The Last Emperor

by Kari Gregg

  “He wanted me to visit him in the capitol.” Arit grunted. “No thanks. If he wants to see me, he knows where I am.”

  Chuckling, his dad shook his head. “You two are so alike.”

  “I’m nothing like him.” Arit growled. “Nothing.”

  “You aren’t interested in political intrigues like your sire.” Dad patted Arit’s back reassuringly. “He’s alpha to his core, though, and so are you. When you feel insecure or threatened, you will both always try to maneuver the circumstances to your advantage, and that was what your sire attempted by inviting you to the capitol. He hoped to lure you onto his territory, his ground, where he has the strongest likelihood of retaining control of the situation.” His dad smiled. “You countered his offer by inviting him into your territory because here is where you feel safest.” He returned his attention to his breakfast. “One of you will eventually break the stalemate. I think you’ll win the war with your sire. He’ll accompany one of the tour groups from the capitol someday. No warning that he’s coming. Benjic will try to retain the slim strategic advantage he believes surprise will grant him, but he’ll arrive on the train with a tour group one afternoon, mark my words.” The programming on the television screen moved from commercials back to the breaking news about the last Marisek. “My guess is soon.”

  Anxiety swamped Arit, and along with it, anger. Arit’s heart pounded. Adrenaline dumping into him made the hand holding his fork shake. He didn’t want to see his sire. Didn’t care. The only answers he’d ever needed was the persistent evidence of his other parent’s absence. If foolish hope screamed at him to give the stranger who was his sire a second chance, then hope could shut the fuck up.

  Arit shrugged a diffident shoulder. “As long as he’s a paying customer,” he said, but deep down, he wished the bastard who had knocked up his dad and lit out of the mountains to scramble for power in the capitol would show up. Arit would enjoy putting that particular capitol shifter through the paces of nightlong hunts and the primitive conditions away from the lodge, in their upper camp where he taught clients how to thrive in the wild.

  “Oh, he’ll pay. You’ve been making him pay for his mistakes since your teens.” His dad snickered. “The sparks the two of you will strike off each other should be entertaining. Keep the bloodshed to a minimum. That’s all I ask. I’ll work hard at not saying ‘I told you so’ while I patch you up after.”

  Arit bristled. “No capitol shifter will ever hold his own in a fight against me.”

  His dad laughed. “You go on believing that.”

  Chapter Three

  Abdicating the throne turned out to be more complicated than Nick had anticipated, and he’d expected it to be a pain in the ass.

  He kept his posture straight and a cool smile in place as another tribesman—one in an endless stream of lower-level dignitaries whose names Nick couldn’t be bothered to learn—twirled him around another opulent ballroom. Lydia, an oddity as a human guest of the empire, waltzed by in the arms of an elder. Rolan refused to play social games altogether and glared on the fringes of the dance floor. Unaccustomed to formalwear, Nick itched in the new clothes he’d grudgingly ordered from the tailor recommended by Benjic once Nick had agreed to this farce.

  Ten parties. Ten.

  Each of the nine tribes had demanded an opportunity to host the last emperor during the abdication festivities, plus this, the tenth and final gala organized by the rebel council as its formal farewell to the monarchy. The tribes’ response to Nick astonished him. By war’s end, the people had hated the Mariseks. Nick distinctly recalled their loathing. When news of the imperial family’s execution had spread, aristocrats who had escaped the purges to fight had been bitterly disappointed, but the gambit had succeeded. Rather than rallying around the next Marisek in line to the throne, the White Army had crumbled. No one, not the nobles or their distant relatives, had cried or mourned Nick’s parents, his brothers and sisters…or for Nick.

  He and his lawyers had hoped to gather enough leverage to negotiate the retrieval of his family’s remains and the bodies of their most devoted retainers from their unmarked grave. He would give up a lot, including his crown and title, to see his family decently buried—if possible in the Hall of Kings in the cathedral near the Winter Palace, where Mariseks had been laid to rest for four centuries. Nick had offered the tribes a hefty bribe from the Wallach trust and a blank check in arranging his abdication in trade for a state funeral for his lost family, but Nick had braced for disappointment.

