by Beth Cato
“Yes, this is King Kethan,” Octavia murmured. Lady, help us. I do not trust Mrs. Stout’s son.
“But . . . the fire . . .” The cogs seemed to turn in Mr. Stout’s mind as they briskly headed down the path. “How can he be the King?”
“He is. Without question.” A few servants passed by. They shot King Kethan some puzzled looks but no one stopped them. “I didn’t exactly have time to interrogate him for the full details,” she whispered.
Mr. Stout scowled. Other people were far too close to discuss the matter now.
“All different. All changed,” King Kethan mumbled.
Octavia’s heart raced with each passerby, wondering who might sound the alarm, or if any more magi lurked nearby. At last they reached the gate. A new guard stood there.
“Bart,” said Mr. Stout, shaking the man’s hand and passing along a gilly coin.
Far, far across the grounds, a bell began to ring. The guard looked past them, frowning. “Good God, not another middle-of-the-night drill. Was told you’d be back this way. Good timing, I suppose.” He opened the gate. “You hear about the Arena match down in the southern nations? Rich bloke made a bloody mechanical gremlin. Won the whole bout.”
Octavia almost let out a whoop. Alonzo and Chi had won! Lady be praised! She could have danced there on the cracked sidewalk just beyond the gate.
“That so? We’ll need to catch up over Warriors later.”
“Bah. Guess you expect me to buy now.” The guard tucked the coin into a pocket and swung the gate shut. “Now you all best get straight home. It’s past curfew, though Ronnie’s on street patrol here this week.”
“Good to know. He owes me a beer, too,” said Devin Stout. The guard chuckled.
Eerie quiet lay over the street like a shroud. “Mercia,” breathed the King, the word rapturous.
Octavia’s legs felt like elasticized rubber as she climbed the rickety stairs. All the day’s stress seemed to quiver through her at once. We made it out. King Kethan craned his neck during the whole climb as he took in the skyline and heavens, as if checking to make sure the celestial bodies were still there. They entered the bakery and Rivka jammed the door behind them.
“Well then.” Mr. Stout walked a tight circle in front of the counter. He slammed his hat down and smoothed back his pale hair, the most visible trait he shared with his grandfather. “You’re King Kethan. Alive. How?”
King Kethan stood in the center of the room. With his billowing robe, he looked like a saint out of an illustration in a religious tract. “When I was a boy, pieces of the Lady’s Tree were brought to the palace. A hunter in the Dallows had found the massive Tree and climbed into its heart. He grabbed what he could, and as he was set upon by threems, he fled. He escaped with a branch, a leaf, and a seed, so he said. My father investigated and found the truth—the hunter had had a bag full of leaves, which he gave to his family so that they might live forever. They chewed the leaves and died in a most excruciating manner. The rest he personally delivered to the palace.”
Octavia perked up. “I knew the first part of that from a chamberlain’s log, but not the latter.”
“Our chamberlain wrote of the incident? He always was a fool.” King Kethan shook his head, clearly disgusted.
“This bloke sounds like the first Waster to attack Mercia,” said Mr. Stout.
“Perhaps. Relations with settlers in the Dallows were starting to disintegrate at that time as they demanded irrigation rights, though I believe he was motivated by grief more than by politics.” Kethan stared into space. “You asked how I am still alive. I am not. I died in the fire attack by the Dallowmen. I do not remember the exact moment, only that I was in the throne room and everything turned red.”
“The Lady’s mercy,” whispered Octavia.
“Do not speak to me of mercy.” Infinite sadness moistened his eyes. “I awoke to agony, to the feeling of my burned body born anew. I remember . . . I remember the sensation of my clockwork crown’s metal being pushed from my scalp, my face. It had melted in rivulets. The cooled pieces of metal struck the floor like dropped nails.” He shivered.
