“Leave the animal,” Sybilla said in a low, deadly voice, “and go to your rooms. I will join you after I have returned the feast to some sense of order.”
“The monkey stays with me.” She was already in enough trouble—why not add thievery to her list of supposed transgressions? Alys was certain God would forgive her even if Sybilla did not.
The Foxe matriarch’s perfect, slender nostrils flared. “Go. I will fetch it when I come, so be prepared to say your good-bye then.”
“Come, Alys.” Cecily took the arm opposite the monkey, and her grip was firm, but so much more gentle than Sybilla’s had been. She leaned in close to Alys’s ear. “Please, darling—‘twill only be so much more the worse for you if you struggle against her, and I wonder already what she might do.”
Cecily was right. Alys had defied Queen Sybilla and now she would pay. Her oldest sister thought her a child still, and cared naught that she had just humiliated Alys before half the English nobility. There was no foretelling the lengths of the punishment that was to come.
Alys pulled free from Cecily’s grasp easily. “I tire of this mundane feast, and its equally boring guests,” Alys said loudly, tilting her chin lest the tears threaten oncemore. “I think I shall retire for the evening and work at my stitchery. I bid you good night.”
She swept through the crowd with the monkey clinging to her shoulder gamely, the guests parting for her as if she had been touched by a curse.
Alys could not help but think to herself that perhaps she had been.
The only stitchery that was worked on in Alys Foxe’s chamber was done by Cecily, who chose to stay with her younger sister rather than rejoin the dubious and scandalized festivities below. Alys was quite surprised that Saint Cecily had not spent the past hour on her knees, praying for Alys’s very soul. Instead, the middle Foxe sister sat in an upright chair near the hearth and a table of oil lamps, working on one of her endless tapestries, and chastising her sweetly every few moments.
“I know you feel you have your reasons in most instances, Alys,” Cecily broke the silence yet again. “But I fail to see why it is so difficult for you to at least try to get along with Sybilla on the occasions where she actually requires it.”
“My quarrel was notwithSybilla until she stuck her pointy nose in it,” Alys argued petulantly, sounding to her dismay, like the child Sybilla accused her of being. Her eyes flicked to the beamed canopy above her bed, where Lady Blodshire’s liberated pet sat munching a dried fig happily, sans skirt, leash,andcollar. “That beastly Etheldred Cobb—”
“You embarrassed Sybilla terribly with your behavior.”
“I embarrassedherwithmybehavior?”
“Yes,” Cecily agreed quietly, quickly tying a knot and then biting off the thread with her teeth. “Sybilla givesyou free reign most of the time. Her view, I’m certain, was that because you are of a higher rank than Lady Blodshire, your breeding should have persuaded you to rise to your station when faced with her venom. Any matter, we are to honor our elders, even when we feel their actions are not particularly honorable.”
Alys rolled her eyes and turned her face back to the window, seeing very little of the night-blackened countryside through the wavy and clouded glass.
“I would thinkyouto commend me for showing mercy to the poor creature unfortunate enough to be in the care of that old bitch.” Cecily gave Alys a look of dark warning, but Alys ignored it. “And for defending myself—as well as our family—against such unwarranted slander! She may as well have called Mother an idiot. I am well aware that allSybillacares about is appearances. Ironic, since she plays the whore for any man who dares cross our threshold.”
“Alys!” Cecily said sharply.
“‘Tis true, and well you know it. Why, I would wager that Sybilla’s had no fewer than a hundred men in her bed. If you feel it your duty to lecture one of your sisters on Godly behavior, Saint Cecily, I would hope it to be Sybilla rather than me.”
“She’s not had that many … friends,” Cecily said awkwardly. “And don’t call me Saint Cecily, Alys—‘tis a blasphemy and mean spirited. You wound me.”
Alys did feel a pinch of regret for speaking aloud the popular nickname for her middle sister. “Oh, Cee, Iamsorry for that. Forgive me. I’m only so frustrated I could tear at my hair!”
“Please, allow me.”
Sybilla had entered Alys’s bedchamber as stealthily as a cat on the prowl, and one look at her eldest sister’ssparkling eyes and squared shoulders left Alys little doubt that she was the intended prey. Behind her, like a dusty old shadow, stood Fallstowe’s steward, Graves. As usual, he stared beyond the group toward a corner of the chamber, as if completely disinterested in the women keeping his company. Employed by the Foxe family since before even Alys’s father was born, Graves was as much a part of Fallstowe as the mortar between the stones.
“I will not apologize, Sybilla,” Alys stated flatly before her eldest sister had even come to stand before her. “To you or to that vicious dragon below. You were horrid to me before our guests, and I am not sorry the tiniest bit for anything I said to Etheldred Cobb.”
“I have had quite enough of your insubordination, Alys Foxe,” Sybilla said, trapping Alys where she sat at the window. Now even should she desire to stand, Sybilla’s powerful physical presence made it impossible. “Your behavior this evening was the final insult.”
Alys slapped the stone seat at her hip. “Insult? You would speak to me of ins—”
“I said I have had enough!”Sybilla repeated loudly, as close to shouting as cool Sybilla ever came.
The two sisters stared at each other for a tense moment, and then suddenly, Sybilla turned to grab a wooden high-backed chair, the twin to the one Cecily still occupied. She swung the piece around before Alys and sat down, positioning herself directly beneath the stone window seat.
“Alys,” Sybilla began, more calmly now, but a snowflake landing on Sybilla’s tongue would have still frozen to death. “You and I have had our quarrels, true. But I do hope you recognize that as—”
“Head of this family,”Alys supplied in the same moment as Sybilla. Her eldest sister paused, her lips drawn together in a thin line. “You’ve made everyone very aware that yourule Fallstowe, Sybilla, so get on with whatever punishment you’ve conjured in your power-drunk mind.”
“Alys!” Cecily gasped again from her seat by the hearth.