  Instead, the tribes had welcomed him “home” with parades, lavish parties, and more pomp than the tribes had mustered for any event in Nick’s memory. The grand celebrations and moon festivals he’d experienced as a boy paled in comparison.

  The peasantry loved him.

  Once the council absorbed the shock of his continued existence, most elders had come to admire and respect him, too.

  Nika’s escape from the war to lead a commoner’s life had won instant acclamation. Here, the tribes crowed, was an emperor unafraid to get his hands dirty, which mystified Nick because managing a yarn shop wasn’t intense manual labor by any stretch. The closest Nick came to breaking a sweat was loading and unloading displays for his mom’s booths at farmers markets. Restocking their inventory wasn’t much of a task, either. Most days, he sat at a computer or at the head of a table while he taught middle-class empty nesters to knit. Compared to Rolan, who worked as general labor at a farm every single day, Nick was soft. Pampered. If the tribes desired an everyman of character in its exiled nobility, they wouldn’t find a better example than Nick’s adopted brother.

  The peasantry would countenance no departure from their glad fantasies of an emperor who had become one of them, though. The media’s discovery that Nick Goode was still making payments on his student loans had sealed the deal.

  “…paint you in full regalia for your portrait in the gallery inside the Hall of Kings,” the wealthy tribesman currently twirling Nick around the dance floor blathered on. “That your ascendency to the throne will be temporary and brief matters not to history.” The bastard smiled, self-absorbed importance dripping from his every word. “I’ve lobbied the council to delay your abdication ceremony until the portrait is completed, so we must arrange your sitting for an appropriate artist rapidly.”

  Annoyance fresh and hot, Nick made noncommittal noises.

  Until his family’s remains had been identified and decently buried, Nick would abdicate nothing, a point he’d made clear to council elders. Locating the graves hadn’t been a problem. Although Nick had no memories of the place and could recall nothing of the executions before reaching the top of the Ural mountain range during his march to freedom long afterward, the burial site had been engraved into his dad’s psyche. Dad had taken Nick to see it before the tribes closed the borders to humans while Nick was still a boy. So Nick, at least, would know.

  No one else did.

  Headlines occasionally blared rumors of the imperial family’s ultimate fate, but those in the tribes who had known the secret had perished in the war. The only survivor of the work crew that rebel soldiers had drafted to bury their sins, Dad had maintained his stubborn silence, because revealing what he knew would have endangered Nick. Dad hadn’t trusted the tribes with his newly adopted son. Nick hadn’t trusted them, either.

  Dad had spoken about the executions only once, during their lone journey into tribe territory to visit the gravesite. Nick remembered little of the night his family had died except his fear. Pain. His mother’s scream before gunfire drowned out her last breath would echo in his ears forever. Because Nick could count his scars, he knew he’d been shot seven times and jagged white lines traced where bayonets had torn into him. What he couldn’t recall, the damage done to his body testified to all he’d suffered, but he knew nothing of what transpired after the shooting had started.

  Only his dad did. Paul Goode had pitched a tent with Nick near the burial site, and after his dad led him from the grave,
he’d told Nick everything. What he’d seen and heard. Who had committed each inexcusable act. How the rebels had stripped all of the bodies and fondled his dead sisters’ breasts. They’d castrated his father and Toly. Nick could only be grateful he’d been young, unimportant, and lost in such a large group of victims, because the rebels had intended to behead and dismember the entire imperial party, burn the pieces, and scatter the ashes before the rising sun broke the darkness and spotlighted their shame.

  The soldiers hadn’t counted on the rigors of their task, however. Even for tribesman equipped with sharp claws, ripping apart a body was hard, tedious work. By dawn, the rebels still had Nick and two of his youngest sisters left to desecrate. Behind schedule, fearful of local peasants discovering them, the rebels had created a pyre with only half the corpses, which had burned the evidence of their crimes poorly, and they’d forced a human work crew selected from a nearby labor camp to bury the bones and remaining bodies whole.

  Including Nick’s.

