The Born Queen - J. Gregory Keyes [172]
“Fond?”
“Oh, stop it. You don’t seem the woman conqueror on the face of it, but first Fastia, now the princess of Hansa who is also, ne’er you mind, one of the Faiths. That is quite a record.”
“I met her—we had met before,” Neil tried to explain.
“You said you had never been to Kaithbaurg before.”
“And I hadn’t. We met on a ship, in Vitellio. This isn’t the first time she’s run away from Hansa.”
“I don’t blame her,” Alis said. “Why did she go back?”
“She said she had a vision of Anne bringing ruin to the whole world.”
“Well, she was wrong about that, at least.”
“I suppose.”
“Well, if Anne is dead…” She sighed and handed him the bottle. “She was supposed to save us, or so I thought before I quit caring. The Faiths told us that.”
“Your order?”
“Yes. The Order of Saint Dare. There’s no point in keeping it secret now.”
“Brinna said that she and the other Faiths had been wrong. That’s all I know.”
He took two drinks.
“Did you know Anne well?” Alis asked.
He took another pull. “I knew her. I wouldn’t say we were friends, exactly.”
“I barely knew her. I hardly knew Muriele until last year.”
“I don’t suppose mistresses and wives socialize that much.”
“No. But—” She closed her eyes. “Strong stuff.”
“Yes.”
“She helped me, Sir Neil. She took me in despite what I had been. I try not to love, because there’s nothing but heartbreak in it. But I loved her. I did.”
Her voice only barely quavered, but her face was wet in the moonlight.
“I know,” he said.
She sat that way a moment, staring at the bottle. Then she raised it. “To Robert,” she said. “He killed my king and lover, he killed my queen and friend. So to him, and his legs severed at the hip, and his arms cut from his shoulders, and all buried in different places—” She choked off into a sob.
He took the bottle. “To Robert,” he said, and drank.
The White Lady—Brinna, her name was—looked up from Leoff’s music. “Will this do it?” she asked.
Leoff regarded the strange woman for a moment. He was tired, his head hurt, and what he mostly wanted was to go to bed.
“I don’t know,” he finally said.
“Yes, he does,” Mery said.
He shot the girl a warning glance, but she just smiled at him.
“You don’t trust me?” Brinna asked.
“Milady, I don’t know you. I’ve been deceived before—often. It’s been a very long day, and I’m finding it hard to understand why you’re here. We had another visitor, you know, pretending to be a relative of Mery’s, and you remind me a lot of her.”
“That was one of my sisters,” Brinna said. “She might have dissembled about who she was, but everything else she told you is true. Like me, she was a seer. Like me, she knew that if anyone can mend the law of death, it’s you two. I’ve come to help.”
“How can you help?”
“I don’t know, but I felt called here.”
“That’s not too useful,” Leoff said.
Brinna leaned forward a bit. “I broke the law of death,” she said quietly. “I am responsible. Do you understand?”
Leoff exhaled and pushed his hand through his hair, wincing as he touched the sore spot. “No,” he said. “I don’t really understand any of it.”
“It will work,” Mery insisted.
Leoff nodded. “I compose more with my heart than with my head, and my heart says it would work if it could be performed, which it can’t. That’s the problem, you see.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“You read music, yes?”
“Yes,” she said. “I can play the harp and lute. I can sing.”
“Then you notice that there are three voices, yes? The low, the middle, and the high.”
“Not unusual,” she said.
“No. Quite the norm. Except that if you look closely, you’ll see that there are two distinct lines in each voice.”
“I noticed that, too. But I’ve seen that before, too, in the Armaio of Roger Hlaivensen, for instance.”
“Very good,” Leoff said. “But here’s the difference. The second lines—the one with the strokes turned down—those have to be sung by…ah, well—by the dead.”
When she didn’t even blink at that, he went on. “The upturned lines are to be sung by the living, and for the piece to be done