by Evie Manieri
The darkness of his threat wound down through his fingers and she arched her back as they dug in to her flesh. His lips grazed her neck and worked their way up to her ear and she tightened her grip on his arms. She could feel the power banked down in him, straining to get out, as he slid the robe from his shoulders and let the fur drip down into a soft puddle on the floor behind him. His muscles moved beneath skin as smooth as the silver plums that had grown near her family’s house when she was a girl: beautiful fruit, but bitter-tasting.
Then she blinked, and there were the scars.
They were everywhere, crawling all over him: scars slashed over his eyes, scars turning his perfect mouth into a child’s scribble. His chest oozed with sores; his fingers ended in blackened stumps. His ears were torn off, his hair was shorn and his scalp flaked away beneath the scabs. He opened a mouth full of rotting teeth and his silver-blue eyes dripped blood.
She slammed a door on her emotions before he could sense the distress brought on by her morbid hallucinations. She had sworn not to keep tormenting herself this way; there was no point at all to it because as everyone well knew, Trey Arregador was dead.
* * *
A loud knocking startled Kira from her sleepless reverie. Gannon stretched beside her and pulled the blanket from her shoulders. With the bed-curtains closed, his naked back glowed like a lantern. The knocking came again and Kira could feel Vrinna’s hammering urgency even from the other side of the chamber door.
Gannon bolted upright and swept the curtain aside. He stepped into a pair of fur slippers and looked around for his robe, still lying by the wall where he’d abandoned it. He didn’t bother to fasten it before allowing the attendant in the antechamber to open the door. The hem swirled around his ankles as he picked up his dagger, then headed for the floor-mosaic of the Eotan wolf’s head in the center of the room; it looked ready to sink its teeth into anyone who walked too near. Kira’s unbraided hair fell around her shoulders, wafting the unwelcome smell of stale smoke into her face as she sat up to pull the curtains closed against the draft.
Through a small gap between the velvet panels, Kira saw the captain reposition the fur-lined helmet under her arm. Vrinna knew perfectly well that Kira was there, but she had no choice but to pretend otherwise. For a moment, Kira considered walking stark naked across the room to fetch her clothes, just to tweak Vrinna’s prudishness, but the thought of the cold floor deterred her almost as much as her desire to hear news important enough to get the emperor out of bed in the middle of the night.
The Shadari garrison. The trapdoor in Kira’s mind rattled, but she pushed it down firmly. A prisoner. A deserter from the Shadari garrison. It couldn’t be.
The presence of the deserter slid into the room like the fetid air in a ship’s hold. The man was manacled hand and foot, and his clothes, clearly intended for warmer climes, were stiff with old sweat. Two of Vrinna’s guards marched him to the center of the room and forced him to his knees. Vrinna put her boot between the prisoner’s shoulder blades and pushed him down in front of the emperor’s feet, the shackles grating against the stone. She bent his neck until his head was right between the wolf’s jaws.
Kira relaxed. It wasn’t her brother-in-law.
Gannon circled around the prisoner. The man’s ordeal, whatever it had been, had obviously left him as weak as a baby, but the will to fight still glowed in him like a live coal. He might have ended up as a deserter, but Kira had the feeling he had begun as something else entirely.
The emperor said nothing for a moment. He held up the dagger and turned it from side to side, examining it in the torchlight.
He was such a poor liar that Kira could feel his deception sitting in her stomach like a stone. Vrinna grabbed the chain between Ingeld’s hands and hauled him to his knees.
Kira pressed her palms down on the mattress as Vrinna and the guards dragged their hapless prisoner away, burying the trapdoor in her mind under layers: first dirt, then rock, then ice, then finally a deep blanket of softly concealing snow, until even she wasn’t sure where to find it. She concentrated fiercely; whatever happened, she could not let Gannon feel her screaming apprehension at what was about to occur.
As soon as the door creaked shut, Kira slid her hand between the curtains and drew them back so that Gannon could see her. A freezing draft wrapped itself around her naked body, but she refused to let him see her shudder.
Kira nearly gagged on the steely bite of his conceit, but now was certainly not the time for him to discover the real reason she had agreed to become his mistress—and as long as the witch saw nothing in her visions to touch on Kira’s dreadful secret, he never would know. Gannon went back to pacing the room, his fur slippers making a sweeping sound that Kira found more annoying with each turn. Just when she didn’t think she could stand it a moment more, Vrinna knocked again and the doors swung open at the emperor’s bidding.
Laine, the witch’s only guard, entered alone except for his charge. He was still in his outdoor garb, with nothing of him visible but his eyes. His emotions were just as shrouded as his body: not so much evasive as elusive, floating somewhere behind a cloud of smoke. Kira had felt something like it before, a cousin who had lost the better part of his wits after a bad fall. Laine pushed the Shadari witch before him like a sweeper moving a pile of rags.
Kira crawled forward for her first actual look at the woman who had brought the ore to Norland more than thirty years ago
and foolishly set in motion the conquest of her own people. This gray-haired, frail little creature in the greasy fur robe, with her wrinkled skin hanging loosely like she had shrunk within it, had altered the course of the entire world.
Gannon stalked toward the old woman. Towering over her like a giant he said,
The witch’s keeper bent toward her and spoke to her in the Shadari’s hideous language. The old woman’s mouth moved in response and a small sound issued from it while tears pooled in the wrinkles below her eyes.
The burned-wood perfume of Gannon’s eagerness flooded the room.
Laine unfastened the catch of his cloak and drew out a chain. At the end hung a little glass bottle—that could only be the magical Shadari divining elixir. The old woman waggled her head and started to move away, whimpering like an animal as her keeper stripped away the wax and removed the cork. Gannon snatched up a glove from the table and grabbed the Shadari’s wrist until she crumpled. Laine handed her the bottle and without a word she took a sip, then handed it back to him.
