“These are dark times,” Sari spoke softly, echoing Nialls’s earlier thoughts.
“They are,” Nialls whispered. He did not meet Sari’s eyes.
“Pontiff Garethe was a good man,” she noted, gingerly cleaning the boy’s misshapen skin with a cool, damp cloth. “I met him a few times during my stay at Godwyn Keep. He had such a positive outlook on the world. He drove others to look deep into the hearts of their fellow man and cultivate the goodness there. Pontiff Evelina knew doctrine like no other, but Garethe knew how to grow and sustain the living faith in each one of us. He will be missed.”
“I suppose each particular Pontiff brings their own strengths to the office,” Nialls agreed. “My father was fond of saying that a king’s legacy is built from the interactions he has with the people. Pontiff Garethe was no king, but he worked harder than most to improve the foundation of the Godwyn faith.”
Sari opened the jar after Demarque’s skin was clean and applied a thick reddish salve to the boy’s body. A rich mint smell filled the room. “And the growing news of the conflict in La Zandia is disheartening to this old woman as well.”
“You aren’t the only one,” Nialls replied. “This self-proclaimed Marcher Lord has a lot to answer for. The First Warden is doing what he can to secure the region.”
“War is not the answer. As a healer, I can verify that myself. So many young people killed, and for what? Land. Power. Wealth. Even religion. Men quibble and fight over the most mundane things. There is nothing so gruesome as a young man missing one of his limbs bleeding to his death under your care or a festering wound bubbling green foulness from the thrust of a sword. These were cases brought to me even without a war—just stupid men who got in fights and lost. But to use men as though they are cattle, knowing they can be slaughtered as easily as the stock that feeds us. Incomprehensible. Powerful men have nothing to gain and yet everything to lose for their people. It turns my belly.”
Over the years, Sari had become like a surrogate mother to him, one who was not afraid to speak her mind. After dealing with aristocrats, her candor was usually welcome.
“I am working as hard as I can to prevent an escalation to battle. I don’t want a war,” the High King said, straightening and crossing his arms. “The Marcher Lord has denied all forms of diplomacy. He intends to take La Zandia, and I mean to prevent it.”
Sari cooled a bit. “Patience is the key with many things in life, Your Majesty. Please, make it a priority in this instance. The mothers of the Kingdom beg you.”
“I have sought a meeting with one of the Marcher Lord’s emissaries. There is yet to be a response. I have to protect the surrounding provinces at all costs. Those people look to the throne for protection. The Marcher Lord should be feeling the Kingdom’s sanctions as well, and that—combined with the inordinate amount of force—should give him reason to pause and consider peace before bloodshed. With any luck, it will be over before it can even begin.”
“The people of La Zandia are passionate, Your Majesty. I hope for their sake and our sake they know what is best for them.” The old woman wiped her fingers clean of the salve, and looked down on Demarque with sad eyes. “My mum had a saying: ‘No matter how hard life becomes, it always works out in the end.’ An ill king cannot rule with wisdom, and you look exhausted. I think you would do wise to heed those words and not be so hard on yourself.”
The High King smiled, hearing his mother in Sari’s words as well. “I’ll try.”
Sari stroked the boy’s locks of hair and his eyes slowed in their dreaming wildness.
Nialls left his private chambers. The hallways were empty this late as he expected. He wondered what price he would have to pay to make Sari’s final words come true.
* * * * *
When he left the palace and drew his first full breath of night air, Nialls pushed down the apprehension gnawing inside him. Although nights of scattered sleep and constant worry had sapped much of his faculties—and he knew it to be true if Sari had noticed—the need to discover the intentions of his enemies had failed to diminish. Now, in the middle of the night, unrequited necessity brought him to the lush green Wyllspring Garden of Aris Shae. He had only done this once before when he was crowned High King—now it could endanger the Kingdom.
In front of him, a set of marble stairs bit deep into the dark green grass of the rising hill, their pale stone absorbing the starlight to become a glowing ephemeral trail vanishing into the well-tended garden. Red maples, apple and cherry trees, and giant rhododendrons grew to either side of the stairs, their branches manicured and shaped by the hands of gardeners. Most of the flowering plants had bloomed earlier in the summer, but the intoxicating scent of lilacs still clung to the air. Like giant arms, tall walls sprouted around Nialls in a smooth circle, containing the whole of the garden. It was ironic that such a beautiful place could harbor one whose design for the living was death.
When Nialls took his first step upon the stone staircase, a shiver ran down his neck, over his back, and into his legs. He quickly pushed it aside. It would not do to show fear when he got to the top of the stairs. She would know. He remained focused, knowing it was the one thing that would help him tonight.
