Ombria In Shadow Read online

  Ace Books by Patricia A. McKillip

  THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD

  THE SORCERESS AND THE CYGNET

  THE CYGNET AND THE FIREBIRD

  THE BOOK OF ATRIX WOLFE

  WINTER ROSE

  SONG FOR THE BASILISK

  RIDDLE-MASTER: THE COMPLETE TRILOGY

  THE TOWER AT STONY WOOD

  OMBRIA IN SHADOW

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  OMBRIA IN SHADOW

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Ace hardcover edition / January 2002

  Ace trade paperback edition / February 2003

  Ace trade paperback ISBN: 0-441-01016-4

  Copyright © 2002 by Patricia A. McKillip.

  Cover art by Kinuko Y. Craft.

  Cover design by Judy Murello.

  Text design by Tiffany Kukec

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  Visit our website at

  www.penguinputnam.com

  Check out the ACE Science Fiction & Fantasy newsletter!

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the Ace hardcover edition as follows:

  McKillip, Patricia A.

  Ombria in shadow / Patricia A. McKillip.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-441-00895-X (alk. paper)

  1. Title

  PS3563.C38 O43 2002

  813'.54—dc21

  2001046388

  ACE®

  Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks

  belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  Rose and Thorn

  TWO

  The Enchanted Heart

  THREE

  Cat and Mouse

  FOUR

  The Alchemist’s Riddle

  FIVE

  The King of Flounders

  SIX

  Dancing Shoes

  SEVEN

  Sleight of Hand

  EIGHT

  Masquerade

  NINE

  The Sorceress’s Apprentice

  TEN

  The Magic Shop

  ELEVEN

  The Stranger

  TWELVE

  Mirror, Mirror

  THIRTEEN

  The Jewel in the Toad

  FOURTEEN

  The Labyrinth

  FIFTEEN

  Charcoal and Wax

  SIXTEEN

  Here and There

  SEVENTEEN

  Blood and Roses

  EIGHTEEN

  What the Manticore Said

  NINETEEN

  Mistress Thorn

  TWENTY

  City of Ghosts

  TWENTY-ONE

  This or That

  TWENTY-TWO

  Tutors Minus Two

  TWENTY-THREE

  Thrice a Fool

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Lost and Found

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The Wild Hunt

  TWENTY-SIX

  Time Out of Mind

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Ombria in Shadow

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Ever After

  ONE

  Rose and Thorn

  While the ruler of the ancient city of Ombria lay dying, his mistress, frozen out of the room by the black stare of Domina Pearl, drifted like a bird on a wave until she bumped through Kyel Greve’s unguarded door to his bed, where he was playing with his puppets.

  They looked at one another, the tavern keeper’s daughter and the child-heir of Ombria, both pale, both red-eyed. Kyel lifted the falcon puppet on his hand. Its feathers were of silk, its eyes of dyed zirconium.

  “Take down your hair,” the falcon said.

  Lydea lifted her hands; pearls, pins, gold nets scattered to the floor. Her hair, the color of autumn leaves, swept nearly to her knees. The boy gazed at it a while, unblinking, until Lydea thought he must have fallen asleep upright in his vast bed. But he shook himself finally. He had his father’s black-lashed sapphire eyes, and his black hair. His skin was white as wax, except for his nose, which was red. He wiped it on his sleeve.

  “May I sit?” Lydea asked gravely. Tall and graceful, head always slightly bowed under the weight of a perilous love, she had come, barely more than a child herself, into the palace of the Prince of Ombria at his wife’s death. In five years, Royce Greve had taught her presence and manners in that difficult place, but he could not stop her from biting her nails. She would have now, but Kyel tossed her a puppet.

  “You must make it ask.”

  She wriggled her poor, torn fingers into its porcelain head: a goose head, appropriately, she thought.

  “May I sit?” the goose asked, and the falcon answered,

  “Sit.”

  “Where are your guards?”

