Soulmarked (The Fatemarked Epic Book 3)

by David Estes

  “Aye. Rates have gone up on account of the war.”

  Dirk set his chin, refusing to back down. These men responded only to strength, power, and wealth. Dirk didn’t have any of those anymore, but he couldn’t let them know that. “You will receive the same payment, half now, and half after we’ve retaken Castle Hill. I can also offer you land and titles—”

  Severon started laughing, a grating sound echoed by the men around him.

  Dirk felt a chill run through him, but also a slice of anger, a natural response bred into him by a life of wealth and power. “Did I inadvertently jest?”

  “Aye,” Severon said. “Your every word is a jest. You have nothing. Your gold is nearly gone. Your house is destroyed. You have no lands or titles to give, and we’d have no interest in them even if you did. You are a spoiled brat lordling used to getting his way.” Dirk was frozen in place, unable to breathe, his lips clamped together. “But the world has changed Lord Gäric”—that mocking tone again—“and you are no longer the breed who controls the north. The Brotherhood will march on Castle Hill…”

  Dirk released a sigh of relief. The man was simply jostling for a better position, trying to squeeze the promise of more coin from him. “Good. And I will double your payment—no, triple it. Will that be sufficient?”

  Again, that laugh, like sword grinding against shield. “No.” Severon took a step closer to Dirk. His men followed.

  Dirk’s façade crumbled the instant he realized this meeting had been a farce from the beginning, a trap. And he’d stumbled headlong into it like a blind mouse. Father would be ashamed at my foolishness, he thought, whirling around to race for the exit.

  He stopped.

  Black-cloaked men blocked his escape, having shifted behind him on silent feet while he talked with their leader.

  “What is this?” he said, spinning back to face Severon, forcing a growl into his voice. A growl that quivered around the edges, descending into a whimper. Then a plea as he dropped to his knees. “Please, I’ll do anything. I’ll join your ranks, I’ll help you, all the spoils will be yours and yours alon—”

  He gasped as the first blade pierced his back, severing his spine, bursting from the front of his chest. Paralyzed, he collapsed, spots of color bursting across his vision as blood pooled around him.

  What had happened? What had gone wrong? He’d avoided the death trap in the Bay of Bounty only to die at the hands of the men who’d worked for his father?

  This is a new world, he realized, just as Severon said. A world I no longer understand.

  Dirk Gäric, just like his father, died, alone and outnumbered.

  The Brotherhood dispersed, off to loot and pillage and prepare to leave Blackstone. For they’d intercepted a stream from Castle Hill requesting all able-bodied men and women seeking employment to report to the capital to begin training in the Queen’s Army.

  After all these long years of being told what to do, they were finally masters of their own destinies. The north was ripe for the picking, and they would be the first to reach for the fruit.

  Thirty-One

  The Western Kingdom, Knight’s End

  Ennis Loren

  Ennis Loren didn’t want to be taken alive, but before he could turn his sword on himself, the castle guardsmen were upon him, grappling his weapon from his grip, slamming him to the floor, holding him there. A dozen blades were aimed at him, and a single thrust would end it all.

  Do it, he thought, still struggling, trying to give them a reason to finish things.

  “I’m disappointed,” a voice said, emerging from the stairwell.

  The last voice Ennis wanted to hear. He closed his eyes. Refused to open them even when Rhea said, “Look at me, guardsman.”

  “The prisoners escaped through the window,” one of the guards said. “Gentry killed several guards and a”—the word seemed to stick in his throat—“Fury…before we could stop him.”

  “Leave us,” Rhea said, and Ennis’s eyes finally flashed open. She was staring at him, and for a moment Ennis couldn’t discern the look in her eyes, so foreign to his cousin’s face that it almost felt like an intruder.

  “Your Highness, this man is danger—”

  “Leave. Us.” A command with all the authority of a queen, but without emotion.

  As the guards shuffled away, looking uncertain, Ennis realized exactly how Rhea looked:

  Lost.

  Alone.

  Sad.

