The Tears of the Rose Read online

  Ursula gave me a wry look over her shoulder. “She’s uncannily like our mother now.”

  “I wouldn’t remember.” Hard to recall much about a woman who died giving birth to you.

  “I do.” Ursula spoke softly to the flames. “And Andi has that about her now. Something witchy. I saw her do things . . .” She shook it off. “Hugh thought he was lying when he told her you were with child. She didn’t want to come with us and he believed that she would do that for you.”

  I scoffed at that, but she ignored me.

  “Then, after he . . . Afterwards, I told her it had been a lie and she got that look in her eye—you remember how she sometimes did? Like when we argued with Father that Hugh was for you and not for me. And she said, ‘Pairing either of them with anyone else would be an exercise in futility. This is how it will be.’ ”

  I remembered it word for word, just as Ursula did. Andi had always hung in the background, preferring to be invisible, but she’d stood before our father—who’d been so, so angry that my cursed face had distracted the match he’d planned for his heir—and told him what he wanted was futile. Nobody told High King Uorsin what he wanted was futile.

  He’d been so angry with her.

  He’d recognized her disloyalty to the kingdom and the family long before anyone else. Maybe he’d recognized her murderous heart when I had not.

  “She was that way, only more so,” Ursula continued, as if I’d replied. “More confident. She said your daughter would bear the mark and—”

  “Whatever that means.”

  “Whatever that means,” Ursula agreed, “and that you should send the girl to her. That your daughter will need what she can teach her.”

  “Is she out of her mind?” Ursula didn’t answer me, so I scrabbled off the high bed in a tangle of skirts and grabbed her by the arm. Her metal-embedded leather sleeve was still icy wet from the gale outside. “Why in Glorianna’s name would I trust Hugh’s child with his murderer?”

  “I’m only passing along the message, Amelia.” Her remote calm made me want to grind my teeth, as it always did. Princess Ursula the Heartless, they called her. No man would ever have her because she loved her sword the most.

  “Then tell me the third thing and go.”

  “She said to find the doll our mother left you.”

  “Doll? What doll?” I shook her arm. The whole thing enraged me. Why would she taunt me in my grief with all this nonsense?

  Ursula looked down at me and gently peeled my clenched fingers off her arm. “I don’t know, Ami. She gave me the same message. Remember that horrible little hair doll Andi always kept, on the high shelf in her room?”

  “No.” I spat it out, as I wished I could spit out all this rage. But I did remember. She’d let me play with anything of hers but that. It was ugly anyway.

  “She took it with her, I guess.”

  That surprised me. Andi had fled Ordnung disguised as one of my maids right after the Tala attacked. She’d been crazy acting, screaming about dogs howling. I didn’t think she’d taken much. She’d been so heartbroken, so afraid our father would kill her mare. She loved that horse. More than she loved me. If she’d ever loved me. I hardened my heart against the sympathy. I should be more like Ursula. Funny, since now I’d be a widow—my bed as cold as my spinster sister’s. So ironic.

  “So?”

  Ursula sighed, the hard smell of her impatience hitting me. She’d delivered her messages, done the requisite comforting, and was ready to be on her way.

  “So, just that. Andi thinks our mother made each of us a doll and that we need them. She said to find yours.”

  “Hard for a dead woman to make a doll.”

  “I said the same thing, but I had a lot of time to think on the journey here.” Ursula turned her head and pinned me with a pointed look. “I remember now—her making it while she was pregnant with you. She spent months on it. Singing and talking to you. I’m sure it’s a sorrow to you that you never knew her, and maybe I should have told you this before, but she loved you and talked to you all the time. Maybe some part of you knows that, deep inside.”

  “I don’t know that.” It hit me then, unexpectedly hard, and I sank to my knees, not feeling the warmth of the fire. I was all alone now, with no one to love me. Not my mother, not Hugh, not even Andi. The pain of them all mixed together and a high keening sound rose from my throat. The people of Avonlidgh might not cry out at the ravages of death, but I was a child of Mohraya, a daughter of Glorianna, and we do wail out our grief.

