But he seemed to be far beyond rational thought.
Normally her skin would be golden-kissed by the sun, he guessed, but something had made her unnaturally pale. Lines of strain rode her forehead and bracketed her mouth. She looked to be in pain, possibly injured in the fighting? But she didn’t look like a fighter, all soft limbs and graceful slenderness. Young, too. Younger than he’d first thought, when he’d glimpsed the curves of her woman’s body in the candlelight.
Barely more than a girl, in truth, especially to be apparently negotiating a surrender.
But then he wasn’t that far into his own majority. Only last season his father had scolded him about flirting with girls more than he practiced with his axe. How things changed in a short time. Look at him—war-weary and in the position to discuss terms for the Destrye armies. War had aged him far beyond the demands of daily life. What he wouldn’t give for those irresponsible days.
The woman reined up before him, her eyes narrowed. Another sign of pain.
“I believe you can understand my words?” she asked in an accented but clear use of the trade tongue.
“I do. What is your intention?”
“I will speak with the leader of these men—is that you?”
“Yes. I am Prince Lonen, son of King Archimago of the Destrye. In his absence, I may speak for him.” He hoped. His father was in no position to disagree and Lonen would pass off negotiations to him soon enough.
“I am…” The woman swayed a little in the saddle and her guard cast her a concerned glance. She recovered, however, straightening her spine. “I am Princess Oria, interim ruler of Bára. I wish to negotiate a surrender.”
A susurrus of surprise ran through her people. Not what they’d expected, despite the banner she carried. Probably, in their arrogance, they’d never witnessed or even contemplated such extremity. Well, they would now.
“Total surrender,” he stated, his voice harsh to his own ears. “You, your people, and your city agree to complete subjugation to King Archimago of the Destrye. In exchange for your lives, you will yield everything else.”
Princess Oria looked to the lizard on her arm, her lips moving ever so slightly. Talking to the animal? Perhaps they’d dressed up a crazy girl to bargain, to distract them from a sneak attack. Backing up a step he summoned Alby. “Keep out a sharp eye, in case this is simply a ruse.”
“Yes, my prince.”
Oria fastened her gaze on him. The same color as her hair, her eyes gleamed brighter with shrewd intelligence. “You offer death, not life, Prince Lonen. Abject slavery is no way to live. The people of Bára might as well expend all our effort and the last of our lives taking as many of you barbarians with us as we can.”
Her people cheered at that and Lonen kicked himself for the misstep. No cause inflamed people faster than that of the martyr. He should know. “Who do you call barbarians?” he challenged, his men shouting in accord. “You sit in your fine city draped in jewels and send your monsters to slaughter our children. Who is barbaric in their behavior?”
She flinched—though she covered it well—more color draining from her face. Her lizard mantled, hissing at him, eyes burning with green flame, as if he’d injured the princess in some way. She soothed the creature, stroking a hand along its scales, and Lonen suppressed a shudder of revulsion. Oria’s eyes flicked up to his again and a small smile twisted her lips, as if she’d somehow read his discomfort and found it amusing.
“Look around you, Prince Lonen. It is you who attack us, our people who are dying. We can debate the specifics later. For the moment it seems to me that it gets us nowhere to hurl insults and accusations at each other. The fact that we are enemies has been well established.” She waved a graceful hand at the scatter of bloodied bodies on the stones, and Lonen didn’t miss that she averted her gaze. “The challenge is to find common ground for setting terms to end this conflict.”
“I offered grounds for your surrender,” he all but growled. It rankled that she remained so calm in the face of utter destruction.
“No, Prince Lonen.” She emphasized his title with the same mild reproof his mother might have in correcting his manners. “You flung out the most extreme ultimatum, likely to challenge how easily I’d fold. I can tell you quite plainly that yes, you have cornered us to the point where we offer surrender, but we are not defeated. Given the choice between utter subjugation and death on our own terms, the people of Bára will choose death—and we have the means to take you with us.” Her people broke into cheers again, raising their weapons.
