by R. K. Thorne
In fact, only two caught his narrow-eyed gaze, but neither noticed. One was asleep in the corner, a glass spilled out of his hand and onto the cushion beside him. Another had his feet propped up on a map of Kavanar and a half-naked girl in his lap, the source of the laughter.
Several others stood in the back, including Vusamon, clutching brandy glasses and frowning fiercely at him. Daes recognized all but a few of them, having served with them in the rebellions and afterward, before politics and the injury to his leg had pushed him out in his prime. The fighting had been over anyway, and he’d been a rank or two too low to hope to be made a general, but it still irked him that an injury had been the undoing of so much hard work.
Mages had long ago fixed the leg, but by then he had already worked too hard to gain his position at Mage Hall. It hadn’t made sense to continue to court the generals. He’d found a new army of mages, one that was his alone to command.
Now, he’d take control of this one, the one that had cast him aside not so long ago in favor of younger and fitter men.
A stillness fell across the room. Someone cleared a throat.
“Lord Cavalion, is it now?” said Vusamon, voice dangerous and stern as he swirled brandy in his glass. “Come to join us for a drink?”
The young man with the girl—whose face Daes hadn’t even caught sight of—had not yet seen fit to pause his activities.
Daes stalked slowly forward, ignoring the greeting. His boots thudded loudly against the dark hardwood. He made sure of it. He stopped short of the table covered in maps and paused, his shadow looming over the girl and her lover.
She apparently was the smarter of the two and tried to jerk away, looking back over her shoulder at Daes with wary brown eyes. But the general pulled her back the few inches she’d gained.
With a swift shove, Daes thrust the man’s feet off the table and sent the two of them both toppling to the floor.
“A map of our fine kingdom deserves more respect,” Daes said calmly, almost casually, as he brushed the map free of imaginary grime. As if that young man had ever done enough to have dirt on his boots. He surveyed the room for reactions, his own expression blank.
Daes caught Vusamon’s eye and spotted a faint smile. The girl regained her feet and bolted wisely for the door in spite of the general’s protests. The youngish man, unfamiliar to Daes, levered himself into his seat and glared, but his bleary eyes looked a bit too drunk for genuine outrage.
“What brings us the honor of your presence, Lord Consort?” said another general from those seated. “Last I heard, there were no urgent matters of state concerning us.”
“Indeed, when was the last time there was an urgent matter of state concerning any of you?” Daes mused. A few narrowed their eyes, wary of an insult. But a few more nodded and murmured their agreement.
“Your point, Lieutenant?” Vusamon said sharply. Ah, apparently he fell into the wary camp.
“I am a lieutenant no longer,” Daes said, pleasantly now. “Which was a shame. I always wished there’d have been another war to fight.”
“Your leg was crushed by a horse,” said another, and now with the voice, Daes remembered him. Edeul, who’d been Vusamon’s second at the time Daes had fought.
Daes looked down at his leg mockingly, then back up at the man. “It seems to have been fixed. And yet, I have not forgotten the long-neglected Kavanarian army.”
“What are you getting at, Cavalion?” Vusamon demanded.
“Lord Cavalion.”
“Of course… sir.” Vusamon’s eyes narrowed, but although he played the part of stern and wary adversary, Daes could sense excitement mounting.
“You’ve been much ignored by King Demikin,” Daes mused. “You’ve been left without purpose or goal or mission. What use does Kavanar have for an army when there is peace?” Daes smiled, almost serenely happy.
“Indeed,” muttered Edeul.
“Well, gentlemen. The situation has changed.”
Chained to a tent pole. This day just got better and better. Thel kept his ears pitched for clues about the camp around them. But it was just the usual metal clangs, drunken shouts, and horse whinnies. Trunks and crates packed the dark tent around him, and the slit between the tent flap and wall revealed little but a strip of dark, dense forest.
The soldiers had deposited Niat a few minutes ago and chained her up alongside him, sitting on the dirt floor. Not even a rug. He shook his head. Brutes.
“You all right?”
She sat in a stupor, her eyes focused on nothing. Not responding. The drug—or poison?—must be doing its work.
He tried a few more times but gave up as her expression remained unaltered. She was not with him, not now. He returned to listening to the camp and trying to piece something together out of what he heard. He didn’t conclude much.
A groan alerted him that something had changed. Her head had dropped into her hands, as it had in the carriage. Was that always the aftermath of whatever happened to her?
“You all right?” he tried again.
She raised her head enough to glare at him. Some light had returned to her eyes, which relieved him in spite of her glare. “Leave me alone.” Her voice was hoarse and raspy.
He held up both wrists in her direction defiantly. “Trust me, I’d love to get away from you.”
She glowered at him, then sank her head back into her hands.
“I definitely think I’m going to be sick this time.” She groaned again.
“I don’t see how, as we haven’t eaten anything all day.” His stomach growled loudly as if to reinforce his words.
“You say that like it changes anything.” She turned away from him, or tried to. Oh. She wasn’t bluffing. She was very serious about this throwing up thing.
“Hey—you out there,” he called to the guards.
No one responded.
