The Flower Reader (22 page)

“I myself did not hang the sheriff of Inverness, brother,” the queen said. “Nor did I personally declare the Earl of Huntly and Sir John Gordon to be outlaws. My privy council consulted together and decided.”

“You are right, madame, I am certain, about Lady Huntly,” Nicolas de Clerac said, before Lord James could reply. “I am sure she means you no personal harm. But the countryside is unsettled, and it would be dangerous for you to leave the safety of Aberdeen just now. Perhaps Lady Huntly can be persuaded to come into the city.”

“There is no point in seeing her at all,” Lord James said. Oh, excuse me, the Earl of Moray said. He was quite touchy about being addressed with every possible respect for his new position. “Either she is going to beg for clemency, which we are not prepared to give, or she has some trap in mind, which we do not wish to give her the opportunity to spring.”

“We,” the queen said, making a point of the royal plural, “will make up our own mind about the matter.”

“There is something to be said for meeting with her,” Nicolas de Clerac put in, once again clearly attempting to smooth over the
conflict. “Who knows what information might be gained about where Huntly is and what he has planned? It is too dangerous for the queen to go, I agree, but I am willing to go in her place, with just a few men. I may be able to read Lady Huntly’s intentions, which would—”

“Read her intentions!” the queen interrupted. She turned and looked straight at me, her heavy-lidded golden eyes glinting with a combination of inspiration and malice. “But of course, Sieur Nico, that is just the thing. You do not have the special talent for such reading, though—it is Marianette who should go, and look at the flowers around this Saint Mary’s Chapel where Lady Huntly says she is waiting. She chose the place—the flowers there should tell us what she intends. Is that not what you told us at Granmuir, Marianette?”

“It is late in the year and cold for flowers.” To be so suddenly singled out surprised me and made me uneasy. I had been standing quietly with the queen’s other ladies, effacing myself; in the past two months of traveling, hunting, feasting, and earl-making, the queen had said hardly ten sentences to me. I had spent every day looking over my shoulder, wondering whether the assassin would strike again. “She wants to see you, madame—she will turn me away before I come close enough to read anything.”

“That is not what I meant at all, madame.” Nicolas de Clerac was as surprised as I was, and clearly distressed as well. “Such a reading is a matter of diplomacy, not floromancy.”

“I agree,” put in the Earl of Moray. He did not often agree with Nicolas de Clerac, and from his expression the words were sour on his tongue. “If anyone is to meet with Lady Huntly, it should be an experienced man, not a trifling girl.”

That made me want to run to the stables and saddle Lilidh on the spot. “I am not a trifling girl, my lord,” I said. “I simply do not believe Lady Huntly will be willing to see me when it is the queen she desires to speak with.”

“Be silent, all of you.” The queen was smiling. She was delighted to have set us all at one another’s throats. “Marianette will wear one
of my cloaks—it is pouring down rain and no one will know who she is until she is safely arrived at Saint Mary’s Chapel. I will send a dozen of my men with her. They will protect her, and at the same time add to the impression that it is actually me riding out upon this commission.”

“I absolutely forbid it,” Moray said.

“I beg you to reconsider,” Nicolas de Clerac said. “At least permit me—”

“I will do it.” I stepped forward. I was tired of effacing myself, tired of being afraid. A ride in the bracing Aberdeenshire rain, a secret mission spiced with danger—it made my blood quicken for the first time since we had left Granmuir. “I ask only that I be allowed to ride my own mare, and take my own man Wat Cairnie as well as the royal men-at-arms.”

“Done,” the queen said. “Go and fetch your man, and ask him to saddle your mare for you. Livingston, find one of my heavy mantles, the blue one, I think. You shall go with the party as well, for appearance’s sake. My lord Moray, please arrange for the men-at-arms to be assembled. Lady Huntly’s messenger will have to be kept from riding ahead to warn her, so see he is guarded. Sieur Nico, you and I shall have some music to while away the time until dinner.”

She put one hand on Nicolas de Clerac’s arm, caressing him quite openly. The Earl of Moray’s frown was angry enough to curdle new milk, but he could do little but bow and obey his sister’s direct command. I curtsied politely and turned to go as well.

