Vengeance: The Umbra Chronicles Book 1 Page 3

  Now, looking down at this very young slave in the Meistri fortress, I felt a sudden spur of hope that all the terrible things I’d been thinking hadn’t come to pass. Elisabeth was alone, but maybe some woman in the service of the White Queen would take her under her wing. Maybe no guard or gaoler had managed to lay so much as one filthy hand on her.

  Maybe one of the gaolers had a daughter and Elisabeth reminded him of her, so she wasn’t to be touched or hurt or even discomfited. I didn’t expect it, but I had to hope it, or I wouldn’t have been able to go on. Maybe on Elisabeth’s first night in the White Queen’s fortress, she’d appealed to some woman there and that woman had sat by her bed and sang her a lullaby.

  God help me.

  Elisabeth had told me, many times, that the Old Master told her that she was the nice twin. I wasn’t the nice one, but I had to do what I could for this poor girl.

  I reached out to pat her shoulder and sang her a lullaby that one of the creepyguardians, long, long ago must have sung to me and Elisabeth, my voice very soft and low. As I sang, I could hear the sound of the creepyguardian’s voice in my head as she’d sung the song, low and warm and rich. It was one of my earliest memories. There wasn’t much of my childhood that I cared to remember, but that was a pleasant memory. The girl rolled over and went to sleep in minutes. I stopped patting her shoulder and went back to bed.

  I curled up on my side, as the girl had, and cried myself to sleep.

  Three of them ambushed me on the way to breakfast in the morning. ‘You don’t belong in a dormitory with decent people,’ they said, poking at me. ‘You’ll frighten the younglings.’

  ‘You should sleep in the ashes of the fire.

  They went away, laughing at the idea of me sleeping in the ashes.

  God, I wish I could say it wasn’t too bad, but in truth it was bloody awful. The work was hard and the others treated me like I was an animal. After that first night, even my bed was a pile of rags in front of the embers of the fire.

  Chapter Three

  I caught sight of my own face in a mirror once and avoided mirrors after that. If you caught it at the right angle you could still make out the fact that there was a woman under the featherskin, the fair skin that had barely ever seen the sun, the dark eyes, and the shine of black hair covered by feathers, restraining the hair like a net. My hair was long, almost to my hips. At night, by the dying fire, I wrapped myself in my feather-netted hair to keep warm.

  I didn’t even get used to it. Every time someone called me ‘Featherskin,’ I felt a sting of shame. I’d tried to get them to call me Emer but that only made it worse. Then they called me ‘Princess’ and curtseyed in their dirty aprons, skirts held daintily in work- roughened fingers.

  A featherskin doesn’t get around much. I wasn’t welcome to join in the conversations around the big, scrubbed tables in the servants’ Refectory, but I heard a few things as I served their meals.

  I gathered that the war was going badly. That surprised me, because in my time, the White Queen was well on the way to wiping Camaria out of history. Soldiers seemed to be coming and going continually around the lower levels of the castle.

  In the strict hierarchy below stairs, there was no mercy. I’d thought that the lowly servants would talk to me but the servant who was next in line above me, Suron, was greatly relieved not to be the lowest of the low anymore and she tortured me. She took my brooms and brushes and hid them, put unspeakable things in my bag of clean, sweet rushes and dropped pins into the pile of rags that served me for a bed. The other servants weren’t so bad, but oddly enough the only one who was kind to me was one of the most senior servants in the whole castle.

  Darragh ‒ who didn’t seem to deserve the title “Master” ‒ always managed to find new ways to humiliate me. He had me serve him at a banquet once. I had to carry plates and jugs in all my feathered glory amongst the best dressed servants in the castle.

  Darragh sat to the left of the Empress. When I moved to his right to remove his plate, the Empress recoiled in horror at the sight of my feathered hand slipping into her field of vision.

  ‘What in Umbra’s name is that?’ she cried.

  I merely continued what I was doing, as though it wasn’t humiliating. Even the music had stopped to allow the Empress to fully voice her disgust.

