The despair in her voice pierces my heart, and I kneel beside her. “Your Grace, you have been left with very few choices, and none of them good. I am sure your people understand you are doing the best you can.”
“But will it be good enough?” she whispers.
And as I stare at her, this young girl whose father left her with an unstable kingdom, an empty treasury, and a surfeit of suitors, none of whom cared one fig for her beyond the riches she could bring to their coffers, I become angry. Just as I am angry on Matelaine’s behalf, I am suddenly furious for this girl—for that is all she is, a thirteen-year-old girl—whose guardians have abandoned her in pursuit of their own ambitions. “Your Grace, it is not you who have failed, but your father.” The moment the words are out of my mouth, I regret them, for surely I am taking an egregious liberty.
But then she looks up at me with a faint glimmer of . . . hope? Relief? I do not know her well enough to understand what she is feeling. She stops stitching and closes her eyes for a moment. At first, I think she is struggling not to cry. But when she opens them again, I see that she is angry, furious, in fact, and struggling to rein it in. When she speaks, her voice is so soft I must lean in close to catch the words. “There are times when I am alone in my bed at night and cannot sleep for the fear and worry trying to claw their way out of my belly. On those nights I am so angry with my father.” She whispers, as if even now that he is dead, he might somehow hear her.
And suddenly, she is no longer my duchess or sovereign, but a young wounded thing, like those who arrive at the convent every year, and it is that girl that I try to speak to. “As you should be, Your Grace. We are given no choices in life—we must rely on our fathers or guardians to make them for us. And when they choose poorly or make weak decisions, they risk destroying our entire lives with their folly. How can we not be angry?” By the time I finish talking, I am no longer certain whom I am talking about: the duchess or myself.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
ONCE I HAVE BEEN DISMISSED, I return to my chambers. My conversation with the duchess has stirred up all my simmering anger and frustration, like muck at the bottom of a pond. Alone in the room, my breath comes fast, my fists clenching at my sides. Between Crunard’s insinuations and my own confrontations with the abbess, I am drawing close—so close—to finally understanding what is at the heart of the abbess’s plots and intrigues. Crunard knows more than he is telling. I do not know if this is some strange game being played between him and the abbess or if he knows even more about the convent than she does.
Of course, the simplest answer is the most painful one, that she is lying—has been lying—to me since the beginning.
Frustration bubbles up from deep inside, so hot and urgent I fear I will scream. Instead, I stride over to the clothes chest, lift the lid, and root through my meager belongings there. When my hand closes around the satin-smooth finish of lacquered wood, I pull the black box from the depths of the chest and carry it over to the window. Even in the bright light of the afternoon sun, I can find no seam, no joint, nothing to indicate how it can be opened. Other than by breaking it.
I take the box over to fireplace, place it on the hard stone hearth, and grab an iron poker from where it leans against the wall. I raise it up over my shoulder, then bring it down against the smooth unmarred surface.
It sinks in with a splintering crack. I place my foot on the box to hold it steady, then pull the poker back up and strike again. And again and again, until I am certain the noise will bring someone running. I toss the poker to the floor, then pick up the box and begin yanking the splintered wood away from the hole that I have made.
When there is an opening big enough, I shove my hand inside, ignoring the sting of splinters biting into my flesh. My fingers search, but I feel no parchment or vellum, only a slim rod of some sort. Slowly, I maneuver the thing around until I can extract it from the hole I have made.
It is long and thin, with a piece of chipped stone at one end. An arrow shaft, I realize, with some ancient arrowhead still attached. Not answers, then, but some musty relic. With a growl of frustration, I hurl the arrow onto the bed, then slam the box onto the floor, relishing the cracking sound it makes. It is all I can do to resist grinding the wretched thing under my heel until it is naught but sawdust and ash.
Instead, I take a deep breath and force myself to a state of calm. The abbess refused to see me this afternoon, but she cannot put me off forever. I do not care with whom she is sequestered or what duties she is performing, I will force a meeting with her and find out what rotten core is at the heart of the twisted web she weaves. I am so close to knowing. It is as if I can put my hand out and feel the shape and contours of the lies, but I am unable to discern the whole of it.
I will meet with the abbess tomorrow, and this time, I will not be put off.
I am not able to get in to see her until the afternoon. It is late, and most people have retired to make ready for dinner, but not the abbess. She is still at work in her office. I rap once on the door. “Come in,” she calls out. Her invitation to enter surprises me—I had expected some resistance—but I step into her office, then shut the door firmly behind me.
At the loud click, she looks up, scowling when she sees it is me. “I did not send for you.”
“You also told me to kill Crunard, and I did not, so clearly my desire to follow your every order has waned somewhat.”
“You are making a grave mistake. Do you think I favor you so much that I will not punish you?”
“Do you honestly think that I care any longer? My need for answers—for the truth—has grown far greater than my need to please you. Now tell me,” I demand, “what lies between Crunard and yourself. Tell me why you have not sent me out until now. Tell me why you ordered him killed when he bears no marque at all.”
