The Broken Realm

by Sarah M. Cradit

  * * *

  A howling wind ripped across the insufficient plain that Dungarde Keep sat upon. The trees on all sides of the exposed land compressed the foul air, whipping it into a tempest that sent anything not tethered flying. The horses sang their discontent from the stables. Everyone talked about the storms that passed through the Northerlands in midwinter, but Jesse recalled Easlan James telling Jesse’s father, Hamish, that one didn’t need snow to sunder the land and tear roofs from foundations.

  He pulled his cloak tight as he dismounted, stabling his own horse with the others, who were still kicking up their protests. “Shh,” he said gently. “Easy now, lasses. These stables are stone. Your home isnae going anywhere today.”

  The storm had darkened the skies. He started toward the keep, but then paused, and turned back toward the far edge of the forest.

  Jesse found Esmerelda at the waterfall. It spilled into a pool of freshwater that she’d been using both to replenish their waterskins and wash their clothing. No one had suggested she be the one to do these things. She’d come to the decision on her own, daily retreating to the water’s edge. She told him she couldn’t abide stillness in herself, but there was more she wouldn’t say, and to press her would open doors better left closed.

  He’d just returned from an exhausting afternoon at The Long-Trodden Mule. More men from across the Westerlands had arrived, the trusted commanders and aides of the stewards. His job was to show them around, introduce them to the resource cache and where they’d stay while in Greystone. There’d be another meeting that night to discuss the findings of their network of spies.

  Jesse hadn’t planned to be pulled into the resistance against the king. As a Southerlander, he was bred to loathe the crown, but his life and work were affected little by who sat upon the throne in Duncarrow. As long as he could provide and be useful, he had no qualms worth following through on.

  But he had no other repayment for Steward James’ kindness. For allowing the women to remain hidden in the small keep in the clearing of pines, safe.

  Jesse knelt next to Esmerelda. Her obsidian hair was pulled back off her face, tied poorly with a ribbon. Rogue hairs annoyed her, and she spent her free hand batting them away, peeling them back off the sweat matting her forehead.

  “Can I help?”

  “You have more important matters, I’m sure,” she said, breathless, as she dunked one of his shirts once, twice, and again, wringing between each cycle.

  “I’m done in town, for now. I came to check on you.”

  “That was unnecessary.”

  He reached his hand over and steadied hers. Her mouth trembled—in anger, in sadness, he could never distinguish between the two with her these days—as she eyed the audacity of his touch.

  “There’s a gathering tonight. Some of the emissaries have returned. There may even be some coming from the Southerlands.”

  “Spies, you mean.” She returned to her animated dunking, wringing.

  “I’ve no care what they call them. There could be news from home.”

  “I have no home.”

  “We may have news of Ryan. Of...” He hesitated. Esmerelda didn’t know Ryan had gone to prison not on a false charge, but a rescue mission. So many times he’d almost told her, but each time, something within him bid him to pause. It wasn’t his secret to tell.

  “If he has escaped, then he will be on a fool’s errand now.”

  It was painful to watch the way she assaulted the linens. He reached down to help. “Ryan will find you, whether you’re in the Hinterlands, or upon a ship in the White Sea. He would find you anywhere.”

  “He’s a freebooter, not a Magi,” she hissed, taking the linen back.

  “Esmerelda, it wasnae safe there. You heard what Brook said, about his friends.”

  “Brook does not have Medvedev blood! You do.” She touched her belly. “And I do, within me.”

  Jesse dropped his head. “You were there. You witnessed how they responded to my claim. They didnae believe me, or care. Something is wrong there. Something that isnae ours to fix, but Ravenna was right when she said we can help the others better if we are not in danger ourselves. We cannae help them at all, or ourselves, if we’re taken captive as well.”

  “Ravenna.” Esmerelda sneered the word.

  Jesse didn’t understand Esmerelda’s enmity toward the sorceress. He’d been just as adamant about leaving the Hinterlands behind. “Her own love was taken away by the Medvedev. She suffers too. She wouldnae have left if she didn’t think she was better served to aid him from elsewhere.”

