Divelo considered that for an extended moment. “My duty is to the king, but I think, in this, your desire and his would be congruous. I shall attend to it immediately.” He made a bobble that passed for a bow in the crowded chamber and then backed out the door.
The gathering broke up. Isabelle made farewells to the captains as they departed for their ships and then took herself to the galleon’s quarterdeck to clear her head. There was more intrigue in Aragoth than she had imagined, and she had imagined a great deal. She needed to get to the bottom of Duque Diego, but she didn’t have enough information to work with. Also, she had just impulsively sent her best source of information to be decanted first by a woman who apparently had Isabelle’s betrothed under her majestic thumb. Though perhaps that was not such a bad thing; when Divelo came back, Isabelle could ask him what questions Margareta had posed to him.
Isabelle clipped herself to a line and leaned against the railing. The sun had disappeared beyond the clouded horizon and a million stars danced overhead. A million million. All around her, the deep sky closed in, milky clouds coalescing from the abyss below and spreading out in a great blanket until it seemed the Santa Anna sailed on a great lake of mist. The wind had lessened and the ship seemed to stroll rather than bound across the pearlescent surface.
In spite of the fire and the fear of the day, or perhaps because of it, the vision struck a silver chord in her breast. She stared into the distance, trying to drink in the tableau, to absorb it and be absorbed by it. She had looked into the sky many times. Sometimes she had cast her dreams across it to strange and distant lands. Sometimes she pondered its elemental composition and the organization of its aetheric forms. But never had she stood within it and seen it for itself, austere and beautiful, without need for interpretation or understanding.
“I could live here,” she murmured.
“Princess,” Jean-Claude called, making his way heavily up the stairs behind her.
She turned to see him clamp himself to the quarterdeck’s forward railing.
“A word with you, if you please,” he said. “And could you not stand so close to the edge?”
“I’m perfectly safe,” she said, or at least as safe as she was ever likely to be with disaffected nobles and a homicidal sorcerer trying to kill her. But Jean-Claude clearly had no ship legs—he kept trying to fight the motion of the ship, as if he could force it to stay level by applying counter-pressure to every wobble—so she unclipped herself and glided to him, attaching herself instead to the mizzenmast.
In a low voice, she asked, “What else do you have to report that you avoided telling the council of captains?”
Jean-Claude fumbled with his belt clip and finally got it to attach to the safety line, then he looked her in the face and said, “Only one thing. It was your brother who put that mirror on the ship.”
Isabelle was aghast. Even from Guillaume, she could scarcely believe it. “But why? Even if he loathes me, he has nothing to gain and everything to lose.”
“I believe he was trying to do a favor for his wife, and I believe that she did not know the nature of what was planned. After all, who would trust Arnette with such information? They were more concerned with winning favors from Duque Diego than with dispatching you.”
“What did you do to him?” she asked, morbidly curious and terrified of the answer.
Jean-Claude grinned through the pall of sky sickness that obscured his usual good humor. “The very worst thing I could think of. I bested him in battle and then let him go. If he has the slightest sense at all, he’ll try to distance himself from the whole matter. He certainly can’t tell your father about it.”
“And if he hadn’t been my brother?” Isabelle asked.
Jean-Claude shrugged and tried to look insouciant. “I think these plots are tangled enough without confusing them with further suppositions.”
Isabelle’s mouth twisted in a non-smile at this transparent evasion, but she let the matter drop. Jean-Claude defended her with extreme prejudice, but there was no point in forcing him to confess how extreme.
*
Isabelle and her ladies had retired to her cabin for the night, though the day’s excitement lingered and nobody seemed inclined to sleep. Five out of six women, including Marie, had exchanged dresses for nightgowns. The sixth, Valérie, was out strolling the deck with Vincent, much to the delight of the other ladies, who had been running low on gossip. Isabelle wondered if she shouldn’t put a stop to the liaison or try to use it to bend Vincent to her service, but she knew how much she hated being used that way. If you couldn’t gain someone’s loyalty without twisting their affections, then you couldn’t get it at all.
The ladies embroidered and chattered, making small talk and wild conjectures, while Isabelle immersed herself in a thick book of Aragothic history, which sadly consisted mostly of a chronology of battles, as if the only debates that mattered were the armed kind. There was some mention of marriages with an eye toward their territorial value, but nothing of any philosophical interest. Still, she dedicated herself to committing as much of it to memory as possible, as any responsible would-be queen ought.
“Would-be queen.” Those words were fraught with complications that she had not even begun to unravel, not the least of which was that Aragoth already had, in Margareta, a queen who was relatively young, healthy, and ambitious. Divelo’s description had painted a picture of a formidable woman who seemed intent on keeping power for herself rather than handing it over to her son. Of course, that was only Isabelle’s interpretation of one man’s opinion delivered during a discussion of a different topic.
So what did Margareta think of Isabelle? It occurred to Isabelle that one more reason Margareta might have chosen Isabelle as her son’s bride was because, as a foreigner, she would be isolated, out of place, and easier to dominate. Or it could just be that Isabelle’s own filial experience had given her an incredibly jaded view of parental relationships.
She’d left a porthole cracked open, and a chill breeze played across her naked arms in a tingling counterpoint to the heat of the alchemical lanterns that burned and buzzed over the desk. She held the book open with her right arm. Her wormfinger, unbound from any glove, curled and uncurled of its own volition, forever like a separate animal trapped in her flesh and striving to escape.