StarCrossed. Part 26

"Uh - bronze? A circle, with a star on it? Why, what does it look like to you?"

I gripped it in my hand, until the magic frothed through my fingers. "Like sunlight on water. Like - heat haze. Or a fog."

"You have magic." Somehow, there was no surprise at all in his voice.

"I see magic. You don't want to see magic at the Celystra. My brother was the devout one; he told me I was unclean. He called me an abomination, a corrupt thing unworthy of the G.o.ds."

Wierolf touched my hand. "That's unforgivable."

"No - what's unforgivable is that I believed him. For years, I thought somehow, maybe he was right. Surely he knew, right? Hadn't Celys chosen him to speak for her? If the Lord High Inquisitor calls something unholy, it must be so."

The prince's dark eyes grew wide. "Wait. Your brother is -"

I was halfway there already. I took a breath and undid the lie I'd been hiding behind for five years. "Werne the Bloodletter."

He just looked at me a moment, utter disbelief on his face. Then he made a strange, strangled sound, and covered his face with his big hand.

"Laughing. You're laughing? I tell you my brother is the king's Inquisitor, and your response is to laugh."

"I'm sorry," he said. "Truly, Celyn - that's just so much bigger than I expected! I knew you had a secret, but by Tiboran -"

"Did you ever think that maybe this is one of the reasons people want you dead?" I snapped. "No wonder they favor Astilan."

The smile dipped. "I deserved that," he said. "I know what it cost you to tell me this. But you speak truly? You really are the Inquisitor's sister?"

I closed my eyes and kissed the knuckles of my left hand. "I swear by Tiboran and the Nameless One, I would not lie about that."

"No, I believe you - it's just . . . I've never heard that he had any siblings." He uncurled my fingers from his medallion. "But I suppose the reason for that is obvious." There was a long, silent pause, as Wierolf seemed to try to place this new information in his understanding of the universe. "So it's Celyn Nebraut, then? Who's Celyn Contrare?"

"An invention. And it's not Celyn at all. It's Digger."

He looked amused again. "The Inquisitor has a sister called Digger. What's your real name?"

"Children born inside the convent aren't given names until they take their vows. I wasn't there that long." The prince was still watching me in astonishment. "It's a long story."

"Then tell me." His voice was gentle, inviting. Go ahead, Celyn, give us your tale. And somehow, there I was, telling him every thing. About the Celystra, about the man who'd died when I'd informed on him, however unwittingly, about leaving the convent and making a life on the streets as a pickpocket. How I'd buried myself so deep in the slums, as Werne rose so high in the church, that I was sure we'd never find each other ever again.

"Who were your parents?"

My voice was rusty and stiff on this unpracticed story. "My mother came to the Celystra when she was pregnant with me, though Werne always liked to claim I was one of the priests' children. She'd been married to his father, a potter who died when Werne was small." A monk had told me that once, meaning to be kind. "She died when I was born, so I don't even know her name. Werne would never tell me. She died in grace, he'd say, and her life before meant nothing."

I sighed and looked into my skirts. "I've always wondered what kind of life she had hoped for, coming there. What she'd wanted for us. She got it with Werne, at least." My voice sounded bitter.

"How old were you when you left?"

"Eleven. I really did just climb up over the wall and drop down on the other side - smack in the heart of Gerse. That first night - I was sure I would die. Everything was so loud, and disorderly. A horse from a pa.s.sing coach nearly ran me down, and I thought it was Celys, come to drag me back inside. I ran. I'm still running." I took a breath, remembering. "But another girl found me when I nicked a roll from a cart, and she took me to a tavern and told me all about Tiboran. And everyone there was messy, and devious, and they laughed at every thing, and they gave me a knife and told me to go cut a man's purse strings - and I did it, and I was good at it. And I liked it. I loved it."

"And somehow you ended up at Bryn Shaer."

I explained how that had happened as well. Wierolf mulled this over for a bit, then surprised me by standing, and by pulling me to my feet too. "Well met, Digger of Gerse," he said. "I am Prince Wierolf, and I've a few questionable relations of my own."

Now that the words were said, I felt horribly exposed, as if someone had stripped away my clothes and pushed me out into the snow. "What now?" I said. "What happens next?"

He regarded me solemnly. "Now you can figure out the next secret on that list."

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT.

