“Then she’s an enemy,” I broke in. Why were we even talking about her? She had to be either an idiot or as corrupt as Anure to marry the toad. Both possibilities made her no one I wanted anything to do with. “No one I want as an ally,” I clarified aloud.
“Reserve that opinion,” Ambrose replied with good cheer. “There’s more to her than you assume. Somehow she’s managed to avoid making it an official engagement—beyond the betrothal promise her father arranged—or marriage. She’s held Anure off for years. They call her the virgin queen.”
Sondra snorted. “In her mid-twenties with the famed pleasures of the Court of Flowers at the least crook of her finger? Not possible she’s a virgin.”
I didn’t know how Sondra could be so frank about such things. Just thinking about the things I’d seen … well, I couldn’t because it made me ill to call up those images. And my sister’s screams, how she called for help and no one answered.
A light flush graced her sharp cheekbones when she read my expression. “Apologies, Conrí, I—”
I held up a hand to stop her and she clamped her lips shut, glancing away, chagrined. She knew better than to bring up such things around me. I was honestly surprised she could bear to.
“The point,” Ambrose continued in a more sober vein, “is that Queen Euthalia has no official lovers to claim her loyalty, regardless of her actual virginal status. She maintains the appearance of keeping herself for Anure. She has no close companions, other than her ladies-in-waiting.”
“One of them could be her lover,” Sondra pointed out.
“But as you’ve noted, the Flower Court is far from prudish. If she loved one of her ladies, the tales would likely tell.”
“Or more than one,” Sondra replied. “I could repeat some stories about Calanthe that—”
She stopped when I cleared my throat, yet again.
Ambrose knew no such delicacy, pointing a finger at Sondra. “I know some good tales, too. Let’s exchange stories later when the company is less forbidding.”
I only wished I were that forbidding. Then they wouldn’t have gone down that precarious path in the first place.
Ambrose gave me a slight bow of apology, tapping the ledger again. “The old alchemist suspected that Euthalia is quite intelligent though she doesn’t always display it directly. He made something of a study of her. She apparently attracts luminaries of all sorts of arts and sciences to Calanthe, promising them sanctuary and her patronage. This confirms information I’ve gleaned from other sources, by the way.”
Ambrose’s “sources” could be what the moonlight told him, for all I knew.
“Friends of mine,” he clarified, reading my frown. “Human ones, who received invitations of this sort.”
“But not you?” This whole conversation irritated me. I was tired. And frustrated. This strange sensation that I knew this pampered queen and had forgotten something important didn’t help. It felt like trying to remember a name I knew well and had blanked on for no reason.
Ridiculous, as we’d obviously never met—we’d been children at the same time, in distantly separated realms. Though we’d shared similar stations in life back then, by the time we’d each passed our first decade, our life paths had dramatically diverged. Calanthe, the land of sniveling cowards, had turned up its belly at the emperor’s first frown. She’d never suffered a day in her life, in her court of pleasures and flowers. While Oriel had fought the noble fight and fallen.
Brutally unfair. Clever or silly, she deserved my hatred.
“I did indeed receive just such an invitation,” Ambrose said, somewhat loftily, and I reined in my gnashing thoughts to recall what question he answered. “A roundabout sort of missive, but quite clear and sincere. I, however, had other plans.” He finished that with a sniff and a pointed glare. “And you’re grateful for it, not only because you have me to guide you, but because of this.” That same tap on the ledger.
Feeling anything but grateful—and knowing Ambrose wouldn’t relinquish this bone until I’d considered every bit of what the wizard found so significant—I made a show of bending over the page. Then sighed, squinting at the crabbed writing, the words like bricks in a wall of text. A painting in the center of the page caught my eye as much easier to contemplate.
A blossom of extraordinary loveliness—a kind I’d never seen before—and attached to what appeared to be a ring. I’d never seen such a thing, not even made of jewels, and this looked to be an actual flower. The Abiding Ring, no doubt.
The usual aspect of the ring, the bit that went around the finger, was painted as a twining vine. I couldn’t tell if it was a clever design rendered in metal or a part of the flower. Surely it couldn’t be real, no matter what Ambrose claimed. And yet the artist had captured it so that it nearly moved on the page, shaded in with fiery oranges that bled into dusky indigo, like the final splash of a sunset—or the intense sky before the sun rose. I fancied that a delicately sweet fragrance rose from the page. Amazing to smell anything but sulfurous vurgsten. And ridiculous. A painting of a flower would have no scent, even if my ravaged sinuses allowed me to smell anything at all anymore.
Still, though I knew it to be an illustration—flat, and on paper—the flower evoked a loveliness beyond our world, the petals almost moving, as if in an unseen breeze. It seemed so real and alive that I had to touch it, pulling back at the last moment at the sight of my callused finger, the nail twisted and forever growing broken from when I hit it with a pick long ago.
When I was a boy, I’d imagined Calanthe as a magical fairyland. This flower ring spoke to that part of me I’d thought crushed and lost forever.
I wiped at the moisture coming from my nose. Bright blood left a smeared streak on my hand. Great. I dug a cloth from inside my leather cloak. “Fucking nosebleed.”
Both Sondra and Ambrose gazed at me, concern on her face and avid interest on his.
“I’m fine,” I said, waving at them to ignore me.
It happened sometimes—to all of us—and though I understood that the mines had done that to me, too, along with my damaged throat and stiff lungs, it still felt like a weakness. Hard to look stern with a bloody rag clamped to my nose. This one probably came of being in the humid sea air, breathing all the vurgsten from the detonations, not to mention exhaustion and bending over the table in this dusty, stale tower room, packed with such an array of potions. Plenty of good reasons to have a nosebleed now, however inconvenient.
No reason for Ambrose to be looking so pleased. I gave him a quelling glare and stabbed a finger at the illustration. “Why am I looking at a picture of the Abiding Ring, now?”
Fascination sharpened the deep green of Ambrose’s eyes with brighter glints. “This is an excellent sign,” he commented.
“What is?” I snapped. “It’s a fucking nosebleed, not a portent.”
“Ah-ah. You’re trespassing on my expertise, Conrí. Observe.” Ambrose lifted the ledger and took it to his raven, lifting it as if for inspection. The great bird cocked his head, feathers gleaming black as the obsidian stones of Vurgmun, and focused one orange eye on the illustration of the flower. He arched his wings in interest, lowering his beak nearly to touching and making a series of soft caws.