The Drinnglennin Chronicles Omnibus

by K. C. Julius

  She realized then that he’d likely seen nothing of the wider world, so she tried another tack. “Who will sail all these ships?”

  “The vaar.”

  Halla gave an incredulous laugh. “By himself?”

  “Yes.”

  She saw that Lash believed this.

  “Where will the vaar sail them to? And when?” Perhaps she could find a way to stow away on one of them.

  “North,” the creature said, infuriatingly. “When we are ten thousand strong.”

  Halla gave him a sharp look. “Why ten thousand?”

  “It will be enough.”

  Speaking with the brute was like trying to cage a shadow, but she bit back her frustration. “Enough for what?”

  Lash started back up the pier, forcing Halla to lope around in front of him to stand in his path. “Enough for what?” she repeated.

  He released a low, sinister hiss through his cruel teeth. “Enough.”

  On their second outing, she made Lash take her through the foundries where the arms and fittings for the ships were manufactured. After that, they went to see the armory, and a cold finger of dread ran up Halla’s spine upon seeing the arsenal of swords, pikes, axes, maces, and bows.

  The following day, she and Lash circled the sprawling yard where the hulking frames of siege engines were under construction. Wagonloads of tanned skins, coils of ropes, and rollers for the battering rams trundled past, and she lost count of the weight boxes, throwing arms, and slings for the trebuchets. Rows upon rows of cannons awaited installation on the ships.

  They then headed to the vast tents where the å Livåri men ate their twice-daily meals. The cooks dished up a thick porridge of rice and droma milk with a few morsels of chicken or fish for each man, then distributed the day’s allotment of krifft, a bitter beverage that kept the enslaved workers’ thirst at bay.

  “Where do the women eat?” Halla asked. “Where are the women?” With the exception of Sharra and the servers in the tent, she’d seen none.

  Lash’s growled response was unintelligible, but before she could ask for clarification, a fight broke out in the line of waiting workers. A man had dropped his palm leaf of food, and was attempting to take his companion’s portion to replace it.

  Lash did nothing to intervene, but an å Livåri overseer ended the scuffle with a few sharp cracks of his whip, then dispassionately moved on. Bright lines of blood welled up on both of the fighters’ faces as they fell to their knees and scooped the fallen porridge into their mouths. The other men snaked around them in a line, focusing solely on the ladles portioning out their means of survival. Most of them were little more than skin and bones, and Halla, remembering the thick slices of melon she’d left uneaten from her breakfast, burned with impotent fury and pity.

  After the incident, she was returned to her chamber to endure the trudging hours of another pointless day. She was half-mad with boredom by the time Sharra arrived with her evening bathwater.

  For the first time, the å Livåri woman was not alone. A girl with crudely cropped hair trudged in behind the handmaiden, her eyes downcast on the two sloshing buckets she was lugging. Her thin robe revealed a telltale bulge to her belly, though she was not as swollen as Sharra. Perhaps the new girl would soon replace the older woman.

  When the women finished hauling in the water to fill the tub, they bent to gather their pails. Halla, desperate for distraction, laid a hand on the newcomer’s arm.

  The girl froze, her gaze riveted to the floor.

  “I should like you to stay,” Halla said. “I need you to… to scrub my back.” Her face flamed as she made the haughty request, but since Sharra’s belly had grown too big for her to kneel, only her assistant could perform this service. The girl flicked her eyes to Sharra, who gave a slow nod before shuffling from the room.

  Halla remembered how at Casa Calida, Kainja’s daughter Yenega had been more talkative when there was no eye contact between them. So she turned her back to the girl, then let her robe slip to the floor and stepped into the tub.

  “What’s your name?” she asked, assuming a warmer tone.

  The girl dropped to the floor behind her.

  Patience, Halla counseled herself. She handed the sponge back to the girl, and heard a sharp intake of breath—

  And then her necklace was pulled tight against her throat, her head slamming back against the tub.

  “Where did you get this, whore?” the girl hissed in her ear.

  The chain bit painfully into Halla’s skin, and now the girl was pressing down on her head, attempting to force her underwater.

