“I’m curious about one thing,” she said, shouldering her satchel and turning to face him, composed once more.
He raised a brow at her curiously. “Only one?”
“If you truly are immortal, then you’ve known all along, if I understand this correctly, that you can’t die?”
Cayal nodded. “Well…yes.”
“And yet you committed a heinous crime in a place where you knew the only punishment is likely to be execution. You must have known your hanging wouldn’t work. Why bother?”
“Because they weren’t supposed to hang me. Lebec usually beheads their criminals.”
“What good would that do you? You told me Pellys was decapitated and his head grew back. Why didn’t you say something when they tried to hang you?”
“I did try. My pleas of I’d rather you didn’t hang me because I can’t actually die didn’t seem to impress the hangman overly much.”
With that, Cayal turned his back on Arkady and walked to his pallet. She stared after him and then glanced across at Warlock and Timms, wondering if the Crasii or the guard had any idea what Cayal meant.
“The suzerain grows weary, I think.”
Arkady looked over her shoulder at the big Crasii. “Weary of what?”
“Living.”
“What do you mean?”
“Decapitation would have taken his memory away, if not his life.”
Arkady turned to look at Cayal. “Is that true?”
He lay back on his pallet, arms folded behind his head. “Truth is an illusion.”
“It is in your world,” she agreed, a little annoyed that he had retreated behind his veneer of disdain and contempt once more. The Cayal who spoke so eloquently of his long-forgotten world seemed a different man entirely to the one incarcerated in Recidivists’ Row.
“Will you speak to the Warden, your grace?” Warlock asked, approaching the bars. Timms drew his truncheon with a threatening scowl, warning the Crasii back.
Arkady looked at the canine blankly. “About what?”
“About being allowed out for exercise. As the suzerain requested.”
She glanced across at Cayal, whose gaze was fixed determinedly on the rough ceiling of his cell. She hesitated and then nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you, your grace.”
Timms ordered the Crasii away from the bars, but Cayal made no attempt to echo the Crasii’s gratitude. More than a little peeved by his moodiness, she shouldered her bag a fraction higher, pushed the chair aside, and then, on impulse, as Timms headed back down the corridor assuming she was behind him, she stepped up to the bars of Cayal’s cell.
“Something else about your story intrigues me,” she said.
“How nice for you.”
“You speak of Magreth as a continent. You talk of a temple dedicated to this Eternal Flame of yours.”
“So?”
“Well, what happened to it? Magreth is nothing more than a series of uninhabited islets, surrounded by reefs and riddled with volcanoes. Where did your temple go? There are no ruins on Magreth that I’ve ever heard of, and I’m a historian, so I would have heard something about them, if they ever actually existed. Where are they? What happened to the people? Did they just vanish, too?”
“Pellys happened to them.”
“What do you mean?”
Cayal was silent for a moment and then sat up abruptly, rose to his feet and walked back to Arkady, stopping so close only the pitted iron bars separated them.
Before she could stop him, he took her hands in his. His touch startled and surprised her. There were no calluses on his hands, as one might expect on a labourer. They were smooth, unmarked and unscarred, which was odd for a man claiming to be a tradesman. Even Stellan’s hands were calloused from holding the reins after a lifetime on horseback.
“You really are too curious for your own good, Arkady.”
She refused to react to him, pretending she didn’t notice he was holding her hands.
“You’re avoiding my question, Cayal.” She’d never been this close to him before. It alarmed her to realise her heart was pounding. She knew this man unsettled her, but she hadn’t expected she might be afraid of him.
“No,” he said, massaging her hands gently. “I’m not.”
“Then tell me what happened to Magreth.” She wanted to step back, but was afraid the movement would betray her uneasiness, or attract Timms’s attention. She couldn’t understand why she wanted to protect Cayal from Timms’s truncheon. This man was a liar, a murderer and probably a spy. He had no business making her pulse race with fear.
