Chapter Two The Villainess’s Plot Begins

CHAPTER TWO

The Villainess's Plot Begins

As Lady Rahela swept into the throne room, her new guard held the door for her. Proud as she was beautiful, Rahela sneered.

Her sneer turned sweet for her king. "The evidence proves my stepsister a traitor."

"And how should I punish a traitor?"

"A traitor must be executed by pit or gallows."

"May the court bear witness," declared the king. "Lady Rahela deserves the drowning pit, with iron shoes on her feet to drag her down."

"She deserves a worse end than that." Rahela's guard moved from her shadow, a lean youth with a hungry smile. "Let me suggest a most unhappy end. Even commoners praise the lady of snow and flame's dancing."

The king listened.

Soon iron shoes smoked on the fire, metal so hot the slippers glowed like twin suns.

"Favour me with a last dance, my dear," urged the king.

Lady Rahela's face twisted with fear, no longer beautiful. She turned from her king to the Last Hope's icy judgement, to the guard's sinister smile. There was nobody to help her.

Time of Iron , ANONYMOUS

D esperate calm descended on Rae. She made a mental to-do list. Number one: escape with her life. Number two: work out the rest later!

She swept the billowing red-and-white skirt over her arm, returning to her bedroom and seizing an ornate golden candlestick. It had a flared base and was elaborately carved with twining gold snakes. Most important, it was heavy.

Clutching her candlestick, Rae crept back into the vaulted marble hall. Her bedroom was windowless, but beside the locked door was the small arched window. The embers of sunset burned behind crimson glass. Opals in the latticework shone like the whites of watching eyes.

Rae hefted the candlestick, taking aim.

The impact was immediate. Rae's breath was knocked from her lungs as she went tumbling onto the marble floor.

A man lay on top of her, solid weight of muscle pinning her down. His arm, heavy with leather and knotted cords, rested against her breast. Fear turned her body into a bridge of silver needles, sharp chills forming an arch. A lock of his black hair fell into Rae's eyes. Cold steel drew a hot line against her throat.

Someone was holding an actual knife to her throat.

Her body jolted up under his. "Holy shit, Jesus, Batman , don't kill me!"

The stained light of sunset turning his eyes red, he asked: "Do I have a reason to kill you?" An old leather glove, rough as a cat's tongue, scraped her neck as he shifted his grip on the knife hilt. "I'm a palace guard, not a palace assassin. They pay assassins more." He paused. "At least I hope they do."

Being inside a book was an intensely surreal experience, but so was enduring a hospital visit that involved a huge curly straw inserted into her veins as though Rae was a giant milkshake. Over her last three years, Rae had learned not to fuss and scream that ‘this couldn't be happening'. If you woke up in a nightmare, you dealt with it.

"You got me. It's the wicked stepsister, in the barred chamber, with the candlestick. Let me up."

"I can't let you jump out the window."

The guard's sing-song voice turned serious. Rae was briefly touched.

He added: "Have you no consideration for others? I'll be in trouble if you jump on my watch. Go take some nice poison in your bedroom."

Rae's eyes went shock-wide. The guard's eyebrows, going up at the ends like raised swords, lifted in an eyebrow shrug.

"I want to live," Rae whispered.

"That's not really my problem."

"I'm profoundly moved by your concern," said Rae. "What if I bribed you to let me escape out that window?"

The guard simultaneously rolled off her and rolled his eyes. "My lady, at last! I thought you'd never offer to bribe me."

He shoved the window open with an elbow. Rae rushed forward and looked down. And down. Below the window stretched a silvery stone wall, sheer as a cliff. Beyond the cliff wall lay the blackness of the void, broken by a single fat red spark drifting up from the sullen fire burning in the depths of the dread ravine.

Rae had totally forgotten about the fathomless abyss crawling with the undead. Eyam was an island surrounded by sea on all sides, except the side where flames and low moans rose. The dead were their only neighbours.

The Palace on the Edge was an extremely literal name. For religious reasons, the kings of Eyam had carved a palace into the very edge of the cliff overlooking the ravine.