  Darragh leaned towards her and murmured loudly enough for anyone to hear, ‘That’s the filthy thing the Librarians want me to watch over. I put the featherskin over it myself.’

  ‘Oh, a featherskin,’ the Empress breathed. I was sure she was watching me depart. ‘I haven’t seen a featherskin since I was a girl.’ She laughed, a light, brittle sound and I felt the intensity of her gaze leave me. ‘How does one remove a featherskin, anyway?’

  Darragh inclined his head. ‘Only the person who clothed the criminal in the skin can remove it, your Majesty.’

  ‘I don’t want that nasty thing in my castle, Darragh, remove it.’

  ‘Forgive me, your Majesty, but the other Librarians have placed me under a geas to guard that criminal. That one is very dangerous. It murdered several Librarians.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ was all she said, before I escaped back to the kitchens.

  The next day, I was cleaning the ladies’ solar, a circular room at the top of a tower. It was before sunrise, the stars just starting to fade in the night sky. I was under strict instructions to be quiet, because both princesses had their rooms just below the solar. If I woke them, I’d find myself even lower than I already was ‒ a whole head lower, in fact. I cleaned the room and opened my bag of rushes to sprinkle sweet herbs on the floor. I no longer put my hand directly into the bag without checking first, because lovely Suron had once slipped a cowpat in there.

  Taking the bag out into the hallway because the light was better, I angled the bag towards the lamp and looked inside.

  I couldn’t help but scream, but I felt stupid for it. As I opened the bag something leaped out at me. I dropped the bag and jerked backwards. Something small and brown, a mere speckled shadow on the floor, hopped away.

  At least I was glad to see it hop. I’d been afraid for a moment that it might run away on many small legs.

  It hopped down the stairs and I followed it, bent low to try and catch the little sucker. I didn’t even notice where I was going until a door opened and a woman rushed out. ‘What are you thinking?’ she whispered. ‘You’ll wake them up! Aoife will eat you alive if you wake her before dawn!’

  ‘Oh, no,’ I whispered back. The frog had hopped past her into the princess’s room.

  The woman, the princesses’ lady’s maid, looked down, following my pointing finger and watched the frog hop towards the bed. The look of horror on her face was so absurd that it was all I could do not to laugh.

  We followed the frog into the room and we must have spent fifteen minutes trying to find the damn thing. The room was a shambles, things cast about here and there with no care at all. It was even harder because the princess was sleeping in her bed, and we couldn’t light a candle or make any noise. Of course, it was hilarious and many times we caught one another’s eyes and tried to suppress the giggles.

  I finally spotted the frog making a bid for freedom across the dressing table towards the window. I flung myself across the dressing table and caught the frog in mid air.

  And I knocked over a bottle of perfume.

  And the princess awoke as the glass bottle shattered on the stone floor.

  ‘Gwen, you clumsy girl,’ she muttered. I crouched, trying to hide behind an ornamental dressing chair that was not designed for subterfuge. Gwen hurried over to the bed.

  ‘Don’t be disturbed, highness,’ she whispered. ‘I’m just preparing your room for the morning.’

  The princess muttered something else, ‘mumble… mumble… three lashes…’ but it was clear she was already asleep again. Gwen gestured to me and I scuttled from the room behind her. Outside the room we nearly collapsed with laughter. Gwen came with me back into the solar an
d opened a window so I could let the frog go outside. Gwen went back to her duties and I went back to mine, scattering the sweet herbs on the floor.

  Gwen had called the princess Aoife. That was the White Queen’s name. No wonder people were so concerned about the war. It was only after Aoife, the White Queen, usurped the throne from the rightful heir that the war had turned well for the Meistri, and the Camiri were slaughtered or driven back to their ancient lands.

  It was a lot to get my head around. I was in the past, probably twenty years in the past if the fresh, teenaged face on the pillow was any indication. I probably hadn’t been born yet.

  All of this, and the thought that swirled uppermost in my mind was that if I’d gone so far into the past, then it was going to take me twenty years to get back to save my sister.

