“No!” Vera shrieked, panic coursing through her body.
Vera hit Shoshone at a full run. Lifted her off the dais, through the stained-glass window, and toward the sea below.
They both ended up in the water. A tangle of surging, struggling limbs.
Vera grappled with the severely injured widow until she had control, then hauled Shoshone onto the stone quay with a furious grunt. She resisted the urge to shove Shoshone’s face back into the water and drown her.
“Why?” Vera asked, breathing hard.
She’d expected attacks, but not from Papyria. Not from another widow. She didn’t understand.
“Orders.”
“Impossible.”
Kira hadn’t wanted to live beneath Okinu’s yoke, but she hadn’t done any harm to Papyria, either.
Blood was streaming from the arrow wounds along Shoshone’s back. One of her legs had broken during the fall to the sea—the foot twisted in an unnatural direction. She was holding a hand tight against the place Vera had stabbed her.
“Okinu’s word is law. You know this. Osyrus Ward—and all of his allies—are enemies of Papyria.”
“Kira was trying to bring peace to Terra. She wasn’t an enemy.”
“Not directly. But that does not change my orders.” Shoshone leaned back on the stones. Looked up at the sky. “See what they make us do to each other, Vera? The rulers of this fucking realm. Such wretched lives we lead.”
Shoshone closed her eyes. Died.
* * *
Vera limped back to the castle in a fog. The image of her own dagger in Kira’s chest was scorched into her mind. She tried to tell herself that the dagger hadn’t hit any vital areas. But she knew that was a lie. Those were mortal wounds. Both of them.
She reached a postern gate that led back to the castle, but a flicker of movement caught her eye before she went through. She squinted in the dying light—working hard to get her battered and swollen left eye to focus, and failing—but swore she made out four figures moving along the dock. One in the lead. Three behind that were carrying something between them.
It was dark, and they were far away, but Vera recognized Osyrus Ward’s wild hair and the queer masks of his acolytes.
They were going to the Blue Sparrow. Vera followed them.
When she reached the skyship, Osyrus was nowhere in sight, but two of Osyrus’s acolytes guarded the dock. Otherwise it was empty. Vera had never seen them armed before, but these two carried long spears with jagged, barbed tips. The shape reminded Vera of a Naga Soul Strider’s tail. The acolytes’ grips and postures made it clear they knew how to use them.
“Vera the widow,” one said. “Osyrus Ward requests that you come aboard.”
“Is Kira alive?”
“Follow us. We will show you.”
* * *
They took Vera belowdecks.
Vera had never been down to that part of the ship. The walls were made of metal and bone and they vibrated at a low hum that made her teeth hurt. The two acolytes moved through the different chambers in silence—opening the bulkhead hatches with a series of Balarian seals. They moved into a circular chamber that was hotter and larger than the other rooms. In the center, the pipes converged on a pedestal, where the Kor was placed. White threads pulsing with power.
There were also two acolytes prostrate on the floor. Black wires ran from their wrists to the apparatus that held the core. Vera couldn’t tell if they were conscious or not.
“What are they doing?” she asked.
“Providing balance.”
“What does that mean?”
“The Kor requires stability. Our bodies serve.”
“How?”
The acolytes didn’t respond. Just kept moving through the holds of the ship. The final hatch required a seal from each of them placed on either side of the circular door. They opened it, and motioned her inside.
Kira was laid out on a raised slab in the center of the room. Eyes closed. There were bandages woven around her belly and chest. Tubes were stuck into both of her arms. One tube had the crimson pallor of blood. The other a dark, mossy green. The tubes snaked toward the walls, which were dominated by complex machinery. Rattling pipes and churning gears and quivering wires sprawled around the room like ivy. Everything seemed to lead back to a massive glass centrifuge that was filled with that dark green substance.
Osyrus had his back to her, scribbling notes on a piece of paper. He didn’t look up or stop writing.
