Crown (The Manhunters Book 3)

by Jesse Teller

  “It’s a girl,” Rayph said.

  “What?” Trysliana said.

  “The aura is white. Boys have a slight golden tint to it. Yours is pure white. You have a girl growing in your belly. You’re gonna be a mother,” Rayph said. “You can’t come with us.”

  Trysliana looked at Smear, and Rayph turned to him. “I understand now. I should have seen it, but I use my eye so rarely, I didn’t.”

  “I have to go with you to help get Dran back,” Trys said.

  Smear and Rayph turned to her and shook their heads. “You’re not going anywhere near Brody Bedlam,” Smear said.

  “He hurts women for sport. He takes trophies. What do you think he will take from you?” Rayph said. “There is no way I’m letting you walk into that building.”

  Trysliana stormed across the room and grabbed Smear by the head. She slipped her tongue in his mouth. They were both crying. He grabbed her and picked her up, laying her across Rayph’s desk, and Rayph hissed.

  “Really?” he said.

  Smear nor Trysliana heard him.

  Rayph slipped out of the office of the Crown and took his work somewhere else.

  Cursed

  They had to carry him from the slave block. Benta Konya, the slaver that owned the Smith, had been furious, screaming of the injustice of his product being stolen and promising retribution. In the end, he led an effort to reclaim Mephsat that was met by Roth and Quill. Never did a slaver scream like Konya. Never did an entire group of men die so completely, or so painfully. When Roth stepped over what was left of Benta Konya, he fought to decipher exactly the kind of life this man would ever lead again. After taking a moment to think about the misery and horror this one man had profited from, Roth decided he didn’t care.

  They brought the Smith to the castle Nardoc at the request of Thomas. He was given food, drink, and a tub full of hot water. Roth waited outside Mephsat’s room until he heard the Smith weeping in his solitude. Roth left, allowing him peace and time to gather himself.

  When Mephsat joined them that night on a balcony overlooking the city, Roth jumped to his feet and bowed. “It is such an honor to meet you,” Roth said. “I have studied your work my entire life. The weapons you have made are breathtaking. Please sit. I have so many questions.”

  Mephsat was much larger than Roth was prepared for. The man they had lifted off the slave block had been curled and whimpering. The one who stood before them now was not the same. This man was hulking, possessing a body that dwarfed every human Roth had ever seen. He stood a little over seven feet tall with wide shoulders and an immensity to him that seemed to make him even larger than a human could reach. The long hair was thick and white and looked to be a mane from some venerated lion. The eyes that sat under the bangs were dark and ancient. His face was shorn clean and it gave him the appearance of a man in his mid-fifties.

  “Ask your questions while I drink,” he said with a thick voice filled with a rich accent. The man lowered himself carefully in the chair afforded to him, and Roth sat across from him at the table.

  “My name is Roth Callden. I am a wizard with a group called the Callden Collective. This is my friend and peer, Quill. The man to your left is Thomas Nardoc. He is the king of Lorinth and was instrumental in your escape,” Roth said. “The woman beside him is his intended, Shalimarie. You have no enemies at this table.”

  The Smith nodded. A servant handed him a mug of wine, and in one great gulp, he drained it to dregs. The servant looked at Thomas who nodded.

  “Leave the bottle,” the king said. The servant set it down beside Mephsat. He snatched the bottle up in his hands and tipped it back for a long time. When he had a good bellyful of wine, he lowered the bottle but did not set it down.

  “Ask your questions, then tell me what you want me to make you,” the man said. “I will need to see your forge. I warn you now, I will need to make adjustments.”

  “You misunderstand our intentions,” Thomas said. “We did not free you because we wanted something from you. We freed you for freedom’s sake. We have information you might want to hear, and after we deliver it, you can decide if you wish to stay here or leave. If you choose to leave, you will do so with supplies and enough money to never feel the pinch of need ever again. If you choose to live with me here at my castle, you will be free to do as you wish.”

  “Why?” the man said.

