Book 9: Chapter 25
Herouxville
The Royal Palace
A SPECIAL SEATING AREA had been erected right in the middle part of the Royal Park, where Carl III planned to watch the day’s entertainment in the company of his family. Below him, to the right and left of his pavilion, stood numerous groups of nobles.
As a person of royal blood and the personal guest of the Vestonian Ruler, Verena was seated on the pavilion. Whoever had been in charge of seating for the event had taken special care to seat Conrad V’s resurrected daughter next to Prince Heinrich (something they had been careful to do throughout the week’s festivities), so that the Prince could regale her with his conversation.
Initially, Verena had felt somewhat uncomfortable as the center of the Prince’s attention, but gradually she managed to relax, and even found herself enjoying her conversations with the young man. Heinrich may have been a little bit blunt and rough around the edges, but Verena (who, after all, could read his energy system like an open book) quickly became convinced that his feelings for her were genuine. More than that, the men of his entourage — Baron von Herwart, for example — made no secret of their readiness to draw their swords against the accursed usurper who had stolen her father’s throne.
Such people were many indeed. Even just the 200 Astlandic nobles who had arrived in Herouxville under Marshal von Mansfeld, an old friend of her father’s, made for quite an imposing force. With his arrival, Verena truly began to feel like a Princess, surrounded as she was by loyal vassals who were ready to go to their deaths in the service of her cause. In recent days, it had become fashionable to refer to the existence of two royal courts in Herouxville, rather than the usual one.
Sophia had transformed from the superfluous, practically-anonymous Verena into the living symbol of an ancient dynasty. Everyone was talking about the new Queen of Astland’s imminent return to her throne.
Verena had discussed the matter with Carl on several occasions. Much in contrast to the rumors about his impulsive, menacing personality, she had found him to be a kind and understanding man. Every time they spoke, Verena caught herself thinking that Carl reminded her very much of her late father. An analysis of his energy system only made the resemblance more striking. The motions in Carl’s energy channels during their conversations made it quite clear to Verena that he was being honest and forthright in his friendliness. She simply couldn’t believe that anyone could put on an act as convincing and plausible as that.
Verena’s eyes fell on Queen Beatrice and Princess Adèle. She couldn’t help sighing as she looked at them. Verena had established a good relationship with the male side of the Royal Family, but the female side was a very different story indeed. The Queen of Vestonia and her granddaughter had obviously come to an agreement about how they were going to treat Verena — they were cold, even (at times) derisive. Not that there was anything particularly surprising about that, mind you. Queen Beatrice was a distant relative of the usurper Otto, as was her brother, the Duke de Bauffremont. They were both openly hostile to the fugitive Princess.
In secret, one of the courtiers had informed Verena that the Queen and several of her advisors had even gone so far as to try to convince Carl to hand Verena over to Astland, and thereby prove himself a faithful ally. But Carl was adamant. More than that, it was common knowledge at court that the King and Queen were having a spat. It wasn’t hard to guess the cause.
Verena had only had one conversation with Her Majesty, and Beatrice had hardly said a word the entire time, opting instead to yield the floor to her distant cousin, the Duchess von Dissen, who had arrived in Herouxville with a large retinue (obviously on Otto’s orders).
Verena had stoically withstood all the slights and digs from the usurper’s relatives when they met that day; she hadn’t dropped a single inappropriate word the entire time. Later on, as she analyzed the situation, the Princess came to the conclusion that her stupor had been caused by fear. Thanks to her gift, Verena had seen that almost all of the Duchess’ ladies-in-waiting were actually combat mages. Sure, they had all acted with the perfect decorum required by their station, but from time to time Verena would catch bloodthirsty glances from the group of hardened killers.
That same evening, she once again experienced a flush of emotion telling her to get as far from the palace — and the capital — as she possibly could. The feeling persisted for several days, like a frigid vice around her heart. Not even the constant presence of the King’s Shadows really helped. Gradually, however, the panic attacks stopped happening quite so frequently. And after Marshal von Mansfeld arrived in Herouxville with an entourage of strykers, Verena felt quite a bit more secure than she had before.
As for Adèle... Well, that was a much simpler situation. She didn’t care about politics at all. As Carl’s favorite, the young Princess was simply used to being the center of attention. Verena’s appearance had knocked the King’s granddaughter off of her pedestal.
