Dead But Once

by Auston Habershaw

  My, but does that woman know her business. Tyvian bowed to her, but not too deeply. “This seems eminently reasonable. Any present who endorse my declaration are welcome to have a part in such meetings.”

  Countess Ousienne grinned at his countermove, even as the furor erupted through the great hall. By being the first to sit at his side, Ousienne was positioning her house as having primacy in a theoretical kingdom ruled by Tyvian. By turning the offer around and extending it to everyone, he made it clear that anybody who joined him would be given similar treatment. But, of course, they would be second in line for the spoils.

  To their credit, none of the other Counts were really falling over each other to swear their support. Tyvian noted a fairly forceful note of support from some freeholdings, border knights, and lesser peers, but what they wanted had very little to do with what actually happened in Eretheria. Those men had been Perwynnon’s strongest supporters as well, and a fat lot of good it had done him.

  Velia Hesswyn pointed a closed fan at him. “If you want our fealty, then take the throne!”

  Tyvian grinned. “My ladies and lords, I should hesitate to do such a thing without your counsel, especially after the fate of my father. No, no—I would hear your wishes first! If you have no desire for a king, then say so, and I shall leave you in peace. If you wish to raise me up, then speak, and I shall ascend!”

  There was muttering among the peerage for a few moments, and then Dame Velia raised her fan. “House Davram supports the heir. Long may he reign.”

  Tyvian just barely held in a snort—Davram was playing as though he was no longer on the board. Did they have that much confidence in Voth? Or the throne itself? Tyvian bowed in the old woman’s direction, anyway. “My thanks, Your Grace.”

  He turned to await the decisions of Vora, Camis, and Ayventry, but before he could, the Guardian entered the hall and smashed his staff on the ground. “Magus Argus Androlli, Mage Defender of the Balance!”

  Androlli was not alone, of course. Two full columns of Defenders followed him into the room, advancing up the central two aisles. Androlli was grinning. “So, Master Reldamar—we meet again!”

  Tyvian cocked his head and blinked. “I’m sorry, but do I know you?”

  “Oh, ha ha—how very childish, Reldamar,” Androlli said. “And since one childish act deserves another, I come bearing a gift, sir.”

  The peerage murmured. The gifts of magi had bad reputations.

  Tyvian frowned. “And what gift is that?”

  Androlli spread his arms to encompass the mirror-men in the room. “I present you with a royal guard! Men of good character with no fealty to any Eretherian house to protect you, so that Perwynnon’s fate does not also befall his son.”

  Tyvian did his best not to curse aloud. Fifty Defenders to follow him around and watch his every move. Wonderful. “How very thoughtful, Magus, but I rather doubt—”

  “Oh no, sir . . .” Androlli grinned. “. . . I insist! And I assure you that, should anyone threaten your life or person, my men will take you into protective custody at once. For your own safety, of course.”

  Tyvian scowled. “Nevertheless, I believe—”

  Count Yvert stood up. “I, for one, think this is an excellent idea! I move that the Mage Defender’s proposal be enshrined in law. Second?”

  Count Duren stood up. “Seconded!”

  “All in favor?” asked Yvert.

  The room thundered with shouts of “Aye! Aye! Protection for the heir!”

  The Guardian thumped his staff. “The law passes, with Hann’s guidance!”

  “As we are making proposals,” Countess Velia said, “I propose a recess—this is not an official session of Congress, and any further declarations or proposals ought be postponed until a more amenable time for all. Especially as our cousins of Ayventry have yet to return from the funeral of Count Andluss.”

  All the remaining Counts seconded that one. So much for pinning down anybody else on the question of fealty for tonight. Duren and Yvert were beaming as they evacuated the great hall.

  Fine, Tyvian grumbled, enough’s enough. He walked past Androlli, brushing him roughly with his shoulder as he went. The mage merely laughed. “Going somewhere, Reldamar?”

  “Bed,” Tyvian snapped. “Want to come? Make sure I don’t disappear?”

  Androlli shook his head. “Don’t worry—you won’t be lonely.”