At the top of the stairs the hill leveled off to reveal a wide pool that mirrored the starry sky as though twinkling ice chips were submerged beneath the water’s surface. Like the garden, the pool was circular and enclosed by marble blocks, rising to Nialls’s knees from the ground. The only marring of the water’s flat plane was an ancient tree that rose from the middle of the pool, its dead branches crooked and broken against the night sky and its bark as white as the bones of a sun-exposed skeleton. A wound shaped like a diamond gaped in the tree, black and rotting. The dead trunk and gnarled roots disappeared beneath the water and deep into the soil of the fountain, but twining up from the depths grew a vine as thick as a man’s thigh that wrapped lovingly about the tree and branched into a new canopy of thorns, leaves, and flowers. It hugged the tree, and crimson rose flowers blossomed as large as Nialls’s fist, giving the first impression a giant rose tree grew instead of a vine. If it were not for the tree, the rose vine would have no trellis to grow upon; without the rose vine, the tree would have been barren, cold, and an ugly sore within its beautiful garden home.
Nialls rarely came to the Rosemere, the worries and duties of his life allowing no room for dalliance of any kind, but even if he could, he would not choose to visit the death spot of Aerom Fatherhead. It was not due to an aversion to the scene—he revered it—but his stress at coming here was due to it also being the Witch’s prison.
Surrounded by silence and feeling very alone, Nialls stood before the fountain and looked into its depths. Nothing seemed out of place. Striking down the All Father’s son and killing those not of her pagan faith, Isere the Witch had fled deep into the wilderness after the War of the Kingdom, seeking ways to establish her pagan order as the new hierarchy. After winters of evading the newly wrought Godwyn Keep, Pontiff Jilliam Horaise had captured her. For her crimes, she had been imprisoned within the very spring her bloody blow had caused. As long as the power of the All Father held the world together, there she would remain, undying, unable to find peace for the harm she had done humanity.
Even with his misgivings, it was for her Nialls had come here tonight.
He concentrated on the depths of the pool and hummed. It was a single note, one with a very low pitch brought from the depths of his chest. With it, he reached into the Rosemere with his thoughts, pulling on the darkness of the water like a curtain across a window. It came naturally to him, as if he had done it every day of his life. He entered the pool with his thoughts, riding the sound of his voice to call forth a door, his mind the key that would allow it to open. Only the royal family of Aris Shae possessed the knowledge for summoning the Witch—it was part of his ancestry and only used in the direst of times. Sometimes she came unbidden, but that was more rare even than a summoning. The fear was gone from Nialls now, repla
ced by a focus necessary to draw the apparition from the limbo existence she was forced to endure.
But she did not come. Nothing happened.
The High King let the note fall off of his lips and disappear into the garden. He had somehow failed. The presence of the prison’s doorway and his ability to connect with it was there. He had firmly commanded the Witch appear. And yet she had not.
He was about to leave, believing his failure based on lack of sleep, when blackness devoid of substance spread from the depths of the pool, and the water moved sluggishly around the tree as though a hand stirred it underneath the surface. The water spat and hissed like a cat, flinging droplets into the air as it moved more quickly. The air deadened, silencing even the High King’s thoughts, his exposed skin clammy and his entire being screaming at him to flee. Though Nialls had ended his call, the pool continued to move with a will of its own, and tendrils of black mist slowly emanated from the tree like long fingers trying to grasp life. Nialls remained where he stood, his fear clenched tight, knowing the Witch could not hurt him. She could no longer touch the physical world; it was her riddled advice that could prove Nialls’s undoing.
Just when Nialls thought the maddening coldness emanating from the pool was going to leach him of all warmth, the shadows of the night gathered together in one place and coalesced into a ghostly figure wearing a cloak that hung on the air as if underwater and a cowl that enveloped a terrible darkness. The specter floated upon the churning water of the Rosemere’s surface, arms hanging at its side, the white tree and its rose vine visible through the transparent phantom.
There was nothing shrunken about it that suggested an old woman; this was not the entity Nialls remembered calling so long ago. It was not the Witch.
It was something else entirely.
—I have come, Shadow King—
The voice was smooth and fluid within his head, a dulled dagger behind his eyes.
“You are not the thing I summoned,” Nialls answered. He stood erect, his shoulders pushed back to suppress the shiver threatening anew.
—And you still live. What a pity—
“I’m sorry to disappoint,” the High King replied angrily, guarding his interests.
The shade broadened, its cloak billowing as if in a strong breeze.
—It matters not. I see fear you repress. You reek of it, deep down in that cringing soul. Your Kingdom’s destruction will be all the more potent with you alive, witnessing it—
Nialls clenched his jaw. He did not know whom this thing represented. “Who are you? Where is the Witch? Of what terrible destruction do you speak?”
—I am not the impotent Witch. No, Shadow King, she is watching with maddened interest, angry at my transgression, made angrier still because she is imprisoned while I am free—
Whoever it was, this creature was aware of all the events Isere would be. But a part of the High King knew this creature was not bound in space as the Witch was, which made it extremely dangerous. It was powerful to use the Rosemere’s prison, and it stood to reason the cloaked figure knew a great deal. If Nialls could find a way to keep it talking, he might learn something of his fracturing Kingdom and the reasons for its disintegration.
“Why did you try to kill me?” he questioned.
—I see you are worrying about my power here. Do not. I have no intention of polluting the tool of my design. I merely wanted to see what stuff you are made of—
“And send a mere child to a gruesome death?”
The apparition did not move, its black gaze pointed at him. “Who are you?” Nialls pressed.
The water of the pool spat angrily, its cool mist falling on Nialls’s face.