A commotion among the Princess’ servants soon distracted her from these thoughts. They were busy staking out sites for torches around the huge stage, behind whose curtains a new troupe was already preparing for its act. The Royal Master of Ceremonies had announced them as the troupe of that very same Maître Brisot who had composed the famous “Song of the Red-Tailed Rat” that had spread so quickly through the streets of the capital. A murmur passed along the ranks of the nobility below. Many of them cast glances up at the Royal Family.
As far as Verena knew, Carl (who was normally quite fond of theatrical and circus performances) had not been a fan of this particular song when he first heard it. And the mischievous smile on the gaudy, painted face of his Royal Jester suggested that this troupe’s appearance on the billing was no accident. Everyone understood that Kiko had basically dragged the poor, unsuspecting performers to the King so that he could publicly pass judgement on them. First, though, they would put on one last performance.
As Verena watched the excited actors finishing their preparations, Verena noticed that there were children in the troupe. At that moment, she decided that she would try to convince Carl to spare these poor, honest people. After all, they were the only people who’d had the courage to speak up in support of the Margrave de Valier. It wasn’t hard, of course, to guess who the fox in their ballad was meant to be. Verena was furious at the horrible rumors surrounding the Margrave’s patrol units. People all across the capital were claiming that these units had started robbing innocent merchants and travelers on the Margraviate’s roads.
Verena had already tried to explain to the King that these accusations weren’t fair to Max. She had quickly realized, however, that the subject made Carl particularly angry, even if he managed to conceal this externally. Verena had therefore opted not to annoy the King by mentioning it, in order not to make things any worse for Max.
She glanced down at the bizarre-looking stage once again. Servants and artists were still swarming all around it. All sorts of specially-selected acts had performed over the preceding days of festivity, and the coming evening promised to be a fitting finale in a string of glittering spectacles.
To be honest, Verena hadn’t been particularly impressed with the earlier performances. Sure, some of the ballads had been pleasant to hear, and she had even seen a brand-new play performed for the first time, but the Princess wasn’t much moved by any of it. The smattering of circus acts hadn’t made much of an impression on her either.
The nobles who gathered to watch the shows every day, however, had obviously loved everything. Even Helga was obviously excited as she waited for the next performance. The northerner, whom Verena had managed to meet with several times since their introduction, had turned out to be quite a fan of circus performances. She tried not to miss a single show.
After their first meeting, when Helga had offered to deliver a message to Max for Verena, they had met for a second conversation. Verena smiled as she thought about it. The northerner had played things close to her chest, asking quite a number of leading (and, at first glance, fairly innocent) questions about Max. Verena, in turn, said nothing about the Margrave that wasn’t already common knowledge.
After these discussions, Verena concluded that there was something more behind Helga’s stated aim of delivering the Margrave an invitation to Prince Louis and Princess Astrid’s wedding. Most likely, Helga had been sent to the Margrave de Valier with some sort of proposition.
And Verena hadn’t yet been able to bring herself to trust Helga with a message to Max...
The trumpets finally sounded, heralding the start of the next performance. While Verena was slightly worried about the welfare of the troupe, most of the audience members were watching with a healthy degree of skepticism.
At the blast of the trumpets, the lights all around the plaza in front of the stage — as well as those scattered throughout the audience — suddenly went out. Verena thought to herself that the artists must have shelled out quite a bit to make that happen. Royal manservants, after all, wouldn’t have agreed to help for free, and they certainly didn’t come cheap.
The first flickers of red-orange fire emerged from the darkness below the stage, to a collective gasp from the audience. Verena’s hands clenched around the armrests of her chair — a reaction she herself hadn’t been expecting at all.
The fires turned out to be round eyes on some very strange-looking masks, which looked like the heads of big, toothy lizards with elongated torsos and six claw-tipped paws. The legs were obviously human.
The savage-looking lizards were moving too fast for any other explanation to be plausible. Every sudden step, every click of “claw” against the floor, sent up a little flash of sparks. Then the lizards disappeared, and the curtain rose to reveal a bright, colorful set. It was a throne room. The audience gasped. Princess Adèle’s eyes were wide; she stood up from her chair.
The gemstone-studded throne, the blazing crystal chandeliers, the tall windows with the capital stretching away into the distance outside them... It all looked so real that Verena thought she was looking through a big window into some alternate universe.
