Murder of the Belvedere Eye

Chapter Two

2- King-Brother Charles

King-brother Charles rested his forehead on his hand, his thin silver crown hanging from his elbow like a loose bracelet. His eyes were trained on a cloth-covered body beneath the canopy. The fur of his crimson robes drooped.

“Aye,” I said. Charles glanced at me.

“Who the hell are you?”

“A pick pocket,” I said. He caught my arm. He examined the necklace in my hand.

“You steal that off the lord?”

I pulled my arm back and walked to the body. The king-brother looked over the side of the short tower. I pulled the sheet back that covered the girl. She had gone stiff during the heat of the day. I removed the knife that had been left in her gut.

“Get your paws off Ezema,” the king-brother said. “She’s been through enough.”

“I see the medicine men did their work.”

They had removed a forearm bone and drained her blood from a spigot in her neck. A gash was cut above her breast, and her heart was missing. Her lids were open, and she was missing her eyes.

“They’re calling her spirit,” Charles whispered, “it requires a lot of the host.”

“Why not move her inside?” I asked. I looked at her face. I tried to pull her eyelids down, but they were as tight as the rest of her body. “It is cooler in the walls. She would not spoil so fast.”

“The magicians said to leave her how she lay.”

I went through her pockets and pulled out a water skin. I opened it and smelled it. Wine. She also had a wine screw hidden within her robes. I began to run my fingers along her seams.

“Why do you sit here?”

“To keep the scavengers off her. They have been flying overhead. That’s why had the shade built.”

“Couldn’t a guard tend to it?”

“I would not trust another.”

I put my body between him and the seeress. There was a small tube in the hem of her sleeve, and a golden coin sewn into her bodice. I took a thin little knife from my pocket and worked out the stitching. I slid the tube, which turned out to be a small scroll, into my sleeve. Charles walked toward me. I made a show of removing the dragon.

“What are you doing? Remove your hands from her body!”

“Why is the king’s brother sitting atop this Belvedere, staring at a corpse?”

“Do not speak of Ezema that way!” Charles' face darkened in the moonlight. “A corpse is too animalistic. She was a light in the dark.”

“You felt for her?”

He looked away. I slipped the gold into my pocket.

“What I feel or don’t feel is of no substance to this matter.”

“Lover’s quarrel, perhaps?”

“You idiot! How dare you speak to me in such a way! I am royalty, and demand-” his face scowled. He clenched a fist. Tears ran. He kneeled beside her. “Cover her.” I pulled the sheet over. “It was… love. It was silly. We were like children with each other. Ezema. Ezema!”

“She seems to be half your age-”

“She was wise beyond her years. Ezema had seen centuries of the past and future. I make the pilgrimage as all the others do. But we spent our time in the present, in the immediacy of touch. She would tell me the things she had seen that day. Death, mostly. It is rare if she sees good things. That is why she’s revered. She tells the bad news, where a lesser seer would tell the client what they wished to hear.”

“When did you find her here?”

“Early this morning. Her time had been filled from first light to the time of breaking fast. I came after the meal, with a gift.” He nodded at a bottle beside the toothed wall. I went to it and examined it in the moonlight.  Gooj White. As expensive as you could get.

“Who saw her before you?”

“Lord Harlen. Lady Harlen. Glastius.”

“Was it one of them that did this?”

“I’d find that hard to believe. They all have servants who follow them around, all loyal to Harlen. And he wouldn’t benefit from this. It is a stain on his name. Sometimes, the servants rush in after their masters, hoping to get a word with Ezema before they are called to their duties.”

“So, you think it the killer was-”

“A servant.”

I broke the wine bottle’s seal. It snapped as if it were dipped the day before.

“Hey, beggar, that bottles worth more than your skin-”

I pulled the cork using Ezema’s screw and lifted the bottle to my lips.

I spat the wine out in a spray.

“Clytone,” I said. The king-brother looked at me with wide eyes.

“You don’t mean-”

“You brought her a bottle of poison,” I said. “Who gave you this bottle?”

“My attendant, Dorlien! I swear to the gods I had no knowledge of this!”

I looked at the king-brother. His dark-ringed eyes fell on the bottle. If the king-brother killed himself, I doubted that I would get paid.

I tossed the bottle off the wall, and it shattered.