The Safe-Keeper's Secret Page 16

  Someone grabbed Fiona’s arm and called her name. “There you are!” It was Angeline, and her face was bright with excitement. “I wanted to come back to get you, but I didn’t want to leave! Are you all here? Reed and Isadora and everyone? The king has come to town—can you believe it?”

  Fiona pushed forward through the mob, towing Angeline behind her. “Thomas, Reed, Robert—let’s all get as close as we can. I want to see the king’s face—I want to hear everything he has to say.”

  She met less resistance from the other villagers than she expected. Everyone else wanted to see the king, too, but everyone else was just a little afraid of being quite so close to royalty. Within a few minutes, she and her small group of friends had won their way to the very front of the crowd, till they were so close to the two carriages that they could see the brushstrokes on the coats of arms. The king’s outriders drew a tight circle around the coaches, their spirited horses dancing a little from side to side. Fiona could get no closer, but she was near enough to see the door of one coach open, and a tall, severe figure step out and come to stand on a small dais in the center of the green.

  The crowd was deathly quiet for a moment, and then everyone began to cheer. It was the king.

  “His majesty, King Marcus!” one of the riders bawled out. “Her majesty, Princess Lirabel!”

  For a second figure was stepping out of the second coach and coming to take her place beside the first. Fiona stood on tiptoe, as curious to see the woman as the man. The princess was nearly as tall as her father, dark like he was, her features as strict and grave. But, as Reed had said, her face looked kinder and sweeter, touched with sadness or disappointment. She stood behind and a little to one side of her father on the dais, her gaze fixed on his profile.

  The king was staring down at the crowd, his eyes darting from face to face as if he was looking for someone he might recognize. “Who among you is mayor of this town?” he asked at last. His voice was thin and cold and carried easily to every listener in the throng.

  The assembled people murmured amongst themselves and shrugged a little and did not answer. “Have you no mayor, no one who acts as leader?” the king repeated, his voice even colder.

  Dirk the tavernkeeper shouldered his way forward. “I speak up now and then, sire, as the occasion demands,” he called up to the stage. “I reckon I can speak for the village now.”

  A general undertone of approval meant the villagers were agreeable to making Dirk their spokesman. The king fixed his dark eyes on the barman. “Then I have a question to ask you,” he said.

  “Anything, sire.”

  “Eighteen years ago a baby was brought in secret to this village. It is news I have just this week learned from a young woman recently come to court.”

  Fiona’s hand clenched on Isadora’s arm. “Megan,” she whispered. Isadora nodded but put her finger to her lips for silence.

  The king was still speaking. “The child was a boy. No one knew his name or his parents’ names. Yet he was brought in the arms of the Safe-Keeper from my court—who died by his own hand on his return from your village.”

  Now the crowd was full of muttering and speculation. Fiona caught more than a few people staring in the direction of her own little knot of friends. Dirk nodded calmly. “Aye, sire. That story is true.”

  The king’s eyes seemed to glitter in the frosty air. “I would meet this boy,” he said, his voice very stern. His daughter took a step back from him and trained her gaze on the wood of the stage. “I would meet this young man whom I believe to be my son.”

  Now the mutterings of the mob grew louder and more excited. Those in back were standing on tiptoe, looking around, trying to locate Reed in the crowd. Those nearest the king had already spotted Reed’s tall form, and eager hands began to push all of them forward from behind. Fiona stumbled from the force of their enthusiasm; she saw Reed turn indignantly to upbraid someone behind him.

  Dirk turned to survey the surging mass. “He’s here, I believe, sire. I saw him earlier. Reed? There you are, lad! Come forward and meet your king.”

  Fiona felt someone’s hand close iron-tight around her arm, but she didn’t even look to see who grabbed her. She was watching Reed take an uncertain step toward the dais, then look back as if afraid to see what he was leaving behind, and then take another step. Dirk caught him by the shoulder and presented him to the king.

