“Speaking of safety,” Forrest said, “I need to address something. Today is the day of my great-grandmother’s funeral. My parents and siblings, obviously, can’t make the trip. I need to attend.”
“That seems…quite a risk,” Gilbert said.
“I’m aware it’s somewhat dangerous, but my family is also very well known in the community. Everyone will be there. I’m betting the Emperor won’t want to make a display of kidnapping me in the middle of a funeral. And moreover, last night something happened. I put the golden ornament on Phoebe that came from my great-uncle, and her appearance changed somewhat…”
Niko perked up.
“I’ve felt much stronger ever since,” Forrest said. “Almost too strong, like I could crush someone. That is to say—I can handle myself.”
“Interesting,” Niko said. “The ornaments tap into greater magic? What do you mean, her appearance changed?”
“I think I might have some dragon blood. Like Abel and—and you.” I poked my fork around my plate. “I told Sir Forrest about what happened before, and I really think we all need to be upfront about everything from now on.”
“So it is a replica of the jewelry the Elders have? Or is theirs a replica?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s the one that works on your sigil,” Niko said to Forrest. “So if we had the others, maybe we would all have more power. But I’ve been keeping a fairly close eye on strange contraband and valuables that move in and out of the city. I’ve never heard anything about this jewelry. Where on earth is the rest? Where did your great-uncle obtain such a thing?”
“No one else in the family knows anything about it,” Forrest said. “I already asked. And I don’t want to bring it up at the funeral. They need to stay out of it. But if you could spare me a few of your thugs to help deter any trouble on the way there and back, I would owe you a favor.”
“I don’t employ any ‘thugs’,” Niko said.
“Hmm.” Gilbert raised an eyebrow at him. “I do believe one of them is still hoping for an opportunity to beat me up.”
“Not thugs,” I suggested. “Toughs.”
“I’ll spare you a few of the finest ex-cons in the whole capital,” Niko said. “And a carriage.”
“You are a gem of a man,” Forrest said sarcastically.
I didn’t love this idea. Of course, I could hardly tell Forrest not to attend the funeral. It meant so much to him and his family had been so sweet. But I could still see in my mind the moment when the guards were chasing us and I thought I might see him killed right before my eyes. I couldn’t stand the idea of letting him out of my sight for an entire day. He didn’t even have his sword anymore.
“I want to come with you,” I said. “And pay my respects, too.”
“No.”
“If it’s too dangerous for me, it’s too dangerous for you too!”
“You’re indispensable.”
“Stop talking like it’s okay for you guys to die because there are four of you. None of you are allowed to die. I genuinely want to go with you. My only family is my mom and she’s hundreds of miles away. Your family are like my family too.”
I could see the little softening line in his forehead that showed I had gotten to him. “The last time I took you out, it didn’t go well.”
“Abel made a promise to leave us alone. He’s the commander. He won’t let them hurt me.”
“Like I would ever trust Abel!”
“You should go,” Niko said. “I’ll send you with my best toughs. You might hear something at the funeral.”
I was worried Gilbert wouldn’t want to be left alone with Niko, but he just seemed sad, not in a fighting mood. I hated that, but I guess time was the only cure for heartbreak.
I was glad I could be with Forrest to comfort him, anyway. We sat in the carriage today, two of Niko’s brawny guards sitting on the outside seat with the driver.
I was wearing a black dress that was slightly too big; Niko produced it quickly. I think he borrowed it from one of the women in the house who was waiting to escape Capamere. The sleeves kept sliding over my hands and it was rather frumpy, the loose fabric secured with a belt. “Quite a contrast from last night, huh?” I said.
Forrest was looking out the window, even though the shade was closed. So, basically, staring at fabric. “What is?”
“Never mind.” I took his hand. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how to act during funerals.”
“No one does.” He clutched my fingers in return. “I was just thinking that if my parents died, I wouldn’t be able to get to their funerals.”
“Oh. Yeah…” Mom, too. “I don’t remember when my dad died. It’s like I missed his funeral, even though I was there. I wonder if my dragon blood comes from him.”
Forrest slid his hand up to my head and pulled me onto his shoulder. I shut my eyes even though his leather-clad shoulder wasn’t very soft. I still liked the feel of him.
