Authors: Beth Bernobich
Doubtful, I thought. A man like that—a scientist—could have only one obsession in his life, and usually that was his craft, not a woman.
He had done with his packing. Still he had not detected my presence, but then I had placed myself outside of anyone’s casual notice. It was a trick my mother had taught me, back when I was a young child.
Watch first,
she said,
and then you will know how to act.
One by one, the crates vanished from the room—no doubt going back to the same hired van. Ó Cuilinn returned a final time and scanned the empty chamber, as though checking for forgotten items. The sunlight fell across his face, but his expression was hard to read. Discouraged? Or merely preoccupied?
The door swung shut. I counted to ten before I left my hiding place.
Only a half hour had passed since Ó Cuilinn had begun his demonstration, and yet the sun already dipped below the windows. The fire burned low; the air felt chill. Soon servants would come to sweep the floor and carry away the worktable. Soon my father would send for me, to ask me my impressions. Still, I lingered. I made a slow circuit of the room, sniffing. The burning odor had faded, but traces of it remained. The closer I approached the table, the stronger the traces were. The prickling sensation returned, as though tiny pins ran over my arms and neck.
Intrigued, I held my hands a few inches above the table. Where the octopus had sat, the wood felt pleasantly warm.
His demonstration was exactly like that of an illusionist. One moment, you saw the apple on his palm, the next it had disappeared. Hardly proof of a scientific discovery.
But he was so certain. And I am certain he could not lie, even if it meant his death.
Then I saw it—a shadow on the table. A clear, dark shadow, in spite of the fading afternoon light. I bent closer. Not a shadow, but a thin layer of ashes on the tabletop. Exactly where the bar had sat inside the machine.
My pulse beating faster, I touched a fingertip to the shadow. A film of dust clung to my skin. I tasted it. (A rash move, since several of my recent ancestors had been poisoned.)
The dust had the texture of fine grit, and a sour metallic flavor.
Was it rust?
Cold washed over my skin as I realized what I had consumed. This was not mere rust, but the remnants of a metal bar, corroded.
Very quietly, I brushed the iron flakes into my palm and closed my fingers around them. I felt as though I held the future.
* * *
A year and a month passed before I saw Doctor Ó Cuilinn’s name again.
My father had approved a grant for his research, and from time to time the King’s Constabulary sent reports on his work, but these went directly to my father. My own days had lately been consumed with preparations for my formal presentation to the Congress of Éire. I had appeared before them five years ago, after my elder brother had died, and my father named me the presumptive heir—more a formality than any real change in status. Now that I was eighteen, almost nineteen, this ceremony signaled I would take my place at my father’s side in ruling the kingdom.
This morning, however, one of those reports lay on top of the stack of documents handed to me by my father’s secretary. Memory shivered through me as I scanned the first page. Only after a moment did I understand its import.
“He has given up his post,” I said. “I wonder why?”
“Who has?” my father said.
We sat at the breakfast table, both of us reading feverishly in preparation for another long day. Lately, my father spent more time reading than consuming his breakfast, which worried me, and his face had taken on a gaunt and harried look. He seemed older—much older—than his fifty-seven years. One could almost see the shadow of bones beneath his skin.
He has outlived three children and his wife.
Hurriedly, I put that thought aside. “Doctor Ó Cuilinn,” I said, in answer to his question. “The man who invented the time machine.”
“Hardly invented,” my father murmured. “There were and remain several significant obstacles to such a device.”
“The corrosion of materials?” I guessed.
“Among others. According to the Constabulary, our doctor made slow but regular progress for the first six months. Lately, however, his laboratory assistants admit they do little more than sweep the floors while Doctor Ó Cuilinn scribbles notes and formulas in his journal.”
“You set spies upon him.”
My father laid his papers aside and regarded me with mild eyes. “I set spies upon everyone, my love. It is necessary, and you know it.”
