A Crown for Assassins

by Morgan Rice

  “Then you have mine too,” Rika said, without hesitation. She looked around at the people there. “Is this everyone?”

  Wol the carpenter shook his head. “No, my lady. Half of the island is ready to stand with you. There are plenty of people who think that what Endi has done is wrong, and now that Oli is telling people about his betrayals, they’re ready to stand against him. They’re just waiting for you to give the word.”

  Rika hesitated. She had an entire rebellion, it seemed, waiting for her command, but she knew what that command would mean. If she told them to act, then people would die, and be hurt, and have their lives ruined. She thought about how much her heart had broken when she’d found out that her father had died. Could she put anyone else through that, even to stop Endi?

  The answer to that was simple: she had to.

  “Get messages out to people,” Rika said. “Tell them that the time has come to rise up. Tell them… tell them that it’s time to free Ishjemme from my brother.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Sophia felt the heat beating down on her like a club as their ship came into port in Morgassa. Sienne wound against her legs, and Sophia could only imagine what the forest cat was feeling with her layers of fur.

  “We’re here,” Sophia said to Lucas and Kate as they stared at the city alongside her. “We actually made it to Morgassa.”

  They had made good time, the wind in their favor for almost all of the journey south. Now, the capital of the other kingdom stood before them in a series of low white buildings with flat roofs. Even the larger buildings, the granaries and the palace, the warehouses and the market, were built in the same style. The dark-skinned people of the city bustled about doing all the kinds of tasks that Sophia might have seen in Ashton, plus plenty that she wouldn’t. Some of them stared at them; she wondered how many outsiders they saw.

  High Merchant N’Ka swept a hand toward the city as their ship bumped up against its dock.

  “Is it not the jewel of the world?”

  “It is a beautiful city,” Sophia admitted.

  “There are such things to see here,” the merchant continued. “Our pleasure gardens bring travelers from a thousand miles around. The temple of the seven snakes still stands despite the efforts of a hundred different invaders. Our market of hidden things—”

  “I wish that there were time to see it all,” Sophia said, interrupting him. “But I left my child and the man I love at home so that I could find my parents. I don’t want to spend any longer away from them than I have to.”

  Sophia could feel the ache that came with missing Sebastian and Violet, and she guessed that things were no better for Kate when it came to Will. This was a time for planning the next part of their journey, not for sightseeing.

  Lucas seemed to be thinking the same thing, because he took out the flat disc that could lead them to their parents, waiting for Sophia and Kate to put their hands on it. The map upon it spun into shape, the glowing point of their parents’ presence there to see. The image of a golden city shimmered in the air above the ship’s deck.

  “It’s still a long way to go,” Lucas said, as the image faded.

  Sophia nodded. “We’ll need to travel quickly.”

  She turned and saw High Merchant N’Ka staring at them with a shocked expression. She assumed that it was just the magic of the device that had him so in awe, at least until he spoke again.

  “The Forgotten City… you’re hunting for the Forgotten City.”

  “You know about it?” Sophia asked.

  “Everyone in Morgassa knows the stories,” he said. “They say it lies beyond a door of gold, but what sits beyond that, no one knows, because it will not open for them.”

  “It will open for us,” Kate said, with her usual determination. “Even if I have to break it down.”

  “The king will want to see you,” the merchant said.

  “We wouldn’t want to trouble him,” Sophia replied. She didn’t want to get caught up in the niceties of royal visits when she could be out searching for her parents.

  “You don’t understand,” High Merchant N’Ka said. “It is forbidden to search for the city. All those who do are to be brought to the king.”

  Sophia looked into the man’s mind. She could see the fear there at being caught up in something that was suddenly much larger than he had anticipated. He didn’t want to upset the guests traveling with him, especially when Sophia had soldiers with her, but he didn’t want to upset his king, either.

  “I’ll go,” Sophia said, looking around at the others. “You two can start making preparations for the journey so we don’t lose any time.”

  “Are you sure?” Kate asked, her hand on the hilt of her sword. “I don’t like the idea of you going into a strange king’s home without anyone to protect you.”

  “I’ll have Sienne,” Sophia assured her sister. “And I’ll shout for help if I need it.”

  “I’ll be waiting,” Kate promised.

  “We’ll be waiting,” Lucas corrected her.

  ***

  Sophia made her way with High Merchant N’Ka through the city to a spot that was clearly a castle, or palace, or other grand building. The white walls were offset with jewels here and there, flashes of blue painted on it so that it seemed like an ocean wave. Guards stood outside the palace, holding spears and with short blades at their belts.

  They said something in a language that Sophia didn’t understand, but she got the gist of it: they wanted to know who the stranger was. High Merchant N’Ka said something in reply, and the guards looked at Sophia in the same way that he had when she’d mentioned the city. They opened the gates, then fell in beside Sophia as they escorted her inside.