“I remember the first time I came to Capamere,” he said. “I was used to my parents’ restaurant. My dad is picky as hell. He always made me help but then he would lose his shit if I made the food wrong. Gran’s different. She’s patient. She was patient…”
“You don’t have to past tense her if you don’t want to,” I said. “I’m sure she’s still around.”
“You think?”
“Don’t you?”
“I don’t know anything. The world’s too fucking confusing to know anything. I hope so.”
Pretty soon we arrived at the funeral site. Funerals were a problem in Capamere. Before the monsters came, everyone buried their dead, but there was no room for cemeteries in a crowded, walled city. The dead were burned on rooftop pyres now. Most of the buildings had flat roofs for gardens could grow on top of them, so it wasn’t as grim as it sounded, but old people had to huff up a ton of stairs. We passed one of Forrest’s aunts as we were climbing. “Are you all right?” he asked. “I could carry you.”
“I’m not that old yet! Just give me time.”
The rooftop was very crowded with people from the whole neighborhood; it was easy to spot different families. Forrest attracted a lot of attention with his light armor. They knew he’d been a soldier, and that he’d left the army and disappeared into the north.
“He married that girl,” someone whispered, meaning me, because that was the story he had been spreading.
“I don’t get it.”
“I thought he had soldier’s sickness.”
“Kind of cowardly, isn’t it? Too bad.”
I hoped Forrest wasn’t hearing this.
He was looking at the pyre in the distance, where his grandmother was laid out with her hands on her chest, but his ears were red. I took his hand again. “I see Cousin Angie up there. Let’s say hello.”
“Angie barely remembers me anyway.”
“But she seems nice. Come on.”
His immediate family knew the truth about us now, his cousin among them. She was a girl of thirteen or so. Her hair was braided and beribboned but she wore plain black like everyone else. “Uncle—Cousin—Sir Forrest,” she stammered. “My mom wasn’t sure if you could come. She’s over there.” Angie pointed.
“Thanks, Angie,” Forrest said, turning toward his Aunt Catherine.
I made him stay. “I like your braids,” I told Angie.
“Oh. Thanks.” She touched her head. “Emma did them.”
She looked like she wouldn’t mind a hug, so I gave her one. “I’m so sorry about Gran. I’m glad I got to meet her.”
“Thanks. I hope you liked the necklace.”
Sure, it only turned me into a dragon creature! “I did. So are we eating any noodles at the funeral?”
She laughed. “Um, no.”
Forrest gave me a perplexed look as moved on. “There’s no point in getting to know my family anyway. Presuming we don’t die, we’ll still have to stay at the gate.”
“What? If we close the gate we can travel and visit our familie
s, right? The book didn’t say the priestess had to be there every second. Abel even said the priestess used to join the Elders on the battlefield. You don’t want me to get to know your family?”
“I think Angie is afraid of me.”
I nudged him with my elbow. “Well, sure she’s afraid, if you’re afraid.”
“I’m certainly not. I just—” He sighed, moving toward the funeral pyre.
His great-grandmother looked very peaceful now. Her fingers were laced together and clasping a string of pearls and some flowers. Lace trimmed her long white gown, and she looked younger. As young as a ninety-eight year old woman could look, anyway. Considering how my year had been, I thought it seemed like a great way to go. As an old lady, with children and great-grandchildren and probably even great-greats.
I probably wouldn’t get to die that way.
I already knew priestesses couldn’t have children.
I didn’t even know what happened to priestesses in their old age. I had always heard it said that a new priestess came along every thirty years or so. So…like…what then? They just retired with their guardians, maybe. It was hard to imagine Forrest, Gilbert, Niko and Abel ever just keeping house with me, without a goal to strive toward. Maybe the priestesses married one guardian and the rest went their separate ways. No, that was also hard to imagine. And the word ‘forever’ had been thrown around a few times already. I didn’t want to ask Forrest because I already knew he expected to die before we got that far.
I glanced up at him. I think he saw distress in my eyes, but he probably took it as funeral-appropriate sadness. In the end, I guess it was. I was just getting too introspective.
“There was always something about Gran,” he said. “I think we had a little bit of a special bond, because she always said I reminded her of Roddy. She’d slip and call me that sometimes. I remember how upset she was when I cut my hair like this.” He ran his hand over his hair, which was very short at the sides, longer around the top, kind of barbarian and the total opposite of Abel, whose hair was almost shoulder-length and lordly. “It was the style at the time, but that wasn’t how Roddy had it.”