"Will you be departing now, my lady? Or have you changed your mind?"

"You've made your point, no need to underline it with sarcasm!"

The palace guard was idly flipping his knife from hand to hand. Rae eyed him critically.

"I thought guards must approach the ladies-in-waiting as if we were fragile swans sculpted from priceless crystal?"

The maidens in the tower were the ladies-in-waiting-to-be-queen. Since nobody knew which lady-in-waiting the king would choose from among his favourites in the tower, all were treated as potential queens.

The guard shrugged. "Your pardon, lady. I've only been a guard twelve hours."

"That's weird."

The system in Eyam had five levels. On top, shiny as his crown, was the ruler. Below were noble families who owned lands and objects of power. Under aristocrats were the serving class, called ‘noble servants' because they got to live in the palace and use the magical artefacts, though they could never own them. Below them, living in the city outside the palace and occasionally allowed within its walls, were merchants: basically peasants who'd dared make money though they couldn't have real power. At the bottom were peasants, who grew food and carried away garbage. Society would collapse without them, so they were treated horribly.

A palace guard was a noble servant. Like aristocrats, their positions passed down through family lines. You couldn't simply get a job at the palace. Rae was having a hard enough time without world-building inconsistency!

"My lady, they explained about me."

The guard sounded incredulous as Alice explaining plot details. How dare he suggest she hadn't done the reading?

"I had a lot on my mind," Rae snapped.

Another voice rang out in the marble hall. "You're new to the palace. Allow me to inform you about nobles. We're the mud beneath their feet, and they only see what shines. Lady Rahela is blind and deaf to anything that doesn't concern her king or her precious self."

On either side of the marble hall was an alcove, the type you found marble busts of politicians or dead kings in. These particular alcoves, screened with beaded curtains, held people. Her guard must have bolted from his alcove when he saw her at the window. Every lady-in-waiting had a bodyguard and a maidservant.

On the far side of the room a woman's hand parted the curtains, white beads catching the dying light with a seashell shimmer. The pearl-pale veil parted to show a cold face and burning eyes. As the woman turned, her left cheek was revealed. There was a mark upon her bone-white cheek, the same colour and irregular shape left by a splash of port wine on the floor. A girl in Rae's middle school had a birthmark. She got it removed over one summer. Rae thought it looked cool and was sorry to see it go, but that wasn't Rae's face or her decision.

There were no lasers to remove a birthmark here. People said Emer wore a mark of divine punishment for sins she had yet to commit.

Emer, Lady Rahela's maid, raised with her from the cradle. Emer, who had always done everything Rahela asked.

"Just checking…" said Rae. "We already had that big scene where I told you I was only using you?"

The future Iron Maid's voice was cold as the edge of an axe. "You made yourself very clear earlier, my lady."

"It wouldn't do any good to say I didn't mean it?"

"Say whatever you like. You usually do."

The maid's hands were folded in her lap and her voice emotionless, an empty hole where feeling had once been. You couldn't sound this devoid of caring, unless you'd cared a lot once.

Rae had always enjoyed the Iron Maid's unimpressed commentary on the aristocracy, but she didn't enjoy Emer's current attitude. It was obvious Emer hated her deeply.

In this place, Rae didn't have to feel pain. Emer's hatred didn't matter. Even Emer didn't matter. She wasn't real.

What mattered was digging herself out of the hole Lady Rahela had thrown her, Rae, into. If she was truly in Eyam, in the glass heart of the Palace on the Edge was a plant that would save her. Rae had to live until the Flower of Life and Death bloomed. Which meant Rae had to live past tomorrow.

The palace guard coughed. He was leaning against the windowsill, watching Rae and Emer's face-off. "You two obviously have a great deal of history. Which is awkward for me. I don't know you."

He didn't know the Lady Rahela. So he couldn't hate her yet.

Rae had to bond with him immediately.

"What's your name?"

That seemed the obvious first step in the bonding process.

"I'm Key."

Which was, if Rae recalled correctly, a peasant name. The lower classes named their children after objects, since objects in this country could be powerful. It hadn't occurred to Rae before now that this naming convention was disturbing.

