl.
“It is almost impossible for a queen to tell what comes from deference, and what from the heart.” Those eyes sought hers. “Tell me the truth of it, Ead. Was it your own choice to lie with me last night, or did you feel compelled because of my rank?”
Her hair was a tangle about her shoulders. Ead softened.
“Fool,” she said. “I would not be compelled by you or anyone. Have I not always given you truth?”
Sabran smiled at that. “Too much of it,” she said. “You are the only one who does.”
Ead leaned in to kiss her brow, but before she could, Sabran caught her face between her hands and pressed her parted lips to hers. When they broke apart at last, Sabran smiled a true smile, rare as a desert rose.
“Come.” Ead draped the mantle over her shoulders. “I would see you walk under the sun today.”
Court life stirred again that morning. Sabran summoned the Dukes Spiritual to her Privy Chamber. She would show them that, though she was bruised in body and spirit, she was very much alive. She would arrange the conscription of new soldiers, hire mercenaries, and increase her funding to inventors in the hope that they could create better weapons. When the High Westerns returned, Inys would bite back.
As far as Ead could tell, the Dukes Spiritual had not yet broached the subject of a successor, but it was only a matter of time. They would be looking to the future now, to war with Yscalin and the two High Westerns that stood poised to wake and unite the Draconic Army. There was no heir and no chance of one. The Nameless One was coming.
Ead returned to her duties. But the nights were for Sabran. Their secret was like wine in her. When they were behind the drapes of the bed, all else was forgotten.
In the Privy Chamber, Sabran played the virginals. She was too weak to do a great deal else, and there was little else for her to occupy her time. Doctor Bourn had said she would not be fit to hunt for at least a year.
Ead sat close by, listening. Roslain and Katryen were silent beside her, absorbed in needlework. They were making favors stitched with the royal initials, to be handed out in the city to reassure the people.
“Majesty.”
Heads turned. Sir Marke Birchen, one of the Knights of the Body, was at the door in his copper-plated armor.
“Good evening, Sir Marke,” Sabran said.
“The Duchess of Courage has requested an audience, Majesty. She has state papers that require your signature.”
“Of course.”
Sabran rose. As she did, she swayed dangerously and caught the virginals.
“Majesty—” Sir Marke started toward her, but Ead, the closest, had already steadied her. Roslain and Katryen rushed to join them.
“Sabran, are you not well?” Roslain felt her brow. “Let me fetch Doctor Bourn.”
“Peace.” Sabran placed a hand on her midriff and breathed in. “Ladies, let me alone to sign these papers for Her Grace, but be back by eleven to help me disrobe.”
Roslain pursed her lips. “I will bring Doctor Bourn when I return,” she said. “Just let him look at you, Sab, please.”
Sabran nodded. As they all left, Ead looked back, and their gazes touched.
On most days, the Presence Chamber would be packed with courtiers, all waiting for Sabran to come forth so they could petition her. Now it was silent, as it had been since Sabran had taken to her rooms. Roslain went to pay a visit to her grandmother, while Katryen returned to her own rooms for supper. Not yet hungry, and with nothing to distract her from her worry about Sabran, Ead found a table in the Royal Library.
As darkness encroached, she considered, for the first time in days, what to do.
She had to tell Chassar the truth. If Sabran was right about what would happen next in Inys, Ead needed to remain here to protect her, and she needed to explain to Chassar in person. After much deliberation, she lit a candle, dipped her quill, and wrote:
From Ascalon, Queendom of Inys,
by way of Zeedeur Custom House
Late Autumn, 1005 CE
Your Excellency,
It has been far too long since I last heard from you. Doubtless you are preoccupied with your diligent work for King Jantar and Queen Saiyma. Will you be visiting Inys again soon?
Your assured friend and most humble ward,
Ead Duryan
She addressed it to Ambassador uq-Ispad. A courteous enquiry from his ward.
The office of the Master of the Posts was adjacent to the library. Ead found it deserted. She slotted the letter into a box for sorting, along with enough coin for postage by bird. If Combe deemed it free of suspicious words, one bird would take the letter to Zeedeur, another to the Letter Office in Brygstad. Next it would go to the Place of Doves, and, finally, with a postrider across the desert.
Chassar would receive her summons by high winter. The Prioress would not be pleased when she heard her request, but once she knew the danger, she would understand.
It was dark by the time Ead left the Royal Library, just as Sir Tharian Lintley was coming in.
“Mistress Duryan.” He dipped his head. “Good evening. I hoped to find you here.”
“Captain Lintley.” Ead returned the gesture. “How do you fare?”
“Well enough,” he said, but there was a notch of worry between his brows. “Forgive me for disturbing you, Ead, but Lord Seyton Combe asked that I bring you to him.”
“Lord Seyton.” Her heart raced. “Her Majesty did ask me to return to the royal apartments by eleven.”
“Her Majesty has already retired for the night. Orders from Doctor Bourn.” Lintley gave her a rueful look. “And . . . well, I do not think it was a request.”
Of course. The Night Hawk did not make requests.
“Very well,” Ead said, and forced a smile. “Lead on.”
