by Terah Edun
The soldier off to Ciardis’s right cursed. “I knew we couldn’t trust that woman.”
Rachael tsked and waved her hand. “Just a ruse. We had to get your group to stop. To hear us out.”
“And the explosion?” Ciardis asked with death in her eyes.
The shaman grimaced. “As I said before, it was a misunderstanding that I deeply regret. I couldn’t get word to my people in time enough to properly explain the situation. Instead of stealth, they chose the most…direct path of opposition.”
Sebastian tensed. “You could have just asked.”
“That’s just it, Prince Heir,” Rachael said with shuttered eyes. “We are asking.”
Ciardis’s eye twitched. “This sounds more like blackmail.”
Rachael met her eyes with a direct gaze. “It won’t once you hear us out.”
“And the ambassador? Has she too disappeared under your orders?” the prince heir asked.
The shaman shook her head. “If we had the power to disappear dragons, you wouldn’t be standing here, Prince Heir.”
“Is that a threat?” Terris snarled while hopping forward.
She looked mad. That was good. They all should be.
Ciardis too was enraged, though she was doing her best to keep a level head.
The shaman responded. “Merely a promise. If it was up to us, the pretender would hold no title in these lands.”
“The pretender?” sputtered Tobias. “How dare you speak of the Emperor of Algardis in such a manner!”
Ciardis blinked. She’d forgotten he was here, or worse yet, that he and his fellow soldier could hear what was transpiring.
Ciardis and Sebastian exchanged calculated glances, but it was too late to put the genie back in the bottle, as it were, and dropping a sight-and-sound shield would do them no good when they needed every person ready for a fight if it came to that.
So the prince heir spoke carefully. “I would ask you what you thought you knew about my family, but you seem to think you have all the knowledge in the world.”
The shaman shook her head. “Just enough to know the Empire has changed…and not for the better.”
Rachael looked over to the east where Sandrin lay and back to the couple who stood before her.
“I just wanted you to know that you have strength behind you, Prince Heir,” she said formally. “Should you choose to right what has been wronged.”
Ciardis’s lips thinned. She really didn’t want to have this conversation here. She didn’t much trust Rachael, not after the stunt she had pulled, but they didn’t have much choice.
It was either feel out her motivations now or wonder for the rest of the journey if they had a target on their backs in the form of a very duplicitous spy.
Ciardis spoke. “How can we know who you are? What you represent?”
“I represent the true Algardis,” Rachael responded steadily. “One ruled by the heir of Bastien Athanos Algardis, not his traitorous brother. I will pledge that oath by blood magic if you are so concerned.”
“We are,” said Sebastian coldly.
Wry wit flashed in the shaman’s eyes before she pulled up a sleeve and drew a knife so fast that both of the soldiers stepped forward with swords drawn.
Sebastian held up a hand and motioned them away. They both reluctantly stepped back and Rachael drew the razor-sharp blade across the palm of her hand.
Thanar stepped forward and said, “If you two don’t mind, I think it might be best if I took this oath of blood.”
Fear flickered through Rachael’s eyes.
Cunning flashed in Ciardis’s own. Trust was all well and good, but when talking about rebellion, perhaps a little fear went a long way.
“Let him,” Ciardis urged Sebastian with a squeeze of his forearm.
Sebastian barely hesitated as he said, “By all means. That is, unless the shaman wishes to renege on her word?”
He said the last few words with a tip of his head at Rachael.
The shaman straightened her shoulders and held out her hand palm up to the daemoni prince with fierce pride in her eyes.
Ciardis hummed as she thought, She’s stronger than she looks.
Sebastian said, I’m beginning to think we all are.
They watched as, blood dripping down her hand and into the grass below, the shaman took Thanar’s hand in her own.
He tightened his grip like a jailer ready to put her in shackles and closed his eyes.
Smoke began to rise between the junction of their flesh and the shaman cried out in pain.
Ciardis jumped and started forward. Sebastian held her back and said calmly, “No, let him finish.”
“I’ve never heard of a blood oath that causes such pain,” Ciardis said.
“You’ve never been on the receiving end of hate-filled magic from a daemoni prince either,” reminded Sebastian. “Because regardless of your murky feelings about Thanar’s techniques, even you must admit his magic has never felt like pure evil to you.”
Ciardis looked over at Sebastian out of the corner of her eyes and whispered, “I’m not sure if that was supposed to be a compliment or a criticism.”
Sebastian said mildly, “It can be both.”
They both refocused their attention on Thanar and Rachael when the shaman hurriedly pulled her hand from the daemoni prince’s grasp and held the torn flesh to her bosom with an angry glare.
Ciardis raised an eyebrow at Thanar.
“It’s done,” he said coolly.
Ciardis felt her eye twitch but otherwise she said nothing damning. She couldn’t, not really. He was only doing as they had asked.
The shaman walked forward to once more to face Sebastian.
“What I say now, I say with full truth and conviction behind my words,” she said through gritted teeth. “I cannot lie in the presence of my oath binder and not have him know.”
“That is true,” Sebastian said calmly.
