Kingfisher(29)

Her mother opened the door a moment later. Perdita saw her glance down the stairwell. Then she heard Perdita’s step and turned her head quickly to meet her daughter’s eyes.

Perdita saw only recognition and a faint touch of relief. The queen stepped back, opening the door wider. “You’re so late. Hurry and dress.”

“I know. I got tangled up in the line of knights.” The little chamber, richly appointed with chairs, couch, wardrobe, mirrors, cupboards, was already draped with the queen’s garments. Perdita began to throw clothes off as the queen closed the door and opened the wardrobe where Perdita’s acolyte’s skirt and tunic hung. Genevra, who rarely smiled, gave a sudden, helpless laugh.

“You smell like a brewery.”

Her mother was a mermaid, the child Perdita had decided. What else could she be with that long sea-foam hair, those green eyes, that skin as luminous as pearl? Decades of marriage, two walloping sons and two daughters, an adopted son from her husband’s lover, her own long, discreet affair, had added a line here, a shadow there, and deepened the intensity in her eyes. She knew that Perdita knew. Others in that women’s sanctum knew as well. But no one spoke of it. Passion had no part in Calluna’s world, which was an escape from the ruthless carelessness of the god Severen.

“There was an accident in a pub,” Perdita said, pulling off her boots, “involving a homeless man, an olive, and Gareth’s beer. Mother, what is my father intending, with all those knights on his doorstep? Are we threatening someone? Is someone threatening us? Are the old kingdoms going to rise up and rebel?”

Her mother, handing Perdita her sandals, hesitated a moment, then said simply, “I sent for Leith to ask him that. The sanctum has always been the last to find out what’s going on among the knights. He said it involves something Lord Skelton discovered in his endless prowls through his books. An artifact of Severen’s, Sylvester calls it.”

“For that I had to ask Daimon to give me a ride through the rosebushes? What on earth is it?”

“Something to do with Severen in his early aspect as the dying and reviving god. It’s quite old, Sylvester claims. And enormously powerful.”

Perdita sat down on the uncomfortable little couch that did not encourage lingering. She bent over to wind and tie the dyed green laces of her sandals around her legs. “But what is it?”

“Leith wasn’t certain. Something like a cup. Maybe a bowl. Anyway, Sylvester is very excited.” Perdita tried to imagine the frail, scholarly Lord Sylvester Skelton inflamed by a piece of crockery. “Yes,” her mother agreed. “It’s hard to picture. But he is impassioned enough to persuade the king to send his knights out to look for it.”

Perdita leaned back on the slippery couch and stared at her mother, astonished.

There was a tap at the door. “Come,” Genevra said, and Mystes Holly Halliwell entered, followed by Perdita’s great-aunt, the previous King Arden’s sister, Lady Morrig Seabrook.

Lady Seabrook, an absentminded relic from an earlier era, had vague gray eyes and a face contained within a labyrinth of wrinkles. She had worn black since the death of her young husband seventy years earlier. She served, for a couple of decades, as Mistress of Acolytes in the sanctum. As she aged, her duties had lightened; now she accompanied Mystes Halliwell to rituals and ceremonies, and she checked to see that the acolytes were at their designated daily posts within the sanctum whenever she happened to remember.

Holly Halliwell, a plump, pretty woman, was colorfully dressed in a blue and green silk robe overlaid with a web of jade and turquoise beads. She wore a crown of willow branches. Metal, which belonged to Severen, was never permitted in Calluna’s sanctum. She carried the staff of her office: myrtle wood topped with the goddess’s haunting face carved in pale green jade, inset against a full moon of ivory.

The mystes looked, Perdita thought, as though she’d swallowed a wasp. She gave the queen a formal bow before she raised the staff in her hand and let it thump sharply on the floorboards. Genevra, whose many subtleties of expression Perdita knew well, eyed her guardedly, as though she might peer under the couch or fling open the wardrobe door in search of the queen’s hidden lover.

But it wasn’t that.

“Queen Genevra,” Holly said indignantly, “have you heard what Sylvester Skelton is up to?”

“I heard,” the queen said, choosing words carefully, “he has asked the king to send the knights out looking for something of Severen’s.”

“Ha!” Holly lifted the staff again, then caught herself. “I do beg your pardon, Your Majesty. It’s just that I’m extremely upset. He has no right—I mean Sylvester, of all people, should know better. He’s a scholar, for Calluna’s sake! How can he have made such an idiotic mistake?”

The queen glanced down at her hands, looking perplexed. She wriggled off a ring of gold and sapphire she had left inadvertently on one finger, dropped it among her other jewels. “I’m sorry, Holly. I’m just not following—”

Morrig interrupted. Her voice, for one so aged, was unexpectedly clear and sweet. “Lord Skelton and I are also having a difference of opinion. He’s not listening very well. Hard of hearing, I suspect, from viewing a thing one way for so long. Hardening of the earways.”

“What Sylvester wants the knights to find never belonged to Severen!” Holly insisted, overriding her. “It belongs to Calluna.”