“But that was before Lady Sonya was killed. My name should never have come up.”
“There were politics involved,” Kantelvar said, lightly rapping his staff on the floor. “We electors decided that it would be better to name two potential brides in the treaty. Lady Sonya, being Aragothic, was the least controversial choice, so she was named first. To be perfectly blunt, one of the reasons your name was included was that it was supposed to provide some protection for Lady Sonya. I’m sure you can see why.”
The bitter logic left Isabelle numb. “Because if anybody killed her, they would be stuck with me.” She’d not been chosen because of her virtues but because of her faults. Once again she was the Breaker’s get, the fate so terrible that anything else looked good by comparison. “I’d be as well received as a gut wound.”
“Which is why we are going to make absolutely sure you arrive safely for your wedding at the royal citadel in San Augustus.”
“How can you be sure?”
“No expense is being spared on your personal security,” Kantelvar said, “but more importantly we are hunting the assassin’s master, which will make it harder for him to move against us without attracting attention to himself. Capturing him will likewise discourage imitators.”
Isabelle was not soothed. Kantelvar seemed to have a great deal of confidence in things for which there was no certainty. She dipped her paintbrushes in solvent and began scraping off her palette. She’d lost the light and her enthusiasm for the painting before her.
“Are there any other questions I can answer for you, Highness?” Kantelvar asked.
Isabelle wanted to point out that he hadn’t really answered the ones she’d already asked.
“No … wait. Yes, there is one. I almost forgot. You said you revivified one other bloodhollow; how is it no word of that ever came to my ear?”
“Because I am discreet. There was a minor noble family, every bit as delightful as yours, deep in the Forest of Sorrows. I was called there by a Sanguinaire widow. Her unhallowed son could not inherit his father’s domain, and so she tried to draw his sorcery out of him, using her own bloodshadow, with results you can anticipate.”
Isabelle winced in sympathy for the poor boy. “She went too far and turned him into a bloodhollow.”
“Yes, so she called me in and I reconstituted him.”
“And what happened after that? What was his state of mind?”
“I didn’t know him before he was a bloodhollow, so I have no basis for comparison, but he seemed compos mentis to me. His mother requested that I never speak of the incident to anyone. Apparently she never did, either.”
*
Two of Vincent’s guards braced to attention as Isabelle approached her room. They were stern men in infantry uniforms, white tabards with the des Zephyrs blue triskelion crest over leather jerkins and gray shirts. One of them opened the door and took a quick look inside, presumably to make sure no assassins had taken up residence in her absence. Inspection completed, he bowed her in. Isabelle muttered shy thanks to him, slipped inside, bolted the door, and leaned against it.
Her mind boiled with revelations about politics, assassins, and betrothals. It was all excited steam, too hot to touch, much less organize. She needed rest and routine and time to let things settle down enough that she could make sense of them.
Isabelle placed her painting of the landscape next to other recent paintings of the harbor, the millhouse, the townsfolk about their daily business. It was not the detailed and meticulous style favored by portraitists, but a looser, more vibrant expression of light and shadow. They were her memories, and they were heartbreaking, but her heart kept thumping just the same.
Marie stood against the wall like a caryatid, not even waiting, just being, like a statue.
Not for long. The promise of getting Marie back, of finally divesting herself of this desperate burden, sang to her more clearly than anything else she’d been promised. She knew nothing about being a wife, or of fulfilling her duties as the bearer of children, or of being a queen. Those were just words, merely dreams, but she had been living in the ruins of Marie’s destruction for nearly as long as she could remember, far longer than she had been the girl’s friend.
She put Marie through a series of stretching and strengthening exercises, then had her strip down for her evening inspection. Might this twice-daily indignity at last be bearing fruit? Kantelvar had said Marie was in better condition than either of the other bloodhollows he’d treated.
Isabelle sat back on her haunches and frowned, for that wasn’t all Kantelvar had said. He’d said, “Only living things can mature.” But how had Kantelvar known she had matured? He hadn’t been here when she was hollowed out. Of course he must have known Isabelle and Marie had been children at the time she had been changed, and Marie had grown up a little, though she looked sixteen instead of twenty-five, much as some plants deprived of sufficient water grow more slowly than those fully nourished.
Isabelle shook off her unease. This upending of her life was making her crazy. If Isabelle was going to call herself an empirical philosopher, even if only in the privacy of her own head, she must be mindful not to entertain the phantasms of anxiety and fear. Right now she had only a feeling that something was … off, and even that was shapeless.
*
Dawn drizzled the Oreamnos Hills with a glaze of amber as Isabelle and Jean-Claude strolled the curving lane of the Chateau des Zephyrs’s plum orchard on the morning of her scheduled departure. The buds on the trees were just beginning to swell, like they had every year of her life. She wouldn’t get to see them bloom. That thought clung to her like a cobweb. Indeed, she was so hung about with gossamer memories she felt like the ghost in a haunted house, all but gone.
And she had to become so much more. A queen. Would that truly be allowed?
Footsteps on the gravel behind reminded her of Vincent’s men, set to guard her against assassins, apparently on the presumption that they might reach her even here, in this mote on a sunbeam that was l’?le des Zephyrs. They were also set to spy on her. In this new life, even her protectors served her enemies. All except Jean-Claude.
While Isabelle and Jean-Claude steadily increased their pace to put meters of separation between themselves and their pursuers, Jean-Claude had been waking up the gardens with boastful recounting of his latest small victories: “You should have seen the look on Guillaume’s face when I pointed out I had an invitation to a royal wedding and he did not. He puckered like he’d had a shaved lemon stuffed up his arse.”