The next morning, Mongen showed up at Ultrina’s door wearing a tunic and sash over his breeches, the only true sign the soldier was indeed home. He still carried with him his sword, which dwarfed everything Ultrina carried; however, she had not reason to worry over him at that moment. They were simply going to go down to breakfast.
Ultrina had been up for some time prior to his arrival. Long enough to have communed with her spirit and allowed herself a moment of self-pity over her situation. If she did what she wanted, she would die. If she did what was asked of her, she might still die. There was no way out of this which allowed her to keep her head. Unfortunate as that was, the idea of escaping only briefly occurred to her. She could make a run for it, but she had no doubt in her mind of how much Mongen would look forward to that and possibly even encourage it so that he could hunt her down and kill her. Ultrina did not intend to give him the satisfaction.
“Are you prepared?” he asked standing in the doorway. She nodded and moved to join him as he stepped out into the hall. There were other people moving around despite the early hour, probably servants, but people were people. She could feel them moving about, her awareness automatically ranging out around her in search of someone who might be useful as an undead puppet later.
“Can you actually do what the King is asking?” There it was, the question Ultrina had no answer for. The answer was yes or no in his mind, but in hers, there were other things which impacted her decision. If she chose to do what she was told and kept it exactly as things were meant to go, then perhaps she could be said to have done what the King asked. Of course, she could do what she had envisioned the night before and lose her head in the process. It was simply a matter of making a choice, a choice which would determine the exact length of her life in all honesty.
“I can,” she said simply. She could bring someone, perhaps even the Princess, back into the Princess’s body, but that didn’t mean she would be who she had been previously. In fact, there was a nearly perfect chance that time in the afterlife had changed her. Would the King even want her back after everything she had seen? Ultrina didn’t have to worry about that part overmuch. In truth, there was nothing she could do about it. Her choices were few, limited.
They passed a servant in the hall with a heavily laden tray. The mugs on it were empty, but the jug set in the center sloshed with his every step. He seemed to be having trouble with it, though he made every attempt to keep the platter aloft. Ultrina marked him not so much for his trouble, but his obvious age. In death, everyone was much the same. It was life that played unfairly.
The servant disappeared around the corner of the corridor, leaving the pair alone as they walked the halls of the citadel, each busy with their own thoughts. Ultrina skimmed the edges of the rooms around them, feeling for the maids and other sundry servants who made life run within the walls.
When they reached the King’s private dining room, Mongen stopped, eyebrows going up. There were only two seats available and one was the King’s. Mongen cast about for someone who might be able to tell him what was going on, but Ultrina settled herself into the extra chair without so much as a backwards glance.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking my place at the table,” she said flatly. “The King undoubtedly wishes to speak to me at length about his request. Perhaps it is you who are unnecessary.” Her tone said nothing untoward, but it was obvious she did not intend to move or relinquish her space.
“You have not been bid to sit,” he said.
“I have not been bid to stand either,” Ultrina said quietly, her hands in her lap. She closed her eyes and began to prepare herself for what was to come next. The King would enter and he would make his demands, whether it be that she stand in his presence and allow Mongen her seat or that he call on Mongen to stand at his right hand and show the power of the throne. It didn’t matter to her either way, she was prepared for both eventualities. The King might have power over all the world as she knew it, but he did not have great power over her. Ultrina would be her own woman to the end.
The King entered to the sound of a door being thrown open and approached the table with his tunic only half done.
“We must hurry,” he said without fanfare before sitting down. “Things have changed.”
Ultrina said nothing as Mongen took up a place at the King’s elbow. As she had not been bid to sit or stand, Ultrina stayed where she was and waited for the rest of the message. Things changing in such a way that the King himself would appear to a meeting without his full dress meant nothing good.
Mongen stood with his hands behind his back, a position which would let him palm a weapon should it become necessary to protect his King at a moment’s notice. Ultrina could agree with that.
“The Ball must happen within the next fortnight. Which means my daughter must be able to attend by then. I need to know, puppeteer, what more do you require to do what I ask?”
For a moment, Ultrina considered what seemed necessary.
She needed a sacrifice, that much she knew from experience. However, what else she might need, she didn’t know. The scroll spoke of bringing others to life, but it said truthfully very little about it. The sacrifice was necessary to appease the afterlife which was being robbed of its proper due when one stole a soul from it. However, the rest was pure guesswork on her behalf.
Ultrina wracked her brain in those moments as she looked into the desperate eyes of the King. What else did she need? She needed time. Time to figure out what she needed and time to figure out the Princess before she could hope to find the right spirit.
