Chapter Text
When Lianne had agreed to marry Prince Roald, consigning herself to a future as Queen of Tortall, Gareth had warned her that it would be a hard path, even if it was a rewarding one. He had meant the duty, the scrutiny, and perhaps even the fact that the job slowly turned her husband into a stranger.
Lianne very much doubted that Gareth had imagined, back in the halcyon days of their youth, that Lianne’s marriage would bring assassination attempts at the hands of her own nephew.
“I’m sorry,” Baird said, valiantly failing to hide his exhaustion, which was a constant feature of his expression around Lianne. “I had hoped that this course of treatment might provide you some relief.”
Lianne felt like her bones had turned to stone and her flesh was going to slide straight off them, but she patted Baird on the hand anyway. “I know you try your best.”
She was turning into a woman three times her age, it seemed to her, ancient and twisted as the Graveyard Hag. Baird, of course, could do nothing. He often forgot the details of her condition between one meeting and the next, and none of his cures came close to touching her agony, except if Lianne mentioned them to Roger, in which case she might seem to get better for a day or two as the court held out hope for her health.
“I’m sorry my best isn’t better.”
Baird was a good man, and if Lianne focused on the fact that someone had been tampering with his mind for years, rather than the way he had ignored the dozens of times she’d told him she was being poisoned and enchanted, she might even have liked him.
“You do what you can,” Lianne reassured him. If her plan failed, she had no desire to leave her poor bespelled healer feeling any guilt. “Why don’t you give me updates on all the palace gossip. I know you hear more than anyone else, save perhaps Myles.”
“Even Myles,” he said, and gave Lianne, for a brief few moments, the gift of pretended normalcy.
Lianne and Roald didn’t share a bed anymore, and he didn’t bat an eye when Lianne asked to be left alone that night. Thanks to Roger, Lianne had little strength, these days.
What little she still had, she’d been carefully hoarding for weeks. All of it would be needed to get through tonight.
Deep in her wardrobe, dusty, though fortunately free of moths, was a trunk that had not been opened for years. Its contents were out of style, now, and rather worn, but that was all to the good. They spoke to the aftermath of wealth, not its presence. They suggested a widow who had inherited nothing, or the wife of a merchant who gambled to excess. In the end, she settled on the former as her story, suiting the age she felt, and pinned a sombre veil to her hair before she slipped from the palace. Lianne had worn it often in the days after the sweating sickness, when her country had been in morning.
Back then they had prayed for Roger to return home and save them, and the thought sickened her mind as much as Roger had sickened her body.
It felt like centuries since Lianne had seen Corus on foot. Gareth had begrudgingly helped her sneak out once or twice after becoming queen, but it was nowhere near as frequent as when they were young, he a squire in the service of Helmuth of Dunlath, and she a lady not yet aware that she would be a queen. They had been wild then, and foolish, but if the gods were with Lianne, the knowledge they’d acquired then would save her now.
The Dancing Dove, when Lianne had last set foot there, had been a harsher place than it seemed now to her eyes, blurring the lines between tavern and court so seamlessly she could imagine some wayward out-of-towner not recognizing this as the Court of the Rogue.
She took a seat at the bar and ordered a cider, grateful to be off her feet. Being out of context was enough to make her unrecognizable to most, but all her sources suggested that this new Rogue – in addition to running a rather less fractious court than the one Lianne had witnessed – was no slouch. It wouldn’t take him long to realize he had the Queen of Tortall sitting pretty before him.
She sipped the drink, calmly, and the satisfaction of having made it this far rendered it the sweetest summer wine.
“Ye gods,” someone said, behind her, and then, “Johnny, you’re cut off for the night. Go home before the lass notices you’ve come without her.”
“But George-”
The gods loved their jokes.
The Rogue said, “don’t challenge me unless you mean it to be a challenge. Now get. You know I’m not one for jokes.”
“Yes you are.”
“Maybe, but I know the difference between them and serious business.”
“Alright,” said Lianne’s foolish son, “I’m getting.”
She listened to him settling his tab, exchanging parting remarks with the men and women around him with an easy familiarity that spoke to months, if not years, of this foolishness.
Precisely the same foolishness Lianne herself had grown up engaging in, of course, but it felt horrifyingly more dangerous when she contemplated Jon doing the same. She wondered, fleetingly, if Gary ever joined him on these excursions, and fantasized of a crownless world where she and Gareth could have introduced their children together to the virtues of being someone but yourself for an hour or two.
The Rogue eased himself into the seat beside Lianne, leaning flirtatiously on the bar, and only widened his eyes a little at the sight of her face under the veil. “I think the pictures don’t do you justice, love.”
He had a handsome air, certainly, but, “I’m old enough to be your mother, majesty.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You lose your accent faster’n Johnny.”
“I’ve more practice, on account of being old enough to be his mother too.”
The Rogue laughed, delighted. “I think you’d best come upstairs, if it won’t offend your dignity.”
She wondered if he was the sort to invite women up to his private rooms frequently. “As you like.”