“Evandia was there in the vault with a few other counselors, the ones who had been in the country during the attack. Evandia was the age of Rivka here. She told me that my Varya had been dead for weeks, as had I, that the palace had been obliterated. Evandia did not want to rule. She wanted me alive. Her council had sought out one of my bastard children in order to break into the vault. They forced the Tree’s seed down my throat and waited a day. When nothing happened, they forced the leaf between my teeth and made me chew it. They did not know of what the leaves had done to the hunter’s family so many years before.” Kethan pressed a fist to his stomach. “Even now I can feel the seed like a weight.”
“The seed didn’t react fast enough, so they used the leaf as well,” Octavia murmured, her mind racing. “Did the seed need time to germinate?”
King Kethan shook his head. “I awoke, fighting against them. Fighting against the seed. A deep sense of peace is all I remember from my time beyond the infinite river. I hope my Varya would have been with me there, and I—I expected Allendia to be there as well. I did not wish to return to life.”
“Of course not,” murmured Octavia.
The leaf is poison if it’s chewed. The Wasters learned that same lesson. And the seed . . . The Lady’s Tree oversees millions of people, animals, flora, across hundreds, thousands of miles. The seed holds that full potential within its shell. If that kind of concentrated power is melded with the toxins of a misused leaf . . .
Mr. Stout frowned. “If I understand this correctly, you carry a seed in your gut that brings back the dead? Even the dead and burned?”
“Yes,” said the King.
In two long strides, Mr. Stout had the King by the hair and pinned him against the counter. Octavia and Rivka cried out, Octavia reaching for her capsicum flute yet again to find it gone. Lady! She grappled with her satchel to shift it behind her. The parasol’s handle smacked against her hip.
“Here’s how I see it,” said Mr. Stout. “You’re dead. No one will miss you. But I can use a seed. I can sell it. I can leave this damned place, buy a dirigible, go over the sea where no one looks at me and thinks, ‘Look at the poor soldier some infernal counted coup on.’ ”
“Devin, no!” snapped Octavia. “He’s your grandfather!”
“My grandson?” whispered the King, really looking at Devin Stout for the first time. He had been too distracted by the outside world. “Through . . . Allendia?”
“Yes. Allendia. Viola Stout. The famed missing princess.” Mr. Stout said it singsong. “The war you started over her has gone on for fifty bloody years. You burned and died. Seems fitting, really, that I’m burned, too.” He pulled back the knife long enough to rip away the face mask. His lips were a deep pink smear of flesh. “See the legacy of your war? I heard my own blokes stand over me and leave me to die. ‘Face like that, not worth living.’ By the time I crawled to the road, no doctor, no medician could mend this damage or stop the pain.” With his facial muscles so tight, his words slurred as they rushed together. Spittle trailed from the corner of his mouth.
“I came back to Mercia, burned like this. I found the bird I knocked up years ago. I see the babe we had, almost grown up, near as ugly as me.” He wheezed a laugh. “To think, I could have been born a royal. Should have been.” Racing heart. Adrenaline. The ugliness of rage. “The people in the city want a revolution, they want Evandia off the throne. I tell you, it won’t be me sitting there. Caskentia can rot to nothing, far as I care.”
The knife entered King Kethan’s gut with a brittle, juicy sound. His blood didn’t scream—it wailed like banshees trapped down a mine shaft. The King moaned, his head falling slack.
“No!” screamed Rivka. “No!” She threw herself at Mr. Stout and flailed his back with he
r fists. He dismissed her with a single mule kick. She pounded against the floor, addled but unhurt.
In one slick motion, Octavia had the parasol free of its loop and switched her hold. She brought the polished wood and copper wand down on the back of Devin Stout’s head. She knew precisely where to strike. She knew the pressure behind her arms—strong by farm labor—and the density of his skull.
She knew where best to crack through to the soft gray matter beneath, just as if cracking an egg.
CHAPTER 14
“Oh, Lady,” Octavia whispered as she recoiled from Devin Stout. His body, his blood, pleaded for healing. The chemical stink of brain tainted the air. She set the parasol on the counter and backed away until she found the wall. Peeling paint crackled against her back.
Rivka shakily stood. She was tall and lean, her body still hesitant to bud into a woman’s curves. Her lips distorted in a sneer as she walked up to her father.