  I saw Gwen again the next day. She was wearing her usual grey servant’s gown with the white lace collar that showed her seniority among the servants. The likes of me weren’t supposed to mix with the likes of Gwen, so I stayed out of her way, but she seemed to be moving stiffly. She saw me ‒ I know that she saw me, going past with brooms and brushes, but she didn’t say a word.

  Later that morning, I was cleaning up in the princesses’ rooms when Gwen came in. She shut the door behind her, then stood there, looking at me, then looking away like I wasn’t supposed to see that she was looking.

  ‘Have I done something?’ I asked.

  ‘Um, no, um.’

  ‘Mmm?’ I asked, because there’s already a headstone out there somewhere saying, ‘Here lies Emer, who was a smart arse once too often.’

  ‘Um, would you mind doing something for me?’

  I put down my brush and stood up to stretch my aching back. ‘No, I don’t mind.’

  ‘Um, could you just…’ she made a little swirling motion with her finger.

  ‘Dance?’ I asked.

  ‘No, um…’

  ‘Spin?’

  ‘Um, turn around.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Um, it’s my back.’

  ‘Your back?’

  ‘Yes, um, when the frog came in here, you remember…?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Um, the princess said I should take three lashes.’

  ‘Three lashes!’ I was shocked, even though I knew the White Queen was cruel. ‘I thought she was half asleep.’

  ‘I don’t dare not take the lash. If the princess told me to take three lashes, then if I don’t take the lashes then it will be so much worse for me. The trouble is, I think one of them has split open and my gown keeps sticking to it. Would you be able to dress it for me?’

  She’d brought things with her to dress the wound. I obediently spun around to face the wall while she slipped her gown off her shoulders.

  I was no nurse. The three weals on her back were mostly just reddened, but she was right. One of them had split open. Cleaning the blood off her shoulder was nothing short of disgusting, but there was no way she’d be able to reach it herself. Afterwards, Gwen still hardly dared look me in the face.

  ‘Don’t tell,’ she whispered.

  ‘Who would I tell? Who would talk to a featherskin?’

  She shrugged her gown back up over her shoulders and fastened the lace collar. ‘If anyone knew I deserved a lash from my mistress, I’d never be able to bear the shame.’

  ‘You’re not the one who should be ashamed,’ I snapped. ‘She’s the one who should feel ashamed.’

  ‘Everyone would say it was all they could expect from a Camiri. I don’t dare draw attention to myself, the way things are these days. I’m not a young woman anymore. I’ve worked so hard to get where I am. I couldn’t bear to be sent to the Pens.’

  She wouldn’t listen to me. After all, who was I to give advice? Gwen might be only a Camiri, but I was only a featherskin.

  It soon became commonplace to duck out of the way of the soldiers as they hurried through the castle. When I’d first arrived, their armour was bright and clean ‒ now it was often stained with blood. The Camiri were rebelling in earnest and the Meistri were worried. The Camiri had made up the bulk of the army for generations.

  Even once I’d figured out what was going on, I still wasn’t privy to the general knowledge that everyone else seemed to enjoy. I could tell, though, that things were stepping up. When I went to sprinkle rushes in the solar one morning, I saw the light of fires burning in the city. Another day, when the maids clustered together in small groups to whisper every time they passed one another in the corners, I heard the sound of fighting in the nearby city streets from the dairy door after I collected the milk from a nervous dairyman.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked as we manhandled the heavy urns onto the trolley I used to transport the milk to the kitchen.

  ‘Just get inside, Featherskin,’ he retorted, ‘and don’t dip your fingers into the milk.’

  Just for that, I wanted to spit in it. After I dropped off the milk to the kitchen, I hurried along to the staircase that led to the servant’s quarters, just under the roof. No one noticed me, they were too busy huddling and whispering to think of me at all. From the servant’s quarters there was a little door that opened out onto the roof.

  The roof ran for what seemed like miles, some parts steeply pitched, other parts level and broad. Aside from when I went to clean out the stables or to pick up the milk, the only time I saw the sun was when I stole a moment to go out onto the roof. The only time I went under the moon, now that I no longer had a bed under her rays, was in the time I stole from sleep.

