The Bandit King

I waited. The bed groaned as he settled upon it. The fire crackled.

“You may as well come out,” Adrien di Cinfiliet said quietly.

So I did, cautiously pushing the curtain aside, my poniard ready. My boots touched the floor, and I braced myself—but the newly-crowned King merely sat on the edge of the bed, still in his white finery, and regarded me with his storm-gray gaze.

I faced the bastard son of the man I had killed. Lifted the poniard slightly, firelight playing along its freshly honed blade. “I should kill you.” The truth was ash against my tongue. “Were I the man you think I am, I would.”

I was that man, but I wish not to be.

He nodded slowly, his dark hair falling over his forehead. “No doubt. But a certain dark-eyed d’mselle would not look kindly upon such a deed.”

The knife was too tempting. I sheathed it. “Are you satisfied?” I merely sounded curious. Perhaps twas the tightness in my chest that robbed my words of the weight I wished them to carry.

The Bandit King gave another sharp, bitter bark of a laugh. “You think I wished for this? I knew she was up to mischief, d’Arcenne. I did not expect to be snapped into traces and neatly put to plow. She laid her plans well, and outwitted us both.”

I could almost believe you. “Where has she gone?”

“Were you not listening? I do not know. Amid the feasting and every man who can lay claim to being a soldier drunk and celebrating, who could find her?” He sagged, and I saw his exhaustion. “She said that had I need, I should send her this. But where to send it, she did not tell me. A riddle from m’cousine Riddlesharp, and one I cannot solve.” A green gleam in his hand, carefully lifted. Twas an ear-drop, and I finally recognized it as hers. She had been wearing them the day the conspiracy was loosed.

Much became clear to me at once. I shall send the other half as proof.

If this was a message from my d’mselle, how could it be deciphered?

We regarded each other for a long while, the fire crackling and shifting. Sweat gathered on my back, dewed my brow.

Finally, some of the tension left me. I stalked across the Cell. He did not move, and when I took the ear-drop from his fingers I was surprised to find I did not wish to murder him.

At least, not at this moment. Perhaps not ever. Leaving him with a crown to wear and the Pruzian to nursemaid him was a far better revenge.

I backed up with a shuffle, a swordsman’s move. The scar on my chest ached. I had not put it to much of a test. Perhaps twas the heart underneath that pained me so. My face twitched, its scar plucking at itself. “Someday, you may think she is a threat to you.” Each word carefully enunciated, slow and quiet. “If that day should come to pass, remember only that I will be watching. As long as you do not seek to harm her, you are safe from me.”

“I would not harm her.” He cocked his head, and the mocking expression was Henri’s, down to the last line and quirk. “There is one thing, d’Arcenne. She left me a letter.”

I waited.

“Tis burned now. But in it, she warned me that I would need a Left Hand.”

Where in the Shirlstrienne could he have learned that delicate insinuation? The right note of velvet threat and dangling bait. A lure, perhaps, to make a hawk rise—and even in the forest, perhaps he had known something of hawking.

I swallowed dryly. “My thanks, Your Majesty. But I already serve.” I paused on my way out the door. “The Pruzian isn’t fit for it, and neither is Jierre. Try di Siguerre. His grandfather has already prepared him nicely.”

And with that, I slid into the corridor, turned away from the guard posted at the end of the hall—they were inattentive, conversing with each other in hushed whispers—and slipped into darkness. I passed Fridrich van Harkke, hidden in a pool of deep shadow behind a moldering cupboard that had perhaps once held rapiers for the dueling-hall just past the next archway. He did not breathe as I ghosted by, and I did not turn or speed my step, though my back roughened with gooseflesh.

The Knife did not strike. I left the Palais an hour later, and by dawn I was outside the Citte.

Twas time to find my Queen.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

They gathered at their fires, bright-eyed and dark-haired, and the throbbing beat of their music rose as they finished their dinner. Bubbling, fragrant meat stew, different spices than an Arquitaine cook would use, woodsmoke, and the odor of difference and green hedgewitchery.

It had taken me weeks to track them.

After the feasting, the dishes were cleaned. Laughter rose among them, bright ribbons of their odd liquid language. Gold twinkled at ear and throat and wrist, thin golden rings and some of the dark women sporting thread-thin noserings. Splashing and jests, merriment and the cries of joyful younglings, then the central fire was carefully tended and the children soothed.

The instruments came forth. Gittern and tambour, pipes like wailing demieri di sorce, the rhythm driving and odd, burrowing into breath and bones and blood. Two lines of dancers, male and female like some of the maying dances, and the women’s voices lifted.

Their dancing is strange, too. Flicker of hips, stamping sandals working into the dusty earth, arms held stiffly and eyes mostly lowered. There is no word for the grace, but the sway of their hips and the hitched-up skirts showing their ankles, their bare brown arms gleaming with gold and effort… it makes a man think of other dances.

The men, straight and tall, took up the challenge and danced forward. Pairs were formed, older married women calling from the sidelines. The older women are held to be experts, and their judgments accepted without question. Pairs retired, breathing quickly and taking swigs of their fiery clear rhuma, joining the onlookers and adding their voices to the song. I touched the lump of my father’s signet under my doublet and watched.

When one pair is left the music intensifies, and they are called upon to perform. They must provide a spectacle, and should they be judged insipid or unworthy of the honor, the mockery, while good-natured, is intense.

She stood at the edges, a shawl wrapped about her shoulders. The headman’s wife, dark and lean, stood next to her, calling out advice and clapping her narrow brown hands. They conferred together like myrmyra birds, the way a Princesse and her lady-in-waiting might.

My chest ached, ached.

When next I peered out the tiny window, she was walking, head down and barefoot, her sandals swinging from one hand. She climbed the steps, lightly, and opened the wagon’s cunningly designed door. Painted in red and gold, the small house-on-wheels was neat, and trim, and pulled by a pair of good-natured roans who were at the pickets, munching contentedly.

She hummed, a wandering melody threading through the thumping beat outside. Opened a tiny cabinet, standing on tiptoe, feeling for something in the darkness. She cursed under her breath, not finding what she sought, and swung the cabinet closed.

Court sorcery flashed. A candle guttered into life, and she swallowed her scream, clapping a hand over her mouth and staring at me.

I was, perhaps, not a comforting sight.

We regarded each other, Vianne and I. My back was to the hedgewitch-armoire built into one whole wall of the wagon, the bed at the far end, the scarves and skirts hung on pegs on the other wall. She had traded the Palais for these cramped quarters, and there was a book tangled in her bedclothes. A treatise by a Tiberian philosopher, a man who had given up the rule of his city and retreated to a farm, only to be slain when the king following him grew suspicious.

Was she reading for her future, then?