The Black Queen (Book 6) (6 page)

But she did know better than to admit weakness.

“My advisors will tell you when I am ready to resume.” She stood, not too slowly to tip off anyone as to how very ill she felt, and not too quickly in case she fainted. The pain stabbed into her brain as if it were digging to pull something loose.

She walked off the platform, through a side door and into the cool hallway. The hallway was lined with tapestries depicting Islander events she didn’t remember or understand. One of her Islander guards came out of the listening chamber. He too looked familiar. And concerned.

“Arianna,” he said and that sounded strange too. An Islander using Fey traditions? He was short, like they all were, blond and his face had lines. But it was familiar. And dear. She knew it, knew it well, had trusted it…

She was frowning. The hand she had placed on her forehead in the throne room was still there. No matter how hard she tried not to look ill, she failed. “Get me a Healer,” she said, and put her other hand against the wall.

She would not faint. Not here. Not anywhere. Fainting was weakness and no one of Black Blood showed weakness.

And then the feeling of determination passed as if it had never been. She looked up to see if her friend the guard had left. He had. She would sit beside the door, in this corridor, until she felt better. She would sit—

Her eyelids fluttered and then she opened her eyes. She was in bed, with a sheet and a blanket covering her. The windows were open to the garden. A robin flew past the window, pausing to look inside. She smiled at it, wondering if she had met it when she shape-shifted into her bird-form. The light breeze blowing inside was cool and fresh, and felt good on her hot face.

She pushed the pillows back and eased herself up. The headache was gone. Only the memory of it remained, as a kind of absence—a feeling that, if she probed too hard, the pain would return. She made herself relax and take in the safety of the room.

This had been her room from infancy. Once it had been the nursery. Her Fey mother had played with her stone brother Sebastian here, and her blood brother Gift had slept in this room for less than a week before he was kidnapped by the Fey. After Arianna’s birth, she spent all her time here. She and Sebastian bonded here, and she had always come to this place when she needed comfort.

She needed comfort now, although she wasn’t exactly sure why. She had had headaches before, and the normal illnesses that plagued everyone: colds and an occasional flu. But she had never felt as if she couldn’t hold herself upright. She had never felt such pain in her whole life. For thirty years, she had been healthy and strong. Was that suddenly going to change?

“Health is what we believe it to be.” The voice came from the corner of the room.

Arianna turned slowly. Seger sat in the chair beside the cold stone fireplace. Her nut brown fingers were threaded together, her delicately aging face placid. She had been the Black King’s Healer once, a woman of such talent that she had been allowed to touch Arianna’s Fey great-grandfather. After his death, Seger had shown her loyalties to the Black Family, and Arianna kept her as her own personal Domestic, the Healer who spent more time looking after the staff in the palace than Arianna herself.

“What?” Arianna asked. Her voice cracked. How long had she been unconscious?

“Health is what we believe it to be.” Seger stood and threaded her hands into the sleeves of her white robe. “You were sitting there, worrying that your health had gone.”

Seger did not read minds. No Fey did. But she had known. “Was it that obvious?” Arianna asked.

“Your face is a book to me, child.”

“I’m no child,” Arianna said.

“In my world you are.”

“I’ve been ruling your world for fifteen years.”

“We shall hope that you rule it for a hundred more.” Seger crossed toward the bed and sat on its side. “Tell me what happened.”

Arianna frowned. She wasn’t sure what happened. She had seen something before the headache, but the memory was tantalizingly out of reach, as if something held it hidden behind a wall. Instead of telling Seger about that (was there something to tell?), Arianna explained the headache, the suddenness of it, the confusion it brought her, and how the pain finally felled her. She couldn’t describe that feeling of alienness, of having thoughts not quite her own, so she didn’t.

“Have you eaten anything unusual?” Seger asked, putting her warm hand on Arianna’s forehead.

“No.”

“Slept normally?”

“Yes.”

Seger tilted her head. “What do you remember before the headache struck?”

“I—” Arianna stopped herself. She closed her eyes, trying to remember. She had—seen?—something.

“Ari?”

She shook her head, sighed, and opened her eyes. “We were talking about opening trade with Leut. The leaders of Jahn’s seafaring merchants came to speak to me about the possibilities.”

“Don’t they have enough business trading through the Fey Empire?” Seger asked. She was clearly trying to distract Arianna. She knew that Arianna had forgotten something and she was trying to give Arianna’s mind a chance to recover the memory.

Arianna smiled at her. “I didn’t know you were interested in policy.”

“And I didn’t think we were going to expand our borders beyond Blue Isle.”

“Trading with countries on a brand new continent frightens you?”

“Worries me,” Seger said. “Open the door a crack, and someone will push it wide.”

Arianna nodded, surprised to find that the movement didn’t hurt. “It worries me as well. But the Islander merchants remember a time when trade with Leut was common.”

“Before you.”

“Long before me. Long before the Fey found Blue Isle.”

Seger took Arianna’s right hand and stretched it before her, poking at the center of the palm. Then she twisted it slightly, exposing the underside of the wrist, and traced the entire length of the arm to the neck.

“None of this hurts?”

“No,” Arianna said. “I feel fine now.”

“Hmm.” Seger frowned. “Nothing happened to you in that discussion? No one touched you? No one cursed you?”

Arianna leaned as far back as she could so that she could see Seger’s face. “You think this was a magickal attack?”

“I am trained to look at all options.” Seger took Arianna’s other hand and began the same procedure.

“I was speaking to Islanders,” Arianna said.

“Your father is an Islander.”

“My father
was
an Islander.”