  “Because I know a little about the things you have suffered, and I hope to take that sorrow away from you,” Thomas said. “And I am king, I can have things how I want them. I want you free, so it will be.”

  The Smith looked at Roth. His eyes seemed to have been soaked in sadness for so long it was beyond the memory of mortal man. Roth looked him deep in the eyes and laid his hands on the table to steady them.

  “Listen to everything I say before you react,” Roth said. “Just let me say my piece, and I will answer your questions.”

  “I thought you were asking the questions,” Mephsat said. He tipped the bottle back again and drained it completely.

  Thomas rang for more wine.

  “I have Betamus, Geterel, Leteral, Harloc, and Ran-toc. I also need only ask and I have Fannalis. They wait in safety and comfort, and my only aim is to free them.”

  The man lifted the bottle, and with one sudden swipe, shattered it on the balcony floor. He leapt to his feet, his chest heaving, and he glared at Roth. Mephsat seemed too gripped by emotion to speak, though Roth did not know what emotion that might be. Maybe rage. This man’s fury was mythic. It was stamped on his face, written in his stance, and blazed bright in his eyes. He seemed as if struck with utter hopelessness. As if a master goal set before him for so long was still just a fingertip out of reach. He seemed overjoyed, as if every dream he had ever had was suddenly thrust upon him. And he seemed confused, as if he were to call out to the gods for any sign of what to do next.

  “Where are they?” he said gasping.

  “Quill,” Roth said.

  Quill stood. She moved her chair and Roth touched the table. It grew broader and longer. Roth waved his hand over it and everything setting on it hovered. With a wave of his hand, it all flew left before sitting on the ground. Quill touched the table. It gave off a light glow, and Roth opened a portal behind him to his conjuring room. He carefully carried each sword from the table it sat on to lay it gently before the Smith. When he was done, he looked at the man, who stared in shock at what lay before him. The man’s trembling fingers reached out carefully. Almost, but not quite, touching the weapons.

  “How did you find them?” he gasped.

  “I wrote a spell to locate them. It was a bit of an effort finding one or two of them, but I was able to do it with the help of others,” Roth said. “I plan on opening the weapons and freeing each one of them in a series of spells I will cast in a few days. Until I do, I want them all to stay with you. Only you know how to care for them.”

  The Smith looked up with weeping eyes. “Why?”

  “My order abhors slavery and captivity of any kind. This is a dream of mine, to unite the brothers. It has been my only desire since I heard of the Thorn Brothers when I was young. It is because of them I began studying weapons in the first place. They defined a life for me. An occupation and goal. I believe I was born to free your sons. Uniquely designed to do the job.”

  “What will you ask in return?” Mephsat said.

  “I ask that you all take Thomas up on his offer and live in peace and joy for the rest of your days,” Roth said. The man scoffed. “And I ask one more thing.”

  “Of course you do,” the Smith spat.

  “I want answers to a few questions I have never been able to find through study and interview,” Roth said.

  The man looked at Roth skeptically, and Roth felt the weight of those aged eyes heavy on him. He knew he was being judged. He braced himself for the verdict.

  “What questions?”

  “What is your real name?”

  “Coale Behan Teyple Deame of
House Deame, Master of the northern basin of the Forest of the First Tree,” the man said. Tears streaked down his face as he spoke, and he ran his hands through his hair. Then he sat at the table, staring at his sons and their prisons.

  “Why did you entrap your sons in these weapons?” Roth asked. This was the one question to which he had never found a suitable answer. The one burning question that had plagued him for as long as he could remember.

  The man reached out and a servant placed a bottle of wine in his hand. The Smith stabbed a finger in the cork and it shot into the bottle. He tipped the drink back, took a shuddering breath. “My wife called me Coal. She died so long ago that I can’t remember her face. I can’t remember her smell. I can’t remember her voice. All I know is that I have never loved anything or anyone better. I made an art of it. Practiced making her happy the way a craftsman will practice with his tools. She was a good wife. And she gave me six sons.”