  He shrugged slightly; the falcon said, “They were summoned away.”

  Her eyes widened. “By whom?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And Jacinth? Where is she?”

  “Domina told her to leave.”

  “To leave the palace?”

  Both boy and falcon nodded. “She said I’m too old now for a nurse.”

  “Who said? Jacinth?”

  “No. Domina.”

  A word Lydea had not said for five years jumped into her mouth; she pinched her lips with the goose’s beak. Kyel’s eyes looked suddenly bleak.

  “My father is dying and Jacinth is gone. Will you stay with me?”

  “For a bit.” She remembered, made the goose speak. “For a bit, my lord,” it said in the coarser accents of her childhood. “For a bite of time, my young duck.”

  “I’m a falcon, not a duck.”

  “’Twas your grandfather a falcon. Peregrine Greve. Not you. You are a sweet duckling.” She stroked his hair, trying to burrow through her sorrow to some thought. Sense eluded her; she felt heavy, resigned, boneless, barely able to lift the goose. “I will not leave you alone here,” she promised, knowing herself good for that at least, even if she lost her life with him on that puppet-strewn bed. What to do, what to do… When Royce Greve breathed his last, his great-aunt Domina would make herself regent for Kyel until he came of age. If she let him live that long…

  The goose descended, beak first, into the embroidered coverlet. Lydea gazed at it, her smoky eyes wide. Or had it been Ducon Greve, wanting to leave Kyel unprotected at Royce’s death, who had sent the guards away? Could a bastard of the House rule Ombria? she wondered. If he were hard enough. A flea-bitten dog could rule Ombria, if it were ruthless enough.

  The falcon nipped at the goose. “Talk.” The falcon was tossed away then, replaced by the King of Rats, whose eyes were garnet, whose crown was gold. “Talk to me.”

  “Shall I tell you a story?” the goose asked.

  “Tell me the story of the fan.” Kyel rolled away from her, pulled the fan off an ebony table beside the bed. It was a delicate thing of slender ivory sticks and a double layer of
folded rice paper. One side was a painting, the other an intricately cut silhouette, a shadow world behind a painted world that could be seen when the fan was held up to the light. It had belonged to Kyel’s mother.

  Lydea opened the fan slowly, revealed the colored side. “This is Ombria, my lord,” the goose said. “The oldest city in the world.”

  “The most beautiful city in the world.”

  “The most powerful city in the world.”

  “The richest city in the world.”

  “This is the world of Ombria.” The goose tapped a tiny jade-green palace overlooking the sea. “This is the palace of the rulers of Ombria. These are the great, busy ports of Ombria. These are the ships of Ombria…” The goose took the fan gently in its beak, angled it in front of the lamp. Light streamed through the fan. “This is the shadow of Ombria.”

  A city rose behind Ombria, a wondrous confection of shadow that towered even over the palace. Shadow ships sailed the waters; minute shadow people walked the painted streets. The future ruler of Ombria, lips parted, surveyed his domain.

  “Tell me about the shadow city. Will I rule there, too?”

  The goose’s voice became dreamy, entwined in the tale. “The shadow city of Ombria is as old as Ombria. Some say it is a different city completely, existing side by side with Ombria in a time so close to us that there are places—streets, gates, old houses—where one time fades into the other, one city becomes the other. Others say both cities exist in one time, this moment, and you walk through both of them each day, just as, walking down a street, you pass through light and shadow and light… So, my lord, who can say if you will rule the shadow city? You rule and you do not rule: it is the same, for if you do rule the shadow city, you may never know it.”

  “Then how—Then how do they know it is there?”

  The goose was silent. Above its painted head, Lydea’s face with its autumn coloring and cloudy eyes was still, sculpted to a poised and timeless beauty by love and fear and grief. She was remembering the noisy, cluttered streets of her childhood: a blinding angle of light across an alley too black to see into, a house that was sometimes there and sometimes elsewhere…

  “Dea, Dea, how do they know?”