  Paul Goode had been chosen for the work crew. Having invested months in scheming a possible avenue of escape if selected for work outside his prison camp, Nick’s dad had taken advantage of post-execution chaos to slip away from his fellow prisoners, which had saved his life because rebels had lined up the other humans and killed them in a spray of bullets once their task had been completed. No one would have faulted his adopted dad for running then. Fleeing would have been smarter. Paul Goode didn’t run, though. Couldn’t.

  He’d noticed the subtle rise and fall of Nika Marisek’s chest before tumbling him into the hastily dug grave, had felt the slight whisper of Nika’s breath.

  As soon as the soldiers had gone and Paul had judged it safe, he’d emerged from the forest and circled around the fallen men he had worked alongside throughout his imprisonment. He’d grabbed a discarded shovel to pierce the loamy soil. Buried alive, Nika Marisek had nevertheless died that day because the horrifically injured child Paul Goode had dragged from the earth had become Paul’s son, Nick.

  And Nick Goode didn’t give two shits about formal regalia and hanging his portrait in the Hall of Kings.

  He had tolerated the string of parties only while he waited for the team that had retrieved his family’s remains to finish identification. The process had been complicated by the bones of the human work crew killed there, and flash flooding at the site had disturbed the grave, too. Search and recovery had taxed the tribe’s forensic anthropologists to such a degree, the ruling council had swallowed their collective pride to open the border to human scientists who had offered to help. Sorting the bones, many of which were only fragments, and assigning each to the correct victim was nevertheless slow.

  “You’ll need to shift, of course.” The oblivious tribesman smiled. “No portrait would be complete without a representation of your beast.”

  The tribes had been trying to force him into a shift to parade the white pelt of Nick’s wolf since he’d arrived in the territories. His answer stayed the same. “No.”

  “All the emperors were painted with their beasts,” his dance partner chided him. “Don’t be shy. White wolves have been gone from the tribes many seasons. Your people long to see you.”

  “My people haven’t seen a white wolf because they murdered every white wolf they could during the war.” Nick stopped, finished with this dance and this conversation. He shrugged out of the tribesman’s arms. “I hope you enjoy the rest of your evening.”

  Before he’d taken more than a few steps, Rolan joined him on the dance floor. “Okay?”

  Grim, Nick nodded. “I need a break.”

  “Let Lydia charm the high muckety-mucks for a while.” Rolan jerked his chin at her, still waltzing nearby, and grasped Nick’s arm to guide him through the throng. “She’s surprisingly skillful at it. Better than you and me.”

  Though thoroughly schooled in the art of diplomacy from birth, Nick agreed. Ruthlessly sweet and engaging, Lydia was a force of nature Nick was grateful to have on his side. “She’ll cover for me.”

  Rolan smirked. “By the time we return, she’ll have rallied the elders to support striking a commemorative coin in your honor.”

  A bark of laughter caught Nick by surprise. “Hasn’t she already?”

  “Probably.”

  Content to follow Rolan’s lead, Nick speared through the crowd to a wall of glass doors thrown wide along one side of the ballroom. His brother was right. The sparkle of Lyd’s smile rivaled the gilded chandeliers and gleaming architectural flourishes of the venue. Her green balloon skirt swished as bright as an emerald among the throng of tribesmen and women outfitted in ceremonial black. Her laughter rang out as a happy counterpoint to the sedate music of the orchestra hired for the event.

  The tribes didn’t trust humans. Many still believed humans were an inferior species.

  They nonetheless adored Lydia Whatney. As much as the tribes had embraced Nick, they loved her more. Nick was certain of it and equally positive, if Lyd decided her best friend should be honored with a commemorative coin, Nick would carry one in his likeness in his pockets before long. He squinted at her. “Is she dancing with Benjic?”

  “Who the hell knows.” Rolan tugged him. “C’mon. Let’s get while the getting is good.”