  The interior of the palace was far more extravagant than the outside had been. The walls were painted with a mixture of geometric designs and pictures that showed men and women in the midst of what seemed like heroic acts: trekking across wastelands, fighting strange creatures, climbing cliffs. Servants stood around the palace, dressed in simple white kilts or dresses, clearly waiting for instructions.

  The guards led them to a large chamber, where more servants and guards lined the way toward a throne apparently carved from stone, on which sat a muscular man who must have been in his forties. His crown was crafted from ivory, set with diamonds. High Merchant N’Ka bowed deeply as he approached, but Sophia only offered a dip of her head. She suspected that rulers weren’t supposed to bow to one another.

  A quick exchange followed, in the same language as before. The king called out something, and a woman in the white dress of a servant moved beside him. The king spoke again.

  “I am King Akar of Morgassa,” the woman said, translating his words with an expression so impassive that she might as well not have been there. “High Merchant N’Ka was sent to trade with you, Queen Sophia, not to bring you here before me. Although now that I see you, I am glad that he has.”

  “I brought myself,” Sophia answered, “because I believe that something I am looking for might lie within your kingdom.”

  The king’s expression turned serious. “The Forgotten City. It is a forbidden place. We do not go there. You will not go there. Stay instead as my guest. Let me show you how beautiful Morgassa is.”

  “With respect,” Sophia said, “I must journey to the Forgotten City.”

  King Akar’s expression went from serious to irritated. He spoke in a long stream that sounded all the stranger for the translator’s lack of inflection. “When I was a boy, men from other lands would come to this kingdom in search of its lost treasures. We tried to tell them that they were not lost; that they were hidden for a reason, and that they were ours. Fools in masks tried to get us to worship a goddess who was not ours, and tried to take gold and people. They put marks on them and said that they owed this goddess just for existing. They called the ones among us with magic evil, and tried to kill them. They thought that they could come to my home and take what they wanted. Do you think you can take what you
want, Queen Sophia?”

  Sophia had the feeling that her next words would determine a lot of what happened to her and the people with her. The king had made no threats, but the guards around them made it clear that he had the power to enforce whatever he decided.

  “I had a mark like the ones you’re talking about once,” Sophia said, “and if you’ve heard of me, you know that I have as much reason as anyone to hate the Church of the Masked Goddess, that I set the indentured in my kingdom free, and that I’m currently looking at your servant and wondering how much choice she gets in any of this.”

  King Akar looked over to the translator, then back to Sophia.

  “A good response,” he said through her. “And one that will see you welcome as a guest in my home. But you still haven’t said what you’re looking for in my kingdom.”

  “I came here to find my parents,” Sophia said. “I’m not here to steal, or to hurt people, or to do anything else, just to see the parents I haven’t seen since I was a child. I didn’t even know that this ‘Forgotten City’ existed until I saw it in a device my parents left behind to find them.” She sought something else to say. “I have left my child and my husband behind to do this. I have left my kingdom at a point when it probably needs me to keep the peace. If you have people with magic, let one of them look into my mind. They’ll see the truth of all I’m saying.”

  King Akar sat there for a minute, staring across at her.

  “That will not be necessary,” he said at last. “You will have my assistance in preparing a caravan for the journey, and my translator will go with you to help you.” The translator looked at him in obvious surprise, then continued. “I warn you now, though, it will be a hard journey. The wastes are unforgiving, the salt plains even more so.”

  “I don’t care about any of that,” Sophia assured him. “I’ll do whatever it takes to find my parents.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  With every stride his army took southward, the Master of Crows could feel himself growing stronger. With every town and village that fell to them, every death, every battle against those who tried to make a stand, his creatures fed and he was sustained.

  He smiled as he thought of everything this small island kingdom had given him and that smile only widened into a rictus when he considered all that it would in the coming days. Unlike the continent, it hadn’t been at war with him for years. Its people didn’t know the best ways to hide, didn’t know to avoid his crows, and he hadn’t depleted its stock of those with magic yet.

  “I wonder if they realize what they lost when they killed Siobhan,” he mused aloud. How long had the woman of the fountain kept him and those like him out of the island she lived on? If not her, then the former rulers, the Danses. Now, there was nothing to stop him.

  One of his creatures landed on his outstretched hand, looking out over the advancing army as he carried it. They’d passed the ruins of Monthys now, the great army passing over the river that barred the way into the main part of the kingdom. Ashton lay to the south, and the Danses’ children with it.

  “I will take their land, I will kill those with power,” the Master of Crows promised the birds around him. “And that will give us enough power to take other bastions held by those who would defend them.”

  The Master of Crows could feel his birds’ approval at that thought, but then, they always liked anything that promised to feed them more. This was different, though. This island kingdom promised enough power that they could take anywhere they wanted.

  On a whim, the Master of Crows started to whistle. It wasn’t something he normally did; he’d not done it for a long time. The tune was so old that even he didn’t know where it had come from. He whistled, and around him every crow, every raven, every magpie joined in, the cacophony spreading out over his army so that the boot steps seemed to slam in time to the off-kilter song of the birds.