Vera crossed the room. Put a hand on Kira’s forehead. Her skin was clammy and cold and Kira winced at the contact, but didn’t open her eyes. Slowly, Vera unhooked the clasp along Kira’s ribs that held the bandage in place. Started to unwind the dressings. When the last bolt of fabric was removed, and her chest exposed, Vera sucked in a breath. Stepped back.
“Black skies,” she whispered.
The wound was still open, her heart still torn. But there were beads of the green material collecting around the sliced ventricles, slowly pulling them back into place.
“Do not fret,” Osyrus said, finally turning around. “She is alive.”
“What are you doing to her?”
“Making sure that she stays that way.”
“The blade pierced her heart,” Vera said.
“And severed her spine, I’m afraid. Both grave injuries. Without careful attention to the healing process, she will never again walk, speak, nor breathe without the aid of these machines.”
Osyrus motioned to the corner of the room, where Vera’s dagger had been placed in a shallow copper tray filled with water, which was rusty brown from blood. He came over to the other side of the bed. “But Empress Domitian is a very special young woman. Her body can repair the damage under the proper conditions, which I have created here.” He raised his arms and looked around the room. “Do you like it? Of course, I need to dress it up a bit more before the empress will feel comfortable. Plants. Moss. A nice teakwood for the walls, I think. Cover up all this grinding machinery, you know? But there is plenty of time for that.”
“What are you doing to her?” Vera repeated.
“Come now, this is nothing you have not seen before. Her brother has the same condition. The only difference is precision and pace.”
She studied the wound a little longer. Remembered what she’d seen Silas do in the dim hold of that riverboat on the way to Burz-al-dun.
It took her a few more moments to put the pieces together. Leon Bershad had been executed for fathering a child with Shiru Malgrave. That child had died at birth. But that didn’t mean it was the only one they’d conceived together.
“Kira is Silas Bershad’s sister,” she said.
“Yes.” Osyrus nodded. “Although her presentation of the anomaly is far cleaner. And full of far more possibilities.”
Vera frowned at the wound. “Silas healed faster.”
“Silas Bershad never took a wound like this. Kira’s spine has been completely severed at the eleventh vertebra. Repairing the nerve pathways will take time. And careful strategy.” Osyrus moved to the tank and shifted several dials and levers. “This is an unfortunate setback, but not wholly unexpected given our early departure from Burz-al-dun. Things have been quite chaotic since Kira’s aggressive reaction to Ganon’s discovery of her plans.”
The implications of Osyrus’s words didn’t sink into Vera right away. She was staring at Kira’s wounds. Mind locked down. But she gave them more thought as Osyrus continued adjusting his machines.
“Early departure,” she repeated. “Meaning you always planned to leave the city?”
Osyrus stopped working. Turned to face her. There was an odd expression on his face. Half amusement, half malice.
“That is correct, Vera.”
She felt the two acolytes behind her shift into fighting stances. Knew they’d kill her if she said or did the wrong thing. She kept her temper controlled. Keeping Kira alive was the priority, which meant that she needed to stay alive, too. But she
also needed answers.
“You’re the one who told Ganon what Kira was doing,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Correct again,” Osyrus said. “At first, I assumed she would fail to build political support naturally. When her success became imminent, I intervened. I knew that Kira would have a strong reaction to Ganon’s quashing of her plans, but not such a … decisive one. My expectation was that Kira would be forced to accept Thorn indefinitely, which would drive her to disenchantment with Burz-al-dun politics. When the time was right, I planned to quietly slip you and her out of the city, and back to Almira on the Blue Sparrow. That is why I had Decimar’s crew held back from Lysteria and trained. Although they were meant to have embarked on five test flights before Kira came aboard.”
“And Linkon Pommol?”
“Was to already be deposed before our departure, which would have made the procurement of the dragon oil my machine required far simpler. But you proved more than capable of overcoming that obstacle. Thank you for that, Vera. And rest assured, there are many more obstacles that you can help me with while I repair Kira’s body.”
