Free Maid of Deception by Jennifer McGowan

quite recently served as our schoolroom. With the current, endless round of celebrations to mark and honor the Queen’s birthday, the room now generally served as one of the few places where we could go and know we would not be overheard. This day, however, we’d been called here specifically by the Queen, and even I was curious to see what the summons might mean.
    “Think you that Cecil knows the Queen has called us here?” Anna mused, sitting at the long table in the room’s center. “We’ve already reported to him all that he has asked about the arriving Lords.”
    Meg glanced up from her small leather-bound book, where she was working through the cipher that Anna had created for her. “Cecil is still in his chambers,” she said. “It seems this is a play scripted only by the Queen—even Walsingham has no hand in it. It will be interesting indeed to see what it is we learn this day.”
    “True enough,” grunted Jane, but I was still eyeing Meg and her journal. The book had been a gift to Meg from her long-lost parents, who had apparently been spies in their own right for old King Henry, Elizabeth’s father. As Meg finished unraveling each passage, she would share it with us. I envied her being able to learn of her parents this way, only the parts they saw fit to write down in an extended letter to their then-baby daughter. Far worse to see your parents in every moment of their imperfections. By now my mother at least had returned to Marion Hall, while my father remained behind at Windsor, no doubt to drink his way through any open cask of ale that he could find.
    “The Queen knows only that there is much she doesn’t know, and it is infuriating her,” Sophia said, her lyrical voice cutting through the gloom of the chamber like a beacon of light. She held up a thimble to peer at it, one I’d not seen before. “She draws us here to regain the advantage against her foes who are yet her friends.” Then she let the thimble fall from her fingers, picking up instead one of my fans; a magpie looking for treasures to line her nest.
    Anna’s head had come up sharply at Sophia’s first words, and now she shot a glance to me. I read its meaning instantly. That was one of Sophia’s clearest predictions yet, and notexpressed in the dreamy swoon that had so signified her earlier visions. Sophia turned to me as well then, but the beautiful girl’s face stopped me cold.
    It was . . . Blank was the only way to describe it. Like a page of unblemished parchment, open and vulnerable, her eyes large dark violet pools. She looked centuries older, her expression wiser, sager than any I’d ever seen on Sophia’s face.
    “Sophia?” I asked carefully, and took a step toward her. Jane rustled by my side, having come away from her perch in the shadows at Sophia’s first words as well. “Sophia, can you hear me?”
    “Deception upon deception covers you over, shadows your heart,” she murmured directly to me, “but love so deeply buried can tear your world apart.”
    What is this? I quickly took the final steps toward Sophia, gathering up her hands in mine as my fan fell away. This wouldn’t do at all.
    “Sophia!” I said, not sharply but with the tone I used to roust the scrabbling children of Marion Hall from their daily fisticuffs. It served; Sophia’s eyes cleared instantly, and color returned to her cheeks.
    “Oh!” she exclaimed, the relief evident in her eyes. “Beatrice. I had the most curious thought about—”
    “Well, you’re back now, and that’s what’s important,” I soothed, talking over her words and keeping her focused. “Now look placid. The Queen is on her way, and she’ll want to believe you are fit to serve.” As if that were possible. Of all of us, Sophia seemed the least fit to serve, no matter howprescient her ramblings. And what on earth had she meant about a buried love? The only thing buried about me, and not all that deeply, was my eternal disdain for—
    “The Queen!”