“Take care, Mistress Rinette,” Nicolas de Clerac said. From his voice one would never have known it made any difference in the world to him that he had suggested this in the first place, or that his suggestion had turned out so unexpectedly. “The going will be…dangerously slippery…in this rain.”

A
ND SO
I
RODE OUT
of Aberdeen toward the northwest, rain and all, my beautiful Lilidh tossing her head and dancing like the windblown
white lily she was named for. The queen’s blue mantle wrapped me warmly and rippled like a pennon over Lilidh’s haunches. Wat Cairnie rode beside me, with Lady Huntly’s messenger on a discreet leading rein; Mary Livingston rode on my other side, her own cheeks flushed with excitement. Twelve of the queen’s men-at-arms followed, armed with halberds and with the red lion of Scotland on their coats. If Lady Huntly had posted spies along the way from Aberdeen to the chapel of Saint Mary’s at Stoneywood, they would certainly have returned to her with the news that it was the queen herself on a lily-white mare, trotting beside the River Don.

We came up to the chapel after an easy hour’s ride. The rain had stopped and I saw a group of women standing in the corner of the churchyard. I had a quick impression of grass, yellow and brown, starred with a few white gillyflowers and a surprisingly late blue violet or two; moss on the walls, ancient and velvety, golden green. A gnarled plum tree overlooked the wall, its blossoms long past and its fruit mostly fallen. I felt a wave of affection, fidelity, loyalty—but not from the women. Not human, even. Frightened—

They all turned at the sound of riders. I recognized the Countess of Huntly by her rich clothing and her light-colored, protruding eyes. I had seen her from a distance at Lord James’s—the Earl of Moray’s—wedding, although I had not been presented to her and so she would not know me. The three women with her were in plain dark dresses and muffled up around their necks and faces with shawls, although all three of them had their heads bare and their hair loose to the wind and rain. They looked like witches out of a folktale. One of them was holding a terrified hound puppy by the scruff of its neck.

That was the source of the fear. That was the love and loyalty. The puppy whimpered and it was like an arrow straight into my heart.

“Madame!” Lady Huntly cried, seeing only the blue mantle and the red lions and Mary Livingston. She swept a magnificent curtsy, no easy thing considering the wet, muddy ground of the churchyard. It was a signal, because a good dozen men came swarming out of the little chapel, two of them grasping for Lilidh’s bridle while the rest
brandished dirks and cudgels at the queen’s men-at-arms. The men-at-arms leveled their halberds.

Lilidh threw her head back. I could feel her muscles bunching under me and hear the angry swish of her tail.

“Hold!” I cried. “I am not the queen. Call off your men.”

Everyone froze. I put back my hood.

“Holy Mother of God,” Lady Huntly said. She sounded more exasperated than angry. “I told Huntly the queen would not fall into so simple a trap. And who are you, young woman? You look familiar. Donal, Calum, all of you, stand back.”

“I am Marina Leslie of Granmuir. The queen asked me to—”

“The Leslie girl. Of course. The one who was married to Glenlithie.”

“Yes.”

“The one who thinks to trade Mary of Guise’s silver casket for her husband’s murderer.”

“So the gossips say.” She might think the silver casket worth a random bit of prisoner-taking in itself, so I did not dismount immediately. I said, “Swear me safe passage, my lady, in front of my men and your own.”

She looked up at me for a few moments, and I could see the calculation in her eyes. A formidable woman, Elizabeth Keith, Countess of Huntly—I was reminded unpleasantly of Lady Margaret Erskine. Lady Huntly did not have the ruined remains of great beauty as Lady Margaret did, but perhaps she was all the more dangerous because of it; she would have learned to win her battles without the easy weapon of good looks. She was waiting for me to move, look away, show fear in any way. I sat straight and still in my saddle and stared back at her.

“Very well, I swear it,” she said at last. “Hear me, all of you—Mistress Marina Leslie and her train are to have full safe passage back to Aberdeen, after they bide here awhile.”

The men murmured and nodded. One or two struck up conversations with their erstwhile opponents, the queen’s men. They
probably knew one another, and more than likely some of them were cousins. I glanced at Wat—
I will keep my een upon them all,
his expression said,
never you fear
—and then slid out of my saddle. I was as safe as I would ever be, and I stepped forward boldly to face Lady Huntly.

“Alexander Gordon of Glenlithie,” I said. “You knew him. He was blood kin to the Earl of Huntly.”

