The woman’s eyebrows rose sharply; she looked almost insulted. “Of course not. It’s just too much for me. Please...”
Artemi sighed and took the necklace. “Thank you, Edi. You are too honest.”
Edilea smiled proudly, and then glided gracefully away from the door.
The necklace weighed heavily in her hand. Burn it! Artemi slammed the door and returned to her desk so that she could have the satisfaction of
throwing Morghiad’s gift into a drawer and permanent obscurity. All gifts are given in expectation, her father said. Such a shame the things that were expected in return for this were so unpleasant.
Her father. Blood of her feet, she was supposed to go home today! Hurriedly she dunked her head into a cold bowl of water, and then dug a set of clean clothes from her trunk. She threw on a shirt, huddled into a jacket and started pulling on a pair of breeches. As she hopped about the room, hauling them up each leg, she crashed into the bookshelf. It wobbled precariously, but kept its position. A single volume fell from it.
The Torvalen Hunt. She hadn’t read that in years!
Artemi picked it up, whereupon it immediately flopped open on the first page. Don’t go home, said the childish scrawl. (3314)
Had nine years truly passed since that peculiar man had come to visit? She still remembered the blond hair, the strange, dark blue eyes and the broad grin. What had his name been... Seefar? Artemi seated herself upon the bed. Why would he have instructed her not to go home? And
why ever had she thought his words important enough to write in her favourite book?
Something had convinced her... if only her head was not so full of old wine! She could not place the reasoning for her self-instruction, but she did recall that she had been convinced of its reliability.
Her father would be expecting to see her. She stood and replaced the book upon the shelf, then turned to assess the world outside. It was still painfully bright, and unsurprisingly sunny. Perhaps her visit could wait... unless... no. Morghiad could not have
set that up, surely? At the age of nine? Even he was not that calculating.
She sighed heavily. She would have to go to the man himself just to make sure of it. Artemi completed her clothing with a pair of daggers and strapped on her sword. She did not expect to be drawn into a fight, but there was no sense in being unprepared where a certain Hirrahan lordling was concerned.
The stables were a busy place when she arrived, noisy with the hurrying of a hundred cadets making their way home. Half an hour passed before Morghiad brought his grim
bearing upon the place, and the whole yard seemed to grow darker with his presence.
“Good morning,” Artemi smiled broadly; she was feeling a little better with the fresh air.
The mood was not returned from him. “Come to beg for money?”
Ah, the charity he had promised. He did owe it. “I’ll not beg, but I did meet the terms of our contract.”
His multitude of black plaits swung silently as he placed the saddle upon his animal’s back. He tightened the girths roughly, and did not turn to face her with any reply. Instead he
simply grunted. He really was in a poor mood.
“There’s something else I wanted to ask you about.”
“I am not interested, peasant. And you ought to learn to speak when asked, not to make noise at me whenever you wish.” Morghiad continued to fasten buckles and arrange saddlebags.
Artemi persisted, “It’s about the man we both met when we were children. The blond one from abroad.”
He paused briefly, but whatever thought had occurred to him soon passed, and he shrugged. “He knew a
few things about us he shouldn’t have known, alright.”
The man in white. Artemi remembered him very well, but she was certain that she had not told Morghiad of him. And from the look on Morghiad’s features, he could not have had any part in Seelah or Seefa or whatever-his-name-had-been’s plans. “What did he know about you?”
“None of your business.” His eyes locked firmly onto hers with that sentence. Artemi was hardly frightened by his efforts at warning her these days. When it came to physical violence toward her, Morghiad was
really quite harmless. With his words, on the other hand...
“Everyone! Everyone!” One of the younger boys ran into the stable yard. “The King of Calidell is dead! News from Calidell! They’re to have a queen again!” The child ran off toward the main part of the school, his voice fading as he became more distant. Artemi had begun to feel rather cold, and her nausea returned with a vengeance.
She swallowed hard to stem the feeling, for what good it did, and managed to speak with small degree of strength. “Last night is catching up with me. I think I may rest a while.” She made to move away, but Morghiad caught her by the wrist before she could.
“Wait.” He was looking around with something that looked like... was it anxiousness? His eyes darted between the shaded corners of the horse box.
“What is it?” A horde of children he had set to attack her, perhaps? A trap of knives and daggers that he would send her to investigate? Or was it a great big pile of dung for her to step into? That thought made her feel even more ill, if it were possible.
Morghiad appeared to be genuinely uncertain about something. Afraid? “I don’t know... Give me your power.”
“No.”
“Artemi...”
“No.” She yanked her arm away. It seemed increasingly likely that he was a better actor than she had previously assumed.