—Shadow King, you do not command me. No one in the Kingdom does—
“Then you are a servant of the Marcher Lord?”
—He has voracious appetites. One of them is your Kingdom—
“Did he attempt to assassinate me?”
—It seemed to get your notice, Shadow King—
“You are just a tool then, a means to an end, a charlatan, a poisoner of innocent children.” Fire bolstered Nialls. “Are you so cowardly you couldn’t attack me yourself?”
—Oh, I am much more than that—
“You stole the Hammer from Godwyn Keep then?”
—No, I did not. I would never pollute myself by entering those fallow hallways filled with the lying hypocrisy of repressive ages. The Hammer is within my grasp. It is always within my grasp. In time, it will even the battle—
It was difficult to take any truth from this creature. Did the apparition intend to use the Hammer on the battlefield as Nialls had suspected, or was he referencing a larger battle Dendreth had warned the High King about?
—Your Pontiff is dead—
The words shattered Nialls’s thoughts. The creature said the words with so much rancor it was almost difficult to breathe. “He was a brave man to the end,” Nialls argued.
—He was a lying fool, the worst of his kind. You know nothing of him—
The words stabbed like a sword into Nialls’s forehead. The pool hissed in satisfaction at the High King’s pain.
—His deceit will one day be revealed. He burns where he is now—
“Why have you come here? To merely taunt?”
—I have come bearing a message. Your Kingdom is dying, Shadow King. The Marcher Lord soon moves against you. It was ordained long ago. The futile future will come to pass—
“And that is it? Why tell me?”
—The satisfaction lies in you knowing; the satisfaction lies in your impotence—
The pit of frustration that Nialls had suppressed for the last week rose up into his chest and radiated through his body. He realized, then, that it might be the shade’s true intent—to goad the High King into making mistakes that helped the figure’s cause. He would have to listen to the thing’s words. Later, he could try to decipher them and distill them into the truth.
Nialls pointed at the hovering shadow. “How can you justify such cruelty on the world?”
—You know, the burned boy is not your son—
Nialls stood still, shackled in disbelief. “What did you say?”
—The burned husk of a boy you left to come here. Visiting him will not help your dying son—
“How dare you…” Nialls began.
—I could save the prince’s life—
“What do you know about my son?” Nialls said angrily.
A low, scraping sound filled his mind, as though a grating of stone—a deep, haunting chuckle.
—He dies as you die. Every day he grows weaker as do you. When he is gone, your Kingdom is gone. No more heirs, Shadow King. No more hope for your long line. He will die. The time has come to set right the powers of the world and begin anew. Power corrupts, as it corrupted the salacious, dead Pontiff, and it has corrupted you—
“As it did you?” Nialls shot back, finding it difficult to contain his anger and not launch himself at the shadowy apparition.
—Your son’s life is in my hands. All of your lives are. Ironic, isn’t it? I am the one person you cannot command. Would you save your son with one wish, or would you rather have knowledge of the end of your Kingdom and let your son die? Choose—
“My son is none of your concern,” Nialls shouted, tired of the conversation. “Tell me, if you are so powerful, why not accomplish the end on your own?”
—It takes a spark to produce a fire. I am that spark, but others need to join with mine. More will come. In time, the Kingdom you love and those you care about shall feel the heat, and it will be too late. Of all the things you desire, none of them will you achieve. They shall fall into the shadow of reign and turn to dust—
“We’ll see,” Nialls answered, his jaw set.
The specter faded back into the Rosemere. The doorway began to close, taking with it any chance to retrieve further answers. The cloak bled back into the black waters, swallowed by the inky darkness there. The tendrils withdrew and the pool
sputtered, resisting the reabsorption of the specter. Soon the figure sank beneath the surface and the water slowed its circling.
—Would you die for your son, to see him live—
Nialls had no answer, knowing the thing twisted lies for gratification.
—Your life is forfeit, Shadow King—
The specter’s voice echoed distant, even within Niall’s mind.
—Remember—
Although the Rosemere had long since returned to normal and the warm evening air had been restored to the Wyllspring Garden, cold gripped Nialls as it never had before.
Chapter 23
With the return of consciousness came pain.
Even before Sorin Westfall was aware enough to open his eyes, he knew the origin of the debilitating throb that permeated his entire body—the back of his head. For what seemed like days, the pulse of his life thudded only in that one spot. Slowly, more of the rhythmic beat spread to the other parts of his body, the dull pain the only reminder he was not dead.
Forcing his eyes open and shielding them with a weak hand from the harsh light, Sorin lifted his head from the stone floor and looked around through bleary eyes, trying to remember how he came to be there. His muscles ached, his limbs weak. He was unbound, his legs and arms free to move, and he was wearing the same clothes.
Body bruised, Sorin took a deep breath to try and clear his swimming head. His dry mouth was gritty and his throat burned with thirst. Taking great effort to raise his head and look around, he noticed a series of indistinct black stripes smudged on three walls of the room. It was not until he could truly focus his vision that what he had mistaken for lines around him were actually bars of a cage.
Then what had happened to him flooded his memory, and he jerked madly, his response to flee overriding the sharp pain in his head.
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