“You killed Mama! You killed her! You were my father all along and you never said . . . !” Rivka kicked Mr. Stout in the ribs, the gut. Octavia lurched forward to grab her around the shoulders and pull her back.
“No,” she said gently. Rivka sheltered her face in Octavia’s shoulder and dissolved in sobs. Octavia held her and stared at the two bodies on the floor. This poor girl. No wonder she knew terror every moment in his presence.
King Kethan did not die. His distorted song scarcely altered. It had flared when the knife sliced in, but as she listened, the tune dimmed as his abdomen came together again. The blood that had oozed out—thick as oil, the coloration as deep as copper—dissolved as if she had passed a wand over him. He sucked in a long, rattling breath.
Devin Stout continued to die. He needed to die.
If I were a better medician, a more compassionate person, I would use a leaf on him. He’s Mrs. Stout’s son. She loves him. Yet Octavia stared at him and didn’t move.
His blood’s cry dwindled to a whimper.
“He was my grandson.” King Kethan’s voice rattled like bared tree branches in a windstorm. Rivka stiffened in Octavia’s arms.
“Yes.”
“The war did that to him. My wars.”
“Only in part, perhaps. His mind . . . maybe something was always wrong there, in some deep place no medician could ever touch.”
“Octavia Leander, you need not feel any guilt. I absolve you of it.”
Her smile quivered. “It’s not that easy.”
“No,” he said. “It never is.”
Rivka trembled. “He’s not dead? The King?”
“No. This isn’t the first time you’ve faced death again since you returned, is it, Grandfather?”
He stood with a whisper of bones. “No. I tried to end myself in many ways, as did Evandia’s men, when they realized what had been done. No mortal blade can slice the seed from my flesh. No maggots can gnaw it out. This is why I stayed in the vault. In truth, we knew not what to do, not with the Tree still hidden.”
Mr. Stout’s body was silent.
Rivka pried herself away from Octavia’s hug. She walked a wide berth around Mr. Stout, as much as possible in the tight space, to the King. King Kethan’s face showed shock as the girl embraced him. He smiled as he wrapped his baggy-sleeved arms around her.
“You. You remind me of my Allendia,” he said.
“I’m glad he didn’t kill you, too,” Rivka said, words muffled against the robe. His song radiated a strange sort of harmony for the first time.
I killed Mr. Drury. Now I killed Devin Stout. And so many have died because of me—the magus and guards in the palace, the buzzer pilot, people on the street in Leffen, even birds. Lady, forgive me. In time, help me to forgive myself.
Her feet scuffed on the floor. It crackled. She frowned and stooped down. The tile floor, already heavily worn, was fragmenting into crumbs. Paint chips lined the floor, too. She brought her gaze to the walls. When she had been standing around earlier, she had noticed fissures and bubbling in the paint. Now it curled and littered the floor as if someone had been picking at it.
“Oh Lady,” she breathed. The sickly-sweet stink of Kethan lingered in the air. “The rot in the vault, the garden, maybe the whole city of Mercia. It’s from you, isn’t it?”
He patted Rivka’s shoulder and she stepped away. “When I was first confined in the vault, I thought that if there was any good in my continued life, it was that I at last would have time to read all the books.” Terrible grief draped over him again. “Then the books began to disintegrate between my fingers, turn to dust on the shelves. Everything in there, even the swords, the muskets, everything crumbled. I had thought the wards of the vault contained my . . . miasma.”
“The Lady’s Tree blesses all life. The seed inside you is wallowing in the leaf’s poison. You—you’ve become a kind of antithesis to the Tree.”
Grief, shame, shivered through him. “I am a curse to our valley, as the Dallows is cursed.”
“Wait. The curse on the Dallows—it’s real?”
“Yes. Over six hundred years ago—closer to seven hundred now—Caskentia warred with the Dallows. Magi were not as rare then. Hundreds marshaled their powers together to lay waste to the plains. Their dark enchantment spread as a pestilence among the people, the crops, the soil, but people healed once they returned to Caskentia. The Waste remained abandoned until my father’s time, when our growing population compelled people to cross the mountains again. The poison was not as potent and so they settled.”