“I knew him,” Lady Huntly said. I could see she was wary; she had expected me to launch into a message from the queen. “And yes, he was kin to the earl.”

“Do you know who killed him?”

“Now, why would I know that?”

“You were in Edinburgh for the queen’s arrival. You and your husband.”

She turned around and walked away from me, toward the three women by the wall. I followed her. Once I got close enough I realized there was a wellhead there, built up against the wall. It was made of a single half-circle of stone, carved with what might have been faces—saints? Angels? Pictish goddesses? They were so ancient it was impossible to be certain. The well was full, and the water’s surface glassy as a mirror but for where it was pocked every few moments by a raindrop.

“Do you know what this is?” Lady Huntly said.

“This? The well? No. I know the chapel is called Saint Mary’s of Stoneywood.”

“This is a holy well. There is a spring that feeds it—it has been here since the days of the Picts, at least, and certainly long before the chapel was built. There is an old tale that if you give it a sacrifice, it will show you the future.”

I did not like that word
sacrifice
.

“It is not the future I wish to learn about, my lady,” I said. “It is the night Alexander Gordon of Glenlithie was murdered, a little over a year ago.”

“There is little I can tell you. Question the queen’s servants at Holyrood—they will tell you Huntly and our son Sir John and I
arrived at the palace with the queen and stayed through the night. We were not out in the city, none of the three of us.”

She sounded so scornful she was almost certainly telling the truth. I would, however, question the queen’s servants when we returned to Edinburgh.

“What, then, do you wish to tell the queen?” I asked. “That your husband and your son have reconsidered their outlawry?”

She laughed. The witches laughed with her, like three eerie echoes.

“Certainly not,” she said at last. “Listen to me, mistress, and repeat what I say to the queen, word for word. She is just a girl, and a Frenchwoman in all but birth—she understands nothing of Scotland, and has allowed herself to fall too far into the power of her bastard brother and his Protestant lords. Here in the north we are true Catholics and true Scots. She would be better off taking advice from Huntly, and making James Stewart the outlaw.”

“He is the Earl of Moray now.”

“He is not. Moray has belonged to the Gordons for a hundred years, and we will not give it up. We will fight for it, and for Huntly’s rightful place as the queen’s chief adviser.”

“Fight!” cried one of the witch-women, a gnarled creature with a single glittering eye. “There is fighting coming, war and blood and death.”

“Blood and death!” the others echoed.

“I see!” This was the woman with the trembling puppy. “There will be a battle, and afterward the Earl of Huntly will take his rest without a wound upon his body, in a soft bed in the heart of Aberdeen.”

“Make the sacrifice, Beathag,” Lady Huntly said. “I would see this thing for certain. We shall show Mistress Leslie as well, so she can describe it to the queen.”

The woman lifted the puppy by the scruff of its neck again. It yelped with pain and fear. The sound jolted me into action. That poor puppy, skin and bones, huge dark eyes, four freckled white paws
flailing helplessly, was to be the sacrifice. I leaped forward and caught it in my arms just as the witch-woman threw it into the well.

In its terror it bit me.

I cried out, surprised more than hurt.

The witch-woman screamed invective at me in old Scots and reached out to take the puppy back. Her nails were long as a cat’s claws, yellow and filthy. I tried to hold on to the puppy, but it was squirming and struggling and yelping—definitely hound blood, I thought inconsequently, from the sound of it—and managed to wriggle out of my arms. It landed on the rain-softened ground, already running.

I felt a rush of sadness so intense it made me dizzy. I wanted to run after the poor little creature. I wanted to feed it, bathe it, dry it with soft cloths, keep it warm, give it a fine leather collar with a silver plate engraved with the sea-wave badge of Granmuir. I wanted it to be mine. But it was gone.

At least it was free.

“I want nothing to do with your witchcraft,” I said. I was panting, my thumb was throbbing where the poor pup had sunk in its teeth, and anger made it almost impossible for me to form coherent words. “How dare you— How dare you!”

“You are as much a witch as they are,” Lady Huntly said calmly. “Enough, Beathag, you have seen what you have seen. Huntly will take Aberdeen from the queen, by force of arms if need be. He has a thousand Highlanders at his back, and we will make Scotland a Catholic country again. Go and tell her that, Marina Leslie.”