by C. L. Wilson
“And when the news came about Teleon and Orest?”
Dorian turned back from the window, his eyes weary. “You mean when the news came that the Fey armies massing in Orest and Teleon forced the Eld to launch a preemptive strike out of self-defense?” He grimaced. “The Eld have been wily; you must give them that. Not once have they attacked a target unrelated to the Fey. That has not escaped the notice of the lords who supported the Eld Trade Agreement this summer. Now they claim the attacks on Orest and Teleon merely prove this is a dispute between the Eld and the Fey—and that we should not allow ourselves to be drawn into your war. They remain convinced that once the Eld are no longer threatened by Fey aggression, there will be peace.”
“Peace.” Rain gave a harsh laugh. “Oh, aiyah, there will be peace. The cost will be misery and enslavement, but your subjects will get their peace.” He spun on a booted heel and stalked to the opposite side of the room.
Ellysetta’s silk skirts rustled as she took a step towards Dorian. “Forgive me, Your Majesty, but have you considered the possibility that one or more of the lords leading the opposition might be Mage-claimed?”
Dorian’s mouth set in grim lines. “I have considered the possibility, yes. And I pray daily that it is not so.” He turned a bleak gaze towards the portrait of his beautiful, silver-blond wife, Annoura, which dominated the wall across from his desk. His shoulders slumped in weary despair. “Because one of the strongest voices against this war belongs to my queen.”
“Merciful gods!” Queen Annoura of Celieria groaned in misery as the painful clench of her belly sent her racing to the garderobe for the third time in the last bell. She reached it just as the contents of her stomach spewed out in a series of racking heaves. She retched again and again until nothing came up but bile, and even then the nausea lay upon her like a foul blanket. Her arms and legs trembled as she dragged herself up to her feet and stood there on the cold stone tile floor, swaying and feeling faint.
What ever illness was sweeping through her court seemed to have found its way to her. A full score of the court’s highest-ranked ladies had fallen ill in the last two days, and now she could count herself among them. She’d been retching since before daybreak and showed no signs of stopping anytime soon.
Poison was the first thought that had sprung to her mind. But what miserable excuse for a poisons master would leave dozens of women ill and none dead? Besides, Annoura’s food taster hadn’t fallen ill, and she used his services religiously. She had too much wily, suspicious Capellan in her ever to give up that protection.
“Your Majesty?” The timid voice of one of Annoura’s newest young Dazzles—a sixteen-year-old featherhead with more breasts than brains—called from outside the garderobe door. “Are you all right?”
“Oh, yes, I couldn’t be better,” Annoura snapped. She snatched open the door and stalked into her bedroom, ruining the effect of her regal ire when her knees gave out and she nearly tumbled face-first onto the floor.
The Dazzle—Mairi? Miranda? What the Darkness did Annoura care what the little slut’s name was?—caught and steadied her. Annoura checked the urge to smack the girl’s cheek for witnessing her queen’s near-humiliation.
“Help me to my bed, then get out,” she snapped. “And find out what in the name of the Seven flaming Hells is taking the physician so long.”
The girl helped Annoura back into bed before tucking the covers around her. “Are you sure I can’t get you something, Your Majesty? Maybe a nice porridge?”
Porridge? Annoura’s eyes bulged. Just the sound of the word made her stomach clench. She leapt from the bed and raced for the garderobe yet again.
This time, when she was finished, the little Dazzle stood there with eyes as big as dinner plates.
Now Annoura did smack her. “I heave my insides out and you ask me if I want porridge? Idiot! Ninnywit! Would you offer fire to a burning man? Get out!” She flung a hand towards the door and glared at the other Dazzles gathered in the suite. “All of you, get out now. And the next person to walk through that door had best have a brain between her ears.”
The buxom Dazzle burst into tears and fled out the door. The rest of the morning attendants scuttled after her.
Annoura staggered back to her bed and lowered herself gingerly to the mattress. Good, sweet Lord of Light, she felt terrible. She hadn’t felt this bad since…well, she couldn’t remember.
