“But what does this have to do with you?” The king sighed. “I have to look ahead, Raesinia. Think about what you’ll be left with after I’m gone. Orlanko has too much influence on the cabinet already. Grieg is in his pocket, and Torahn is heading in that direction. Count Almire has made a career of avoiding politics. If Orlanko puts one of his own in Justice as well, he’ll be king in all but name.”
“If you don’t trust Orlanko, get rid of him,” Raesinia said, unable to keep a bit of heat out of her voice. “Better yet, have him executed.”
“If only it were that simple. The Borels would never allow it. And, like it or not, Orlanko may be all that has kept us afloat since. .”
He trailed off, eyes losing focus and staring away past the ceiling. But Raesinia could finish the thought on her own. She’d been only thirteen at the time of Vansfeldt, the battle that had cost Vordan its war with Borel and its crown prince in one disastrous afternoon. Her father had been sick then as well, too sick to go to the front as he felt he ought, and though his illness had waxed and waned since then, she wasn’t sure his spirit had ever recovered.
The king blinked and shook his head weakly. “Tired. I’m so tired, Raesinia.”
“Rest, then. I can come back later.”
“Not just yet. Listen to me. Count Mieran is. . more than he seems. I had hoped. .” He swallowed. “I had plans. But I am running out of time. I think. . I think you can trust him. At the very least, he is no friend of our Last Duke. He will help you, Raesinia.” Tears glistened in the royal eyes. “You will need all the allies you can get.”
“I understand, Father.”
“It will be hard for you. I never meant for this to happen.” His voice softened, as if he were drifting away. “None of this. You were supposed to have. . something else. Not this. But. .”
“It’s all right, Father.” Raesinia leaned over him and kissed him, gently, on the cheek. His attendants had bathed him in rosewater, but the perfume was unable to cover the sick-sweet scent of rot wafting from the royal flesh. “Everything will be all right. Now rest.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again, eyes slowly closing. “My little girl. . I’m sorry. .”
Raesinia’s own quarters were in a faux-medieval tower named, inelegantly, the Prince’s Turret. Most of its rooms had been shut since the death of her brother, Dominic, and Raesinia preferred to live simply in a few chambers on the ground floor. She had the keys to the whole place, however, and it was easy enough to unlock the servants’ stairs and slip up, past silent sitting rooms and parlors with furniture covered in dust sheets, and emerge on the roof.
Strictly speaking, she did not have to be naked to accomplish what she was about to do. There was no point in ruining a perfectly good dress, though, and it appealed to her sense of melodrama. Raesinia had decided long ago that this was a defect in her character, that in the same way a coward lacked moral foundation and a drunkard strength of will, there was something in the pit of her soul that gave her an unhealthy weakness for sappy gestures and romantic poetry. Alas, the acknowledgment of this flaw did little to help excise it, and periodically it got the better of her.
The sun had set behind the forests to the west, but dark crimson light still stained the sky in that direction, painting the scattered clouds the color of blood. All around her were the lights of Ohnlei, neat rows of lanterns marking the avenues and byways, clusters of more distant lamps picking out the dark hulks of the Ministry buildings. Most of these had gone dark already as the clerks retired for the evening, but as always the Cobweb was a blaze of light, and smoke puffed merrily from its many chimneys. The Ministry of Information ran in overlapping shifts, it was said, like a coal mine, and there were clerks in the deep basements who had never seen the sun.
Farther to the south, across the intervening belt of royal parks and carefully tended wilderness, a deeper, ruddier glow marked the edges of the city of Vordan. Raesinia stared for a long time in that direction, as the wind whipped around her and raised goose bumps on her bare skin. It was a warm July night, but four stories up the breeze still carried a chill.
Only a single lantern burned atop the Prince’s Turret, and no guards waited there. It was just a circular expanse of slate surrounded by an irregular raised lip meant to suggest a real castle’s crenellations. In better times, the prince might have used it to breakfast in the sun, but Raesinia was certain no one but she had been up there in years. The pigeons that infested Ohnlei like lice on a beggar had stained the stones white and gray.
For her purposes, the important feature of the roof was what it overlooked. The Prince’s Turret formed the northeasternmost corner of the great rambling palace, and it was well away from any of the heavily trafficked areas. Looking down, Raesinia could see a raked gravel path four stories below, and beyond that a low stone wall marking the edge of the gardens. The only windows that looked onto it were her own, and she kept the curtains drawn. Squads of Noreldrai Grays patrolled the perimeter in a slow procession, but they only passed at twenty- or thirty-minute intervals, and the torches they carried made them visible from a long way off.
One of these squads had just passed out of sight, and Raesinia gave them a count of two hundred to get safely around the corner of the vast, irregular building. She stepped up onto the lip of stone, staring out over the darkened trees beyond the edge of the grounds, and forced herself to stand straight, with her arms at her sides.
She felt as though she ought to say something, to mark the occasion, although there was no one to hear.
“I wish,” she said, “that there was a better way.”
Raesinia extended one foot, let it hang tingling for a moment in midair, then tumbled forward off the wall and into darkness.
She’d always pictured the few seconds of fall telescoping into an eternity, time stretching like taffy as the wall of the tower rushed past and the wind whipped across her bare skin. In fact, she was barely aware of it, a single blurred moment of weightless, involuntary terror before the crashing pain of impact. Her shoulder hit the ground first, shattering the bone instantly, and an instant later her skull impacted so hard on the gravel it shattered like an egg. The princess’ body twitched once, feet pushing weakly at the gravel, then lay still and broken in the gathering twilight.
Deep inside, in the darkest pit of her being, she felt something stir.
Raesinia wished she could faint. Some of the ladies at court were given to fainting, and she had always considered it a useless affectation in that setting, but she had lately come to appreciate that it was simply the body’s way of trying to spare its occupant some grief in a difficult time. Unfortunately, in her current state, she seemed to have lost the knack, and so she could feel the grinding of bone against fragmented bone in her shoulder, the slow seep from the cracks in her skull, and the drip of blood from where innumerable bits of sharp gravel had driven themselves into her back.
She had become somewhat indifferent to pain over the years. Repeated demonstrations had made her acutely aware that there was her body, currently lying in a broken heap in the gravel, and herself, somewhere else entirely, and that pain and all sensations of that kind were simply signals from one to the other, as one ship might warn another of a dangerous reef via semaphore flags. Still, she couldn’t quite banish her discomfort, and she directed a silent, metaphorical glare at the magical binding and demanded that it quit lazing about and do its job.
It emerged languidly from the depths of her soul, yawning like a sleepy tiger coming out of his cave. Raesinia imagined it casting about to see what she’d done to herself now, heaving a sigh at the extent of the damage, and reluctantly setting to work. She knew it was ridiculous to anthropomorphize it so-it was simply a process, after all, no different from that which consumed wood and phlogiston to make fire, or turned exposed iron into rust. But after living-if that was the word-for four years with the thing wrapped around her soul, she couldn’t help feeling as if it had moods and feelings of its own. She imagined it looking in her direction with hooded, reproachful eyes before it set to work.