The Immortal Prince

by Jennifer Fallon

She reached out to touch my face. “I’m only trying to help you, Cayal.”

  “Why?” I demanded, jerking away.

  She lowered her arm, studying me intently. “Because you’re one of the few who’s not totally lost.”

  “Really? How can you tell?”

  “You take no pleasure in killing.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re wrong, Arryl,” I said. “You’re wrong about everything. Fliss isn’t my child and I’m no better than any other fool in this Tide-forsaken place. Don’t make me out to be something you’d like me to be, rather than what I am.”

  She studied me for a moment longer and then shrugged, clearly disappointed by my response. “Then I apologise, Cayal, for my mistake in thinking you had some shred of humanity left in you. I suppose you’re not interested in my plan for saving Fliss, either. Do have fun murdering your own child, won’t you?”

  She turned on her heel and headed back along the brick path, but had only taken three steps before I sighed, shaking my head.

  “Arryl!”

  “Yes?” she enquired, glancing over her shoulder, as if she had no notion as to why I was calling her back.

  “What plan?” I asked.

  Chapter 49

  “Are you going to tell me you actually killed that poor child?” Arkady asked when Cayal’s voice faltered just on dawn. The fire had burned down to coals again, but she was warm enough, sitting close beside him on the floor near the hearth. At some point, she’d rested her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes, listening to his hypnotic voice as it transported her back to a place and a time that couldn’t possibly exist.

  “No, I didn’t kill Fliss.”

  “Then why did you warn me that I’d like you less once I’d heard the tale?”

  “Because you haven’t heard it all yet.”

  Arkady lifted her head from his shoulder, rubbed her eyes and glanced around the cabin, not sure that she wanted to hear the rest of it. She’d been expecting to be told about the great love of Cayal’s life but, as he suggested when he began his tale, Amaleta was almost a footnote, rather than the focus of the tale. She yawned and stretched luxuriously. “It’s almost dawn. Did Maralyce not come back?”

  “We may not see her again for days,” Cayal told her. “She’s not all that fond of company.”

  Stiffly, Arkady moved a little, only to discover her backside had gone to sleep on the rough wooden floor. She rubbed it painfully as pins and needles shot down her legs, frowning. “What’s for breakfast?”

  “Are you hungry again?”

  “We poor, insignificant mortals have to eat, you know.”

  He looked at her curiously. “Does that mean you’re finally ready to admit that I’m immortal?”

  “Tides, no!” she exclaimed, climbing to her feet, stamping them to banish the tingling from her numb buttocks. “That would mean admitting I’m wrong. I’m never wrong. Just ask my husband.”

  “Do you love him?” Cayal asked, looking up at her.

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then why are you here with me?”

  “You kidnapped me, remember?” Stretching again, Arkady glanced around the small cottage with a frown. “It would be too much to hope, I suppose, that this place has internal plumbing?”

  “It’s a miner’s cabin, Arkady.”

  “I feared as much. Will you put the kettle on while I answer the call of nature?”

  He nodded and Arkady turned for the door, gasping as the icy dawn slapped her awake when she opened it. Hopping gingerly from one bare foot to the other, she spied the outhouse on the other side of the muddy, equipment-strewn yard and hurried across to take care of business. By the time she returned, Cayal had the fire stoked up again and the water sitting over it, the large black kettle hanging on the hinged metal hook attached to the side of the fireplace for just that purpose.

  She shivered as she closed the door and hurried back to the fire. “Tides, it’s cold out there.”

  “It’s the altitude,” Cayal explained. “Did you want the last of the bread?”

  Arkady nodded, helping herself to the remains of the bread lying discarded on a wooden platter beside last night’s meal, which sat congealing on the table. The bread was stale but she was ravenous enough not to care.

  “You’re common-born, aren’t you?”

  Arkady stopped chewing mid-mouthful and stared at Cayal. “You can tell that just from the way I eat?”

