Once upon a Lover

Chapter 6: Thirteen Bells

The bells woke her. They always did, and she hated them for it, and they were the only clock in Calderane she had ever trusted.

Six strokes for the sixth hour. She lay in the gray light with her eyes closed and counted them out as she had every dawn since the nursery. Four. Five. Six.

Seven.

Her eyes opened.

Eight. Nine. The sound came up through the floor rather than the air, the great bell in the Tower of Tides, a note so deep it settled in the teeth. Ten. Eleven. Twelve.

A child in Calderane learned the bells before she learned her letters. Six for dawn. Twelve for noon and for midnight. Nothing else was ever struck. The bell-keepers were forbidden to improvise and had been, by statute, for three hundred years.

Thirteen.

Then a silence so complete that she could hear a gull complaining on the far side of the palace and, nearer, her own heart.

Twelve for the day, and one for the gone. The nursery rhyme came up out of her memory unasked, in her old nurse's cracked voice. Nobody sang it anymore. Nobody needed to.

The door opened without a knock. Tamsin stood in it, half-dressed, her braid coming loose, her face the color of tallow.

“Don't,” said Isaveth. “Don't say it.”

“Somebody's dead. In the Court of Lanterns. The Chancellor says you should come before the physicians move him.”

The Court of Lanterns lay at the heart of the palace, a cloister of pale stone around a fountain forty feet across. In dry years the fountain was drained for repairs, and this was a dry year. The masons had begun the week before and left their scaffolds standing. The basin lay open to the sky, white as a bone, utterly dry.

A crowd had already gathered beneath the colonnade. It parted for her. She noticed that none of them looked at the basin. They looked at her.

Lord Teague Hesk sat against the rim with his legs stretched out before him, like a man pausing to rest his feet. He was Keeper of the Privy Purse, sixty-one years old, round, fond of velvet, vain about his beard. Once he had lectured her for forty minutes on the price of candles. His doublet was black with water. His beard dripped. A pool was spreading out from beneath him across the flagstones, bright and slow, and the stones around it were dry as dust.

He had drowned in a drought, beside an empty fountain.

His mouth hung open, and it was packed with salt.

Coarse gray salt, the kind the fisher-folk used for curing, crammed to the teeth and crusted along the lips and into the creases of the beard, as though he had been fed it by the fistful. Isaveth made herself look. She had been taught that a ruler did not look away.

Yesterday afternoon a page had brought her a note in Hesk's cramped hand. A quarter hour, Highness, at your earliest convenience, concerning the Gallery. She had written Thursday across the corner and sent it back, because she had a treaty reading, and because Hesk always asked for a quarter hour and took an hour.

The guilt arrived with perfect timing, the way guilt does, after it can do nothing.

“Drowned,” said the court physician, a nervous man named Pell, to no one in particular. “I would stake my license. The lungs, the froth at the lips. He drowned.”

“In a dry fountain,” someone said.

“I did not say it was sensible.”

The whispering had begun. It moved along the colonnade the way wind moves through wheat, and she heard the word before she could stop herself hearing it. Tithe. Then another. Thirteen. A woman near the back made the old sign against ill luck, two fingers pressed to her lips.

“Sav?” Caspian had pushed through the crowd in his shirtsleeves, hair wild, still half in a dream. He was seventeen and looked twelve in the mornings. His eyes found the body and went very round. “Tides. Is that Hesk?”

“Go back to bed.”

“Is it a Tithe? They're saying it's a Tithe.”

“Hesk had no beloved,” said a young lord loudly, to a ripple of nervous laughter. “He was married to his accounts.”

“It isn't the Tithe,” said Isaveth. She did not turn her head; she kept her voice level and pitched to carry. “The Tithe takes the beloved of an heir. It does not take Keepers of the Purse. Somebody killed this man.”

“Somebody,” said a low voice behind her, “who wanted us to think otherwise.”

High Marshal Sethric Oake had come up without a sound. He was a lean man in his late fifties, gray as slate from his cropped hair to his boots, with a soldier's economy of movement and a face that had once been handsome, before grief or discipline or both had planed it down. He regarded the body with the flat attention of someone who had seen a great deal of death and never quite stopped noticing.

“Highness. The salt is deliberate. The water is deliberate. Whoever did this wanted the bells rung and the old fear stirred. That isn't a killer. It's a message.” He crouched and touched the crust at the dead man's lips with one gloved finger. “To whom, I wonder.”

The Chancellor had arrived. Isaveth saw him standing at the colonnade's edge, in his charcoal coat, perfectly motionless, and for one moment his face held no expression at all. Not grief, not shock. It looked like a house with every shutter closed. Then he moved, and the gentleness came back over him like a cloth, and he was giving quiet orders to the physician and the pages and the white-faced clerks as though nothing in the world could surprise him.

His hand, she noticed, had closed hard around the gold ring.

“The court should be cleared,” said Dask.

“Not before it's counted,” said Oake. He rose. His pale eyes found Isaveth's, and there was no malice in them. There was something worse: a courteous pity, like a man preparing to tell a child that her pony has died. “Three days ago, Highness, there was no stranger in this palace. Three days ago, nobody within these walls was a mystery.”

The colonnade had gone quiet. Every eye had slid, one after another, to the high windows of the cartographers' loft, small and dark against the morning.

“I should like the mapmaker brought down,” said Oake. “If Her Highness has no objection.”

She had a great many. She stood in the dry court beside a dead man weeping water onto a dry floor and felt the shape of the thing close around her, neat, unhurried, and meant for somebody else's neck.

“None,” she heard herself say.