  Halla clawed at her attacker’s hands, but the girl was surprisingly strong. So instead she rammed her feet against the ribs of the cramped tub and sharply levered herself up. The necklace snapped, and her would-be strangler reeled backward onto the rushes. In an instant, Halla lunged out of the water and dropped a knee across the vixen’s throat.

  And suddenly, the years fell away.

  She was back in Lord’s Wood under the rustling trees of high summer, facing the impudent girl she’d caught poaching her father’s leverets—the girl who, after a stave fight that ended in a draw, had become her best friend in all the world.

  “Bria?”

  Bria’s angry scowl faded as Halla dropped onto the floor. “How do you know my—Halla?”

  And then they were in each other’s arms, laughing and crying, Halla naked as the day she was born and both of them sopping wet. Slowly, their laughter fell away.

  Halla pulled on her robe, her eyes drinking in Bria’s face. “Where did they take you?”

  Her friend looked down at her chafed hands. “In Palmador, less than a week’s journey from where we were to winter in Glornadoor. We’d left Lord’s Wood later than usual—” She gave a helpless little laugh. “Actually, it was because of you. We’d heard you never reached Cardenstowe when your mother sent you over there. I thought perhaps you’d changed your mind—you know, about coming south with us—and that you’d lost your way.” She smiled ruefully at the memory. “I even persuaded Florian to try to speak with your brother, but he never got past the gate at Lorendale Castle. I would have gone myself except…”

  Bria’s hand drifted to her belly, but then snatched it away as if it had been burned.

  She bit her lip before continuing. “I couldn’t go because I was busy with our little one. Mine and Ilie’s.” A small choked sob escaped her, but when Halla reached out to hold her, Bria shook her head. “If I’d had a girl, I would have named her after you. But Ilie got the son he so wished for instead. We called him Vesel.”

  Joy. Halla felt her heart squeeze as tears welled in Bria’s eyes.

  “When the raiders came—”

  “You don’t have to tell me, Bria, if it’s—”

  “Oh, but I do. If I don’t speak of my Vesel, the horror keeps growing and growing inside me until…” She frowned at Halla’s belly. “Sharra told me you’re not breeding—not like the rest of us, anyway. It’s true, isn’t it?”

  Despite the warmth of the solar, Halla felt a creeping chill. “What do you mean—not like the rest of you?”

  Bria’s mouth twisted, her expression bleak. She picked up the broken necklace from the floor and examined the ring dangling from it. “You kept this with you all this time?”

  “What do you mean, Bria?”

  Her friend rose awkwardly to her feet. “Get into the tub, Åthinoi, and I will tell you what they have done to us.”

  * * *

  Halla lay wide-eyed on her narrow bed that night, the horror of Bria’s story playing over and over in her mind. How the raiders, posing as distant å Livåri kinsmen, sat down to break bread with Bria’s clan, singing and clapping to the ringing strings of Ruv’s lavuta, then laid out their bedrolls by their hosts’ fire. Her heart pumped with the same terror Bria had described, wak
ing in the dead of night to the screams, and she was filled with the same dread that Bria and Ilie must have felt when they rushed out of the wagon, leaving Vesel behind.

  Bria had spared her the gruesome details of what they saw in the fiery light, but Halla could imagine them all the same—the men cut down as they fought to protect their families, the elderly and very young slaughtered out of hand, the women, children, and any men who surrendered their staves and knives rounded up and roped together, Bria among them, to be herded to the coast and across the sea to this ungodly place.

  “Florian?” Halla had asked, although she feared the worst.

  Bria shook her head. “I don’t know. I didn’t see him fall, praise the Three-Faced Goddess. But Ilie…” Sorrow warred with pride in her reddened eyes. “He fought for us with every fiber of his being and took down five of the bastards before they… they…”

  She drew a ragged cloth from her pocket and blew her nose. When she spoke again, her voice was hollow.

