Blasted apart by it. Her mother didn’t have to say it. Yar sat still, finally, absorbing the conversation.
“Then the answer is a strong front,” he said. “We have water reserves. We have the Trom, which means we have more power than ever before. We can get more water and force our sister cities to continue to pay tribute to us.”
“We can’t do that—”
“There is no we,” Yar cut Oria off, popping to his feet. “I will do it because I will be king. Our mother cannot be queen, not without a mask.”
“The law doesn’t say that.”
“He’s right, Oria.” Her mother withdrew her hand, patted Oria’s once, then settled it in her lap. “The law may be silent on the issue, but only because no king or queen has survived the death of their temple-blessed spouse. I’ve spoken with High Priestess Febe. She, the temple, Folcwita Lapo, and the rest of the council no longer consider me to be the queen. The throne of Bára belongs to a matched, masked husband and wife. As we sit, there is only one candidate.”
Yar held out his hands, as if expecting congratulation.
“But Yar cannot be king—he has no wife.”
“I’m one step closer than you are, sister dear. At least I have a mask. If I cannot find a match here—though I’m testing a few of the junior priestesses—I’ll command our sister cities to send theirs for testing. There’s a perfect wife for me out there somewhere. In the meantime, I’ll act as king.”
“Our sister cities know perfectly well that you won’t qualify. One of their matched couples will come here and claim the throne.”
“Not with me as their sole source of water—thank you for that solution.”
“We have only a few months left!”
He shrugged. “We’ll get more from Dru. I’ll command the Trom to do it.”
“The treaty prevents us from attacking them again, Yar. You can’t do that.”
“Oh yes I can.” Yar prowled over to her. “And it’s all your fault. Your treaty means nothing because you had no power to sign.”
Oria glared up at him. He’d always been precocious, and the baby of the family, so spoiled for both reasons. But she’d never imagined he’d be so foolish. “You saw the Trom. What they did to Nat, to so many. They do not serve us.”
“Correction. They do not serve you, but they do serve me. I summoned the Trom, not Nat. That’s why they didn’t listen to his commands. I realized the answer when I awoke this morning.”
“Why—what happened?” Oria rose to her feet. Grien, bright, nearly uncontrolled, rolled off Yar, along with a kind of triumph twisted together with sheer terror. This was what had changed from the night before. “Is that why you won’t remove your mask?”
“Why are you obsessed with me removing my mask?” Yar snarled, clenching his fists, impotent rage and fear billowing through his hwil. Oria nearly flinched, anticipating the blow to follow.
“He’d better not.” Chuffta’s fierce thought bolstered her courage.
“What are you hiding behind it, little brother?” Oria replied, all reasonableness to his tumult.
“If you must know.” Without waiting for a servant, Yar wrenched the mask from his head, the ribbons leaving wild tufts of hair in their wake. Oria and her mother both gasped, Rhianna putting an involuntary hand to her throat, as if choking back further words.
Yar’s eyes had gone entirely black, like the Trom’s, matte and without pupils. Horrified, Oria extended a trembling hand to her brother, not sure how to help but moved to try. He yanked out of her reach.
“Can you see?” she asked, for want of other pertinent questions.
“Only with grien, just as I always do with the mask on. It’s no loss. Especially compared to what I’ve gained. You! Come tie this on me again.” The servant scuttled over, taking the mask with shaking fingers.
“When did this happen?” Oria asked.
“I noticed when I awoke this morning, when I washed, before I donned my mask.”
“Did the Trom do it, touch you in some way?”
“You know they didn’t. The Trom touched you and you’re fine.” Yar oozed bitterness. “I’m the one who performed the summoning ritual. It should have been me the sacred one paid attention to. Not my magicless, maskless sister.”
Oh, Yar. “What was involved in the summoning ritual?” And why had Nat put their brother up to it? But she kept it to the one question. Not that it did any good, as Yar exploded out of his seat.
