“The knight,” she pressed on, “was moved by her tears. Sweet lady, he said, I should sooner plunge my sword into my own heart than see thy blood water the earth. If thy people will give their souls to the Virtues of Knighthood, and if thou giveth me thy hand in marriage, I will drive this fell beast from these lands. This was his promise.”
Ead paused to gather her breath. And suddenly, an unexpected taste entered her mouth.
The taste of the truth.
“Cleolind told the knight to leave, insulted by his terms,” she found herself saying, “but Sir Galian would not be deterred. Determined to win glory for himself, he—”
“No,” Sabran cut in. “Cleolind agreed to his terms, and was grateful for his offer.”
“This is as I heard it in the South.” Ead raised her eyebrows, even as her heartbeat stumbled. “Lady Roslain asked me to—”
“And now your queen commands you otherwise. Tell the rest as the Sanctarian does.”
“Yes, madam.”
Sabran nodded for her to continue.
“As Sir Galian battled with the Nameless One,” Ead said, “he was gravely wounded. Nonetheless, with the greatest courage of any man living, he found the strength to thrust his sword into the monster. The Nameless One slithered away, bleeding and weak, and tunneled back into the Womb of Fire, where he remains to this day.”
She was too aware of Sabran observing her.
“Sir Galian returned with the princess to the Isles of Inysca, gathering a Holy Retinue of knights along the way. There he was crowned King of Inys—a new name for a new age—and for his first decree, he made the Virtues of Knighthood its true and sole religion. He built the city of Ascalon, named for the sword that had wounded the Nameless One, and it was there that he and Queen Cleolind were joyfully wed. Within a year, the queen gave birth to a daughter. And King Galian, the Saint, swore to the people that while his bloodline ruled Inys, the Nameless One could never return.”
A neat story. One that the Inysh told again and again. But not the whole story.
What the Inysh did not know was that it was Cleolind, not Galian, who had banished the Nameless One.
They knew nothing of the orange tree.
“Five hundred years later,” Ead said, softer, “the break in the Dreadmount widened again, and it let out other wyrms. First came the five High Westerns, the largest and cruelest of the Draconic creatures, led by Fyredel, he who was most loyal to the Nameless One. So too came their servants, the wyverns, each lit with fire from one of the High Westerns. These wyverns made their nests in the mountains and the caves, and they mated with fowl to birth the cockatrice, and with serpent to birth the basilisk and the amphiptere, and with ox to birth the ophitaur, and with wolf to birth the jaculus. And by means of these unions, the Draconic Army was born.
“Fyredel longed to do what the Nameless One had not, and conquer humankind. For more than a year, he turned the might of the Draconic Army on the world. Many great realms crumbled in that time, which we call the Grief of Ages. Yet Inys, led by Glorian the Third, was still standing when a comet passed over the world, and the wyrms fell suddenly into their age-old sleep, ending the terror and bloodshed. And to this day, the Nameless One remains in his tomb beneath the world, chained by the sacred blood of Berethnet.”
Silence.
Ead folded her hands in her lap and looked straight at Sabran. That cold face was unreadable.
“Lady Oliva was right,” the queen said eventually. “You do have the tongue of a storyteller—but I suspect you have heard too many stories, and not quite enough truth. I bid you listen well at sanctuary.” She set down her goblet. “I am tired. Goodnight, ladies.”
Ead rose, as did Linora. They curtsied and left.
“Her Majesty was displeased,” Linora said crossly when they were out of earshot. “You told the story ever so beautifully at first. Why in the world did you say that the Damsel rejected the Saint? No sanctarian has ever said that. What a notion!”
“If Her Majesty was displeased, I am sorry for it.”
“Now she might not invite us to sup with her again.” Linora huffed. “You should have apologized, at least. Perhaps you should pray more often to the Knight of Courtesy.”
Mercifully, Linora refused to speak after that. They parted ways when Ead reached her chamber.
Inside, she lit a few tapers. Her room was small, but it was her own.
She unlaced her sleeves and removed the stomacher from her gown. Once she was out of it, she cast away the petticoat and the farthingale, and, finally, off came the corset.