  “I ran for the woods to draw them away from our wagon, but I didn’t get far. I don’t know what happened to Vesel. They searched the wagons, and I didn’t see them bring him out of ours. He’d just started walking and liked to hide. He might have survived.” She raised her chin, her jaw set, as though daring Halla to contradict her. “Promise me, Åthinoi, if you ever escape this ungodly place, you’ll find out what happened to them—to my Vesel and Florian. You will, won’t you?”

  “We will, Bria. When I find a way out, you’re coming with me.”

  Bria shook her head. “I’ll not be leaving Drak Icar.”

  “You can’t give up hope. Between the two of us, we’ll find a way.”

  Bria folded her hands with resigned care over her bulging stomach. “There’s no point in me going.” Her voice was eerily flat. “Even if we managed somehow to get away, the drakdaemons would scent me out. No, I’d only hinder you. In any case, I’ll be dead before the year is out.”

  “You don’t know that!”

  “Oh, but I do, Åthinoi.” Then Bria began to strike her belly, hard, hammering it with her fists.

  Halla tried to catch hold of her friend’s hands. “Stop it, Bria! You’ll hurt—”

  “What?” Bria’s wild laugh made the hairs rise on the back of Halla’s neck. “I’m the one who will suffer, not this… this monster growing inside me! When it comes into the world, I will leave it.”

  “Why? What are you saying?”

  “The vaar has found a way to grow his creatures faster, Åthinoi. His dark sorcery took too long, and the drakdaemons it produced were too bestial. Now he has us within which to breed his abominations!”

  Hearing that the vaar was a wizard didn’t surprise Halla; she had felt an undercurrent of something menacing emanating from him. But that he had been able to tamper with the laws of nature in such an aberrant way… that was unthinkable. She remembered something Master Morgan had once told her about the virtuosi—wizards of great power like Whit. He’d said that wanton acts of magical cruelty from the likes of these had set off the last Purge on the continent.

  “Could it be… do you think the vaar could be one of the Strigori?”

  Bria’s eyes widened. “Aren’t they all supposed to have perished?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. But maybe one of them survived.” Halla wished she’d listened more carefully when Whit and the old wizard had discussed these dark sorcerers. “But if he is one of them, why would he single out your people for this suffering?”

  “Why not?” Bria replied bitterly. “When old King Owain made the Leap, we lost our champion in Drinnglennin. The vaar has gambled on few folk caring about our disappearance. And no one has.”

  And now another kind of Purge is happening.

  With this realization, all of Halla’s fear and anger and frustration, her hatred for Palan, her sorrow over the deaths of Kainja, Chik, Mihail, Jibin—and most of all, Nicu—coalesced into unmitigated fury.

  It must have shown on her face, for Bria snatched up her hand. “Åthinoi? You can’t fight the vaar. No one can.”

  A grim smile curved Halla’s lips. “I have something the bastard values, and he needs me alive to get it.” She moved Bria’s hand to her own belly. “If I don’t try to fight him, he’ll kill us anyway. So I’ve nothing to lose. And everything to gain.”

  Chapter 5

  Fynn

  Fynn’s heart felt like a lump of stone in his breast. This time, he had lost Grinner for good, and he was to blame, although his companions thought otherwise.

  “I should have been watching him more carefully,” Wren lamented. “I should have shouted a warning to him before the wave struck.”

  Whit stabbed angrily at the fire, sending a spray of orange sparks into the purpling sky. “You wouldn’t have needed to if I hadn’t called up the water in the first place.”

  Fynn hugged his knees closer to his chest. “Stop it, both of you. It’s my fault. I was the one who insisted he put on the harness. If he’d been free when he went overboard, he might have…”

  He didn’t need to explain further. What remained of the harness had been found dragging beneath the batteau, where it had pulled Grinner and trapped him until the straps gave way in the surging water.

  “If you hadn’t cast that spell, Whit, we’d all be dead now.”

  Whit tossed the stick he’d been torturing into the fire. Fynn had requested the flames in the hope that Grinner was alive to see them, though he suspected that hope had now vanished from all of them. The merry crackling of wood did nothing to lift their spirits, and in time they decided to turn in, with Whit taking first watch.

