Chapter 2 - The Fire in the Blood
Clara screamed.
It wasn't the sound of a maid who had been struck with a whip; it was the sharp, tearing cry of someone whose soul was being unstitched from her bones.
The white-gold light didn't burn her flesh—it filled it. Every vein in her arms and neck stood out like cords of silver wire under her skin. Through her closed eyelids, she saw a world built of blinding light and jagged shadows, a world that moved faster than the beating of her heart.
Images.
A woman with hair the color of autumn bracken running through a thick, fog-shrouded pine forest, clutching something wrapped in blue silk against her chest. The sound of heavy horses behind them—the baying of hounds, the metallic clatter of steel on mail.
A stone chamber lit by a single tallow candle. A newborn baby crying in the dark, its tiny fist clutching a scrap of parchment stamped with the seven-pointed star of Aurel.
A high stone balcony overlooking a burning orchard. A man in silver armor—young, with Darian’s chin and Garrick’s cold mouth—kneeling before a woman who held a naked sword across her knees.
“Hide her until the crown calls her home.”
The voice didn't come from the room; it came from the stone floor beneath her feet, from the roof timbers above her head, from the very air she breathed. It was a voice that sounded like grinding millstones and the roar of a spring thaw.
Clara jerked her hand back as if she had touched a hot coal.
The white-gold fire vanished instantly, leaving the hall in a twilight gloom illuminated only by the grey drizzle filtering through the high octagonal lantern.
She staggered backward, her bare feet sliding on the cold mosaic, and would have hit the flagstones if a heavy, iron-plated arm hadn't caught her around the waist.
“Easy,” King Darian muttered. His breath smelled of old tobacco and cloves. He was holding her with a strength that belied his sixty-eight years. “Easy now. Look at me.”
Clara opened her eyes. The world was spinning—the red granite pillars seemed to tilt like drunken soldiers, and the faces of the nobles in the gallery were white blobs floating in the grey air.
“What... what was that?” she whispered, her lips feeling thick and numb.
“What did you see?” the king demanded, his grip tightening on her ribs until it hurt.
“A woman,” Clara gasped, pressing her palms against her temples where a drum seemed to be beating in triple time. “Running in the dark. A baby in blue silk. And... and a man with a sword.”
Lord Garrick had pushed his way through the circle of guards, his hand no longer resting on his hilt—he had drawn the short court sword three inches from its scabbard, the steel hissing against the leather lining.
“Lies,” Garrick spat, his face twitching with a fine, nervous tremor. “A common conjuring trick. The girl is a thief from the southern slums—everyone knows those border-folk are born with grease under their fingernails and smoke in their sleeves. Father Thomas has lost his wits to the palsy, and my brother—my brother has gone mad with grief for a line that died twenty years ago!”
Father Thomas didn’t look at Garrick. The old priest had sunk to his knees on the stone floor, his bony hands clutching the hem of Clara’s torn tunic. Tears were tracking through the grey stubble on his cheeks, carving clean channels through the dust of decades.
“Princess Helena,” the old man whispered into the folds of the rough linen.
The hall went so quiet that the dripping of the rain through the roof lantern sounded like pistol shots.
King Darian slowly released Clara’s waist. He turned his head toward the priest, his movements stiff and mechanical, like a clockwork figure whose grease had gone cold in the winter.
“What did you say, Thomas?”
The priest raised his head. His eyes were wide, milky with age, but they were fixed on Clara with a terrifying, absolute certainty.
“The night the northern keep burned,” Thomas said, his voice rising into a cracked treble that echoed off the vaulted roof, “when the rebel lords broke the southern gate and the king’s children were carried out into the snow... the nurse-maid swore the cradle was empty when they reached the river. But I was the one who blessed the child before the naming-day. I knew the mark between her shoulder blades—a small, silver crescent, shaped like the moon at the third quarter.”
Clara instinctively pulled her torn bodice tighter across her back, her breath catching in her throat.
“You lie,” Garrick snarled, taking three rapid steps toward the priest. His sword came all the way out of the scabbard now, the grey steel catching the dim light from the lantern. “The princess died in the burning stables with her mother. We found the bones—we buried them in the royal crypt beneath the chapel!”
“You found the bones of a peasant child from the village,” Thomas said, his voice dropping into a register of iron solemnity. “Swapped in the dark by a mother who knew that the uncle would kill the branch to save the root.”
Lord Garrick didn’t answer with words. He raised the short sword, his arm drawing back for a thrust that would have pinned the old priest to the flags.
Clang.