“What obstacles?”
“We are betrayed, Vera. My acolytes killed most of the Dainwood wardens, but a small group survived and fled the city after the assassination attempt. Skulking back to their jungle like the cowardly animals they are, where they will continue to cause trouble for us. We must also deal with the remnants of the Balarian Empire. And you should know better than anyone that there is only one person in Terra who controls Shoshone Kalara Sun’s hand.”
“Okinu.”
He nodded. “Perhaps Kira could have forged a peace with her aunt in time, but Papyria is our enemy now. We have no choice but to counterattack with the armada. As for the jaguars, they might be safe from the skyships beneath their forest canopy, but I have a way to deal with them, too. We will root them out, and establish Kira’s empire while she recovers.” He turned to her. “Will you help me do that?”
Vera very much wanted to put a knife through Osyrus Ward’s heart, unplug Kira from the machines, and run away with her. But that would kill Kira. For the time being, she would do whatever was necessary to keep her alive. That meant making peace with Osyrus Ward’s deceptions, and staying in his good favor until the right moment.
“Yes.”
Osyrus smiled. “Good.”
“What’s first?” Vera asked.
“Oh. Before we do anything else in Almira, I would like to rearm the skyships and send them to Papyria, where they will make Empress Okinu pay for what she’s done to Kira. And prevent her from trying again.”
If Osyrus had suggested that yesterday, Vera would have opened his throat. Papyria was her homeland. Okinu was her sovereign. But Okinu had betrayed her. Vera had no choice but to do the same. The only thing that mattered now was protecting Kira, no matter the cost.
“Do it.”
57
JOLAN
Almira, Dainwood Province
Sten died on the journey to the alchemist’s research station.
Jolan didn’t understand why. The broken bone was swollen and serious, but there was no sign of infection or blood clot. Nothing that would have made the wound fatal. But the warden was dead all the same.
“Wasn’t your fault,” Willem said after they’d given him a shell and a burial. “Him and Cumberland had been soldiering together for twenty years. You lose a friend like that, sometimes you just give up trying. Sometimes that’s all it takes.”
“It is my fault. All of this is my fault.”
“We’re wardens, Jolan. Dying on the end of a blade is part of the job description. And we’re the ones who press-ganged you into this whole goatfuck of a mission. Ain’t like you volunteered for the fucking thing.”
“But I could have stopped it. If I’d let you all kill Garret like you wanted. Or killed him myself. I had the chance.”
“Maybe that’s true. But I could have come running up that hill with Cumberland when we heard you scream. Cumberland could have beaten that gray-eyed asshole when it came to steel. And all of us could have fucked off and left Sten to die, seeing as he did that anyway. That’s war. Looking back on anything, you see a thousand ways you could have done better. But there’s no such thing as second chances, so here we are.” He spat. “Let’s finish the job so I can see about drinking myself to death, yeah?”
* * *
It took them another two weeks to find the research station, which was—according to Willem—tucked into a hidden valley of the Dainwood with high forested hills on either side. Cold rain hissed from the sky in a constant drizzle that soaked the trees and the ground and them. Jolan’s socks squelched with each footfall, and even though he knew damp socks were the road to toe rot and fungus and eventually amputations, he couldn’t summon the energy to change and dry them when they came to a halt each night. Instead, he just found a halfway-covered spot underneath a tree and went to bed fully clothed, shivering.
Monkeys yelled at them from the upper branches of the Daintrees. All the birds and dragons were gone. Each day he felt worse, not better. The sorrow inside of him was festering. Consuming him.
The research station was built around a small lake—water still as a pane of glass. On the near side of the lake, there was a lone hut with smoke rising from the chimney. On the far side, there were three buildings—a hut, a greenhouse, and an apiary. Jolan could hear the low hum of the bees.
