Cobweb Bride (Cobweb Bride Trilogy, Book 1)

Chapter 4

The Infanta, Claere Liguon, sat motionless before a great window in her Imperial bedchamber. She was straight-backed and her shallow chest did not rise with breath. She still wore the magnificent birthday crinoline dress of white and the crowned wig of silver thread and pearl and diamond, though the front of her dress was stained deep crimson that was slowly drying and turning black—she would not allow them to remove it—and her skin was the color of the grey sky outside.

Indeed, after the initial mad scuffle by the doctors to get her to a bedchamber, she resisted all help. She had allowed no one to touch her and instead stayed for several interminable horrifying hours in the Silver Hall, pacing before the table laden with Gifts from the Court. As she moved back and forth, occasionally putting her cold sticky fingers—what was it that made them so sticky?—on the shining objects, a slick trail of her own coagulating blood formed on the shining parquet floor, and her delicate slippers were soaked. She had trailed the blood here from the place near the center of the hall where the silver chair still stood, the spot where she had been stabbed. In that spot on the floor was a large thickening crimson-black puddle that no one dared to clean up.

After about an hour of watching her, watching the impossible spectacle before them, the petrified courtiers slowly regained a measure of something, if not sanity, and started to slip away one by one. The Emperor and Empress sat on their Thrones like two sacks—boneless, powerless, devoid of will and ability to think—from the shock. As the Hall emptied, except for the most essential attendants, they continued to sit, long past midnight, while the candles in the hall smoked, sputtered, and burned down. In only an hour or two, it was to be dawn. . . .

Eventually, as the nature of the dark in the windows started to change and the Silver Hall took on a hue befitting its name, the Infanta stopped pacing and pronounced that she wanted to be taken back to her quarters.

As she passed the Imperial Thrones, she curtsied before her devastated parents and then continued, as though this was but another ordinary audience. The grand doors were opened before her; she was gone. And yet they sat, Emperor and Empress, as the sky outside bloomed and the light filled the windows. They could not move—not yet, not ever. . . .

And now, here she was, in her bedchamber. Despite the early hour, an army of Ladies-in-Attendance, surgeons, priests, and other Imperial serving staff hovered around her in futility.

The Infanta's great smoky eyes were trained outside the window, looking somewhere beyond the delicate curtain of snowflakes that obscured the morning world with winter lace. Her hands were folded delicately in her lap, and for the first time ever she looked at peace, like a subject of a grand painting, stilled in an evocative pose for the ages, to be viewed and admired by future generations.

Now, of course, there would be no future generations stemming directly from her. In the unlikely event that the Emperor and Empress produced more children, there might be cousins who would one day in the distant future find a yellowing portrait of the Infanta dressed in splendid white, with a crown upon a silver powdered wig, archaic in its splendor, and eyes of dark receptivity in a pinched grey face. She would be frozen thus for eternity, for as things were now, Claere Liguon was never again to grow or age, or indeed change. . . .

It is possible that these and other thoughts tumbled through everyone's mind in those long excruciating hours of early dawn and morning. Lady Milagra Rinon, bearing the honor of First Lady-in-Attendance to the Grand Princess, stood trembling in her fulfillment of the task of Attendance, only a few steps away from the chair in which the Infanta now sat.

Lady Milagra's long-fingered hands were clutched together in a bloodless grip of terror, so as not to fidget upon the front of her plum-colored brocade dress or, God forbid, to call any attention upon herself now. And yet, oh, how she needed to be called upon to do something! Soft-spoken, with lovely unblemished skin of a deep olive hue and rich black hair underneath the platinum wig, Lady Milagra was a daughter of a fine noble house from the southern regions of the Realm, in Morphaea, where her family held lands very close to the border with Balmue. When the Emperor decided to honor her father the Marquis Rinon, one of the privileges granted was the acceptance of Lady Milagra into Attendance at the Silver Court. It might have seemed an odd choice considering how exquisitely beautiful and stately she was, and how much of a chance existed for her to outshine the bland Infanta. But Lady Milagra proved herself to be very loyal, self-effacing, and the perfect companion for her Imperial charge.