Nettle & Bone(11)

She had not, however, realized that the maid might be superstitious. “What dead kings?” she asked.

“Under the palace,” said the maid. “That’s where the crypts are. You have to keep them down there deep so that the frost doesn’t heave them back up, but it means they’re all cold and dry and they don’t really go to bones as quick as they should. Tuck your chin, ma’am, so I can get this bit here…”

Marra tucked her chin obediently. In the mirror, her neck vanished into a plump roll. She wondered if the maid was going to continue on her own or if she needed to ask for more information. Fortunately, this was apparently a favored topic.

“All the dead kings are down there, and the dead princes, too. They say it’s a whole palace of the dead down there. Each king got a room, you see, and the queen got her room next to his. If she had any babies who died, they put them in her room, and in his room…” She gave a small, pleased shudder. “In his room, they’d put the royal concubines, back in the days when they had them, yes? And if the concubines weren’t dead when they buried him, why, they’d strangle them with a silken cord and put them down there beside him.”

Marra watched her own eyes go wide in the mirror. “Goodness! What did the queens think of that?”

“I expect they were just glad to get their own room,” said the maid practically. “But of course, some of the kings had more than one queen. If she died before she had any babies, they sent her back to her people, but otherwise, they buried her here, so sometimes the kings have three or four rooms branching off their room, and then the princes would also have rooms nested in there, so now it’s like a maze down under the palace, and nobody knows how far back it goes. Sometimes people try to explore it, but they have to take a family tree in one hand and a map in the other, and they don’t always come back.” She wrinkled her nose. “The dead don’t always lie easy, particularly kings, and they don’t always approve of the way their descendants are running things, so they come up and walk around and disapprove. That’s why there’s so many drafts.”

“Goodness,” said Marra again. She would have liked to swear rather more strongly, but it did not seem appropriate for the princess’s sister, who was also mostly a nun. “Are there so many kings as that?”

“They don’t last that long,” said the maid, matter-of-fact about the royal family’s mortality. “It’s hard to be a king, and the ones who don’t die in battles waste away young. You’ve seen His Majesty, of course.”

“He’s very old,” said Marra, thinking of the ivory teeth and the wandering mind.

“He’s barely fifty.”

“What?”

The maid laughed, but kindly. “Oh, aye, it’s in the blood. My mother served his father and his grandfather, and she only retired last year. Some say there’s a terrible magic over the kingdom and it’s the godmother’s blessing that keeps it all at bay, but the strain of it wears on them, poor souls. My mother, she said they burn themselves out keeping us all safe. Who knows, though? Anyway, that’s why the palace under the palace is so large.”

“Oh…” said Marra faintly, wondering what her sister had married into.

“There’s some who say that it’s not just the kings,” added the maid. “You can’t have a great big palace of the dead like that without grave robbers, can you? So it’s all laid about with curses that rip the souls out of the robbers and wad them all up together, and they say that goes waddling and wiggling through the halls of the dead palace, looking for more souls to eat.”

“Oh my.”

“Makes you fair shiver, doesn’t it?” said the maid cheerfully. She patted Marra’s shoulder as if she were a horse. “You’re all ready to go, ma’am. Best not be late for the christening.”



* * *



It was at the christening, for the first time, that Marra saw Prince Vorling.

He was small. That surprised her the most. Her whole family had ordered their lives around his whims, and he had loomed very large in her mind. But he was barely taller than Kania, slim-hipped, with a narrow, angular face. He stood behind the golden cradle and smiled and smiled, his eyes as flat as river stones. He did not look as if he were aging out faster than a normal man, but perhaps it came on the kings all at once, or perhaps it was only a maid’s gossip.

Still. She looked over at the king, his hair as soft and thin as that of the infant in the cradle. Could he really only be fifty?

The christening itself was dull. Courtiers stood around and pretended to be fascinated by the sight of a cradle that presumably held a child somewhere in the pile of lace and linen. As a family member, Marra was closer than she might have been, but as a very unimportant person in the family, her primary view was over her mother’s left shoulder.

The cradle had golden ribbons on it. The king mumbled a name and then Vorling shouted his daughter’s name in a carrying voice. Marra caught that the first name was Virian and then it dissolved into a welter of names that slipped out of her mind as soon as it went in. Surely they cannot be saddling this child with all those names? she thought. She wanted to give her sister a bemused look, but she could only see the side of Kania’s face.

And now there will probably be speeches, she thought, and steeled herself to stand looking calm and composed and politely interested.