  He shook his head. “I can tell from the way you do everything. Your manners are far too perfect for one raised with them. You’ve learned to be a duchess, Arkady. You weren’t born one.”

  “Did something happen while I was gone?” she asked, looking around the cabin. “Why the sudden need to insult me?”

  “I wasn’t insulting you. I was complimenting you.”

  “Then I’d rather you didn’t do me any more favours, thank you.”

  “How did you become a duchess?”

  “I married a duke.”

  He smiled thinly. “You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t see that it’s any of your concern,” she replied, taking a seat at the table.

  “You expect me to tell you every little intimate detail of my life,” he reminded her, as he spooned the tea leaves into Maralyce’s chipped teapot. “Don’t you think it’s fair you tell me something about yours?”

  “No,” she stated flatly. “I don’t.”

  “Let me tell you about it, then.”

  She rolled her eyes and looked away, knowing there was little she could do to stop him. “This ought to be good.”

  Cayal set out the teacups and turned to the fire, lifting the heavy kettle from its hook with his bare hands. If he was burned by the scorching metal, she couldn’t tell. He poured the water as if it came straight from a cool mountain stream, rather than bubbling over a fire. “You don’t love your husband, Arkady. You might like him. You may even respect him, but you don’t love him. I’m guessing you have your own bedroom at the palace and he has his. He probably takes lovers, now and then, but he’s the king’s cousin, so he knows how to be discreet. You married him because you gained something from it—wealth, certainly, although you don’t strike me as the avaricious type—and he gained a very nice table ornament to trot out at dinner parties.” Cayal replaced the kettle over the fire and turned back to the teapot. “You’ll have to give him an heir, someday, I suppose, but you’ve time yet, before you reach the danger years for childbearing, so he doesn’t mind you playing at being an academic for a while longer. How am I doing?”

  Swallowing the last of her bread, which had suddenly turned to ashes in her mouth, Arkady made no attempt to deny his accusations. Nor was she impressed by them. “You could have found out all of that from any guard in Lebec Prison.”

  “They told me your father died there.”

  “Then you know everything about me.”

  He smiled humourlessly and began to pour the tea into a couple of mismatched cups he’d found on the mantel. “I have a feeling we could be acquainted for a thousand years and I’d never get to know you, Arkady Desean. You’re far too practised at concealment. I doubt you’d even recognise yourself, if you were ever forced to confront the truth about who you really are.”

  Arkady looked away. “I believe we’re rapidly approaching that ‘you’ll like me less when I’m done’ point you spoke of.”

  “Why was your father arrested?”

  “He was caught helping escaped slaves.”

  “He’d been doing it for years, I heard.” Cayal handed her the tea, which she accepted gratefully as she nodded in agreement, much more comfortable talking about her father than the direction the conversation had been heading a few moments ago.

  “He was betrayed by a colleague at the university,” she told him, sitting at the table opposite him. “Someone he trusted. They arrested him, took him to Lebec Prison and interrogated him for days without respite. My fa
ther was a sick old man before they took him away. He was dead before I could find a way to have him released.”

  “What happened?”

  “I just told you what happened.”

  “No, I mean what happened to make this trusted friend suddenly betray your father?”

  Arkady hesitated for a long moment before she answered, not sure, even as she did, why she was confiding in this man. “Because I refused to sleep with him any longer.”

  Cayal said nothing, but neither did he look particularly surprised.

  “Aren’t you going to say something?” she asked in the awkward silence that followed her announcement.

  He shook his head. “Is there anything I could say that would make a difference?”

  His question surprised her a little. “I…I don’t know. Probably not.”

  “Did your father know?”

  Arkady shook her head. “My father’s betrayer was a man named Fillion Rybank. He was the head of the School of Medicine at Lebec University. He and my father had been the best of friends since their student days. It would have killed him if he’d known.”

  “It killed him anyway, I’d say,” Cayal pointed out a little heartlessly.