Seger tilted her head slightly. They disagreed about her father. Arianna believed he was dead; Seger believed he was not. Arianna’s father, King Nicholas, had gone down one of the tunnels in the Place of Power fourteen years ago, and hadn’t been seen since. At first, Arianna had been unwilling to accept the loss. Now she knew it was what made her rule on the Isle possible. If her father had still been alive and visible, none of the Islanders would have accepted her.

Still, any thought of her father saddened her. “All I meant,” she said carefully, “was that the average Islander does not have magickal abilities.”

Seger smiled. “Sometimes it is clear that you are a Shape-shifter. You have a Shifter’s arrogance.”

Arianna rolled her eyes. “All right,” she said. “The average Islander has no idea whether or not he has magick. And certainly couldn’t use it on me.”

“There were no Fey in the room?”

“My guards.”

Seger stared at her. Arianna took her left hand back. Seger’s silence was profound.

“What have you been trying to remember?” Seger asked.

Arianna bit her lower lip. Seger was right; she saw everything about Arianna clearly. Too clearly. “I saw something before the headache. A—light?”

“What kind of light?”

Arianna shrugged. “At the time, I thought I imagined it. No one else seemed to notice.”

“Perhaps you saw it with your Vision.”

“Or perhaps it was part of the headache.”

Seger stared at her. Obviously, Seger did not believe the light to be part of the headache.

“What makes you think this was a magickal attack?” Arianna asked.

“The fact that I can find no residual pain in your body. The suddenness of it.”

“I have known people to die suddenly of extreme headache,” Arianna said, thinking of one of her father’s guards, a loyal man who had put a hand to his head, complained of pain, and then passed out. When he awoke, he could no longer speak or move, and two days later he died.

“Yours is not the same pattern,” Seger said. “You should summon other Shifters on the Isle, see if they had the same experience you did.”

“What of other Visionaries?”

“Is that where the pain was? In your Vision?”

Arianna shook her head. “It was all over my brain, as if something were digging into my mind, and peeling away layers of thought.”

Seger placed a hand on Arianna’s forehead, and then put her other hand on the back of Arianna’s skull, as if she wanted to hold Arianna’s brain together. The movement pulled Arianna forward slightly.

“Do you feel as if you’ve lost anything?” Seger asked quietly.

“No,” Arianna asked.

“As if anything’s been added?”

“No.”

Seger let go of her head. Arianna could still feel the imprint of her hands.

“Do you know what this could be?” Arianna asked. “Does it sound like a magick you’re familiar with?’

“No,” Seger said. “But Fey and Islander families have started intermingling. Magick is no longer as controlled as it was. You and Gift are evidence of that.”

“And Sebastian.”

Seger smiled. “Your stone brother is old magick. I worry, sometimes, about his longevity.”

“Perhaps he felt something,” Arianna said.

“We can ask.”

Arianna nodded. “Find him. Tell him I want a private conference. You can listen.”

“I plan to,” Seger said. “I will accompany you from now on.”

Arianna crossed her arms and leaned back against the pillows. “Now you give orders to the Black Queen?”

Seger looked at her oddly. “It is my function,” she said, rather stiffly.

Arianna wondered what she had said that was wrong. Seger had never given her that look before.

“If you can’t find anything wrong with me,” Arianna said, “I’m going to go back to work.”

“As long as I accompany you.” Seger was holding fast to that. Arianna stared at her.

“You will not divulge anything you learn in private meetings.”

“I never have,” Seger said. ‘I don’t plan to start now.”

Arianna threw the covers back. She felt fine. In fact, she felt better than fine. She had more energy than she had had in weeks. She grabbed the gold ceremonial gown she had been wearing before, and slipped it over her head. She didn’t know who had undressed her, and she didn’t care. Her people did their duty as they saw fit, and their first order of business was to take care of her.

She cinched the gown at the waist with an ornate gold belt made on Nye. She had decided about five years ago to start mixing the cultures that the Fey Empire had conquered. If she wore something, the rest of the Empire did too. She could think of no better way of supporting unity than mingling products, ideas, and commerce in as many ways as possible.

Her long black hair was flowing free. She wrapped it into a bun and held it in place with gold and black painted L’Nacin sticks. Then she slipped her feet into sandals made here on Blue Isle, hating the feel of shoes against her skin. She had always hated shoes, but she wore them now. The birthmark on the base of her chin marked her as a Shape-Shifter, and the golden color of her skin marked her as part-Islander. She didn’t need other things, like her preference for bare feet, to set her apart from the people she ruled. They had enough trouble with her unusual attitudes without being reminded that she had a slightly different heritage than all of them.

Arianna opened the door to her room. A young Islander page stood outside, his simple brown clothing marking his lowly status. He bowed when he saw her.

“Get the Islander merchants back in my audience chamber,” she said, “and apologize for the abrupt end to our meeting. Tell them I will join them shortly.”

The page nodded and started down the hall.

“I haven’t dismissed you yet,” Arianna said.

The boy froze, his back rigid. He couldn’t have been more than twelve, and he was probably terrified to work in the palace. Still, he had to learn protocol.

“Is my brother in his rooms?”

The page swallowed visibly. He bowed again. “No, ma’am. He left his rooms a few moments ago. I believe he was going to the gardens.”

Of course. Sebastian’s favorite place on the entire Isle. Arianna placed her hand on the page’s shoulder.

“Thank you,” she said to him. “Now you may go.”

He started to run, then remembered himself and slowed down. He headed for the stairs, toward the royal portraits of all the past Islander rulers, and looked up as he did so. He seemed started by all those round blondes facing him. Arianna was nothing like them.