  He took another drink and sat in his chair. He grabbed the table and pulled it closer to him. “They were good boys. Fannalis was a jokester, Betamus serious. They were twins in birth only. In practice they were more different than I can describe. When she gave me the second pair of twins, I thought she had cursed me. Those two boys were trouble from the start. Geterel was brash. Prone to outburst. Had a temper. He ran everywhere he went. Punched everything he could. He was a warrior born. Leteral would run away from home. The first time he did, we nearly lost our minds.” Coal paused to drink before wiping his eye. “He would run off to the woods. Live with the animals for days. We would hunt for him. He would run deeper into the forest. We had to stop looking before he would come back. Harloc was soft. Not a warrior at all, but a poet and painter. Breathtaking images he would summon up with word and with brush. He could sing. He could dance. Every fine thing lived in him. And he shared it with the world. Ran-toc, his twin, was a lover. We knew him smitten from the first day. When he was a babe, he did not pull his mother’s hair, as a baby would do. He stroked it. Never met a woman he did not fall in love with. Never had a foul thing to say about the fair sex. He loved noble girls as much as a crone. Adored the perfect shape of a woman in her youth as greatly as he adored the plump cooking maid. Ran-Toc was a lover.

  “It started with Geterel. He had been wrestling with the savage folk and he broke a man’s arm. He told me later it was an accident. I am not sure if I believed him, but I went to the savage family to see if I could aid them. To see if I could make it right. The chief and I had been at each other often. My gentry type was not thought well of. The Forest was changing. The savages were taking over. They wanted us out. Said the First Tree had made a decision to oust us from her land. Well, he demanded Geterel’s arm be hacked off and delivered to him.

  “Of course I refused. There was unrest. It was all different back then. We thought ourselves superior. We acted in ways I am ashamed of now. When the chief came to the house with war paint, boasting that he was going to chop my son’s arm off himself, I had him seized and beaten. I left him like trash before my gates.”

  The man took a long drink from his bottle. He stared forward as if retelling a nightmare he could not escape.

  “The druid came to the house and started shouting. She demanded we leave the Forest. She made threats. I ignored them. Finally, she said my boys would learn to understand the Forest. When they became part of it. She tossed a handful of seeds in her mouth and spat them at all of my sons’ feet. Then she left. She took the chief and she was gone.

  “It started a month later. The screaming.” The man held his head against a sound torturing him for eons. “The boys all started screaming at once. They were in so much pain. So much pain. We could not settle them. We could not cure them. No doctors knew what was wrong with them. A few days of this and the first of the thorns came out. Their bones had begun to grow thorns.

  “The pain continued. I took men into the Forest in search of the druid. I couldn’t find her. I raised an army and scoured the Forest for her. I killed savages, I tortured, I committed atrocities. Every day I came back bloody, and every day my boys grew more thorns.

  “Finally when Betamus’s hand turned to wood, we knew they were going to just one day become trees. That is when I crafted the swords. We needed to get them away from this world. Needed to find a safer place for them, to stop the driving force of the curse and give us a little time to figure some things out.

  “I crafted the blades and my wife spun her magic to set them there. They were away from the world of nature, the curse could not take effect, and they grew to live with the pain. After years of begging, we found the druid and asked her to alleviate the curse. She demanded blood, a life given for the boys. We were given a week to decide. It took my wife an hour. She did not tell me what she was doing. She snuck out into the night and gave herself to the druid. That same night my servants betrayed me and stole the boys. They were the finest weapons I had ever crafted. Worth a fortune to a collector. I always assumed they did not know the boys were trapped in them. The swords and the dagger scattered across the world.

  “I had little I could do. I searched for my sons. I knew I had to get them all together in order to free them. I also knew I couldn’t die. I had given a bit of my soul to the crafting of each weapon. Without my soul, I would be immortal. My hair turned blue. My eyes, blue. My body, devoid of soul, was incapable of dying, and I had nothing to do but look for the boys. Lifetimes passed. Things got in the way. I found them all once, only to have them stolen again. After forty thousand years, I gave up.

