The Queen Who Married Her Enemy’s Ghost

Before dawn, Elianor's supposedly dead enemy would ask her for a divorce. For now, the flour column was wrong by eighteen sacks, and she could not go to bed while those sacks remained capable of being either bread or theft.

She put her finger beneath the river wharf total. The candle had burned low enough to soften its own base; wax crept toward the requisition, stopped by the knife she had laid across the paper. Outside, thaw water dripped from the battlements. Every few moments the wind pressed damp air through the shutters and made the flame lean toward her sleeve.

The queen of Aster, thirty-two years old and confirmed that week, ought to have possessed a clerk in the first hours of Frostwane 1. She possessed three. One had fever, one had gone home to a wife in labor, and the third believed a total became correct if written beautifully enough.

Elianor crossed out his beautiful total.

There were eighty-six sacks awaiting dispatch, not a hundred and four. The eastern wards could receive their full allotment only if the palace kitchens surrendered the morning's white flour. She wrote the order, then added that bran loaves would be served at the assembly breakfast. The councillors could discuss scarcity while chewing it.

Her left hand cramped. She rubbed the knuckle beneath the iron rehearsal ring. Pell's ceremonial assistant had fitted it yesterday with soap and considerable enthusiasm; now the metal seemed tighter. She had been told to wear it until the procession so that the final band could be sized without another fitting. Royal dignity apparently required sleeping in a sample.

She sanded the order and set it beside the morning dispatch case. Before she could turn the key, a man's reflection appeared in the black window.

He stood behind her chair.

Elianor seized the paper knife, rose, and drove its point toward the gap below his ribs. Her chair struck the table. The blade met no resistance. Her fist passed through a dark military coat and emerged cold on the other side.

She stepped back until stone stopped her shoulder.

Soren of Merrow looked down at the place she had stabbed.

“That would have been inconvenient,” he said.

She knew his face from a parley three months earlier: the narrow scar through one eyebrow, the long nose reddened then by outdoor work, the mouth that had found her proposed water tariff amusing. At thirty-four he had already commanded the men who burned two of her river depots. Twelve days ago he had reportedly died at Red Ford.

Tonight his coat was buttoned unevenly. Mud marked its hem. A dark puncture lay above his heart, small enough that she might have mistaken it for a missing stitch.

“Move away from the door,” she said.

He glanced behind him. “I'm trying to work out whether I came through it.”

“Try somewhere else.”

He moved three steps toward the hearth. She watched his boots. They neither displaced the hearth ash nor squeaked on the boards. The fire showed faintly through his right leg.

Elianor pulled the bell cord beside the bed. Once for the outer guard; twice for the captain. She kept the knife raised, despite having just demonstrated its usefulness.

“You can put that down,” he said.

“You can cease giving orders in my bedroom.”

He looked at the bed, its untouched linen turned down by a servant, and then at her. Something embarrassed crossed his face. He moved farther toward the chimney.

“I didn't choose the room.”

Her ring burned with cold. She tucked the hand beneath her opposite arm, unwilling to give him another observation. His gaze followed the movement anyway.

“Where did you get that?”

The door opened. Captain Maud Rusk entered with a lamp and a drawn short sword; the guard behind her carried no weapon beyond his staff, but had brought a second lamp. Maud's gray hair was loose at the temples. She had plainly been asleep.

“Who?” she asked.

Elianor pointed with the knife. “Beside the hearth.”

Maud turned. The lamp illuminated the brick, the coal scuttle, and Soren standing between them.

“What am I looking for?”

Elianor's estimate of the situation changed. Poison, exhaustion, some trick of the glass: all returned as possibilities. She had slept four hours the previous night and fewer the night before. She had eaten half a boiled egg for supper.

“A man,” she said. “In a Merrow officer's coat.”

Maud held the lamp higher. “No man here.”

“Captain Rusk,” Soren said, “I remember your cavalry at West Reach. Your horse bit my adjutant.”

Maud did not turn toward the voice.

Elianor lowered the knife by an inch. “Did you hear anything?”

“You. The shutter. Someone running downstairs.”

“There is frost on your lamp,” Elianor said.

Maud looked at its iron cage. A white crust had formed on the side nearest Soren. She shifted the lamp away; the crust began to bead.

“Harl, stay at the threshold. Nobody enters.”

The guard obeyed. Maud advanced toward the hearth, sweeping her sword slowly through the place Elianor had indicated. Soren stood still as the blade traversed his chest.

“It doesn't improve with repetition,” he observed.

Elianor almost laughed. The impulse frightened her more than his appearance.

