The Spirit Lens (22 page)

A trumpet fanfare from Philippe’s heralds made further conversation impossible. The stern anchor raised, the
Destinne
’s crew now hauled on their bow cable as if to draw the great ship all the way upstream to the Spindle by strength of their arms. But a shouted command loosed the spritsail, and the caravel began to come about. When the bow anchor lurched free, another scrap of sail high in the rigging was unfurled, and to the roar of Merona’s delighted citizenry, the
Destinne
harnessed the quartering wind and rounded slowly into the Ley’s current and the outgoing tide.

Gaetana beckoned Dante to resume their movement aft, toward the king’s party. But as Dante passed between me and the furled banners, he swiveled suddenly and grabbed my neck. His iron hand shut off my breath. Green eyes blazing, he pressed me to the rail and snarled. “Do you think me deaf? I’ll have no murmured resentments as I pass. Keep out of my sight until you are summoned, librarian. The stink of failure offends me.”

A brutal twist and a powerful shove and I crashed to the deck, sliding headfirst toward the chanting rowers. Chest burning, cheek scraping the polished planks, I was only vaguely aware of blaring trumpets.

From a corner of my watering eye, I glimpsed Haile’s man haul on the lines. A cascade of painted linen unfurled from the bird-topped posts, first the king’s own black and silver standard, then the gold-on-scarlet tree of Sabria, and lastly a new ensign—a sky blue field with a white ship, a golden sun, and the words HONOR and REMEMBER and a third word that might have been DESTINNE, only the banners’ unfolding tails crackled and spat, and the world an arm’s length above my head erupted into a blinding spray of white flame.

Chaos erupted in every quarter. Gluttonous flames swallowed the
Destinne
’s banners as if they had never been and raced along greased ropes and varnished crossbeams, quickly engulfing the next banner and the next, and licking at the billowing canopies.

Rolling, scrambling away from the fire, I tumbled over the edge of the gallery decking into the open hull, very nearly into a shocked oarsman’s lap. My right hand sirened pain, as if sparks of molten iron had penetrated flesh and bone.

Bellowing oarsmen shot up from their benches, brushing frantically at skin and hair. A writhing, screaming few jumped into the river, while still others tried to slosh water over the bulwarks to douse the burgeoning fires. The bargemaster, whose platform had placed him directly in front of the forward-facing banner, lay draped over his handrail, un-moving, pitted skin smoking like a field of geysers. Heavenly angels . . . Philippe!

Eyes streaming, I strained to see the rear of the barge where I’d last seen my cousin, but billowing smoke and flame obscured the way. The whoresons who’d done this could not have found better tinder than the inked linen banners, the silken furnishings, and the
Swan
’s newly painted wood.

The oarsman nearest me twisted and danced in macabre torment, screaming and clawing at his face. I lurched upward and reached out to steady him, but the current and the changing tide caught the barge and swung it around drunkenly. We both staggered. His partner in the lead bank, a brawny fellow with a gold strap across his chest, shoved us aside and yelled,
“Seicha mar! Seicha mar!”

A few men grabbed flapping oars and sat, though flames had burst out here and there like demonic seeds scattered from a plowman’s hand. I needed to move. But the back of my right hand had become a paralyzing agony, the raw wounds smoking . . . great Heaven . . . as if I burned from the inside out.

As the lead oarsman yelled and the few at the sweeps took up a ragged rhythm, I ripped the cloth band from my hat, dipped it in the water, and wrapped it tightly about my hand. I wasn’t going to be able to do anything if I started screaming, too. I needed to get aft . . . to the king . . . to Maura . . . Ilario . . . Dante.

Cradling my hand, I scrambled onto the gallery deck. Blistering heat, dense white smoke, and licking flame barred the promenades on either side of the lounging pavilion. The only way to make it aft was to forge straight through the pavilion itself. Greedy flames licked at the sagging roof canopy and gnawed at the support poles. I took a deep breath and charged in.

Impossible. The smoke was blinding; the walls ablaze. I tripped over a couch and crashed to the decking. A drifting ribbon of flaming silk settled on my sleeve.

Rolling to the side, I slapped at the fire and scrabbled forward, straining to recall the room’s arrangement from my morning inspection.
Around the low tables, over a divan, shove the chair aside.

