Silently and with infinite care he slips between jamb and door opened just enough to admit him, shutting it after with such delicate precision, and the faintest click of the latch.
The room’s unlit but for daylight weakly seeping from the edges of heavy curtains drawn, not enough to clearly determine the color of the duvet and pillows neatly spread, just enough to make out the mass of a dresser against the wall, to render the figure, sprawled insensate, palely naked, in what must be some sort of armchair, black-capped head tipped back, one arm flung aside, the other folded tucked against his flank, and the darkly swollen mass at the end of it cradled on his breast. One soundless step after another to the foot of the bed reveals a second figure crumpled on an oblong rug of singed fake fur, delineated by thickly regular strokes of long dark hair laid in drooping hanks about and over the slimly round of a shoulder, the slope of a waist, the swell of a hip. Between the two of them, by a bare foot, a hand closed about a little silver knife, there’s a wide round soot-smudged basin, half-filled with greasy smoking water, and hung within it a cloud of darkening yellowish grey unskeined in sluggish threads and tatters, and he sucks his teeth to see it.
Hiking up his sharp-creased trousers he kneels by that tableau, pale hair in dreadlocks swaying in the shadows. He plucks forth a pocket square, ivory edged with a pink insistent even in this darkness, and shakes it out to twist and wad it up again, and dips it in the basin, dredging up that slimy cloud as best he can, dunk and swipe to lift it, dripping, from the water. He stuffs the whole mess under the bed, distastefully flicking his fingers, wiping them back to front on an unscorched stretch of rug.
The man in the chair, unmoving. The woman, still, fœtally curled, not even the hint of breath.
An energetic plinking as he digs in the pocket of his jacket to produce a couple of slender glass tubes, each capped with dark blue wax, and within them threads of golden warmth, shining enough to ruddy up his hand. He sets one on the fur, and snaps off the top of the other with a quick clean clink of sundered glass. Tipping it over the basin he taps out golden dust, some falling to spark and pop and blacken on the greyly greasy surface of what water’s left, but mostly drifting in clumps and streaks of gleaming gold on the sooty porcelain rim. The tube, emptied, he whips beneath the bed as well.
The second tube.
Tink as he breaks off the top of it. Sits up there by the armchair, leaning over, careful of those canted ash-splashed knees, the bare thighs slackly muscled, hatched with thick black hair. Focused intently on that shape that had once been a hand, fingers lost in the purpled bloat, a glint of quick-bitten nail capsized in the swell of it, the ghost of a knuckle knurling the darkly taut skin. The bit of leather tied about the wrist. The arm then, drained pale, held close against that chiseled flank. He tips the second tube up over his palm and taps out the golden dust into a tidy little pile. The woman, still curled, unmoving, behind him now. The basin gently steaming by his knee, the little silver knife, the saucer, daubed with a wine-dark paste. He frowns.
He slaps his laden hand down on that shape.
Shuddering jolt the man in the chair surges struggling wrestles to yowling shrieking hissing smoke, but Agravante will not be dislodged, holding tight as yanked and wrenched he’s chucked from side to side, knee-thump and kick-chime and slop a hissing gasp, but keening up from Luys’s throat such a lost and hopeless howl that gathers strength, volume, a vector, weight, well on its way to becoming a vowel, perhaps a syllable that might’ve opened into a word, but roughly raggeding as he thrashes in the chair, hoarsening, raveling, shredding, crumbling into a lowering hacking cough of a sigh as his body relaxes, slumping beneath Agravante yet between his knees, hunched over until a gasp, that broad bare chest beneath him rising, falling, a breath taken in, let out, another, and another, and.
Hanks of long hair shifting slip from her shoulder as hips, rolling, lift above pivoting knees, her hands still pressed to the scorched and sodden fur, and her face, “My lord,” she says, the words half-swallowed, pushing up her head, “my lord,” she says, again, and something somewhere’s dripping. “You mustn’t, my lord. I have failed you all.” Wavering, unsteady, she looks up to his arched back jacketed in midnight, bent over Luys’s lap. “I must,” she says, wincing as she sits herself back on her settling heels. “Gather myself,” she says, head hung low, hands lifting to the hair spilled long and loosely damp about her. “I must wash.”
“Your majesty did not fail,” says Agravante.