But his tension remained, and his horse began to pick up on it. The mount fidgeted and shifted his hooves about. With no warning, Morghiad grasped at her fingers and tried to take hold of The Blazes within her. She
managed to fight him off with her own will, but through their brief connection she thought she saw something... move in the darkness. It was gone in an instant. “Did you see -?”
He met eyes with her, eyes that darted about more often than they usually did. “I’ll head home tomorrow. It seems there was something not right about last night’s wine,” Morghiad said. He began unbridling the horse. “Tell me where you want this charity to go. I’ll pay it for you, but you must take me to your intended recipients.”
Artemi had to tense every muscle in her jaw to prevent her mouth from dropping open. “I can do that.”
He nodded. “Good. We’ll go now.” He dropped his saddlebags with his leatherwork in the tack room, and re-joined her in the stable yard. From the way his gaze moved about, and the lightness of his step, he still appeared to be agitated.
“Now? I’m really not feeling-”
“Now or never, Artemi.”
She desperately wanted to lie down and sleep for an age, but Morghiad had an expression upon his face that said he would not be argued with. His money could help so very many people. “Fine.”
She stumbled beside him as they made their way through the gates and into the main city, her arms tightly folded over her stomach to stop it from rebelling. The smells from the markets were overpowering: spices, nuts and frying meats that announced their presence without any sort of regard for her state. The air was especially dusty along the path they took, the road having been churned about by the constant stream of departing cadets. Morghiad did not appear to appreciate the heat of the atmosphere, either.
He looked down at her occasionally, measuring, assessing,
disapproving. They remained quite devoid of conversation through their walk, and Artemi did not feel she needed to explain where she was leading them. She was half-asleep, anyway.
Quite without warning, Morghiad took hold of one arm and pulled her into a nearby lounge. It was a fashionable place for well-to-do merchants, and certainly not the sort of establishment where beer was served. She tried to wriggle out of his grip, but found it impossible short of starting a fight. Burn propriety!
“What can I offer you,
Hirrahan?” asked the owner, a haughty-looking man with dark ha
ir that was long enough to brush his calves.
“Sephyrs for each of us.” Morghiad did not bother with any pleasantries, and hauled Artemi to sit next to him at a table. She grunted loudly to demonstrate her irritation at it. “Tem,” he began in low tones, “You look like a dead, shrivelled old nag. It’s embarrassing to walk beside you. Please don’t make embarrassing noises too.”
“So you take me into a place where people come to be seen?”
He pulled his lips tight across his teeth. “I’m trying to look after my property.”
A waiter soon arrived with their drinks and set them upon the table. He grinned. “One for sir, and one for his lady friend. Enjoy.”
“I am not his lady friend.”
The waiter’s face dropped, but Morghiad interjected before any apologies could be made. “No, she’s my benay-gosa. Thank you.”
Benay-gosa?! Never in a hundred-thousand years would she ever stoop to something so disgusting! Blazes, but the thought made her feel
even more ill! The waiter looked understandably puzzled, and rapidly turned away to see to his other clients.
Morghiad pushed the glass toward her. “Drink it. You’ll feel better for it.”
She studied it with suspicion. He had not been afforded the opportunity to lace it with anything this time, but he was not above paying other people to do such things for him.
“It’s not drugged,” he said, taking a large swig of his own.
A sigh escaped through her nose. She was very thirsty, now that she thought on it. With his glass set down,
he was now watching her steadily. Waiting. What she would pay to know what went on in that mind of his! Oh, what more did she have to lose? Artemi started to drink, and discovered that the liquid was rather pleasant. It tasted of a fruit she recalled eating as a small child, and of jarria spices. She downed it in a matter of gulps, which was probably not the done thing in such an establishment. She hardly cared.
Morghiad was smirking at her when she had finished. Burn him to ashes! He had drugged her. Artemi waited for the inevitable blackout to come, but it did not.
“I’ve just remembered,” he said, “Silar told you not to go home this year.”
“He did.”
“Hmm.” Morghiad tapped on the table surface. “I think you ought to
go.”
“Saying such a thing is a very
good way to get me to stay, Calyrish.”
He looked away. “Maybe I thought of that, and I actually want you to go.”
Stupid man. She would go and see her father tomorrow. Morghiad did not have to know anything about it; it was none of his business, anyway.
“You look like you’re feeling better.”
Artemi nodded slowly. She was... but... the cadet’s words of news still echoed in her mind. “How do you think he died?”
“Same way kings always die. They are murdered by someone.”
“Do you feel anything? After all, you were named after his father.”
“You know he had a queen called Artemi.”
She shrugged. “Many Sunidaran women have my name. Few men have yours.”
Morghiad did not rise to her bait. Instead he stood from his chair and dropped an inordinate number of coins on the table, far more than would have been necessary, and motioned for her to follow him. With some reluctance, she did.