“Fevrin,” he barked. The guard must have jumped, because the tent wall jerked suddenly.
“How’s he know my name?” said the one soldier to the other.
“He may be a scrawny thing, but he can hear, you fool,” came the reply.
Thel scowled. He was just trying to get a little help for a sick woman here. Why did the width of his shoulders or biceps have to matter to everyone so damn much? “Hey, you hear me?”
“What you want?” Fevrin grunted.
“I don’t know what you store in here, but unless you think your lords want it nicely festooned with vomit, you had better fetch a bucket.”
“A… what?” They didn’t react for a second. “Is that some kind of fool threat?”
“You’d think a prince would have more decorum,” said the other, clearly smarter one. “Although I suppose threatening to vomit on things is a creative way for a prisoner to rebel.”
“Not me, you loon,” he snapped. “The priestess. You have a sick priestess of Nefrana held captive in here, and you can’t be stopped from your drinking to be bothered to help?”
“Now how does he know we’re drinking?” said Fevrin, even more exasperated now.
“He’s got ears, I told you.”
“Ears like a bat, you mean.”
“Yeah. A scrawny, snappish bat.”
“Snappish?”
“What, that word’s too big for you? He’s demanding. Princes usually are.”
Thel smacked a hand to his forehead and ran his hand over his face. Why did he even bother?
“Stop it,” she grumbled. “They won’t help. You’re just going to have to turn your royal nose up in the other direction.”
He rolled his eyes at her. “Your determination to think ill of me is astounding. Really. It knows no bounds. You should be proud, you’ve quite the knack for it.”
Her only answer was another groan.
To his surprise, footsteps clomped away from the tent and returned shortly, sliding something under the tent flap. In the dim light, he groped and slid it over toward her. It was no bucket, but it was part of a broken barrel that would s
erve much the same purpose. If she didn’t puncture herself in the process.
True to her word, she did get sick, but luckily for everyone it only lasted a few minutes before she collapsed in a shivering, feverish ball, her back against a nearby crate.
“Oh, Fevrin,” he called again in a singsong.
“Gods damn you, stop calling me by my name! You’re a prisoner.”
“By Anara! Thanks for the reminder, I’d completely forgotten. How about I’ll stop if you get her a blanket?”
“You’re right, he is a demanding little nit.”
“Come on,” Thel called. “She’s a mess. Shivering, sweating. Have some decency.”
“Stop it,” Niat whispered.
“What do you think?” Fevrin said warily to his companion.
“What can he do with a blanket?” Thel imagined the men shrugging at each other. “They’re chained good and tight. And you heard her in there.”
The two men grew silent, likely considering.
“What do you care?” she whispered. “The sight of normal people suffering too much for your delicate sensibilities?” Her words dripped with a dark pain, as if she were steeped in suffering, made from it.
“As Sven’s daughter, a priestess, and a seer, you’re hardly someone I’d classify as normal.”
“Thanks for reminding me.”
“Your capacity for negativity seems particularly exceptional as well. What can I say, you’ve got many talents.”
“Go to hell.” It was a hoarse, monotone whisper with exactly the same passion as everything else—very little.
He winced mockingly. “Coming from a priestess, I’m sure that’s an especially powerful curse. Of course, you already think I’m going to hell, so it doesn’t really make much difference.”
Eventually, footsteps led away from the tent again. He eyed Niat. Her eyes were closed, arms crossed across her shoulders, knees curled in. He needed to act. Before she passed out.
He shifted onto his knees and crept closer as silently as he could. When he was just in front of her, he bent down close to her ear. “Niat,” he whispered.
She jumped, smacking her temple into his forehead and groaning loudly again. Thel just barely stifled a curse as the pain shot through his already aching head.
“Please don’t. Just leave me alone,” she whispered. Her words were tight, maybe frightened now, but as quiet as his own.
He didn’t oblige. Not yet, anyway. Now might be his only chance to try. He bent closer again, keeping his hand in front of his forehead defensively this time. “Do you know anything that could get us out of here?” he whispered. “Any weaknesses we could exploit? Habits of Detrax or Alikar or the troops?”
“Give it up, little prince,” she said bleakly, and it occurred to him that she still didn’t even know his name and hadn’t asked. For some reason, that was even more depressing than her response. “I don’t know anything.”
“Think. There could be something. Detrax must have a weakness.”
“It’s hopeless.”
He gritted his teeth, refusing to believe that. Unless… “You saw that in your visions?”
She shook her head minutely. “No. None of the visions I’ve gotten are about that.”
“So you don’t know for sure,” he said triumphantly. “You could be wrong.”
“I know because I’ve been at their mercy my whole life. I don’t need to see the future. I know the past.”
He said nothing for a long while, groping for some words to dissuade her from despair. None came. He eased away from her and back to the other side of the tent, intending to leave her alone. But his curiosity gnawed at him. “What are they about?” he said more casually now. “The visions.”
