“I found out from Mademoiselle Odette the dyer that Príncipe Julio was betrothed before. Captain Kyle of the Sunflower, a merchantman, informed me that the príncipe’s bride-who-was-not-to-be was one Lady Sonya de Zapetta from El Sangre Aragothia on Craton Riqueza. Unfortunately, she took ill en route to San Augustus. She was diagnosed with the gray pest, so the story goes, and chose to fling herself overboard rather than risk infecting the crew.”
Isabelle blanched at this horrific tale and made a warding sign against the pest. “How … noble of her.”
“Yes,” Jean-Claude said acidly, “it’s not at all likely that a pack of cowardly sailors seized a terrified young woman from her sickbed and threw her screaming into the abyss. In the end, the crew was let off on a quarantine skyland, and the ship was burned down to the aetherkeel, but by the Builder’s grace, no one else got sick. It’s a miracle to be sure; the pest strikes like a hurricane, not like an assassin’s knife.”
Isabelle quieted her voice. “You believe Lady Sonya was murdered.”
“A metaphor only,” Jean-Claude insisted, but he belied his assertion when he added, “Cantator’dok, the Gyrine Windcaller, just arrived from San Cristobal, where the plague-ship crew was eventually landed. He spoke to some of that crew. The disease they describe is inconsistent with the progression of the pest. Monsieur Clovis, the vintner, has received a recent letter from his brother in El Sangre Aragothia. He mentioned an excess of fire beetles, and an ongoing drought, but no gray pest. ‘Plague’ is not a word I would choose to describe just one death. We shall have to be on our guard.”
Isabelle marveled at Jean-Claude’s clairvoyance. Who else could spend three days carousing and return to present her with some very suggestive intelligence from half a world away? Someone she did not want to lose.
“We have another problem,” she said. “My father intends to prevent you from accompanying me to Aragoth.”
Jean-Claude contrived a pained expression, but his eyes twinkled. “Pshaw! I am a King’s Own Musketeer. Your father can bellow like the boor he is but cannot stop me from going where I choose. The only one who might prevent me from accompanying you would be the ambassador the Aragoths have sent to escort you. Once I announce my intention to go, the comte will certainly ask him to forbid me setting foot on Aragothic soil.”
“Then I will tell Don Divelo that you are to be my personal guest. Once he has given his word to me, he will not be able to retract it.”
Jean-Claude swept his hat almost to the floor. “I am most honored.”
A soft tread in the hallway opposite Jean-Claude announced Marie’s return with Isabelle’s prosthesis. The bloodhollow opened the door, padded to Isabelle’s side, and stopped. Father’s face manifested through her ghostly visage.
“To whom were you speaking just then?” he asked.
Isabelle looked up, but Jean-Claude had silently taken himself out.
“My ladies,” she said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I need Marie to help me with this glove.”
*
Isabelle stood on the balcony overlooking the spinward fields, a canvas before her and paints to hand. She didn’t normally paint pastoral scenes, but there was a soft quality to the evening light, like golden honey drizzled across the land, that she wanted to capture. And I’m never going to see this place again. That realization wrenched her heart in spite of all her enthusiasm for escape. She knew every fold of this land, every glade and rill, every street and shop of the town. It was the only place she’d ever known, and its colors had bled into her soul. Who will I be somewhere else?
“Your Highness.” Kantelvar’s greasy clicking voice drew Isabelle’s attention back to the here and now. She turned to watch the artifex hiss, clank, and gurgle up the stairs behind her. He’d forgone his cote today in favor of long purple tippets emblazoned with the silver sigil of Saint Céleste, a four-armed woman bearing a gearwheel, an escapement, a spiral spring, and a ratchet.
“Your Exaltedness,” she said. “Thank you for attending me.” After a third day of being drowned in petitioners, Isabelle had discovered the joy of minions: ladies-in-waiting to accept gifts and supplications on her behalf, and runners to fetch people she actually wanted to talk to. Jean-Claude had referred a few ladies of exceptional competence and Isabelle filled out the roster with people who had at least been polite to her and who had shown wit and kindness to others. Most of them were from lesser families, none of them had a drizzle of sorcery, and all were grateful for the secondhand status her elevation afforded them.
Kantelvar bowed deeply to her, which unnerved her. He need not have shown such deference even to a queen, so why to her? “How may I serve Your Highness?”
Isabelle needed to talk to Kantelvar about Lady Sonya—she had rehearsed the conversation with Jean-Claude—but her throat locked up at the moment of commitment. Politics and assassinations were too dangerous a subject.
Isabelle took inspiration from his garb. “You are devoted to Saint Céleste. It seems an odd choice for an Aragothic artifex.” It was always easier to talk to other people about themselves, erasing herself as a subject as much as possible.
“I was not always assigned to Aragoth,” Kantelvar said. “It is more of a historical oddity that l’Empire Céleste was named for her, given that she was l’étincelle rather than Sanguinaire.”
“But she was married to Saint Guyot le Sanguinaire,” Isabelle said. “He named his kingdom after her, or at least that was the story I heard.” It was one of the great vexations of history that most knowledge of the saints, and most of the wisdom they had brought with them from the Primus Mundi, had been lost with the city of Rüul. What was left over mostly had the weight of old cloth, threadbare fabric many times patched and embroidered.
“That is a lie told by the Sanguinaire to try to claim her as one of their own,” Kantelvar said, his voice ringing like a hammer on an anvil. It was the most emotion she’d heard from him, genuine anger, but it dissipated as quickly as it flared. “It is true that Saint Céleste had a child by Saint Guyot, your Grand Leon’s direct ancestor, or so he claims, but those were desperate times. Unfortunately Saint Céleste was the only one of her kind, and her sorcery did not manifest in her children. ‘Ghostbred’ is the term of art for that outcome.”
“What was l’étincelle, or does anybody know?” Isabelle had never even heard the term before, not that saint lore was near the center of her interests.
Kantelvar did not answer immediately but tapped the foot of his staff on the flagstones, something he seemed to do when making up his mind.