It was not long before they arrived at the home of Artemi’s chosen recipient, Master Horfinwaley. There was no moment to pause and discuss how the money would be spent; Morghiad seemed not to be interested in that. He simply handed over the coins he had promised, turned and began walking away. There had been no choice left to Artemi but to offer a
rushed explanation and apology to Horfinwaley, before running to catch up with his new benefactor.
He barely cast her a sideways glance when she arrived. “We are even now, property.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. Now I may start work on my next plan for you.”
Mirth found its way into Artemi’s bones, and she was surprised to feel as if it had somehow been absent for a long time. She laughed. “I look forward to it, arrogant pig.” And with that she trotted ahead of him to make her way back to Fate’s on her own.
The night was quieter than most and quite definitely darker. A few points of light still glimmered from the city below, but many had been extinguished for the period of mourning. Medea closed her eyes. She could see him before her, lying
peacefully in his bed as if he had gone to sleep. But his lips were blue and his fingers grey. She had known immediately that he was gone. And then there had been that moment, that horrible moment when everyone attending him had turned to her. His note had suddenly made perfect sense; her freedom was gone at that moment. She opened her eyes again and tried to focus on the calculations before her. Though everyone else seemed to find it peculiar, mathematics offered her an escape from every problem that the world could throw her way. Numbers had no emotion, they did not
try to hurt, and they could not die. There was a truth to them that no opinion could subvert, and they just were.
Her most recent measurements had revealed that there had been some very minor reductions in the amount of Energy that ran through the world. They were only at the very limits of the precision that she could reach with her estimates, but they were measurable, and therefore worthy of concern.
A long time ago her mother had asked her to look into the possibility that her father was linked to these changes, that he was an anomaly in the
Blaze system. Medea still had no reason to doubt that theory, but she had very little new information to explore it further.
She pulled out one of the reports at her desk. It was from a prospector in Wilrea who made his living looking for precious metals in the mountains. The Tegran desert advances north almost daily, he wrote. Daily! And by how much? Feet, yards? Miles? Medea made a note to herself to find out. Another report lay beside it, one that she hated the sight of now. In spite of her own better judgement, she opened it again. It contained census data and
settlement sizes. In just a few decades, Calidell’s population had exploded. The effects of successful battles, prosperity and security had made the country thrive. But more people meant more farmland was needed to support them, and much of Calidell’s wild lands were being turned over to crops or cattle. If the population continued to grow, how much time would there be before the land reached its limit? Before the forests had to give way?
Panthers needed somewhere to hide.
And if the deserts continued to advance, how long before Calidell’s
green lands began to die? Medea closed the report with a hiss. There was nothing she could do about it now, not without massacring thousands of her own people.
A man was watching her, she realised. She did not have to turn to see whom it was. “I do not want to speak with you now.”
“We must. There is pressing business, my queen,” he said in his Calbeni tones.
“Don’t call me that!”
“But it is what you are now.”
Queen. She was never meant to be a blasted queen! That had been
Tallyn’s duty. His duty to rule; his duty to make the babies. Burn him, but she could not do those things!
The Hunter took a few steps closer. “Medea, sweetheart, I-”
“I am not your sweetheart.” He was handsome, yes, and famous and all the rest of it. But feelings did not matter. No one’s feelings ever seemed to matter.
“We must sort this situation out. How are we to work together if it is always like this between us? I cannot die, Medi. You know that.” Tallyn. Blazes, his name was Tallyn, too! How was she supposed to mourn her brother
and yet be around this man with the same name? How could she ever use that name in happiness again? It would have been so deeply disrespectful to his memory.
“No. You’re right. We cannot work together. You are dismissed, Hunter. Rahake will take up your post. Now, go
.”
“At least let me stay to advise-”
“Go!” Medea yelled loudly enough to start an echo in the walls.
Two of the guards popped their heads into the doorway to see what was happening, but as soon as Tallyn Hunter stormed past them their faces
relaxed and they returned to their posts. Violent emotions were not unusual in these days.
Medea had to flop into her chair from the weakness she felt in her bones. She was lost. Abruptly, she sensed the presence of him in the doorway again. Blasted man! “I told you to go away.”
“I don’t recall you saying that to me, sister.”
Blazes, Kalad?! She had not seen him in years! Medea ran to him and threw her arms about his neck. Her tears followed shortly afterward, and it was a while before she could let go to
assess him. “You have a beard.”
Kalad rubbed at it briefly. “It’s better that I look as little like him as possible.” He meant their father. Evidently her little brother still held considerable resentment for him.
“Where have you been?”
He smiled. “Everywhere. And nowhere. It’s a strange world, Med. But I received that letter from Silar. I’m sorry about Tal – you were always so much closer to him-”
The Fireblade Array: 4-Book Bundle Page 163