“I need to enter the Princess’s private chambers and I need to have time to speak with those who knew her well.”
“I can grant you those things. How much time will you need?”
“I will have her ready in time for the ball, but I cannot say sooner.”
Storm clouds passed across the King’s face, but he did not speak in a thunderous voice. It was a whisper like a breeze heralding the worse yet to come. “You will do this for me, or you will die.”
A moment later, a man dressed in the colors of the citadel entered flanked by two men with trays. Apparently, the food had arrived.
Ultrina took those moments while the food was being delivered to think. There was definitely something she needed, but without knowing what it was, she would have quite a time getting it. Best she figure out what it was and quickly; otherwise, at the King’s command, her head would be separated from her shoulders, perhaps by Mongen himself. Her appetite took a turn for the worse as she contemplated her rather near death. All things considered, perhaps it would be a relief to finally finish her life. She would no longer have to live with what had happened before, she could join her family in the afterlife. That thought was immediately followed by the awareness she had no intention of dying. There was a way out of this and she just had to find it.
Set before them were several things Ultrina did not immediately recognize. Though she had traveled throughout the Holy Land, she had mostly eaten what she herself hunted or bought from merchants that she could identify. These things which the King ate for breakfast apparently were neither of those things.
The King sat with his plate before him as others placed things on it. Ultrina waved away the food she didn’t know and tried to see what there was which she could tell what it was. The servants drew up their eyebrows at her behavior, though they said nothing. Then they looked to the King for his approval or disapproval of her behavior. Silence. He said nothing and seemed to be more preoccupied with his own plate and starting to eat to notice what Ultrina was doing. The servants withdrew to the edge of the room a few moments later, taking the trays with them and covering them with cloth.
With a nearly empty plate, Ultrina tucked into what was there. She would discover her way to the kitchen later, when she was free to roam. Assuming of course she didn’t have to have some form of leash on her to keep her from going where she pleased.
Mongen hadn’t moved from his position, though his face said he paid attention to what was going on. Perhaps he had eaten earlier and did not truly need to join them for breakfast. Ultrina found herself watching him through hooded eyes, waiting for him to say or do something which might give her a clue to what he was thinking. Yet there he stood, stone faced in spite of everything.
“I will withdraw,” Ultrina said quietly after picking at her breakfast. “Show me to the Princess’s rooms, please.”
The King gestured for Mongen to move and the giant stepped away from the King’s elbow undoubtedly to be Ultrina’s escort throughout the citadel.
“My daughter’s wing is well guarded, do not attempt to leave it without permission.”
Ultrina nodded in agreement to the those terms. Now that she knew she would not be able to travel far within the walls, she reconsidered how she felt about breakfast. Picking up off her plate what looked like sausage of some kind, she popped it in her mouth and then stepped away from the table. The King continued to eat without seemingly noticing her. He had said his piece and she would abide by it, or lose her head.
Ultrina had no desire to lose her head.
Mongen stepped out of the King’s dining chamber and held the door for Ultrina to join him. There was no reason for him to be so nice to her, but she took it for what it was, a show of power. He had every right to decide where she went and how she got there; therefore, she needed to be careful of the giant.
“Mongen,” she said. “How did the Princess die?”
“I don’t know,” he said without looking at her. He led the way out of the King’s chambers and into the halls of the citadel once again. The bright washed walls of daylight dazzled Ultrina for a moment after the darkened dining room. Ultrina took a deep breath, blinking rapidly to bring her eyes up to speed as Mongen walked away from her. He was leading the way into a new part of the citadel and she needed to remember her way around.
In this section of the citadel, the walls were a quiet green, not so bright as new leaves, but bright enough to reflect the light from the windows. Ultrina had to guess that the Princess had commissioned the walls this color. Perhaps that would be a question she asked her when she met with her in the afterlife.
Chuckling, Ultrina considered other questions she might ask to make sure she had the right spirit. Ghosts could be tricky, their memories fragmented at times by the way they died. The why or how of her death could be the key to bringing the Princess back from her final rest. Of course, she had to find out what was going on with the Princess prior to her death to insure things went as smoothly as possible.
They reached a room with a stouter than normal lock on its door. Mongen produced a key from within his tunic as if he had been awaiting this moment. When he unlocked the door, he did not step inside, but gestured for her to precede him. Ultrina looked at the room within and then at Mongen.
“This is her chamber?”
“It is.” His face refused to move, though Ultrina saw something in his eyes which made her wonder. “Go inside,” he said.