She shook her head again, almost imperceptibly. “The bluebell is too strong. It’s all a blur of light and sensation. There’s lots of—stone. Boulders, florid archways, this sparkling purple tall heavy thing, white fur. Maybe a cave?” He rubbed his chin. That description could match Estun. But it didn’t tell him much else. She continued, “I don’t know what any of that is supposed to mean. He won’t be pleased.” She shrugged very slightly. “Nothing I can do about it. Bluebell is terrible for my visions. But no one listens when I try to explain how it works.” Her words were pained, growing softer but edged with pain. As if she found him beyond trying. She probably did.
She was clearly ill. He should leave her alone, so he turned his thoughts to planning an escape. Of course, with her so weak, he wasn’t sure escape was possible. But he had no intention of leaving her behind to be tortured with blue vials.
A lump flopped into the tent, and Thel reached out to find not one but two blankets. They were rough as burlap and stank strongly of horse, but he didn’t care. He eased one over her.
Whether from the natural need for sleep or exhaustion from her illness, she had collapsed into a fitful slumber. He studied her face now that he could look without her glaring. She was paler than that morning but did not look near death. The kohl around her eyes was smudged, which made them no less dramatic, but her face was creased with lines of anguish. She was young to be so bitter.
He retreated to the other side of the tent and pulled the second blanket over himself, forcing himself to lie down and rest as best he could while chained. What did he have to work with to escape? They’d failed to search him in the tumult of leaving Panar, so he still had his boot dagger, but it wasn’t going to be any help against iron manacles. If Fevrin and his smarter friend ventured close enough, he might have a chance at using it on them. Thin he might be, but he felt fairly confident he was better trained than they were. But he’d still need luck to take them both out quickly. And he felt less inclined to do so anyway, now that they’d actually had the decency to meet his demands. He’d be more likely to best them at math problems, but somehow he didn’t see that knowledge helping him much in this situation.
Perhaps he could convince them she had some kind of highly contagious disease and they were all doomed to die unless they let Niat and him go? Hmm, but if he did succeed in convincing them, he doubted Fevrin would come close enough to unchain them. The guards would more likely just let them rot where they sat.
Could he outwit them somehow? Was there something seemingly innocuous he could claim he needed to help Niat that would help liberate them? Aside from the keys to their shackles, he couldn’t think of anything.
If he could start a fire somehow… but these chains were looped round the center tent pole. He and Niat would be just as likely to burn alive as escape. A bribe was perhaps a possibility, but he had a feeling he lacked the charisma for that.
He needed some advantage, something he had that they didn’t. Preferably something they didn’t know he had.
Magic?
Thanks to Niat, they did not seem to yet know he was a mage. Or perhaps they did and didn’t care. But either way, magic was likely his best weapon.
A shame there was still too little light to peruse the book. Perhaps it was for the best, as he’d rather lose his knife than that book, so taking it out at all was foolish. No, he’d have to stick with what he’d figured out already. Which was not much.
Probably a good idea to rest anyway before staging an escape. He turned as much away from Niat and toward the door as he could, and to his surprise, he drifted off to sleep.
“I need you to take a look at this,” King Aven said.
Almost before the king could unfold the slip of paper he’d removed from his pocket, Tharomar could see something strange was going on. The king held it out.
Tharomar took the sheet in his hands. It… shimmered.
Silver rays cut swaths across the thin paper. Impossible. Ro just stared, watching something like starlight snake into fine circles and lines, curls and jagged twists.
“Can you read this?” the king asked.
“I’m… not sure,” was all he could manage.
The paper felt impossibly mundane in his hands, twitching like any normal map in the w
ind. The ordinary ink on the page looked broken, malformed. But the light was starting to put the pieces together, to fill in the blank spaces.
Serabain. It was Serabain, but mixing two known alphabets, the ancient and the modern. The broken words slowly solidified before him as new letters bloomed to life, now constructed only of pale starlight.
Yes. Yes, he could read this. With some work. The real question was should he?
He glanced nervously at Jaena, then the king, then back at the paper. This was strange magic indeed. What kind of information had someone chosen to encode this way? Something they didn’t want easily found. Who had done it?
He had a bad feeling about this map.
“It’s… like a map of Zaera’s,” Ro said slowly.
“I thought the same,” came a voice from behind him. Ah, yes. That older mage—Wunik, was it?—was now pacing back and forth behind Ro. Jaena and Aven hovered on either side, also gazing down at the map of starlight.
“But those maps are supposed to be…” Ro hesitated.
“What?” said Jaena, looking up. Light cast a soft glow across her features, dark eyes searching his and lips slightly parted. Her body was warm against his hip, his arm.
He swallowed. “They’re supposed to be cursed.”
“Really?” said Wunik. “I’d never heard such a thing. Fascinating.”
“What kind of curse?” said Aven.
“I’m not sure, sire. I could look into it further for you. I just remember they are supposed to be very dangerous.”
He narrowed his eyes at the map. Could such a magnificent creation truly be dangerous? Evil…? His memories of the maps were a vague swirl in his mind, but he didn’t think he’d read anything good about them. The warnings were all very dire.
And yet, it was hard to believe anything that shone with light stolen from the heavens could be truly malevolent.
He shivered. The wind picking up was frigid, yes, but it was more than that.
