In the Ruins (Crown of Stars 6)

“He does not know where you are. We haven’t any way to let him know. If any of us escape, Holy Mother Antonia will hear of it and send horrible demons after us to eat us alive. That’s what Lady Elene says.”

“I don’t believe her! I hate her!”

“You should! You must! You will! She is like your mother, trained as a sorcerer. She knows. We are trapped, Your Highness. And you are more vulnerable than ever now! Do you understand me? Lady Elene is our friend. So is Lord Berthold and Brother Heribert. And Lord Jonas. And our servants, Berda and Odei. But no one else. We can trust no one else.”

Footsteps rattled on the ladder. Blessing folded her hands over her loins as soon as Julia’s head appeared and sat there stubbornly, refusing to budge, until Anna wrestled a shift on over her bare shoulders. A moment later, the healer appeared.

“Berda, come here!” said Anna.

“Small queen sick in her belly?” The healer knelt by the pallet.

Anna turned her back to Julia and lifted two fingers to seal her lips. The healer nodded. Blessing, still sitting cross-legged, pulled her shift up to her hips to show the blood streaking her thighs.

Berda nodded. “A drink calms the belly,” she said in her odd voice. Her broad hands smoothed the shift back over the girl’s legs. She touched the girl’s forehead, throat, and her collarbone on each side.

“Some sickness in the food,” she said. “Have you piss this morning?”

Blessing shook her head.

“Come, small queen.”

They went to the corner, where the chamber pot was tucked away behind a bench, and Blessing did her business. Julia came over to look, but after Blessing rose, Berda squatted quickly with her heavy felt skirt concealing this complicated maneuver, since the steppe women, Anna had seen, wore both skirts and trousers. She then peed in her turn, and rose with a grimace.

“Moon turns,” she said. “I am bleeding. Must move my bed to upstairs.”

It was a habit of the Kerayit healer to sleep downstairs with the men most of the month, and upstairs with the women during her bleeding, although it seemed to Anna that it had not been more than two weeks since her last sojourn upstairs. Never mind it. They would burn that bridge after they had crossed it. She looked at Berda, and the healer nodded, covered the pan, and offered it to Julia to dispose of, as was her duty.

“I fetch drink of herbs for the small queen. She rest this day.”

Rest she did. Berda found clean rags for her, to catch the blood, and pretended they were her own. It was not so difficult, once the ruse was begun; Julia, like the other Aostans, found the healer so peculiar that she didn’t like to get close to her.

Afterward, they went about their usual routine. Water must be brought up for washing, and the buckets taken downstairs and emptied and rinsed out. The morning chores broke up the monotony of the day, so Anna eked out each least errand, dawdling where she could. She didn’t even mind it when, after the upstairs was tidied and washed, she was sent down to empty the dungeon bucket. The old man didn’t scare her, although the stink was bad. After the first few weeks, the soldiers simply stopped going down with her because they hated the pit, and she was free to make quick conversation with the Eagle, mostly a detailed account from her of yesterday’s doings, and perhaps a few oblique sentences passed back and forth between him and Lady Elene.

This morning, though, the soldiers loitered nervously by the outer door, as if keeping an eye out for someone they expected to come along at any moment. Anna had a clean bucket in one hand as she reached the head of the steps that cut down into the gloom. The sergeant on duty glanced back into the chamber and saw her.

“Here, now,” he said, lifting a hand to get her attention.

But she was already descending along the curve of the stair with the cold stone wall brushing her shoulder and the bucket dangling over air as soon as she cleared the plank flooring. It was quite dark, but she knew the feel of the wall and the angle of each step by now. She could have gone down with her eyes closed, and indeed she paused partway down, in the shadows, and closed her eyes, because she heard voices.

The tower rose in levels, with the deepest chamber dug out of the earth and markedly colder than the ground floor and the other rooms stacked above. The space below was used to store beans and onions, and here also three small cells had been bricked in. From her place on the stairs, with the dampening of sound and the lack of any footsteps clomping above, she heard them speaking in low voices. One of those voices was familiar to her; the other had a strange, enchanting timbre that seemed to stick her feet right where they were so that she didn’t dare, or want, to move.

“You cannot escape because Antonia controls the galla.”

“I do not fear the galla.”

“You should.”

“Perhaps.”

“Then why do you not escape? If you can, why don’t you?”

“Is that not obvious? I have those to whom I am responsible. If they cannot run, then I cannot run.”

“Thus meaning, you cannot protect them from the galla. Is it Princess Blessing, or Conrad’s daughter, who holds you here?”

“Why can it not be both?”

“I heard the story once that you tried to drown Prince Sanglant, when he was an infant.”