She was bluffing. She had to be or her sorcerers would have hurled magical weapons at them already. Still, he had to give her credit. Young princess and interim ruler or no, she had a gift for rallying her people. Something about the way she held herself communicated her commitment to that path. She would rather die than give up entirely. The sudden image of her white gown bloodstained, her throat cut and those brilliant copper eyes going dim with death raked at him. He had no wish to see her dead.
He’d had plenty of death already. In fact, it suddenly felt as if he might agree to anything to be able to set down his axe, wash off the blood, and sleep for a few days. Could she be that sort of witch, to influence him that way?
“What terms do you propose then, Princess?” He made the question hard and sneering, so she wouldn’t catch on to his weakness.
She steadied herself, raising her eyes as if reading from a mental list. Someone had prepped her. Not a fool then.
“We will agree to cease all fighting, both in and out of the city. You and your men will be granted safe passage. We will open the gates and you will inform your forces that a temporary truce is in effect. We will similarly inform our forces of such. At a date and time we agree upon, the highest ruler of each of our peoples who yet survives will meet to discuss further terms.”
It sounded reasonable, though his tired brain could be missing a loophole. Or whatever she was doing to cloud his intentions and incline him towards sympathy. “The truce includes the use of magical weapons against us.”
“Of course.”
“Including any witchcraft you or your creature may be working on me at this moment.”
She cocked her head, ever so slightly, but he noted it. He’d surprised her. “I’m working no magic on you at this moment,” she said. “And Chuffta is magical by nature. He cannot cease being who he is. However, I offer my personal guarantee that so long as you do not violate the truce, magic will not be used to harm you or your people.”
“And your personal guarantee is worth how much, exactly?”
A shadow flickered across her face, beyond whatever pained her, something hard behind that pretty oval face.
“I might ask the same of you, Prince Lonen, you who wears the fur of animals and is covered in the blood of my people. I am not the one with a battle-axe in my hand and hatred in my gaze.”
No. If anything, grief and exhaustion clouded her eyes. She had no right to play the high moral card, however. She might be pristine in her garments, but her people’s hands were bloodstained with the guilt of causing this war.
She must have read something of his anger in his face because she held up a hand, as if to ward him off, briefly closing her eyes. “I cannot offer more than my word. Either you and I trust each other enough to stop the fighting long enough to set terms or we might as well all go back to slaughtering one another.”
Once again, she set him back, had him feeling chagrined. Fine then. Lonen lowered his axe, wiped it ostentatiously on the uniform of a fallen guard of her city, then sheathed it on his back and held out his bloodied hands. “You have your temporary truce, Princess. Open your gates. You, however, will go through them with me.”
~ 9 ~
Oria managed to keep her expression smooth, drawing on years of faking enough hwil to escape lessons. She couldn’t let this Prince Lonen—if he was indeed a prince, as that seemed a lofty title for such a brutish man and people—perceive how much he frightened her
. Up close the Destrye were every bit as vile, ferocious, and bloodthirsty as the worst of the illustrations she’d pored over with such sick fascination.
Even the wild dark hair that hung to his shoulders was matted with blood, indistinguishable from the black fur vest he wore, which left tanned arms as bare as his thighs. He bled from a half-dozen wounds and seemed not to notice. It must be abhorrence that transfixed her, that made it so difficult to look away from the play of corded muscle as he sheathed that enormous axe.
And now he expected her to go with him through gates she’d never passed through in her entire life.
“You likely cannot withstand it. You are already close to collapse.”
“I’ve been ‘close to collapse’ for hours and hours,” she muttered at Chuffta. “So far it hasn’t happened.”
“That doesn’t mean it won’t. You’ve been able to forestall it through strength of will, but even you will reach a breaking point—and it will be all that much worse for pushing yourself so far.”
“This is not helpful advice.”
She’d tried to keep her lip movements small, but Lonen frowned at her, black suspicion on his face and angry revulsion pouring off him like the stench of a decaying animal. It made her stomach lurch. Several of his men made hand signs at her, hate and fear oozing from them.