And it is fear, she told herself sternly. She wouldn’t allow herself to contemplate the notion that it might be for any other reason.
“Magreth was destroyed,” he told her, studying her face closely, as if he could read every conflicted emotion lurking behind her eyes.
“In the Cataclysm?”
“In a fit of pique.”
“I don’t understand.” Arkady was no longer even certain they were talking about the same thing.
“When Pellys’s head grew back,” Cayal told her softly, forcing her to focus on what he was saying rather than what she was feeling, “he was a blank slate, just a whole lot of power and no memory of how to control it. The gemang has that much right. Pellys split the continent asunder with a stamp of his foot.”
“He destroyed the temple?”
“He destroyed everything. The immortals survived, naturally—or unnaturally, I suppose would be more accurate—but the rest of Magreth’s population wasn’t nearly so fortunate. Diala and Arryl were able to protect the Eternal Flame, but Lukys estimates nearly half a million people died that day.”
Arkady searched his face, certain that this close, she should be able to detect some hint that Cayal was lying. But all she could see were a pair of startlingly blue eyes that seemed to devour her very soul. “So you tried to get yourself executed for what, Cayal? Were you trying to erase your memory?”
“More or less.”
“Why?”
“If I can’t die, then oblivion will suit me just as well.”
Arkady smiled faintly, thinking that at last she’d found a chink in his story. “If that was your purpose, Cayal, why kill seven people? You could have found someone…paid someone…surely, to chop your head off…if that was really your intention.”
“I wanted my head chopped off, Arkady, not hacked off. The job needed a professional to do it properly. It’s a somewhat specialist profession, you’ll find. And it takes a decent axe to do it painlessly. Why didn’t I just pay someone? Because headsmen don’t tend to advertise their occupation. Too many pissed-off relatives to deal with, I suppose.”
“So you did something that would bring you to the headsmen,” she concluded, thinking, yet again, that either Cayal was the most gifted liar on Amyrantha or he really was telling the truth.
“For all the good it did me.”
“And the power you claim such an event would unleash? What about that? If I’m to believe this sorry tale, your beheading might well have destroyed Glaeba.”
He shrugged. “I would have survived it.”
His callous disregard for human life broke the spell. She snatched her hands away and stepped back from him, more rattled than she was prepared to admit.
“How do you know so much about what happened to Pellys?”
“Because I’m the one who decapitated him.”
Arkady recovered her composure quickly, certain now that he was mocking her. “You really must take me for a fool.”
“I’m not the fool here, Arkady,” he warned. “Word will reach the others, eventually, that I’m here. And when it does, they’ll come looking for me.”
She raised her brow sceptically. “The other immortals can’t be coming to kill you, surely?”
“I have immortal enemies aplenty and we have other ways of taking vengeance on each other,” Cayal assured her ominously. “They’re much more effe
ctive than death. Mostly they involve destroying things you think your enemy cares about.”
Far from being intimidated by his warning, Arkady was genuinely amused. This story of Cayal’s immortality was getting wilder by the day. “Oh, so now you’re suggesting we should release you to protect Glaeba from the wrath of your immortal brethren?”
He smiled crookedly. “There’s a thought.”
“I think you really are insane, Cayal.”
He shrugged. “Can’t hang a man for asking.”
“No,” she agreed. “We save that punishment for murderers.”
“Now you’re trying to hurt my feelings.”
“A tactic that might work, if I thought you had any.”
Arkady turned away, satisfied she had gotten the last word in, but she was still too close to the bars and Cayal was quicker than she anticipated. He snatched at her arm and held it tight, pulling her closer with bruising force, until his lips were next to her ear, the cold bars pressed against her side. Across the corridor, Warlock lunged at the bars of his cell, growling, but there was little he could do to aid her.
“You know nothing of my pain, Arkady,” Cayal hissed, his hot breath burning her ear, sending shivers down her spine. “Your narrow, wretched, shuttered, mortal mind can’t conceive of the true agony of immortality.”