  “This is Reed, sire, the child brought to the village in secret so long ago. He’s a good boy—or rather, a fine young man. Any man would be proud to call him son.”

  Princess Lirabel seemed to grow smaller and thinner as King Marcus bent down very low to look searchingly into Reed’s face. “Are you that baby?” the king demanded. “There is nothing I would not do for a male child of my body, be he legitimate or bastard. Are you my son?”

  “I don’t know,” Reed said.

  Another voice rang above all the other murmurings of the mob. “He is not!” the speaker proclaimed in a voice meant for carrying news as far as it needed to go. “You have no son!”

  And Fiona felt herself jerked forward by the man who was speaking, the man who had such tight hold on her arm. Thomas, whose greatest wish was coming true as he announced an unwelcome truth to the king.

  The king, in fact, was glaring at Thomas with a most unnerving fury. He was still bent from the waist, the better to stare at the people arrayed before him. “Who are you?” King Marcus demanded. “What do you know about this boy and his parentage?”

  “I am a Truth-Teller, and I have never told a lie,” Thomas said calmly. He had dragged Fiona so close to the dais that they were merely inches from the king. Reed put his arm around Fiona, but she could not tell which of them was trembling. She looked up at the king, at his handsome, unhappy face, and watched his gaze flick between Thomas and Reed.

  “You are telling me this child was brought here from the royal city eighteen years ago, in great secrecy, and yet he is not my son?” the king demanded, his voice very tight.

  “He was not brought here that night. He was born here to the Safe-Keeper herself. The child brought here that night was a girl.”

  And Fiona felt herself pushed forward one more time, till she was almost nose-to-nose with the king.

  And then it was her wish came true.

  “Look on your father’s face, Fiona,” Thomas said. “For you are the child brought here from Wodenderry that night.”

  The king straightened to his full height, disappointment and displeasure making his face look even bleaker. “Is this true?” he said at last, though it was unclear whom he asked.

  Fiona found her voice. “True, sire,” she said in a breathless voice. “My mother—the Safe-Keeper who raised me—told me the story a few days before she died. My aunt can confirm it, for she was there the night I arrived. They did not know how valuable I was or why I might have been hurried from the city, so they thought to protect me by pretending I was the Safe-Keeper’s daughter instead.”

  “Then—then—who is this boy?” the king demanded, pointing at Reed. Who stood stock-still beside Fiona, as dazed as the king, as astonished as everyone else in the now-silent crowd.

  Thomas answered that. “The Safe-Keeper’s son.”

  “Who is his father?” the king snapped, still clearly unwilling to believe the story that was unfolding around him. “Since everyone apparently believed him to be me.”

  “His father was a merchant from a nearby town,” Thomas said, gesturing with his left hand. Behind her, Fiona heard a choked cry. “A man with whom the Safe-Keeper had had a brief liaison when he believed his own fiancée had perished in an accident.”

  And so it was that Robert Bayliss’s wish came true.

  “Then—” the king said, and looked around him blindly, as if surprised to find himself before an unruly audience of people, hearing things he did not wish to know. “Then this boy is not my child. He is not my bastard son.”

  “You have no son,” Thomas said, speaking with a certain
relish. “You have never sired a son. You never will. You have only Fiona and Princess Lirabel. You must name the princess the heir to your throne, for you will beget no other legitimate children.”

  And so it was that the princess’s wish came true.

  The king turned clumsily toward the woman next to him on the stage, who seemed to have grown stronger and more regal in bearing with every one of Thomas’s words. “Lirabel,” he said, and his proud voice was broken. “Lirabel, help me to my carriage. Ride with me back to the city.”

  “Gladly, Father,” she said, and her voice was rich and compassionate. “Step carefully here—take your courtier’s hand. There. I will join you in a moment.”

  And as soon as her father was seated, Princess Lirabel stepped back onto the dais and crossed to the very edge. No one had moved. Reed and Thomas and Fiona were standing exactly where they had stood for the preceding momentous ten minutes, and the entire crowd waited still, expectant and hopeful.

