The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [54]
“We went to where the chatelaine sleeps. We went into endocarp.”
“Endocarp?”
“The inner sanctum. Heart of the palace.”
Serena almost looked up. “I know what it means. You went there with Nahid?”
“Yes.”
“And was she there?”
“Octavia?”
“No. The chatelaine.”
“She was.” Name of the Sun did not want to tell Serena any more of story. This had been a bad idea. She said, “Have I done something to upset you?”
“I’m not upset, it’s just that there were these men who came by the ostracon—”
“Maybe I should just go.”
One of the cognosci, which had been looking over its shoulder, started to make a nasally whine; people nearby—three male hemos—were moving among the rocks, carrying fishing poles, making it nervous. The cognosci were accustomed to Name of the Sun being around, but men terrified them.
“Let’s both go.” Serena stood. “I need to get these guys back up. You can come back, too, if you’d like.”
Serena ran a shelter in a shed on Red Cross Street. There, she had taught herself rudimentary physicker training—enough, anyhow, to mend the most obvious of ailments. The creatures followed her wherever she went. But the invitation to return to the shelter had been cold, hollow; Name of the Sun did not feel welcome. She was so tired anyhow, and she had a shift at the end of the day. “I should get some sleep.”
They walked the embankment and Name of the Sun glanced up to see a man wearing only a loin cloth, holding a crop, staring down at her. She froze. The man’s chest was streaked with welts. He pointed toward her with his whip and she looked away for a moment, breathless—
When she looked back, the man was gone, but the cognosci huddled by Serena, baring their teeth, piddling where they stood, and would not budge.
Lingering in the narrow archway at the top of the stairs, the chatelaine watched her father. Her lungs and legs were sore from the exertion of the climb, and from the recent sex, both this afternoon’s and the debacle of the previous evening. She should have brought water to drink.
Or started to act her age.
She hooked tabs of a gauze mask behind each ear, pushing the fabric against her mouth, making sure it was snug; some days her father demanded this and would only greet her if she wore the mask.
He stood at his work table with his back to her. He seemed smaller than he did the last time she’d been up here, which was a fortnight ago, maybe a little more. As he worked, his narrow shoulders rose and fell. He was naked, as always: ribs prominent, hairless buttocks clenched. On the table, something she could not see squealed; her father lunged, grunting, to subdue it, or catch it, as it tried to bolt.
The dungeon was colder than her own bedchambers; there were no reeds on the floor here, no wall hangings, no sparks remaining in the cavernous fireplace. Smiling grimly, the chatelaine recognized a definite familiar bond: neither of them was able to keep a fire lit, even with a city of resources and servants at their command.
Lanterns cast dim light over the dungeon chambers from sconces angled either side of the room, but since there was no parchment over the windows here, the dim yellow light of day also fell across the worn wood of the floor; the room was generally brighter than most. But no window covering also meant that the dungeon was abuzz with insects, mostly swarming the table where years of blood, choler, and melancholy had all drained from a central funnel to collect and congeal in a stone trough on the floor.
Somehow, in the castellan’s fractured logic, this situation was not an issue. The chatelaine had long ago abandoned attempts at seeing logic up here.
Out in the streets of Nowy Solum, the old castellan’s reputation was worse than the chatelaine’s own. His reign had been brief and tumultuous before it was suggested, in many counsels, that his young daughter take over. The chatelaine had been a child when her father retreated to this room, just a small girl, left alone in a great palace, with monsters and silent palatinate for company.
Would chamberlain Erricus agree that there had