  The Master of Crows looked around at those who marched nearest to him. If his aides thought it was strange, they said nothing. They’d learned to say nothing.

  He stopped whistling when he saw the crow cages.

  The gibbets should have been full. His outriders had one task, and that was to fill them, whether it was with those with power, or the inhabitants of villages, or simply with those who were too slow to get out of the way. Doing it fed his crows, even as it sowed the fear of what would happen to those who did not surrender.

  At first, the Master of Crows thought that perhaps someone in his ranks had been lazy. He turned to an aide, ready to issue the order to summon back the outriders so that examples could be made, but then he paused, taking a second look at the gibbets. He stalked over to them, angular and graceless as a hopping crow, looking at them first through one eye, then the other.

  “What do you see?” he asked the nearest of his aides.

  The young man paled as the Master of Crows asked him the question. “S…someone has broken the cages, my lord.”

  “Correct,” the Master of Crows said, taking in the snapped locks and the broken chains. The bars on some of the gibbets were bent, while others had been tipped onto their side.

  “And what do you think that means?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, my lord,” the aide said.

  “Then think!” the Master of Crows snapped back, rounding on him. “If someone has broken the cages, what does that mean?”

  “Rebellion, my lord?” the aide said with a frown. “Peasants trying to get back their families? Witches who still had enough power to break free?”

  The guesses were all ones that fit with things they’d seen in the past, but in their own way, each was a foolish guess.

  “The outriders are well armed, and each set of gibbets would have guards,” the Master of Crows said. “More importantly, I did not see this happen. I did not see it, do you understand?”

  “No, my lord,” the aide said. “I thought… I thought that you saw everything.”

  The man’s faith in his general was the only thing that saved his life right then. Instead, the Master of Crows struck out at one of the cages with his foot, bending the metal as he sent it flying. He sent his awareness out into his crows, and quickly found what he was looking for.

  He stalked out from the path, out among the rocks and the heather, until he found the small ditch where a dozen of his outriders’ bodies had been left. The men had sword cuts marring their bodies, and the holes that marked out bullet wounds.

  “This is not from a few peasants,” the Master of Crows said to his men. “Note that there are no bodies from others here, no signs of them being able to fight back? They were ambushed by experts. Experts who could do it without being spotted by my birds.”

  That as much as the rest of it told him that these were dangerous foes. He had beaten whole armies whose generals hadn’t worked out how to stop him from seeing every move that they made. This was something that was enough to make him pause, and think.

  He could have let this go. It was just a few lost morsels compared to the feast that his birds would have in Ashton, after all. If that had been all it was, then he might have left it. At most, he would have told some of his men to keep a watch for people fleeing from them. Yet if there was a foe like this out there, he wanted to know. He wanted them dead.

  “Where are you?” he mused, sending his awareness out into his creatures.

  He scoured the countryside around them, suspecting that those who had done this could not have gone far. The Master of Crows knew the condition of bodies as well as anyone alive, and his outriders had not been dead for long. His birds flew their patterns, dividing up the land around as the thermals took them. It took him a minute or two before he realized that something was missing.

  There was a whole strip of ground where none of his birds flew. No, that wasn’t quite true, because a raven wandered into it even as he watched, only for it to disappear from his awareness as if it no longer existed. Or as if someone had picked it off the moment that it got too close.

&
nbsp; He bombarded the area with his crows, determined to see more, to find out what was happening. Some were taken down as the others had been, but more got through, too many to stop completely.

  He saw them then. A column of figures hiked through the landscape: villagers and townsfolk, people with wounds that suggested they had been the ones in the cages and others who merely looked as though they had run ahead of the army. They moved through rocky areas of heath and moor, sticking to whatever cover they could find, led on by two figures who did not look ordinary. A man and a woman, too similar too be anything other than siblings, led the small column.

  The Master of Crows recognized Ulf and Frig Skyddar instantly. A man should know his enemies, after all. They were firing short bows, bringing down as many of his birds as they could. He heard them call out to the column of refugees, and it broke into a run, heading for a deep gouge in the moorland, and an area of forest that lay at the far end.

  “The ones who did this are to the southeast,” the Master of Crows said, coming back to himself. He strode over to a war horse, mounting it without caring whose it was. The beast whinnied and reared, perhaps sensing what was on its back, but he mastered it quickly. “I require a hundred men with me, now.”

  Men rushed to their own horses, mounting and moving in behind the Master of Crows as he kicked his beast into a gallop.

  “I want them before they reach the safety of the woods,” he called out. “Kill everyone we find. There are to be no survivors. The crows feast today.”

  ***

  Frig cursed to herself as she urged the column of refugees to move faster, because the truth was that there was only so fast that hungry, often injured people could move.

  “I’m not sure I like being the hunted rather than the hunter,” Ulf said beside her as they loped along.

  “It certainly lends a sense of perspective,” Frig agreed. She glanced up, seeing the crows that now filled the sky, not letting them out of their sight. There was no way that even she and Ulf could hope to kill them all to blind their owner again.