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XXXIII. In My
Lady’s Chamber



“Sleep.”

Thomas listened to Isabella Birkin’s soothing voice. Not that it emanated from Isabella Birkin at all. If he’d had to guess, he would have submitted that it was the same Yvag who had befuddled him and tried to hand him over to Passelewe’s guards in The Pilgrim, the one called Zhanedd. She had been attempting to gauge the real Isabella’s relationship to him—probably had plucked images, memories from Isabella directly, the way she’d pulled them out of him in the cave—but in a hurry: She didn’t know how angry Isabella was with him at the moment, and so had gotten much wrong. Her not knowing the reference to the word inaudita confirmed his doubts. Had Isabella become a skinwalker, she would not have gotten it all so wrong. But, then, he had all three dights at the moment and thus the upper hand. They weren’t turning anybody just now. He wondered if the others had caught up with Isabella before she reached Laxton, or whether they, too, had endured a performance by D’Everingham and been made to down drugged wine. Either way, not that much time had passed, so presumably they were somewhere nearby. He hoped they were all still breathing. They couldn’t have been interrogated yet.

Having cast her spell over him and put John to sleep, “Isabella” crept into the room. With one eye, he narrowly peered at her going through their belongings. She was quiet but methodical. She reached deep into his mason’s bag, feeling all around inside it before returning it to its peg. Finally, she held his quiver, drew the arrows out, placed them on the low chair. Not letting himself smile, he watched her feel about in the quiver. Unsatisfied—as he’d known she would be—she replaced the arrows and hung the quiver off the chair arm again. If she wanted to search his clothing, to seek the pouch that hung from his neck, she was going to have to roll him over. He had a dagger at the ready if she did.

For a moment she stood still and stared at him and he kept his eyes shut, listening for the sound of cloth in motion. Pressure swept his way, within it the strong impression of the dights. Did his mind answer the call?

Finally, with a sigh of frustration, she closed the door and walked away. He let out a long, held breath and opened both eyes.

Soon enough she would discover that her husband was not simply drunk, but had swallowed whatever potion they had prepared for him and Little John. When she did, she would return, no doubt armed and ready to kill him.

It was time to hunt for the Keepers and Isabella. Other than as a gauge for how long D’Everingham himself might remain unconscious, snoring John was going to be useless. There was no time to waste. He rolled John on the bed, then pushed up the linen-wrapped straw and dug his arm deep beneath it until he touched the Yvag knight’s armor. As no one had found it, he supposed he could assume that all the servants were human, no one glamoured, else they’d have gone pawing through everything in here while the lord and lady distracted them.

Out in the great hall, Isabella was directing four servants to carry D’Everingham to his chamber. Her voice fairly dripped with disgust.

Thomas peered around the doorway. Lifted up, D’Everingham tried unsuccessfully in passing to grab onto Isabella with his one free arm. She turned and slapped him. “Idiot!” she said. “And your like are supposed to be so superior. Get him out of my sight.” He tried to latch onto one of the female servants tasked with dragging him off, but tawny-haired Edme took her cue from her mistress and swatted his hand away. Thomas hid behind the large open door and let them pass by. Small bursts of pressure in his head suggested that the Yvagvoja was attempting to complain to Isabella, perhaps to say that it had been poisoned. She ignored the communication, turned, and followed the servants out the far door.


As carefully as possible, Thomas searched through the main hall. He avoided the few servants who came and went, carrying off the food and drink that had been laid out for him and John.

With each turn of a handle he expected to find bodies, poisoned, drugged, or spelled into a trance. But there were none. The bed chambers all lay empty, unused, save for D’Everingham’s room. His lecherous host lay alone and snoring within the draperies of his bed, and still fully dressed. No doubt nobody wanted to be near him.

The next chamber along he assumed would be Lady Isabella’s. He had a dagger out as he cautiously opened the door, but that room, too, was empty, as if nobody used it.

There were no cells, and no cellar lay beneath the stones of Laxton Castle’s ground floor. He wondered if there was some other hidden room, but then why would it have been built and where? The exterior shape of the hall conformed with the chambers he had already investigated.

He exited the main hall, and stood awhile at the top of the motte, from where he studied the various inhabitants below where most of the houses, buildings, and a small church stood, inside the second curtain wall along with the stable and paddock.

Nothing about the scene suggested anything odd, and he very much doubted D’Everingham shared any of his dealings with the villeins who farmed and worked Laxton.

However, the main hall itself was flanked by two smaller sets of buildings. Thomas glamoured himself as one of the men he saw below and walked around to the buildings on his right. He knew from the smell before he reached them that these were the kitchen and pantry houses, and behind them the adjacent buttery. Peering into each, he got some odd looks from the staff, including two of the women who had served in the great hall, but no one interfered with his search and he found no one. Nor in the well, where the elves seemed to like to dump their enemies.

He walked around the back of the hall to the single smaller version of it on the opposite side. Two stories like the main hall, and with two smaller mullioned windows in the front, echoing the larger ones in the hall.

He lifted the latch and pushed open the door.

The ground floor comprised just a single chamber, with a low ceiling of thick beams, and a stone floor again; there was an empty hearth, old tapestries and a few X-framed seats, a row of benches, and a small table. Lady Isabella’s blue sleeveless surcoat and gown lay across the table. To his left, a stairway hugged the outer wall. Thomas crossed to it and followed the stairs up. As carefully as he tread, he didn’t know these steps, so it was impossible to keep the stairs from creaking in places. At the top, the bare stone wall became paneling. Directly ahead stood a closed door. He paused to listen and caught the faintest hint of Yvag thrumming.