“Cease stalling,” Lonen sneered at her. “Do we have a deal or not?”
“I cannot go through the gates with you. I can stay just inside the doors and—”
He cut off her words with a chopping hand and furious glare. “Then I can only conclude you are without honor and mean to betray your word. Do your men wait outside the gates to slaughter us the moment we step out? Perhaps the earth will open beneath our feet or a wall of fire will immolate us? No deal, Princess.”
Oria sighed. “There is no such plan, but I understand your fear.”
“Fear?” He visibly bristled. “I am not afraid. I am a warrior of the Destrye, a prince and my father’s son. I am simply not a fool to be tricked so easily.”
Instead of retorting that she could sense his fear as palpably as the sun on her skin—and that it made her want to empty her guts except she hadn’t eaten in so long that nothing sat in her stomach—she nodded in resignation. “I shall go through the gate with you.”
“Oria, don’t do this.”
She didn’t reply to Chuffta, partly because there was nothing to say and partly to forestall more of that glowering hatred from the Destrye. Not that she cared what he thought of her, but the toxic energy dragged at her fragile control more than any other variety. In a better frame of mind, she might appreciate how much she’d learned about her own capacity to endure various energies in the past hours.
“Renzo, would you help me down?” She held out a gloved hand to him, not trusting her legs to hold, especially in the heavy court gown meant for sitting and looking impressive, not walking. With a mental grumble, Chuffta climbed to her shoulder, winding his long tail around her waist.
“Princess, I can’t let you walk among armed enemy soldiers with no protection,” Renzo whispered, harsh and adamant, as he handed her down.
She dipped her chin at him, doing her best to ignore the way the ground squished beneath her silk slippers, moisture soaking in along with the violently fractured energy shed by the dying. Perhaps she’d reached a similar saturation point, where she simply couldn’t hold any more energy, so it ran off an overflowing roof cistern in a good monsoon year. That would be helpful. Chuffta snorted his opinion of that in the recesses of her mind.
“My man comes with me, to guard my back,” she said, hoping she sounded firm.
Lonen acknowledged that with a grim twist of his lips. “Mine, too, then.” Another man, equally shaggy and blood-soaked stepped to his side.
“They need to form an aisle,” Renzo murmured to her, “and lay down their weapons.”
Lonen overheard the quiet words. “Not happening.”
“You can’t ask Princess Oria to walk a gauntlet of the enemy,” Renzo snarled at him.
“If they wanted to cut me down, they could have already,” Oria said in a mild tone, letting Lonen overhear that, too. She held his gaze with her chin high. “My people are largely dead, our defenses falling around us. One more death would hardly matter.” She’d surprised him with that, enough to abate his fury, the relief like a cool evening breeze after a sweltering afternoon. “I shall walk your gauntlet.”
He eyed her, gaze slipping to Chuffta. “Leave the dragonlet behind.”
A laugh escaped her, shocking and raw. Mostly at her Familiar’s indignant and inarticulate reaction. She shook her head. “Not happening.” It gave her some satisfaction, too, to throw his words back at him.
They locked eyes and wills. His, densely fringed with black lashes, were a dark gray, like the granite their sister-city to the north, Arvda, sent in trade. Surprisingly lovely, they would have made him look feminine but for the angry line of a recent scar that dragged from his forehead, skipped his eye, and continued down his cheek. Nearly missed losing that eye to whatever had sliced at him, something thin and sharp by the look of it.
“Every moment we waste allows more of both our people to die,” she said softly. “Chuffta remains with me or I don’t go. Give your men the order to let us through and I’ll give the order to open the gates.”
With a grim nod, he turned to face the gate, standing on the side of her away from her Familiar.
“Dragonlet,” Chuffta fumed.