  She was his cousin again, the girl whose face had been carved by the Furies, a princess without a throne.

  As he stared at her in wonderment, the look seemed to fade, but not entirely. Once the guards were gone, Rhea said, “You will leave the west at once.”

  Defiance coursed through him. “I will not. You will have to really kill me this time. No more lies.”

  “I will not,” she said, her voice trembling. Were those tears shining in her eyes? She blinked them away before he could be certain. “I have lost too much already.”

  “What happened to Bea?”

  A sob choked her and she almost collapsed, gripping a table to keep her feet.

  This was not a woman who had killed her own sister in cold blood—at least not intentionally. “I—I thought I had control.” That look again. Lost. Broken. Defeated.

  “Rhea…”

  “No.” She shook her head. “No more words. You are leaving the west, Ennis.”

  “I allowed your prisoners to escape. I killed your guardsmen and Fury. I committed treason of the highest order. And you would let me live?”

  “Yes.” A single word that seemed to span the canyon that had opened between them.

  “Why?”

  She shook her head.

  Ennis sighed. “Rhea, you pushed the light away from you, so why does it surprise you when you’re left alone in the dark?”

  She gritted her teeth and, finally, a tear trickled from the corner of her eye. “I’m not alone. I have my guards, my furia, my people. They’re going to fight for me. All of them. They want what I want.”

  Ennis didn’t know if he was overstepping, but he reached forward and held her shoulders gently. “None of it is real, Rhea. None of it matters. You can kill all your enemies, raze their cities to the ground, claim the entirety of the Four Kingdoms for yourself, and you’ll still be alone.”

  She fell into him, sobbing into his chest, a lifetime of tears soaking his armor, running in rivulets along the etched, blood-spattered lines of the rearing stallion atop a high cliff. He held her for a long time, until long after the sun had crept over the horizon, casting the entire room in a mystical yellow haze, her blond locks shining. This was the real girl inside the monster, Ennis believed. Her armor and mask had hidden her for a while, but they’d fallen away at last.

  Words hovered on his lips, and Ennis couldn’t hold them back any longer. “I love you,” he whispered into her hair.

  She froze. “Ennis,” she said, and that word seemed to close a door, turn a key. “Ennis, I’m pregnant.”

  He left at once. Several of the furia had forced a thick cloak over his head and hustled him out the rear of the castle, where horses were waiting, stamping in the morning light.

  Ennis wondered whether Gareth and Gwendolyn had escaped. He hoped so.

  He tried not to think about Rhea, about what she’d taken from him, the pieces of his soul carved away only to become carrion tossed to the scavengers cawing and swirling overhead. He’d rather she’d have taken a knife to his face.

  He knew he was a fool for feeling this way. He was decades older than her and she was the queen and he was supposed to be dead and she’d done horrible horrible things.

  A heart wants what a heart wants, he thought, as he was tied to the horse, a dark-eyed furia behind him.

  They took the coastal route, riding along the banks of the bay before turning southward. When Rhea had informed him of his fate, it had felt almost poetic. He’d almost laughed.

  Within a fortnight he wo
uld either be dead at the hands of the Phanecians, or sold into slavery. He hadn’t yet decided which he preferred.

  Thirty-Two

  The Western Kingdom, the Western Road

  Gwendolyn Storm

  Gwen was already regretting having saved Gareth Ironclad.

  After escaping the castle, they’d raced through the deserted city streets. Not south, like would be expected—they wouldn’t leave through the main gates—but east, directly for the enormous wall surrounding Knight’s End.

  “Ore save me,” Gareth had said, eyeing the climb he’d faced.

  “Your whining will be the death of me,” Gwen had replied, and then tossed him onto her back.

  His complaining hadn’t ceased since, even as they raced through the darkness along the Western Road, only stopping when day broke, sleeping off the road in a thick copse of trees. My feet hurt. I’m tired. I’m hungry. And on and on.