  Back aboard the batteau with Wren, Fynn laid his bedroll under the overhanging branches. Before he closed his eyes, he sent a silent prayer to Aetheor Yarl, far over the sea on Cloud Mountain. If my friend Grinner should find his way to the Sky Hall, please make him welcome. It was foolish, Fynn knew—Grinner had no more right to enter that celestial realm than he did—but the Helgrin gods were the only ones he knew to call on.

  * * *

  When he woke again, Whit slept at his side. Fynn crawled past him and leapt onto the bank, where he found Wren feeding kindling to the fire.

  “I’ll take my turn at the watch,” he offered.

  “No need.” Wren tossed a small log after the twigs. “It’ll be dawn soon.”

  The trill of a hidden lark confirmed this, but the night air was still cool, and

  Fynn edged closer to the fire to settle next to the knight. “Do you know people in Thraven?” he asked.

  “Yes, of course.” Wren leaned back and wrapped his arms around one knee. “There are a number of noble families there—the Derrengers of Grennen, the Conroys, the St. Clinders. All of them are vassals of Lord Grenville Fitz-Pole of Bodiaer, which borders Heversney. The Fitz-Poles have been my grandmother’s family’s neighbors for generations.”

  His eyes took on a faraway look. “Bodiaer Castle is beautiful, like a water lily rising from the moat. I remember riding my pony with Lord Grenville’s daughter on the castle grounds. I couldn’t have been more than seven at the time, because I left home to squire for Lord Jaxe the following summer. It was a bright winter’s day, and the cold had put roses in Georgiana’s cheeks. She was a few years older than me, and so ridiculously lovely, with her sparkling blue eyes and raven-black hair, that I was completely tongue-tied in her presence.” He laughed and shook his head at the memory. “And her smile… like a ray of warm sunlight breaking through dark clouds. I was heartbroken a few years later to learn she’d disappeared.”

  Fynn staggered to his feet and blindly away from the fire. Wren’s hand caught his shoulder, turning him back.

  “What is it, Fynn? Did I say something to upset—”

  Fynn swiped his hand across his leaking nose, his throat tight with unshed tears. “She was my mother,” he blurted out. />
  “Who? You mean… Georgiana Fitz-Pole?” Wren’s arm dropped to his side. “I think you must be mistaken, Fynn. Georgiana—”

  “Offered herself to the Helgrins after Urlion Konigur married her. And then she raised me as one of them.”

  Wren’s jaw dropped. “Urlion Konigur married Georgiana Fitz-Pole?” His eyes were as round as platters. “And then she was captured by Helgrins?”

  “Something like that.”

  A twig snapped, and they both turned to see Whit standing by the fire. “You’ve remembered something about who your mother’s people are, Fynn?”

  “Only because Wren made the connection.” Fynn looked past the wizard to the river churning by, allowing himself a bittersweet moment with the memory of his mother’s smile. “He knew her as Georgiana Fitz-Pole.”

  * * *

  The next morning they were preparing to set out once more, Wren and Fynn checking the batteau to make sure everything was tied down, when Whit began muttering under his breath behind them.

  Turning around, Wren reeled back and cried out. “Blearc’s blood and bile, man! What have you done to yourself?”

  Fynn cast a look over his shoulder to see a stranger in Whit’s place. He was at least forty years of age, with a hooked nose, heavy dark brows, and grey streaking his hair.

  “I’m guessing it worked,” said the man in Whit’s voice. “Don’t be frightened. I’m still me; it’s just an illusion I’ve conjured up. We should pass Sinarium today, so I’d like to get us through the city without drawing undue attention. Now—who’s next?”

  Wren shook his head vehemently. “No need to meddle with my face. I’m not likely to be recognized. At least, not until we pass into Langmerdor.”

  The new Whit frowned, clearly disappointed. “Well, if you’re certain.” He turned his heavy gaze on Fynn. “Very well, then. Let’s see what I can do for you, shall we?”

  Fynn squeezed his eyes shut and braced himself to feel his features twist and stretch, but as Whit began the incantation, all Fynn felt was something like a silk veil being drawn across his face. He opened his eyes to Whit’s satisfied smile.