Alex Bledsoe - The Sword-Edged blonde

Nurse Maxwell left the baby with his mother and went to fold some linen in the laundry. Next, one of the maids, Sally Sween, entered the nursery to refill the night lamps with oil; the queen appeared to have dozed off in her rocking chair, with young Pridiri asleep in her arms. This, evidently, was not unusual, and the maid left them alone. And they stayed alone for the next hour. So from about 10:30 to 11:30, the queen could’ve done anything.

At 11:30, Nurse Maxwell returned to the nursery to put away the fresh bedclothes and diapers. She found the door locked, which according to her had never before happened. Miss Sween joined her in pounding on the door, but they got no answer. When they smelled smoke, they summoned a captain of the guard, Thomas Vogel, who forced the door open.

Here I found the guard’s report most illuminating, because he was a trained soldier who could observe accurately in a crisis. The queen lay on the floor, naked, covered in “a red substance that appeared to be blood.” Marked on the floor was a circle, with “various ideograms inscribed along its border with chalk.” He also described a knife, a stick with three feathers attached, and a bundle of what he correctly judged to be sage. In the center of the circle, a cauldron had been set up over a small brazier. This, plus the incense, supplied the smoke the two women smelled.

As the women attended to the fallen queen, Vogel examined the cauldron. Inside it he saw “boiling water and several pieces of bone, one of which appeared to be an infant human skull.” The window was open, but he stressed that no one could have gained access through it, as the window was barred and opened onto a sheer four-story wall well inside the castle’s guarded perimeter.

The queen awoke then, and was immediately violently ill. Vogel, in some sort of triumph of observational skill, mentioned that “she expelled large chunks of what appeared to be boiled meat.”

Vogel dispatched Nurse Maxwell, the calmer of the two women, to immediately fetch King Philip. He then shut the door to the room and insisted nothing be touched. He spent the few minutes before the king and Wentrobe’s arrival sketching the designs and placement of items within the circle. He also provided a list of banquet guests, along with capsule summaries to help jog people’s memories: Lady who bark-talked to her poodle, Blond man with the ugly chimpanzee, Countess with flatulence problem, Baron and young footman with family resemblance.

I smiled; with a dozen men as cool-headed as Vogel, I could rule the world.

And so the king and Wentrobe arrived, and pieced together-no pun intended-what must have happened. The queen, who had never before shown any interest in mooncraft, had, for reasons unknown, ceremonially sacrificed her son and cannibalized his corpse.

The queen claimed to remember nothing other than falling asleep while she nursed. This obviously wasn’t much of an alibi, and the scrutiny Phil knew he’d face if he tried to delay action left him with only one option: he arrested her for murder and had her held in the prison tower reserved for the most dangerous, or most important, criminals. And then secretly, he sent for me.

Queen Rhiannon had been in that tower a week now, with no visitors except for the staff and no contact with the outside. Not even Phil had been to see her, since that would give the wrong appearance. No date had been set for her trial, but Phil would have to announce it soon.

I let the night’s wind blow through my hair. I could just make out the top windows of the prison tower, visible over the peaked roof of the king’s main audience chamber. I thought I saw a figure move across one of the windows, but it was too far and too dark to be sure. My first glimpse of this mysterious Queen Rhiannon?

The next morning I got down to work.

I pushed open the nursery door. The hinges, well-oiled as everything else in the castle, made barely a peep. The door swung slowly back and bumped softly against the wall. I stood on the threshold, absorbing the scene for a long moment before I finally entered the room.

I wasn’t sure if this was the “official royal nursery from time immemorial,” but Phil had been nursed in this room, and Janet. One of my earliest memories was of Phil and me repeatedly slamming our thick little skulls against the slats of his crib. Now the room was empty, the lamps unlit, and the smells of smoke and dried blood still hung in the air. The light through the window fell on the scene of the crime like the blazing finger of some god.

The cauldron had been removed, and the brazier, but the designs chalked on the floor remained, and the big red stains. I carefully walked around them, remembering that moon priestesses cast their spells clockwise. They wrote in a symbolic language I couldn’t quite translate, but that usually had some sort of common theme. For instance, almost every symbol might feature a bird, if the spell had something to do with the primary magical element of air. But these designs meant nothing to me; one featured a bird, the next two a dragon, and the one after that a mermaid. To me, and I suspected to any real moon priestess, it was gibberish.

I walked to the window and looked out. Vogel’s report had been accurate; the bars were close enough to keep any small inquisitive bodies from accidentally tumbling through, and the wall beneath the window was sheer straight down to the courtyard. I shook the bars and examined the corrosion around the bolts that held them in place; they were anchored into the stone as securely as the day they’d been installed. No one, or at least no human being, had entered through them.

A soft knock and cleared throat got my attention. I turned to see a tall, portly man with a long mustache standing at attention in the door. “Thomas Vogel, Sergeant of the Palace Guard,” he announced stiffly, “reporting as ordered, sir.”

“At ease, sergeant,” I said. “I’m a civilian.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, and clasped his hands behind him in military at-ease. He was about as relaxed as the bars over the window.

“Come in and close the door,” I said, and he did so, standing in front of it. I sat on the window ledge. “Your report was very thorough. I didn’t ask you here because I found any fault in it, I just wanted to walk through the scene with you. Does anything look like it’s different now?”

He took a slow look around, moving his head from left to right. “The cauldron and brazier are gone. The linen on the crib’s been changed. The cushion on the rocker is different. And one of the pictograms is smeared.”

I smiled. I’d deliberately smudged the corner of one drawing with my boot to see if he’d notice. “Damn,” I said softly, “why are you just a sergeant?”

“I notice things,” he said flatly.

I nodded. “Okay, help me out now. Where was the queen, exactly, when you came in?”

He stepped forward and pointed. “Kneeling here, in the middle of the circle. She was facing the door. The cauldron was in front of her.”

“And she was naked?”

He actually blushed a little. “Yes, sir, she was.”

“Where were her clothes?”

“In a pile right there. As if she just undid them and let them fall.”

“Including her shoes?”

He squinted with thought. “Yes, sir, her shoes were under the pile.”

I nodded. That was odd; a formal gown around your knees would make it hard to then step out of the kind of shoes a queen would wear. I hadn’t yet met her, but the Rhiannon I’d heard described seemed far more graceful than that. “What did she do the moment you opened the door?”

“She looked up and gasped.”

“In surprise?”

“No, sir. More in satisfaction.” He took a deep breath and went “ Ahhhhh, ” imitating her response.