  Esmerelda looked up. “Suffers? She seems quite adjusted to life at your side. Her Dereham lad is a distant memory.”

  Jesse opened his mouth to respond to this claim, but then closed it again. He didn’t know where this was coming from, but it was better to leave it rest. “My only charge is to protect you and your child, Esme. There is nothing else. Do you understand? Do you believe that?”

  Esmerelda pressed her lips tight in her anger. She nodded.

  “Aye, you should. For I’d rather be enjoying an honest ale at my own hearth in Sandycove than choking down the piss water that passes for it here. Do ye know how much effort I spend feigning my love for it, so as not to harm poor Easlan’s tender heart?”

  Esmerelda tried hard not to smile, but one tickled the corner of her mouth.

  Jesse tucked a stray hair back from her face. “Your child changes everything. I would have faced down the entire Medvedev guard if not for your bairn. You are both safe here. We’ll stay until I know there is a better, safer place for you both. It’s what Ryan would want, and when we know he’s safely returned from the Wastelands, we’ll find a way to send him word.”

  Tears beaded in her eyes. She returned to her laborious scrubbing.

  “You’ll see him again,” Jesse said. He pushed himself up off the damp grass. “I promise.”

  * * *

  Ravenna ran her hands over the bow mounted above the hearth. The wood, smoothed once by the hands who crafted it, and many times by the ones wielding it, felt like raw power. She’d never had occasion or need to hold one, to pull back upon the string and feel the command in the resistance before releasing it, delivering, if her aim was true, a clean death.

  They didn’t eat meat at the Rookery. The sorcerers of Midnight Crest consumed the greens, fruits, legumes, and grains from the covered gardens behind the kitchens. It had been an adjustment for her when she’d dined with the Derehams in Wulfsgate, tables filled with crisp boar and glistening venison. She’d once snuck a taste of the venison and it turned her belly. But weeks on the road with Drystan and the girls had left her with no choice but to consume what was available, or dwindle away. Now, she rather enjoyed the earthy richness of a freshly taken elk-kind. Even rabbit, though too lean to be filling, made her mouth water now.

  Another sign she was moving further away from herself.

  “You fancy a hunt?” Jesse asked.

  Ravenna’s face flushed in tandem with the surge in her chest. She withdrew her hand. “I don’t think I could take a life.” She remembered the acrid scene of the burning flesh of the brigands. Their animalistic screams that started hopeful and ended otherwise. “I was only curious.”

  “You could if you were hungry enough.” Jesse pulled the bow from the hooks. He gripped the center of the arch in the carved wood and drew back the string with ease. His head fell to the side as he pretended to find something to aim at. He released it and handed it to her. “I could teach you.”

  “No need,” Ravenna said. “I spent some time in the woods, gathering some foods that were familiar to me. I never should have let myself become accustomed to meat.”

  “You don’t eat meat at...”

  “The Rookery,” she finished. “I’d never tasted it before my training with the men of Wulfsgate.”

  Jesse nodded slowly. She pulled the questions from his mind.

  “You want to know how I came to love a man, and not one o
f my own.”

  Jesse laughed. “I cannae say a word about love, sorceress. I’ve never known it myself.”

  “What you do for your brother is love.”

  “Aye. But it’s not the same.”

  “What happened with Drystan wasn’t intentional,” Ravenna said. “By the time I realized it, it had gone too far.”

  “And Lord Dereham wouldnae allow you to wed his son?”

  “It wasn’t Lord Dereham. I didn’t want to end up plastered frozen upon the side of Icebolt Mountain for treason against my blood.”

  Jesse’s eyes widened. “They have you train with men, but would kill you for bonding with one?”

  “Yes. Exactly that.” Ravenna glanced toward the window. She could see Esmerelda in the distance, taking her fears out on the poor linens. She would have liked for them to be friends. Ravenna had even tried at the task, attempting to engage her on the return voyage from the Hinterlands by asking about Ryan and her life in the Southerlands. But Esmerelda blamed Ravenna for turning them back south. Ravenna had been the one to push them to depart the Hinterlands, but she suspected that the Medvedev’s inexplicable fear of her would not last once the shock dissipated. They would return, with others, and there’d be enough of them to overcome whatever they feared in her. When that happened, they’d be captive in a place unknown, bound with magic unknown. At least free they could formulate a plan to help Drystan and the others.

