I could have him killed with a gesture, but that would risk spilling blood in violence on her soil—anathema to living land like Calanthe—and also bring unholy retribution down on us from His Imperial Nastiness. Leuthar could make things difficult for me with Anure, whisper in the emperor’s ear of vague treacheries—or, worse, insinuate that I no longer possessed the virginity Anure so prized in his blind certainty that no man in my bed kept me sexually innocent—but that would lose him the plum job of emissary to the wealthiest, loveliest, and most pleasurable of all the emperor’s subject kingdoms.
My father had preserved Calanthe in all her pristine beauty, much as he had his daughter, to be Anure’s prized possessions he dared not touch lest he ruin them. Leuthar enjoyed the privilege of pride of place, entrusted with those things.
So I made certain that the emissary’s spacious rooms with a breathtaking view of the hanging gardens and the sea beyond were always well stocked with his favorite foods, wines, and willing companions of all genders. In return, he reported only glowing tales of my loyalty and behavior.
I wouldn’t call us friends. In truth, I had no real friends besides Tertulyn. But our congenial détente served us both.
“Syr Leuthar,” I said, allowing the sound of delight to infuse my voice, a sweet jasmine touch. “We have missed you these last weeks. What news do you bring of My old friend, His Imperial Majesty?” I like to try out lies of varying sizes and to see how well I can make them sound sincere.
Syr Leuthar swept off his elaborate hat, less a helm and more a confection like those the court ladies wore perched on their wigs. Some unfortunate bronze bird had given up a significant portion of its tail feathers for the cause.
“His Imperial Majesty sends his regards to the rose of his empire, and also a box of the candied dates You so favor, which I’ll have delivered to Your rooms, once the ship has been unloaded. He’s also sent a special message of affection for Your Highness.” He reached into an inside vest pocket and produced a folded letter on the emperor’s stationery, Anure’s symbol clear even from that distance. Embossed in deep-gray tones on paper shades lighter, it was a stylized image of the citadel at Yekpehr, the rocks jagged and menacing. Someone had added a pink ribbon to decorate the missive—which I imagined Anure’s desiccated heart had thought romantic—but that only made the stark symbol look more grim. Maybe that was just me.
Leuthar vanished the envelope again with the deft sleight of hand practiced by con artists of all types. “I’m to place it in Your hands only,” he added with a sly twist of his mouth that insinuated a great deal.
To make a point, I nodded to Tertulyn. Anticipating me, one of her particular gifts, she’d been watching and sprang to her feet as if her gown weighed nothing and drifted light as a petal on a breath of summer wind to the emissary. She curtsied to him with perfect respect, holding out her gloved hand in patient demand. He only flicked a brief glance at me before producing the letter again and laying it in her palm. She brought it to me, her eyes full of lively mirth once only I could see her face, one brow cocked in a way that clearly communicated both her disgust and her amusement.
We both knew what the missive would likely say, and I would read it aloud for her later so we could laugh at it and pretend we weren’t afraid of what Anure would do. Such were our bedtime stories. I only hoped it was his usual vague promises and not what I feared.
For the time being, I tucked the vile thing away in one of my own hidden pockets, this one guarded by a cluster of indigo blossoms. The advantage of my grand gowns being so full of air is that I have multiple secret spaces to choose from. “My gratitude.” I bestowed a smile on Leuthar with the words. “If that is all, then—”
“I beg Your pardon, Your Highness,” Leuthar interrupted, “but I’m afraid I am tasked to bring You distressing news.” He paused with great significance—then he had the actual balls to simper at me.
I made sure to seem surprised. It served several purposes to have him think me a blissfully ignorant and loyal vassal. Not the least because sending spies beyond Calanthe made me a traitor. I like my head attached to my neck, thank you. I blinked, long and slow, the glittering crystals on my lashes falling, then rising again. They gave me a sleepy-eyed stare, as if everything that occurred bored me beyond belief. Also a useful impression to give. “Oh?” I cooed. “Not too distressing, I hope. Don’t say His Imperial Majesty is unwell!”