  “Ironic, isn’t it?” she agreed. She wasn’t angry. Cayal said nothing she hadn’t tormented herself with for the past seven years. And it surprised her now how easily the tale came out. “It started when I was fourteen. Fillion came by to visit my father late one night on some pretext or other and caught him treating an escaped feline in the basement.”

  “Did he confront your father about it?”

  “No,” she said. “He didn’t know Fillion was there. But I saw him and I begged him not to say anything. He agreed on the condition that I come to his rooms the next afternoon to…‘take care of some important business for me’ I believe was how he put it.” She sipped her tea, not surprised at how distant the memories seemed. Arkady had partitioned off that part of her soul many years ago. “I soon learned what sort of business he had in mind, and that it mostly involved me on my hands and knees, begging him to punish me for being a naughty girl, and then thanking him afterwards for having his way with me. I think I must have cried for two days after the first time. And he kept making me come back, week after week, for the better part of six years. I was so frightened of Fillion. So frightened for my father. I couldn’t tell him what was going on. At first I thought I was protecting him. When I got older, I realised he’d die of shame and mortification if he discovered I’d suffered such abuse to save him, when he believed so fervently that it was his job to protect me.”

  “But you put an end to it,” Cayal said. It wasn’t a question.

  Arkady shrugged. “I got older. And a friend discovered what was going on. He threatened to kill Fillion himself if I didn’t put an end to it. Odd, don’t you think, that it was the threat of his death that helped me finally get the courage up to tell Fillion Rybank it was time he started taking care of his own business? Mind you, I was more concerned for my friend than for my tormentor, because he was quite serious about killing him. I didn’t want him punished for my foolishness. Anyway, Rybank didn’t take the news well and three days later, they arrested my father.”

  “And yet despite these setbacks, you somehow came out of this calamitous mess married to a duke,” Cayal remarked.

  Arkady remained calm, displaying no emotion. She’d had almost six years of weekly visits to Fillion Rybank’s rooms to practise that particular skill and had mastered it long ago. “I’ve known Stellan Desean since we were children. When I’d exhausted every legal avenue to have my father released, I petitioned him directly.” She might be feeling unusually garrulous, but there were some secrets she wasn’t prepared to surrender quite so easily.

  “And what?” Cayal asked with a raised brow. “One look at your matchless beauty and he took you to wife after promising to release your father?”

  “More or less.”

  “You’re a good liar, Arkady.”

  “It takes one to know one,” she retorted. “Tell me the rest of it.”

  “Why should I bother? You think I’m a liar.”

  She smiled. “I enjoy watching a master at work.”

  Chapter 50

  We left the palace—Fliss and I—in the early hours of the morning, taking the ferry across the mist-shrouded waters of the river. The walls surrounding the royal palace were little more than a pale blur in the predawn greyness as we slipped through the fog, creeping across the meandering river like thieves escaping in the night.

  She was a good-looking child, long-limbed and tall for her age, with dark hair tucked carelessly behind her ears and eyes the colour of polished sapphires. Other than the fact she had wielded Tide magic and lived to tell about it—despite what Arryl claimed about her parentage—there was nothing about her physically that separated Fliss from the rest of her kind, no strong family resemblance to any of her “uncles” which might indicate whose child she was.

  Our departure was arranged with indecent haste. Arryl made certain Fliss barely had time to say goodbye to her cousins, or farewell to the Crasii who had attended her since she was born, before she found herself shivering on the pier, Arryl fussing over her anxiously as we waited for the ferryman to load her baggage.

  Fliss looked up at me as the ferry slid across the fog-bound water toward Libeth on the eastern side of the river. The world felt still. Paused on the brink. Only the rhythmic suck and splash of the ferryman’s pole disturbed the silence.

  “Where are we going, Uncle Cayal?” she asked.

  Aware that anything I said might be reported to Syrolee by the ferryman, I avoided the question. “Away.”

  “Are we going away so you can teach me, Uncle Cayal?”

  I looked at her in surprise. “What?”