  “Amelia . . .” Ursula put her hand on my shoulder.

  “Just go. Leave me alone for a while.” I sounded like I was begging her. In fact, I was. I couldn’t bear for anyone to see me this way. So lost and broken. “Dulcinor can show you your rooms.”

  Another person might have argued. Andi likely would have, as much as she hated my hysterics, but Ursula always respected someone’s desire to be alone. Without another word, she left, softly pulling the door to behind her.

  I sat on the floor in front of the fire, my dry eyes baking while soothing tears remained in some distant, cutoff place. Alone.

  2

  We buried Hugh the next day.

  In keeping with their silence in the face of loss, the people of Avonlidgh hold neither wakes nor elaborate services for the dead. How brilliant Hugh, so full of life and laughter, had come from these grave people, I didn’t know. He had been the sunlight streaming through a break in the storm clouds. Now there was only gray.

  The rock carvers had been working since we’d heard the news, and they had Hugh’s final resting place ready. He would be entombed with the rest of his line, the royal stone sarcophagi each in their niches, then sealed in. Though Erich’s seat was at Castle Avonlidgh, a much more central location, on the Danu River, Windroven was the ancestral home of their family. This rocky, desolate shore was where they were born, if it could be arranged, and where their bodies were laid to rest, Glorianna willing.

  Ursula and Old Erich flanked me, slightly behind, as if I might turn and run, a child bolting from punishment. I fixed my eyes on Kir, High Priest of Glorianna, who’d traveled from Ordnung when the news spread, for the express purpose of laying the hope of Avonlidgh to eternal darkness. The only one not in gray, he wore Glorianna’s vivid pink, a color undimmed by grief or death.

  I found myself clutching my golden pendant, Glorianna’s rose, for . . . something. I couldn’t call it comfort, for there was none to be had.

  All too soon, Kir finished with his benedictions and they covered Hugh’s body in the open sarcophagus with a blanket of pink roses woven by the chapel priests from their carefully tended hothouse. Glorianna is eternal, thus Her roses bloom year-round. It’s Her gift to us, that nothing truly dies, but lives on.

  The pendant bit into my palm as I prayed fiercely for it to be true. But Glorianna did not answer.

  “Princess Amelia?”

  Oh. They all waited on me. I took a step and faltered. Ursula put a hand under my elbow, but I yanked it away. I didn’t need her support. I needed only one person and he was forever torn from me. Feeling the cold damp of the caves in my bones, I moved like a corpse myself, to gaze down on Hugh’s waxy, bloodless face.

  Though his skin was dull, devoid of life, his golden hair flopped over his brow, as it always had, gold spun into silk. Someone had washed it. But they hadn’t fixed it right. Of its own accord, my hand reached out to tidy it, the way I’d done so many times. Always he would turn his head and kiss the palm of my hand and say, You might as well not bother. My wife is the most beautiful woman in the Twelve Kingdoms. No one will notice how I look ever again.

  Part of me waited for it, for him to complete our little ritual.

  But he was gone.

  Someone muffled a cough—one of those winter lung diseases, wracking and wet—though the rest of the assembly held their silence. With a sigh, I reached up and unclasped the necklace my father had given me for my fifteenth birthday, Glorianna’s
rose worked in precious gold dangling from the chain with sparkling light, even in the gloom. I tucked it in Hugh’s clasped hands. His fingers felt like stone already.

  “Glorianna’s love go with you, as mine always will,” I whispered.

  High Priest Kir led me out of the niche, patting my hand on his arm. The assistant priest, in mourning gray over a white monk’s robe, a deep cowl covering his head, closed the sarcophagus and returned to his master’s side. His eyes flashed from the shadows of his hood and I got the searing impression of their unnatural green color, like apples in the early spring. Scar tissue distorted the shape of his face and I understood why he wore the cowl.

  My fingers spasmed, crumpling the fine velvet of Kir’s sleeve. He didn’t protest, but he smoothed my hand, then whispered that we need not watch the stonemasons close the tomb.

  I shook my head, pressing my lips together. I would stay. Stay until they had sealed Hugh forever away from the light.