New flames exploded before and behind. Searing, thundering, they drowned out the screams and wails that had guided me. Everyone on the barge could be dead for all I knew.
Father Creator, no air here.
My throat scorched; my eyes streamed and blurred.
Which way?

Instinct clamored that my friends lay beyond the thickest battlements of white-hot flame. Near blind . . . panicked . . . I drove through the roaring wall. My feet stumbled on the aft steps. I scrabbled upward, and burst into the air, gasping and swatting at my smoldering hair.

The marqués and two deckboys were passing buckets of water to Haile and his steward, battling the encroaching flames on the port side. The dowager, half her body seared like roasted meat, wailed piteously. Ilario, pale hair and fine garments blackened, had stretched his long body over her to shield her from fiery debris as the flames crept ever closer. His head jerked up and his eyes widened as a post and crossbeam crashed beside me. The blazing fountain catapulted me forward. I curled in a knot, my seared lungs fighting for air.

Calls for help from the starboard promenade spurred me to my feet again. I doused a cushion in the river and beat at a towering wall of flame, ever more frantic as the cries became screams of mortal pain and terror. I might as well have been trying to snuff the stars in a middle-night sky.

The barge lurched and wallowed. The horizon spun. My boots slipped and I crashed to the deck. Coughing, breathless, I clutched my wrapped hand to my breast and pressed my head to the planks. The flames flared higher, engulfing the entire center structure beam to beam. I was no hero who could defeat an inferno. The agonized cries became mindless bleats until the thunder of flames silenced them.
Please, saints and angels, let Maura . . . Philippe . . . Ilario . . . Dante . . . not be in there
.

Portier, get up!
The stern voice of conscience lifted my head from the blistering deck, just as a wind gust cleared a hole in the heavy smoke. Philippe sat wedged against a bulwark, his head bleeding, a charred beam crushing his middle. An unknown man in tattered garments was attempting to shift it. I scrambled across the steaming deck. “Sire, are you well?”

“See to the others,” mumbled Philippe, adding what strength he could muster as we hefted the beam and shoved it overboard. Wrapping his arms about his ribs, the king curled his head to his knees, coughing.

Another gust stirred the gray smoke. On the far side of the stern gallery, Orviene and Gaetana had laid out scraps of charred silk, a great deal of shattered glass, a palm-sized golden flask, a silver drinking cup, and a brass fitting from the ship. Using a rope, they had created a ritual enclosure about the particles and themselves. Gaetana knelt at one vertex of a triangle, the rope looped round her waist. Orviene stood at a second vertex, the rope wound about his arm. They had enlisted Maura, hair straggling, one shoulder bare and blistered, to support the third vertex of the enclosing triangle. I did not need to see Gaetana’s grip on a string of rubies twined around her fingers or Orviene’s focused concentration on the array to guess they had already infused a spell—something huge to require so elaborate a rite. The air crackled with more than fire.

Helpless rage consumed me. To charge into the middle of an ongoing ritual risked worse disaster. But Dante . . .

The mage, apparently unsinged, leaned against the stern rail between me and the other two, arms folded around his staff—doing nothing. Was he deaf? Blind?

“Dante!” I yelled. “The oarsmen are trapped. People are dying. The king is in
peril
.”

I could not tell if he heard me over the thunderous fire. His dark brows shadowed his eyes at such a distance. But he did not move.

Another explosion ripped through the holocaust, and I threw myself atop Philippe, expecting a scourge of fire and splinters. But the droplets that spattered my head and back did not burn. Cold, wet, soothing; the spattering quickly became a gentle drumming, as enchantment riddled my innermost being, and the sky brought forth a deluge.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

15 QAT 46 DAYS UNTIL THE ANNIVERSARY

E
ight people died in the fire on the
Swan
: the two heralds, a botanist, one of the Fassid merchants, the bargemaster, and three oarsmen—one burned, two drowned. One rower was blinded by the explosion. The disfigured dowager was likely to die as well, sooner or later. Almost everyone suffered burns, many far worse than mine. The rain had saved our lives.