I felt raw and hollow after my confession to the prince, like after a bad sickness. I had said the words, and they hadn't killed me, but it would take a while before I felt like myself again. I took the kennel route from Wierolf's chamber, to delay the moment I'd have to face people. Afternoon had faded to evening, and Tiboran's moon was high and bright in a deepening sky. I looked up at it gravely, then sketched a formal, actor's bow. "Thank you," I said aloud. He had guided my per for mance all these years, after all. I had to have faith that the timing he'd chosen for the end of my masquerade was the right one.

The next few days were peaceful ones at Bryn Shaer, even amid the birthday prep ara tions. Lady Lyll's late-night meetings with the conspirators continued; Meri and I "attended" another one together, and they seemed to be piecing together their final arguments for the king's representative. I knew Lyll nursed some concern for Lord Antoch's party, now a day or so overdue, but for me, with Daul gone, it almost really was like a holiday.

One morning I came back from the stillroom to find Phandre pawing through Meri's clothes chest.

"What are you doing?" I crossed the room and slammed the lid shut, unfortunately missing her fingers.

"Looking for Meri's pink sleeves," she said haughtily. The garments in question were balled up in her hand. "Not that it's any of your business. I wanted them for luncheon this afternoon."

"Wear your own sleeves," I snapped, s.n.a.t.c.hing them away from her. As I smoothed the silk, I saw a little tear in the lining. "Phandre . . ."

Phandre ignored me, just strode across the room, looking around like she didn't live here too. "Where is she this morning?" she asked sweetly. "She disappears a lot, doesn't she? Like you. I came in late last night, and what a suprise to find your bed empty."

"I'm sure you find that strange," I said. "If Meri wanted you to know what she was doing, she'd tell you."

"Oh, yes, I forgot. You're her great confidante now." Phandre gave me a little sniff and headed off to her own room - but not before plucking the pink sleeves from my hands again.

I shook my head. n.o.bs.

Meri returned a few minutes later, bubbling over with excitement. "Stagne and I materialized a ball of flame for a full minute before it dissipated!" As I helped her out of her riding clothes, she added, "I saw Marlytt in the courtyard. She'd like to speak to you."

When I didn't respond, she squeezed my arm. "Say you'll go. I don't like to see you two quarreling. She says she has something to give you."

Outside, a figure in blue descended the east tower steps and came to meet me, long hem trailing behind her in the snow.

"I know you don't want to talk to me," Marlytt said. She held the neck of her coat closed with one s.h.i.+vering hand. "So just listen."

Warily I nodded, and she set off walking toward the moonslit sculpture garden. I followed close behind.

"When Daul found me, I was in Tratua with a man called Mils Rhonin. He was a low-level city official, a widower. I had been with him almost a year." She paused and looked up into the sky. Ice crystals had formed on her long, pale lashes. "He wanted to marry me."

She kept a mea sured pace, and her voice in the whipping wind was soft but distinct. "I think he mostly wanted a mother for his children - a girl and two little boys. They had a house with a view of the sea, and a courtyard where the children could play." She looked straight at me. "It was the kind of life that girls like us never dream of having.

"And then one night I met Daul at a banquet - some city function that Mils had to attend. I danced two dances with him, and by the end of the night he'd told me to leave Mils and come with him. I refused, of course. The next day I saw him again, when Mils's daughter and I were drawing water at the city fountain. He claimed to have contacts in the Inquisition. He again told me to leave Mils, this time in much less . . . subtle terms. Mils's daughter had to stand there and listen while Daul called me a wh.o.r.e.

"A week later, five Acolyte Guardsmen arrested Mils at our house, in front of his children. Daul was there an hour later. And that time, I went with him."

She arranged a strand of fair hair that had slipped loose. "He brought me here to spy on Antoch, to seduce him. But when it came time, he wouldn't let me. I guess Daul turned out to be a jealous lover after all. Not that Antoch would ever have been tempted; I saw that immediately. He's too good a man. And then you showed up, a new toy Daul just couldn't resist." She shook her head. "I'm sorry, Digger. I didn't mean to get you into this."

Her eyes were as icy as I'd ever seen them. "Daul is cold and he is ambitious. When he wants something, he gets it. When he hurts you, he leaves no marks - but you bleed to death on the inside, from a thousand invisible cuts." She turned her gaze into the distance, toward the wall and the mountains and, maybe, the ca.n.a.ls of Tratua. "I saw Mils one more time. Daul took me to see them release him from prison. It had only been a few days, but he'd changed so much. The worst thing, though," she said, so softly I almost didn't hear her, "the worst was the look in his eyes when he saw me standing in the boat beside Daul."

