mean anything by it, it’s just… how do I sentence my wife to prison when I know she didn’t do anything?”
I met his eyes as well as I could. “I wouldn’t say she hasn’t done anything. I don’t think she’s been honest with us, for one thing. But I’ll bet my left nut she didn’t kill your son.”
He took another drink. In a small voice I’d never heard from him before, he said, “I miss him.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
“Losing Janet was tough,” he continued. “And you’d think it would somehow, I don’t know, prepare me for losing P.D. But it didn’t.”
I took a long drink from the bottle.
“You ever think about her?” he asked me. “What she’d be like now?”
“Nope,” I lied.
“Think you would’ve married her?”
“Nope,” I lied again.
“Mom and Dad never blamed you, you know. Never. Neither did your dad.”
I stared at him. “You talked to my dad about it?”
“After you ran off, I felt bad for him. I used to visit him while he was sick before he died. He wanted me to tell you, if I ever saw you again, that he regretted all that stuff he said.”
“That a fact.” You failed to protect the goddamn princess of the goddamn country, he’d roared. If you’d died too, then maybe we’d have some dignity left, but you couldn’t even do that right. “Well, he always tended to speak before he thought.”
“Something I noticed you don’t ever do.” He took another drink. “What do you really think happened, Eddie? To my wife, to my son? Please, man.” The pleading was so honest it damn near broke my heart. I never expected to hear Phil beg anyone, let alone me, for anything.
“I think,” I said carefully, “that your wife knows more than she’s telling, and that someone from her past, from before you met her, is out to get her. I don’t know why they picked now, and I don’t know why they chose this particular way.” I took another drink. “And that’s why she has to go to jail. I have to do some poking around outside Arentia, and that may take a while. I need all the cover I can get. The best cover is to let whoever did this think they got away with it.”
“But I can’t even tell Ree.”
“ Especially not Ree.”
“She’ll think I hate her.”
“And so will everybody else, which is the important part. She has to believe it, or no one else will.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“As long as it takes me to find the answers, or at least find better questions to ask.” My sympathy got the better of me. “I’ll go as fast as I can, Phil. I promise.”
We stopped talking then, but kept drinking. Eventually we staggered downstairs, gave each other drunken hugs and stumbled off to our respective rooms. Mine kept spinning whenever I lay down, so I paced for a long time, trying to burn off enough buzz to get to sleep.
I snuck back out and made my wobbly way to the royal portrait gallery, where paintings of the Arentian rulers and their families had hung for generations. I wanted one look, just for a moment, to see if my memory had embellished itself or if she’d really been as beautiful as I recalled.
The gallery was dark, of course, since it was the middle of the night, but the moonlight shone through the huge windows and illuminated the paintings on the opposite wall. I’d entered on the far end, where the legendary founder of Arentia, King Hyde, began the progression. I quickly moved down to the most recent paintings.
And there she was. Dark hair cut shorter than was fashionable at the time, framing a face that was still a little too round to be striking. And yet she was still the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Never mind that she was a child when this was painted, barely two months before her death; I’d been a child, too. Both of us sixteen, full of the certainty of our own immortality. And the moonlight in the painted eyes seemed an especially cruel reflection of the trust I’d once seen in them, a trust I failed in the most horrendous possible way.
Hell, Janet, I wanted to say. I did the best I could. I’d do it all so much better now.
The painting was too high on the wall for me to touch. I stared at it for a long time, marveling at how accurately the artist had captured her smile, the cocky tilt to her head, the way she’d lean her weight onto her right hip as if readying for a scrap. We should’ve had a lifetime of scraps; but we never even had time for one.
I fell asleep fully dressed, and dreamed the worst dream ever, of Janet screaming for me to save her while the men who’d killed her laughed at me. I hadn’t had that dream in years, and hoped the wine would dull my head enough to avoid it now. I awoke in tears, but luckily no one was there to see it.
ELEVEN
I left Arentia before dawn, two days after my interview with Queen Rhiannon. I slipped out of the castle with the morning garbage detail, and waited at the dump outside town for an hour to make sure no one had followed me. My adversary, whoever he was, clearly had his fingers on a lot of spider webs. I wanted to make sure mine didn’t quiver.
A day’s ride on my stolen horse brought me almost to the Arentian border, where I made camp. That night I stared up at the stars and imagined a wide-eyed horse tumbling out of the sky, its hooves pumping madly as it plummeted toward the ground. I looked over at my stolid, arrogant horse, tied to a low tree branch. The absurdity of the idea made me smile.
If you wanted to say anything was possible, it was conceivable that Rhiannon had fallen from the sky in the shape of a horse and then transformed into a beautiful woman. And I guess it was also conceivable that the fall could’ve knocked her memories from her head. But none of that explained how a horse got up in the sky in the first place. Or why Queen Rhiannon was the spitting image of Epona Gray, the Queen of Horses.
Hell, I chastised myself, don’t be catty about it. Queen Rhiannon is Epona Gray.
Epona Gray, and Cathy Dumont, and Stan Carnahan and the mysterious Andrew Reese. I hadn’t thought of those names in over ten years. It was from a time in my life when I made foolish alliances far too quickly, and often found myself stuck with obligations I couldn’t fulfill. I’d learned a lot since then.
They say too much introspection is as bad for you as too much drink. The folks who say this spend a lot of time introspecting, so I guess they’d know. Forced introspection can be even worse, because no one is ever compelled to contemplate the good things in their past. You look to history to avoid the same mistakes, not repeat the same joys. That’s why defeats are clearer than victories, funerals more vivid than weddings.
I hated my past. Yet in it was my only clue to the disappearance of Phil’s son. The resemblance between Rhiannon and Epona Gray was too striking to be mere coincidence. But how had a woman who’d been dying when last I saw her traveled all this way, in both time and distance, to emerge as the sun-infused beauty I met in that tower?
The trail to Epona Gray stretched back thirteen years, almost as far as the one to Phil and Janet. I seldom thought about that time in my life, but now I had to retrace not just my footsteps but my memories and feelings. Something, some miscellaneous detail, had to provide the connection. And if I knew why Epona had become Rhiannon-never mind how — I might know why someone hated her.
So by day I headed toward Cazenovia, eventually crossed the bridge at Poy Sippi, and traveled through the dense forests to the hidden place that, long ago, had sheltered Epona Gray. And each night, I gave my thoughts renewed access to those days as well, hoping that some vital clue might shake loose from the memories. The past washed over me like the flood that hit Neceda, leaving behind the debris of pain, failure and death.
That first night on the trail, my thoughts returned to the other time I’d skulked out of Arentia, after Janet’s death. I’d been sixteen, and sure of absolutely nothing except that I never wanted to see anyone I knew ever again-not my parents, not my friends, especially not Phil. As soon as my injuries had healed enough for me to travel, I caught a ride with a flannel merchant heading for the border, and spent the next three months drunk off my ass, fighting and whoring my way as far as my money took me. I wasn’t trying to burn Janet’s memory from my mind, or seeking death so I could be with her. I was creating a new Eddie LaCrosse, one who’d never been rich or