“Then hear these words, prince of the realm,” Rachael said with a fire in her gaze. “My people and I wish to help with the rebellion, in whatever form that comes. We know the truth of your bloodline and we will only assent to the reign of our true Emperor.”
Sebastian’s hand tightened briefly on Ciardis’s forearm in what she assumed was a nervous reaction.
“If I call for you aid?” he said quietly.
“We will come,” promised the shaman.
“If I send renegades to your door?” he asked.
Ciardis startled in surprise. What renegades?
Do you think I haven’t been forming plans of my own? questioned Sebastian loftily.
I’ll be very surprised if you had, Prince Heir, Ciardis replied with doubt. You do remember that it was I who saved you from a court that wanted to kill you the moment I came to the capital?
A lot has changed, Sebastian replied softly.
“We will shelter them,” the shaman said without taking her eyes off the prince heir.
Sebastian nodded. “That is all I can ask…for now.”
Rachael blinked, bowed, and said, “Then I will hold you to these plains no more.”
Ciardis tilted her head. “Will you come back to court with us?”
Rachael replied thoughtfully, “I think my role is best served here as liaison between my people and your courts if necessary.”
“A smart move,” Ciardis said with bite on her tongue. “And a safe one.”
Fire flickered in the shaman’s eyes. “The only one safe is you. The Emperor would not think twice about eliminating my people with the help of just a single garrison of his guards for treason.”
Ciardis frowned and then sighed. “You are right. My apologies.”
“Then we will take our leave,” the shaman prompted with a wave of her hand and a backward irate glance at the daemoni prince who stood guard behind her.
“By all means,” purred Thanar.
Terris shouted from where she stood over the body of a dead horse. “What about the blasted wyvern?
”
The shaman looked at a plainsman with a particularly powerful strung bow in his hands and nodded at him.
He fired a shot into the middle of the empty fields, not thirty feet from where they all stood. The arrow bounced off the air like it had been deflected in the wind, and with that a sight-and-sound bubble that even Thanar hadn’t detected dropped.
Inside sat a dejected and put-out looking wyvern.
Ciardis said, “Well, he looks…depressed.”
At the same time Terris shouted, “What did you do to my wyvern?”
Several of the plainsmen warriors muttered something disparaging about the fire-breathing lizard, but none dared meet Terris’s furious gaze.
“Peace, Kithwalker,” the shaman said while holding up a forestalling hand. “We used its own magic to build the shield.”
“That’s it?” Terris said as she stalked closer to the wyvern which sat with wings folded into its body and its head drooping down.
“A wyvern’s magic is more than just its offensive power, it also feeds on it,” the shaman said. “Which makes it a formidable foe to go up against this. In this case we simply made it feed on itself and gave you a much more amenable traveling companion now that its magic is depleted and it is quite exhausted.”
Even Ciardis found that distasteful, but she had to admit, the wyvern didn’t look like the spitball of fire that had wanted to tear them all into tiny pieces when it had its own free will just days ago.
It looked almost…placid.
Which was a strange thing to think about when staring a creature that was one step away from being a full dragon.
“Speaking of dragons,” Ciardis said as her mind drifted over to the last remaining missing member of their crew.
She withdrew her arm from Sebastian’s grip and crossed her arms with a glare. “And I suppose you have a dragon under a sight-and-sound shield as well?”
“As I said before,” the shaman said with a darkening glance, “your dragon disappeared of her own volition, but if you wish to see her, I suggest you just look behind you.”
Ciardis eyed the shaman in suspicion and said aloud to Thanar, “What do you think, Thanar?”
“She’s telling the truth,” he said flatly.
“Because of the blood oath?” Ciardis asked bluntly.
“No,” a sinuous voice said before the daemoni prince could reply, “because I’ve been here all along.”
Ciardis spun around and, true to the shaman’s word, there the dragon ambassador was. She looked no worse for wear than when they had left Kifar, which was surprising since they had all been flung off their feet with the arrival of the shaman’s people.
Ciardis’s jaw dropped. “Mind explaining why you just disappeared?”
The dragon ambassador sniffed and smoothed a hand over her waist. “I threw up a shield as soon as I sensed ill-omens coming.”
They all turned to look at her.
The dragon said, “If you humans are foolish enough to get into a new battle with your young present, who am I to stand in your way. Besides, this little tit-for-tat has been amusing, to say the least.”
Sebastian sighed in audible irritation. “I’m glad we’ve been able to entertain you, ambassador.”
Raisa nodded in gracious assent. “Shall we be going?”
Ciardis blinked and looked around in assessment. There really wasn’t anything keeping them from doing so, not now anyway.
“Let’s,” said Sebastian with a grunt. “It’s a long walk from here to Sandrin—nine hours at the very least.”
“Perhaps I can cut that in half?” the shaman said tentatively.
They all turned to her with somewhat hopeful looks on their faces. Nobody was looking forward to seeing the Emperor again, but Ciardis was fairly sure they all wanted to get home.
“We can provide fresh mounts,” the shaman clarified. “It’s the least we can do.”
She said the last sentence with a wince at all the broken and battered bodies of their dead mounts scattered around. If they hadn’t broken their heads in the fall, broken legs had led the soldiers to give them merciful death blows in the minutes after.