I did. I remembered the assassination attempts from my childhood, and the investigations after my mother’s and brother’s deaths, when my father stalked the corridors of the palace, suspecting every councilor and courtier of plotting against the throne. My mother and brother had died of fever, and nothing more. But the assassination attempts—those were real.
“Back to Doctor Ó Cuilinn,” my father said. “Yes, I knew he had resigned his post. He gave no concrete reason to the university, but if I were to guess, I would say he believes himself close to discovery. He wants no distractions.”
“But the reports—”
“Are accurate, but they can only record his outward activities. Not his secret thoughts.”
Or his soul,
I thought. I had only observed the man for a scant half hour. Still, he had impressed me as someone who did not give up very easily. The word
obsessed
came back to me. “Will you extend his grant, then?”
“Possibly. Certain members of our Congress believe the device will have practical applications, and my scholars agree Doctor Ó Cuilinn’s theory about time fractures is … plausible.”
His gaze turned inward a moment, as though he surveyed a scene far different from this elegant breakfast room, the warm yellow gaslight glinting off the silver tea urns. Was he pondering the implications of time fractures? (The idea alone made me queasy.) Or was he perhaps remembering my mother?
Then he gave himself a shake. “Enough speculation. We both have a busy schedule this morning. Let us finish our breakfast and set to work.”
It was Tuesday, a day set aside for private interviews with delegations from other nations. Today, my father would meet with the Prussian ambassador, a stiff-necked, belligerent man, who matched his king’s personality well. It would not be a pleasant hour. The Prussian Alliance was seeking to expand their territory, and while their activities did not affect Éire directly, they did affect our closest ally, Frankonia.
Mine was the less taxing morning. An informal meeting with the newly appointed representative from the Papal States. Another with a group of Egyptian scholars, who wished to organize an exchange between their universities and ours. A much longer session with an ambassador from the Turkish States, listening demurely as the man droned on, and his interpreter murmured in my ear.
The noon bells chimed. The Turkish ambassador and I rose and went through all the formalities of leave-taking. It had been an especially tedious hour, and later events should have erased this insignificant moment from my memory, but a scattering of images and impressions remained. The man’s watery green eyes, almost ghostly in his brown face. The soothing lilt of his voice, which was echoed by the woman who translated his words. How faint lines and the mottling of his skin belied his otherwise youthful appearance. The scent of coriander and rose that hung about his person.
One of the senior runners escorted the ambassador and his interpreter from the room. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. I had a moment of respite before my next engagement, an intimate luncheon with my father and a coterie of influential representatives from Éire’s Congress.
Then, a door swung open.
I heard it first, a deep, grating noise that penetrated to my bones.
Even when I opened my eyes, I could not quite take in what I saw.
It was not the unobtrusive side door, used by servants and runners. Nor the ordinary ones used by visitors, such as the Turkish ambassador. No, these were the doors used only for the most formal state affairs. Each panel measured six feet by sixteen, and was carved from a single tree imported from the western continent. I had only seen the portals opened once during my lifetime, and that was when my mother had died.
An old man in livery marched into the room and stepped to one side.
Next came a silver-haired lord with the ribbon and chain of office draped over his raven-black coat. It was Lord Mac Gioll, the oldest of my father’s councilors. He had served as an officer, then as my grandfather’s personal adviser, when my father was but a young man. Old, so very old, his thin white hair like a veil over his skull. He walked with a stiff limp, but he held his chin high, and I saw there were tears in his pale gray eyes.
He stopped six paces away. “Your Majesty.”
“What are you saying?” I whispered.
Lord Mac Gioll knelt before me and bent his head. “My Queen. I have the great misfortune to report that your father…”
I heard nothing past that, only a roaring in my ears, but I knew what he was saying. My father was dead.
Impossible,
cried a voice within.