  Our cause is not yours! Esmerelda had hissed at her, growing weary of Ravenna’s attempts at kinship. I came to take refuge with my husband’s people, and now we are forced to abandon this for your whims!

  I wouldn’t ask you to abandon your cause. Only to realize how futile it becomes if you are a prisoner of the same peoples you believed would shelter you.

  They might have done so. Because of you, we will never know.

  Neither of us have to leave behind our causes, Esmerelda. We only have to be wiser in pursuing them.

  There is no ‘we,’ Ravenna. Only you, and whatever you’ve done to Jesse to make him follow you.

  There was no use in insisting Ravenna had done nothing at all to Jesse. Whatever confused feelings Jesse harbored, they were his own. She’d seen glimpses into his dreams of her... his flushed, feverish face when he’d wake, struggling to make sense of them. But she had not sent the dreams.

  “Ravenna.” Jesse shifted, holding his hands crossed over his torso. “I’ve made a decision. I should have told you sooner, but I’ve been running between here and the Mule, and—”

  “You’re staying. Until the child is born.”

  He cocked his head. “How did you know?”

  Ravenna tapped her temple. “I don’t intentionally read your mind, but sometimes I can’t help myself.”

  Jesse blushed. Likely recalling a few things he’d prefer she didn’t take from his thoughts. “Right. Yes, Esme and I are staying. She’s safe here, and there may not be anywhere else in the kingdom I can protect her right now.” He swallowed, nervous. “She’s carrying my brother’s son or daughter.”

  “You don’t need to work so hard to persuade me of your motivations. I understand them well enough,” Ravenna said. She stepped around him and leaned in to whisper, “Would you like me to stay with you? Is that where this is going?”

  Jesse took a step back. “You should do what your conscience compels you. As I am.”

  “I wasn’t asking about your conscience.”

  “I would help you rescue Drystan and the others. But it may be months before I’m free of this duty. I cannae ask you to wait months.”

  Ravenna thought of her own dilemma. Drystan’s imprisonment was only part of it. It was too early to be certain, but if there was life growing within her, she had few options in protecting the child from the grasping hands of others. The Derehams would never let her keep from them their future heir, no matter how unwilling Drystan was to embrace his birthright. And she equally could not spend her life in Wulfsgate married to a Dereham, so close to her ancestral home, flaunting her treason, gazing perpetually over her shoulder for the rest of her life. Her sins would catch up to her.

  No, there was no future in the north with a child of Drystan Dereham. Or anywhere, if the Derehams believed he was the father.

  “Ask me. I can always refuse,” Ravenna whispered. She shouldn’t enjoy the pronounced ebb of his throat as he watched her mouth move; as he remembered how she looked lying beneath him in the world of his dreams. She didn’t love him as she did Drystan, but she did need him, and though she was still beginning to understand the strange plan formulating in the back of her mind, she needed him to need her.

  Jesse inhaled a deep breath. The heat rising off him was palpable. “I willnae ask that,” he said, quickly recovering the hitch in his voice. “But you are welcome to stay, for as long as you need. Your secret is safe, as are you.”

  Ravenna eased off. “I’ll stay, for now. Until I have my own plan,” she said. Leaning on the tips of her toes, she pressed her lips to his cheek. She lingered like this, long enough for him to shift in place. “Thank you for your aid, Jesse. You have no reason to help me. I won’t forget that you did.”

  A crash startled them both. Esmerelda dropped the basket of wet clothing at the door and bolted up the stairs. Ravenna tried to speak, but Jesse had already gone after her.