She turned to face me. "So you can stop giving me that look like I've plunged a knife into you, and don't you dare judge me. Because I know what it feels like to betray someone I care about, and believe me - this is nothing."

Before I could say anything, Marlytt pulled something from her sleeve and held it out to me. A packet of letters, a little road-worn and rumpled still from being crushed against someone's rib cage for a month. Her hand was blue with cold, but steady somehow. "I think you were looking for these," she said. "Don't lose them again."

She lifted the sable hood up over her face, turned, and walked back to the castle with mea sured dignity.

I didn't follow. But in the fading light, I unfolded Chavel's letters. And there, along with the letter to Vichet and Wierolf's death warrant and the incomprehensible list of odd markings, was something new: a worn and much-folded slip of paper that read In these pages, I have recorded the truth. I knew that dark, spidery hand all too well: Senim Daul, my expert huntsman. Beneath that p.r.o.nouncement, the page was covered in numbers that spread onto the back side. Folded with it was another sheet, in a hand I didn't recognize, but could guess: Senim's son. This one was filled with little notes and scratch marks, as if he'd been trying to puzzle something out. And, standing there in the late morning chill, I thought I knew what.

"Thank you, Marlytt," I whispered into the dusting snow.

I had to wait until everyone else went to dinner, but as soon as I could, I hastened back to Meri's rooms and popped open the little compartment beneath the window seat. Her books were still there, and I pulled out Senim Daul's hunting journal. Beside it, I spread out the two pages Marlytt had given me: the sheet of numbers, and Daul's efforts to decipher his father's message about Kalorjn. A message to share, he'd said: half to Antoch, half to Daul. Antoch had received the journal, and Daul the list of numbers. How did they fit together?

I turned a few pages in the journal, glancing not at the words but at the book itself, the margins, even the page numbers, carefully rendered in tiny, neat script. I'd had to renumber them in Daul's version, to account for the sections his was missing - Meri's sections. Daul had said the journal was worthless.

It wasn't worthless. Not the real one. Not the one I held in my hands, carefully arranged by a system of page numbers to say precisely the right thing at the right spot on the right page, so another reader could find that reference easily.

I had seen a coded book once before in the Celystra ma.n.u.script room, a volume of heretical scripture disguised beneath a lackl.u.s.ter history of foreign rulers. The Scriptor had explained to me how it worked: One conspirator wrote out a message using words in the book, and then sent a coded version of the message referencing only page and word numbers. The recipient could then look up the numbers, and reconstruct the message by finding the right word on the right page. It was a neat little system, and in theory it worked beautifully.

Unless you had a forged version of the book that was off count by some fifteen pages. Then your reconstructed message, instead of saying I can identify the man who betrayed us, would read Boar the and b.l.o.o.d.y fowl tossed there water.

Precisely what had happened to Daul.

I got up from the floor and made very certain Meri's door was locked. Then I knelt in the dark by the fire, trying to decide if I really wanted to do this. In these pages I have recorded the truth. Senim had meant this information to be known, at least by a very few people that he trusted. But eigh teen years had pa.s.sed; the damage was done long ago. Wierolf was right: Did it even matter anymore?

It mattered to Daul. The truth he thought was hidden in this book had twisted friends.h.i.+p and love into something awful and vindictive. Maybe it was best if I just threw the note and the journal both into the fire, let this secret die with Senim Daul, like it should have.

Antoch is too good a man. Even Marlytt sensed that, and her instincts about people were infallible. If it was true, if Antoch was the Traitor, it would destroy a lot of that good. And what would it do to the alliance growing right now at Bryn Shaer, if Lady Lyll's allies discovered Nemair had betrayed them?

I held the book close to the flames, but something stayed my hand. Wierolf had spoken of how damaging secrets like this could be, as if they ate at the heart of the country like a poison. And it seemed Tiboran had ordained this hour for the unraveling of secrets. First mine, then Marlytt's - and now the truth about Kalorjn.

With a weird weight pressing on me, I fetched fresh paper and ink, and set about uncovering one more secret.

The contents of the message unfolded before me. What Senim Daul had carefully hidden among the falconry lessons and mating habits of the wild boar was the account of what the Sarist commander had discovered about the Battle of Kalorjn. How under only mild duress, and with weak promises of paltry rewards, someone had agreed to leak false intelligence to the Sarist troops.