  Ore! Princes are impossible, Gwen thought now, ignoring whatever Gareth was saying. It was dark again, and so on they went, a race against Darkspell and his blasted potion. They needed to reach the Spear first, and then hopefully stop the potion master from ever dumping it into the river…

  Finally, she could take it no longer. “Would you shut that sorry trap of yours?” she said.

  Gareth said, “No.”

  She groaned. “Look, compared to the hell I’ve been living in since we were captured, your so-called cell was luxurious. I saw that plush bed of yours. You know what I’ve been sleeping on? Stones and rat droppings.”

  Gareth crinkled his nose. “I thought I smelled something. Perhaps we should find a stream…”

  Gwen continued. “You had a table and chair, for Ore’s sake! If I wanted to sit, I pressed my back up against the rough wall and bent my—”

  “Now who’s complaining?” Gareth said, grinning like he’d just made the cleverest jape of his life.

  Ore grant me patience, Gwen thought. Else I murder the prince before we reach the bridge.

  They walked in silence for a while, the dark covering all. Even the stars were blotted out by thick gray smoke. So it’s true, Gwen thought. The Tangle burns. She thought of the nymph she’d battled there—Felicity. She thought of the nymph’s sisters, whose lockets Gwen still wore around her neck, hidden beneath her armor. They were the only possessions besides her plate that Rhea’s guards had been unable to take from her. She wondered whether the nymphs had the strength to leave the fiery wood, moving on somewhere safer.

  “I need to rest for a while,” Gareth said, stopping and falling to the ground where he stood.

  “No,” Gwen growled. “We can only move at night, and we need to reach the bridge before—”

  “You think I don’t know that?” Gareth fired back.

  “It’s not your people being threatened.”

  “You’re damn right about that,” Gareth said, looking away. “I have no people, not easterner or Orian.”

  “This again,” Gwen said. “You know, I am so sick and tired of your nonstop woe-is-me horse dung. Roan and his soft heart might’ve fallen for it, but I won’t. So get up, and quit being stubborn.”

  “That’s like telling a skunk not to stink,” Gareth said. Then, intentionally slowly, he worked his way back to his feet, grimacing like an old man with half a hundred ailments and a bone disease to boot.

  They walked on, and Gwen let her anger fade away. She took a deep breath. “Sorry I said that about Roan.”

  He glanced at her sharply, but then seeing something in her expression, genuineness perhaps, he sighed. “It’s fine. It’s not like we weren’t at each other’s throats half the time. Or all the time.”

  “Seems a common theme in your relationships,” Gwen quipped.

  “Sad, but true.” The melancholy in Gareth’s tone reminded Gwen of what he’d said a moment ago, about not having people.

  “You have people, you know. Me. Roan. Ennis.”

  “Roan is out of reach. And Ennis?” Gareth laughed. “That fool is dead by now. I still can’t believe he helped rescue us. As if we can really forge an alliance between our kingdoms.”

  “So you’re not even going to try?”

  “My brother told me the east doesn’t want me. So what can I do?”

  “Roll over, shove your face into a hole, and stop breathing.”

  Gareth gaped at her.

  “I’m kidding. You fight. You go to Ferria and demand to be a part of any decisions that are made.”

  “You want me to try to reclaim the throne?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know, maybe. It is technically still yours. You were injured and confused when you relinquished your rights.”

  “Injured, yes. Confused, no.”

  “They don’t know that. If you can forge a peace between kingdoms, it’s worth trying.”

  “Don’t you see?” Gareth said. “No one wants peace. Except Roan, and he’s off chasing a dead oracle and her dead son, who you claim is a skinshifter.”

  “I want peace.”

  Gareth laughed again. “So if Empress Raven Sandes showed up right now, on this very road, and offered an alliance between Ferria and Calypso, you would…what? Invite her to a feast and break bread and drink mead with her?”

  Damn, she thought. Never argue with a prince, or king, or whatever he is. The faces of those she’d lost at the hands of their desert neighbors cycled through her mind. “Not Calypso,” she growled. “Never Calypso.”

