The Duke's Decision

“I want the bodies of the ones named Ivette and Gelle,” Beatrice said to her butler. “Whole, not stripped down to the skeletons. Have Reginald do a basic draining and necromantic preservation. Since their parents are dead as well, there shouldn't be anyone in town to claim them, you should be able to bribe the coroner into handing them over.”

The butler opened his mouth, but Beatrice held up a finger at the butler.

“Wait. I have a better idea,” she said. “Grab all the bodies from the incident that you can, except for the innkeeper and his family, who surely have local relatives coming to claim them. It will surely be less memorable if we're just buying more supply for the factory. The bribe won’t be much steeper, the coroner will be happy to save on necromancy, and we’re short on corpses as it is.”

“Yes, ma'am,” the butler said. “I'll see to it straightaway.”

Beatrice paced back and forth in front of the desk, frowning. Avery spurning her affections had bothered her. The fact that Avery had spurned her while deciding to propose simultaneously to dozens of other women bothered her considerably more. And yet she was also bothered to hear the news that two of those women had been murdered. Not because two of her rivals were dead, but because she didn't know who had done it. Or why. Or even entirely how. And while she knew it wouldn't matter in a few days anyway… it still annoyed her. And worried her a little.

Ivette, as the daughter of a baron conspicuously seen courting Avery, had been an obvious prospect – but she hadn't been among the nine who swore to the duke publicly. Beatrice hadn't known Ivette was engaged to be married to the duke until the morning after she was murdered. The same was true of Gelle. Who had known that Ivette and Gelle had been among the duke's brides-to-be before their deaths? Was the murderer someone who wanted to kill all of the duke’s suitors, or did they have a more selective agenda in mind?

Beatrice had always thought of herself as shrewd and clever in business matters. But these matters seemed far more political. Political matters had to make sense to her if she were to somehow arrange to become Avery’s duchess. Someone had murdered over a dozen people – including a baron – for what? So that the duke would marry eight women instead of ten? But then the other eight women would be protected much more closely. Before, the duke had invited his fiancees to the castle; after the attack, he had ordered his fiancees to the castle.

These two things didn't quite fit together. Surely the price was too high for the return value, she thought to herself. Unless the murderer was someone on the inside, someone with access to the castle, who puts great stock in her ability to furtively murder more women. Perhaps another one of his fiancees did it, knowing she would have more opportunities later.

She shook off this last unsettling thought irritably. She didn't know who killed two of her rivals and her families, but she planned to celebrate their deaths even if the perpetrator was another rival for the duke’s affection. Today should be an enjoyable day, she silently told herself. The duke had been punished (if not by her) for his crime of spurning her, punished with the deaths of two of his brides.

Those two deaths pushed him two steps closer to begging for Bella.

Sabine fumed as she stalked across the room. “And when I went to the coroner, the bodies were gone. He said relatives must have claimed them all already. I could believe that for one of the families, but all of them? Including the traveling merchant’s party? He's lying.” She turned sharply on her heel, leaning forward over the top of a chair as she glared at her brother.

“What would you want the bodies for?” Stephen, comfortably reclined on a long striped couch, popped a grape into his mouth, chewing.

“I want to know who killed them.” Sabine looked away from her brother and resumed pacing back and forth the length of the room, her steps still whisper-quiet in spite of her state of agitation. “A good necromancer can recover the last moments a dead body saw, and we have enough money to hire a good necromancer even if we have to fly one from Lancaster. One of them might have seen something useful. I don't like not knowing who is murdering women trying to marry the duke. It's a bad precedent, considering my own ambitions.”

Stephen spat out the grape seed into a bowl. “You sure you didn't just want to gloat over your fallen rivals?” His voice was lightly teasing.

“They're only my rivals if they're my equals,” Sabine said, shaking her head. “I rank a baron’s get, much less a knight’s.”

“Still, you do know something,” Stephen said, sounding more serious. “You know someone stole – or bought, more likely – the bodies from the coroner. Find the bodies and you find someone who wants to hide evidence.”

Sabine pursed her lips, pausing to turn and look at her brother. “True. I was frustrated with the fact that the coroner was obviously lying to me and didn't think to dig deeper in that direction.” She sighed and sat down in a plush oversized chair, considering a more specific problem. “Maybe the duke will have better luck. He's the big fish in this little pond. Maybe he can get the truth out of the coroner. You can suggest that to Maude at our dinner with her tonight.”

“Why not you?” Stephen asked.

“I'm profoundly disinterested in anything to do with the duke, remember?” Sabine arched an eyebrow. “From this moment forward, you're the one who desperately wants to build connections between York and Lancaster, and I've been dragged to this dinner against my will by my bully of an older brother,” Sabine said. She made a sour face. “Besides, the duke appears to have a distaste for necromancy, so I don't want to have a single good word to say about necromancy while I'm courting him. You can fumble around like an undiplomatic oaf and appeal to his better political interests; I have to capture his heart.”

“Then I won’t wear the ceremonial armor at all,” Avery snapped, his hands planted on the desk now inhabiting his old bedroom. “I’ll wear my battle armor and be glad of it. But I cannot go wait through hours of fittings and adjustment at a time like this.”

Maude clucked her tongue, leaning back in her chair. “Think, Avery, you’re a duke. You don’t go personally comb your fingers through the rubble looking for clues, you have people who do that for you. Besides, if you’re the true target of these attackers – the crossbowman, the poisoner – then you’re safest staying inside the inner keep. The city is compromised, but as far as we know, not the castle.”

Avery looked into his foster mother’s worried eyes. “Would your grandfather have sat in his castle after his fiancee was murdered?”

