by Vela Roth
Regret weighed heavy in the Blood Union as Lio’s aunt and uncle inclined their heads and followed the soldiers down the slope. Lio waited for Basir and Kumeta to follow them first, before he took his position behind and to the right. Kadi, with Javed at her side, brought up the rear so she could watch their backs.
Lio felt the others’ empathy bolstering him as they all descended. It should have brought him comfort. But it only reminded him they had seen death before and he had not. He did not want a crutch. He must stand on his own two feet.
By the time they reached the bottom of the hill, most of the crowd had ordered themselves into an array of burnished armor and busy heraldic tabards behind the king’s dais. Lio sensed that most of the Tenebrans were grateful to be there, with the breadth of the greensward between them and the Hesperines.
When the embassy approached the foot of the dais, the achingly lovely fragrance wrapped around Lio suddenly and drew his mind away from the victims of the king’s justice. Lio almost halted in his tracks. Hespera’s Grace. The Goddess made miraculous creatures everywhere, and Tenebra was no exception.
He sensed about him, wishing for a better impression of the beautiful woman, perhaps even a glimpse of her. She slipped around the edges of his senses, on the move. Behind the throng that attended the king, a second crowd stepped lightly, attempting to return to the palace without causing any further disturbance. The woman’s fragrance drifted away from him in that direction. He could not catch sight of her. Then she was gone.
And Lio stood before Lucis Basileus, the most recent and perhaps most brutal King of Tenebra. Also one of the most capable who had ever held the throne.
Lio studied as much of the man as decorum allowed. He knew well that among Tenebrans, one gazed at a king’s shoes, robes, and jeweled rings, not his face. Thinking of his own Queens’ ready smiles and kind eyes, Lio felt just how far he was from home. A sense of foreignness overtook him. The familiar figures of his own people appeared strange and out of place. He even felt distant from himself.
Lio was grudgingly glad about the very thing that had so frustrated him when they set out—he was not called upon to speak publicly tonight. Now he understood why his uncle had gently insisted he only observe during their first nights here. If Lio were required to put two words together now, in front of this gathering, to make himself the center of their attention after all he had just witnessed, it might really cost him what little he’d drunk since they’d crossed the border.
Lio fought down the nausea and disorienting emotions. He must do better than this, if he was to prove himself worthy to be an ambassador in his own right. Worthy of his mentor. Argyros had never been in danger of vomiting his breakfast on a foreign monarch.
Uncle Argyros had embarked upon the exchange of presentations with Lord Titus, who appeared to be keeping up. King Lucis watched in silence, apparently accustomed to sitting on his throne while he ordered men to speak or kill for him.
So this was how things were done in Tenebra. The king twitched a finger, a person died, and then the negotiators carried on as if nothing had happened.
When Lio heard his uncle say his name, he came forward and gave a bow he had practiced for decades to the king whose reign had captivated and appalled him throughout his studies. This was his one opportunity when it was appropriate to meet the royal gaze.
Lucis’s eyes were as blue as paintings Lio had seen of cloudless, sunny skies. The king’s gaze was as dangerous as midday and as sharp as the sword resting across his knees. He was of average human height, squarely built, with large hands and a scar on his bearded jaw. A brute wrapped in velvet and jewels. He looked exactly like what Lio knew him to be. And stank of it, as well.
Lio had hoped the Blood Union would reveal King Lucis to him in a way chronicles and reports had not. This man who had united fractured Tenebra surely had complex motivations that made his deeds more understandable, even if nothing could ever justify his acts of cruelty. He who had brought order and stability to his people must possess hidden virtues that coexisted with the violence he practiced as a way of life.
But all of Lio’s Hesperine power would not bring him into Union with the king. Everything within Lio recoiled.
