The Women's War Read online

  CHAPTER SIX

  The last Alysoon had heard, the death toll of last night’s devastating quake and flood had reached two thousand, with thousands more missing or wounded. The Harbor District was in shambles, its displaced survivors homeless and penniless and lost. Rescuers were still searching through the wreckage, and soldiers were doing their best to discourage scavengers, but it would be a long time before true order was restored.

  The Terrace District had fared better, with only the lowest level experiencing any flooding, and few homes taking substantial damage beyond broken windows and toppled furniture. Alys’s manor house would be livable after the servants had had a few hours to clear out the most vital rooms, and she planned to send for the children as soon as that work was complete. No doubt the palace would be more comfortable, but she greatly preferred her own home over enforced proximity to her father and half-brother.

  She had meant to spend a few hours with her mother’s book while the servants continued the cleanup, but the peremptory tone of the royal summons that appeared just after breakfast made it clear she was expected to drop everything and come at once. Under ordinary circumstances, Alys would have delayed just because she could, but her mother’s ominous warnings still rang in her ears, and antagonizing her father for no reason would not be wise.

  Reluctantly, she’d left the book behind and set out on the long and uncomfortable journey up the zigzagging road to the top of the cliffs. The palace was an enormous walled complex built around Aaltah’s Well—the heart of the city of Aalwell, indeed of the Kingdom of Aaltah itself. While the palace had originally been designed as a fortress meant to protect the Well, each successive king had adorned it and added on to it until over the centuries it became a virtual city all by itself.

  Alys was not surprised to find the royal palace showing few signs of last night’s devastation. There were fewer luminants in the halls than usual, and the rooms all looked comparatively sparse from the removal of glass-fronted cabinets and breakable ornaments. A marble bust of King Aaltyn’s grandfather was conspicuously missing from the top of the grand staircase, and the crackled floor tiles below its pedestal suggested its likely fate. But she doubted she would have recognized these differences if she weren’t intimately familiar with the palace.

  The entire palace was teeming with carpenters and stonemasons and maids and footmen, all industriously setting things to rights. Alys suspected that within a week, the palace would be fully restored to its usual grandeur. In a better, fairer world, all those carpenters and stonemasons and servants would be down in the Harbor District, trying to help those who were in desperate need, but Alys was under no illusions as to the priorities of the Crown and the aristocracy.

  She was escorted to the royal living quarters, and then deposited in a sitting room and left to wait. And wait. And wait.

  After what she judged to be at least an hour, she’d attempted to leave the sitting room only to be blocked by one of the palace guards stationed outside the door.

  “His Majesty has requested that you remain here, my lady,” the guard said apologetically.

  “I’ve been remaining here for over an hour,” she said. “I was going to go and check in on my children.” Which I would have done when I first arrived if I hadn’t been led to believe the king was waiting for me. “I’ll be right back.”

  But the guard remained planted in the doorway. “I’m sorry, my lady.” He shifted in apparent discomfort. “I have my orders.”

  Alys suppressed a shiver of unease. The tone of the summons, the long wait, and the guard’s refusal to let her leave the sitting room painted the picture of an angry king. Her father had always had a temper, but rarely had she found it directed toward her. Perhaps he’d heard that she’d spent the night on horseback, trying to help the rescue efforts. Her behavior had been improper and unladylike, to be sure, and she’d expected him to be irritated by it. But not actually angry. He might not approve of some of her more mannish ways, but he’d tolerated them even when she’d been living under his roof and he’d had the ability to curb her behavior.

  Returning to the uncomfortable sofa in front of the cheerfully crackling fire, she chewed her lip and stared into the flames. Her mother’s letter had warned her of danger to come, but surely that danger wouldn’t come from her own father. He couldn’t even know that her mother had been responsible for last night’s disaster and the change in Rho. He couldn’t yet know what that change signified.

  When she’d been waiting for at least two hours, a guard finally came to fetch her and said His Majesty was ready to see her. She half expected to be led to the formal audience chamber for some kind of official reprimand, but she was taken instead to yet another sitting room and told to wait once again. This might not be a formal audience, but it was not a casual meeting between father and daughter, either. His tactics were making that abundantly clear.

