The Briar Crown, page 18
Frederik loomed at the centre, both leaning on his cane and using the door as a support. He wobbled and looked around with unfocused eyes.He was drunk, but Roslyn’s heart beat just that little bit faster at the sight of his rakish grin.
Before he could speak, she ran to his side. He was about to brush her away, protesting that he didn’t need any help, when as much to her surprise as his, she found her arms around his neck and she was pulling him into an embrace. He stiffened with shock at her sudden and impromptu rush of emotion, but after a moment he relaxed and she felt one hand sneak around her waist and grip ever so slightly.
“I don’t know how you did it,” Roslyn said breathlessly. She stepped back, a flush of embarrassment painting her cheeks at the sudden proximity. “But thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, from all of my people. Thank you!”
Prince Frederik smiled sadly and straightened himself, his hand gripping his cane so much that it shook a little. He nodded his head and turned his cobalt eyes towards her own. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from him. She tried to, but then found herself staring at his fine cheekbones, his golden curls and the fullness of his lips that were slightly apart and wet with the memory of wine.
Frederik cleared his throat, no hint of joy in his voice at what he had accomplished—simply exhaustion.
“I upheld my end of the bargain, Miss Pleveli.” It was then that she noticed the dark circles under his eyes, the tightness in his jaw and the effort it took him to stay upright after days of bargaining with his father—the man that she would have to heal. “Now, it’s time for you to do yours.”
A comely little maid roused Roslyn early the next morning. She was bid to dress in her finest clothes, but the maid held out an apron for her to wear over them.
“Where am I going?” Roslyn asked the girl, who could not have been more than fourteen.
The maid looked at her with a puzzled expression, one eyebrow arched until it disappeared into her fringe.
“Why, to see the king, of course.” The girl smiled wryly and rolled her eyes. “It would appear his majesty had too much to drink last night and is in need of some remedies. Prince Frederik suggested you as he went to bed last night, as you were so skilled healing him.”
Roslyn sighed and nodded her head. A cover story for why she was seeing the king. So, whatever his illness was, it wasn’t common knowledge yet. If it had been, no doubt Eik and the rebels would have attacked before now. A chill ran down her spine as she thought about how ominously silent they had been of late. It was well past the last moon of spring when they had planned to meet, but no rebel attacks had been reported by the Oderberg soldiers.
Instead of descending the steps to the great Hall or the throne room, Roslyn was led through the back passages behind the royal apartments, which were only used by a select few of the staff. These were the hallways that led directly into the chambers of the king and the princes. They stopped in the dusty, dark hallway outside a door where one small torch hung to the side. The young girl knocked three times and then waited. She looked over at Roslyn without moving her head.
“He’s not as frightening as he seems,” she said jovially, trying to make the healer more at ease, “but then again, I’m not Domovnian, so...”
Roslyn had no time to find out what the maid was going to say because the door swung open and they were blinded by the light from the room beyond. A steward looked her up and down and then turned to the young maid.
“I’ll take her from here, Heidi. Off you go.”
He didn’t give them any further instructions, just turned and walked back into the king’s sitting room. Roslyn followed, her palms slick with sweat, making it hard to hold on to her satchel. The steward led her to the fireplace and a high-back chair in which was sat the dishevelled and exhausted form of King Casimir von Oderberg.
Roslyn stifled a gasp. Although he had not seemed well the first time she’d met him, the man before her now seemed to have crumpled in on himself over the space of a few weeks. His hair was thin, almost non-existent, and what remained stuck up in tufts. His cheeks were so gaunt, they seem stretched over his cheekbones like vellum, his skin having taken on a yellowish tinge. He waved a shaking hand at the steward to dismiss him and then motioned to the stool opposite him.
“So, you seem to have done a good job healing my son.” He paused and narrowed his eyes, which were still shrewd and cunning, despite the rest of his decaying appearance. “Tell me, Domovnian, will his limp ever heal?”
