"Her family were friends of the queen, a long time ago. Felicity knew them, too. She came to make sure you girls were all right, after Eleanor died, and after a while we fell in love." The corner of his mouth pulled up. "Her family were also furious, though she still wrote—writes—to them, and they to her. I've been graced with women who are too good for me, Amber, and that includes you girls. I'm sorry I haven't done better by you."
"The queen?" Everything else Father had said fell by the wayside with that revelation. The Queen's War—the one commemorated in the Queen's Corridor mosaics—had been years ago, so many years that the number of decades was foggy in my mind, and half impossible to believe. "Our mother—Maman?—knew the queen? But the queen is—is—" Ancient was the only word that came to mind, and though it was by all appearances true, it still seemed rude to apply to our sovereign.
"I didn't say they were age-mates," Father pointed out. "But yes, Maman, and your birth mother, did both know the queen. And I suppose you do have other family, Amber. I don't know them at all, so it's hard to think of them that way." He pulled at his chin, a gesture that would look better if he'd grown a beard, but he had resolutely kept the city's clean-shaven look, even after a year in the country. "I never thought to contact them," he admitted. "Even at the worst of our travails, I never thought of it. Perhaps I should have. For your sake, Amber. For all of you children."
"Sooner salt the earth and curse the sun," I said, offended. "If they wouldn't have you, they've no right to us."
Father chuckled again, but said, "I wonder if your sisters would feel the same way," before letting it go. "Tomorrow, Amber. We'll talk with Stewart tomorrow, and leave for home as soon as we can."
The weather had broken in the morning: sunlight reflected brightly off banked snow and cast blue shadows in its depths. Father whistled merrily on his way out of the inn, and I, mindful of the stories he'd told the night before, went to visit the mosaics along the Queen's Corridor for the first time since before our house had burned.
The elegant frames told the story of our country's darkest hour, so long ago now that even the children of its war veterans were dead, and their grandchildren old. We had been ruled then by a king thought too gentle to rule well: he preferred diplomacy to warfare, and conceded too much, too often, to those who pressed at our borders. When illness struck him down, our enemies amassed, anticipating an easy conquest of a weak country with only a young queen on its throne.
They were not prepared for Irindala's ferocity. She gave her son, the prince and heir to the throne, to her closest friend to raise safely while she rode to war, and ride she did, with an army of the people at her back. Irindala fought alongside the people, bleeding for her country as they did; the first few panels of the mosaic, depicting the king's death and the gathered enemies, then Irindala leading her army, and finally a bloody battle, had frightened me as a child. The centermost, though, had inspired me then, and, a little to my embarrassment, still did: Irindala tall and strong with light all around her, her sword in one hand and the other open to the people, upon whose uplifted hands she stood, trusting them for her strength and balance. I knew now it was a cunning piece of propaganda, but its affect was no less for knowing that.
The next frame, though, broke my heart. Irindala returned to an empty castle, her trusted friend and her son both gone. In every remaining mosaic, Irindala wore a gown with a red slash across the breast, as she was said to every day, to show that her heart had been cut out and could never heal.
She did not become a cruel mistress, though. Despite her own heartbreak, she ruled fairly, and the next panel was broken into four smaller images, showing critical moments in her reign. The last of those reflected a battle from the Border Wars that Father had fought in, pushing back against an encroaching enemy said to be infused with faery blood, so relentless and powerful were they. But Irindala's army triumphed again, as it, and she, had done all through her long reign, save in the matter of her son.
At the end lay one final open space, where the end of Irindala's story would be told with beads of colored glass and glue, marking the end of an era so extended it already belonged to the stuff of legend, and someday would be thought myth.
I could hardly imagine my father fitting into that story somewhere, his part too small to be seen in a mosaic, but still a part of it, if my birth mother and Maman had both, somehow, known Irindala herself. Nor could I imagine asking Maman about it; she was inclined to vapors over a chicken wandering across the threshold, and I thought asking her about her childhood would induce one of her month-long silences. I tried, briefly, to imagine what kind of life we might have had, if our mothers had stayed in contact with their royally-associated families, and my imagination failed me there, too, although the idea made me laugh. We girls, at least, had grown up in luxury. Improving on it would have brought our comfort to unimaginable levels. No one needed that level of indulgence. I had learned, in fact, that no one even needed the kind I had grown up with, although that thought would have once been incomprehensible to me.
I gave the mosaics an unselfconscious curtsy, and went on to the shops to buy a few more gifts—finer fabrics, newer shoes, sweets that would last the journey, and other things—for my family, and was ready to leave when Father returned from selling the Spidersilk to Captain Stewart. We wouldn't get far with only an hour or two of daylight left to us, but we were both eager to be on the road home.
Beauty, on the other hand, paused at the stable doors and glowered at us, as if the snow—packing down now, at least—was our fault, and as if a filthy enough look would make us agree to put the journey off until the snow had melted. I patted her jawbone, apologized, led her out to hitch her to the wagon, and we were on our way.
Clear, cold weather followed us, the lengthening days letting us eke a little more distance out of each day traveled. We stopped reluctantly the sixth night, knowing ourselves to be within a day's travel of home, but also knowing we were most of a day's travel from home, and that we would only exhaust ourselves and Beauty if we pushed onward that night. That was my doing; we had lost half a day's travel when I'd recognized the road our lady's maid, Annalise, had taken to the village she said was her own. Father had not objected aloud when I turned Beauty down the little track, and we had emerged into a healthy village nestled in the woods only a little while later.