“You look to steal my secrets, my power—but I won’t let you!” Yar’s unmasked fury poured out and Oria staggered back from it. Chuffta spread his white wings, wrapping them around her in a shield as Yar’s grien followed his shout. Green fire shot out, incinerating the blast.
Yar’s turn now to fall back with a thin scream as his robes caught fire. His valet rushed forward to put out the flames, but he pushed the man away with an incoherent roar, patting them out himself, featureless face fixed on Oria. “How can you do that?” he whispered, hoarse. Frightened. “You shouldn’t be able to do that.” Then he ran from the room, the valet in his wake.
Oria met her mother’s stunned gaze. The queen had both hands around her throat, horror in her brown eyes.
“What did I do?” Oria asked her mother, though the queen didn’t answer. “It was Chuffta who breathed flame.”
“But you dissipated Yar’s grien. You neutralized it.”
She sank into the chair, pressing fingertips to her temples. Out of habit, though, because her head didn’t hurt for once. It should. That amount of fury should have sent her screaming to the shadows.
“This is what I mean—you stopped it.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. But it would be most useful to find out.”
“As much as I knew this might be,” her mother said slowly, the quiet words slipping past her hands, “I never truly believed. And here we are.”
“That what might be?” Frustration roiled up. “Ponen?”
Her mother closed her eyes, nodded ever so slightly.
“Explain this to me, Mother. I need to know.”
Queen Rhianna nodded again with more conviction, finally dropping her hands. For the first time since her husband died, something of her powerful sgath welled up. “Yes. I have things to show you. Perhaps there is yet another way out of this mud trap.”
Oria could only hope. Though through no fault of her own, she had still broken her oath—and she would do everything in her power never to be forsworn again.
~ 23 ~
With relief, Lonen left the Báran desert behind him. It had taken days of slow travel to reach the dry scrublands, which then gave way to the cactus- and evergreen-studded border country, populated by neither Destrye nor Bárans. Much as he wanted to ride ahead with the faster scouts, he sent Arnon instead and kept himself to the back of their decamping army, moving with the slowest of the injured.
Ion might have made a different choice, but their father wouldn’t have abandoned their many injured and Lonen hoped to be something of the king Archimago had been. If nothing else, he owed his father that, and the Destrye his father and brothers had died to save. They’d be remembered with honor, certainly. Already the musicians and poets among the warriors called him the Savior of the Battle of Bára. Several tales of the various battles with the Bárans—including increasingly more lurid descriptions of the golems, dragons, and Trom—were passing up and down the caravan of men and wagons and circling the campfires at night.
None of them mentioned Oria or her dragonlet, which suited Lonen just fine. The strange princess continued to plague his thoughts in worrisome ways, sometimes walking through his dreams, her hair copper fire, gaze full of some question. Sometimes her eyes were the bright green of the lizard’s, her teeth the same sharp fangs as she hissed. Once she flew at him, white leathery wings capturing him and holding him still while she feasted on his liver, murmuring love words all the while, her avid mouth then fastening on his cock, milking him until he ruptured.<
br />
He woke from that nightmare in a cold sweat, his seed ignominiously filling the furs as it hadn’t done since he’d been a randy adolescent. Too long away from women, from his lovely Natly. It seemed a king shouldn’t be subject to such human frailty. He’d never expected to wear the Destrye crown, so he hadn’t imagined exactly what it would be. Shinier and more noble, somehow. Without the disturbingly sexual dreams of a foreign sorceress or the persistent runs of the campaign trail.
Or the endless consultations on every matter, great or small.
The slow pace gave him time, at least, to learn the tasks of being a king, which seemed to be mainly making one decision after another, few of them compelling—a mountain of gravel, like the sands of Oria’s desert, relentlessly piling into dunes. He longed to switch places with Arnon, to be riding fast and furiously to reunite with the rest of their people. The greatest irony of becoming king was learning that he’d lost a freedom he’d never fully appreciated—and would never have again.