“No,” Maude admitted reluctantly. “If Duchess Jennifer but wanted for a flower, he would go himself to fetch it from the hills, or so my father told me. I never saw that side of the old duke – she passed on before I was born.”

“Well, I am not so easy of a target to hunt as a sleeping woman or a drunk man,” Avery said. “I’ve had a werewolf’s teeth wrapped around my arm and come off with but a little light denting.”

“You’ve… what?” Maude stood, concerned. “Has there been a full moon since?”

Avery waved his arm. “I’m fine,” he said. “Really. Fiona told her master, and he looked at my arm when I came in from the hunt. Archmage Warin is a diviner, and he said it was okay.”

“And you trust him?” Maude said.

“Yes?” Avery screwed up his face. “I can hear lies.”

“He’s an archmage. If anybody can obscure a lie from you, it would be an archmage.” Maude put her hands on her hips. “Tomorrow is the first night of the full moon, and it was nearly fully blue at midnight last night – barely scraps of white, and on the wrong side for any green at all. If the moon is so bright and uniform tonight, lycanthropic episodes will be of great severity.”

“I will grant that an archmage may be able to conceal his lies. But… I’m to marry his adoptive daughter,” Avery pointed out. “He surely wouldn’t want her infected with lycanthropy. He doesn’t have any reason to lie to me. Sit down and go back to… whatever it is you were doing, and I will go speak with people who might know something about the attack. As they are not archmages, I trust I shall be able to tell if they are lying to me even if they have good reason to.”

Madame Jocosa looked back and forth between the two girls dubiously. One was tall with dark hair and green eyes, holding a dark bundle and wearing a faded green dress; the other was short (at least for a human) with light brown hair and blue eyes, wearing a drab dress of undyed dark gray wool. Both loomed above her in the cluttered quarters of her shop, transforming – as customers were wont to do – a vast and spacious room into one barely large enough, cluttered with racks and mannequins and mirrors and a sewing table.

“And you want me to make you a dress that matches one your friend Anna already owns? To marry the duke in?” The halfling dressmaker looked up at the shorter one.

“It needn’t be exact, but I’d like it to show us as being like sisters,” Rose said.

“I’m surprised to get the job over Madame Percy,” Madame Jocosa said. “I’ve lost half my custom to her, and she still has most of the inventory she brought up from London.”

The two girls exchanged looks. “We were hoping you might work less dearly,” Anna said. “Sir Walter has not a great deal of money to spend.”

“And you want it cheap as well as a rush job,” Madame Jocosa muttered under her breath. “Fine. Hand it over and I’ll see.”

Anna extended her dark bundle to the dressmaker with trepidation. “Be careful, I’ve been working on it for years,” she said.

Unrolling the dress, the halfling mumbled under her breath, peering closely at the black woolen velvet with green embroidery before holding it out at arm’s length and closing one of her eyes, eyeing both the dress and its reflection in an oval silvered mirror. “Well done,” she said. “I can see where you started over. Except it’s not your size. Nowhere near. It’s closer to your friend’s size, though I might still need to take in the bust a little for it to fit her.”

“I’ve been working on that embroidery since I was fifteen,” Anna said, numbly. “Getting it exactly like I had dreamed.”

“Try it on if you don’t believe me,” Madame Jocosa said. “I’d wager you’re not the same size you were at fifteen.”

Anna didn’t try on her dress, satisfied with lining it up against herself in a mirror and having her measurements taken for a replacement dress. She winced at the price quoted by Madame Jocosa.

“I – we could buy your dress, and cover most of that for you,” Rose said hurridly. “If the alterations to make it fit aren’t too expensive.”

In the space of a few short moments, Rose’s dark grey dress was lying on the sewing table, replaced with the black velvet dress once so carefully embroidered by a younger Anna. Rose held her arms out to the sides.

“Now, Anna, hold the fabric here,” Madame Jocosa directed, then pulled. “See? Two, two and a half inches less in the bust. I could do three, but… inhale, dearie… perhaps a little padding on the inside. I’ll need to take up the hem at least two inches as well, at least in front – you wouldn’t want to trip over it.”

There was a loud knock at the door to the shop.

“Walt, we’re still busy!” Rose shouted over her shoulder.

The door opened. It was not Walt. A silver chin appeared below the doorframe, then lowered, exposing a silver face with slit-pupiled golden eyes. The duke.

“Madame Jocosa. You spoke with one of my guards this morning. Philip. I wish to speak with you.” Golden eyes flickered from side to side, then paused, pupils widening slightly. “Wait. Anna. And…” A hesitation. “Rose.”

“I was to fit a dress for your wedding, Your Grace,” the gray-haired halfling seamstress said, dropping into a deep curtsy on top of her step stool. “But am at your service directly.”

“You will be later,” the duke told the dressmaker, sticking his head partway through the door, one hand on each side of the frame and the other pointing at Rose. “But first, those two will accompany me back to the castle immediately. Madame Jocosa, you may call on them later to complete your business. They will not be leaving the castle.”

As Anna dipped in a graceful curtsy and walked towards her intended, Rose looked over at her own dress, draped across the back of the chair, then back the implacable golden eyes of the duke. Swallowing nervously, she grabbed her gray wool dress with one hand and hiked up the black velvet dress with the other to make sure it wouldn’t drag on the street, then made for the door wearing the dress Anna had meant for her own wedding.

After the door shut behind Rose, Madame Jocosa shook her head, looking around her shop in the steady even glow of the magelight.

“Bad luck to see one’s bride in her new dress before the wedding.”