  And fifty armed Defenders followed Tyvian from the hall.

  He was in a cage. A cage he’d voluntarily stepped into. He found his room eventually and slammed the door on the pair of mirror-men posted to “guard” him. He discovered he hadn’t curses enough to cover all the people he was angry with.

  Chapter 29

  Caught Sleeping

  The emerald green fields of Eretheria shone beneath a soft rain and hissed lightly as Hool’s paws disturbed them. The raindrops were cool on her fur, the air was clean. For the first time in years, she felt free.

  Brana wheezed behind her. “Mama. I’m tired.”

  Hool frowned and slowed her pace. Brana limped to a halt beside her and sat on the ground. She sat down next to him and pulled him into her arms, letting his snout nuzzle up against her chest, just as she had done all those years ago, when he was new and the world was as it should be. “Rest. We will go again soon.” She pulled a blanket of pale wool over their heads. It was muddy and filled with sticks, and it would hide them well from casual eyes. She huddled against a rock and let her breathing slow.

  They were sitting near the crown of a hill overlooking the Freegate Road and the spirit-engine tracks that paralleled it. She’d been along this road before, though never this far south—it went past the northern spur of the Tarralle Mountains, through Ayventry, then Galaspin, and then to Freegate. Hool didn’t intend to go quite that far—once clear of the Tarralles, she and Brana would turn north and head up into the empty, wild territory that separated Dellor from Galaspin. It might not be the Taqar, but it was wide and open and devoid of many humans. It was a place to start. She suspected, at their current rate of speed, the journey would take two or three weeks. She was looking forward to it.

  “I miss Artus,” Brana whined. “I wanted to go to the big party.”

  Hool’s ears drooped. “Parties are no place for gnolls.”

  “That’s not true,” Brana said. “Everybody likes me at parties.”

  Hool ran a hand through Brana’s gold-white mane. “They are just laughing at you. Humans are mean.”

  Brana whined, but didn’t protest further. He nuzzled close to her. “What if Tyvian gets in trouble?”

  “Tyvian is always in trouble. That is why we’re leaving.” She took a deep breath. “Our debt is paid. He understands. We will always love him, but we cannot help him anymore.”

  Brana opened his mouth, but Hool licked his nose. “Mama!” he yipped, shaking his head.

  Hool rumbled a laugh. “Hush, my rabbit. Sleep.”

  Brana slept. Hool meant to nap as well but found she could not. She was restless—not to move on, not to stay there, but restless anyway. Her mind had things it wanted to discuss with her, apparently, but had not made itself clear yet.

  Was she worried about Tyvian? No, of course not. Tyvian, she was convinced, was unkillable. Even if someone did stab him or drop him off a building, that magic ring would probably save him. She wasn’t worried about Myreon either—she was smart and knew many tricks. Besides, Hool had never really liked her that much. No, she was mostly worried about Artus.

  If Artus weren’t a human, Hool would have taken him with her, too. But he was, and life in the Wild Territory was not for him. He was better off with Tyvian.

  Probably.

  She snorted, shaking off all the visions of danger her mother’s brain could concoct for Artus—Artus being poisoned, Artus being shot with an arrow, Artus falling off a horse, Artus falling in love with an evil woman—and focused her senses on Brana, her real child. She breathed in his scent and at the same time t
ried to remember the scents of all her other pups. Even Api. Especially Api.

  At night, when she balled her hands into fists, she could still feel the stiff, dried pelt of her youngest pup there. She could smell her scent, tainted with the scent of death and with horrible chemicals used to clean the skin. She would have nightmares about it—the bloody face of Gallo, Sahand’s bodyguard; the darkness of the closet, and the smell. Always the smell. She had never told anyone about these dreams. There was nothing to be said.

  Now, she tried to remember Api’s scent as it had been in life. She found it very hard to do. She had spent too long trying not to remember. The rain intensified, and Hool let her thoughts drift back to Artus, and Artus’s mother.

