Lena spoke through her fingers. “How long has he been . . . ?”
“Months? I’m not sure.” Cas surveyed the rest of the chamber. A single room with low beams and steps in a corner leading below. Dark cloth had been nailed to the windows. The only light came from the open door. Hundreds of jars sat on a wall of shelves, big jars, little ones. In them were terrible things floating in thick, murky liquid.
Cas drew closer, fascinated and repulsed. The archive at Palmerin carried all sorts of books and manuscripts. He had spent many hours poring over the keep’s medical treatises, for what could be more intriguing to a young boy than drawings of severed body parts and human organs?
Hearts and kidneys filled these jars. Human heads with milky, unseeing eyes. A single hand. A pair of feet. The doctor had not limited himself to man, Cas realized, when he spotted the jar holding a lynx cub. There were mice, turtles, ducks, genets. And in one jar, near the end of a row, something he could not identify.
Lena came up beside him. She grabbed his sleeve and whispered, “What is it?”
Sister Roslyn also stepped closer, peering into the jar. She stumbled back with a cry.
Lena reached for her, alarmed. “Sister?”
Stunned, Sister Roslyn said, “It is a woman’s . . . It is a womb.”
Bittor could not enter the cottage. He tried again, and Lena showed him the womb. He fled. Out of sight this time, but the retching sounds were unmistakable. A soldier who reacted poorly, delicately even, to gore. Privately, Cas wondered at his decision to join the army.
Sister Roslyn, after one frozen moment gaping at the shelves, rounded on Sister Ivette in a fury. She struck the younger nurse twice across the face—“You wretched girl! You spawn of snakes!”—before Cas caught her arm and pulled her out of the cottage. Lena dragged the wailing Sister Ivette out as well.
Bittor sat on the ground by the horses. Cas hustled Sister Roslyn his way. “Will you keep them apart? She might kill her.”
“Fine.” Bittor wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Anything but going back in there.”
Sister Ivette crumpled beside him, crying into her hands. Sister Roslyn stalked off some ways to stand beneath a tree, her back to them.
Cas turned to Lena. “Stay with them. I’m going to look around.”
Lena did not bother to argue. She gave Sister Ivette the evil eye, then simply turned on her heel and entered the cottage again, leaving Cas no choice but to follow.
Cas stepped around the doctor and examined the restraints on the table. Rust coated the iron cuffs, along with blood turned black with time. His mind shied away from the horrors that had taken place in this chamber.
Lena’s eyes had filled with tears. Not all of them, Cas knew, were due to the stench. “He kept her here,” she said. “Hurt her. All this time.”
“Yes.”
Lena snuck a glance at the womb. She shuddered. “Maybe it isn’t hers.” Then, “What am I saying? If it isn’t Lady Mari’s, it is someone else’s.” She regarded the doctor with loathing and said very softly, “I want to burn this house down.”
The cuffs made him think of his own imprisonment. The shackles, the beatings. He had gone mad for a time, and he suspected his suffering had been nowhere near as wretched as Lady Mari’s. He said, “Then let’s burn it down.”
They regarded each other across the table, and Lena saw that he meant what he said. She nodded slowly. “Then let’s burn it down.”
Outside, the weeping continued, followed by Bittor’s bad-tempered “Oh, pipe it, won’t you? If there’s anyone who should be crying, it’s me.”
Cas found a candle on its side on the floor. “But first”—he indicated the stairs—“let’s see what’s down there.”
There were no bodies or jars in the lower chamber. There was a bed, a chair, and a table piled high with books and parchment. A trunk had been placed at the foot of the bed.
And there were chains.
Three sets attached to separate walls. Lady Mari had not been the only person imprisoned here. Sister Ivette had sent others.
Cas set the candle on the table beside a ring of keys. For the cuffs, he guessed. The candle was made of cheap tallow. It offered a stingy yellow light and plenty of smoke.
Lena kicked at some chains and sent them rattling. “Where do I start?”
“The trunk?” Cas suggested. “I’ll look through these.”
Cas sifted through medical books and anatomical sketches, but could find nothing that told him where Lady Mari might have gone from here. Disappointed, he looked beneath the table and, to be thorough, checked under the chair. Lena had discovered her grandfather’s inventory tucked behind the wheel of a carriage, he remembered. But he found nothing.
“Look at this!” Lena knelt by the open trunk. Cas hunkered down beside her. She held up a dress that had once been very fine, blue silk trimmed with black lace.
“The buttons are missing,” he said, noting the rips and tears.
“A dress like this would have had silver buttons, or enamel. Maybe even seed pearls. They would have been easy to carry and easy to sell.”
“Lady Mari’s?” He eyed the three sets of chains. The dress could have belonged to someone else.
“Let me see.” There was a brief rustling as she turned the dress inside out. “Yes! Look, the lining’s been ripped free. This was where they hid the coins.”
“What’s this?” An object glinted on the floor, in the narrow space between trunk and bed. Cas reached for it. The square box, made of solid gold, fit in the palm of his hand.
“It’s a portrait box!” Lena exclaimed.
Cas’ mother had owned such a box. Hers had opened to a miniature of his father painted on the inside of the lid. The box had also held a lock of hair from each of her sons, snipped when they were babies.
Cas undid the clasp. He angled the lid toward the sputtering candle. He barely heard Lena’s gasp, so loud was the buzzing in his head.
A portrait had been painted inside the lid. It was of a young woman, unsmiling but lovely, dressed in full court regalia: a white dress and robes, a crown, a scepter. Beneath the painting was an engraving. For Rayan, My Husband, My King. Honor, Faith, Fidelity. And a name: Jehan of Brisa.
Only the woman who gazed out at them was not the person Cas knew as Queen Jehan. This was the archer who had shot an arrow across a lake. Cas had chased her through the streets of Palmerin. The woman in this portrait had shared a conversation with him by an open fire, even as she poisoned an innocent boy and the nurse who raised her.
27
King Rayan had married the wrong woman. Unknowingly. He had fathered a child, the heir to the throne, not with Princess Jehan of Brisa, but with her friend Lady Mari.
And Ventillas had known.
His brother had left the real princess at the hospital, and then he had kept his silence. Had stood quietly by as his king—his friend!—married an imposter. Not a word had passed through his lips when their son was born and named for him.
Prince Ventillas.