Roslyn swallowed, finding a lump in her throat. She tried to clear it, but it wouldn’t budge.
“It may, your majesty, but then again it may not. As long as he does not push himself too hard and uses his cane whilst he is still healing, then I see no reason he shouldn’t have a full recovery.” She knew now from her conversation with the prince’s man-at-arms that it never would, but looking at the man before her, he didn’t have the time to find out for himself.
Casimir nodded and sank deeper into his chair. He placed his elbows on the armrests and steepled his fingers together by his lips. “You know why you have been summoned here?”
Roslyn gave a half nod. “Prince Frederik said that you had been feeling unwell of late.”
The king scoffed and snorted so loudly that he made her jump, but his laughter soon subsided into a coughing fit. She jumped from her seat and poured him a glass of water from the table beside him, inwardly cursing Frederik for having read her so well. She had to help the sick, no matter who they were. He took the glass with shaking hands and gulped at the rim, half its contents spilling down his fur-lined morning robe. He waved her away irritably and she sat down again, lowering her eyes as he wiped the spillage away.
“I have been ill for quite some time, yes. Now, I know what is wrong with me, but I want to see if you do. I want to see if you have any other solutions than my brown nosing, stuck-in-their-ways healers...” he paused, and when she looked up into his eyes, she saw fear there, the fear that she had seen many times before and hadn’t expected to see in the king. “In essence, Domovnian, you are my second and last opinion.”
Roslyn’s heart sank and her limbs moved as if made of lead. She rose from her stool and took out some instruments from her satchel. She blew on her hands to warm them and then raised the king’s shirt, conducting a full examination of the man, just as if he were the brewer or a beggar in the street.
The first thing she noticed was the large a growth on the lower right side of his abdomen, the skin stretched shiny over the mass. It had taken on a strange purplish hue and throbbed with his pulse. Here was a man who was very ill, indeed. He answered her questions fully and honestly, no matter how invasive.
Casimir groaned when she put her hands to the growth and pressed ever so lightly. She glanced up at him sharply, and saw that his face had drained of blood, the yellowness that had stained his skin suddenly more visible. As his eyes rolled back in his head and he made a sound as if to vomit, Roslyn snatched her hands away. She had seen enough. It was with a heavy sigh that she sat back down and wrung her hands in her apron.
“Your Majesty, I am afraid to tell you that you have the swelling sickness and it is very advanced, most likely it has taken root in the pancreas. There is little I can do for you. All I can do is to make you comfortable... until it runs its course.”
“Until I die, you mean?”
She bowed her head and looked him levelly in the eye.
She’d expected ravings, expected him to call for his guards and have her dragged down to the dungeons, but the man before her simply nodded.
“No doubt there are many, yourself included,” he gave a wry smile, “that think I’ve earned this. Comfortable is what I want in the end, and if you can help me hold on a little longer, until my son is wed, then I would be very grateful.” Roslyn’s heart tightened at his remark. Which son? Frederik? “My son says you have amazing sleeping draughts. In fact, he gave me one of your concoctions last night, and I found it to be most effective.”
“I can make you something stronger than that, your majesty. I can make you ones for daytime to chase the pain away, and others for night, to ensure you have a good sleep.”
King Casimir stared at her over his gnarled fingers and then laughed again, more gently this time, so as not to induce another coughing fit.
“Well, I would have said before that you’d try to kill me with your potions, and you may very well yet. Go on... have at it. I’m dying anyway, but just leave me enough time to get my affairs in order. You will speak of this to no one, especially not my sons. I will tell them in my own time.” He coughed and brought his hand to his throat. He rubbed at the spot, clearing his throat again and again, and as he removed his hand, he brushed away the collar of his nightshirt, revealing a thick, ugly scar that ran across his neck from his left ear to his right shoulder. It was old and had not healed well at the time of injury—the scar tissue was bulbous and swollen.