  Did she feel the same way that Hool did now? Did she think of her dead sons and could only see their bodies, their living faces lost to her? Is that why she had sent Artus away—to fix him in her memory forever as a living, breathing boy and not a cold, dead corpse? Yes, that had to be it. Hool sighed. She would have done the same thing. Artus’s mother must be strong, like a gnoll.

  Brana’s ear twitched, brushing Hool’s cheek. She heard it, too—a wagon coming, its axle creaking. Then hoofbeats—a dozen horses at least, riding at a slow pace heading south, toward Eretheria. Hiding as the gnolls were, far off the road, Hool doubted the people in the approaching caravan would see them. Still, she settled lower down and put her eye to a hole in the blanket to see what was coming.

  She saw an armed party, four horses in the van, eight in the rear, a fortified wagon in between. The wagon was pulled by a team of four and loaded heavily with what had to be weapons and armor or other heavy equipment. The men on horseback were wearing black mail with black and silver tabards, a wyvern stitched on their chests. Hool knew the emblem all too well—Sahand’s. These men were Delloran soldiers.

  Hool had to resist the urge to charge down the hill and kill them all. At this range, they would put crossbow bolts through her before she got halfway. Besides, they weren’t her problem anymore. She had gotten revenge for Api, hadn’t she? She had killed dozens of men like that, destroyed Sahand’s plans, saved her Brana—what more was there to be settled? Even still, she couldn’t suppress a low growl as she watched them pass.

  Beside her, Brana shivered. “What are they doing here, Mama?”

  It was a good question, but Hool didn’t want to answer it. “Nothing. They are doing human things. We will stay away from them.”

  “They won’t hurt Artus and Tyvian and Myreon, will they?” Brana asked.

  Hool snorted. “Don’t be silly. Tyvian will kill them if they try. He is much too smart for them. And Myreon has magic.”

  “Oh,” Brana said, pensive.

  The two gnolls remained huddled under their blanket for a while, both awake and alert, even after the Dellorans passed out of hearing. Again, Hool’s thoughts were restless ones. Why were Delloran soldiers here? What was Sahand up to? Was he in Eretheria? Did it have to do with Tyvian?

  Of course it does, Hool snarled at herself. Twelve Dellorans weren’t enough to topple a country or invade a city, but it was certainly enough to kill one man. What other single man would Sahand want dead so badly that he marched these men here from the distant north?

  “Mama,” Brana said, “we should warn Tyvian.”

  “No. Tyvian is fine.” Hool pulled off the wool blanket and rolled it up, but not before dipping it in some mud.

  “But—”

  “We go north. Forget the stupid soldiers,” Hool growled and then started off.

  With one last, long look at the road where the soldiers had gone, Brana loped along behind her. His face had lost its characteristic enthusiasm. It looked sad and grim. Much the same as Hool’s did, she imagined.

  She pressed on through the rain.

  The next day they saw more soldiers. This time it was a column of fifty footmen, bearing Sahand’s colors and wearing his livery. Hool and Brana hid atop a great flat boulder and watched them march past a toll house without stopping. Sniffing the air, Hool smelled blood—probably the toll-keeper and his family. She remembered how Sahand worked.

  “Where are all the good soldiers?” Brana asked, his ears back. He, too, smelled the blood.

  Hool’s ears twitched. “Probably in their castles, waiting for the spring campaigns to start. Not here.”

  Brana said nothing, but Hool knew what he was thinking. She nudged him with her nose. “They can take care of themselves, pup.”

  Brana said nothing, his ears still plastered back against his head, his hackles raised as he looked at the column.

  Hool sighed. “We will sleep here tonight, just to be safe.”

  Brana let his tongue peek out. “Okay.”

  They spent the late afternoon catching birds. Hool taught Brana the basics of using a sling, and they caught a half dozen doves, which they ate greedily, not bothering with a cookfire. It was the first wild meat Hool had had in months. She breathed deep, and the air was full of nothing but rain and the scent of pollen.

  That night, she and her pup lay on their backs to watch the stars come out, and Hool pointed out the constellations and told the stories that went with them. She found herself gradually shedding the tension she had slept with for too many years—that nagging sense of not fitting in, of having obligations to fulfill, of the human world intruding on her natural state. A knot of muscle between her shoulders that she hadn’t known was there relaxed. She rolled on her back in the long grass beside the flat rock—almost like home.