By the time Lonen and the tail end of the returning warriors and litters of the injured sighted the forests of Dru that filled the deep and wide valley between the Snowy Peaks, they’d received word of those who’d been on the Trail of New Hope. The good news was that the refugees had turned around and traveled back to their homeland also, in another long caravan, spearheaded by the strong, followed by a long, straggling tail of the weak and wounded.
The bad news was that the women, children, and elderly had run afoul of more golems, suffering additional losses. Indeed, said the scouts who reported to him in the squalor of his inherited tent, much worse for wear from the long campaign, had the golems not inexplicably fallen dead one night, the refugees would have been decimated.
As it was, less than half those who’d set out returned to their emptied city. They turned out to welcome the final dregs of the Destrye army. They lined the road and drawbridges over the moats surrounding Dru, cheering with the forced enthusiasm of traumatized survivors, pitiful in their reduced numbers.
Once the Destrye had lived in cabins scattered throughout the lush deciduous forest of trees that towered as high as Bára’s many towers. Some Destrye preferred to live alone, others in small family groups occupying one cabin, still others in extended families and communities in compounds of connected buildings. None had walls like Bára. Networks of roads had connected them, allowing for travel and commerce—all feeding into the broad, main road that led to Arill’s temple.
Some holdouts lived in those outlying cabins and communities still, but the bulk of Destrye had fled their homes following the golem incursions, building new homes to cluster under Arill’s sheltering wings. King Archimago had devoted considerable resources to digging wide, deep moats around the burgeoning city, filling them first with sharpened wood spikes, then iron ones to foil the golems. Those moats looked like a child’s ditch compared to the chasms of Bára.
Never once had it occurred to them to build walls.
Lonen brought up the rear, riding over the last drawbridge through the gates of the city at the end of the column. Odd to see wooden buildings and leafy trees instead of stone balconies and towers, people with dark hair instead of light. The slapdash, panicked construction around Arill’s temple had only deteriorated during the period of abandonment, but it had been ramshackle to begin with. One hastily assembled dwelling piled on top of another, the city was a hodgepodge of materials and design—except for Arill’s centuries-old temple and the adjacent palace of governance—and nothing like Bára with her meticulously arranged and airy towers.
Still, the similarities shone through. The defeated Bárans had also been determined to cheer the smallest victory. The two peoples had chewed on each other’s livers, it seemed, both cities crippled husks of what they’d once been, simply in different aspects.
Who had won what?
A woman broke from the throng, running up to him, long dark hair streaming like the tears running down her lovely face. Natly.
Though he was filthy, soiled in body and soul, Lonen dismounted, making his startled horse sidestep, and caught Natly up in his arms. She was both sobbing and laughing, her words incoherent. He held her close, inhaling the scent of qinn spices, the warmth of home. This. This was what he’d fought for, what so many died to protect. What his father and brothers had given their lives to rebuild. Through the exhaustion, a thin ray of hope wormed its way through. He’d made it home. Alive and mostly well.
Natly framed his face with her long fingers, her once elegantly jeweled nails short and broken. “You’re king now,” she managed to say, her gray eyes full of tears. “And returning victorious. I’m so proud of you. I love you so much, Lonen.”
He kissed her, mostly to stop himself from saying this was no victory. All that time he’d waited for her to say those words, to be proud to be his woman—and now she said it because he’d simply managed to survive where others had not. And by committing unspeakable acts. “It still feels like dream. A long and terrible one.”
“For me, too,” she said, kissing him again and again. “But it’s over now.”
“Yes.” Her mouth strange against his after so long apart. He threaded his chapped and dirty fingers through her black curling hair, grounding himself in Natly. His lover with dark eyes, not copper, who smelled of qinn and possessed no uncanny magics. She would make a good queen for the Destrye. “It’s over now,” he echoed her, wishing he felt that in his heart. Over her shoulder, a movement caught his eye.
