When Isabelle judged they had enough of a lead not to be easily overheard, she said, “What else have you discovered about this marriage treaty?”
“Nothing to speak of,” he said at a much lower volume. “’Twould seem the negotiations were rather closely held. Unfortunately, my friend the shepherd has been too busy avoiding conscription to have received any news from his brother in Rocher Royale, so I haven’t heard any rumors from that direction. How did your conversation with Kantelvar go? Did you ask him the questions I suggested?”
“Yes,” she said, giving him a précis of the conversation. “I was chosen as Lady Sonya’s second as a sort of guarantee. Who would murder her knowing they would get stuck with me as alternative?” It had been a blow to her pride to know that she had been a booby prize, but pride was coin she could afford to spend.
Jean-Claude listened intently and replied, “If you were meant to be a terrible warning, we should have heard about your candidacy long before now. It should have been heralded to the widest possible audience to gin up more support for Lady Sonya as the preferable choice.”
Isabelle tried to look at the problem mathematically. “Surely there are a limited number of people who stood to gain from Sonya’s death, other people who might have a candidate to put forward. They were the only ones who needed to be told, and they could be counted upon to be paying attention, couldn’t they?”
Jean-Claude made a tsking noise. “In my experience it is just as unwise to overestimate your opponents as to underestimate them. What else did you learn from Kantelvar?”
She shook her head. “I have the feeling I missed more than I caught from what he said. I’m just not very good at this sort of thing. Have you learned anything interesting about him?”
“I don’t have as many friends of friends in Aragoth as I’d like,” Jean-Claude said. “But I get the impression Kantelvar was a recluse. He had a large estate outside of San Augustus, preferred to make people come to him for favors and let his ambassadors do his traveling for him. That is, until just about a year ago, when the old Omnifex recalled him to Om, presumably to work on this treaty for your marriage.”
“He bothers me,” she said, clasping and unclasping her hand as she groped for specifics. “He quoted my father as saying that Carlemmo’s reign would be notable only for its brevity, but Carlemmo has been on the throne for twenty years. That’s only short when you compare it to Grand Leon. So when did my father say that to him? I don’t think he’s ever been on l’?le des Zephyrs before.”
Jean-Claude scratched the edge of his beard. “He wouldn’t have to be. Your father keeps a bloodhollow in Rocher Royale so he can do business at court without ever leaving his demesne. He might have one in Aragoth as well … but, come to remember it, there was an artifex here once, on the occasion of your birth.”
Isabelle’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. Jean-Claude had told her the true story of her birth, how the midwife had tried to smother her, to fortify her against the rumors and lies that had sprung up around the event. “You never mentioned that before.”
Jean-Claude shrugged. “Truthfully, I’d forgotten him. He was administering the admonishment of Iav to your mother in her labor. I didn’t ask his name. That’s the problem with clerics. You see the yellow robe and you think Temple. Well, sometimes you think, Oh look, the bugger’s gone and pissed himself, but usually you give them the benefit of the doubt. It’s pretty thick whitewash.”
“You don’t find it odd that one of the Seven came all the way out here just to attend a birth?”
“At the time, I thought your father might have summoned him to provide some extra theological oomph to your mother’s delivery. That was before I realized your father has almost as little use for the Temple as I do.” He grunted as if begrudging this similarity of thought.
“After that, I whisked you to Rocher Royale and presented you to Grand Leon. I delivered my report, you received his official blessing, and then he banished me back here. By the time we returned, the artifex was gone, and I had no cause to think of him again.”
“And yet here comes another artifex to whisk me away,” Isabelle said. “Or is he the same one?”
“No,” Jean-Claude said. “Not even if you add on all the clinks and clanks the current one is wearing.”
“Ah, so you don’t think the two events are related?”
“It’s a good question that needs looking into. In the meantime keep your eyes open and your wits about you, and I’ll talk to some people who might know more about that first artifex.”
The winding path left the orchard and climbed up a stone stair leading to an overlook of the deep sky. Today l’?le des Zephyrs stirred a layered soup of low-hanging clouds. The thin green film of the Miasma overlaid crisscrossing yellow tendrils of the Upper Veil. Beneath them roiled the lightning-shot Galvanosphere. Streaks of lightning chased each other through the indigo murk, igniting tingles along Isabelle’s spine and all the way down to her fingertips. Even her wormfinger felt more alive in the presence of the storm. If only she had a long enough cable to fish up a bottle of that lightning, what might she learn from it?
Isabelle waited until Jean-Claude had recovered from the climb before asking, “Do you think there is any chance of me becoming queen, happy ending and all?” she asked. Or am I going to end up dead?
“Alas, there are no happy endings, only interesting middles,” Jean-Claude said. “As for your marriage, the Aragoths made you a promise. I intend to see that they keep it.”
CHAPTER
Six
The Aragothic royal courier, the Santa Anna, was a week out from Windfall, bumping along through turbulent skies. Captain Santiago directed the ship’s operations from the quarterdeck. Jean-Claude clung, one-handed, to one of the stanchions holding up the captain’s sunshade. He strove for nonchalance even as his stomach lurched in a rhythm exactly contrary to the skyship’s undulations. It had been more than twenty years since he had set foot on one of these flying death traps. He had almost forgotten how much he hated sailing. The wind tugged his greatcoat, threatening to whisk him from the deck like a tuft of thistledown and send him tumbling into the Gloom.
He shut his eyes against the ship’s damnable lift-and-drop and fantasized about stable land. Maybe someday, when Isabelle didn’t need him anymore, he would return to the hinterland of his birth, la Valeé du Vin Rubis, where the sky had an actual horizon, not just a hazy guess, a place where he could tip over in any direction without fear of plunging to his death. Maybe he would take his severance and start a little farm, or better yet, an inn, someplace unlikely to fall off the face of the world … once he let go of Isabelle.
When she was married, it would be her husband’s job to protect her, and no doubt the husband would find Jean-Claude about as welcome as an infestation of lice.