“Hush,” both her mother and Claude said.
The Nix ducked its head into the water and lifted it out again. Held in its bared teeth was the distaff. Beatrix gently pulled it out.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“There,” the Nix said. “I do grant some wishes, you see. Because you, unlike some people, are kind.”
“By all the saints,” groaned Margriet. “I’d almost rather swim.”
“I could grant that wish as well,” the Nix grunted.
But he carried them a little further to where the water went as black as pitch and they were out of sight of the city walls, and then they were out of Bruges, and into the Chatelaine’s territory. The land opened darkly before them.
The Chatelaine invited the King of France to a feast in Hell. He brought his own food: boars, swans, even a blackbird pie, which erupted in birds when it was cut. The birds fluttered up and into the high corridors, where they woke the bats to screeching and people looked up. Black feathers floated down over the feast and a bird fell with a thud.
The Chatelaine, along with her chimeras, ate what they always ate: the blood of the beast. It rushed from the golden spigots along the walls of the Great Hall and splashed into bowls and cups.
A Mantis-man carried a platter of bloodseeds to her. They were piled high, glittering like red gems in the lamplight. She gestured to Philippe, and smiled when the king cringed at the offered food.
“It feels something like roe on the mouth,” she said. “And something like pomegranate. Thicker, though. Rougher. We mix the beast’s blood with the beast’s spittle and cook the drops in the furnaces.”
“Your furnaces are the greatest marvel in the world, madame.”
The Chatelaine grasped the handle of one of the long silver spoons and ladled the bloodseeds into her bowl. The body of the Beast; the food of Hell. She had been eating it so long, she remembered no other.
She took a few with her fingers and ate. It was a sweeter, milder taste than the thick, fresh blood that ran from the spigots, that must run even now into her husband’s mouth from whatever scratches and scrapes he had made in the walls of his oubliette.
The greasy meat in front of King Philippe hardly looked like food; it smelled like death, not life. But let him celebrate in his way and she would celebrate in hers.
This was her victory feast, although it was mostly for show, because Bruges had not yet fallen. She had invited the king to remind him: she had done what he required. He had asked her to defeat the Flemish rebels and she had. Her army of chimeras had won the day at Cassel. She had spent nearly her whole army on it, so many of her precious creations killed. She had earned her reward. He must make her Countess of Flanders; perhaps even tonight.
And perhaps Bruges was falling even now, if her gonner-chimeras had done their work.
Chaerephon sat to her left. He never ate now. She could remember him eating, years and years before, when her husband was still master of Hell. Chaerephon had always been thin but now he looked like a skeleton wearing skin. She suspected he was becoming a revenant of a kind, that he and the Beast had come to some kind of arrangement. But she had not asked him; she could not think how to phrase the question.
“How does it go with Bruges?” Philippe asked, low enough that people would not hear above the noise of eating and talking.
He ate only a little of his stinking food, a little of each dish, as if he owed each one a favour.
“It would go better if I had a few trebuchets and ballistas, and a company of knights.”
“It’s a city of women!”
“Women can throw rocks and boiling water.”
“It could be worse. It could be Greek fire.”
“When we bring a ram to the gate, they throw down rocks and burning branches and boiling water and kill the men. I don’t have enough archers to take them off the walls. When we put up ladders, the women throw them down.”
“But the revenants get in.”
“Yes. The revenants get in. If we leave it to the revenants, it will be a charnel city by the time we take it.”
“All the better for you, since you find the burghers such an obstacle. If you can’t control Bruges, you can’t control Flanders,” said Philippe. “Before I was born, the people of that accursed city killed the flower of French nobility. When I was a child, the people of Bruges ambushed Frenchmen in the streets and stoned them to death—the men, women, children all. If you hope to be countess of these vicious people, you must be able to keep them in check without running to me every year, as Count Louis did. If you can’t, I shall return poor Louis to his rightful place.”
The Chatelaine bit her tongue. Louis had men, and machines. All she had were ghosts and chimeras. The ghosts worked slowly and strangely, and the chimeras now were few. She would need proper weapons and knights, and if Philippe would not give her them, she would need to make them herself. But it was not so easily done. The forges of Hell only worked on the willing. It took time to convince people, one by one, to become chimeras. And there were losses; there were mistakes.
At the far end of the hall, Monoceros ambled alongside a young man on crutches. A recruit! Missing one leg, but he seemed sound in body otherwise.
She beckoned to Monoceros, who came and knelt by her side, opposite Philippe.
“Do you come from Bruges?” she whispered to him as they exchanged kisses. “You ran, I think. You stink to heaven.”
Monoceros had gained the speed of the unicorn who had all but disappeared within his man’s body when the two went into the forges together.
“The gonner-chimeras are lost,” he muttered. “They blew themselves to bits and did not breach the walls. The powder must have been too strong.”
She froze, still embracing him. Her nails dug into the leathery skin of his bare shoulder.
“But the last time it was too weak,” she whispered.
Monoceros said nothing. She thrust him from her and turned back to her place.
She wanted nothing but to run, far from here, to a quiet corner of the Beast where she could think. They had been working with various recipes for the black powder for months, but none seemed quite right. They refined the saltpeter from the bat droppings in the Beast’s nostrils; they took the fuming yellow brimstone from the Beast’s innards. But somehow the recipes never came out right; perhaps there was something about the sulphur that was not the same as the stuff on the surface. And each experiment cost them more in charcoal, which they had to buy or steal, and which was not cheap in this country, with its little woods and far between.
“Is anything amiss?” Philippe asked smoothly.
She smiled at him, shook her head.
She looked over the heads of the chimeras assembled at the tables all around the hall. It had been much emptier in her husband’s day; he had left most of his guests in the oubliettes or the torture chamber.
So she had shared many meals with her husband here alone, or nearly alone; often in later centuries Chaerephon was there, and anyway no one was ever alone in Hell. Her husband had bought her a throne in Samarkand: lacquered red, wide enough for her to sit cross-legged on a silk cushion, and with two great dragons leaping out on the armrest. She had that throne cast into the furnaces after she cast her husband down into his private hell. She sat now on what had been his throne: a chair made of the carved and polished bones of some unnamed beast.
The noise in the hall was strange and satisfying, even if it did distract her, when she could not afford to be distracted. King Philippe required unstinting watchfulness.
She needed to show him she could manage Flanders. She needed more chimeras, better chimeras.
The Chatelaine turned back to her dear Monoceros, who crouched as though he were trying to make himself small. Dear thing. Dear loyal thing. The very first thing she had made for her very own.