The Bell at Sealey Head

ritual, and most of its movements are no more onerous than steps in a dance. You can do this one thing without complaining.”

Maeve turned her head, said sharply, “Be merciful to her. You at least were loved.”

“Yes.” The brittle word made Ysabo turn, too, to look at her. Aveline stared out at the dark again, her jeweled fingers working, tightening and loosening, on the stone ledge. She moved abruptly, went to Ysabo, and leaned over her, drew her so close that Ysabo felt her mother’s tears on her cheek. “But,” she whispered, “I did not love. I don’t know which is harder. Then I had you, and I loved as I had never learned before.” Ysabo lifted her arms, groped blindly for Aveline, who dropped a kiss on her brow that burned on her flushed face like the knight’s fingers. “Best it be a princess who will never leave your heart.”

Ysabo lay awake for a long time that night, watching the moon in its changeless ritual and trying to remember the knight’s face. Just before she fell asleep, she realized ruefully: I don’t even know his name.

Emma found her the next morning, when Ysabo was returning from the crow tower with the empty bowl. The maid opened a door somewhere in her world and saw the princess in one of the long, empty stone passageways, just about to turn the heavy, iron ring of the latch on her side. Emma said nothing, just gazed at her over the tray in her hands, her eyes as dark and searching as the crows’.

Ysabo gave her a crooked smile, and said, “Can we talk?”

For once, and for a wonder, time and privacy stood with them on both sides of the door. Emma put the heavy silver tray with its ornate handles on the floorboards and sat down beside it. Ysabo hunkered down to the cold stones on her side.

“I’m just bringing Lady Eglantyne’s breakfast down. The doctor has already been and gone; nobody else will come up here this morning.”

Ysabo studied the remains: a triangle of buttered toast with a crescent moon of a bite missing from two corners, most of an egg congealing in its fine flower-strewn cup, a dab of porridge in a bowl that had not been disturbed, an untouched half of a pear in syrup. A strange, dour thought flashed through her head: the crows would have that eaten in a breath.

“I’m bringing the scrap bowl down,” she said. “No one needs me until noon, now. She’s still eating, your lady.”

“Very little,” Emma sighed. “Mostly she just wants to dream.” Her soft, chestnut brows were knit in her pretty face, with its bright, full lips and warm, burnished skin that the princess had never thought to envy before. Perhaps, if she had that face instead, the knight might have loved her?

“What happened on your birthday?” Emma asked baldly; she had never been taught to be afraid of questions.

Ysabo’s thin mouth twisted wryly. “I got betrothed.”

Emma sucked a horrified breath. “Why?” she kept asking, as Ysabo described the supper and its aftermath. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” Ysabo kept answering. “I must not ask. It’s the ritual.”

“You don’t even know his name?”

“Well, there are so many of them, and they come and go. The faces seem to change so often. Anyway, I never paid much attention to them since they hardly see me when they look at me. I am only there as part of the ritual. I pour wine into some of the cups but not others. I am chosen to escort one, but never the same one twice. They talk among themselves, but not to me. As though I don’t really exist.”

“It’s fantastic,” Emma exclaimed, and then, after thought, “It’s monstrous.”

“Is it?” Ysabo asked, suddenly, intensely curious.

“It would be in my world.”

“It doesn’t happen there?”

“No. Well, yes. Anything happens here. But even I can choose who I want to marry, and I’m only a housemaid.” She paused, her brows peaking again. “I mean, in the best of circumstances. As I said, anything happens here. People marry those they don’t know, they’re forced into it for money or status, they lie to each other about being in love, they make all kinds of mistakes. Even being obliged to marry someone who hits you before you know his name—I’m sure it does happen here. But why should it happen to you?”

“I don’t know. That’s the way things are, here.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know.”

Emma’s lips tightened; she glanced up and down the wainscoted hallway as though the painted faces along the walls might be listening. “Run away,” she said abruptly. “Just walk through this door. Come into my world. I’ll find you a place here.”

Ysabo felt herself smiling for the first time in days. “You know I can’t,” she said softly. “I can’t abandon the ritual.” She lifted her hand, held it in the air above the exact center of the threshold. Emma raised her own hand, frowning and smiling ruefully at the same time. Between doorways, their palms and fingers touched. “This is as close as I can come.”

“I know that. But—”

“I may not question. But no one has told me not to think, or look for answers on my own, as long as I break no rules. Maybe there is a way to find out why.” She paused, then shrugged lightly. “Maybe, if I can change nothing anyway, it’s better not to know why.”

Emma started to speak. Ysabo heard a voice, a door opening, somewhere in the dim, quiet house; the maid turned her head toward the sounds.

“I’d best go,” she said, getting to her feet. “I have my own rituals to attend to. Our lives won’t end if I don’t dust, but that’s what I’m paid for.” She picked up the tray, hesitated, gazing fretfully at Ysabo.

The princess smiled, hiding her own apprehensions. “Maybe next time I can tell you his name.”

“I hope so,” Emma breathed, and pushed the door shut on her side with one elbow.

Ysabo opened it again, a breath later, and the tidal wave of noises in the great house welled up, echoing against the walls of the hall below with laughter, calls, dogs barking, the clatter of armor against stone, clink of crockery and goblets, distant music. She paused before she gave the bowl to the kitchen maid waiting for it. She could hear, even amid the tumult, the desolate silence on the other side of the door, as though that Aislinn House had already begun to die.

Questions filled her head, crowded like strangers into a room not big enough for them, kept coming, until fear itself, pushed far back against the wall, became scarcely recognizable in the crush.

Six

Luck, Gwyneth wrote in her impetuous, untidy hand, was a ship.

It sailed into Sealey Head harbor on a fine spring day when another roof beam had fallen into the middle of Anscom Cauley’s best guest room, when Lord Aislinn received half a dozen stiff and threatening letters from the lawyers of two wine merchants and a boot maker in Landringham, from a certain Mr. Grimm to whom he owed a substantial gambling debt, and a very private, perfumed letter from a woman with whom we need not acquaint ourselves. On a day when Mr. Blair, receiving no word either of his missing ship or the ship sent out to find her, sank deeper into gloom, and in Magnus Sproule’s fields, crows were busy ravening every seed that might possibly have been missed by previous flocks of hungry birds.

The ship, which caused the despondent merchant to sit upright in his chair, was extraordinarily beautiful. It was long and lean, its three tall masts raked back to suggest its speed and power. It was superbly painted in the glossiest of cream, finely trimmed with gold and airy blue. It took the difficult channel into the harbor with a nonchalant roll. A bell sounded as in greeting: a single toll. Mr. Blair was quite relieved to see, as it sailed into the harbor, that it was not armed. Turning his telescope upon it, he was among the first to notice that its crew was most unusual.

Steps pounded up the little stairway: Crispin, she recognized, and glanced out the window. The sun had set already, she saw incredulously; she hadn’t heard the bell except in her story.