  “Now you possess them all except Fannalis, and I know no matter what we have planned, we will never find him in time. Sooner or later, someone will steal the ones we have. This is how the dance works. I thank you for your efforts, but this is simply impossible. I cannot tell you how nice it has been to see five of my sons again. But Roth, we are doomed to fail.”

  Roth nodded and stepped back. He opened a door. This was not a portal. This was a door. It appeared out of the air and opened to a simple room, white in all decor with white walls and a long table. “This is a wizard room,” Roth said. “No one can open it but me. No soul, be it man or god or anything else, can open this door except me. Within, you will find that you are never hungry, tired, or thirsty. You will not age. You will not be disturbed in any way until I am ready to free you, until I have Fannalis and can begin my spells to free you all.

  “I invite you now to enter it and take your sons with you. In there, you will know no theft, no betrayal, unless it is me who does the betraying. This is a place to wait for Fannalis. You only need ask yourself if you are willing to trust me. Only need ask yourself if this is too good a chance to pass up.”

  Coal wept when he, one-by-one, took his children into the wizard room, and Roth closed them up inside.

  Bedlam

  Rayph looked at Trysliana’s perfectly rendered map and sighed. He had it memorized. Had the entire thing down exactly, every turn, every curve of the bar. He knew each room as she labeled them and every corner as if he had built it himself. He looked at the shadows on the roof of the clothier shop next to Radamuss’s, and he knew they knew it, too. Cable and Lyceanias also had the place memorized. He had seen to it. Sisalyyon knew it, too. She stood at the back door waiting. Eloam stood on the roof behind Rayph, ready to rain down hell if anyone tried to escape through the front door. The plan was set perfectly. Everything had been seen to.

  Rayph didn’t like it.

  “Fanhon?” Rayph said through his fetish.

  “I’m here, right where you want me. I have the package. It’s waiting to be delivered.”

  Rayph wanted to check in with all of them again, but he had been standing here talking to them for maybe half an hour. Going over the same things again and again. This was a mistake. “We are not ready,” Rayph whispered.

  Smear leaned against the building they stood in front of and scuffed the dirt of the street with the toe of his boot. “We are ready. Are you?”

  “Ready for wha
t? What are you talking about?”

  “This is it. This is the end for us. No matter what happens when we walk in there, this is the last dance for the Manhunters. Are you ready for that?”

  Rayph growled. “That’s not it,” he said.

  “How about Fannalis?”

  “What about him?”

  “You ready for that? You ready to free him and walk away from that dagger? You ready to make the big decision you have been working on for years now?”

  “Smear, this is not the time.”

  “Why not? We are all in place. You will get someone asking about it when they get jumpy, but everyone here is too nervous. They need a minute to think about it, to get it right in their heads. You know that. You’re giving them that time. We have time to spare. So how about it. The decision?”

  “Do I want to go back or not?”

  “Do you want to go back or not?”

  “I do,” Rayph said. “I want to go back. I miss my home. Our home. I miss Ebu. I need to take my place and I need to do it soon. Glimmer deserves rest.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “This nation, Lorinth, what about them?” Smear said. “See, you’re worried you can’t leave them behind. You’re worried you are gonna fail everyone in this nation and this place will crash to the ground without you.”

  “It has been a long time since they have had to get along without me. Ten thousand years of—”

  “You really do need to work on that arrogance problem.”

  Rayph growled.

  “This nation has existed a hell of a lot longer than ten thousand years. It was a power back then. It will be a power when you leave,” Smear said. “You aren’t worried about Thomas. You shouldn’t be either. The kid is a masterpiece. He will be strong for a long time. He has met Mandrake, so he will be leading this nation for centuries at least. He has The Rider, who has come out of hibernation, if you will let me call it that. Lorinth is going to be fine without you. Will you be okay without it?”