“I could not,” she says, combing those dark wet tresses with her fingers, “turn,” she says, “the owr, it all, it all,” tugging, snarled in a knot, a hiss, “it all,” she says, “went off,” her hands suddenly ceasing. Caught on the back of her hand a glimmering crumb of gold, and more, a-sparkle along the verges of the rug, flashing from this half-molten strand of fur, or that, somehow, incredibly, gilding the rim of the tumbled basin.
“It was never all,” says Agravante, “or nothing at all.” Dark shoulders gather themselves, bracing, “Our fortunes only ever turn on just so much: enough.” Pushing himself up, and back, silhouetted by a sudden flare of gold, gold that brightly lights Luys’s chest and shoulders, limning even as it fades the edges of his cheeks, his chin, glimmering the dark cap of his hair, falling into the black pools of his wide eyes staring aghast at the arm he’s lifted in Agravante’s wake, the bit of leather tied about his wrist and the hand, there, five fingers unfolding, turned this way about and that, ruddily mottled, a bit darker, perhaps, than the rest of him, but otherwise hale and whole.
“Enough,” says Agravante, again, and a burbling cough. His arms fold about himself, that midnight jacket pouching open, his white shirt, his pinkly lustrous tie still smoldering, spotted with a last few golden embers dying even now, and his drooping white locks singed. “Enough, to heal a hand. Enough to quicken a queen. Enough,” a deep breath, “to save our court.” Shrugs to resettle his jacket, hands still tucked away. “I’ll leave your majesties to compose yourselves.” Turning, stepping away. He winces as he reaches in the shadows for the doorknob, but stops before stepping through. Looks back. “Unless you’d have me send someone to assist?”
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Luys, sat up with no little effort, stares in horror not at his hand, but Agravante, “My lord,” he manages to say. “You can’t possibly, my lord. You can’t!”
“But, your majesty,” says Agravante, stepping out, into the hall. “I didn’t.”
•
Over, through, down, and switch, then up around and through again, and switch, around and through once more, fingertips patting the knot to shift, adjust, but “No,” says Agravante, “no, no, stop,” slapping those fingers away, “it’s lopsided. Stop.”
“My lord,” says the Majordomo, glumly, “allow me to, if you would,” lifting his hands away even as he reaches again for the tie, glossy blue and red and buttery yellow to pick out paramecial paisleys, crumpled by the half-done knot, “I said stop!” snaps Agravante, slapping again, wincing as he strikes the Majordomo’s hand. “Go on,” he mutters. “See to the court.” Tugging to loosen the knot, fingers clumsy in gloves the color of fawn, sawing the tie back and forth until he can hurl it away. “My lord!” cries the Majordomo, reaching for him even as he rears away, but “Enough!” snarls Agravante. “Go on, about your business.”
“Your tie, my lord – ”
“I’ll do without!” Tugging the gloves, one hand, the other, resettling the fit of them, eyes closing definitively as he presses the one thumb against the other palm. “I’ll do without,” he says, again, and opens up his eyes, and with those newly stiff, tight-wrapped fingers, undoes the top button of his shirt.
•
Clunk of a key, turned in a lock, the body of it dropping enough to free the shank, twist and she lifts it from the hasp, her other hand turning the knob to open the door, “Your majesty,” she says, stepping to one side.
“I,” says Annisa, but then, words fail. She doesn’t take the proffered step through the doorway, into the room, the gauzy wall beyond, the scraps of shadow fluttering against it, in the lamplight. “We,” she says, still stood there in the hall, loosely wrapped in a rough green robe, and only an underscarf of beigely grey to bundle up her hair.
Set on a stool before the wall of gauze an overweening bouquet of roses, the buds and blossoms so very round and full and richly winey red and purple against the paler green of their foliage, so droopingly heavy they threaten to topple in any available direction, a-tremble with possible catastrophe.
“Majesty,” says Florimell, the Laguiole, in her jacket of salmon pink, “will you require assistance, with your ablutions, and preparations?”
“We,” says Annisa, and a deep breath, squaring her shoulders. “We would have that,” a gesture, toward the exuberant bouquet, “removed. The odor, in such a profusion, cloys.”
“Of course, majesty.” Florimell’s looking down to her suede magenta booties, pressed together side-by-side, pink-painted nails just visible through the cut-outs at the toes.