  This time, she had to wait only a few minutes before the door opened and her father strode in.

  At seventy-two, King Aaltyn II was well past his prime, but a stranger seeing him would never have guessed his age. Tall and barrel-chested, with the straight back and the salt-and-pepper hair of a much younger man, he exuded strength and authority. He was dressed today in a quilted royal purple doublet with fine gold embroidery. A rich velvet cape draped over his shoulders and attached across his chest with an enormous sapphire brooch. Alys didn’t need Mindsight to know that brooch was a powerful magic item, though it was not one she’d seen her father wear before. Atop the king’s head sat a thin gold circlet peppered with more sapphires, and that magic item she did recognize. With the addition of a few motes of Rho, the circlet could create an invisible shield all around the king’s body.

  That he was wearing the circlet in the palace, in the privacy of the royal residence, did not bode well for his state of mind. Nor did the coldness in his hazel eyes or his straight, thin lips.

  Alys quickly rose from the sofa and gave a deep curtsy when ordinarily she’d give no more than a token bob.

  “What do you know about this?” the king demanded, thrusting a small sheet of parchment in her face.

  She gave him a worried, puzzled look as she took the parchment. “What is it?” she asked, frowning at the parchment, which had clearly once been tightly rolled and wished to return to its natural state. She made the assumption that it had been delivered by a flier.

  Her father didn’t answer, merely glaring at her from under heavy brows. She forced the little roll open and saw several paragraphs of tidy but heavily slanted handwriting that she recognized as her mother’s.

  The message was as concise as it was devastating. The abbess laid out what she, her daughter, and her granddaughter had done, and how the changed Rho would affect the lives of women everywhere. She also claimed that the only people who could understand the spell well enough to have a chance of undoing it had died in its casting. Finally, she said she’d sent similar messages by flier to the kingdoms of Rhozinolm and Khalpar, as well as to each of the four principalities, so that everyone would know what the changed appearance of Rho meant.

  “Well?” the king demanded before Alys had reached the end of the message. Not that she needed to read every word to understand his anger.

  “Well what?” she asked, then immediately regretted the quick and easy rejoinder. Right now, she was speaking to King Aaltyn, not to her father, and a wise woman would choose her words carefully. “I didn’t know about it, if that’s what you’re asking,” she hastened to say.

  “You don’t look surprised!” he snapped, his eyes flashing as he glared at her so fiercely she had to fight the temptation to take a step backward.

  Alys cursed herself for not thinking things through. She’d had hours of traveling and waiting, and instead of using that time to think about what the king’s summons meant and how she should respond, she’d assumed it had something to do with her unladylik
e behavior and given her position little thought. Her father would know perfectly well she’d been to the Abbey yesterday, and it wasn’t unreasonable for him to think her mother might have warned her what was going to happen—or at least said goodbye.

  If her mother had warned her, Alys could be charged with treason for not passing that warning on to the king. And if she hadn’t warned her, then Alys should have been visibly shocked by the contents of that letter.

  Telling her father about the spell book and its hidden message was out of the question, so Alys had to think quickly to escape the trap she had blindly stepped in.

  “Mama was acting strange when I saw her yesterday,” she said, forcing herself to meet her father’s angry gaze and hoping she looked completely innocent and honest. “I kept asking her what was wrong, and she kept telling me it was nothing, but…Well, I could tell it wasn’t nothing. I had the uncomfortable feeling that she was saying goodbye, but I told myself it was my imagination. Then the earthquake happened.”

  Alys shuddered and hugged herself as images of last night’s chaos forced themselves into her mind. The sound of the rushing water rending and tearing as it destroyed everything in its path would echo in her nightmares for years to come, punctuated by the screams of those being dragged out to sea and the sobs of those who were left behind.

  “I didn’t think the earthquake had anything to do with Mama, but then when everyone kept telling me that Rho had changed…” She let her voice trail off.

