A Dirge for Princes

Angelica felt her eyes widening slightly at that. She knew that Rupert wasn’t back yet, so how could the Dowager have heard so much, so quickly? Maybe he’d sent a bird ahead.

“She did,” she said. “She sailed off with her sister’s corpse, on a boat heading for Ishjemme.”

“Heading for Lars Skyddar, no doubt,” the Dowager muttered. It was another small shock for Angelica. How could peasants like Sophia and her sister possibly know someone like Ishjemme’s ruler?

“I’ve done what you wanted,” Angelica said. Even to her, it sounded defensive.

“Are you expecting praise?” the Dowager asked. “Maybe a reward? Some petty title to add to your collection, maybe?”

Angelica didn’t like being talked down to like that. She’d done everything the Dowager had required. Sophia was dead, and Sebastian would be home soon, ready to accept her.

“I have just announced your nuptials to the Assembly of Nobles,” the Dowager said. “I would think that marrying my son would be reward enough.”

“More than enough,” Angelica said. “Will Sebastian accept this time, though?”

The Dowager reached out, and Angelica had to force herself not to flinch as the old woman patted her cheek.

“I’m sure I said that was part of your job. Distract him. Seduce him. Get down on your knees in front of him and beg, if you have to. My reports say that he’s cloaked in grief as he comes home. Your job will be to make him forget all of that. Not mine, yours. Do a good job, Angelica.” The Dowager shrugged. “Now get out. I have things to do. I have to make sure that you actually finished Sophia, for one thing.”

The dismissal was abrupt enough to be rude. With anyone else, it would have been enough to warrant retribution. With the Dowager, there was nothing that Angelica could do, and that only made it worse.

Still, she would do what the old woman required. She would make Sebastian hers once he got home. She would be royalty by marriage soon, and that elevation would be more than reward enough.

In the meantime, the Dowager’s uncertainty about Sophia gnawed at her. Angelica had killed her; she was sure of it, but…

But it wouldn’t hurt to see what she could learn about events in Ishjemme, just to be certain. She had at least one friend there, after all.

CHAPTER SIX

Sophia could feel the rhythmic flow of the ship somewhere beneath her, but it was a distant thing, on the edge of her awareness. Unless she concentrated, it was hard to remember that she had ever been on a ship. She certainly couldn’t find it, even though it was the last place that she could remember being.

Instead, she seemed to be in a shadowy place, filled with mist that shifted and billowed, fractured light filtering through it so that it seemed more like the ghost of a sun than its reality. In the mist, Sophia had no idea which way was forward, or which way she was supposed to go.

Then she heard the cry of a child, cutting through the fog more clearly than the sunlight. Somehow, some instinct told her that the child was hers, and that she needed to go to it. Without hesitating, Sophia set off through the mist, running toward it.

“I’m coming,” she assured her child. “I’ll find you.”

It continued to cry, but now the mist twisted the sound, making it seem to come from every direction at once. Sophia picked a direction, plunging forward again, but it seemed that every direction she picked was the wrong one, and she got no closer.

The mist shimmered, and scenes seemed to form around her, set out as perfectly as performances on a stage. Sophia saw herself screaming in childbirth, her sister holding her hand as she brought a life into the world. She saw herself holding that child in her arms. She saw herself dead, with a physiker standing beside her.

“She wasn’t strong enough, after the attack,” he said to Kate.

That couldn’t be right though. It couldn’t be true if the other scenes were true. It could happen.

“Maybe none of it is true. Maybe it’s just imagination. Or maybe they’re possibilities, and nothing is decided.”

Sophia recognized Angelica’s voice instantly. She spun, seeing the other woman standing there, a bloody knife in her hand.

“You’re not here,” she said. “You can’t be.”

“But your child can?” she countered.

She stepped forward and stabbed Sophia then, the agony of it lancing through her like fire. Sophia screamed… and she was alone, standing in the mist.

She heard a child crying somewhere in the distance, setting off toward it because she knew instinctively that it was her child, her daughter. She ran, trying to catch up, even as she had the sense that she’d done this before…

She found scenes from a girl’s life around her. A toddler playing, happy and safe, Kate laughing along with her because they’d both found a good hiding place under the stairs and Sophia couldn’t find them. A toddler pulled from a castle just in time, Kate fighting against a dozen men, ignoring the spear in her side so that Sophia could run with her. The same child alone in an empty room, no parent there.

“What is this?” Sophia demanded.

“Only you would demand meaning from something like this,” Angelica said, stepping from the mist again. “You can’t just have a dream, it has to be filled with portents and signs.”

She stepped forward, and Sophia raised a hand to try to stop her, but that just meant that the knife thrust into her under the armpit, rather than cleanly up through the chest.

She was standing in the mist, a child’s cries sounding around her…

“No,” Sophia said, shaking her head. “I won’t keep going around and around this. It’s not real.”

“It’s real enough for you to be here,” Angelica said, her voice echoing from the mist. “What does it feel like, being a dead thing?”

“I’m not dead,” Sophia insisted. “I can’t be.”

Angelica’s laugh echoed the way her child’s cries had before. “You can’t be dead? Because you’re that special, Sophia? Because the world needs you so much? Let me remind you.”

She stepped from the mist, and now they weren’t standing in mist, but in the cabin of the boat. Angelica stepped forward, the hatred on her face obvious as she thrust the blade into Sophia once more. Sophia gasped with it, then fell, collapsing into darkness as she heard Sienne attack Angelica.

She was back in the mist then, standing there while it shimmered around her.

“Is this death then?” she demanded, knowing that Angelica would be listening. “If so, what are you doing here?”

“Maybe I died too,” Angelica said. She stepped back into view. “Maybe I hate you so much that I followed you. Or maybe I’m just everything you hate in the world.”

“I don’t hate you,” Sophia insisted.

She heard Angelica laugh then. “Don’t you? You don’t hate that I got to grow up in safety while you were in the House of the Unclaimed? That everyone accepts me at court while you had to run? That I could have married Sebastian without any problems, while you had to run away?”

She stepped forward again, but this time she didn’t stab Sophia. She stepped past her, walking off into the mist. The mist seemed to reshape itself as Angelica passed, and Sophia knew that this couldn’t be the real her now, because the real Angelica wouldn’t have tired of murdering her quite so quickly.

Sophia followed in her wake, trying to make sense of it all.

“Let’s show you a few more possibilities,” Angelica said. “I think you’ll like these.”

Just the way Angelica said it told Sophia how little she would like it. Even so, she followed her into the mist, not knowing what else to do. Angelica quickly disappeared out of sight, but Sophia kept walking.

Now she was standing in the middle of a room where Sebastian sat, obviously trying to hold back the tears that fell from his eyes. Angelica was there with him, reaching out for him.

“You don’t have to hold your emotions back,” Angelica said in a tone of perfect sympathy. She put her arms around Sebastian, holding him. “It’s all right to grieve for the dead, but just remember that the living are here for you.”