She looked around. The audience was frozen. Their eyes were bulging. Nobody had seen anything like this before. What Verena was seeing made all the previous performances seem gray and shoddy by comparison. She noticed that Helga was standing there open-mouthed, staring up in awe at what was happening on the stage.
Meanwhile, the spellbinding show continued. Drums began to thunder, and trumpets began to blow as the Tiger King made his appearance on the stage. This was a massive, broad-shouldered man in a striped suit, wearing a tiger mask and an impressive-looking crown on his head. A long sword with an engraved hilt hung from his belt, and a golden cloak was billowing through the air behind him.
As soon as the Tiger King swung his sword, Princess Adèle jumped for joy and began gleefully clapping her hands.
“Look, grandpa! He’s like you! A Tiger King!” She shouted, turning to Carl.
Seeing the happy look on the King’s face (he was obviously still stunned by what he had seen during the first few minutes of the show), Verena smiled. Whoever had written this play had obviously counted on just such a reaction from the King.
Shouts of approval rang out from the audience, and everyone present burst into an ovation alongside Princess Adèle. The sour look on the jester’s face, however, was painful to behold. Everything that was happening was a surprise for Kiko. But he quickly recovered, and began clapping along with the rest of them.
Next onto the stage came Fox, a crafty soldier in an orange-red suit, complete with a black-tipped tail and a fox mask. A tense pause hung in the air.
The drumroll picked up pace. Tongues of flame burst out above the stage, and green sparks hissed toward it from both sides. The audience let out a scream of surprise.
Fox bent down into a courteous bow before the Tiger King. The latter let out a thunderous (and very real-sounding) roar and raised his sword above his head. The play didn’t have any lines, but judging by the way that Fox rushed off in the direction that the Tiger King had indicated with his sword, it was pretty clear what the authors intended to suggest.
The hall descended into darkness. Then, from the sides of the stage, enormous monster-shaped decorations began floating in toward the center. A long-fanged wolf, a toothy lizard, an enormous snake... The beasts were snarling, hissing, and howling. The sounds put goosebumps on Verena’s skin.
Fox raced into battle. He was jumping, rolling, swinging his sword; whenever he hit a “monster,” a burst of multicolored fire would erupt from inside the beast. Streams of flame poured from the mouths of the beasts, threatening to engulf the agile Fox at any moment.
He slid on his knees to dodge the lizard’s enormous tail; he shot up into the air off the stage, straight over the snake’s head. Verena couldn’t tear her eyes off the stage, but she suddenly felt a violent shudder pass across her body.
The monster decorations and the still-fighting Fox slid away to the sides, making way for a new set. This time, the Tiger King was being set upon by mysterious figures with rat tails, who ended up wounding him severely.
Princess Adèle squealed loudly as the Tiger fell, and the lights faded until they were almost out. All that could be heard was loud, heavy breathing, and the sound of setboards sliding.
When the torches burst into light again, the audience beheld the wounded ruler lying on a raised bed — a symbolic royal bedchamber — with animal-healers swarming all around him.
The King seemed to be on death’s door. Meanwhile, the Rats had strapped red tails onto their backsides, and were running amok in the foreground, robbing and frightening all the “little beasts” — baby bunnies and birds, whose roles were all being played by the troupe’s children. The little ones were surprisingly good at simulating genuine fear, running and screaming all around the stage in their efforts to evade the horrible rodents.
Then came a single, deafening blast from a horn: Fox was back. He took one look at the chaos sown by the Rats and launched into a vicious battle against them. As soon as Fox approached a given rat, a flash of golden sparks would erupt from its tail. He was chopping off their ginger tails and hurling them to the floor. The Rats ran away in panic, throwing their weapons to the ground. To the tune of furious pounding on the drums, Fox chased all the usurpers from the stage.
The finale came as the recovered Tiger King, resplendent in his armor and once again holding his sword, came out to greet his loyal vassal to the sound of general fanfare. Fox bowed before his master, falling to one knee as he did so, and held up the severed fox tails in a demonstration of loyalty to his ruler.
The King raised his sword above his head, and the stage burst into light — servants had hurriedly set up additional torches all along the perimeter. The musicians burst into a rapturous melody, at which point all the characters (including the six-legged lizards and newly-tailless rats) filed out onto the stage for a bow.
