Cards of Grief by Jane Yolen Page B

them.
    “I will change now,” she said.
    “I will fill the Cup,” I answered.
    I sat for a long moment at the table before I began, thinking about Gray and how she had looked at me, her face calm, whispering, “For all that you have done…” Have done! All that I was now doing was for her, too, though it was the Queen who required it. Then the face of the Queen, avid, vulpine, full of eager plottings, replaced Gray’s in my mind.
    I took a small silk purse from around my neck, and opened it, and was assailed at once by a vivid musky odor. I tipped the purse and three dark kernels of Lumin fell out.
    Only the Queen uses the Lumin nut. One small kernel can cause nights of sensual phantoms and phantasmagoria. Two can provoke hysteria and nightmare. Three kernels, soaked in wine, lead to a short, dream-filled sleep and death. It is the quickest, most painless death we can give. That is why only the Queen is allowed the use of the kernels. There are two Lumin trees that grow in her courtyard. All others, save for some that may be in the deepest, most impenetrable part of the forest, have been destroyed.
    I looked at the kernels and sighed. Someone like T’arremos might have been tempted to pocket the nuts and smother the old woman instead. But I had had my orders and, besides, she was Gray’s grandmother. She would not suffer at my hands.
    I picked up the kernels and dropped them one by one into the Cup. The faintest tink was all I heard. Then I poured a bit of Queen’s wine from a flask I had carried with me. It would not do to send the old woman on her final journey with that common Lands swill. She would go in style; that was my very own idea.
    “I am ready,” she said.
    I turned to look at her. She was standing by the stairway dressed in a long dark gown that covered her from neck to ankles. Lands go covered to their deaths while we Royals are laid out with only a diaphanous silken sheet over us. I did not show any emotion, even by a blink, for I did not want to shame her.
    I followed her silently up the stairs, or at least as silently as the stairs allowed, for they sighed and moaned under our combined weight, a curious accompaniment to the journey.
    The upstairs room was windowless, the thatch old, and there was a distinctive smell of mold about. The darkness was illumined by a single candle and in that small light I could clearly see the bed, its posters ornately carved, the linen sparkling clean. A drawing of rood and orb hung over the bed.
    Without any extra fuss, the old woman lay down and put her hands one atop another over her stomach. “I need not confess to you,” she said. “I spoke my final piece to my daughter last night.”
    I nodded. They had both known. These Lands women breed true. Gray’s lines were firm.
    I knelt down beside her and held out the Cup. “Come, take the Cup,” I said. “You will like the wine. It comes”—I hesitated, then chose the lie—“with the Queen’s blessing and with three kernels from her Lumin trees.”
    She took the Cup without a moment’s hesitation and drained it as if eager for sleep. Then she handed it back.
    As the drugged wine took effect, her eyes grew first bright, then fogged. Her mouth began to stretch in that rictus we call the Smile of the Dead. She whispered and the snatches I heard convinced me that her dreams had started, for she spoke of bright and holy things.
    I began to rise and her hand shot out and held my arm. She half rose onto one elbow. “You will make them remember me?”
    “I will.”
    “May your lines of grieving be long,” she said, her voice graveled and slow. She lay back and closed her eyes.
    “May your time of dying be short,” I answered and sank down by her side again. I stayed there until she stopped breathing. Then I put two funerary gems on her eyelids, another gift from the Queen, and left.
    I had planned to stop only briefly at the Hall of Grief, long enough to tell Gray’s mother about her mother’s death,