“We would have my clothing, our clothing, our personal effects, brought to the bedroom where I was,” another breath, and a shake of that tight-wrapped head. “Where we were, this morning. My subjects, and equipment,” looking past the roses to those palpitating shadows, “will remain; this is to become my laboratory.” Looking to Florimell then, waiting, patiently, until Florimell looks up, those softly light brown eyes. “We would speak with the Majordomo at his earliest convenience.”
“Of course, your majesty,” says the Laguiole.
•
Into the lemon-yellow kitchen, those high white cabinets, his chamois shirt more of a goldenrod, really, in all this brightness, the crash of running water, there, at the sink beneath sunlit curtains, a tall broad man in buff coveralls looks over his shoulder and smiles. Shuts off the faucet, turns about, drying his hands on a dishcloth, “Sir Mason,” he says. “How good to see you.”
“Don’t,” says Luys, quiet and quick, unsteadily lurching the lemony length of floor to fetch up there at the end, and the tall man stood between him and the sink, “don’t,” he says, “presume, to such familiarity,” and a brusque gesture, “Scuppernong,” he says, “your pardon, but I’ve need, of the sink.” And then, “It’s, good, to see you, too,” he mutters, as Scuppernong steps aside.
He catches water in cupped hands, splash to his face, and again, and he takes the dishtowel Scuppernong offers, blotting his brow, his cheeks, wiping his hands. “I had heard,” he says, “there were few enough to see to the house, these days.” Still wiping his hands, the front of his shirt wetly dappled.
“Oh,” says Scuppernong, “I work the grounds, mostly. He never sees me. I do hear him, of a morning,” reaching to take the cloth from Luys, “chattering to himself on the porch,” and Luys is left with the one of his hands cradling the other, darker, mottled, the palm angrily ruddied, and there the ghostly rondel of faintly darker toothmarks, the memory marked of a bite almost taken. “What is he,” says Luys, a merest whisper Scuppernong leans close to catch.
“My lord,” he says, drawn back. “He is the Grandfather Count.”
But Luys is shaking his head, no, he says, a soundless puff of a word. Scuppernong’s genial puzzlement crumples to a frown, “My lord,” he says, but Luys is turning the one red hand over and back again, squeezing the mottle of it with his thumb, his fingertips, and the bit of leather swings about his wrist, “my lord,” says Scuppernong again, reaching hesitantly, to take both hands in his, to stop them, soothe them, press them close between his own.
“You will show the deference his majesty is due,” says Agravante, calmly stern there in the doorway, his midnight suit, his white shirt open at the throat, hands clasped behind his back. Scuppernong looks from him there back to Luys, something dawning in his expression, a whelming horror to slack his lips, smooth his brow, dull his blinking eyes, his hands leap apart, releasing Luys, and with an awkward rustle, a thump of cabinet doors, he sinks to one knee before the King, bowing that tow head, and Luys all the while yet shaking his head, no, he’s mouthing, no, no.
Striding the length of the kitchen footsteps heavy a hand swept out to clasp a buff-shrouded shoulder, “Up,” says Agravante imperiously, “and be about your work,” that hand gloved in pale fawn, lifted away as Scuppernong gets to his feet, but Luys catches him, his own hands on those shoulders, and Scuppernong stiffens, uncertain where to look. Luys hikes up off his heels, leans close, to press a kiss to Scuppernong’s forehead, nosing aside those towy curls.
“Go,” says his majesty.
Scuppernong steps away, back down the lemony length of the kitchen. Luys looks to his hands, there on the counter. Takes up the dishcloth to wipe them again, and over again. Agravante looks him up and down, brushes the chamois shirtfront with the backs of his gloved fingers. “We should change this.”
“No,” says Luys.
“Your majesty,” says Agravante, but then, at the look he is given, stops.
“Do you know,” says Luys, sternly, quietly cold, “what you have done,” but also shakily, and hoarse.
“What has happened,” says Agravante, “happened, because it had to. We cannot be without a Queen. A Queen must have a King, to quicken her. It’s as simple as that, your majesty.” He moves to step away, but Luys catches him by the elbow, “When the time comes, for her to turn more than a pinch of owr,” dragging him close, “what will happen then?”
“What has to happen,” says Agravante, looking down at the clutching hand, mottled so angrily, “will happen, but it will not be for some time. In a moment, after I make a call,” shrugging himself free from Luys’s grasp, “we will step out to address the court, and your majesty will rally the knights. We have a city’s ransom to secure, and a foolish wrong to right.” Again, those fawn-gloved fingers brush yellow chamois. “You really ought to change this shirt.”