After all, it was what Lianne had come here for. Catching Jon in a lifetimes’ worth of teasing material had only been a secondary effect.
“Take your drink with you,” the woman standing just to Rogue’s right shoulder said magnanimously. “We can always send someone up to clean if you decide to throw it at his head.”
It was a mark of his power that the Rogue could laugh at himself in front of his subjects. Lianne was not sure Roald could have done the same, and took some pleasure in the knowledge that Roger surely had never laughed at his own expense in his life.
The Rogue gave her his arm, to help her up the stairs, without even being asked.
“How good are your spells against eavesdropping?”
He smiled, knife-sharp. “Better than any of your Lord Provost’s mages can break. Mind, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone enchanted enough to set my hair on end like you are.”
It was a balm on the wound Baird and Roald had been carving into her flesh every day. “You can see it.”
He nodded. “Given that surprises you, I think I might have a guess as to who’s done it, if not what ‘it’ is.”
“Tell me who you suspect, first.”
“Don’t chance too many demands here, when you’re a stranger.”
“Is your friend’s mother a stranger?”
“Johnny learned not to ask favours quick enough.”
So her son had some sense, at least. “I have pay in mind. Gold, as much as you could ask. A title, if you’d like. A pardon.”
“But not,” he said, knowingly, “for my services as a seer, I think.”
“Tell me who you suspect, and I’ll tell you who I want dead.”
He examined her critically. “There’s a duke in your court with a… very specific skillset.”
Yes, he knew. “There’s a duke in my court who I want dead before he kills me.”
Seemingly recognizing that Lianne wasn’t going to shoot first, he said, “a Conté duke.”
“Can you kill him?
His eyes were like a comb running along her skin, sending a shiver down her spine. The sight was a strange thing, less orderly and natural than a gift like Gareth or Jon’s, but she did not flinch away. She was a queen, speaking to a king, in the city that belonged to them both. Even in his territory, she didn’t bow.
“I think,” he said, “there’s more you should know before you ask me that.”
Lianne was not the only person to ever suspect Roger. She knew this, intellectually. On a sheerly mathematical level, it seemed impossible that Roger had enchanted everyone who ever had evidence against him except her. But there was a difference between knowing that and having it laid out for her, clear as polished copper, that others had doubted her false nephew for years.
Roger had tried to kill Jon, at least twice, and the Rogue thought he’d tried to kill Jon’s squire, who had subverted those attempts, at least twice more. He’d had Gareth thrown from his horse for little more than a matter of petty ambition.
“Alan doesn’t suspect him the way he once did,” the Rogue confided, “which tallies with your being so surprised I see the spellwork on you. He’s got some sort of magic against suspicion that he places over people he sees as a threat.”
“Which doesn’t include you.” Because Roger had never been entirely in tune with real people enough to consider Tortall’s shadow court a danger. He didn’t understand the possibilities of what could happen if the Rogue decided there was something truly loathsome in the daytime king.
“Or you.” Because Roger respected women only as far as they were willing to serve him.
“But I can’t have him killed” said Lianne. “Not with his spell on my husband and brother, and not before he kills me. So, your majesty, can you? Only name your price.”
There were ways to kill mages. People dedicated their lives to devising them, for both just and nefarious purposes. The simplest and the most reliable, of course, was simply to find a stronger mage – or several – and pay them accordingly. That was no good for Roger. Lianne would have had to go to Carthak for that, and she was a thousand times more willing to be in debt to a Tortallan thief king, one who apparently knew her son, than she was to owe the Emperor of Carthak.
“If I were certain I could,” the Rogue admitted, “I might already have tried. But paranoia and a strong gift is a bad combination for assassinations. You’d need a way to get close enough and fast enough to kill before they had time to use the gift, and I haven’t got one. Thom Trebond – that’s the older twin, up in the City of the Gods – is of the opinion he’s got the best shot in Tortall at the Duke, but he’s overconfident, and even he’s not particularly eager to get himself executed for killing a Conté.”
“They would have to execute me with him.”
It was not an impossibility, of course. Queens had been cast aside before, though never in such a dramatic way or for such a dramatic reason. In Tusaine, they had once executed the queen for an affair that resulted in multiple royal bastards. But Lianne was reasonably certain that, if his mind was his own, Roald would never choose to hurt her, even if he would be disappointed in her violence. And Gareth would not let him. Being a Pillar of the Realm was a privilege as well as a duty. You could always choose to step aside and watch it fall.
“You change things,” he agreed. And then, standing, he said, “can you walk? There’s one more person we should speak to before we decide anything.”
“I’ll manage.” She would feel rotten tomorrow, but she already knew that. “Who?”
“A healer who isn’t being ensorcelled.” At Lianne’s skeptical look, he said, “my mother, so you know she’s not going to betray our confidence with a blade to her throat. And call me ‘George’ in front of her. She doesn’t like to think of the Rogue when she doesn’t have to.”
