Read Online The Sword-Edged blonde by Alex Bledsoe - Free Book Online Page A

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 ofshoes 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.
    “Did she protest the interruption?”
    “No, sir, she seemed intoxicated.”
    “How long did that last?”
    “Until the king arrived. Then she seemed to sober up.”
    “He does have that effect on people.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    I walked around the circle. “Did you find the chalk she used to draw this?”
    “No, sir, we did not.”
    “How do you explain that?”
    “Two possible explanations, sir. One, she used all the chalk she had for the designs. Two, she threw the chalk out the window, and it shattered below. I found no fragments, but the courtyard has a lot of traffic. They could have been thoroughly crushed before I was able to search.”
    I nodded again and returned to the window. “Sergeant, is there anything, any detail, that was