Roslyn gasped at the sight of it and the king looked down to see what had brought on such a reaction from her.
“Go on, ask away.” His voice was etched with weariness but there was the faintest of glints in his eyes.
“How—how did you get that scar? I’ve never seen one in that place on...”
“On a living man?” the king supplemented. Roslyn nodded, feeling an embarrassed flush rising in her cheeks. The king took little notice of it and stared into the fire.
“I got this twenty-five years ago, on a night that gave me my son’s name. Viktor. We were victorious that night when we took this land for our own, but it would appear that all victories have their price.”
He touched his hand to the scar again and traced along its length with his spindly fingers. “The Domonov Queen gifted me this.” He gave a wry chuckle and the hairs rose of the back of Roslyn’s neck.
Her mother. He was talking about her mother.
“She was certainly a sight to see, and a queen unlike any other, even my own wife, Veel, bless her soul. I first saw the Domonov bitch after breaching the inner walls and she was using all of her power, wrenching brambles and briars against my forces to slow them down, to slow me down, as I entered the sacred courtyard at Eluha. At first, I thought she just wanted to live. I thought she was doing it to save her own petty life, but then beyond her, in the flames of destruction, I saw a shadow. A woman was lifting a weeping child up off the ground from the queen’s skirts where she clung to them, and carried her into the smoke and away into the night. The Queen was slowing us down to save her child. But we were too many for her. We had machetes; we came prepared for their witchcraft.” The king shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I ordered men to find the child, to stop her getting away. I didn’t want any Domonov bastards coming after me in a decade’s time. The Queen knew what I was doing, and in a last-ditch attempt to stop me, she tore the crown off her head, a crown of pointed leaves and thorns, and threw it, spinning through the flames towards me.”
He pointed above the fireplace with a crooked finger and Roslyn, for the first time in her life, saw the fabled Briar Crown, the crown of the Domonov Queen. The Queen whose power balanced all flora in the land.
The crown that should have been hers.
A faint whine sounded in her ears as if it was calling to her.Its beauty, and its harsh ugliness, wrenched a gasp from her throat. Any woman wearing that would have been a fearful and empowering sight.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” The king growled, “She sliced my throat with that, so as my life bled out through my neck, I did the same to her... but I made sure my blade went all the way through.”
He fell silent and Roslyn, not wanting to witness him in the shadowy dimension of memory, stared up at the crown, her eyes filled with tears. Now that she had looked upon it, she could hardly tear her eyes away. It was crafted of a bronze-coloured metal, leaves and thorns and the tiniest of flowers all entwined into two pointed horns at the front. It would have encircled the head and given the wearer a set of impressive leafy antlers. As she looked up at it, she felt something blossom within her. She felt the sudden opposing force to the anger that had ridden within her so long, the anger that had had no outlet. At the sight of the Briar Crown, Roslyn was filled with hope.
“And the child?” The words left her lips before she knew they’d even moved. Did they have any idea she was still alive?
King Casimir grunted.
“They never found it. Probably died the same night, as the passage where the servant had disappeared soon crumbled in the fire that consumed the palace. Even if it’d been carried out of the rubble alive, there was no way the child would have survived the smoke inhalation... Besides, your rebels have never once proclaimed a pretender to my throne, so she must be dead.”
He followed Roslyn’s gaze up to the crown on the mantelpiece, the firelight glinting off its copper spikes.
“So, I keep the crown there, and I look at it every day. I look at it as a symbol of lost power, of the night a woman—a mere woman—nearly bested me.” He turned to stare coldly at Roslyn, his features twisted in hatred. “I keep it to remind the lot of you that it will never sit on the head of a Domonov again.”