“Let…me…go,” she ordered stiffly, afraid of this dangerous man for any number of reasons, few of which—she was only just beginning to appreciate—were his potential for anger or violence.
“If only you understood,” he added in an agonised whisper, “that release from this hell in which I reside is all I crave.”
He released her then and retreated to the back of his cell, refusing to look at her again, leaving Arkady rubbing her bruised arm, wondering what he meant.
Of one thing, Arkady was certain. When Cayal spoke of the hell in which he resided, he wasn’t talking about Lebec Prison.
Chapter 27
Once a year, the King of Glaeba came to Lebec.
It was a tradition as old as the nation of Glaeba itself, although the reasons for the annual ball were lost in antiquity. Tilly Ponting claimed it had something to do with one of Stellan’s ancestors saving a Debree’s royal hide in some obscure battle fought long ago, and the annual visit was to acknowledge the family debt.
Being rather more cynical than his wife’s friend, Stellan thought it probably had more to do with the king keeping on the good side of the one branch of his family with the wealth, the resources and the right bloodline to topple him, if the mood ever took them. The Deseans were loyal supporters of the king, but it would only take one Duke of Lebec to get a little greedy for the whole royal house to start trembling.
That, Stellan knew, was the reason Mathu had originally been sent to Reon Debalkor and not here to Lebec, when it came time for his lessons in government. Enteny wished to keep his cousin onside. He didn’t particularly want him inside.
Despite that, Enteny and Stellan got along quite well, helped, no doubt, by the difference in their ages. The king was already a young man by the time Stellan was born. In fact, he was closer to Mathu’s age than the king’s age. They had never been rivals—Stellan and the king—or even particularly close friends when they were younger. It was only since Stellan had become Duke of Lebec that the king had begun to fully appreciate what a loyal servant he had in his cousin, and maybe even now, he didn’t fully understand how good a friend Stellan was. Karyl Deryon knew, but it was in the best interests of both men that the king remained in ignorance of some matters.
The king’s visit, however—politics aside—was easily the most important social event of the year, marking the beginning of summer and end of the court’s winter recess. Everybody who belonged at court, many who wished they did, and quite a few who were out of favour, flocked to Lebec for the King’s Ball and then retired to their town houses in Herino for the rest of the summer, where they could attend court on a daily basis if they wished to. Or if the king wished them to.
An invitation to the King’s Ball in Lebec was a guarantee of favour for the coming court season. Exclusion might mean something as simple as an oversight, or it might herald the downfall of an entire House. One advantage of hosting the ball, Stellan thought as he descended the grand sweeping stairs that led down to the ballroom, was there was no danger he wasn’t going to be invited.
“The flowers are all wrong! That’s not what I ordered at all!”
Stellan smiled at Arkady’s irritated exclamation as he reached the bottom of the staircase. The vast ballroom was empty, but for his wife and the score of Crasii slaves loading up the tables and placing gilded, velvet-upholstered chairs around the walls.
“Should I fall on my sword now, or wait until the king arrives?”
“You mock me at your peril, Stellan,” she warned.
He kissed her cheek fondly. For a common physician’s daughter, she had a remarkable eye for the finer details of staging a royal event. He studied the flowers in question, which were being held by a nervous canine Crasii whose face was lost amid the foliage of the large arrangement. “They look fine to me.”
“That’s because you’re a complete ignoramus about anything floral. You can’t tell the difference between a petunia and a pine tree. Fuchsias are in this year. Royal Cerise fuchsias, to be precise. These are Noble Scarlet fuchsias.”
“They look like pretty red flowers to me.”
“Laugh at my flowers one more time, Stellan Desean, and trust me, you won’t need to fall on your sword. I’ll give you a push.”
“I wouldn’t dream of questioning your floral expertise,” he assured her, forcing his features into a very serious, albeit entirely false, expression. “You look quite stunning, by the way. Is that the dress you beggared me for?”