Here was a king who presented no illusions and needed none. Lucis Basileus wore his nature for all to see, and that was one of his greatest advantages. He was a brilliant strategist. A wholly pragmatic one who, if it served him, thought absolutely nothing of slaughtering a frightened father for trying to keep his children safe. Lucis did not love violence. He used it the way a farmer used a plow or a potter used clay, and he tolerated no delay of the harvest nor a single imperfection in the ceramics.
This was the man who had invited Orthros to make peace. But what would Lucis’s peace resemble? Worse still, what would it cost Lio’s people?
Trespassing
Cassia had seen them. She had endured her first glimpse of the Hesperines. That must surely make the rest easier.
She stared into the darkness above her bed and listened to the fire crackling to sleep beyond her open door. At last she heard the swish of slippered feet. Perita shuffled through the hearth room, kicking aside rushes as loudly as possible on her way to the corridor.
Their unspoken bargain worked well. What the handmaiden was not present to learn, she could not report to the king or be punished for withholding. What the bastard daughter knew regarding the handmaiden and Lord Hadrian’s guard, she kept to herself. Their sleeping arrangements accommodated their truce. Perita had a pallet in the dressing room, Cassia had her bedchamber to herself, and Knight provided the excuse they needed to dispense with the custom of handmaidens sleeping by their ladies.
Whenever Cassia was fortunate enough to have a disinterested handmaiden, she always hoped that one would last awhile. She had lost count of how many the king had assigned her, then replaced in the years since her nurse had died. Spying on the king’s daughter was a taxing occupation.
Cassia got up, shivering in nothing but her underlinens and long woolen tunica. The bed creaked as Knight flopped down beside her, and she leaned close to him. She would take a warm dog over a fire any day. Best of all, Knight’s role as her bodyguard had always meant the king never put soldiers at her door. A liegehound to keep her alive and a handmaiden to observe her were all the resources the king deemed necessary to expend on Cassia.
By the faint light that shone through her doorway, Cassia tugged her practical green dress over her tunica and shouldered her oilcloth gardening satchel. She wrapped herself in her wool cloak, which was much simpler and more serviceable than Lord Adrogan’s lambskin monstrosity. On instinct she hunted for a kerchief, but none came to hand. No matter. Who would be there to see her hair uncovered?
No one but the Hesperines.
Together she and Knight padded out of her bedchamber, through the hearth room and into the narrow corridor beyond. It was easy to recognize where she was. The king had put her in unfamiliar chambers suited, such as they were, to a young lady, but the rooms that had been hers as a girl were just in the next hallway. It was strange how everything looked exactly as it had when she was seven. But the palace had not changed in over a thousand years. Why should it have done so in the years that had changed her from child to woman?
Despite how little time she had spent in her own rooms then, childhood memory came powerfully to her and served her well as she found her way through the high, remote wing of the palace where she had stayed, then as now. Her life right after her time here was a blur to her, but Solorum was graven deep in her memory. Emotion was a sharp chisel. A tool she no longer had use for.
Only once did she halt, when Knight came to an abrupt stop in front of her and straightened, his ears pricked. She withdrew into the dimness against one wall, and he leaned against her legs to stay her. In the adjacent corridor, a tall shadow reached into a pool of torchlight, and a man staggered in its wake. He was soon gone, along with the reek of ale and a woman’s scent oils. A sure sign the fe
stivities to welcome the embassy had drawn to a close—except for the private dinner the Hesperines would hold afterward.
Cassia found her way through side doors and servants’ corridors until bare floors and stained brown rugs gave way to thick, plush blues and finally to intricately woven golds. She stood in the forbidden halls of the queen’s wing. A name that meant little now, when there was no queen, nor the promise of one in a beloved princess.
Cassia could not afford to hesitate here in the corridor. She could not allow any thought of the past to distract her from her task. Nor would it serve her to dwell on what lay behind the door at the end of the hall. Why should she be so aware of the king’s presence there and of his soldiers who watched through the night? The king should not seem like a hunter with his bow drawn, ready to let fly an arrow at any moment, just because she came so near the door that led to the king’s wing. Now that she was at court, she must learn to endure being near him. She had chosen this, and she must face the consequences.
