“How enticing,” Petunia said, her voice just as cold and distant as his. “I can hardly wait.”
She squeezed the trigger and shot the King Under Stone. And woke up, in a sweat, in the bed she shared with Pansy at the grand duchess’s estate.
“Are you all right?” Pansy’s voice came in a mumble, her face half buried in her pillow.
“I just shot Rionin,” Petunia gasped, sitting up.
“You did what?” Pansy pushed herself up on her elbows. “You shot Rionin?”
“In my dream,” Petunia said.
“I wasn’t there,” Pansy said. “I was sleeping, just sleeping.”
“I dreamed that I was there with Kestilan,” Petunia told her, “and I got so angry that I hit him. I threw the diamond sand in his eyes, and then I thought of having a pistol and it appeared. The others came out of the palace and I shot Rionin,” Petunia said, panting. “He made me look at the room he said would be our room—his and mine—when we are wed. Kestilan, not Rionin. Rionin wants to marry Lily. Still. I think. But Kestilan said that Rionin is going to give Jonquil and those of us whose partners are dead to some of the courtiers, to increase his power.”
“What are we going to do?” Pansy asked, her face white.
“Did he say when you would wed?” Rose asked when Petunia had awakened her to tell her about the dream. “Do you have any idea when this will happen?”
“No,” Petunia said, and tried not to feel guilty that she hadn’t thought to find out.
She and Pansy had gone to Rose’s room, which she was sharing with Jonquil for the night, to tell them what had happened. Jonquil was sitting up, and Lily was trying to coax her to drink some chamomile tea and try to sleep, when the two youngest sisters entered. Soon they were all huddled on the wide bed, with Petunia describing her dream in detail.
Maybe she should have asked more questions of Kestilan, she thought, and done less hitting. And shooting. But she didn’t particularly enjoy these dreams, and attacking Kestilan and Rionin had been deeply satisfying.
“Galen thinks … he thinks Rionin will make his move soon,” Rose said with a little catch to her voice. “I just wondered if they’d hinted at how soon.”
“Now, Rose,” Lily said comfortingly. “It was three years ago when Blathen went after Poppy in Breton. We thought then that Rionin would try to do something, but there was nothing except the dreams.”
“Yes, I know,” Rose sighed. “But now the dreams are coming nearly every night. And they’re more than just dreams … the line between dreaming of the balls and being there physically is blurring somehow. Their father couldn’t do such things.”
“And they’re trying to come into the house, through the garden, like they did that time at home,” Petunia said, then rather wished she hadn’t when Jonquil made a small sobbing noise.
But Rose just nodded. “Keep whatever charms you’ve got on at all times,” she said.
Petunia self-consciously checked for hers. She had both a knitted bracelet and a charmed garter on, even though she was in her nightgown and not wearing any stockings.
“I gave you those sachets to put under your pillows, though it doesn’t seem to have worked for Petunia tonight,” Rose went on. “Also, keep your pistols handy, and plenty of bullets. The silver daggers that Bishop Schelker blessed for us too.”
“I feel strange carrying weapons around,” Pansy admitted.
“We’re at war,” Petunia told her. “A soldier needs his weapons close during a war.” It was something both Galen and Heinrich had always told them.
“I don’t want to be a soldier,” Pansy whined.
“I don’t think we have a choice, Pan,” Lily said gently.
Petunia’s pistol and dagger were hidden under her mattress. She hadn’t been carrying them at all, here at the estate, even though she knew it was foolish. But it wasn’t as if she could wear a leather belt and holsters over a morning gown. She’d tried cutting slits in her skirts so that she could wear her weapons underneath them, but Olga kept sewing them up again. She supposed she’d just have to settle for hiking up her skirts, flashing her legs at Kestilan, and then shooting him, if it came to that.
“I keep thinking about the silver wood,” Petunia said. “Galen and Lily shot four of the princes. But if they become king, they have to be killed with blessed silver and their true name. Do we know Rionin’s true name? Is it Rionin?”
“We can hardly ask to look in the family bible,” Pansy grumbled.
“But … maybe it’s foolish, but I just keep thinking of how the wood was Mother’s … it sprouted from her brooch,” Petunia said. “I wonder if it has extra power. I wish we could get a few branches, and make arrows or bullets or knives out of it.”
“To do that,” Jonquil said in a faint voice. “You’d have to go back there.”
“It would be worth it, to get some of their silver branches,” Petunia said stubbornly.
Rose just shook her head. “There’s simply no way to sneak into the Kingdom Under Stone,” she said. “For one thing, we don’t know how to get there anymore. And once you got there, you’d have to unlock the gate … and goodness knows that Galen’s chain is barely holding it closed as it is. I think that’s the only thing that’s keeping Rionin and his brothers from coming to take us away.”
Jonquil gave a small moan, but the others ignored her.
“And Galen’s working on a way to seal them in permanently?” Lily asked.
Rose nodded.
This made Petunia want some of the silver branches more, before they lost that piece of their mother forever. Their father had created the gardens around the palace for Maude, but the silver wood had been truly Maude’s, and only hers, in a way.
“He is working on a spell to close the gate for good,” Rose told them. “If he can’t find a way to destroy the Kingdom Under Stone completely.”
Spy
In the end, Oliver arrived at the estate at the same time as the princesses’ husbands, though they arrived in coaches, and Oliver was on foot. And, while the princes were welcomed at the front gates, Oliver went to the back wall and climbed over.
Of course, Oliver could have walked through the front gate with the princes. He had been wearing the dull purple invisibility cloak since he’d left the old hall.
Being invisible made Oliver feel very strange. Animals sensed him coming, heard him, smelled him, but panicked when they could not see him. He walked openly along the road, and other travelers passed him without pausing, as though he didn’t exist. He wasn’t sure he liked the feeling, and invisibility was dangerous besides. He thought constantly of all things that could happen to someone who could not be seen: coaches could run him down, stray bullets from hunters might hit him, and who would find his body? Even if he fell, broke his leg, bumped his head … if he were unconscious, there would be no way to receive help.
It was with a profound relief that he made his way to the unused hothouse and went inside. He left the cloak in place, but at least he knew he wouldn’t be shot, trampled, or otherwise injured inside the little building. He would be able to investigate the floor at his leisure, in good light, without worrying about one of the gardeners seeing him moving about and coming to look. Which, he supposed, made the invisibility cloak worth the other problems it might cause.
Oliver tried to remember where the shadows had come from. It had been toward the front of the hothouse, he thought. There was a large worktable there, covered with pots and rusty spades with chipped blades. He wondered why they didn’t throw such things away: the pots were cracked, the tools broken, and it wasn’t as if they were using the hothouse to start new plants. It had clearly become a dumping ground for junk, even more so than in his family’s time.