But who was it? Daul's book contained no proper names, but when I searched through its pages again, I discovered a handful of strange spelling errors - letters repeated in certain words. I had taken them for fatigue or carelessness when I'd made my copy, but now I wasn't so sure. When I rearranged the extra letters, they sorted themselves out into a name. I was hoping it would be harder, that the shape of the words would be unfamiliar, that it would reveal a name I didn't know from the halls of Bryn Shaer.

But it didn't.

According to Senim Daul's convincing account, the Traitor of Kalorjn was not Lord Antoch Nemair.

Commander Daul had named Lougre Sethe.

Phandre's father.

I sat in the roar of the flames, feeling hot and sick. The strange things Antoch had said about her in the Armory finally made sense. No wonder the Nemair felt sorry for her. They were just that generous.

What would Daul do? What should I do? I folded the account up with Daul's papers and the journal, and tucked every thing under the window seat. I had to tell Daul when he got back; he needed to know Antoch was innocent. But that might turn his wrath on Phandre, which, however I felt about her, she didn't deserve. And there was no way to convince Daul without also showing him the real journal - and nothing had changed there: I still couldn't do that, not without endangering Meri. To say nothing of the trouble Marlytt would be in, for stealing Daul's papers.

Meri came in before I had made up my mind. She swished over to me in her red velvet gown. "We missed you tonight," she said. "Are you all right?"

Was I? I had no idea. But I nodded.

"Master Cwalo asked after you. He wanted to partner with you at riddles. He told me all about his son Viorst, who manages a winery in Yeris Volbann. It sounded very romantic."

"Meri, I'm not going to marry one of Master Cwalo's sons."

She smiled. "I know. But it's fun to think about."

I watched her, something tight in my chest I didn't understand. She wasn't the daughter of a traitor; if she'd had any clue there was ever a risk of it, she'd be delighted that it wasn't true. Was there any chance that Phandre knew what her father had done? "I'm sorry about Phandre," I said without meaning to, and Meri frowned.

"What about her?"

"She took your sleeves," I improvised. "I think she's still mad about the seating arrangements for your breakfast."

"Oh, she's always like that." Meri looked at her hands, smiling faintly. "My parents always insisted we be kind to her, and we have so much in common, anyway."

"Like what?"

"Both of our parents were exiled, while we had to stay in Llyvraneth as wards of the Crown. She didn't have a family to take her in, like I did, just a lot of tolerant houses that would keep her for a season or two. Lord Ragn was always kind to her, and the Decath usually let her stay longer than most. But she'd always move on, and then when she came back . . ." Meri trailed off.

A daughter cast to the fickle sympathies of random n.o.bs seemed like pitiful reward for Sethe selling out his brethren. Why had he done it? Meri curled up beside me on the bench and leaned her sparkling head against my shoulder. "I'm glad you came to Bryn Shaer with me, Celyn."

That weight on my chest pressed harder. "Me too, Meri."

The door to Meri's rooms swung open, and Phandre walked in. She took one look at Meri and me sitting together, and her face clouded with disgust. With an angry shake to her head, she walked straight past us and slammed the door to her little room.

As soon as Meri set off to meet Stagne the next morning, I nipped down to see the prince. He was carving again, this time with a better grip on the wood and a lot less blood. He looked up when I came in.

"It's not Antoch," I burst out. "He's not the Traitor."

The prince's face lightened with relief. "Good. That's wonderful. Did you find out who it was?"

"It's no one at Bryn Shaer. It's someone - dead. I think it doesn't matter anymore."

Wierolf studied me a long moment, eyes dark and soft. I looked away before he convinced me to make any more spontaneous confessions, but I sat down on the floor, feeling strangely light and free. Daul was gone for the moment, I'd survived revealing my ident.i.ty, and Antoch wasn't the traitor. Maybe Wierolf was right, and this secrecy business was overrated. "What are you working on now?" I asked.

Wierolf handed me the sc.r.a.p of wood he'd been whittling. It wasn't much of anything, really, just a series of scrolls and edge-fluting and faint, tentative markings, like he'd been trying out ideas before committing to them. "I'm carving you a miniature of the Celystra, for a souvenir," he said with a grin.

I punched him in the shoulder. "Oh! You're very amusing. When winter's over, maybe Lyll can find you a post with a troupe of traveling -" I stopped, staring at the carving. Among the random sketches on the back, one thing stood out. Scratched in the wood was a long, thin arrow, etched inside an oval.

Suddenly I was freezing. I turned the piece around and showed it to the prince, my finger on the symbol.