“You can see marques?” She studies me closely and I consider demanding to know what she put in the Tears that caused me to go blind. Except I am not certain enough that she is behind it to risk sharing that information with her. It would be too easy for her to use it against me.
“No. I cannot. But Ismae can, and once Crunard was here in Rennes, I had her look for me. What happened to Matelaine? Why was she gone so long if she was only to kill Crunard?”
Her mouth pinches in annoyance, but she answers me all the same. “It was a complex assignment. Everyone in Guérande was on edge, and the man was in prison. It took her a while to get into position to make her move.”
“You never saw a vision for her to kill Crunard, did you? She hesitated because she couldn’t see a marque on him either, and yet you ordered her to remain there.”
The abbess’s nostrils flare. At first I think it is in irritation, but then I see how wide her pupils are, how rapidly the pulse in her neck is beating, and I realize it is fear. I take a step toward her. “Why are you so afraid of him?”
She turns and carefully folds the letter she’s been reading. “I am not afraid of him; he has just become a liability to the convent. He has betrayed his country and shamed us by association. I truly believed him to be marqued.”
“Believed? You told me Sister Vereda had Seen it, but if so, Ismae would have seen a marque.”
She whips her gaze up from the letter and narrows her eyes. “And I told you that Vereda was too old, too enfeebled, to be relied on for such things any longer. Do not throw her vision in my face when you are the one who has defied my order to replace her.”
“How can you take His will into your own hands like that? What gives you the right to break the rules that lies at the heart of our service to Him?”
She does not answer, and as she sits there, saying nothing, my frustration continues to simmer until it boils over. “Tell me precisely what is going on and why I should not report it to the others. Then, once you have told me that, you will explain why you sent Matelaine out instead of me.”
“You have been chosen to be the next seer—”
“No! You have chosen me to be the next seeress—not Mortain, not Vereda, you. And for no reason that anyone could determine. There are plenty of other virgin novitiates or nuns beyond childbearing years who could easily, perhaps even happily, step into that role. Sister Claude would welcome an opportunity to come in from the rookery.”
The abbess gives a snort of derision. “You would put such weighty decisions in the hands of a tired old woman who reeks of bird droppings?”
“No,” I say quietly. “I would put them in the hands of Mortain, where they belong.” But it is too late. I understand now why she so desperately wants me to fill this role. “You want me to be seeress because you think you can control me. You think you will only have to make a suggestion here or nudge me a bit there to have me ‘Seeing’ precisely what you want me to.” After all, not only have I had exceptional training in the assassin’s arts, but in blind obedience and biddability as well. The thought of how much of my own will I have handed over to her and the Dragonette throughout the years causes a hot, painful wave of mortification to course through me.
“How can you threaten me?” The abbess rises to her feet, fists clenched. “I, who have spent my entire life at the convent protecting you, shielding you, saving you from that wretched woman?”
“The Dragonette?” I snort. “You did not shield me, or even save me—you were simply there once in a while to offer me comfort.”
She stands as still as any statue as my words echo in the silence between us. Then she turns, as if she cannot bear to look upon me a second longer, but not before I see the pain that twists her mouth. “You do not wish to know the answers to your questions, not really.”
“Oh, but I do. That is why I have left the convent and ridden one hundred and twenty leagues across the country. I have come in search of answers as well as my destiny.”
“Your destiny? You think to find your destiny here? You will find nothing, nothing but heartache and things you do not want to know.” She turns around then, her hands clasped before her and anguish in her eyes. “Annith, I beg you, leave off these questions. Return to the convent and assume the duties of seeress, and you will have a destiny to be proud of, one that few can claim as their own.”
“What you do not seem able to grasp is that I will not return to the convent—not if I am forced to be seeress.”
She draws herself up, and, to my surprise, her lips curl in a half smile. “You will change your mind when you hear the truth, for any sin that falls upon my head will also fall upon yours.”
“Why? I was never a party to your scheming. I had no knowledge of your plans.”
“That will not matter, for our close ties will speak far louder than any words you can say.” She takes a step toward me, then another, until we are close enough that I can see the faint lines that have begun to appear at the corners of her eyes. Abruptly, she turns away. “Would you like to hear the story of your birth? I know it has plagued you for years, not knowing how you came into this world.”
I blink in surprise and everything inside me grows still. “What do you mean?” My voice does not sound like my own. “No one knows anything about my birth.” I am not at all certain I wish to hear, for I am suddenly terrified of this story I have hungered for my entire life.
Unaware of my inner turmoil, the abbess begins to speak, her voice soft, as if she is peering down the corridor of time. “It was raining that night. They had traveled far, and the lady had only an old castoff maid from her father’s household, for he declared her dead to him once he learned of her plight. She was exhausted, and well beyond the point where she should have been traveling, but it was as if her shame and her heartache were some location on a map and she had to get as far away from them as she could.
“And then the pains began, leagues from a city of any size, and the lady and her maid both panicked. They stopped at the next house they passed and asked for the nearest midwife. There was none. The closest thing was the herbwife who lived at the edge of the mill road. It would have to do.