  High Priest Kir and his assistant withdrew with deep bows and murmured prayers, drawing Glorianna’s eternal circles in the air. Behind me, people left as quietly as they could, the whispers of their clothing marking their passage. There was some bit of fuss in helping Old Erich into the chair they’d carried him in. His aged joints couldn’t navigate the narrow and uneven cliffside path.

  Silence settled, broken only by the splat and scrape of the stonemasons building their wall. Someone still breathed behind me and I looked to see Ursula, standing military straight and somber, at my right hand.

  “You can go,” I told her.

  “I’m staying with you.” She said it in that tone, the one that meant I’d never argue her out of it.

  And though I thought I hadn’t needed her, a rush of gratitude filled me to have her there as witness. Then, one day, if I needed to ask her if we’d really buried him, she could tell me and I’d be able to tell what was true.

  I tried not to think about how Andi should be there, on my other side. Never did I imagine we three wouldn’t always be together.

  Much less that Andi would murder my one true love.

  I worried at that, a tongue returning again and again to a sore tooth, unable to help myself, despite the sick, spiking pain each time I touched it. I pictured her face, those stormy eyes burning out of the wild mess of her rusty black hair. In my mind, she plunged her dagger into Hugh’s breast. There, the pain. I played the scene again, Andi’s sweetly mysterious smile twisting into an evil grimace of delight. Oh, the pain. I clung to it, reveling in it, needing it.

  The stonemasons had finished. They gathered up their tools and bowed their way out, leaving us alone in the tomb, with only the gusting wind whistling through the alcoves, worming its way through the cracks.

  Ursula never stirred. If I stayed here all night, she would stay with me. With her fit warrior’s body, she would long outlast me.

  With a last prayer, I made myself move. Ursula followed me, giving me space and the courtesy of her quiet, something I’d never before appreciated. The wind hit me like a closed fist when I stepped out of the tombs, taking me by surprise, and my gray-kid-slippered foot slid on the ice that formed on the rocks. My stomach flew and the precipice loomed beneath me, white, foaming waves churning below.

  Ursula, fast as a striking snake, grabbed me and steadied me. “Watch that step, Ami.”

  I stared down at the waves. “You should have let me go. It would be fitting.”

  She pushed me against the rock wall, the stones biting into my back, and gripped my shoulders, steely eyes sharp as a blade. “Never. I will never let you go. Neither will Andi.”

  Andi’s face, gleaming with unholy joy as she plunged in the knife.

  “Andi wouldn’t care.”

  “She does.” Ursula’s fingers dug into my shoulders like talons. “I don’t care if you believe it or not. But she made me promise to see that you survive this blow. If not for us, if not for yourself, then live for the child you carry.”

  “I’m still not sure that—”

  “I don’t care if you’re convinced. I am certain enough for both of us. Now, can I trust you to walk up this Danu-cursed trail on your own, or do I have to truss and carry you?”

  “You shouldn’t swear by Danu.”

  “You’re not in a position to be giving me advice. Choose.”

  I sagged, deeply chilled and ever so tired. Only her strength held me up. “I’ll go. Suicide is against Glorianna’s plan.”

  “At least we have that.” Ursula’s tone held a hint of her usual dry wit, but she sounded tired, too. I hadn’t asked her how the last months had been for her, chasing Rayfe’s demonic armies through the Twelve Kingdoms, taking our father’s and Avonlidgh’s troops after the Tala, only to fail in the end.

  Drained, feeling as empty as Hugh’s corpse, I still didn’t ask.

  That night I lay alone in our huge bed, the fire casting lurid shadows against the looping lace above me. It seemed the satin rosettes, cunningly formed to echo Glorianna’s roses, mocked me with their loveliness. Outside the wind howled in the turrets. A full gale had hit just after Hugh’s burial, sealing us inside Windroven as surely as the castle’s dead were entombed below.

  I curled on my side under the extra blankets my ladies had piled on. Surely I’d never be warm again. They’d covered the glazed windows with tapestries to keep out the chill, but the wind is clever. It snuck through, as it had snaked through the tombs. It seized me that Hugh would be cold down there, all alone.