Ultrina stepped inside the door and Mongen shut it behind her. A moment later, the door was locked from the outside. Inside, the room had the same pale green walls as the halls, but this place did not have the enlivening light of those halls. Instead, it was dark, the curtains pulled on the windows as if to preserve everything within. From the thin scrim of dust over everything, no one had entered perhaps since the Princess’s death. There were no tracks on the floor, which said the same. The bed was made, water still in the wash basin clear and untouched. Ultrina took a deep breath of the atmosphere and let it flow into and out of her. The slightest chill inhabited the air, still and thin as if it were waiting for someone to break it. Ultrina stepped further into the Princess’s bedroom, her hands gathered against her body to avoid disturbing anything. There was no reason to disturb anything quite yet. A plan, small and unformed, appeared in Ultrina’s mind as she looked at the sullen empty room. There was a sense of the girl who inhabited the place, but Ultrina needed a deeper sense of what was going on. Of what had led to the death of the Princess in the first place.
Had her death been natural? Unnatural? Man caused or by her own hand? Those were questions which settled in Ultrina’s mind uneasily. She knew too little to affect the change she needed. And she was locked in for an indeterminate period of time. That meant she would have to make the most of it, what this room had to offer.
Ultrina strode to one of the tall windows and twitched back the curtain to allow some more light into the room. The bright green of the walls reflected it back, showering the place in enough light one could see the dust motes of Ultrina’s passing in the air.
Turning to look across the bed toward the door, Ultrina considered how she might learn what she needed to know about the young woman who had inhabited this space. Her eyes fell on a desk.
Of course the Princess of the Holy Land would be a woman of letters. Ultrina could read the text of the scroll she had been given as a child, but that didn’t mean much. The words were meant for her to read, the common tongue had never been of much interest to her. Now, however, she might well need to be able to read what was written upon the Princess’s desk. It would, hopefully, be written in language Ultrina could read. If not, she would need every moment she could to decipher everything available. Going over to the desk, Ultrina picked up the first sheet of parchment she came across. From the form, it was a list of some kind.
Skimming it, Ultrina tried to make heads or tails of what the Princess had been making the list for. It was written in High Form, which made things all the more interesting seeing as High Form, while a language she recognized on sight, was not a language Ultrina read. It was the language of edicts and royal messages. If one stayed far away from royal messengers, one would never truly learn it without being a member of the court. Ultrina had always avoided reading edicts and that meant, she had little practice with High Form.
“Common would have been easier,” she murmured to herself. Though why the Princess would be writing in common, Ultrina didn’t know. She placed the list off to the side and picked up another parchment, going methodically through the things lying on the Princess’s desk. Each time, she came upon things in High Form, the letters beautifully scripted across the paper. The parchment paper, for all its thinness, moved like silk through her hands. If Ultrina had been given to writing anyone, or had anyone to write, perhaps she would have bothered with parchment. As it stood, everyone she cared for deeply had gone to the afterlife already. They had only the rituals of the night of souls to look forward to.
Ultrina stopped, her mind going backward for a moment. The Night of Souls, there was one every turn of the moon, when the moon disappeared for the night. When had the Princess passed? She didn’t know exactly, but if it had been less than a turn ago, then maybe she had been touched on the Night of Souls.
“If she had been,” Ultrina reasoned. “Someone knows what happened.”
Perhaps someone from the Church would know. Ultrina considered cursing, but bit her lip against the thought. The Church would know everything from the moment of her birth until the day of her death since she was of the royal family. Therefore, there was some record of what happened to her, somewhere among the Church’s archives. Maybe Tal could get them for her.
Ultrina hesitated to ask Tal to do anything for her. The Sister had been chilly since their arrival in the citadel, but that could easily be put up to the fact that she was once again in the center of her faith and thus she felt the need to distance herself from an obvious heretic like Ultrina. However, if the King truly wanted this done, he would not allow anyone, not even a disgruntled Sister, to stand in his way.
And the King wanted this done.
He wanted his daughter back.
Ultrina didn’t have to question why. The King had made it clear. He wanted his daughter back to insure the continuance of his line through the kingship. Without her, the line would fall to some relative of his. If there were relatives for it to fall to. Ultrina didn’t know or care about the royal family tree enough to pay attention to it. Who was in charge hadn’t been of interest to her since the death of lover and the near death experience for her which followed.
Those thoughts bubbled up inside of her with a ferocity she hadn’t anticipated.
