“Yes, Your Grace. We never actually got near it. The crowds were everywhere.”
“What’s…what’s the Place of White Stones?” Ophele asked, looking between them.
“That’s the place where they execute criminals, child,” Azelma said gently. “We were caught up there for so long, even Lady Pavot roused enough to take notice. She asked the coachman what was the matter, and he went to check, and when he came back he told us they were executing House…that House.” She glanced at Remin, her light blue eyes shining with unshed tears. “They had been executing them since dawn. Your Grace, I can stop if you want me to.”
“No. Go on.” His face was dead white.
“Yes. Well. Well, when she heard that, Lady Pavot gave a little scream and fainted dead away, but we were delayed so long, there was time for the coachman to run and fetch some smelling salts from an alchemist to bring her back around. We sat for hours before they finally started diverting traffic. She was…sick. We could hear it, every time the crowd cheered…”
Ophele covered her mouth with her hand, feeling as if she might be sick herself. She wanted Azelma to stop. She didn’t want to hear anymore. No, she didn’t wantReminto hear anymore. She wanted to cover his ears and tell Azelma to be quiet, but his face was so hard and cold and still, she didn’t dare to move, and his eyes were like two open wounds.
“I could guess it had something to do with her.” Azelma pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and blotted her eyes. “She kept saying,but they promised they wouldn’t, I saidIdid it, they said if I just signed…she kept saying that, over and over again.”
“Did she say what she did?” Ophele asked wretchedly.
“She confessed to poisoning the Empress.” Azelma’s hands knotted in her handkerchief. “Poison to keep her from conceiving, poison that would abort the Emperor’s divine heir. She signed a confession that she had done it on the orders of Duke Benetot of…that House.”
Ophele was frozen with horror.
“But—but she didn’t,” she whispered. “She didn’t really—”
“No. I don’t believe there was ever any such plot. Until the day she died, she said His Grace was innocent. And she was sorry for it,” Azelma said quietly. “I know that doesn’t help. Even when she began to get sick, she said it must be a curse from the stars, for what she had done. Mercy, child, I thought the same,” she confessed, tears streaking her soft, seamed cheeks. “I will never forget that day. She was a good girl, but she was afraid, and she did a terrible, terrible thing. She was so afraid that you would pay for it, when she was gone.”
The silence drifted down, soft and cold and complete, like a blanket of covering snow. Ophele’s throat was so tight it hurt, as if all the words and thoughts and feelings were knotted and strangling her, and when Remin finally stirred and rose, she rose with him, terrified, horrified, and wanting more than anything else to somehow blot the last hour from his memory. But he caught her arms before she could wrap them around him, holding her gently away.
“Thank—thank you for telling me that,” he said stiffly to Azelma. “I might ask you more questions later. I am—going out, for a little bit. Wife, I am not angry. You did nothing wrong. I am glad you were born. I will be back.”
“Remin,” she whispered, but she did not try to follow him. He did not even pause. He almost stumbled over Miche, who was hovering in the hallway right outside the door, and kept going, his heavy boots thudding toward the stairs.
“I’ll go with him,” Miche said quickly, and his face blurred in her vision as Ophele’s tears overflowed, and she covered her face with her hands and sobbed wretchedly.
“Oh, child,” said Azelma, just as she must have done all those years ago with Ophele’s mother, and pulled her beside the fire to let her cry.
Chapter 6 – The Place of White Stones
It had not taken long for Remin to learn the details of his parents’ executions.
Three months. He had not even turned nine.
They were traitors. The shock and terror of the Conspiracy followed him all the way to Ereguil, the last survivor of his House, a walking warning of the Emperor’s wrath. Duke Ereguil had saved his life with some desperate gambit, but the logic of the people was that if the punishment was so terrible, surely the crime must have been unspeakable. Even in Ereguil, people looked at Remin askance, and common-born children called him a traitor to his face.
He felt guilty for years for visiting that shame on Duke and Duchess Ereguil. Though the Duke always swore that Remin’s parents were innocent, for the longest time, Remin had been sure it was a lie, and the only reason the old man said it was because of some promise he had made to Remin’s mother.
His father had died first. He learned that barely a monthafter it happened. Benetot of _______ had gone to the block in rags that scarcely covered his huge body, an unnamed prisoner whose House had already been blotted from the history books. It took six men to drag him to the block and hold him down.
“Stars above, protect my son,” was all he said when they read the charges, and then they made him kneel, and put his head down on the block, and cut it off.
His mother had fought. Freezing in a ragged shift that was too cold for February, with her long hair shaved off, she had wept and struggled, refusing to lay down her head. Some of the Ereguil children had laughed at that, and called her a coward, but Remin had always wondered if she just hadn’t wanted to put her face in her husband’s blood.
Red blood showed very dark on the Place of White Stones, where rightful judgment could be witnessed by all, and then scrubbed white and clean after justice had been carried out. And after his mother had come Remin’s grandparents, and then his uncles, and it had taken seven blows to sever his Uncle Soucine’s head, after which they paused to sharpen the axe.
The executions went on for weeks, as all of the guilty were captured and brought to the capital. All of his father’s House, down to the furthest cousins. All of his mother’s House Roye, to the third generation. All the servants of both Houses, saving those who had fled. The oldest was Remin’s great-grandmother Batilde, who was ninety-three and had to be helped up the steps to the block. His cousin Paole was the youngest to be beheaded; at twelve, he was tall enough to pass for sixteen.
All the other children and babies were strangled in prison.
Remin did not want to know these things. Others had flung this unwelcome knowledge in his face over the years, sometimes drunk and sometimes sober, sometimes viciously, and sometimes on the sands of the Court of War, hoping to unbalance him. When he was seventeen and went to Segoile,Remin had sought out the details himself, so at least he would know what was rumor and what was true, or malicious lie.
He had heard all of this before. He knew how all of them had died. That was a very old wound.