  She blinked. Another voice had called her that: Dea Dea, a sigh of satiation, only at that time, only when they were most alone. There was not anything private in that house, not anything, nothing…

  She felt the heavy tears swell behind her eyes. The door opened abruptly. She turned, the goose turning with her, both faces staring, mute. But it was neither Domina Pearl nor her ensorcelled guard come to deal with the child. It was Camia Greve’s bastard son, Ducon, who stood in the doorway, gazing back at rat and heir, mistress and goose, with as much expression, Lydea thought, as a halibut without a head.

  He said to Lydea, “The prince is calling for you.”

  He did not resemble his mother, the prince’s younger sister. She had died a decade after Ducon’s birth without ever naming his father. Who he resembled still kept tongues busy. Even Lydea had tried to guess, but found no one at court with that stark white hair, those silvery eyes which gave nothing away but light, the thin, tight smile that challenged even Domina Pearl. Who he loved, what he did with his time, Lydea had only a vague idea. He treated his uncle’s mistress with equal measures of courtesy and indifference; what he truly thought of her, she had no idea. He had odd interests in art and rambling; she guessed that from the watercolors she had seen of shabby doorways, broken piers, crumbling stairways, shadowed streets. He seemed to wander fearlessly through the darkest places in Ombria. Royce had been fond of his sister’s bastard, and had treated him generously. But even after five years in the palace, Lydea hardly knew enough to be relieved or uneasy at his presence.

  She put the puppet down and rose, looking anxiously at Kyel, torn between the unprotected child and the dying man’s summons. Surely Ducon would not harm Kyel, she thought, but in that house who could assume that even fire and water would not conspire?

  Kyel himself chose for her, speaking without fear, “My father wants you. Ducon will stay with me.”

  She made some attempt at her hair, noting, with a practical eye, that Ducon was unarmed. Ducon said briefly, “Leave it down. He will like it.”

  She dropped her hands, took a moment to give him what was left of her stunned thoughts. Kyel trusted him; she could only trust that. She said, desperate with fear, “Someone sent his guards away.”

  “I noticed.”

  “If Domina Pearl—if she has some plot—”

  He was shaking his head; he picked his words with care in front of the boy. “Without Kyel there would be chaos. His rightful heirs are aged and frightened, and the younger scions may decide to take what they will not inherit. She is better off regent for Kyel, than precipitating a power struggle in the House of Greve that might heave her out the door on her ancient backside.”

  She let her head drop an inch in resignation. “More likely my fate, my lord Ducon: the back door and my backside. Domina Pearl will be on her feet when the House falls down around her.”

  His light eyes remained on her face. “Do you have some place—” He stopped, as Kyel stirred anxiously on the bed.

  “Lydea will not leave. I forbid it.” He lifted the falcon puppet; it stared fiercely at them both. “I will be Prince of Ombria and I forbid.”

  “My lord,” Lydea said gently, stirring her wits to answer them both, “will it please you to give me leave to visit my father for a time? He was fond of me, and I have not—I have not been home lately.” Grief clawed at her voice. She turned quickly, barely hearing Kyel’s answer, remembering the young woman who, five years earlier, had entered the great palace by the sea giddy with love, spinning dreams while the storm clouds gathered, too huge for her to comprehend them. Silly dribbet of a girl. Bird nest for a brain. Impossible she could have smiled so, been so blind to her mother’s horror. Her mother had died not long after Lydea left. If she still had a father, he had not been inclined to let her know.

  The falcon gave her leave.

  Then there was the waking dream: Royce Greve looking at her one last time, skin molded to the bones of his face, his hand shaking, lifting to touch the long fall of her hair. Something happened. She waited for his fingers to reach her, but they lay on the tapestry coverlet as if they had never moved. Around her, in the dead silence, the candles whispered his name, hers. Domina Pearl touched her.