She put a hand over her eyes to block the weak sunlight streaming in from the draped windows. Gods. Even that made her feel like retching. She flopped back into her mountain of pillows, scowling and feeling frighteningly close to tears.
Where was Dorian? Why wasn’t he here? The few times in their married life that she’d been ill, he’d always come to her bedside and stayed there, holding her hand, stroking her brow, weaving cool webs of Spirit to soothe her discomfort until the physician’s remedies took effect. Where was he? Surely by now one of the yammer-mouths who called themselves her ladies-in-waiting would have whispered the news of his wife’s illness into his ear.
Surely he would not be so coldhearted as to continue their estrangement when she was in ill health?
A knock sounded, and the heavy door to her bedroom swung inward. Annoura looked up, a surge of hope lifting her spirits. “Dorian?”
But the feet that stepped over the threshold did not belong to her husband. Annoura sank against her pillows, blinking back tears. Well, at least it wasn’t that useless Dazzle or another idiot just like her. The woman walking through the bedroom door did indeed have a brain between her ears—and a face nearly as pale as Annoura’s own.
Jiarine Montevero dropped a graceful curtsy to her sovereign as she entered, then approached the bed. “Mirianna said you were taken ill, Your Majesty.”
Mirianna. That was the dim-skull Dazzle’s name.
“If by ill you mean that I’ve been retching until my intestines nearly saw daylight, then yes, I suppose I am,” Annoura snapped. She hated being sick. The loss of control that came with illness was an agony to her, and she had never borne it graciously or well. “Fetch a cold compress at once.”
“Of course, Your Majesty.” Without the tiniest blink of hesitation, Jiarine made her way to the nearby nightstand, where a bowl, a stack of scented towels, and a ewer of fresh water had been laid out earlier. Moments later, she laid a damp cloth over Annoura’s forehead and eyes.
Annoura sighed as the cool darkness soothed the frayed edges of her temper. Calm, efficient Jiarine. She’d been such a help these last weeks. For all that Annoura had never been keen on keeping female confidantes, she’d come to rely rather a lot on Jiarine recently. Especially after the queen’s Favorite, Ser Vale, had disappeared from court with nary a word save some useless, impersonal scrap of a note claiming a dire emergency on his family estate.
Lady Montevero and Ser Vale had been good friends. She had, in fact, been the one to initially sponsor Ser Vale at court and introduce him to the queen’s circle. Now, with Vale gone and no word from him in months, Annoura had found herself talking more and more to Jiarine, hoping Jiarine might have news about the handsome Dazzle who had so quickly become Annoura’s indispensible confidant and Favorite. Alas, the lady had received no word from their mutual friend either.
Annoura plucked at the coverlet with restless irritability. “Where is the king? Has he been told of my illness?”
Silence. Then, “I delivered the message myself, Your Majesty. Half a bell ago.”
Half a bell.
Half a bell and still Dorian had not come. Time was he would have been at her side in mere chimes, breathless from having run through the palace to reach her. But now, even with half the court afflicted by this mysterious stomach illness, he’d not roused enough concern to visit her?
“I’m sure he will come to see you soon, Your Majesty,” Jiarine soothed, “but the Tairen Soul and his mate arrived this morning.”
Annoura’s fists clenched around the comforter, pulling until the satin was taut
. “The Fey…are here?”
No wonder Dorian wasn’t by her side. The Fey. It was always the Fey. They—not she—would always be first in his heart. She could be on her deathbed, and if a single flaming Fey crooked a finger, Dorian would abandon her without a qualm and go running to his magical master’s side like the obedient lapdog he had become.
“They arrived unexpectedly this morning,” Jiarine said. “I’m sure the king would not otherwise have stayed away.”
“Oh, of course he wouldn’t.”
If Jiarine heard the heavy irony in Annoura’s voice, she gave no sign of it. “Your Majesty, I’ve sent for the physician, but he left the palace a bell ago to attend Lady Verakis. I don’t know how long it will take him to arrive.” Skirts rustled as Jiarine moved closer to the bed. “Lord Bolor is outside, Your Majesty. He’s no physician, but he has a tonic that worked wonders for me earlier this morning.”