She nodded distractedly, dismissed the Crasii who’d brought her the flower arrangement to inspect, and then turned to look at him. She was wearing the family rubies, an elaborate choker encrusted with deep red stones interspersed with freshwater pearls that had been in his family for generations and was probably worth as much as some entire noble estates. The ball gown was red beaded silk, the same colour as the rubies (and Arkady’s questionable fuchsias), cut low at the front, even lower at the back, designed to entice as much as conceal. Her dark hair was caught up in a matching ruby and pearl clasp on the right side, but allowed to tumble over her bare left shoulder in a cascade of perfectly arranged curls. She has an eye for more than the appropriate flowers, this wife of mine, he thought.
“Do you like it?”
She was beyond beautiful. She was breathtaking. But Stellan knew how annoyed she could get when he reminded her of the fact. He shrugged. “Actually, I’m a bit disappointed. Given the price of the damned thing, I was expecting it to be encrusted with hand-sewn virgin mermaid scales, at the very least.”
Arkady spared him a brief smile, ordered another one of the Crasii to move the punchbowl on the main table and then turned back to him. “It’s the quality of the workmanship, Stellan. The stitching is so small you can barely see it. No, Tassie,” she called suddenly, “put the cups by the punch-bowl, not by the hot food platters!” With a sigh, she turned her attention back to her husband. “Have you seen Kylia yet?”
“No. Why?”
“No particular reason. Just be certain to make a fuss of her when you do see her, particularly if Mathu’s around. This is her first official outing as an adult. She needs to know she’s beautiful.”
“Is Mathu suggesting she isn’t?”
Arkady smiled. “Just do it, Stellan. Don’t try to figure it out. Be impressed by her. And don’t ask what the dress cost.”
He sighed dramatically. “If you’re so determined to ruin me, Arkady, I could arrange for you to stand at the gates and throw all my worldly wealth to the passers-by, you know.”
“I’d never be able to lift the antiques,” she replied blandly. “This is much more fun.”
Shaking his head, Stellan smiled.
“I’ll bet she looks a treat. As do you, I might add. Are you planning to flirt with the king?”
“Don’t I always?”
“You know he thinks you’re the only woman in Glaeba he can’t have.”
Arkady seemed amused. “That’s only because he doesn’t get out much, Stellan. Do you think they’ll be on time, this year?”
“As they haven’t made it on time once in the past decade, I’m not certain it would be wise to count on it this year, your grace.”
Stellan and Arkady both turned at the unexpected answer to find Declan Hawkes standing at the entrance to the ballroom, cutting a surprisingly elegant figure in his unaccustomed finery. It must be raining again, Stellan noted. The spymaster’s hair was damp, although obviously he had taken the time to comb it before entering the palace ballroom. Hawkes stepped forward, bowed politely to Stellan when he reached the foot of the staircase and then turned and bowed with equal respect to Arkady. “You look lovely as always, your grace.”
“Thank you, Declan. It’s nice to see you again.”
“As always, it’s nice to be home,” he replied, raising her hand to his lips.
Stellan frowned. The friendship between Declan Hawkes and his wife made him more than a little uneasy. He frequently told himself there was nothing sinister about it. They’d grown up in the slums of Lebec together. Their friendship was almost as old as they were, but it disturbed him, nonetheless. Perhaps it was because he was never certain just how much Arkady had shared with her best friend, or indeed if Declan Hawkes wasn’t secretly jealous of him for marrying Arkady and simply biding his time, waiting for the right moment to bring the whole world crashing down upon his rival. Stellan had no proof, or even the slightest evidence that was the case, but the possibility niggled at the back of his mind every time he saw his wife and the spymaster together.
And then another thought occurred to him. Arkady knew Stellan would not object to a lover. If she took one, would it be this man? For that matter, had she already chosen him? Was that what she meant when she’d warned a lover was too dangerous? Did she mean all lovers in general or was she specifically referring to Declan Hawkes?
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