We should be so lucky. I liked to suggest it often. If only I’d been born a wizard, I could make it so by repeating it enough. In that case, however, even Anure’s lust to possess me wouldn’t have preserved my life.
A quicksilver grimace creased the corner of Leuthar’s mouth before he smoothed it, shaking his head. “Your concern for the emperor’s health does You credit, Your Highness. Not everyone wishes him well as sincerely as You do.”
“Well,” I said, adding a vague finger-flutter that had Tertulyn suppressing a smile, “I have no quarrel with the emperor. He has always treated Me with tender care.” I even produced a simper of my own, far better than curling my lip in contempt—or fear.
One day, no doubt, Anure would find a way to wed me in truth. A dire fate I’d managed to stave off by pretending to wish for it with all my heart, all the while reminding him of his existing stable of wives and citing his own vows to make me empress. As queen of Calanthe, my rank fell second only to the emperor himself, but if I became his fourth wife—no, it would be his fifth wife now that he’d married the Lady Ibb, practically on the battlefield of Derten while standing over the corpse of her former husband and king—I’d be lower-ranked than the previous living wives by ancient custom, and unable to be empress.
In destroying magical law, Anure had bound himself to man’s law, and that kept us at an impasse, which had so far saved me.
I wrote lavish replies to Anure’s stomach-turning love letters. Much as I loved him and longed for us to be joined, I just couldn’t risk angering the ancestors so—or destabilizing the empire by violating the emperor’s own laws—and bringing the wrath of ill luck down on his empire, and so on and so forth, ad nauseam.
On a less melodramatic note, I frequently reminded him that compromising my rank that way would make inheritance of the throne of Calanthe problematic, as if it weren’t already. What imperial governor could be trusted with Calanthe’s bounty, which I kept pristine for him and from which I tithed so generously? I’d managed to continue my father’s gambit and the stalemate that, if tenuous, at least let me remain on Calanthe. The entire empire viewed me as the emperor’s fiancée in essence, if not reality, which worked fine for my purposes. And they viewed the enduring beauty of Calanthe as testament to the stability of Anure’s rule.
Syr Leuthar had been blathering on, assuming a grave expression, using many words and saying very little. He toyed with the feather on his hat. Nerves? Interesting.
This trouble worried the emperor far more than I’d have predicted. The news from Keiost mattered to Tertulyn, thus it mattered to me, but it was a small kingdom with relatively little wealth, especially after Anure pillaged it. Beyond his propensity to want to own all land and people in existence, the emperor shouldn’t be so bothered by a small rebellion. In fact, he enjoyed bloodshed and visiting punishment on those who dared resist. Whatever had happened in Keiost, though bloody, shouldn’t reach as high as Anure’s seat of power. Not unless something monumental had occurred.
“I must inform You”—Leuthar finally came to the point—“that Keiost has been overrun, fallen to a craven enemy of the empire.”
The court gasped as one entity at the words that were tantamount to treachery to even voice aloud. Enemy of the empire.
The orchid ring on my finger tightened, petals flexing to send a scent wafting up. The smell of broken iron, old ashes, and new burns. A wolf, dragging its chains.
Whatever the dreams foretold, it had begun.
6
I left the plaza and its conquered populace, swallowing down the grate of ash
burning my throat. General Kara quickly caught up and paced alongside me, subtly directing the angle of my escape. “I have the imperial governor confined to his treasure room,” he said. “You’ll want to interrogate him.”
Want wasn’t how I’d have phrased that. “Treasure room?” I inquired instead of saying as much. Surely Anure hadn’t left much “treasure” behind to be hoarded in Keiost.
“You’ll see. The room has the great benefit of being secure.” His smile made a lipless slash on his sere, dark face. “In fact, if you want the man to answer any questions, you might hurry, as I can’t guarantee the air supply now that we’ve sealed it.”
Sondra bowed as she joined us, Kara’s words hanging in the air, her grin as tight and toxic as his. “Your prisoner awaits, Conrí,” she said by way of greeting.