  Then she was walking to the west gate with the Black Pearl at her side to see that she did not linger a moment past her usefulness. The yard was deserted there. A stand of sunflowers hung their heavy heads like mourners; the sea drew slow, hollow breaths, loosed them as slowly. The palace stood listening, it seemed, to the tolling of the bells, with every window an eye, witness to her disgrace.

  “You’re best out of here,” Domina commented. She was small, compact; she did not so much look old as emanate age, like a musty puff of air, or bone-creakings too slow to be heard. Her hair had been dyed black for as long as anyone had been around to remember; no one alive remembered a time without her. She wore it drawn back with pearls and tortoise-shell combs from a stiff face powdered dead-white. Her eyes were cold, barren moons. “There are those in this house who would strip you like carrion birds.”

  Lydea gazed back at her wearily. Domina Pearl had given her no time even to change her shoes, though the sapphire heels on them would shout to every moving shadow. “As will those in the streets of Ombria.”

  “Surely you expected no reward for loving.”

  “No. But, odd as it sounds, I didn’t expect punishment.”

  Domina shrugged slightly. “It is not punishment. There is simply no place for you here, now. Go back to your father.”

  “I doubt my father will have much use for me.”

  “Then try the docks,” Domina said without a flicker of expression. “Any tavern there will find a use for you.”

  “I’d rather die,” Lydea said simply, and then, unb
idden, her childhood tongue returned to her. “You raven-eyed hag, some bitter bird ate your heart out so long ago you don’t even remember how to be human. I may be a fool-headed limpet with nothing left to cling to and about to be done to death for my shoes, but if I hear you’ve set your bleak eyes at harming Kyel Greve, I’ll come shoeless out of my grave to put you in my place, you ugly foul mausoleum.”

  The Black Pearl opened the gate. She laughed suddenly, a little scuddering of dry leaves. “You won’t live past midnight on the streets. Get out.” The gate clanged shut with more force than necessary. “You are already dead.”

  Lydea, standing on the wrong side of the gate in the dark street, with her bright hair streaming down her shoulders and gifts from Royce on every finger, thought the old witch was probably right. She cast one final glance at the palace, saw the richly dressed courtiers clustered safely in the long halls, whispering about how Royce Greve had breathed his last, and that was the last any of them would see of his tavern-brew of a mistress, there one moment for five years and gone the next, as if she had, under Domina Pearl’s arid glance, ceased to exist.

  Lydea turned her back to them. “We’ll see,” she whispered, thinking of Kyel. “We’ll see about that.”

  She braided her hair quickly, using rings here and there to secure it, then took off her shoes and tossed them into the sunflowers. Their great, strange faces, all eyes, trembled oddly; something rustled within them and was still. Lydea, with half the city to cross in the night, stared at them and realized that she even had sunflowers to fear; she could not trust that the Black Pearl had not planted her death among them. She took a step away from them, another. And then, tears of sorrow and terror sliding down her face, she ran from shadow to shadow into the dark.

  She did not get far before the shadows began to reach out for her. She was pulled toward lit doorways, toward black alleys. Hands snatched at her hair, her bodice, her bare feet. She fled down a side street; someone caught her long braid, jerked her to her knees, wrapped the braid around her throat. She cried out, flailing at air. Stones echoed her cry, mocking, she thought, but she was free suddenly, for no reason. She stumbled up, reached the end of the street and ran into a body like a wall. A huge hand trapped her hands behind her back; a beard burrowed beneath her ear. A bird or a bat flew out of the shadows and the man was down, passed out drunk at her feet, she guessed, and moved again, frantically trying to remember the tangle of streets she had roamed so easily as a child. Voices plucked at her. Where so fast, pretty one? Walk with us. What’s your hurry? Stars, she wears, shining in her hair. Show us your stars, just show us, and we’ll leave you be. That’s a dead alley, nothing there, come back out here into the light. Stop her, catch her, she’s stolen a treasure and hid it in her hair…