Wonderblood by Julia Whicker

Author:Julia Whicker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CHAPTER 11

QUEEN ALYSON

John had met Queen Alyson many times, and yet each meeting renewed his terror of her, not because she was herself terrifying but because she burned with a need to understand—not him, no, and not his work, and nor did she seek a definite prophecy about the Return or the endless remedial horoscope calendars her husband Michael so loved. But there was something fixed and slow and deep about her that caused him to trip up his words, to poorly explain even the most explicable events, to stumble about her chamber like a hyperactive child, sweeping his arms along with the peaks and valleys of his lecture. He lectured her, he could not help it, and her appearance of boredom never failed to horrify him.

She mostly called upon him to explain practical things: why, for instance, were all the ladies of the palace bleeding at once?

Tygo waited in the hallway in the care of another lion-masked guard, who had yanked him hard by the arm to stop him from entering the queen’s grand chamber, as though Tygo posed some immediate threat, although it seemed plain to John that he did not. This evening, John faced Queen Alyson alone. She was gazing at him with her I-dare-you eyes, the way he assumed she must look at everyone, for what was he to her? A weak sneeze of a man. The king, although nearly middle-aged now, was broad and somewhat tall; Alyson was his second wife—the first queen, Rachel, had fallen from one of the palace minarets, or that’s what everyone said, and frankly John had not cared for her, either; she’d been inbred as a lapdog and ugly as well. Alyson seemed somewhat young, but John was not certain she was. She had the sort of face that could exist mostly untouched for several decades, with faint lines and freckles across the forehead exacerbated by smoking, which she did in excess and was doing at the moment, holding her slender moonstone pipe a foot and a half from her lips. Her hair was the darkest brown and straighter than a normal person’s hair—another artifact of inbreeding? He suspected. She was the daughter of Marvel Parsons but cared little for magic or ceremonies. She preferred to spend her time at golf.

“Your Beauteousness, forgive us. Your discomfort was not our intent.”

She watched him. “Okay.” Her pipe adularesced when she drew smoke through it, a throbbing opal, blue with gem-light. “I didn’t say it was.”

He squirmed. “O. Yes. Well…”

The queen waited. She had a girl’s manner of waiting for him to speak first, a paroxysm of disinterest upon her even when she herself had asked the question. He wondered how she thought of him, if she thought of him at all—her life was in every way a mystery to him. What did she do all day? The vast room she occupied in the southeast tower, Columbia, was the same room her predecessor had lived in, but Alyson had removed every trace of

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