But once she began to move down the hallway away from that door, her walk hastened to a run. Knight lengthened his stride beside her. She made it around the shelter of a corner.
And there above her, up a short flight of stairs, was the door that had once always been open to her. A rounded arch, a mahogany panel whose sinuous carvings of flowers and birds tried to gleam in the blurry moonlight from the thick glass windows in the walls above. Solia’s door.
The metal ring handle bit Cassia’s hand with cold. Slowly, warily, she inched the door toward her. A brief groan hinted what noise she could expect once she opened it fully.
She reached into her gardening satchel, careful not to cut her hand on her spade, and felt around. Her fingers halted on smooth ridges of carved wood. No, she could not pause. She had work to do.
Cassia pulled out a rag and a bottle of expensive scent oil. She doused the cloth in the foul stuff and went to work on the hinges of the door. She oiled, then tried the door, listened, then oiled again. The bottle was half empty by the time the door swung open with nothing but a soft, low complaint.
Cassia stared into the dark.
Knight walked in ahead of her, disappearing into the gloom. When his sniffs quieted and his tail thumped the floor, she followed him in. She eased the door shut behind her and listened to it seal away the corridor outside.
Dust weighted her breaths. A wisp of blue in the dark ahead of her was moonlight, sneaking in beneath a wayward curtain. Using that to orient herself, she envisioned the layout of the room. Knight snuffled, and she followed the sounds, hands out before her.
She found him sitting on the rug where he had slept as a pup. She felt its familiar texture beneath her slippers. How many forbidden nights had they spent in these rooms, squatting like waifs in the temple on the benevolence of the golden-haired goddess who had dwelt here?
Cassia must think. Not feel. Ha. Never feel. She put out her hands again and groped her way through the cold, dark hearth room, from one familiar piece of fine furniture to the next, until she came to what she knew was the outside wall. The intruding moonlight was right at her feet. A heavy drape hung before her. She slid it aside, and the light shone on her through translucent blue birds and green glass leaves. The greatest luxury in the queen’s wing was this window over the garden door, a stained glass roundel the size of a platter. Cassia tried the door handle. Not even locked. The king was deterrent enough.
It took the rest of the bottle of oil to undo some of what weather had wrought upon the door in the intervening years. Cassia held her breath and grimaced as it opened on whimpering hinges. It didn’t matter. It could not matter. This was the princess’s inner courtyard. No one could even see into it, except from these very rooms. No one could hear through the massive walls of the king’s wing. Cold air welcomed her outside.
Cassia stood fixed and confronted the sight of what had become of Solia’s garden. The princess’s fountain was dry, reduced to cracked tiles, dirt, and nettle. The annuals were long gone, the perennials tangled remnants beneath rampant weeds and an army of king’s wort that must have somehow invaded from the kitchen gardens. The few stalks that survived would never turn into flowers come spring. The bed she and Solia had planted together was just one casualty among many in that havoc.
Cassia knew no one could see her, but she kept to the edges of the courtyard where juniper trees badly in need of pruning stood between her and the palace looming above. The ivy still held sway on the walls, and its leaves brushed against her as she passed.
At last she spied the long fall of ivy nestled in the corner of two walls where wood peeked out between the leaves instead of stone. A sigh escaped Cassia.
With the flora as her only witness, she slid under and between years of vines. The ivy shivered around her as Knight forged through behind her. She opened the hidden postern just enough for the two of them to slide through. As soon as they were inside, she shut the door securely behind them and hastened into blackness.
The low tunnel stretched ahead of them, through the depths of ring after ring of walls that stood between the royal chambers and the grounds beyond the palace. One hand on the crumbly wall was enough to guide her, and Knight’s presence was enough to keep the rats scattering before them.
Her legs ached by the time they reached the end of the tunnel. Moisture trickled down the walls here, nursing a thick growth of moss that promised they neared the fertile outdoors. She reached forward and a little above her head. A slanted panel of moldering wood, bound together by rough iron, greeted her hands. She could see the door that led out in the torchlight of her memory.