  The king was still glaring at her, his chin still jutting out in a way that said his jaws were tightly clenched with fury. It took every scrap of Alys’s will not to break eye contact like a frightened—and guilty—child.

  “I had no idea what was going to happen,” she finished firmly. “Do you honestly think I would have kept quiet if I had?”

  “You were always your mother’s creature,” he said, and she flinched at the bitterness in his voice.

  “I loved my mother.” Her throat tightened and her eyes began to sting as the weight of loss settled on her shoulders. “But I would not have let her do this had I known.”

  Which was why her mother had settled for those cryptic, useless warnings, she realized. Maybe the change that was made to Rho would genuinely improve the lot of women everywhere—Alys regarded that claim with a heavy dose of skepticism—but the loss of life had been intolerable. If Alys had had any inkling of what her mother was up to, she would have found some way to stop it—even if it meant betraying her mother by telling her father.

  “Please believe me, Papa,” she begged, and was relieved to see a hint of softening at the corners of his eyes and lips. He might not be wholly convinced, but she had at least succeeded in planting doubt of her guilt in his mind.

  She glanced again at the scroll in her hand, her mind hardly able to encompass the enormity of what her mother had done. Not only had she cast the terrible spell, she had sent out fliers to make sure the whole world knew about it.

  “Everyone’s going to blame us for this,” she said, shaking her head.

  Her father let out a heavy sigh. “Thanks to your mother shouting her guilt from the rooftops, of course they will. And rightly so.”

  “All of Aaltah isn’t to blame for one woman’s acts.”

  Her father laughed briefly. “I did not raise a naïve daughter.”

  “It wasn’t for lack of trying,” she retorted. She wouldn’t say she felt completely at ease with him yet, but she no longer felt like she was talking to a dangerous stranger. He gave her a reproachful look, but didn’t otherwise scold.

  “Shelvon lost her baby last night.” Her father pointed at the message she still held. “Delnamal saw that message before it reached me.”

  Alys grimaced. She barely knew her half-brother’s wife, but she knew Delnamal much better than she’d have wished. Perhaps Shelvon lost the baby due to nothing more than the stress of last night’s earthquake, but many would assume she’d lost it due to the spell. No one would want to suggest out loud that a woman might not wish to bear the crown prince’s baby, but no one seeing the two of them together would mistake theirs for a happy marriage.

  “Is Shelvon all right?” she asked. For all his faults, Alys had never known her half-brother to hit a woman, but if he blamed his wife for losing the baby, she wouldn’t put it past him.

  “The midwife assures us she will make a full recovery and that there’s no reason she shouldn’t be able to carry her next child to term.”

  It was on the tip of Alys’s tongue to point out that wasn’t what she’d meant, but the quelling look on her father’s face convinced her to keep the thought to herself. She wasn’t sure if he was blind to all his heir’s faults or if he merely refused to acknowledge them, but he was highly sensitive to anything Alys said that could be perceived as critical. Rarely did knowing that stop Alys from criticizing, but rousing the king’s temper a second time seemed ill-advised.

  “Delnamal wants me to arrest you on suspicion of treason,” the king said, and Alys’s heart skipped a beat, though the accusation was hardly a surprise.

  Her mother had warned her, and Delnamal had always hated her anyway. Practically all his life, he’d tried to drive a wedge between his father and both his half-siblings. As a teenager and a young woman, Alys had tried to win him over with kindness, but she had eventually realized his hatred and jealousy ran too deep to be conquered. Since then, her defenses had turned to avoidance when possible, chilly courtesy when not.

  “Is that why you summoned me?” she asked in a ghostly whisper. She was sure all blood had drained from her face, and suddenly the tone of the summons and her father’s anger when he’d entered the room took on new meaning.

  “Of course not,” he said, but she wasn’t sure she believed him.

  It was hard to imagine her father ordering her arrest, throwing her into some dungeon and putting her life in danger. But then she doubted her mother had ever imagined her loving husband divorcing her, banishing her to the Abbey, and publicly disinheriting their children. He’d told Alys time after time that in denying her his name, he was not denying her his love. But he was the only one who believed he could possibly love Alysoon Rai-Brynna as much as he’d loved Alysoon Rah-Aaltyn.