Except Key's mother hadn't named him, had she? The writer must have chosen ‘Key' because he was a guard – and guards held the keys to the places they guarded.

" My lady ," Emer snapped at Key.

"There's no need to address me as ‘my lady'," said Key the peasant guard. "In fact, I'd prefer you didn't."

Emer scoffed.

"So why are you a peasant?" Rae instantly regretted her question. You couldn't go around asking people why they were peasants! "Ah, how did you become a palace guard?"

Emer the grim maid seemed tired of their nonsense. "The king rewarded him for a great deed. The court's calling him the Hero of the Cauldron."

Key the irreverent palace guard didn't seem like the hero of anything.

"Titles are for nobles. The Beauty Dipped In Blood?" Key flicked a mocking glance at Rae. "I could call myself Key the Irresistible, but people would make hurtful jokes."

He was tall, dark and handsome, which Rae found suspicious. Normally when fictional characters were good-looking, they turned out to be important. Were side characters allowed to be randomly handsome?

Maybe they were. Key's face suggested no dramatics, only casual good humour, with an easy grin, ironic eyebrows and cheekbones so angled they were almost hexagons. His eyes were grey, not the emerald green or summer-sky blue of a main character, and his nose was too long for symmetry. He looked about twenty, Rae's age and several years younger than Emer. He had black hair, but not a menacing mane of midnight. Chopped-uneven locks sprang straight from his head with the ends flipping down as if he were a cheery goth daffodil. He had a lean and restless look, and a general air of being charismatically untrustworthy. Rae felt she could work with this.

"So you did a great deed?" Rae prompted.

‘Hero of the Cauldron' rang a bell so faint she might be hearing the sound wrong. If the guard had a title, he must have a role to play. Since Rae didn't remember any details about him, he probably wouldn't last long. Poor minor character. Rae bet he died.

Key snorted. "A bunch of ghouls crawled out of the ravine. I stabbed them."

Ghouls were the walking dead who would one day become the Emperor's unconquerable army. Rae didn't have to pretend to be impressed. "And you asked the king to make you a palace guard as a reward?"

Many characters in Time of Iron cared about duty. Maybe Key would feel honour-bound to serve her.

"I asked the king to give me one thousand gold leaves."

Coins came in four shapes and four different metals in Eyam. Rae couldn't remember what the other shapes and metals were, but a thousand sounded like a pile of cash.

Faintly hopeful, Rae inquired, "Were you happy to be made a guard?"

"No," said Key. "I would be happy to get one thousand gold leaves ."

So the dude was in it for the money. Mercenary minor villain, check.

Emer's voice grew a shade less harsh, as though she pitied Key. "You distinguished yourself, so the king must honour you. However, the aristocracy don't want a peasant defiling the palace halls."

Rae began to understand. "The king and the nobles made you a palace guard, then assigned you to a lady who'd be executed in the morning."

Key was still smiling, close-mouthed. "Such an honour."

"Wow," murmured Rae. "Eat the rich."

The Hero of the Cauldron bared his teeth. "Think they'd taste good?"

His light tone held the faintest trace of bitterness, candy laced with poison. Despite his smiles, Key obviously wasn't amused by his current situation. It was becoming clear Rae was locked in a room with two extremely angry people.

A stress migraine threatened.

How did Lia get out of her near-death situations? Right! The damsel begged for help in a whisper that smote men to the heart.

"You tried to stop me from throwing myself out the window." Rae's voice emerged more purr than whisper, but she reached an appealing hand to Key anyway. "Say you won't let me die."

Key took her hand. Rae was shocked to feel as though his hand was a burning match and her spine a candle. She guessed the rumours about Rahela's wanton ways were true, but Rae had different priorities. Lady Rahela's body could cool it.

"My lady, if you're trying to seduce me…" Key leaned forward, gazing into her eyes. "I'll still let you die in the morning."

Rae snatched her hand back. "I'm not trying to seduce you!"

Key lowered his own musical tones into exaggerated sultriness. "Then why did you put on that voice?"