As long as the Hesperines were guests, the human residents of the palace were not to walk the grounds after nightfall. The king had made himself clear. But walks on the grounds after dark, especially alone, had always been forbidden to Cassia. Hesperines were hardly a deterrent in comparison with the king’s injunction. A stroll through the royal forest was the least of the transgressions she would commit before the night was through.
“Come, my Knight,” she whispered, violating the silence within the walls. “Let us trespass.”
She gave the door a great heave and let them out onto the Hesperines’ feeding grounds.
Blood Union
Lio wished moonlight and sated thirst offered him some peace. But the generosity of the king’s deer and a walk in the night were no antidote for the tragedy the embassy’s arrival had caused.
Father had warned him he would function at less than his peak with only the contributions of animals to sustain him. Perhaps Lio could attribute some of his distress to that. But he doubted even a draught of a human’s lifeblood would give him any respite tonight.
He could not get the sight and smell and sensation of the man’s death out of his mind. It followed him everywhere. He could not hide from it, not even within himself. The voices clamored inside him. The wound reopened.
He leaned his forehead against the trunk of a tree and let the moonlight bathe his back. He could feel the Goddess’s Eyes looking down. Both watched over him, wide open. He sensed the clear, white beacon of the Light Moon beginning to wane for the month, while the liquid pulse of the Blood Moon waxed toward its annual fullness.
But the light of her gaze felt far away, almost like a dream. The torchlight felt close. Real. The crimson stain on the sword blade. The sound of the man’s blood slowing in his veins. Lio tried to push it away, but it pushed at him, struck him, and he relived it again.
His own blood ground to a halt. He shed his own body and stepped out of it. His soul made to follow the man’s. But the human departed and left Lio standing on the hillside in his own Hesperine skin again.
Now Lio looked down at his trembling hands, turning them over under his scrutiny. He had never once in his existence regretted the Blood Union. Tonight he wondered if these feelings would stay with him forever, tainting the delight and pleasure the Goddess’s Gift had always brought him. How fortunate the Tenebrans had been, not to feel th
eir fellow mortal’s death the way Lio had.
Fortunate? What was he thinking? They had stood ready to slaughter an animal and rejoice at it. Many had watched the man die with unconcern.
Was that why they were able to live like this? Were their deadened senses what made it possible for them to endure such squalor and suffering? It was the Blood Union that taught Hesperines the Goddess’s Will. It must be the lack thereof that made Tenebrans unthinking of her mercy.
But Lio had thought somehow that all living creatures sensed what the Union made clear to him. Did they not all have the Goddess’s voice within them in some form? Did not humans live with a soft whisper of what Hesperines heard loud and beautiful?
A tendril of sensation teased Lio’s nose, a tinge of flavor behind his tongue. There was a scent to be smelled if he were to breathe. He drew in a lungful of air and straightened in surprise.
It was her. The fragrance in the crowd, the reminder of beauty. She was somewhere on the grounds tonight.
Lio breathed more in the next moment than he had in the entire time since he’d crossed the border into this land of foul smells. There was another new scent among the forest beasts, too, musky animal flesh and contentment, but he hardly gave it thought. He shut his eyes, tuned out sound and parted his mouth, scenting her.
Hespera’s Mercy, what was she doing here? A woman wouldn’t risk exposing herself to one of his kind for a shortcut home after a day of hard work or a secret tryst with a lover.
Lio was confident none of the Tenebrans would take exception to him availing himself of the royal game. That was the agreement King Lucis had established. As much as his subjects hated it, their fear of Hesperines and the king’s displeasure was sure to outweigh their outrage. Yet Lio would have been less surprised to meet a hoard of angry farmers wielding pitchforks and sickles, bent on subjecting him to the same fate they had planned for the bull, than to encounter a woman out alone after dark.
