There was a splash, and then there were screams. Queen Maisie dropped into a chair by the window. She didn’t look. A girl should never hesitate about saving her own life, but that doesn’t mean she has to watch a hundred ravenous sea creatures tearing her assassin of an aunt to shreds if she doesn’t feel up to it. And Queen Maisie was exhausted. Before the screams died down, she was asleep, and the fog tucked itself right around her like a blanket, around that girl in her stained and tattered nightgown, and it wasn’t cold and clammy at all, but soft and woolly, like you’d imagine a cloud might be if you could pluck it down from the sky and use it for a pillow.
They found her there in the morning, and of course at first, seeing the nightgown and the knife tossed where Lady Dorcas had dropped it, and that fog still swirling about like mystery, the queen’s lady’s maid thought her mistress had been murdered in her chair. But then Queen Maisie opened her eyes and stretched, and it was as if she’d come back from the dead right there before her maid’s eyes.
And I can tell you that the fog stayed and followed her like a train from that day forward. She was in many ways the same kind, sweet, good queen she had always been, but she would never again be a girl no one had tried to kill. Still, she knew she was strong, and she knew she was brave, and she knew she was clever, and on days when the memory of that night came back, she reminded herself of all the things she was, until she was not afraid anymore.
From that day on, her people, when they weren’t calling her a miracle, called her by the name she had given herself on that fateful night: they called her the Queen of Fog.
There. Not the story I meant to tell, but perhaps . . .
Did you?
Did you really?
Well, then I’m very pleased to have told it, even if it wasn’t what I’d planned.
Shall I get you another cup of chocolate, miss?
INTERLUDE
MAISIE ACCEPTED her refilled cup of chocolate and turned, satisfied, back to the castle of cards. Tesserian handed her the queen of caskets and the queen of knots.
In the corner rocking chair, where she had been sitting nearly motionless, her body silently enfolded in her mass of wraps, Madame Grisaille stirred. The shifting satin might as well have been a soft voice whispering Shhh. The room fell utterly silent.
“That was a good tale,” Madame said, her voice thrumming. “I think, although it was not the story you wanted to tell, Mrs. Haypotten, you did well. As did you,” she said, smiling and taking one of her thin dark hands from the white fur muff to gesture briefly at Sorcha. “And now I will try to do as well.” She looked thoughtfully at the folklorist in his chair before the fire. “I do not think you have heard this one, Mr. Amalgam; however, I suspect the masters Colophon might know it.” Her dark eyes turned toward the twins, lighting first on Reever, to Amalgam’s left, and then on Negret, by the display cabinet. “Please correct me if I get anything wrong. My memory occasionally suffers a touch of rust.”
Reever grinned and Negret guffawed, and as she was appreciating the way the laugh lit up Negret Colophon’s face under his floppy hair, Sorcha blinked in surprise, noticing the glint of what looked like a second row of teeth behind the first.
Don’t be ridiculous, she thought. Nobody has two sets of teeth.
“Just a moment,” Captain Frost said, turning his glass. He hurried from the room, the windows rattled, and then his sharp, heavy footfalls returned. He settled himself into a chair between the sideboard and one of the river-facing windows. “Please continue, madam.”
“Very well.”
SIX
THE ROAMER IN THE NETTLES
The Old Lady’s Tale
NETTLES GROW TALLER over the place where a body is buried. Or so I am told. Despite what people believe about very old folk, I am an expert in neither death nor gardening.
There was once a boy. I like the name from your story, Phin, so let us call this boy Pantin, too. Perhaps it’s even the same child. Who can say?
Pantin lived in a house of red stone, beside a garden ringed by crumbling stone walls and full of nettles that grew taller than his own head. In fact, though it had been decades since the last oldster who knew the truth had passed, the garden beside Pantin’s house was no garden at all. It was a very old, very secret, very private cemetery; a cemetery that had been built for one grave alone. That grave had never had a marker of any kind, other than the garden that was planted above it and the nettles that quickly overcame everything.
There are many such secret graves in Nagspeake. This one belonged to a hero. Most of them do.
This man under the soil—or what was left of him—had not only been a hero; he had been what is sometimes called a roamer. It is difficult to convey the many, many things that word means, particularly since roamers come in all sorts. Most of them spend at least part of their lives in wandering, but not all; some were once human, but over long years and a life of uncanny experiences, they became something subtly different; others had never been human for even a moment. Some do great things with their time, which can be very long indeed. Others walk and watch. To an outside observer, some would seem to be heroes, like the man under the nettles, and others villains. But all of them have at