I ask only to hold the torch. She didn’t speak the words aloud, but I heard them like the day she first spoke them to me. They resonated in my memory like the striking of steel against stone, lingering like the stench of sulfur in the air. Even though it had dissipated in the breeze off the ocean, the vurgsten smoke lingered in the ache between my eyes and the burn in my lungs.
My father had felt that burn as he died, as the vile shit slowly suffocated him. His death had been foul, not fitting for a king. His blood would never return to the soil of Oriel. There had been no state funeral with solemn crowds and violet-stained horses drawing his draped casket. Instead the fallen King Tuur had died bald and emaciated under a cloud of gray ash falling around us like burning snowfall. Knowing the man barely clung to life, the guards and even the overseer had watched from a healthy distance. Dying men brought bad luck, according to the old ways. The specter of mortality swung its weapon in wide arcs, happy enough to take bystanders along with the chosen. Anure might’ve declared all that to be untrue, but the old superstitions die hard. The guards were hardly enlightened men. They’d left us alone.
And I’d held my father at the end. I’d put my back against a rock, the dying king propped upright against my chest, lying against me like the son I’d never have. An ironic reversal of our roles. Keeping him at that angle let the fluid of infection in his lungs settle to the bottom as much as possible.
Still, he’d drawn in each breath with terrible effort. He strained to inhale. If he’d had air to give voice to the pain, he would have. But he had no breath for screaming. His mouth contorted with it, a wide hole, gaping nearly toothless after years of his body weakening. The hearty grinning father from my youth, the arrogant, untouchable king who’d defied prophecy, boomed orders, and wielded a mighty sword had collapsed into a wraith, a bare skeleton wrapped in weakened parchment, blackened from fire and ash.
The only thing that remained of the father I remembered were his eyes, the fierce blue rheumed and milky, but something of his ferocious spirit still shining within. I’d tried to calm him, but he’d stared up at me, his only remaining son, gasping for life like a dying fish out of water. Desperate to speak a last message.
I’d bent close trying to hear, weeping shamelessly, not caring who witnessed the accursed weakness. Even if I had cared about anything but watching my father die, I couldn’t have stopped those tears. And it took so long, the wait unbearable, each racking breath, each grating shudder seeming to be the last. The air would leak out. His body going still. And I’d think it was finally done. Until, impossibly, the man breathed again. Fighting, always fighting. He’d never known when to quit, when to surrender to the inevitable defeat.
If he had, maybe the emperor’s retribution wouldn’t have been so severe. Wishes like ash on the wind.
In the end, he vanished in one of those long pauses between one breath and the next. It seemed death should arrive with more fanfare than that. Instead the last remnant of the man inside the desiccated husk simply evaporated. I kept waiting for that next labored breath that never came. Finally, it became clear the old king would never breathe again.
“The king is dead. Long live the king.”
The quiet voice burned through my vigil. Sondra crouched nearby. She must’ve crept over to share my vigil. She’d smeared ashes in lines over her shorn skull. More lines of ash trailed down her cheeks in the traditional style, something she’d done purposefully, rather than the standard grime that coated us all. Even in my stunned grief I’d had the thought that if she wanted to recognize the old man’s death, to demonstrate in the old ways that it mattered, she’d have washed. But that would’ve meant squandering precious water rations we needed to keep ourselves alive.
“The king is dead. Long live the king,” she intoned again with somber gravity.
“It’s not a time for jesting.” Even then her humor had been black and twisted. The ashes grated between my teeth.
Her dark eyes fixed on mine, rage in them. “You insult me, Conrí.”
A laugh, harsh and bitter, escaped me, painfully scraping out of a throat choked with unmanful tears, and jostling my father’s corpse. He weighed nothing, and I fancied his bones rustled in a mocking reply. “Don’t call me that,” I bit out. “That’s not my name. Oriel is gone. My family is all dead. I’m king of nothing. I’m only a slave, as we all are.”
“Shall I call you the King of Slaves then?” Sondra sneered. She’d meant to taunt me, but it sounded right. With my father gone forever, the boy prince I’d been had died with him. Conrí, a boy who would never be king, had finally and utterly ceased to exist.
