Page 43 of The Court of Venus

“Well done, Mouse.” Roland ripped away the tapestry and strolled over to the guards to check their pulse, then pushed open the door with his shoulder. We dragged the first guard inside by his boots, leaned him against the wall, set his slumped-over companion beside him. I filled their heads with memories of an exquisite feast. One began to smile in his sleep, opening and closing his mouth.

Together we surveyed the chamber. I had been here just this morning, but hadn’t gotten a good look. Charles Guildford was a collector—his wardrobe stuffed with furs, his shelves overflowing with dust-coated trinkets. We ran our hands along the shimmering jewels and astrolabes lying on velvet cushions, the gilded spines of books lining his shelves.

“This was Prospero’s,” Roland said suddenly, pointing to an object tucked far back, nearly hidden. An armillary sphere to track the heavens. It was made of brass and stamped with Jupiter’s symbol, a ♃. Roland pulled it down and began to fiddle with it, smiling as the spheres oscillated on their axes.

“If only we could find his wisdom hidden here, too. I thought all of his things were burned or discarded.”

Roland gestured to the bursting shelves. “Some things must have been seized by Charles Guildford first.” Then his attention returned to the sphere. “‘The greatest magic is your mind,’” he recited.

Prospero’s motto was engraved into the metal, too. He said it to remind us magic was limited, that we could solve problems without it.

The armillary sphere still in his arms, Roland set his boots on the desk, crossing one ankle over another. “Where shall we begin?”

“The books.”

There were hundreds. Any of them may have belonged to Eleanor. Neither of us could say what we were looking for, only that we hoped there would be something to find.

After an hour or so, Roland wiped his brow with his sleeve and collapsed on Charles’s bed, disrupting the smooth state of his coverlets. “We must think. Who was she? Who was Eleanor Guildford, and where would she keep her secrets?”

I had to admit I didn’t dwell much on Eleanor Guildford when she was alive.

“Do you remember the wide-eyed look she had?” he said. “Everything frightened her or shocked her. If she was indeed working with Prospero, she would have hidden the proof very well, and they would have communicated only in cipher.”

“I only knew her when she was a girl, not as queen.”

He rested his head in his hands, rubbing his temples, his jaw. “Yes, well, she was a terrified rabbit. I always thought she’d keel over from fright if I turned a corner too fast.”

I shook my head. Eleanor Guildford was never fearful, not when I touched her mind. Roland was remembering someone I didn’t recognize—or she’d changed after I left court. She was fearful because suddenly she had everything to fear. As queen, she’d been shaken to her foundations and never recovered.

“When Richard turned against her,” said Roland, who had now returned to the desk, leafing through stacks of paperwork and twisting a quill impatiently through his fingers, “she was found in her rooms lying in a ball in the corner clutching her prayer book. Imprisoned in the Archimago Tomb, she hardly ate or drank, only prayed and prayed that the king would see reason. She insisted he would forgive—”

I gasped his name.

The quill stilled. Roland squeezing it so tightly, his knuckles turned ivory.

“Where does a person hide valuable information if they’re particularly paranoid?” I said. “It would be something they could carry with them everywhere they went. They wouldn’t trust a hiding place; they would only trust themselves.”

“She carried it in plain sight,” he breathed.

“Yes, she never would have been seen without it. She would have even knelt with it before bed. No one would have suspected. And when she was arrested, and found holding it, they wouldn’t have suspected, either.”

“A prayer book?”

I nodded. “Her Book of Hours.”

Most courtiers had one—an assortment of verse and astrological predictions, divided into parts of the day. We set off, pulling volumes off the shelves until Roland found one that was thin and frayed, but I shook my head. “That’s not right.”

I surveyed the piles of books, finding nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing familiar, either.

I closed my eyes. I saw Eleanor, walking across the courtyard with her father, her long sleeves flapping in the wind. She wore a modest, unfashionable gable hood. Almost as pale as I was. Wheat hair, blue eyes. We were nearly the same age, she was perhaps three or four years older, and she sent a dirty look my way whenever I smiled at her.

In her hands, she clutched a small, oxblood velvet book with golden trim. She glanced over her shoulder, raised her chin. Maybe once I’d learned to transform better, once I could wear a new face for her, once I’d shorn my white hair off, she might be my friend. Maybe then.

I carried a remnant ache, a shard of childhood loneliness, out of the memory. “Red. Her family’s planet is Mars, so it was red.”

He scanned the shelves, running his fingers across the spines. And there it was. A small book draped in vermilion velvet, nothing extravagant. He deftly plucked it from the shelf. The pages were thick, crinkling as he turned them, the calligraphy work dexterous. Illustrations burst with colorful scenes of battles between lions and unicorns, the zodiac signs in the night sky, the seven planets anthropomorphized into ethereal, mighty beings. Roland flipped through, licking his finger before he turned each page. “You’ll ruin it,” I complained, but he only rolled his eyes and exaggerated his licks from then on. Roland eventually handed the book to me, shrugging and saying it seemed perfectly normal. Maybe there was something else we should be looking for.

But I quickly noticed his mistake. When I stared at a single page for longer than a few moments—Planets, Roland was impatient—a cipher shimmered in the margins.