Maud crouched over the hearth tiles. “Cold here. The fire's drawing properly.” She held her free hand near Soren's knee. “Colder than the window.”

“I can see him,” Elianor said. “And hear him. You cannot. We will record both.”

“Have you drunk from the decanter?”

“No.”

Maud lifted it by the neck and passed it to Harl. “Keep this. Nobody tastes it. I'll have the physician look at you.”

“In the morning.”

“Now would be a better morning.”

“Then ask her to come. But you stay.”

The captain studied her face and nodded.

Soren had lowered his head. His left hand rested over the puncture in his coat, though Elianor could not tell whether he could feel himself.

“You asked about the ring,” she said.

Maud looked from her to the empty hearth.

“Let me write,” the captain said. She took the chair Elianor had overturned, set it upright, and found the blank reverse of a rejected requisition. “Tell him to wait until I have ink.”

“He can hear you.”

“Good. He can wait.”

Soren's mouth twitched. Elianor resented sharing even that small amusement with him.

She held her hand toward the candle. The ring was plain iron, flattened along one edge so that the final setting could be measured. On its underside, near the join, a pale scrape interrupted the black finish. Two broken strokes remained inside it, the edges of a maker's stamp someone had filed almost away.

“It was fitted yesterday,” she said. “For coronation rehearsal.”

“Take it off.”

“Explain why.”

“Because the last thing I remember clearly is your chancellor putting a needle into my chest. Now I am here, and that ring is the only object in the room I can feel.”

Maud's pen stopped when Elianor repeated the accusation.

“You saw Pell?” the captain asked.

“He says he did.”

“I did,” Soren said sharply.

“You are giving testimony,” Elianor told him. “You aren't supplying a verdict.”

He watched her for a moment, then looked away. She had seen him make men wait in rain rather than admit a map was wrong. She expected a dispute. Instead he said, “Write the time. Before dusk, on the day the causeway fell.”

She relayed it. Maud wrote.

Elianor tried to turn the ring with her thumb. It shifted a fraction, scraping chilled skin, then stopped. Beneath its rim her finger had gone pale.

“Soap,” Maud said.

“No,” Soren said.

Both women looked toward him, although only one could see him.

He seemed surprised by his own interruption. “I don't know what happens if it comes off. I said that badly. Don't force it until we know.”

Elianor withdrew her hand. The admission made his account more troubling. A fabricated ghost might have supplied tidier instructions.

Maud rose and fetched Elianor's wool shawl from the bed. “Sit. Your finger can be examined with the rest of you.”

Elianor wrapped the shawl around her shoulders but remained standing. “Why come to me?”

“I woke beside you. I have tried leaving.”

“When?”

“While you were counting flour. I reached the stair landing. Then everything thinned. I came back because I prefer a room to whatever was outside it.”

“Why didn't you speak?”

“I thought, for a minute, that you might be dead too.”

She looked at the requisitions. “A reasonable conclusion.”

His expression changed, almost warm, and she found herself noticing the familiar crease beside his mouth. At the parley he had leaned over her survey drawings with ink on his cuff. She had disliked the intimacy of their shared attention then. She disliked remembering it now.

“I am alive,” she said. “I have work in the morning. Tell me what you want.”

Soren straightened. “Divorce me before I become your king.”

Maud's pen scratched so hard that its nib caught.

“Those are his exact words,” Elianor said.

“I was afraid they might be.”

Elianor placed the knife on the table. “I have never married you.”

“I have never married you either.”

“Then we agree on one subject.”

“The ring disagrees.”

“The ring has no standing in court.” She pulled a fresh sheet toward her. “This morning's procession is postponed until the physician examines me and we inspect wherever that cold is coming from.”

Maud frowned. “The councillors are already in the city.”

“Their grain meeting can proceed at noon. They don't require a procession to count sacks.”

She wrote a short order, gave the reason as an irregularity in ceremonial equipment, and signed. Delay would invite the uncle's remaining allies to speak of weakness. A public collapse would give them better material.

Maud sanded the order. “I'll send this with Harl when his relief comes.”

Below them a bell struck.

It was a small sound, deeper than the household bells, followed by a long uneven tremor. Soren looked toward the floor. Frost gathered briefly along the table's silver inlay.

Maud put down the pen.

“Which bell?” Elianor asked.

“Lower chapel.”

“Who has the key?”

“The sexton. But there's no rope. We took it down last winter when the bracket cracked.”

The second stroke reached them through the boards.

Elianor folded her signed order and pressed it into Maud's hand. “Then we begin downstairs.”