He was well not three hours ago. He—
“… the first to pledge my honor, my loyalty, my blood, and my self to your throne…”
As Lord Mac Gioll recited the vows of lord to queen, a part of me recalled that he had recited those same vows to my father, twenty-five years before, when he had lost
his
father to an attack by Anglian revolutionaries. It was important that I face the news with as much strength and composure as my father had. And so, when Lord Mac Gioll finished his speech, I held out my hands to receive his kiss upon my rings. With great difficulty (I knew better than to make any move to assist him), Lord Mac Gioll rose and gave way to the next man just entering the room.
* * *
Later, much later, I sat alone in my private chambers and laid my head upon my hands. Firelight jumped and flickered against the walls. No gas lamps burned here. Only a single candle guttered on the table. Its orange-scented perfume overlaid the wood smoke and pervasive sourness of my own fear.
I was Áine Lasairíona Devereaux, the seventeenth of my house to take the throne, the thirty-first ruler of Éire.
I do not want this,
I thought.
* * *
I did not want it, but I could not turn away from my duties.
And so I let tradition carry me through the next six weeks. When I looked back upon them, I remembered nothing in particular, just a weight against my heart, a curious and lasting numbness. The funeral itself proceeded without any misstep. A hundred ambassadors passed before my father’s coffin; thousands more—from Éire, from Alba, from a dozen or more nations of Europe and beyond—paused to bow and whisper a prayer, before making way for the press of mourners behind them.
And I, I stood dry eyed upon the podium, flanked by guards.
I have no tears,
I thought.
No grief.
Or had grief been burnt entirely away?
There was no one who could answer that question. Or at least, no one I trusted.
Afterward, I met with my father’s ministers and other members of Éire’s Congress. I held innumerable interviews with representatives from the Continent and farther abroad, those who came to express their condolences, and to reassure themselves that an alliance with Éire would continue to be to their advantage.
I also met with the royal physicians and ordered an autopsy on my father’s body. They soon reported he had died of a seizure of the heart. There were no signs of poisoning, nor that the seizure had been induced by artificial means. I thanked them for their thoroughness, wondering all the while when my grief would break free.
Ten days later came the coronation—a hurried affair, but my ministers agreed I should take control of the throne as soon as possible. Once crowned, others would find it more difficult to dislodge me. And there were those who would attempt it. I knew that from my own history.
The day began with a stuttering of snow—a typical late-January morning. The skies were flecked with clouds, and the sun, when it finally consented to rise, cast an uncertain light over Cill Cannig and the nearby city of Osraighe. Cold nipped at my skin as I darted from the palace into the waiting carriage.
The kings and queens of Éire had lived in Cill Cannig and the Royal Enclosure for six centuries. Tradition, however, proclaimed they would receive their crowns in the ancient cathedral of Osraighe. And so I rode alone in the royal carriage, shivering in my finery, in a slow, creeping procession from the palace, through intervening fields, and into the city. The clocks were just chiming ten as I arrived at the cathedral. There Lord Ó Cadhla took hold of the lead horse’s reins, while Lord Mac Gioll flung open the carriage doors to greet me with a long ceremonious speech. A cold dank wind blew against my face. I paused upon the step to listen, as the ritual required.
It was there the assassin took his chance.
A shot rang out. Fire exploded inside my shoulder, as though a white-hot spear had pierced me. I gasped and fell backward, reaching for that spear and thinking confusedly that if I could pluck the damned thing out, the agony would stop.
After that, I had difficulty remembering. Pain and more pain. The strong stink of blood. Lord Mac Gioll’s creaking shout, then Lord Ó Cadhla’s stronger voice calling for the Queen’s Guard. And me, retching all over my grand expensive gown, and weeping at last, weeping so hard and furiously that I retched more and finally collapsed onto the ground.
* * *
The wound proved painful, but not dangerous. Once the physicians removed the ball and bandaged my shoulder, they allowed themselves to be herded away by Lords Mac Gioll and Ó Cadhla.
“Your Majesty,” said Lord Mac Gioll.
I turned my head away.
“Áine,” said Lord Ó Cadhla.
That nearly caused me to look around. I stopped myself, but not before I glimpsed a smile on Lord Ó Cadhla’s grim face.