Princess Adèle shrieked with delight as she turned to Carl:
“Look, grandpa! The Tiger King’s all better, and Fox is serving him! This is about you and the Margrave de Valier, right?”
The King burst into peals of laughter, delivering a kick to the sour-faced jester at his feet. Carl was obviously pleased. Slowly and loudly, he clapped his hands several times in a row, and Verena let out a sigh of relief. A wave of excited gasps and loud applause erupted from the nobles in the audience below. They obviously hadn’t been expecting such a spellbinding show, or such amazing special effects: everything from the flashes of fire to the amazing acrobatics from Fox was new to them.
Led by an amazed Princess Adèle, the courtiers came forward, chatting excitedly among themselves. They approached the stage, in order to get a better look at the set and the actors’ costumes. The cast simply smiled meekly, replying to the thunderous applause with the occasional bow. Verena could hear invitations to various capital-city palaces raining down onto the heads of the star-struck Brisot troupe. Everybody wanted to see a repeat performance — only this time, they wanted it at their own receptions.
* * *
A gloomy darkness reigned in the halls of the Palace. Only the occasional candlestick served to cast some light down the halls, throwing flickering shadows onto the wooden panels and velvet drapes.
After the performance, Verena felt a sense of faint tiredness, as well as a strange sort of nervous anticipation that she couldn’t really explain. She left the garden, where shouts in honor of the Brisot troupe were still ringing through the air, in search of a few minutes of solitude. She needed at least a little bit of peace and quiet amid the general furor.
The hallway through which she was walking happened to run parallel to one edge of the inner garden. Through its tall windows, she could see the moon bathing bushes, statues, and fountains in its gentle light. Verena strode across the marble floor, headed for a small side door that led to a lounge where the women of the Palace could freshen up after performances like the one they had just seen. As usual, she was accompanied by two of the King’s Shadows, who waited outside while she went in.
Stepping over the threshold, Verena looked around, found that the room was empty, and sighed with relief. The Princess walked over to a big blue velvet couch, sat down, leaned back against it, and closed her tired eyes. How wonderful, she thought, to simply be alone with oneself. A few minutes without someone else constantly controlling her... It was priceless.
Alas, the sound of footsteps quickly tore Verena out of her reverie. She sighed and opened her eyes, then cast a look around to see who had decided to follow her example and get a little break from the festivities outside. Verena saw five figures in dark clothes, all wearing masks on their faces. She jumped up from the couch in terror. An icy chill ran down her back.
She was about to call for help, but one of the newcomers cut her off.
“Save your breath,” said a derisive female voice with an Astlandic accent. “Those two won’t be helping anybody ever again.”
Verena switched to true vision and quickly examined the energy systems of these mysterious newcomers. All five were strykers. Four women, one man.
Verena knew that she was doomed. Strangely, that made her feel indignant... Would this really be it? Was her life about to end — just like that, here and now? What would have been the point of it all? Why had she gone through such a long journey, so full of pain and humiliation, just for this?
“You’re as brainless as your dear old daddy,” said a male voice. “You should have stayed in your little hole and kept your head down.”
Instinctively, Verena took a step back toward the doors, but one of the strykers shot forward in a lightning-quick lunge and grabbed her by the wrist.
The Princess screamed and tried to free herself, but the stryker’s powerful fingers wrapped themselves around her throat. Verena croaked; her eyes were darting furiously from side to side.
“We’ve got bad news for you, I’m afraid,” snickered a female voice. “We’ve been ordered to leave a message for Carl. This is going to hurt a lot.”
A sudden lunge — and Verena flew into a corner of the room. She pushed herself up on trembling arms and stared at the approaching killers. A brackish taste began to spread through her mouth.
Suddenly, something flitted through the shadows next to her. A human figure appeared between her and the strykers. Verena gulped and stared at the mysterious newcomer. He was wearing a fox mask. Oh gods, she thought! It was the same actor who had played the lead role in the performance.
The strykers froze for a moment.
“My friends.” Fox’s voice had a vicious edge to it, and sounded somewhat muffled by the mask. And yet somehow, it also sounded vaguely familiar to Verena. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but you’ve already failed your task. That said, I do have one piece of consolation for you. You’re correct about one thing: this is certainly going to hurt a lot.”