“I came to see you,” he said, half the truth. By every oath he had ever sworn to le roi and to Isabelle, he ought to press his questions on her immediately, but she deserved better, and if there was not some higher justice that commanded compassion, then there bloody well ought to have been. “I see that you are out of bed.”
“Oh, yes.” She beamed weakly, like the sun through a dense fog. “Now if the cursed doctors would just let me get back to work—” A spasm of coughing interrupted her bravado, and Jean-Claude wrapped a tentative arm around her shoulders. She leaned into him and he held her tight to his chest as she expectorated blood, serum, and bits of rotted lung. When the spasm passed, she leaned her sweating forehead against his chest. Fever heat rolled from her in waves, and tears rimmed her eyes.
“Why did you come to see me?” she asked.
Jean-Claude fought back an urge to lie, to make Adel the center of the universe, at least for a few moments. “I need to ask you a question about Príncipe Julio,” he whispered in her ear. “I think someone may have betrayed him.”
She stiffened, but with anger, not disbelief. “Who?”
“That is what I hope you can tell me. Did he have any servants who went away or disappeared about the time he had his riding accident?” Whoever replaced the príncipe must have studied him closely, and the only sort of person who could know the príncipe that well and still be able to disappear without drawing undue attention was a servant. Every nobleman knew servants ran away at the drop of a hat; it was one of those facts that no amount of evidence to the contrary could refute.
“Servants? No, not that I can think of.”
Jean-Claude gritted his teeth. There had to be someone. Someone whose appearance had somehow been altered to match the príncipe’s.
“Someone with a bad leg,” he guessed. Why else maim the puppet prince except to cover up some deformity? After all, Kantelvar had been willing to cut Isabelle’s arm off … a fact that made his vision red with rage.
Adel looked up at him in surprise. “Clìmacio,” she said. “He had a clubfoot. He ran away a month before the accident.”
“The whipping boy?” The idea stunned Jean-Claude with its pure vindictiveness. Kantelvar needed a pawn to replace Julio, and he had offered the job to Clìmacio; what better way for a whipping boy to get back at the whole family? Replace the prince, assume the throne, disgrace the queen. It was an ambitious revenge, more than a whipping boy might conceive, but easily the sort of thing Kantelvar might have invented, the means to some greater, more twisted end. But how was such a deception possible?
“Did Clìmacio greatly resemble Príncipe Julio?”
“No, why?”
“Just a thought,” Jean-Claude said, and a major hole in his speculation. Yet either Julio had to have a twin nobody knew about, or someone had to have been altered to resemble Julio. A Goldentongue glamour could disguise one’s appearance, but they tended to be temporary effects, not the sort of thing one could rely on for months.
Adel huddled against Jean-Claude, shuddering in her distress. “I am sorry. About la princesa.”
“Nay nay, take comfort. She is alive.” That particular secret would be all too safe with Adel, he feared.
Adel gasped in a way that had more to do with surprise than suffering. “Truly?”
“She is kidnapped by the same villain who betrayed Julio, and I seek to find her.”
“Even so. Good news.”
Jean-Claude embraced her through another long shudder. It was cruel to trouble her further, but there was yet another question she might be able to answer. Would she not take some comfort, even now, in serving the príncipe and princess?
He said, “But we do not know what became of Marie, Isabelle’s bloodhollow handmaid.”
Adel said nothing for a long moment, and Jean-Claude thought she might be too lost in her own pain to respond, but at last she said, “La princesa took her. With the artifex. Don’t know where. She came back alone.”
Jean-Claude denounced himself as a dunderhead. Kantelvar had promised Isabelle to lift Marie’s curse; it was an obsession she could not resist, her biggest blind spot.
Someone cleared his throat behind Jean-Claude. He turned to find DuJournal standing there and cursed his inattentiveness; that could have been an enemy. Indeed, it might still be.
But DuJournal said, “I think I know where the bloodhollow might have been taken. There’s an old Temple not far from the guest residence. It was razed years ago, but the basement vaults are still there.”
Jean-Claude wanted to ask, And just how do you know that? but decided not to kick the messenger in the teeth.
“Someplace dark and cold without windows?” he asked.
“Yes, indeed.”
He shifted his weight to stand but then remembered Adel. “Mademoiselle…”
She stirred and eased away from him. “Go, Jean-Claude, rescue your princesa.”
He stiffly stood and bowed to her. “I will return, mademoiselle,” he said. It will be too late, I fear, but I will return.
She smiled at him again. “I thank you for your concern, brave musketeer.”
Tears obscured Jean-Claude’s vision. He groped for DuJournal’s shoulder and allowed himself to be guided from the room, Adel’s racking cough echoing in his ears.
CHAPTER
Seventeen
“Who designed this madhouse?” Jean-Claude said as DuJournal led him through a maze of dusty rooms and corridors, antechambers and staircases filled with clinging cobwebs. Leaving Adel to her fate had been inevitable and needful, but it left him in a foul humor.
“Half a dozen different architects, each with his own rampant ego, all at the same time, without any sort of effective oversight,” DuJournal said dryly.
“Wasteful,” Jean-Claude said.
“On purpose,” DuJournal said. “The gold and silver being brought back from the colonies were swamping the kingdom. Carlemmo threw as much as he dared into roads and harbors and ships and aqueducts, but there was still too much. The value of the doubloon was starting to dissolve, hence this extravagant money sink.”
Jean-Claude tried to bend his thoughts around the idea of a kingdom with too much gold, but right now he hadn’t the mental resources. “So how far is this Temple vault?”
“Not far.” They took a right-hand turn. No hesitation. Jean-Claude wondered, not for the first time, if his guide was leading him into a trap. He made sure to do a bit of extra limping, just in case he needed DuJournal to underestimate him.
“I take it you’ve been here before,” Jean-Claude said.
A pause before answering and then, “When I first began my service on Princesa Xaviera’s behalf, I followed Artifex Kantelvar down here in an attempt to discern his place in the scheme of things.”
A lie, Jean-Claude thought, or at least the truth dressed in beggar’s clothes. Clearly DuJournal had been down here often enough to know the place. He had quite probably been looking into Kantelvar, so what omission was he troweling over?
“When did you start working for Xaviera?”
DuJournal chuffed and said, “A few months ago.”
A few months and already he knew the minutiae of this sprawling project that had been going on for decades. “And did you manage to arrange for me to have an audience with the false prince?”