  Not that there was any point going under the moon anymore, since I had no magic for the moonlight to enhance. I still went through the motions of my exercises every day, though. I might not be able to reach my magic, but I was still going to behave as if I could. I’d done these exercises every day since we’d been in Cairnagorn. I wasn’t going to let Darragh stop me

  I looked down from the roof, peering towards the streets to see the fighting, but all I could make out was a mass of people in the streets and the distant sound of shouting. After a few moments I went back inside.

  That was the last day of fighting, but if anything, the gossiping got worse. Even I started to make out a few words ‒ words like ‘treaty’ and ‘surrender.’

  Chapter Four

  Since I hadn’t made trouble for at least five minutes, which had to be some sort of record for me, I was allowed to watch the betrothal ceremony of Caradoc, the leader of the Camiri rebels, and the princess, so long as I didn’t stand too close to any of the other servants. Apparently, the smell was quite distressing from downwind. I found a place that overlooked the ballroom. I was so high up I even overlooked the servants who overlooked the ballroom. The thought crossed my mind that I could spit on them from here.

  The scene below was colourful. Couples danced, the women’s dresses swirling prettily in circles above the marble floor of the ballroom. There was every colour of the rainbow spread out before me. The men were as colourful as the women in their silk coats and skin-tight breeches that showed off more than their calves. The room was edged with gossips, eagerly fluttering fans and wobbling double chins that I could see from the ceiling.

  At one end of the room was a dais, several stairs above the rest of the ballroom. On it were three chairs that can only be described as thrones. The one in the centre was large and ornate ‒ and empty. The two thrones either side of it were occupied by twin princesses in Meistri-white gowns trimmed with gold, their faces nearly identical to mine. I had learnt their names by now: Aoife, the eldest and Aine, the nice one.

  In my time, twenty years from now, Aoife was the White Queen, thief of the throne of Meistria. Aine was the Dark Queen, ruler of Camaria. One of them was probably my mother, given how similar we all looked, but as neither looked pregnant I had no idea which one.

  There was a blast of trumpets. The dancers changed direction, swirling towards the edges of the room until they mingled with the gossips. After a moment the Empress proceeded int
o the room. Her gown was gold silk and reflected the light of a thousand flickering candle flames. She glided up the stairs of the dais and seated herself on the centre throne. The princesses rose to their feet to greet their mother.

  ‘Behold,’ the Empress cried, raising arm to point at the doors at the other end of the ballroom, ‘the finest of the Camiri, the man whom the people have decided fit to take the hand of Aoife, my fairest daughter.’

  Aine didn’t even flinch. She stood there, calm and serene, with her hands folded in front of her. She might have been anywhere. Aoife preened and sneered at once, which I didn’t think you could do, but it only shows what you can achieve if you try. I followed her superior sneer to the other end of the ballroom.

  I wasn’t much of a position to judge, but the guy in the doorway was in serious need of grooming. He nearly filled the doorway, for one thing, and it’s hard for a man that size to look tidy. His hair was flaming red. I had only seen that colour once before, on a hive-guard who had tried to be kind to Elisabeth and me. His hair was wild, falling past his shoulders in a riot of curls and braids, threaded through with small blue beads. He looked like he hadn’t shaved for a week or more and he was dressed in a rough tunic and trousers that he probably hadn’t changed since the last time he’d shaved.

  He looked like it had been a rough week. I was as far as it was possible to get from the throne and even I wrinkled my nose and held my breath to make sure I didn’t breathe in the odour I could practically see wafting off him.

  And as proud as the morning star. He stood in the doorway, unshaven, hair matted, dressed in clothes that would make a tramp turn up his nose, and he held his head so high he was going to drown if it rained.

  ‘You have permission to approach, proud Caradoc, finest of the Camiri!’ A titter ran through the crowd. Aoife covered her mouth as she giggled. The other princess, Aine, darted her sharp glance, but aside from her eyes she didn’t move muscle.

  Caradoc marched down the centre of the ballroom. People stood back a little as he strode past. Aoife stopped giggling. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him run up to the Empress and throw a punch.