  “And that, my friend, is the very problem we face—the problem Roan faces. Everyone hates someone. Which means there will never be peace in the Four Kingdoms.”

  “Then that leaves only one other option,” she said, finally realizing the truth. Gareth looked at her, his eyebrows arched in the dark. “We win the Hundred Years War.”

  Thirty-Three

  The Western Kingdom, the Western Road

  Gareth Ironclad

  “Do you really love Roan?” Gareth asked on the third day since they’d fled Knight’s End. The question had been weighing on his mind the entire time, but he’d been afraid of the answer. But with each passing day his fears seemed less and less important.

  “No,” Gwen said. It was too fast, too automatic, like she’d planned to say it if he ever mustered the nerve to ask the question.

  “Orion,” he sighed. “You do love him.”

  Gwen set her jaw, her teeth jammed together. Though the smoke still roiled overhead, even blacker and thicker than before, occasionally there was a break in it, one of the moons slicing through, red or green, casting trails of light across their path.

  “This is awkward,” Gareth said, chuckling. “An Orian-king-king love triangle, and two of us fatemarked to boot. Ha!”

  “So you admit you’re a king?”

  “You’re trying to change the subject.”

  Silence, her graceful footsteps drowned out by his own stomps.

  “What do you love about him?” Gareth asked.

  “We shouldn’t talk about this.”

  “Why not? What else is there to talk about?”

  “It’s…strange.”

  “Damn right it’s strange,” Gareth said. “Which is exactly why we need to make jokes about it and do everything but take it too seriously, or else we might go crazy and then one of us will end up strangling the other in their sleep, and the strangler will likely be you because you’re freakishly strong.”

  Gwen blurted out, “I love how when Roan talks about the idea of peace his eyes seem to light up from within, how real it is to him.”

  “Naïve bastard,” Gareth said, but he couldn’t disagree. He loved that about him too. “I love his quick tongue. It’s rare I meet my match, but he tested me from the moment I met him.”

  “Aye!” Gwen said. “For the longest time I tried to hate him for it, but half the time I had to look away so he wouldn’t see that I was amused.”

  “He thought you were giving him the cold shoulder,” Gareth said, smiling at the memory. “I thought so too.” />
  “Why does he have to be so damn amusing?”

  “At least he’s not charming, like me,” Gareth said.

  Gwen made a vomiting sound.

  Gareth laughed. This felt like the most normal conversation they’d had since they left. Which said a lot, considering they were talking about the man they both loved. “Half the time I wanted to hit him and the other half kiss him.”

  “Did you?” Gwen said. “Kiss him?”

  There goes our “normal” conversation, Gareth thought.

  “Yes. Sort of.”

  “Sort of?” Gwen’s eyes twinkled as they were highlighted by a green moonbeam. “Well, I kissed him.”

  Gareth couldn’t help the twinge of jealousy that struck him. He fought if off. It wasn’t her or Roan’s fault. I was the one to reject Roan originally, he reminded himself.

  “What did you think?” he asked instead.

  “About the kiss? I’ve had better.”

  “But he’s a damn good kisser, right?”

  “You think so?” The moonbeam passed on, but her yellow eyes continued to shine in the darkness.

  “Better than any women I’ve kissed,” Gareth said. There hadn’t been many, not as many as he made everyone think. And he’d forced himself to kiss each and every one of them, for appearance’s sake, later coming up with some excuse why he had to break it off with them. His brothers, his father, would never have understood where his true attractions lay.

  Gwen said, “Fine. He’s a good kisser.”

  For some reason, neither of them could find words after that.

  Thirty-Four

  The Hinterlands

  Annise Gäric

  The rage was a living, breathing monster, ringed with fire, filled with storms and ice and power—so much power. The monster saw through different eyes, the world a dark place full of mist and danger and enemies on every side. Those around it were wraiths, ghost-like forms whose voices seemed to come from a faraway place, as if spoken underwater, or from deep inside a cave. Annise could feel what that monster felt: the fury, the bloodlust, the violence.