“Thank you,” said Sebastian with a harsh swallow. “We would be grateful.”
The shaman nodded and quickly walked away to confer with her people.
As they all broke to go and the shaman handed the last pair of reins over, Rachael said loud enough for Ciardis to hear, “We’ll be here when you need us, Prince Heir. Just remember what we can do.”
Silence echoed as the shaman and her people walked off across the plains.
Ciardis watched in silence, unsure if she could do anything about it. Unsure if she wanted to do anything about it.
“So that went well,” Terris said as she came up to stand by Ciardis and watched their erstwhile allies march off.
Ciardis didn’t bother responding to the comment. Instead she said, “The wyvern.”
“Amenable is a good way to put it,” Terris said dryly.
“Then we can go,” the princess heir-in-waiting said.
“We can go,” Terris echoed softly.
6
As they mounted the fresh horses provided by the tribe, Ciardis asked, “Why do you think she wants to help so badly? And don’t say out of loyalty. I’ve had about all I can stand of loyalty.”
Sebastian flicked his eyes over to her and said, “I don’t know, and that’s what troubles me.”
Ciardis sighed and flicked the reins of her horse. It troubled them all.
It didn’t take them long to push the horses into a steady ground-eating canter. They had some hours to make up in lost time, but luckily, fresh horses meant they could go longer at a much faster pace than before.
Ciardis thought long and hard about what was waiting for them in Sandrin.
An imposter emperor who seemed keen to test them at every turn.
A flock of courtiers more interested in saving their own hides than in the fate of the empire.
A people who had no idea what was coming.
And a rebellion that seemed to determine to rear its ugly head at the most inopportune time.
If they didn’t have the bluttgott to attend to and the possibility of impending destruction hovering over the whole of the empire’s head, Ciardis would have gladly fostered the hopes and the activism of the hodge-podge of rebellious individuals who kept popping up like mole rats when least expected.
But deposing an emperor when faced with an even greater foe was a fool’s errand.
They needed leadership and unity right now above all, and no matter how you sliced it, a coup d’état would never inspire the cohesive bond they needed to fight back against a god.
Ciardis wondered if the rest of the empire would even believe the prince heir’s tale.
And if they did, he had no answers to give them.
“We have no answers to give them,” Ciardis muttered to herself in disgust.
They didn’t know where Sebastian’s true father was. Or when he had disappeared.
Maradian had taken his brother’s place as smoothly as an actor stepped onto a stage.
What happened to Bastian Athanos Algardis?
Was he alive? Had he been imprisoned like Ciardis’s mother? Could he rule in his brother’s stead after so long?
It had been at least half a decade. The man could be lying somewhere in the darkest hole that his maniacal brother could find.
And knowing the emperor, it was probably very deep and very dark, Ciardis thought with a cold shiver.
They kept riding for hours, pushing the horses as far as they could go at a grueling pace. As much as none of them wanted to know what devious trap laid in wait for them, they were even surer that staying here wasn’t an option.
Hours passed. Night turned into day.
Still they rode. A few stops to rest the horses for hours at a time, then they were back in the saddle.
It paid off the following day when Ciardis felt the cobblest
one steps of the imperial roads beneath her horse’s hooves and she saw the city by the sea coming into view on the distant horizon.
The bright sun of the day had long since disappeared and dusk was falling.
With the pace they’d set, they’d hit the city gates just before darkness fell.
And then? Ciardis thought to herself as she took a drink from the last of the remaining water from the river. What then?
The water tasted like her life. Slightly bitter. Tepid to the touch and unappealing.
Then we find allies. We coax foes to our sides. And we hope like hell that your idiotic rebellion has kept to itself and been out of the emperor’s sight while we’ve been gone, said a voice with just a bite.
Ciardis threw up a hand to shade her eyes as she searched the skies for the bearer of that voice.
In an appeasing effort to help her search, Thanar banked his wings and uncloaked to glide closer to their riding party.
She had to smile at the smooth maneuver. He could make flying look as easy as walking.
I doubt if they were all that interested in being hidden in the first place, Ciardis shot back at him wryly.
Thanar moved his hands in a street sign that she was sure wouldn’t have earned him any favors at court.
Then they were and are fools, Thanar said. Because if they think to approach allies in the same manner in which they came to us, I fear for their lives.
And our own, Sebastian said in a quiet voice.
Ciardis jumped in the saddle and spooked her horse in the process.
The high-spirited gelding dropped out of a canter and danced sideways in annoyance at its jittery rider.
Ciardis fought for control and leveled an angry glare at an amused prince heir who had matched his horse’s speed to her slowing gait.
“Apologies,” he said in a tone that conveyed anything but. “Though one would think you’d be used to that by now.”
“What?” grumbled Ciardis as she adjusted the shawl covering her hair in an unnecessary manner.
Sebastian smiled at her. “Voices in your head.”
Ciardis couldn’t help it. She dropped her hands back to her lap and laughed.
“All right, I might have deserved that,” she said, still chuckling.
Sebastian turned back to face forward. “Shall we keep going then?”