Kira had been out hunting once when one of the low-clan bearers had eaten the wrong kind of berries. The way the old woman now tensed and shook by turns reminded her of how that man had suffered before he died. Gannon had left the servant’s body in the snow and continued on with the hunt, and she’d wondered if the man’s family had ever been told why he never returned.
The witch began to speak like she was choking, spitting out words that hung painfully in the air. A drop of sweat crept down Kira’s face, clinging like a spider, but she dared not even reach up to wipe it away. She held her breath while the old woman muttered to the guard.
The guard and the old woman exchanged another stuttering series of words, then Laine reported,
Kira felt Gannon’s emotions liquefy and spill out of him.
Kira raked her mind for the passage of the gods’ words to Eowara: the same scene she had just seen acted out in the skits. Then be ready against the day they will rise up and strike at the Righteous. On that day let a Hero be prepared with the sword we have given you, to subdue them, lest they corrupt all that is pure in this land.
The witch looked up, and Kira saw her eyes for the first time. Warmth like molten gold rolled over her, and in a rush she understood something Gannon didn’t seem to realize: that pathetic little body, for all its fragility, was just a piece of something much larger, like the corner of some buried monolith poking out from beneath the snow.
The guard stood up.
Kira moved back from the curtains and sagged down against the fur blankets. The witch had said nothing new about the cursed; they were all safe, for a little while longer at least.
Gannon flung open the door and called for Vrinna.
Gannon told the captain the moment she hurried back in.
Gannon thundered. Vrinna flinched as if he’d cut her; Kira could almost feel the bite of hot steel and the scent of cauterized flesh in the air. The captain might have fought a hundred battles at Gannon’s side, but she had never overcome her craven need for his approval.
Vrinna ordered the guards to drag Ingeld back in. His head still lolled on his shoulder, but he was conscious.
One of the guards dragged the stool over and unhooked the manacle from Ingeld’s right wrist. The emperor took his sword from its stand by the door and went to the fire. Kira watched the flames curl around the blade as the black metal sucked in the light.
Gannon turned the blade over in the flame.
Gannon took the blade from the flame and crossed over to the stool.
Vrinna stepped back just in time for Gannon to slice straight down through Ingeld’s wrist. The blade sank deep into the wood, and both Ingeld and the severed hand fell back when Gannon yanked it out again. The stool clattered onto its side as Vrinna grabbed Ingeld’s maimed arm and held it up so that Gannon could hold the flat of the heated blade against the stump.
Kira wanted to close her eyes, but she was afraid she would faint if she did. Instead she tried to focus her senses away from the bile rioting in her stomach and her gaze fell on the witch, standing in the corner where she’d been led. The old woman had her eyes fixed on the blood dripping from the cleft stool. Kira couldn’t see her face; something made her glad of that.
Chapter 6
Kira summoned Aline the moment Gannon took himself off to be dressed. The danger of discovery might have passed, for now, but there was no question of going back to bed.
Aline opened the door and pushed back the curtain so that Kira could precede her into the empty throne room. At the far end, a pair of wooden doors let in a bitter draft from the terrace. The late Emperor Eoban had stuck the terrace on the front of the castle, apparently in emulation of the grand houses of Thrakya, although his never-ending campaign there had reduced the originals to rubble. Gannon liked to rail against the vulnerabilities it opened up in the castle’s defenses, and kept vowing to have it knocked down.
A magnificent map of the world hung behind the throne; it had been recently updated to show the foreign provinces held by each of the twelve high clans. Only the gray-green seas
occupied more space than Eotan blue, but the Arregadors’ deep green made a good showing, while the Aelbars were little more than an orange smudge here and there. Far south and a bit off to the left was a tiny blue crescent between the sea and a curving mountain chain: the Shadar. It looked small, harmless, and reassuringly distant.
There were smaller maps, framed in wood, and the ceremonial copies of The Book of the Hall and the Genealogies, each on their separate stands; they cast angular shadows on the walls.
The play of the torchlight as they passed the throne made it look as if the boiled bones of Norland’s extinct enemies were straining to free themselves from their unnatural union. It was traditional for the throne to be covered with the pelts of animals killed by the emperor’s own hand. Gannon had occupied it for only a few months, and already the pelts looked deep enough to lose a baby in.
They continued past the simple carvings of Onfar forming the twelve progenitors out of snow, and Onraka bringing them to life with her breath. The genderless progenitors all had the same body, but their tokens distinguished them: Aelbar’s iron-wood cudgel, the wolf’s head Eotan wore like a helmet, the fir wreath in Arregador’s hair. A rendering underneath showed the battle with the ice-trolls, when the first Norlanders had sprung to life: the high clans from the progenitors’ blood, the middle clans from their sweat, and the low clans from their bile. She no longer believed any of it, of course, but she still liked the picture.
Her steps slowed near the center of the room as memories crystalized around her like ice. Over there, in front of the throne, was where Trey Arregador had been standing the first time she saw him. He had just returned from the Redland campaign with Scion Gannon and no one had talked of anything except how his bold actions had broken the siege. She remembered how impossibly handsome he had looked as he came forward to receive his accolades from the emperor, Gannon’s father, with his helmet under his arm, his battle-scarred shield and the warm torchlight kissing the shining hilt of Honor’s Proof. The moment their eyes had met across the room—she a wholly insignificant girl from a craggy little Aelbar estate and he the hero of the mighty Arregador clan—she’d known she would have to be better than she was to be worthy of him, and she’d wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of her life trying.