If Lianne’s son had become a child-king by murdering his predecessor, she didn’t think she would have liked it either. Still, all things considered, the Rogue was well-mannered enough that it spoke well to his mother’s abilities, even if she couldn’t keep him from the throne. After all, Lianne wasn’t going to be able to keep her son from the throne forever either.
Eleni Cooper was older than Lianne, though they both carried an equal tiredness about them, and when Lianne and George arrived, she pulled her son down to kiss him on the forehead and said, “oh, not another one.”
At Lianne’s look of concern, George said, “Johnny’s perfectly alright; you’re just not the only noblewoman to ever unexpectedly call on me for help.”
If any noblewoman in Lianne’s court was being hurt and couldn’t trust the healers in the palace, that was a failure of Lianne’s. Her duty, first and foremost, was to see to them, both to protect them and to command them in service of the crown, as it was her husband’s duty to do the same with his lords and knights.
“You’re not,” Eleni agreed. “The highest ranked though, by a fair margin. And the most wounded too. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”
She set Lianne through an examination, with fewer spells and more direct examination of Lianne’s body than Baird would have. The end result too was radically different.
“As best I can tell,” Eleni said, “which isn’t as well as I’d like – you really need half a dozen mages for this, and I’d like to run it all past someone who studied at the University in Carthak and at least one Mithran – you have some sort of perpetual enchantment lying over you. It’s strange and much too powerful for me to lift on my own, or even with the help of everyone I know.”
“‘Perpetual enchantment’?”
“It’s not a one-off. Say someone gets stabbed.” She shot a glance at her son, who had crept back in once Lianne was dressed. “If they’re healed, there may be some permanent injury, but they’ve stopped bleeding. Most spells are like that. A mage stabs you, and you bleed until you’re healed. Mayhaps the wound is poisoned, complicating the healing, but not rendering it impossible. This isn’t that. You’re being perpetually stabbed, and healing you without disarming the rat that’s biting at you is worth less than ash. I imagine even the most powerful healer up at the palace could pour their whole gift into this wound without fixing it, unless the spell was broken.”
“Would killing the mage break the spell?”
Lianne wished she’d sat in on Gareth’s gift lessons when they were children. With no gift of her own, she had never imagined having to truly understand it.
“It depends where the power comes from. If he’s created some sort of gods-cursed mechanism to do this… I can’t guarantee it would stop on his death. Particularly if he’s got gems involved, which the bastard can certainly afford. But if it remains bound to his gift, then yes.”
The same answer, no doubt, applied to the spell cast over the court. More accursed uncertainty. Damn Roger.
“George, how much do you trust Thom of Trebond’s account of his own power, really?”
“Not enough to set him to duel the duke. But I’d trust his brother with my life, and I think he’d walk into death itself for your boy.”
Lianne remembered being told that they were letting an eleven-year-old page, barely trained, try to save her son. She’d wished, then, that Baird had let her die in hopes of having some shred of gift left to save Jon. But Page Alan had done it, under Myles’s supervision. They’d saved her son from Roger before she’d even known where the danger lay
Eleni must have read something in Lianne’s face, because she said, “the Temple of the Goddess might be able to help you. They don’t have as powerful a school as the Mithrans, but they do train their own healers, and they would call upon the Goddess for you, and protect you as best they could.”
It was a kind fantasy, but, “if a queen could seek shelter there, men would dismantle such a powerful place, and I would rob other women who need it.”
“You wouldn’t be the first to seek shelter there from Roger of Conté.” To George’s raised eyebrows, she made an aside. “I still have ears, you know.”
What else had Roger done that they were all unable to see? Lianne dug her nails into her palm, and made the decision Eleni had been softly warning her against.
“How good are your ears in the palace?”
“Good enough.”
“Summon Thom of Trebond to Corus, if you have that power, but tell him he is not to present himself at the palace or make his presence known in any capacity. Sometime in the next few weeks, you’ll receive a sign. When that happens, send Trebond to the palace by royal command. I haven’t got my seal, but I’ll write out a letter for you, and kiss it so a mage can trace my touch on it. He’s ordered to present himself there to make an attempt to break a spell on the queen.” They would believe she was enchanted then, one way or the other.
Lianne was being imperious, she knew, and George said, “anything else, your majesty?”
Loose ends and promises. “I’ll leave other letters in your care, if Mistress Eleni will let me sit and write them out. Including a note to the Naxen solicitor, ensuring your receipt of funds in the worst case. I’ll put them down as payment for seeing a healer.”
Nothing else mattered, really.
Eleni turned her back a moment, rummaging through drawers, and came up, to Lianne’s amazement, with a beautiful dagger in a thigh sheath.
“Ma,” grumbled George, “some might say you’re sentimental.”
“It was an awful gift to get your mother,” she told him, “but I’ve no mind to waste. And some might say I’m a hypocrite too, given that I disdained wearing it, but now I’m giving it to you. Pick apart the seams of your dress pockets.”
There was much to be said for the kindness of strangers. It was nice to have a reminder that even Roger could not rob the world of all its goodness. That would give her something to cling on to, as things came to a head.