Annoura grimaced. “No.”
“But, Your Majesty–”
She lifted one corner of the compress long enough to fix Jiarine with a withering look. “Have your ears failed you? I said no.” Then, because Jiarine had been such a boon companion to her these last weeks, Annoura sighed. “Jiarine, I know you’ve taken to him. He’s handsome enough, I’ll grant you, and he has a sharp wit.” Too sharp at times. “But there’s just something about him that rubs me the wrong way. I don’t trust him.”
Not that she truly trusted anyone except Dorian—and even that was questionable these days—but with most courtiers, Annoura knew what they were thinking even before they did. She could read them. She had a very good idea of how they would react in most important situations, and she knew how to keep one step ahead of them and manipulate them to achieve her own aims.
But this Bolor fellow…Annoura didn’t know what he was thinking or how to control him. And that bothered her beyond mea sure. No matter how much Jiarine seemed to like him, Annoura had no intention of granting Bolor entrée to her inner circle.
And she certainly wasn’t going to quaff down some potion the man had brewed up just because Jiarine—clearly addled by the man’s virile good looks—vouched for it.
“Your Majesty—”
“The answer is no. And if he’s waiting outside my door, you can just send him away. Except for the king or the physician, no one sets foot in this room but you. Is that clear?”
Jiarine bobbed a brief, stiff curtsy. “Of course, Your Majesty. As you wish.”
“Good. Go sit there, in that chair. There’s a book on the stand beside it. You may read to me.” Annoura dropped the compress back over her eyes. She heard Jiarine cross the room to the door, whisper something unintelligible to someone outside, then return and take a seat.
The lady’s acquiescence pleased Annoura. Ill she might be, but some things the queen of Celieria could still control.
“If there’s even a possibility the Mages have claimed your queen’s soul, we need to know it,” Rain declared after King Dorian spent several chimes detailing the troubled political situation in Celieria City.
Dorian flinched, and Ellysetta’s heart ached for him. His deep and genuine love for his beautiful queen was well-known throughout Celieria—even a celebrated point of pride to its citizens—and fear for his wife must be eating at him night and day. «Oh, Rain, no wonder he looks so weary.» His country was at war, his nobles were infighting over the Fey, and now his wife might possibly have been corrupted by the Mages. Those were burdens enough to bring the strongest of men to his knees.
«He’ll be ten times worse off if his wife truly is in the service of the Mages.» Rain glanced at Gaelen, who gave a slight nod. “As you know, we now have a way to detect Mage Marks. Gaelen showed us the weave this summer. While Ellysetta spins healing on the queen, Gaelen can check her for Mage Marks. Unless she possesses magic herself, she will not sense his weave.”
Dorian looked up from his desk, his hands knotted before him. “You’re asking me to let you spin forbidden black magic on my queen.”
Rain’s eyes narrowed. “I’m asking you to let us check your queen for Mage Marks. If she is Mage-claimed, you need to know. If she’s not, it will set your mind at ease. If she bears only a few Marks, you need to know that, too, so you can take precautions to prevent further Marks.”
As he spoke, an urgent thread of Spirit stabbed into Ellysetta’s mind across the private communication pathway forged by their partially completed shei’tanitsa bond. «Ellysetta, open your senses to Dorian and tell me what you find. Quickly.»
«What’s wrong?» It was a mea sure of her trust in him that she didn’t wait for his answer before tearing down the barriers that kept human thoughts and emotions from battering her empathic senses. With swift delicacy, she sent gossamer-fine threads of Spirit and shei’dalin’s love spinning out towards Dorian.
«I told Dorian this summer that the Fey had learned how to detect Mage Marks, but I never told him it required spinning Azrahn. So how did he find out?»
«You think the Mage has gotten to him?»
«I don’t know, but he found out from somewhere. And it wasn’t from us.»
Her threads reached Dorian, only to encounter a powerful barrier that blocked her attempted probe. «He has shielded himself from me.» She tested the perimeters of the shield lightly, not daring to press with any substantive power for fear that he would sense her presence. Celierian king or not, he was a descendant of the vol Serranis line, and not without magic of his own. When he frowned and waved a hand near his face as if to shoo away a buzzfly, she yanked her weave back. «Sieks’ta, Rain. I can’t get past his shields. If I try, he’ll know.»