She was back with her love, the young man who had given her heart a beat so many years ago. They stood on the grass at the edge of their village, hand in hand. A darkness had crept into his body. Something she could see but not do much more than that. The sky had been clear in the moments when they first arrived there, but a storm offered them a heavy whistling breeze which tugged at her hair and tunic. Ultrina swallowed knowing what would happen next. This wasn’t a dream she had, but a nightmare which reminded her again and again of the world she had lost. The pale blue of her tunic spotted with blood as he coughed suddenly, his whole body shivering enough to make her own hands shake. Ultrina caught him as his knees buckled and he convulsed, her eyes filling with tears. The mass, the mess, the darkness within his body was winning and she couldn’t do anything to stop it. Or at least, so she thought.
Their horse cropped grass close by, hardly better than a nag, but they had it and that was enough. A horse, any horse, was a commodity not to forget. To have one was to have the ability to go when one pleased without wearing out yourself.
Ultrina considered the animal, considered it without seeing it even though she stared at it.
The scroll of her childhood whispered to her from her memory. A life for a life. Whatever one chose to bring back from the afterlife, there was to be payment. Ultrina saw the death of her love, felt his ghost rising from his body, and knew she had time to do what she must. Lying him down in the grass, she withdrew the knife he kept on his person for skinning game, and approached the horse. It shied, almost as if it were aware of the end of its life coming with its mistress’s approach.
Yet it did not run when she reached it and brushed her free hand along its neck. It still had so much lifeforce left, despite its age and previous ill use. Ultrina felt it reaching out to her, felt it offering itself to her whims. A horse would be a suitable sacrifice, wouldn’t it? Ultrina needed something, the ghost was already starting to fade. Whatever happened, it needed to happen soon or she might well lose him. A species of panic slipped a knife into her skin and began to pull. It offered her little quarter as she stabbed the horse in its neck, cutting through the main artery with one swift blow.
The horse screamed and started to run away, but didn’t get far before it tumbled headlong into the grass and kicked feebly.
Blood on her hand, Ultrina considered what was to come. How was she to do this? Going back to the body of her love, she lifted him uneasily. He had lost so much weight in his sickness that she could carry him, but not far. She carried him over to the horse and laid him down beside it.
Blood and tears streaking her face, Ultrina closed her eyes and envisioned what she wanted to happen. The horse would go, her lover would return his body healed of the sickness which had taken his life.
A clap of thunder said the storm had arrived and the rain began in earnest, soaking the blood into the earth and driving it from the grass. Ultrina’s hair dripped from the sudden water, and the blood spread on their tunics until the fabric had gone the pink of summer flowers.
The horse died; its spirit reaching for the heavens where it belonged for its service. And the world became suddenly still. Ultrina could reach out and touch the droplets of rain before her face. Time had stopped, caught in the moment of two lives trapped in a sacred dance.
Ultrina took the knife, the horse’s blood gone from it now, and brought the tip to her own hand. Piercing the skin, she offered up her own contribution to the ritual and then pressed the bloody tip to her love’s forehead leaving behind a smear of blood.
His eyes flew open, cloudy at first and then turning clearer with each passing second. His heart began to beat again loud enough Ultrina heard it from where she knelt.
Her breath came in a gasp. How had she known to do that? It wasn’t on the scroll.
“What have you done?” he mouthed, his voice not yet coming from his throat, but more from her mind. Ultrina stared at him, stared as the rain began to fall again, fat droplets splashing on his face that had turned into a grimace.
She didn’t know what to say. She had hidden for so long against what she had been, to tell all now seemed foolish. Yet what was she doing if not showing her forbidden heritage. The heritage which had sent so many to the fires before her.
“Only what I knew to do,” she said without inflection. Her eyes dropped to the forest floor where they would study each wet blade of grass and wait for her to hear more. She waited, the moments stretching like filament from a spider, for him to say more.
Her lover sat up from his place, staring with eyes going ever clearer. Soon there would be no telling what had happened to him, save for the bloody tunics they wore. Only she and he would know that he had died.
What had he brought her out of the village for in the first place? So that he could tell her he was going to die and then he died suddenly leaving her with no choice but to return him from the grave he had not even truly entered.
Ultrina reached for his face and he shied away.
“Where’s the horse,” he demanded.
She could only hide her face and wait for him to realize the animal had died within a few feet of him. Not died, been killed, she had killed their only horse in hopes of bringing him once more to life and she had succeeded.
Against all that she knew, she had succeeded in bringing him back to life.
Only she did not know if it was worth it with the way his eyes settled on her.
Ultrina shook herself awake. Once more she stood in the Princess’s chambers before the desk. How long had passed, she wasn’t sure, but the light filtering in had changed, so some time had certainly passed.
How much had she loved and lost in that little more than a day? He had been her all. Then he had taken away what little she had left, driving her onto the path of the nomad.
Now she stood to gain it all back.