  Here I lay in our bed, while he had only the freezing comfort of stone and rotting roses. It gnawed at me. My fingers curled with the gut-wrenching need to tear the stones apart, to unbury him from the crushing weight of the tomb. He should be here with me, cuddling against my back.

  The tapestry rippled, the wind clawing at it.

  In a flurry, I hurtled out of the covers, pulling on my heavy velvet robe. It wasn’t mourning gray, but Hugh wouldn’t care. I burst into the anteroom, looking about for my boots. Ursula sat in a chair by the fire, a wine goblet dangling from her hand. She’d been staring at the flames, deep in some memory, but her keen gaze found me.

  “Where are you going, Ami?” She spoke gently, as she had when Andi had been so afraid, when the Tala first found her.

  I wrapped my arms around myself. “Where are my ladies?”

  “Asleep. As you should be.”

  “Why aren’t you?”

  She grimaced. “Can’t. So I volunteered to sit with you.” “I’m not a baby who needs to be sat with.”

  “You’re grieving, Amelia. People go out of their heads with it. There’s no shame in needing people around you.”

  “What do you understand about it?” As if summoned by her words, the grief rose and caught me around the throat, choking my voice away.

  “Enough that I’m not letting you go anywhere near those cliffs.”

  “That’s not where I was going . . .”

  She only gazed at me, eyes dark with sympathy, the salt scent of it soft on the air. I couldn’t say that I meant only to visit him, to keep him company. The wind howled, mocking me.

  “I’m going back to bed.”

  “Or you can sit with me by the fire. Have some wine and talk.”

  She and Andi used to do that—sit up late after feasts and have long, wide-ranging conversations. First I was too young to stay up with them; then . . . Then what? I’d had better things to do, I’d thought. I starred in my own sonnet by the time I was twelve. After that it seemed there had always been some entertainment, some far more exciting thing to do. The court social life at Ordnung had circled around me and I’d loved it. So odd that I was the one left out now.

  What would we talk about? I nearly asked her.

  Instead I mutely shook my head and returned to my cold bed.

  The sick hit me before I fully awoke. I managed to roll to my side, to at least spew on the floor, but only dry heaves racked me. When had I last eaten? I wasn’t even sure if it had been last night that
I’d talked to Ursula by the fire. It might have been a dream.

  Hearing me, my ladies rushed in, all dressed for the day, flowers looking toward spring. No extended mourning. The people of Avonlidgh give death its nod and move on. There’s always more work to be done.

  Lady Dulcinor clucked in sympathy, tucking the pillows behind me and setting an empty washbasin on my lap. “Oh, Princess! So terrible how wan you are. It’s a tragedy for you to be widowed so very young. And poor Hugh! Cut down in his prime. They’re already writing the songs, I hear, of your tragic, young love.”

  She babbled on. I nearly hurled the washbasin at her. Would have, but the surging queasiness hinted I might need it yet. Suddenly I understood why Andi had called her empty-headed.

  One of the other ladies set coddled eggs, pickled fish, and some of my favorite jasmine tea on a lap tray. The scent curled into my gut, wrenching it in its sickly-sweet fragrance, and I gagged into the basin, coughing up bitter bile.

  “Take that away,” Ursula ordered from the doorway. “Isn’t there a midwife around here?”

  They gaped at her. No flower, she. Instead she wore her fighting leathers, a tall and lean woman, a hawk among doves. She looked haggard and I wondered if she’d slept at all.

  “But Princess Amelia isn’t—” one of the younger ladies ventured.

  “This is nonsense,” she snapped at them, making scooting motions with her hands. “The lot of you are useless. Go find a midwife or at least a castle woman who’s had the morning sicks. Someone who knows how to deal with this. Surely someone knows. Danu knows I don’t.”

  “Get Dafne—the librarian.” I rolled my head on the pillow, damp with cold sweat.

  Ursula raised an eyebrow. “You think she’ll know?”

  “Really, Princess Ursula,” Dulcinor fluttered at her, “Lady Mailloux has no real royal status. She’s not fit for Princess Amelia’s—”