Arnon stepped forward with Salaya, her hair shorn short in grief, holding the hands of her young sons, who’d never see their father Ion again. Natly made a sound of protest, clinging to him tightly when he tried to disentangle himself. “I have to talk to Salaya,” he told her, and Natly also looked over her shoulder, thrusting her lip out in a bit of a pout that he’d always found so sexy.
“Do you have to? Talk to her later. Come with me and I’ll bathe you.” Natly scratched the back of his neck with her nails, a trick that had always made him crazy for her. But the devastation in Salaya’s face, the haunted look in her eyes that reminded him strangely of Oria, cooled any desire he might have felt.
Gently, he unwound Natly’s hands from his neck and kissed her nose. “Go prepare the bath. And food if you can find any—I’m starving. I’ll talk to Salaya and meet you shortly.”
“You’ll have to make it quick, Brother,” Arnon said, gaze dipping over Natly and away. “I have a list as long as my arm of things for you to deal with as soon as possible.”
“He’s only just arrived home.” Natly put her fists on her voluptuous hips. “Surely a conquering war hero—our new king!—deserves a bit of rest and celebrating.”
Arnon shook his head wearily, squinting at the sky. “He’ll be king of nothing if we don’t figure out how to feed everyone. The first frost is only weeks away and it seems wolves scattered the herds we left behind. Not to mention we drained our water supplies when we left and the nearest source is at least a day’s journey. We’ve brought some in, but it’s slow going and not enough to keep up with everyone returning. Plus there’s squabbles over housing and accusations of theft that have already caused several fights resulting in injuries.”
“You’re full of good news, aren’t you?” Lonen scrubbed hands through his hair, slick with oil and dirt. He’d last bathed in Bára and it didn’t seem as if he’d have another one any time soon. It would be unconscionable with their supplies so low.
“A fine welcome home for the King of the Destrye,” Natly hissed.
Arnon only shrugged with a wry smile. “The good news is that we’re alive to come home. The rest of it is pretty bad. We’ve got a lot of work to make it livable again.”
Looking at his city made of wood, however ugly, Lonen let the weight of responsibility settle on him, heavy as Salaya’s imploring gaze. He owed so much to his father’s legacy, to Ion’s forsaken family, and to Nolan’s unrealized dreams, along with all the lives cut short, Destrye and Báran. He’d fin
d a way to rebuild. His people needed him.
They needed a good king and he’d be that. Or die trying.
~ 24 ~
Wrapped in a cloak of night, Oria followed her mother to a place she’d never known existed, much less been to. Still within the city and somewhere beneath both the palace and the temple, they descended a set of stairs that seemed to be the mirror of the ones to her tower, spiraling around a dark pit that echoed with odd whispers, winding into the earth, possibly as deep as the chasms that cracked through Bára. Climbing these again, plus those to the height of her tower, might very well kill her.
Something to worry about later.
For the time being, feeling crushed beneath the earth occupied most of her attention.
“It’s no different than being in a cave.” Chuffta chirped the observation far too happily. “I used to live in a cave. Cool in the hot weather, cozy when the chill winds blow. You’d like it.”
“So far I am not liking it,” she muttered at her Familiar.
Her mother glanced over with a wry smile. “I found Chuffta in a cave. Is he telling you that?”
Surprised that her mother mentioned it, Oria latched onto the question. “Yes. Will you tell me about that? How did you find him and why? How did you convince him to come with you if you can’t hear him now?”
“He can hear me, though, can’t he?”
“Of course. I’m not stupid.”
“I will tell you,” Rhianna continued, “as we still have farther to go, no one to overhear, and all of this is a piece of what I wish to show you. Perhaps I should have told you more to begin with, but that’s sand long since blown away.”
Though she privately agreed, Oria kept silent, lest she stem this flow of long-awaited answers.
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