Rae winced. "Damn it."

She should have known trying to act the heroine's part was ridiculous. Rahela and her stepsister were built different. Evil minx Rahela wasn't able to get Lia's results. Rae herself wasn't the type anyone loved at first sight. Or any other sight.

In Rae's life before, she'd had a perfectly nice boyfriend. She made out with him on her bed when her parents were away, and debated with her best friend how to signal she was ready to go further.

Then Rae got sick. Her best friend took her spot on the cheerleading squad and her boyfriend. They had more in common with each other than her. Nobody had much in common with Rae any longer. She drifted away from her friends on a sea of pain and strangeness.

In hospital, Rae would chat with older women in chemo. One woman's husband always brought her breakfast in bed and took her wig to the hairdresser's. ‘Some people are special,' another woman told Rae. ‘Some people are made to be loved.' That woman's husband had left her the day she went into hospital.

Only special people were saved. The rest had to fight their own way through.

At least now Rae had a chance to fight.

"Why do you think you're going to be executed in the morning?" Emer's voice flew through the air, sharp as a hurled weapon. "You said Lady Lia would be the one executed. What's changed?"

Great question.

Thankfully, Rae remembered the lead-up to Rahela's big death scene. Their guileless heroine told Emer she was visiting peasant huts to care for sick children.

An ancestral knife was discovered in one of the peasants' humble huts. The hut was promptly burned down with the peasants inside it. Any item of power was a cherished possession of either the king or the nobles, guarded and marked with the family seal. The knife was an heirloom of the Felice family.

Only Lia Felice and Rahela, Lia's stepsister, had access to the family heirlooms. Both were confined in their chambers, awaiting the king's judgement. Emer had already reported Lia's visit to the humble hut. Lia could have smuggled the knife out in her medicine basket. Lia was the obvious suspect.

Except when Lia laboured in the palace kitchens, she whispered her tragic secrets to the ashes she swept on the hearth. The hearth was directly connected to the chimney in the palace library, where the Last Hope sat wrapped in scholarly pursuits. The Last Hope, the king's childhood friend and the most incorruptible man in the country. He told the king Rahela had stolen Lia's family heirlooms and must have planted the knife. The Last Hope's evidence led directly to Rahela's death.

Rahela shouldn't know any of this. How could Rae possibly explain what she knew?

"I know I'm going to be executed because of him!" Rae gestured wildly to Key.

He pointed to his heart, or possibly his jerkin, and mouthed ‘ Me? ' His fingerless gloves were made of ancient black leather that didn't go with the blue and steel of the palace guard uniform. This was Rae's first time seeing a jerkin in real life. It was basically a leather waistcoat.

Rae concentrated on Emer, willing her to believe. "Key was assigned to me because when a noble is executed, their servants are presumed guilty and killed along with them. The king wants Lia, not me. If he was planning to kill Lia, he'd have assigned Key to her. They want to get rid of me, they want to get rid of Key, and they want to get rid of you because you're loyal to me. One stone, three birds. We must help each other."

Thinking of it that way cheered Rae. By definition, there was only one fairest of them all, but it was different for villains. This world was against them. So they should conspire together.

"Sorry to contradict, my lady." Emer didn't sound sorry. When she lifted her chin it became clear Emer was tall, dark and handsome as well. She looked as if she would scorn beauty. "While traditionally servants are executed with their master, the rules are waived if another noble asks for them. Nobody has an eye for hair and dress like me. I have the skills to make a lady the king's favourite. I can get out of this on my own. Everything you possess will be confiscated if you're executed, so you can't bribe me. You're a liar, so I won't believe any promises. Why would I help you?"

A long-ago teacher had told Rae stories were created by villains. Their desires and evil deeds ignited the plot, while the hero only wanted to stop them. At least to begin with, villains were in charge.

Once Rae had a list of fifty colleges, and no idea what to major in. She ruthlessly organized every extracurricular activity, ending up head cheerleader and student council president. Rae had variously imagined she might be a lawyer with killer instincts and killer suits, an editor who put stories into perfect shape, or run a real estate empire alongside her mom. She'd never known what she wanted to be, except in charge.

