The City in the Lake by Rachel Neumeier

women had withdrawn into an adjoining room—with relief, because they did not know whether the Queen would shout and throw things, or if she did, at whom. And also because they were afraid of the Bastard, who was too quiet and too contained and whom the Queen did not trust.
    The Queen looked at him steadily. She was clad in black and lavender, and wore a silver circlet set with amethysts in her black hair; the stones were almost exactly the color of her eyes. She occupied her heavy chair as though it were a throne.
    The Bastard drew a lighter chair around and sat down in it, facing the Queen. He said, “Tell me of the King’s last night. He visited you in these chambers, but did not stay. He went to his own rooms and vanished from there, after pacing half the night. But did he speak to you that evening? Of what did he speak?”
    The Queen had raised her fine narrow brows in an expression of astonishment. “What is this pretense, Neill? No one is here but me.”
    “If you believe I am pretending, then humor my pretense,” suggested the Bastard patiently.
    The Queen studied him. The assumed astonishment had fallen from her face like a mask, leaving behind an expression harder and colder and more difficult to read.
    “Deny it,” she said. “Deny it to me.”
    The Bastard, meeting her eyes, said directly, “Ellis, you have been mistaken. I do not censure you for thinking of me. But my hand is nowhere in this. I am in no way responsible for the disappearance of your son. I am in no way accountable for the disappearance of the King.”
    “You hated him.”
    The Bastard moved a hand slowly over the polished arm of the chair, which was carved in the likeness of a swan in flight. He traced the feathers of its wing, frowning, before he looked up at last to meet the hard stare of the Queen. He said slowly, “Ellis, you are mistaken again.”
    “I am not mistaken! He never cared for you: he loved my son and not you, and you hated him—hated them both—and now they are both gone and you have everything—”
    “Ellis,” the Bastard said. His quiet voice brought her to a halt. He said, still quietly, “I did not hate my father. Or Cassiel. I never knew until now that you hated me. It seems to me that the only one who hates in this family, Ellis, is you.”
    The Queen did not answer. She stared at him, her eyes wide and a little shocked.
    “I am not now, nor have I ever been, your enemy. You are unjust.” The Bastard rose and took a step toward her, leaning forward earnestly. “If it was not I, Ellis? What then?”
    For a moment there was doubt in the Queen’s wide violet eyes. She was shaking, the Bastard saw. Then she moved, gripping the arms of her chair as though to rise, or as though to hold herself back from rising. She said, furiously but not loudly, “I am not unjust. I am not wrong. Get out. Get out. How dare you come here and lie to me about your innocence?”
    The Bastard straightened. He said with amazement, “You blame yourself. You rail against me to defend yourself. Ellis, what have you done?”
    The Queen picked up a heavy silver pitcher on a low table nearby and threw it with considerable force at the Bastard, who fended it off with a raised hand and backed away as water arced across the room. “Get out!” she shouted at him. “Get out!”—and left him to retreat in the most undignified manner imaginable, because he could not raise a hand against her.

    “How can the Queen be guilty?” he asked the guard captain later, still consumed by that sense of astonishment. “How can the
Queen
be guilty?”
    The guard captain, leaning against the back of a heavy chair because he would not sit in the Bastard’s presence, frowned. The mage Marcos settled comfortably in the depths of a huge softcushioned chair, answered instead. “I doubt she is guilty in quite that sense, Neill.”
    They were all gathered in the Bastard’s personal apartments. The shutters of the sitting room were open, the late autumn