“Apt,” I replied, staring at my father’s slack face, dead eyes finally devoid of the last piece of the king he’d been. “A slave to lead slaves, and with one future. I’ll lead you all to the same death, perhaps one step ahead of you. Call me Con.”
Easy to slice away the honorific rí for a king. My father should never have given me a name that assumed so much. The court wizards had been wrong in that foretelling, too. No throne awaited me. The kingdom that would’ve been mine shattered into pieces and consumed by Anure. Our borders erased, our people enslaved or scattered, the royal line of Oriel—and with it the land we’d tended—had ended with my father’s last agonized breath in the stinking fires of Vurgmun.
“This is a time for grief.” Sondra closed her eyes, bowing a face gaunt with sorrow, and making the ancient sign consigning the old king to the afterworld, to Sawehl’s shadow sister, Yilkay. Then she lifted that burning, raging gaze to mine again. “But not for despair. The bloodline of Oriel lives in you. Long live the king,” she repeated, implicit demand in her voice.
I’d had to look away from that, look at anything but her. The jagged black peaks around belched their smoke and flame, broken craters spilling liquid rock. Beyond that, the bleak and ragged land that had never yielded life forever shifted between molten and solid, crimson here with fire, grayed there with ash, steam billowing. Farther down the rockslide, the guards crouched, passing a skin of water and watching us only obliquely. A stretcher lay beside them, not to rescue a dying man but to drag away his desiccated corpse, to ship it to the emperor. Proof that his old enemy had died at last, and not by his hand. Proof that Oriel would never reclaim the blood and bones of her last king.
It was bad luck to kill a king; even Anure wouldn’t dare that much. Besides, murder didn’t require a direct blow.
Something hard shifted inside me, and a resolution formed to deny Anure his prize, his satisfaction in subduing the claims of the land he falsely possessed. The upstart emperor wouldn’t have his peace, nor his evidence that he hadn’t struck a blade to King Tuur’s heart himself. I would deprive him of that—and strike a blow of my own.
“Help me with the king,” I said, not realizing in that moment that it was my first royal command, the first step in a long campaign.
Sondra had known it, though. I’d never forget the severe slash of her grim smile, or the way she inclined her head in eager compliance. “Always, Conrí,” she averred.
I gathered the old king’s corpse against me and rose to my feet, stealthily so as not to draw the guards’ attention. Then, quickl
y enough that they had no time to stop us, Sondra and I scuttled to a vent nearby. The heat seared my eyes, burning away the last of my tears. Meeting my eyes, Sondra took my father’s feet and helped me swing his body up and out, flinging him into the abyss. With a sigh and a scrabble of loose rock, the body fell away, bursting into flame before it hit the surface of the molten pool below.
The guards shouted. Began climbing the long slope.
And the old words came to me. I grated them out, that prayer I’d have sworn before that moment that I didn’t remember. Another voice, sand to my gravel, finished it with me: Sondra, chanting loud and with determined rebellion.
“I will avenge you,” I told him. Avenge them. We never talked about my sister, what happened to her and all the others. We couldn’t.
Sondra nodded as if I’d spoken to her, as if she’d expected it all along. “We will avenge him, and all the others. You will lead us.”
“I can’t lead my father’s people.”
“Your people now, Conrí.” She threw the words at me.
“No.” I shook my head. “His people. The last of Oriel died with him. I am a ghost. I only want to watch Anure choke for breath, die, and burn.”
“I ask only to hold the torch,” Sondra replied. Then she bowed.
The guards reached us then. They dragged us away to flog the rebellion out of us. They hadn’t thought we had any left. Neither had I, and I embraced the pain. It felt good, in a twisted way, right and justified. And I hadn’t shed any tears, not even when they flayed the skin from my back, grinding ash into the wounds so I’d forever carry the black scars of Vurgmun.
Somehow I’d not only lived through it, but also found a way to live up to that ill-conceived vow born of rage and grief. And Sondra survived what they did to her, her relentless gaze holding me to those promises, that rage. The blackest passions spur one on where nobler notions fail. The mines crushed nobility along with all the finer emotions. But the need for revenge, gritty and sulfurous—that flourished in the dark, suffocating tunnels.
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