  “I knew you couldn’t have been part of this,” the king said, apparently forgetting that he’d entered the room in a rage and all but accused her of just that. “However, Delnamal won’t be the only one who suspects you. You were right to send the children here last night. And you should have come yourself. You will be safe here.”

  “I’ll be perfectly safe in my own house,” Alys said firmly. Which was far more diplomatic than what she wanted to say, that she would be far safer putting as much distance as possible between herself and her half-brother.

  “Not without a husband you won’t!”

  “I have an honor guard, Papa. And a houseful of servants.” She tried to imagine how her late husband could possibly have protected her against any attackers who might blame her for her mother’s spell, and it almost made her laugh. Sylnin had been a dear, sweet man and a better husband than she ever could have hoped for, but he’d been far more philosopher than soldier. Their thirteen-year-old son could have bested him in a wrestling match.

  “And here you would have them along with the entire palace guard.”

  Alys hoped her father was truly thinking only of her protection. It was also possible he wanted to keep her close so that he could keep an eye on her.

  “I’m sure neither Delnamal nor Shelvon would be happy to see me wandering the hallway.”

  “It isn’t their decision to make.”

  “No. It’s mine. And I would like to take my children home so we can all return to something resembling normal as soon as possible.”

  Alys held her breath as her father thought it over. Where she lived was her decision now that she was a widow—a
nd would continue to be so until she remarried or until Corlin came of age—but if the king really did suspect her of conspiring with her mother, he could force her to stay. He might not want to throw her in a dungeon as Delnamal would prefer, but he could put her under house arrest of a sort. It would destroy her reputation and put her in exactly the kind of danger he’d said he wanted to protect her from, but he could do it.

  The king heaved a sigh and shook his head. “You are as stubborn and reckless as always. I will send additional men for your honor guard. Neither you nor your children may leave the house without at least three men until things settle down.”

  Alys bit down hard on the urge to argue.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Ellin had spent most of the day in a numbing haze, trying to come to terms with everything that had happened. Occasionally, the numbness deserted her and she wept. It was likely that she’d never have been able to repair her relationship with her father after he’d agreed to marry her off to Zarsha of Nandel, but now she’d never have the chance to try. To have lost so many people all in one day was just…Well, she didn’t have the words to fully express all she felt.

  In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, she had not given any thought to what all those deaths meant to anyone but herself; however in the cold light of the next morning, it had occurred to her that not only had the king died, but both his heirs had died also.

  Once or twice, she’d allowed herself a passing worry about the future of the kingdom with no clear heir to the throne, but mostly she’d been too sunk in her own misery to give the situation any significant thought. She’d tried to think as little as possible as the interminable day brought a constant wave of well-wishers and condolences that she could barely tolerate.

  Late in the afternoon, she received a visit from Semsulin Rah-Lomlys, the lord chancellor and head of the royal council. Fifty years old, with steel-gray hair, a hawkish nose, a razor-sharp mind, and an even sharper tongue, Semsulin somehow managed to arouse an equal quantity of dislike and respect in everyone who knew him. Well, in almost everyone. Ellin couldn’t manage much in the way of respect, for she knew it was the lord chancellor who had first suggested marrying her to Zarsha of Nandel. He’d known her since she was born, and had a daughter of his own, and yet he’d thought nothing of shipping her off to a principality where she would have few—if any—rights beyond what her husband granted her. She understood that the trade agreements were important—Rhozinolm got almost all its iron from those agreements, and a large percentage of its gemstones, which were necessary not just for adornment but for use in magic items, as gemstones could hold a large number of elements. But she was certain there could have been some way to renew those agreements without forcing her to marry Zarsha, if only Semsulin and the king would have worked harder at it. She would never forgive him for planting that idea in her grandfather’s ear, and he was the last person she wanted to hear condolences from. Unfortunately, simple manners insisted she receive him.