Abruptly, Dorian pushed his chair away from the desk and stood. “Let us be frank, My Lord Feyreisen. I know about your banishment from the Fading Lands and the reason for it. A messenger arrived not three days ago from Tenn v’En Eilan, the leader of the Massan. He wrote to inform me that he is now the acting ruler of the Fading Lands and to warn me that you and the Feyreisa had been stripped of your crowns and banished for spinning Azrahn.”
Ellysetta gasped. The faces of her quintet turned to stone.
Beside her, Rain curled his fingers around the hilts of the meicha scimitars sheathed at his hips. “Is that so?”
The shutters on the windows overlooking the gardens trembled and the curtains flanking them fluttered as if from a breeze. Dorian’s gaze flicked in that direction before returning to Rain, whose eyes had begun to glow as his tairen rose.
«Three days. The messenger arrived three days ago.» Anger vibrated in every shining thread of his Spirit voice. «It takes only a week at most for a runner to reach Celieria City from Dharsa.»
Ellysetta processed the calculations quickly. The messenger had left Dharsa ten days ago, which meant—
«Tenn sent his message after he received the battle reports from Teleon and Orest—and after the tairen declared you the rightful Defender of the Fey. Oh, Rain.»
“What else did Tenn’s note say?” Rain’s voice lowered to a throaty growl.
Another man might well have fled in fear of Rain Tairen Soul’s infamous Rage, but Dorian stood his ground with admirable calm. “Among other things, he warned me that your mate was Mage Marked and that your bond to her had clouded your judgment. And he vowed I’d receive no more support from the Fey as long as I continued to count you among my allies. Here.” He pulled open his desk drawer and withdrew a scroll encased in a gilded wooden scroll cover. “Read it for yourself.”
Rain snatched the scroll from Dorian’s grip, removed the protective cover, and unfurled the parchment. Ellysetta looked over his arm as he scanned Tenn’s message, and the vile, damning words, written in an elegant golden script, jumped out at her.
To the Most Honorable and Beloved Fey-kin, His Majesty Dorian vol Serranis Torreval, Dorian X, King of Celieria,
It is with heavy heart and deep concern that I write….
…Rainier Feyreisen has broken his honor…confessed under Truthspeaking…both he and hi
s mate did with knowing and willful deliberation weave the forbidden magic, Azreisenahn, also called Azrahn, the soul magic…. The Massan had no choice but to declare them dahl’reisen and cast them out of the Fading Lands….
…Ellysetta Baristani’s soul is tainted with Shadow…. Elden Mages have begun the possession of her soul…. How deeply she is tainted, we do not know, but the danger cannot be ignored…. Already the insidious effects of her presence have divided the Fading Lands…honorable Fey have discarded their honor to follow her into Shadow…her influence drove our king to dishonor….
…The Eye of Truth has foretold a grim future for Ellysetta Baristani, one that honor and duty to the Fading Lands will not allow the Massan to overlook…. She will bring destruction….
…If Celieria continues to consort with the dahl’reisen Rain Tairen Soul and his Shadow-tainted mate, you may expect no further aid from the Fading Lands….
Each damning declaration drove a spike into her heart. «Dear gods, Rain,» she breathed in horror. «Why would he send this?»
Rain tossed the scroll on Dorian’s desk as if it were a polluted thing. His eyes had gone pure tairen, pupil-less and whirling with purple radiance. A muscle jumped in his tightly clenched jaw. “So you received this…message three days ago, and yet still you greeted us with open arms rather than drawn swords. Why?”
Dorian arched his brows. “You forget, My Lord Feyreisen, I am a king, born and raised. I don’t take kindly to veiled threats from foreign powers.” He picked up the scroll, glanced at it briefly, then rolled the parchment back onto the scroll rods and slid the cover into place. “Nor does the idea that a usurper could strip a sovereign of his crown sit well with me, for obvious reasons.”