The night was young. Ead took a seat at her writing table. Inside was the book she had borrowed from Truyde utt Zeedeur. She could not read any Eastern script, but it bore the mark of a Mentish printer. It must have been published before the Grief of Ages, when Eastern texts were permitted in Virtudom. Truyde was a blossoming heretic, then, fascinated by the lands where wyrms basked in human idolatry.
At the end of the book, on a flyleaf, was a name in fresh ink, scribbled in a curling hand.
Niclays.
Ead thought back as she braided her hair. It was a common name in Mentendon, but there had been a Niclays Roos at court when she had first arrived. He had excelled in anatomy at the University of Brygstad and was rumored to practice alchemy. She remembered him as gorbellied and cheerful, kind enough to acknowledge her where others did not. There had been some trouble that had concluded in his departure from Inys, but the nature of the incident was a closely guarded secret.
In the silence, she listened to her body. Last time, the cutthroat had almost beaten her to the Great Bedchamber. She had not felt the flicker of her warding until it was almost too late.
Her siden was weak. The wardings she made with it had kept Sabran safe for years, but it was finally dying, like a candle at the end of its wick. Siden, the gift of the orange tree—a magic of fire and wood and earth. The Inysh in their witlessness would call it sorcery. Their ideas about magic were born of fear of what they could not understand.
It was Margret who had once explained to her why the Inysh had such a fear of magic. There was an ancient legend in these isles, still told to children in the north, of a figure known as the Lady of the Woods. Her name had been lost to time, but the fear of her enchantments, and her malice, had knitted itself into the bones of the Inysh and seeped through generations. Even Margret, level-headed in most things, had been reluctant to speak of it.
Ead raised a hand. She mustered her power, and golden light sputtered in her fingertips. In Lasia, when she had been close to the orange tree, siden had glowed like molten glass in her veins.
Then the Prioress had sent her here, to protect Sabran. If the years of distance extinguished her power for good, the queen would always be vulnerable. Sleeping at her side would be the only way to keep her safe, and only the Ladies of the Bedchamber did that. Ead was a long way from being a favorite.
Her restraint had cracked at supper, telling that story. She had learned to play a game over the years, to speak Inysh falsehoods and utter their prayers, but telling that butchered story herself had been difficult. And though her moment of defiance might have hurt her chances of rising any further at court, she could not quite regret it.
With the book and letters under one arm, Ead climbed onto the back of her chair and pressed at the strapwork on the ceiling, sliding a loose panel to one side. She stowed the items in the alcove beyond, where her longbow was hidden. When she was a maid of honor, she had buried the bow in the grounds of whatever palace the court occupied, but she was confident that even the Night Hawk could not find it in here.
Once she was ready for bed, she sat at her table and wrote a message to Chassar. In code, she told him there had been another attack on Sabran, and that she had stopped it.
Chassar had promised he would reply to her letters, but he never had. Not once in the eight years she had been here.
She folded the letter. The Master of the Posts would read it on behalf of the Night Hawk, but he would see nothing but courtesies. Chassar would know the truth.
A knock came at the door.
“Mistress Duryan?”
Ead put on her bedgown and undid the latch. Outside was a woman wearing a badge shaped like a winged book, marking her as a retainer in the service of Seyton Combe.
“Yes?”
“Mistress Duryan, good evening. I have been sent to inform you that the Principal Secretary wishes to see you at half past nine tomorrow,” the girl said. “I will escort you to the Alabastrine Tower.”
“Just me?”
“Lady Katryen and Lady Margret were both questioned today.”
Ead’s hand tightened on the door handle. “It is a questioning, then.”
“I believe so.”
With the other hand, Ead drew her bedgown closer. “Very well,” she said. “Is that all?”
“Yes. Goodnight, mistress.”
“Goodnight.”
When the retainer walked away, darkness took back the corridor. Ead shut the door and set her brow against it.
She would have no sleep this night.
The Rose Eternal rocked on the water, tilted by the east wind. It was this ship that would bear them across the sea to Yscalin.