Leith Duresse.
She had grown up aware of him, not really knowing why for years, only
understanding finally that it was her mother’s awareness of him she had
sensed at a very early age. Other knights could come and go, their faces
blurring into one another; she always saw Leith clearly: the tall man with the
black hair and broad shoulders, eyes the turquoise of Calluna’s walls in the
sanctum. Always shadows in them, Perdita saw, always something she could not
grasp. Then one day she did. Maybe someone had said something. Maybe it was
the way he had looked at the princess, from behind that tangle of passion,
guilt, love, acknowledging his fault. Or maybe he had opened the door of her
mother’s chamber in that place where only women came, just at the moment when
she was old enough, knew enough, to understand what she saw.
Her mother opened the door a moment later. Perdita saw her glance down the
stairwell. Then she heard Perdita’s step and turned her head quickly to meet
her daughter’s eyes.
Perdita saw only recognition and a faint touch of relief. The queen stepped
back, opening the door wider. “You’re so late. Hurry and dress.”
“I know. I got tangled up in the line of knights.” The little chamber,
richly appointed with chairs, couch, wardrobe, mirrors, cupboards, was already
draped with the queen’s garments. Perdita began to throw clothes off as the
queen closed the door and opened the wardrobe where Perdita’s acolyte’s
skirt and tunic hung. Genevra, who rarely smiled, gave a sudden, helpless
laugh.
“You smell like a brewery.”
Her mother was a mermaid, the child Perdita had decided. What else could she
be with that long sea-foam hair, those green eyes, that skin as luminous as
pearl? Decades of marriage, two walloping sons and two daughters, an adopted
son from her husband’s lover, her own long, discreet affair, had added a line
here, a shadow there, and deepened the intensity in her eyes. She knew that
Perdita knew. Others in that women’s sanctum knew as well. But no one spoke
of it. Passion had no part in Calluna’s world, which was an escape from the
ruthless carelessness of the god Severen.
“There was an accident in a pub,” Perdita said, pulling off her boots,
“involving a homeless man, an olive, and Gareth’s beer. Mother, what is my
father intending, with all those knights on his doorstep? Are we threatening
someone? Is someone threatening us? Are the old kingdoms going to rise up and
rebel?”
Her mother, handing Perdita her sandals, hesitated a moment, then said simply,
“I sent for Leith to ask him that. The sanctum has always been the last to
find out what’s going on among the knights. He said it involves something
Lord Skelton discovered in his endless prowls through his books. An artifact
of Severen’s, Sylvester calls it.”
“For that I had to ask Daimon to give me a ride through the rosebushes? What
on earth is it?”
“Something to do with Severen in his early aspect as the dying and reviving
god. It’s quite old, Sylvester claims. And enormously powerful.”
Perdita sat down on the uncomfortable little couch that did not encourage
lingering. She bent over to wind and tie the dyed green laces of her sandals
around her legs. “But what is it?”
“Leith wasn’t certain. Something like a cup. Maybe a bowl. Anyway, Sylvester
is very excited.” Perdita tried to imagine the frail, scholarly Lord
Sylvester Skelton inflamed by a piece of crockery. “Yes,” her mother agreed.
“It’s hard to picture. But he is impassioned enough to persuade the king to
send his knights out to look for it.”
Perdita leaned back on the slippery couch and stared at her mother,
astonished.
There was a tap at the door. “Come,” Genevra said, and Mystes Holly
Halliwell entered, followed by Perdita’s great-aunt, the previous King Arden
’s sister, Lady Morrig Seabrook.
Lady Seabrook, an absentminded relic from an earlier era, had vague gray eyes
and a face contained within a labyrinth of wrinkles. She had worn black since
the death of her young husband seventy years earlier. She served, for a couple
of decades, as Mistress of Acolytes in the sanctum. As she aged, her duties
had lightened; now she accompanied Mystes Halliwell to rituals and ceremonies,
and she checked to see that the acolytes were at their designated daily posts
within the sanctum whenever she happened to remember.