After the pleasure barge limped into port, King Philippe, the blood cleansed from his face, had proclaimed to the awestruck crowd that the Pantokrator himself had surely sent his blessed rain to douse the fires begun by a “faulty brazier” on Massimo Haile’s vessel. The king reminded his subjects that the glory of the event must not be sullied by an accident that could happen on any common day. The
Destinne
and her noble crew were safely launched on their noble voyage, giving honor to Sabria and bearing the dead infant prince on his journey to Heaven.

Beloved and honored as Philippe had been since his defeat of Kadr—unlike the Blood Wars, the kind of wholesome conflict that creates heroes—he soon had his people cheering. He walked all the way up to Castelle Escalon, as if to show himself uninjured and unafraid. I suspected he had cracked ribs and could not bear the jostle of riding. Along the way he distributed another barrelful of memorial coins imprinted with his dead son’s likeness on one side, and the words HONOR, REMEMBER, and DESTINNE scribed around a ship’s emblem on the obverse.

It took no time at all for the rumors to begin—that the fire had been no accident, that the celebration banners had been enspelled with the white waxy substance known as
devil’s firework
, that the queen’s mages had worked terrible spells
before
the fire, and that the queen’s absence meant—Some dared not complete their conclusion, but many others did, inside and outside the palace.

On the morning after the fire, a new chapbook showed up in Merona’s markets—and in many a courtier’s gloved hands. The story told of a Syan concubine who decided to burn her land’s emperor to bring back the spirits of her former lovers. That afternoon, the queen’s coach, transporting two of her ladies to the lace market, was battered by a barrage of rock-centered mudballs. Despite the crowded street, no witnesses to the incident could be found. If rumor and innuendo shadowed truth, the king would be able to stave off the hounds baying at his wife for very little longer.

Ilario summoned me to his apartment that evening. His barber had trimmed his scorched hair short, save for one fair lock that dangled over his right temple, hiding a raw red streak. Twirling an ivory-headed walking stick, he paced and fidgeted, entirely unlike himself, as we exchanged platitudes about the dreadful event.

“It is a grace the queen was not aboard the
Swan
,” I said. Head muddled and stomach churning from the incessant pain of my hand, I offered this sentiment entirely without innuendo.

Ilario slammed his stick onto a table so hard, the maple cane broke away and flew across the room, shattering a mirror. “She fell ill!” he shouted, and launched the ivory elephant that remained in his hand clear through the open door and off his balcony. “For her to sail would have been torture.”

“Certainly, Chevalier. Certainly.” His vehemence shocked me out of my sleepless stupor.

“And everyone in Merona knows it is customary for the queen to supply celebration banners.” Ilario’s ferocious kick buckled the leg of a delicate chair that likely cost ten times my year’s pay; then he snatched up a tasseled pillow and began ripping out its threads. “
Anyone
could have enspelled them. She herself stitched only the
Destinne
ensign. Others sewed and finished them.”

Great Heaven! Grim certainty infused my heart, alongside sympathy and sorrow for both husband and brother.

“Perhaps . . .” Ilario’s slender hands paused in their destructive agitation, and he made another circuit of his room. “Now Philippe has seen evidence of true sorcery, perhaps he will broaden his mind. Compromise. He and Michel forever scoffed at her requests for caelomancers or healers. That’s why Geni took it on herself to find help when Desmond fell so ill. If some mages are corrupt and wicked, it is no fault of the magic . . . or of my sister.”

“My lord, if you could persuade Her Majesty to allow us to question—”

“Don’t ask it!” He swung his long body around. “By the sainted Reborn, she’ll not do it for her husband; she’s certainly not going to do it for me. Her household is her only pride, her only demesne. Deeds of honor that can further her family’s progress through Ixtador must be her own. Not lent. Not granted by a husband. She will not yield control. And she will
not
be treated like a common thief.”

Of all the prattle that had fallen from Ilario de Sylvae’s lips in these past days, the sincerest and most sober were those that embraced his half sister. No matter his flighty ways, he cared deeply for her. And he was terribly afraid. Rightly so. No queen’s crown or wedding vow was proof against a charge of treason. I did not point out how unlikely it was for Philippe to compromise with Eugenie about anything after this disaster. Had her husband been any but Philippe de Savin-Journia, she would already have been in custody. So might Ilario, as well. He had arranged our presence on the barge.