  “Isn’t that why we’re going away? So you can teach me all about the Tide so I don’t hurt anybody again? How to do stuff.”

  “How to do stuff?” I repeated, glancing across at the ferryman. Did he know I was escorting this child to her death?

  I forced a smile I didn’t feel and looked down at the little girl, wondering if Arryl was right. Was Fliss my own flesh and blood, or was Arryl simply lying to elicit my cooperation? I didn’t know. I had no inkling of what it might be like to feel paternal, and no way of knowing if that’s what I was feeling now. My unease might simply be a reaction to the inclement weather.

  But whatever the ferryman reported back to Syrolee, I wasn’t going to frighten the child unnecessarily. “Yes, Fliss, I suppose I’ll have to teach you how to do stuff.”

  “Will it be hard?”

  “That depends on you,” I told her.

  “Will you teach me Crasii magic?”

  I frowned. “You should learn how the Crasii are made before you decide you want to follow that particular line of study.”

  “Will you show me a Crasii farm?” she asked eagerly.

  I debated the matter for a moment and then nodded, realising it made little difference what the child believed at this point. “Perhaps we can take a detour on our way.”

  Fliss slipped her small hand into mine. “This is going to be so much more fun than living in the palace.”

  I looked down at her with a dubious frown. She had dark hair like mine and the same blue eyes, but then so did half the population of Tenacia. It proved nothing. “I hope you still think that in a few days’ time, Fliss.”

  “I have to keeping thinking it, Uncle Cayal,” she replied solemnly. “Otherwise I’ll cry.”

  By the time the ferry reached the dock on the other side of the river, the fog had lifted, revealing a crisp blue morning and the towering white walls of Libeth, a town famous for its tapestries and fine linen. Shivering in the cool air, Fliss stared up in wonder as we approached.

  “Don’t gape,” I ordered, as the ferry bumped against the long pier. “You’re a Tide Lord, remember? You need to cultivate an air of jaded cynicism.”

  “What’s that, Uncle C
ayal?”

  “The worst advice you’re ever likely to get,” an amused voice answered from above us.

  We looked up to find someone waiting for us on the pier. He was young, barely twenty, in fact, although he was hundreds of years older than me, with dark hair braided back in the fashion of the day, dressed in leather breeches and a linen shirt, with a finely embroidered jacket over it. I frowned when I saw him, wondering how he’d known where we would be this morning.

  “Uncle Jaxyn!” Fliss exclaimed happily. “What are you doing here?”

  “Exactly what I was going to ask,” I remarked with a scowl, as the ferryman tied the barge to the pylons.

  Jaxyn looked down at Fliss and offered her his hand. “Heard you were going on a little trip, Fliss. Thought I’d invite myself along.”

  “That’s so wonderful!” she cried, allowing him to help her up onto the dock. I followed them up, carrying Fliss’s smallest bag and my own pack. I turned and tossed a coin to the ferryman.

  “Take the rest of the baggage back to the palace,” I ordered, pointing to the towering pile of “essentials” that Fliss’s nanny had sent along with her charge. “Tell them it wasn’t required.”

  “But that’s all my things!” Fliss protested.

  “You won’t need them where you’re going, Fliss,” Jaxyn assured her, looking over her head at me. “Isn’t that right, Uncle Cayal?”

  I refused to be baited by him. Instead, I turned my back on the ferry and Fliss’s possessions and fell in beside Jaxyn as he headed back along the jetty, our boots sounding hollow on the damp, slatted wood.

  Probably afraid we planned to abandon her with the same ease I’d disposed of her luggage, Fliss hurried after us, squeezing her way in between the two of us. The white walls of Libeth loomed over us, but there was no sign of a welcoming party. I was mightily relieved, having chosen this early hour to leave the palace for just that reason.

  “Why has nobody come to greet us, Uncle Cayal?”

  “Because I didn’t tell them we were coming.”

  “You told Uncle Jaxyn we were coming, didn’t you?”