  An annex of the Winter Palace, the ballroom spilled out to a terrace skirting a formal garden. Despite the cooler temperatures of autumn, partygoers collected in groups near the building, so Rolan guided him into the surrounding greenery. Towering redwoods soon blotted out the stars, gravel paths winding between the enormous trees and occasionally threading through arches carved into the trunks. White flowers bloomed in the darkness alongside fronds of silvery leaves. The Winter Palace’s moon garden of flora specially selected for night viewing nestled among statuary, marble benches, and fountains. Wineglasses with dainty stems abandoned by the party’s revelers dotted the landscape. As Nick and Rolan retreated deeper into the forest, they passed a pair of neatly folded tuxedoes—at least two of the tribe had elected to roam the imperial grounds in their animal forms.

  Nick had toured the palace earlier, most of which had been remodeled for government use and was therefore open to the public, but the ballroom and famous gardens had remained closed, used only for the grandest of state events.

  The minders that the elder council had appointed for Nick, Rolan, and Lydia had not offered to show Nick the imperial suite that had been his home every winter of his first seven years, and he hadn’t asked to see it. The rooms had been stripped after the rebels had captured them. Nick had read newspaper accounts of the pillaging as a college student. Why they’d torn his family’s private rooms apart he couldn’t say since the furnishings in their personal quarters had been sturdy, serviceable pieces, the art and decorations scant. Eton and Olina accepted finery in the rest of the palace as their due, and necessary, but outside the public eye, they’d preferred to live simply. The peasantry had still ransacked the imperial suite, prying up the floorboards and punching holes in the walls in search of hidden loot. The damage had been so severe, perhaps the rebels had sealed off the rooms rather than make repairs. Just bolted the doors shut.

  After the war, the tribes had shuttered away anything hinting at the disgraceful and criminal treatment his family had suffered after they’d surrendered.

  Except Nick.

  They couldn’t close the door on him.

  “Here,” he said, taking the trail to the right when the path forked.

  As a boy, his parents had seldom permitted him access to the moon garden or the grand ballroom, but like all the other emperor’s isolated children, Nika had learned his way from the family’s private rooms to an overlook from which the gallant opulence of parties and festivals could be observed in secret.

  “Through the bushes,” he said over his shoulder to Rolan as he plowed into a berry thicket that seemed vaguely familiar.

  “Ow. Damn it, Nick. Wait!”

  Nick couldn’t. Excitement zipped through him, prodding him
from a hurried walk to a jog, then to a sprint through the undergrowth. He ignored the thorns and briars snagging his clothes and pricking his skin. Unimportant. The trail he and his siblings had forged twenty years ago had faded, overtaken by wild brambles and low vines threatening to trip him in his haste, but Nick would not slow. Although the grand ballroom had been faithfully restored to its former elegance, Nika Marisek had been inside it very little. None of that part of the palace was recognizable to him barring pictures he’d seen in books.

  This stretch of unmanicured forest had been an intimate friend to him, though, and a regular haunt for his brothers and sisters alongside him.

  This, he knew.

  Ignoring Rolan’s loud curses, Nick ran. He nimbly jumped a fallen tree limb, the trunk to his left as massive as a house. The wood had splintered since the last time he’d leapt through the tangle of branches, the stringy fibrous bark sloughing away in the intervening years as woodland creatures reclaimed the trunk for their own. Memory guided Nick through the mess, and when he emerged on the other side, he turned right—back toward the ballroom annex. He almost lost the path. Lush, fertile growth had filled in this area of the palace grounds, and without the imperial children’s feet beating down the brush, evidence of the trail had disappeared. None would discover it, unless they knew where to search.

  Heart thumping a glad staccato, Nick raced to the copse of trees he’d known as a child and, upon reaching it, he collapsed upon a flat thigh-high boulder that had provided prime seating frequently fought over by the emperor’s children. His fingers relearned the shallow dips and grooves in the rock, now covered with a thin carpet of moss.

  Directly ahead, the lights of the ballroom glittered like a jewel.

  How many nights had Nika and his sisters watched the pageantry from afar? The dark formalwear of the rich contrasted with the brightness of the venue, making it easy to distinguish nobles from wealthy commoners who, forbidden from wearing black, had traditionally opted for somber grays and midnight blues. That much had changed. The peasantry hadn’t been barred from black clothing since the revolution and wore it in abundance now. Nick spotted little else in the milling crowd on the terraces and inside.