She ignored him, knowing perfectly well that he was attempting to distract her from the trial of stepping beyond the boundary walls of her world. She didn’t understand how it worked—yet another temple secret that would be shared only if she fully realized hwil—but something about them buffered the wild energy of the larger world just as her tower did. No sensitive who hadn’t taken the mask even came close to the gate, much less set foot outside.
All she had to do was get through the next minutes and remain conscious long enough to get the message through to stop the fighting and get word to her brothers. Hopefully at that point at least one of them lived and could take over.
“And plan your funeral,” came Chuffta’s sour thought. His worry came through clearly or she might have been annoyed.
“Don’t put attention on a result you do not want,” she told him. Then, before Lonen could say anything or make that sign against evil, she called out in a louder voice, “Open the gate!”
Lucky for them that Priest Vico had enough magical ability to do that much, with Priestess Febe feeding him from her still vast reserves. It seemed a grave miscalculation to Oria to have left the city without sufficient sorcerers to even open the gates again. Why had the king committed all of the most powerful to the battle? It didn’t bear thinking of at the moment, but if she survived and didn’t end up a Destrye prisoner, she resolved to learn more about strategy.
She’d wasted a lot of time pretending to meditate and chasing elusive hwil that she could have spent studying useful knowledge.
Magic streamed in a thin swirl past her, then burgeoned, touching the massive doors. Without a sound, they slowly opened, admitting the roar of battle that had been muffled before.
Frenetic, fragmented energy slammed into her like a physical assault.
Chuffta loomed large in her mind, soaking up what he could, but she swayed on her feet. A hand grasped her wrist, where the lace cuff bared her skin, burning with raw, undisciplined energy, scorching her unmercifully.
“Princess Oria?” Lonen peered at her, much too close.
“Don’t touch me.” The request came out ragged, nearly begging him, and he snatched his hand away, eyes firing with renewed offense and fury. She turned away from it, feeling top-heavy and bottom-light, a festival cake piled too high. The doors opened enough to show a raft of Bára guard just outside. They turned, swords and spears ready.
“Stand down,” Oria commanded, fastening her gaze on one she recognized. “Lieutenant. We have a
temporary truce.”
The men sagged, their exhaustion and despair swamping into a kind of dreadful relief that blackened the edges of her vision.
“Bring my brothers—or the highest in command who’s still alive. I’ve offered surrender in exchange for cessation of hostilities.” She got all of Captain Ercole’s words out, though it seemed she heard them from a vast distance, down a long tunnel. “Someone needs to take over negotiations.”
She pushed the final instruction through the onrushing black. Then succumbed as it crashed over her and washed her away, Chuffta’s mind-voice a wail in the distance.
“Oria!”
Lonen caught Oria as she fell, an instinctive grab he would have stifled if he’d had a beat more to recall her hissed directive not to sully her with his touch—and to consider her reptilian defender. As it was, she passed out so precipitously, as if that last word uttered took her final breath, that he nearly didn’t catch her before she hit the paved road. The dragon creature took wing.
Bemused to find himself holding her as he would a Destrye bride, but dressed in white, he kept one wary eye on the man Oria had called lieutenant and the other on the dragonlet circling his head. He’d throw the princess to the ground if either of them attacked. He owed her nothing, not even this courtesy. Except…
Except she’d said she couldn’t exit the gate and he’d insisted on it. Perhaps it hadn’t been a trick or missish timidity. What did he know of magic? He’d thought of her as a puffed-up, spitting cat before—holding her this way now, she seemed like one soaked that turned out to be skin and bones beneath a wealth of fur. She weighed practically nothing and most of that had to be the gown.
He nearly did drop her when talons sank into his shoulder. “Gah!”
Bright green dragon eyes stared fiercely into his. “I’m not hurting her, curse you, beast,” he hissed. Amazingly the thing seemed to understand because the wicked points retracted some. Not entirely, but less painful. The thing’s long tail curled up like a snake about to strike, then wrapped around the bare skin on Oria’s forearm, a slight strip of creamy flesh, slightly darker than her glove and sleeve.
Lonen's War Page 7