  * * *

  Jesse perched at the corner of the bar, watching through the smoke as the Long-Trodden Mule slowly filled with unfamiliar faces. The men were representatives of the Great Families of the Westerlands, sent in the stead of their stewards. Jesse and his father, though from a Great Family themselves, seldom broke bread with men like this. He was more at home in the company of the merchant class. Theirs was a language he understood. Judicious with words, loud in intention. No history between them was needed to fall into familiar routines, of drinks and fun. No one cared who you were, what name you bore, what standard was stitched into your armor.

  These men filtered in quietly, bursting for something. Some knew one another, or had done business in the past, but they had never before gathered to huddle over the future of their Reach. There was a low, nervous energy that passed through them, bouncing from table to table, a series of thoughts unspoken.

  He waved at little Brook, who swept the floor with a sense of purpose, tongue wedged between the corner of his lips. Brook brushed his hair back and returned the greeting.

  Kaslan leaned forward next to Jesse, arms spread over the bar. “Never expected you’d be part of plotting a war in the Westerlands, did you?”

  Jesse almost laughed. “No. And I willnae be in a war, should it come to that. I’ll help here, how I can.”

  “So you say. Wait till the promise of bloodlust spills through your veins.”

  “We talking about me or you now?”

  Kaslan chuckled. He pointed at a table of solemn men sitting together, each occupied with different distractions to avoid engaging each other. “They’ll say they have no fight in ’em. For some, might even be true. But men are men, Jesse. We’re born to the sword, and most prefer to die to it.”

  “There’s been no war in our lifetime, or our fathers’.”

  “Aye.” Kaslan’s eyes twinkled. “So we agree. We’re due.”

  Jesse grunted. “Spend a year fighting the White Sea with a Strong man. That’ll satisfy your craving for war. My grandfather and his father before him paid their sacrifices to the sea, and I expect that’ll be my end someday, too. There’s a reason our skills are in such high demand.”

  Kaslan stretched his jaw in a grimace. “I’ll pass on that one, friend.”

  “The emissaries. Did they all return?”

  Kaslan turned to him. “Didn’t you hear?” Jesse shook his head. “They already heard their reports. There was nothing new.”

  “How can that be?”

  “The Deceiver’s men are everywhere. Makes you wonder who’s guarding the Easterlands.”

  “Nothing from the Southerlands?”

&n
bsp; “’fraid not. Lord Warwick declined to provide any aid or wisdom to the cause.”

  “Why are we here then?”

  Kaslan grinned. “We have a special visitor. Lady Blackwood’s seer arrived this evening. He has a vision to share with us all.”

  Jesse ground his jaw. “We’re here to entertain the ramblings of a swindler?”

  “Wouldn’t have pegged you for a non-believer. Not after what you told us about your mother.”

  “Isnae about believing,” Jesse muttered. “You should fear for the Westerlands if it’s come to this, Kaslan. It isnae a mage who will save your Reach.”

  “This is about the mage in your bed, I think,” Kaslan teased. “She cross you? Leave you wanting?”

  “There’s no one in my bed but me,” Jesse countered.

  Kaslan jumped out from behind the bar. “Yet.” He winked and skirted off before Jesse could correct him. But what would he have said? He didn’t want or need the distraction of the bewitching sorceress from the north. She invaded his dreams, without consent. She’d driven a wedge between him and Esmerelda, without doing anything other than existing in the same space. He didn’t want her in his bed. Nor could he wipe the fantasy of it from his mind.

  He’d been away from home, and a life he recognized, too long. That was the only explanation he could conjure for how she had affected him. His will and desires had never been so disconnected.

  Jesse had hoped she would rise to his offer to leave, but her response earlier implied she had, inexplicably, something else in mind. Something he desperately hoped she hadn’t seen in his own troubled thoughts. He would stem it before it could sprout leaves and twine itself even further into the safety of the small estate in the woods. He had no other choice. Though he’d espoused confidence in Ryan’s mission outwardly, he was all too aware of the risks his brother took to restore the crown. There was always a fair chance he’d never return to see his deeds in action. Now there was a child, and if the father did not or could not return, the bairn was all they’d have left of him. It didn’t take much for a pregnancy to turn poorly. He knew it all too well, from watching his mother decline after the loss of several bairns.