  Lirabel came to her knees at the edge of the stage and reached her hand out to Fiona. Unthinking, Fiona put her own in that strong, sure grasp. “Come to me in Wodenderry,” the princess said in a voice so low only Fiona could hear it. “I would like to get to know my sister.”

  Fiona nodded, still too numb to say very much. “I would be glad to,” she whispered. “In a few days. When everything is settled here.”

  Lirabel squeezed her hand and let it drop. Quickly, she rose to her feet, disappeared inside her father’s carriage, and shut the door. The outriders cleared a space in the crowd for the two coaches to turn, and the trumpeter announced that the king’s carriage was on the move. In a few moments, the king and his entire procession had disappeared down the road.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Naturally, after all that, there was little chance that Fiona would be able to simply walk away. Angeline guided the exhausted Isadora out of the crowd, but the others stood fast, Reed and Thomas and Robert banding together behind Fiona to give her support. One by one, the villagers gathered around her, wishing her well and touching her cheek and claiming they had always known she was something special. She was as gracious as shock and wonder would allow, and she endured their good wishes for as long as she could.

  Then, “Let’s go home,” she said to the men, and they broke away as gently as they could. Still, scattered groups of villagers waved to her from streetcorners and doorways as they passed, and Fiona waved back.

  “You should not be so overcome,” Thomas observed, though he held her right arm and lent her his considerable strength as they finally walked home. “You have known this secret for two years.”

  “True,” she said in a faint voice. “But I suppose I did not expect it to become known in such a public fashion.”

  “Could this have been a better day?” Reed said jubilantly. “Good news for everyone! Except the king, perhaps, and he did not deserve better news. I could not be happier!”

  Fiona looked at him sideways, for he held her left arm, and beside him on the roadway paced Robert Bayliss. The merchant kept his gaze on the ground before him and had said nothing since they left the city center.

  “So you are pleased to learn who your mother is, and your father,” she said. “You have for so long wanted to know.”

  “Pleased!” Reed repeated. “Overjoyed!”

  Robert came to a sudden halt, and they all perforce stopped alongside him. There was no traffic before or behind them, so they all just stood in the roadway and waited for him to speak.

  “I did not know—your mother never told me,” he said, his voice rapid and miserable. “I would have—I would have stood father to you all these years, either one of you, and yet she made me think—she never said—”

  Fiona shook loose of Reed’s hold and put a hand on Robert’s arm. “My mother chose always to do what suited her best and caused the least distress to anyone else,” she said. “I never doubted that this was news that had been deliberately kept from you.”

  “But you mustn’t think—Victoria was dead, or so I thought, I would never have looked at another woman while I was betrothed to be married—”

  “Everyone knows that,” Fiona said. “And my mother knew she could never mortify Victoria by letting you know you had fathered a child while she was missing. It is only now that the pieces could come together and the secret could be shared.”

  Reed stepped forward and put his hand on Robert’s shoulder. “I have the father I would have chosen if I could have picked from the whole world,” he said in a quiet voice. “I will be the best son you could have imagined, if you will let me.”

  There was that sound again, a choked cry, and then Robert was openly weeping. “You and I will continue walking,” Fiona said to Thomas, “and let the two of them sort everything out.”

  Angeline met them at the door of the cottage with her fingers to her lips. “Isadora is sleeping,” she whispered. “I think this day has been almost too much for her.”

  Fiona slipped by her into the welcome warmth. “I think this day has been almost too much for all of us,” she said.

  The three of them sat around the kitchen table, drinking mint tea and talking quietly. “I still don’t understand,” Fiona said. “Why it was so important to disguise me. What’s another bastard daughter to the king, after all?”

  “There had been two others, delivered to highborn ladies in the years between Lirabel’s birth and yours,” Thomas said. “Both of those little girls died in infancy.”

  Fiona felt her eyebrows rise. “From … illness?”