  “I love you, Brana,” she whispered softly as the crickets sung all around.

  Brana licked her on the ear. “I love you, too, Mama.”

  For the first time in a long time, Hool drifted into peaceful sleep. Deep, dark, and dreamless, Hool lost track of time and space and let her fears slip away. She slept late—well after dawn—and awoke better rested than if she had slept on a thousand feather beds.

  Only to find that Brana was gone.

  She sat bolt upright, listening to the wind, sniffing the air—where was he? She barked “Brana!” Her voice was swallowed by the open pastures.

  She found his tracks—he had left them easy to follow. Easy for her to follow.

  They went back toward Eretheria. They followed the Dellorans. She cursed like a human.

  She followed the tracks.

  Tyvian passed a restless night in a huge, circular bed made out of a sorcerous material even Tyvian hadn’t heard of. It was like sleeping on water, though without the sloshing. He spent about ten minutes wondering how one made sheets for a circular bed without showing any seams. The rest of the night he spent feeling fundamentally unsafe. The palace, perversely silent given its size, seemed to hide innumerable possible dangers. His personal chambers alone were so huge he couldn’t see into the corners in the dark and likely wouldn’t hear the door creak open, even assuming the hinges creaked. He didn’t even want to think about the thick, heavy carpet laid from one wall to the other. Adatha Voth could skip across that floor and knife him without taking her high heels off. Having a pair of mirror-men at the door did not make him feel any better either.

  He found himself wishing Myreon were there. Like it had been at the start, a year ago or so. The two of them, working in concert, trusting each other. Partners.

  Maybe it’s better this way. He lay with his hands behind his head, Chance under his pillow as always. Sooner or later, he told himself, an assassin is going to show up that I can’t beat. He . . . or she, I suppose, is going to kill me. If Myreon were with me, they’d kill her, too. In the world I live in, only Carlo diCarlo gets to grow old.

  “I wouldn’t worry.”

  Tyvian flew to his feet, Chance drawn in an instant, adrenaline surging like a storm in his veins, narrowing his vision. Someone was there—sitting by the fireplace, clad in black.

  The fireplace lit itself, and in the orange light Tyvian could make out his brother, sitting in a comfortable armchair, his staff across his knees. “Xahlven!” T
yvian coughed. “Come to finish me?”

  Xahlven laughed, his perfect teeth glinting in the firelight. “Well well, you seem to be recovering from bloodroot poisoning quite nicely. Sit down, put the sword away—you know perfectly well it wouldn’t do you any good, anyway.”

  Tyvian did not put his sword away, but he did decide to squat in the chair across from Xahlven, ready to leap if need be. “Mother’s here, too, you know. Quite the family reunion.”

  Xahlven eyed his brother’s posture with obvious amusement. “So, how do you like being king?”

  “Heir.”

  Xahlven smirked. “Yes, pardon me—heir.”

  Tyvian felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. There it was again—that infuriating feeling you got with Xahlven that everything you said was according to some script he had plotted months ago. “Is there a reason you are in my bedchamber, Xahlven, or is this just how you make social calls these days?”

  Xahlven shrugged. “Pardon me for my excess of caution, but it isn’t easy infiltrating this palace, even for me. The Guardian and all those Defenders, well, they can be fooled, but getting past mother is a whole different challenge altogether. I could not contrive a more socially acceptable meeting—I apologize.”

  Tyvian kept Chance pointed at his brother’s face. “Well?”

  “They’re going to kill you.”

  Tyvian rolled his eyes. “You’ll have to be more specific by ‘they.’”

  “The Great Houses.” Xahlven shook his head. “You’re playing with precious little latitude—you know this.”

  “I’m waiting for you to tell me something I don’t know.”

  Xahlven smiled. “I want to help you.”

  He didn’t expect that. “Help? How?”

  “By doing what that ring of yours cannot. By seeing to it that your enemies are replaced by less formidable foes.”