King Darian’s broadsword—the great, two-handed iron blade he hadn’t unbuckled since the peace of the three kingdoms—intercepted Garrick’s point with a shock that sent white sparks dancing across the granite.
“Brother,” Darian said, his voice level as a plumb-line. “Let him speak.”
“He is senile! He’s babbling of dead ghosts to save a kitchen-slut from the lash!” Garrick’s face had turned a mottled, bruised purple, the veins in his temples standing out like earthworms. “Look at her! Look at the dirt under her nails! Is this the blood of Aurel? Is this the star-born line that drove the wild men from the passes?”
The king didn't look at his brother. He looked down at Clara.
Up close, without the grease of the scullery and the dust of the hearth, her face had a strange, stark clarity. The high, stubborn bridge of the nose; the wide-set eyes that were the exact shade of grey as the northern ice before a thaw; the small, stubborn curve of the jaw that every portrait of Queen Isolde shared.
“Take off your tunic,” Darian said quietly.
Clara shrank back against the wooden pillar, her hands crossing defensively over her chest. “No.”
“Not all of it,” the king said, his tone softening—a sound no one in Aethelgard had heard since the queen died in childbed twenty-one years ago. “Just the left shoulder. Let me see what the priest saw.”
Clara hesitated. The eyes of every lord, lady, and guard in the hall were fixed upon her like the points of a hundred daggers. With fingers that felt like wood, she pulled the torn grey wool down past her left shoulder.
There, just below the hollow of the collarbone where the skin met the base of the neck, was a pale, silvery mark about the size of a thumb-nail. It wasn't a scar from a burn or a lash; it looked as though a drop of liquid moonlight had been pressed into the flesh and left there to dry.
King Darian reached out. His iron gauntlet was gone; he had slipped it off while the hall was in darkness. His bare hand—old, liver-spotted, scarred with the old cuts of the sword—trembled slightly as his fingertips brushed the mark.
A low, collective sigh went through the assembly.
“The crescent,” Darian whispered. He closed his eyes for a long moment, his throat working as if he were trying to swallow a stone. “The third quarter. Just as your mother had when I first met her in the gardens of High-Reach.”
“This is an imposture!” Garrick screamed. He lunged around the king’s flank, his sword pointed straight at Clara’s heart. “A conspiracy of priests and scullions! I will cleanse this house before the sun sets!”
The movement was too fast for the guards.
Hael shouted an oath, his hand clawing for his heavy broadsword, but he was ten paces away.
Clara didn't run. She couldn't. Her knees had turned to water. She simply closed her eyes and raised her hands to her face, waiting for the cold bite of the steel.
Wham.
The sound was like an axe hitting a side of beef.
Clara opened her eyes.
It wasn't her blood on the marble.
Lord Garrick had stopped dead three paces away. His mouth was open, a thin pink froth bubbling between his lips. His sword had dropped from his hand, clattering loudly against the flagstones.
Between his shoulder blades, the dark, iron-shod point of Captain Hael’s broadsword protruded four inches through the plum velvet of his doublet.
Garrick looked down with a stupid, puzzled expression at the point of the blade, his fingers twitching as if trying to grasp something that wasn't there. Then his knees buckled. He fell forward like a felled pine, his face striking the hard granite with a heavy, final thud.
The silence that followed was absolute.
Captain Hael wiped his blade slowly on the skirt of his leather jerkin, his face as expressionless as a milestone. He looked at the king.
“He drew steel against the royal blood, Majesty,” Hael said, his voice flat and steady. “That’s treason by the laws of the march.”
King Darian stood for a long time looking down at his brother’s body. The grey light from the lantern caught the silver stars embroidered on the dead man’s back, making them look like cold, indifferent dust.
“Take him to the vault,” the king said at last, his voice dropping into a hollow whisper that seemed to come from the bottom of an empty well. “And bring the crown.”
He turned to Clara. The old man looked smaller now—his shoulders rounded, his beard matted with grey, the heavy burden of twenty-one years of silence lifting off him only to reveal a landscape of absolute desolation.
He picked up the Crown of Aurel from the stone tripod. The star-iron was cold now, dark and heavy as ordinary metal.
He walked over to Clara, who was still kneeling by the post, her torn grey wool hanging from one shoulder.
Without a word, he placed the heavy circlet upon her chestnut hair.
May you like
The seven spires settled among the braids she had pinned with her apple-wood peg. For a second, nothing happened. Then, as the grey clouds outside parted to let a single shaft of autumn sunlight through the octagonal lantern, the seven diamonds on the spires flared into life—not with white-gold fire this time, but with the warm, steady amber of an old hearth fire on a winter night.
“Welcome home, daughter,” King Darian said.