  Angeline shook her head. “They had been murdered. And the royal Safe-Keeper knew it, for the queen had confided her dark deeds to him. And he confided in me, the day he left you in my arms. He had done what he could to protect you—acting as Safe-Keeper indeed, though we who keep secrets are not always so active in defending them.”

  Fiona slanted a look at Thomas. “Some of us are,” she said.

  “I still don’t understand,” Thomas complained. “If someone had tracked that Safe-Keeper all the way to Damiana’s house, wouldn’t Reed have been in just as much danger as Fiona?”

  “We thought about that,” Angeline admitted. “But we thought we could still keep him safe. We could have brought in any Truth-Teller—even you!—to swear that he was not the king’s bastard. We thought if Damiana claimed Fiona as her own, no one would think to ask questions about her.”

  “A little chancy still,” Fiona said.

  “All secrets are,” Angeline replied.

  “Did you know the other secret as well?” Thomas asked Angeline. “All these years, did you know who Reed’s father was?”

  Angeline shook her head. “I thought it was you. Though you and Damiana were not very close until the children were a little older. But I thought—well—that I had missed some earlier moment when you fell in love.”

  Now Thomas was the one to shake his head. “I would have claimed them—either one of them. That’s a truth even a Safe-Keeper wouldn’t have kept from me.”

  “All the secrets are out now,” Angeline said. “All the truths told. All the wishes come true.”

  “Not quite all of them,” Fiona said.

  Thomas looked at her. “What’s still left undone?” he asked.

  But she merely smiled and shook her head. She was still a Safe-Keeper—for a while yet.

  Robert and Reed came back late, having stayed for a few glasses of ale at Dirk’s tavern, buying a few rounds for the other patrons and generally celebrating their newfound connection. Fiona wanted to talk to Reed, but not in his inebriated state, and so she sent both of them on their way to bed and retired to her own room. She couldn’t sleep, of course. For the longest time, she just lay on her mattress, listened to Isadora’s breathing, and stared at the shadows on the walls.

  So much had already changed, but there were changes still to come.

  In the morning, she rose as soon as she heard quiet footsteps descending the stairs. It was Reed, as she had known it w
ould be, for he was always an early riser. She hastily dressed and went out to join him in the kitchen.

  “It snowed last night,” he said, speaking in a whisper to avoid waking Robert, who was sleeping on the sofa. “Do you want to go walk through the fresh snowdrifts?”

  “Yes,” she said, and they put on their boots and crept out.

  “How’s your head?” she asked once they’d stepped outside. The world was a frigid white scene of ice and gauze; their feet crunched through the crisp top layer of snow with every stride they took. The air felt freshly washed or newly made, cold and delicious when they breathed it in.

  Reed laughed. “Fine, if you’re talking about the ill effects of ale. In a whirl, if you’re talking about the aftereffects of yesterday’s audience with the king.”

  “Everything is different now,” she agreed.

  He surprised her with his response. “But everything is better.”

  She glanced up at him as they tramped along. His strong young face looked rested and serene; his smile was wider than ever. “You mean, you were happy to find out you were not the king’s son?”

  He shrugged. “I was happy to find out I was someone’s son, and to find that I’m Robert’s! I couldn’t ask for a better father. And to know at last who my mother was—to have all the questions answered—it makes me feel like I belong in the world, after all this time of wondering.”

  “I told you before, you make your own belonging.”

  He peered down at her from his much greater height. “So does that mean you still belong here—in a small village—when you know you’re the daughter of the king?”

  She sighed. “I do foresee some upsets in my life.”

  They had come to an old wooden fence that separated their property from some open space. Reed brushed the snow off the top bar, then lifted Fiona up to sit. He leaned on his elbows beside her.

  “This is what I expect to happen,” he said quietly. “You will go to the royal city from time to time, and make friends with your sister, and learn how to behave in the presence of your father. You will return to Tambleham now and then, but it will never be your permanent home the way it has been for so long. There will be other pressures at work on you, other hands reaching for you. After all this time, it is you who will be the restless one, and I the one who stays in one place.”