“That time frame. Seven hundred years ago—that’s when the Lady was said to have lost her family and become the Tree.”
“In my reading, I encountered the same. ‘And lo, the Lady lost her final babe while it still suckled upon her breast, and she looked to God and cried for mercy, and for no more mothers to suffer. And so the bark began to grow on her skin and the leaves in her hair and she smiled, for she knew her shade would cool children at play.’ ”
Octavia stared, hot nausea roiling in her gut. I’ve made no such cry, yet I am still turning. “I recall that tale from Miss Percival. I . . . I have always heard about your knowledge of books. Is it true that you memorize most books upon first reading?”
“Yes. I set the life goal to read most every book in Caskentia’s great libraries.” His smile was ghastly and yet fond. “In my studies, I found that Trees are said to exist around the world, most always hidden. They produce a single seed, always at the end of their life.”
Octavia mulled everything over and tried to avoid rubbing her arms and legs. I am becoming a tree, but why? Did something happen when I bled onto that branch? I haven’t had to bloodlet since, and that is when my skin started to change. If my body is changing on its own, what’s the real purpose of the seed?
She looked at the dead man on the floor and turned away. “Let’s talk in the kitchen, please.” As she passed the counter, she grabbed her parasol. By its nature, the wand had already shed the bits of hair and skull, but she still felt peculiar with that familiar grip in her hand.
Rivka walked to a cabinet and grabbed a stack of sweet Frengian flatbreads. She passed two to Octavia. “Mama always said when life makes you cry, eat some bread, because it always tastes better with a little salt.”
“Your mother, she was Frengian?” asked the King. There was no judgment in his words.
“Yes. She came down to work the factories, and after she had me, she baked bread at home. Can you . . . are you able to eat?”
King Kethan stared at the sweet bread, longing in his eyes. Golden turbinado sugar crusted the bubbled top of the yeast bread.
Octavia listened to his song. “He can, actually. The seed is in his stomach but there’s room for food as well. I think he’ll actually gain muscle and energy if he eats.”
The seed. I can even feel the texture of it in his stomach. The hull is intact, e
ven as it marinates in poison. If there were a way to remove it, it might still grow a new Tree.
And King Kethan would truly die.
Rivka smiled as she handed him the rest of the bread.
They ate and did not speak for a few minutes. Bits of turbinado sugar melted on Octavia’s tongue like tiny snowflakes, the bread’s texture soft, chewy, and thin. King Kethan closed his eyes and forced himself to eat slowly, though occasional murmurs of bliss escaped him. Even a day old, the bread tastes like heaven to me, but for Kethan . . .
“Either medicians have changed greatly in a few generations, or you are most gifted.” King Kethan brushed raw sugar from his fingertips. His cheeks had actually gained more color. His body has fed on itself for fifty years, with the seed keeping him alive regardless. He could eat nonstop for days and become more passably normal. But we don’t have days. I don’t. Her skin ached.
“The Lady has been too generous to me, especially these past few weeks. I had planned to journey to the Tree, even before finding you in the vault.”
He pondered that. “Our paths have merged in a peculiar way.”
“How far is it to the Tree?” asked Rivka.
“I don’t know, but if the army’s heading that way, it shouldn’t be too hard to find out.” Octavia looked down at her robes. “Winter is beginning. We’ll need to pack well.” She mentally ticked through the supplies they’d need. The gilly coins could buy them horses, perhaps—a cabriolet would never make it over the pass in winter.
“Our rooms are in back,” said Rivka. “I don’t have many clothes, but there’s all of . . . of Mr. Stout’s things. I can wear his clothes. So can the King.”
“Rivka, you can’t come with us. This is a dangerous journey,” said Octavia. She heard a very soft pop and looked up. The paint in the ceiling erupted in a long fissure. She grimaced. “We’re on the third floor of a ten-story building that was rotting even before I arrived. We can’t linger in the city, not with this aura around you, Grandfather.”