As soon as Jolan laid eyes on the greenhouse, he knew that an alchemist lived there. It was built with the same geometric hexagons that Morgan Mollevan had used when they built theirs at Otter Rock.
As Jolan and Willem made their way around the waterline, a plump, bald man in a gray robe came out of the greenhouse and met them. His hands were covered in soil and he was sweating.
“Morning. I’m Frula,” he said, wiping his hands on his robe. Smiling with warmth. “What brings you two all the way out here?”
Jolan glanced at Willem. “We came for the pigeon. Shoshone gave us a message to carry on its wings.”
“I see,” Frula said, smile disappearing into a sorrowful frown. “There’s food and drink in my cabin. Come. You look as if your spirits need refreshment.”
* * *
The inside of the hut was a tidy space with a wood-burning furnace in the middle and a ladder that led to a sleeping loft. Jolan and Willem took seats near the furnace, warming their hands while Frula made a pot of tea.
Jolan stared blankly at the hut’s western wall, taking a moment to register what was on it. There were rectangular sections of cork hung in long strips. Upon each cork, there were scores of bees, pinned in place by the thorax. The bees were organized by the color of their pin—red, green, blue. “What are you studying?” he asked.
“Ashlyn Malgrave contracted me to learn more about the bee colony’s methodology for selecting new hives.”
“What did you find?”
Frula pointed to the wall behind Jolan. This one was dominated by paper instead of dead insects. There was a carefully drawn, but erratic, swirling pattern in the middle of each parchment page. Dozens of equations filled the edges.
“To document a bee’s path is quite laborious,” Frula said. “But like most things, there is an underlying system to the process. The colony’s strategy is actually quite simple after you peel away the movement and confusion. When spring comes, and the hive must select a new location, they dispatch scouts to search the surrounding area. Each scout hunts for the best location they can find, and returns to make their report through a series of gestures. If two scouts disagree, they visit the locations in question together and make a decision. In time, the scouts settle on a single, ideal new home. And the hive moves.”
“Interesting,” Jolan said, thinking to himself that that would never work with humans. When two scouts disagreed they would probably just murder each other.
“You got anything to drink?” Willem asked.
“The tea is almost ready.”
<
br /> “Tea,” he muttered. “Who the fuck drinks tea? Stupid Pargossian drink.”
“I’m from Pargos.”
“I want booze, old man.”
“Well, I am currently brewing a batch of mead, but it has not yet finished the secondary stage. There are too many sulfates.”
“Course there are,” Willem muttered, then stood up and started riffling through Frula’s rack of supplies. He found a bottle full of clear liquid in the back of a cabinet.
“What is this?”
“That’s purified potato liquor.”
“You said there wasn’t anything to drink.”
“You can’t drink that. We use it for sterilizing wounds and killing bacteria on the beakers.”
“Uh-huh.” Willem yanked the cork off and raised the bottle, taking four long, deep gulps.
Jolan waited for him to throw up, which was by far the most likely result, but instead the warden just whooped really loud—like a man who’d just had freezing water dumped on his head—and then took a few more long swallows. Slammed the bottle down on the table.
It was half empty.
“Now. Let’s have that pigeon so we can update the fucking empress or whatever and then get out of this shithole.”
Frula cleared his throat. “I am sure you are weary from your travels, and carry an urgent message, but I wonder if you would like to include recent news from Floodhaven? I just returned from the crossroads market, and heard several grave updates.”
“Updates?” Willem said, sniffing the bottle and drinking some more of it. “What kind of updates?”
“The leader of your army recently traveled to Floodhaven under a banner of peace.”
“Carlyle went to make peace with Linkon Pommol?”
“Linkon Pommol is dead.”
“Huh. Serves the skinny bastard right.”
“Carlyle met with Kira Domitian, who took control of Floodhaven,” Frula continued. “However, from what I hear, Kira has also been killed.”
“Killed? By Dainwood men?”
Sorcery of a Queen Page 49