She was back in Eluha. The courtyard was no longer bathed in cold, white light, but illuminated by the frantic orange dance of flames. Smoke clouded her vision and snaked down her throat, making her cough. In the obscurity she heard screams, saw people running past her. Tears fell down her cheeks, but she was searching for something. She crawled onwards, her hands turning black and bleeding from the rubble littering the ground. Half of her wanted to sit back and cry, to give up, but then she saw it, the thing she had been searching for. She moved as fast as she could, cursing the long white robe that flowed out behind her and knelt, reaching up for the one person who could stop this nightmare.
The woman was not white or ghostly, but fully fleshed, covered in soot and grime, her cheeks flushed with exertion. The bronze crown on her head reflected the fire, making it a blinding halo atop her dark hair. At the sight of the crown, her ears filled with a high-pitched whining and a piercing dart of pain hit her between her brows. As Roslyn fell into her skirts, the woman stopped her frantic waving; her bellowed orders ceased, and she looked down, abject terror in her eyes.
The woman looked around frantically and screamed at someone, but her words were muffled.
A word was on the tip of Roslyn’s tongue, but she couldn’t form it; instead, she just reached out with her strangely small, podgy hands.
Suddenly, she was lifted from the ground from behind. She shrieked and wailed, but the look of terror in the woman’s eyes dimmed, turning to one of sadness as she planted a hard, shaking kiss on her forehead and pushed her away.
The person carrying her ran from the fire, ran into the smoke and the darkness. A sudden chill made her skin prickle. Where were they? What was happening?
The noise had dimmed and she could hear the frantic breathing of her bearer, the beating of her bosom as she held her close. They stopped at a crossroads in what appeared to be a tunnel. She didn’t know which way to go.
“Here!” A voice warbled through the gloaming and a small figure stepped forward. The cloven hooves and haunches of a goat stood beneath the bare chest of a man. In her dream body, Roslyn clapped her hands. She knew this person but his name wouldn’t come.
“This way!” he called, but the woman shook her head.
“I must get the princess to safety. I have to get to the stables.”
“It’s too late, the tunnel has caved in. You must follow me! It’s her only hope.”
The woman holding her nodded and they scurried off into the dark, musty labyrinth in the hillside.
The pounding of the woman’s heart in her ear and the constant motion as they ran rocked Roslyn to sleep. She was woken by a cool breeze passing over her face. She opened her eyes and gazed up past the horned head of a satyr and the tearstained face of the woman who would raise her as her own, and saw stars scattered across an indigo sky.
Chapter 21
And so began Roslyn’s habit of visiting the king in his chambers twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening. She administered medicines that would ease his pain and send him into oblivion at night. Yet, she did not sleep. She had the king in the palm of her hand. She could end all of this now... it was what Eik, the bastard, wanted, and what her people needed.
At least once a day while she was preparing his medicine, her hand would flutter automatically to the hemlock shoved down her bodice. It would be so easy; all she had to do was make him one strong tea...
But every day, something stopped her. She wasn’t a killer, but there was more to it than that. She couldn’t kill the father Prince Frederik loved.
He was not the one that had committed these crimes; he was not the one who had slaughtered the Domonovs, ridding Domovnia of her rulers, her balance. The sons should not be punished for the sins of the father. And, if she was truly honest with herself, she knew there was another reason too, one that made her blush.
As she made up the batch one evening, her hand resting on her stays, a croaky voice made her spin round from the counter.
“If you are going to do it, just do it.”
The king was sat propped up on his pillows, staring at her. She swallowed and shook her head, the lie unconvincing to her own ears.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
A cold smirk lifted the sagging skin of his cheeks. “Oh, yes you do... Whatever you have shoved down there between your tits will kill me, won’t it?” Roslyn was about to shake her head again when his eyes narrowed and he reached for the coverlets. “Don’t make me come over there and pull it out myself,” he laughed coldly. “It’s been a long time since these hands have squeezed a warm, soft teat, so don’t think I won’t.”
Roslyn swallowed down the bile that had clogged her throat and reached in between her breasts, pulling out the linen-wrapped tuber.
