‘Well, nicety doesn’t man the walls, below the Highgate. If there’s been foul play, the merchants are likely to work themselves into a lather, bemoaning the loss of Devall’s ships. Suppose we faced a war?’ Flippant though he was, to broach that jibing comment, Vensic jumped to clear the doorway. ‘If the old king fancies he sees armies at the gates, he’ll want your field experience ahead of any uptown bravo’s breeding.’
Mykkael scotched the ribbing with his usual spiked glance, and prowled in hitched strides towards the stairwell.
‘You won’t have to go afoot,’ Vensic added, dismayed as he noted the exhaustion betrayed by his captain’s dragging limp. ‘The herald’s overbearing and snide with impatience, but his escort has a saddled mount waiting.’
‘Well, the walk’s the lesser evil,’ Mykkael admitted, bald-faced. ‘Bloody war’s my proper venue. Crown orders aside, the drunks won’t stay their knives. How in the reaper’s hells can I keep the peace among the riff-raff if I’m called on to the proverbial royal carpet to act as a frisky maiden’s chaperone?’
The wry conclusion stayed unvoiced. Taskin, Commander of the Palace Guard, was no more likely to appreciate a garrison man with desert-bred colouring treading on his turf above the Highgate.
Commander Taskin, at that moment, bent his ice-pale gaze upon the tearful maid who had last seen Princess Anja in her chambers.
‘What more is left to say, my lord,’ she despaired, her pink hands clasped and shaking. ‘I’ve told you all I know.’
Tall, gaunt, erect as tempered steel, with a distinguished face and frosty hair, Taskin radiated competence. His silences could probe with unsubtle, scorching force. While the distraught maid stammered and wept, he stepped across the carpet and bent his dissecting regard over the clutter on Anja’s dressing table.
The gold-rimmed hand mirror, the brushes and combs and tinted bottles of scent glinted under the flutter of the candles. No rice powder had been spilled. The waxed parquet floor showed no scuffs or other evidence of struggle.
In a cultured, velvet baritone that inspired chills of dread, Commander Taskin prompted, ‘The princess was wearing bracelets adorned with golden bells. Her slippers, you say, had silver heels and toe caps. No rare jewels, none of the crown heirlooms, but she would have made noise at every movement. What else? Could she have masked a change of clothing under her court dress?’
The nervous maid curtseyed, though the commander’s back was turned. ‘Her Grace’s gown had bare shoulders and laces down the front. Nothing underneath, but her thinnest silk camisole. Canna brought her smallclothes from the cedar closet. She stayed to empty the bath and gather towels while I helped her Grace with her wardrobe.’
Taskin added nothing, hands clasped behind his waist.
The maid swallowed and dabbed at streaming eyes. ‘Her Grace sent me out to fetch the turquoise ribbons and a pin she said had been her lady mother’s. By the time I came back, she had already left. Gone to the banquet, so it seemed, since nobody heard even a whisper of disturbance. If she’s never been so thoughtless, well, new love would make her giddy. Her intended has the looks to scatter reason.’
The maid’s distress was genuine. Anja loved a joke, but her style would not stoop to indiscretions that embarrassed her blameless servants.
Taskin prowled the chamber, his booted step silent as a wraith’s. An uneasy pall of silence gripped the cream and copper opulence of the princess’s private apartment. Such stillness by itself framed a stark contradiction to her tireless spirit and exuberance.
Anja’s zest for life met the eye at every turn. The plush, tasselled chairs were left in compulsive disarray by her penchant for casual company. Gilt and marble tabletops held a riot of spring flowers, with long-stemmed hothouse lilies forced to share their porcelain vases with the weeds and wild brambles plucked from the alpine meadows. On the divan, a book of poetry had a torn string riding glove marking its vellum pages. Abandoned in the window nook, a seashell scavenged from the beaches of Devall overflowed with a jumble of pearl earrings and bangle bracelets. The playful force of Anja’s generosity clashed with the constraints of royal station: the seneschal’s latest scolding had been blatantly ignored. The massive chased tea service kept to honour state ambassadors had been shanghaied again, to cache the salvaged buttons for the rag man.
Even Taskin’s impassive manner showed concern as he subjected the princess’s intimate belongings to a second, devouring scrutiny.
‘My Lord Commander,’ the maid appealed, ‘if Princess Anja planned an escapade, I never heard a whisper. Her maid of honour, Shai, was the one who shared her confidence the few times she chose to flaunt propriety.’
‘But the Lady Shai knows nothing. I’ve already asked,’ a voice interjected from the hallway.
Taskin spun. His glance flicked past the startled maid, while the elite pair of guards flanking the entry bowed to acknowledge Crown Prince Kailen.
His Highness lounged in stylish elegance against the door jamb, still clad in satin sleeves and the glitter of his ruby velvet doublet. Fair as his sister, but with his sire’s blue eyes, he regarded the ruffled icon of palace security with consternation. ‘Don’t dare say I didn’t warn you, come the morning. Anja’s surely playing pranks. She’s probably laughing herself silly, this minute, enjoying all the fuss. Ignore her. Go to bed. She’ll show up that much sooner, apology in hand. Did you really think she’d wed even Devall’s heir apparent without any test of his affection?’
‘That would be her Grace’s touch, sure enough,’ a guardsman ventured. ‘Subtlety’s not her measure.’
And the smiles came and went, for the uproar that had followed when her Grace had exposed the pompous delegate from Gance as a hypocrite. On the night he fled the realm, flushed and fuming in disgrace, she had asked the pastry cook to serve up a live crow inside the traditional loaf of amity.
‘Furies, I remember!’ But Taskin did not relax, or share his guardsmen’s chuckles of appreciation. Instead, his tiger’s stalk took him back to the window, where he tracked the distanced voices of the searchers beating the hedges in the garden. They met with no success, to judge by the curses arisen over snagging thorns and holly. ‘No harm, if you’re right, Highness. We’d survive being played for fools.’ The commander inclined his head, meeting the crown prince’s insouciance with deliberation. ‘But if you’re wrong? Anja taken as a hostage could bring us to our knees, drain the treasury at best. At worst, we could find ourselves used as the bolt hole for some warring sorcerer’s minion.’
An uncomfortable truth, routinely obscured by Sessalie’s bucolic peace: the icy girdle of the mountains was the only barrier that kept the evil creatures from invading the far north.
‘May heaven’s fire defend us!’ the maid whispered, while the nearer guardsman made a sign to ward off evil.
If not for the peaks, with their ramparts of vertical rock, and the natural defences of killing storms and glaciers, tiny Sessalie would not have kept its stubborn independence. The hardy breed of crofters who upheld the royal treasury would never have enjoyed the lush alpine meadows, which fattened their tawny cattle every summer, or the neatly terraced fields, with their grape crops and barley brought to harvest through the toil of generations.
‘Show me the sorcerer who could march his army across the Great Divide.’ The crown prince dismissed their fears with his affable shrug. A drunk hazed on cloud wine might dream of such a prodigy; not a sober man standing on his intellect.
Even to Taskin’s exacting mind, the worry was farfetched. The flume that threaded that dreadful terrain was nothing if not a deathtrap. Foolish prospectors sometimes came, pursuing gold and minerals. They died to a man, slaughtered by hungry kerries, or else drowned in the rapids, their smashed bones spewed out amid the boil of dirty froth that thundered down the mouth of Hell’s Chasm. Skilled alpinists occasionally traversed