She must seize control now, and execute her scheme quickly. The timing had to be perfect.

Rae, the head bitch cheerleader, offered an evil smile. "I'll make the oath of blood and gold."

Emer's birthmark blazed against her suddenly ashen skin. "That's forbidden."

"So what?" asked Rae. "I'm wicked."

Key blinked, expression suddenly intrigued.

Encouraged, Rae continued, "I'm a heartless monster with a strong character and stronger eyeliner game, and I intend to get away with my crimes. What about it? Why should you care about my personal failings?"

Key seemed impressed by her insight. "It's true, I don't care."

Emer's gaze stayed stony. Rae swept across the marble floor, skirt a darting red snake behind her, and launched into a villainous monologue.

"I'm a treacherous, power-hungry bitch, and honestly? It feels amazing. Don't listen to stories encouraging you to be good, telling you to shine in a filthy world and patiently endure suffering. Screw suffering. It's too hard to be good. Do the easy thing. Do the evil thing. Grasp whatever you desire in your greedy bloodstained hands."

By now they were both paying close attention. She'd never given a motivational speech for the dark side before, but surely these villains would see things her way.

"The other choice is to accept fate, and I won't. I scheme for power because I refuse to be powerless. I would break this whole world to get what I want. Most people die without mattering at all. If they curse your name, at least they remember it. Don't you dream of the forbidden? Choose wrong. Choose evil. Let's do it together."

Rae brought her jewelled hands together in a lavish thunderclap.

"Villains," she announced. "Let's unionize."

If she hadn't convinced her minions, she'd convinced herself. Determination crystallized as she spoke, her goal more real with each word. Heroes might be reluctant to accept a call to adventure. Villains had to intercept the call and steal the treasure.

On a mission, Rae dashed into her bedchamber. The Beauty Dipped In Blood had a mahogany dressing table crowded with ceramic perfume bottles, drawers inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

Rae wished for that moment where a character gazed into a mirror, so the audience learned what they looked like. Unfortunately, mirrors in Eyam were made of bronze. The nuance of Rahela's features were lost in a bronze lake, but she made out one surprising detail. There was a beauty mark directly over the left corner of Rae's mouth. Rae had always liked it. Everybody prepared cancer patients for losing the hair on their head, never for the rest of their hair. Having no eyebrows changed your whole face and having no eyelashes made you resemble a lizard. The beauty mark let Rae know, no matter how strange her reflection, that this was still her.

Lady Rahela had the same mark.

It was disorienting to have hair again, a weight pulling Rae's head back and lying warm against her neck. Rae had never had hair this long, or curves this curved. The reflection she beheld was the image of a temptress. Rae had experienced many things, but she'd never had a healthy adult woman's body before.

Adulthood must be different for normal people. Surely everybody didn't spend their whole lives feeling like both a howling child and a weary ancient.

Rae shook her head, heavy with unaccustomed weight, and pulled open the top drawer. She didn't need to find herself. She needed a knife.

In the recesses of the drawer lay a knife, and a snake uncoiling to strike. Rae screamed.

Her maid and bodyguard came running. When Emer saw what had startled Rae, she stilled. "Why are you shocked seeing your own pet?"

Rae searched for Key's reflection in the mirror. He leaned against the arched entryway of her chamber, arms folded. Without his ready smile, his face seemed different. Vacant in a disturbing way, a crucial factor missing.

Emer's gaze was steely as a trap. Rae remembered how cruel Emer's mistress had been to her, and the axe murders Emer would commit in the future. Across the room was a cabinet containing enchanted gauntlets Rahela had stolen from her stepsister. Wearing those, she would have the power of a dozen warriors.

If Rae could get to the cabinet fast enough, theoretically she could kill them both.

Lady Rahela was destined to die slowly and horribly. Rahela's death was the first step in the prophecy coming true. Rae had escaped her own destiny. Surely she could escape someone else's. But how?

Nobody would help her. They were all villains here.

Emer's unforgiving voice asked, "My lady. What are you hiding?"