Delicately, he opened the door. It gave a loud creak.

In the center of the room, Isabella turned with a gasp and in the same moment dropped the large curtain around her bed that she’d been holding up. He glimpsed a limp hand before she stepped forward, capturing his attention. She was dressed in only her undertunic.

Her probing stabbed at him. Thomas could see that she wasn’t pretending to be surprised. She’d really thought him laid out by the potion in the goblets. He closed the door behind him. The bed stood on a riser. Three sides of it were hidden by an elaborately carved set of screens. The posts almost reached the ceiling. There was a padded stool near its foot. A small writing table across the room, and a hearth with protruding and carved stone hood. In the hearth stood an incongruous well bucket with a ladle handle protruding from it. On the far side of the room, he thought something shifted in the shadows near the darkly beamed ceiling.

He smiled to Isabella. “Do you know, I’ve tried and tried, but I simply cannot find your foresters anywhere.”

“Robyn, my heart. Whatever do you mean? I’m . . . I’m surprised—and delighted—that you found my own apartments. Why ever would you want the Keepers with us?” Even as she spoke she was trying to enchant him with a hummed note or two. It was hardly enough, no competition at all with Alderman Stroud’s wordless tune long ago. She strolled away from the bed to her table.

“Tell me, did they catch up with Isabella before she arrived at Laxton, or were you forced to improvise when they interrupted your capturing her? And then we showed up. You didn’t have time for a proper interrogation, not like Passelewe gave Little John.”

“I told you,” she replied, “they all rode off together.”

“‘Together’ is a certainty. You haven’t had time to deal with them one by one. But none of them ‘rode off,’ now, did they?” He gestured at the curtained bed. “Must have been difficult carting them all up here. So, tell me, was it the same elixir you used at The Pilgrim, or something different?”

Isabella’s expression hardened. Her probing changed to images flung at him—of the weird ley where he’d seen Nicnevin’s changeling babies before they were transmuted; the Queen carrying one into the pond for the ritual. He could not help recalling how he’d nearly drowned in that glowing pond before learning to breathe the lucent fluid. From fragments of her thought storm, he understood that she believed as Passelewe had that he must be one of them. He did not disabuse her of the idea. Better that than she learn who he truly was.

Instead he reacted to the images she invoked: “Why show me the Pool? Nicnevin isn’t transmuting Keepers this week, is she?” He walked closer.

This close, she exuded lust like a perfume. Unlike her skinwalker husband, she controlled and directed that lust. She was very much like the Queen herself. But she was also frightened.

“Or was that your memory of when you were made? Yes, it’s always there, isn’t it? But I thought changelings forgot they’d ever been anything but Yvag. I met one who derided them all as inferiors, never for a moment considering he might be one himself.”

She faltered then. She knew herself to be a changeling and under all of her cold and efficient achievement, she doubted herself. She fought for recognition. He read it as if it were written on her skin.

She redoubled her effort to wrap him in her desire. She shrugged and the undertunic fell around her feet. Naked, she faced him.

The lure of her compelled him, but he denied it. “You are not Isabella,” he said.

She tilted her head, looking at him. “And you are not human. So.” She shifted. Her body rippled and knotted, twisted and flexed. It lasted only a few moments but must have been painful to endure. He remembered reshaping all too vividly.

The form of Isabella Birkin was absorbed into the true insectoid form of the Yvag from The Pilgrim, her belly ribbed with yellowish muscle, rose sprinkled at her throat, arms ending in taloned fingertips. But above it all was the face of Innes; it was impossible not to see his sister in those greenish-gray features despite the spicules, the metallic hair, the hungry, golden eyes.

I am Zhanedd. Embrace me. Her desire was a rope around him. He must obey. Everyone obeyed. She smiled, baring her needle teeth.

He knew what she was expecting: another changeling like herself. He could only conclude that she believed him to be one of the rogue Yvags driven insane by the transmutation, that Taliesin had spoken of forever ago as his “mad companions.” Her lust rolled over him, but he had been here before, with Nicnevin. He would not give in, but he let himself stumble closer as if she had him. She backed up to the bed.

Tell me now where you’ve hidden the dights. As she asked it, she turned away. Reached under the bed curtain.

She swung back quickly. He’d already closed the distance. Now he charged, rammed her with one shoulder, threw her against the curtained frame of her bed. The Yvag sword she’d just drawn leapt and stabbed into the wall across the room and back again. Splinters of paneling flew. Zhanedd struck her head on the thick bedpost and dropped to the floor. The sword fell beside her. Had he succumbed to her overtures, it would have plunged right through him. So much for giving in to any Yvag.

He knelt beside her. He ought to kill her with her own sword . . . Only, unconscious, she bore an even more uncanny resemblance to his sister. Finally what had been obvious even at The Pilgrim smothered his long-held desire for revenge.

This was Innes’s child, the one the elves had snatched and replaced. There was no cause for her to maintain that face now: It was her own. Alderman Stroud had lied and claimed Innes had borne a son, but Innes had given birth to a daughter. He was certain of it, just as he was certain that he ought to kill her with that sword, but he could not make himself do it. At war with himself, a voice that once would have belonged to Alpin Waldroup, his mentor, warned him that no good came of showing mercy to an Yvag, while his own argued that there must be some part of his gentle sister in this changeling, and he might yet find it. Right now, however, he had no time.

He picked up the elves’ elongating sword, stood up, and drew back the curtain. Four bodies lay across the bed. From behind it came an unholy shriek.


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Framed