“It was the style ‘at the time’?” I grinned. “What about now?”
“Well, I’m locked in now. Like my dad and his mustache.”
“Do you think Roddy really was a guardian?”
“Well, no one in the family seems to know anything about it…”
We greeted a few other family members. Forrest was always kind of guarded. I could tell his other family members regarded him with some awe. It must have been unusual for him to come here to train as a knight, and the close family now knew he was a guardian.
As if knew what I was thinking, he said, “Gran saved money to help me buy my first set of gear and weapons so I could train with Sir Marsten. Even though she had lost Roderick. She supported me anyway. She said Roderick always wanted to be a knight.”
“What makes someone a knight and not just a soldier?”
“Only other knights can train a new knight, and it is one on one, and there is a moral code and vows that go with it. You need money and usually a family name. We had knights in the family going back to the Age of Elders, but they had lost everything a while ago.”
“Ooh, I didn’t know that.”
“Well, it’s seven or eight generations back. If my bloodline were a pie, the knight slice would be so tiny you wouldn’t even want to take a bite. I don’t like to think that bloodline has anything to do with it.”
“I know you don’t like fates and destinies much.”
“Not really.”
“You picked the wrong line of work. Well, either way, I’m certainly learning a lot about you while you avoid talking to your family.”
He grimaced.
“And you weren’t even going to bring me! What would you have done?”
“It’s a funeral,” he said. “I can just stand here looking grim if I want to.”
“Do you really want to?”
“You’re better at talking to them,” he said.
I took that as a ‘no’. I knew he loved and missed these people, even if he had never quite felt a part of them. Today, I thought, I really could be his wife and drag him into conversations. I could handle conversations. I could even handle funerals. In a town as small as Istim, every funeral was attended by every person in town. Niko had put a few handkerchiefs in my pocket and I handed them out to people who were hit with tears. I tried to get people talking about their memories of Gran or Forrest or the noodle shop or anything else.
It wasn’t always easy. I could still hear whispers here and there.
“He said she is the priestess…does that mean…?”
“I don’t believe it.”
“He was at the raid where they wiped out those bandits. Who knows what he’s been through…you can see it in his eyes.”
One older woman started talking about Roderick and Margaret and how Gran never got over his death. “They were such a sweet pair. It was a blessing, really, that she got sick at the same time he was killed.”
“Margaret? She got sick?”
The woman nodded. “Yes, she had pneumonia. Katarina claimed that they died on the same day.”
Katarina was Gran. I shot Forrest a look. If the priestess died, her guardians died. Pneumonia, huh? That seemed like quite a coincidence.
The service began, with Gran’s closest family reading an ancient blessing. The Elders practiced a particular form of the older religion, following the Book of Stones. When the first emperor shut down the Temples of Elders, he urged everyone to return to more archaic religious practices that predated the Elders. They were still familiar to people, and still practiced, but they involved a lot of fantastical tales of gods that people thought more quaint than believable. In Istim, we had more land and we ignored that decree and kept doing all the same things the Elders had done, like burying bodies under towers of stones in the northwest corner of town. It was technically illegal but even though soldiers came through all the time, none of them had ever said a word about the stone piles.
I’m not sure it mattered what the rituals were. They were just something you did so you felt like you were doing something. I didn’t know Gran enough to mourn her, but I had other things to mourn and reflect on as I listened to the prayers. They covered her body in a thick blanket of fragrant dried grasses and branches, and lit the pyre.
“We are born of sun and sky, and to sun and sky we return… Katarina Argrave, beloved mother and grandmother, may you dance with the gods forever.”
“Will she make them noodles?” some child asked in an awkwardly loud voice, and I snorted.
When it ended, Forrest seemed like he didn’t even know what to do. Everyone was standing up and talking to each other.
“Are you coming to dinner?” Aunt Catherine asked.
“I’d better not,” Forrest said, putting a hand on my shoulder as if to say, I have a duty.
“I understand. Well, I’m glad you were able to be here.” She looked like she wasn’t sure if she should hug him. I stepped back and sort of urged him into it.
We returned to the carriage. The toughs were just hanging out.
“All’s well, boss,” one of them said.
“Good.” Sir Forrest let out a breath as he climbed in, and I curled up next to him on the carriage seat.
“I am glad you came, Phoebe,” he said. “I thought you might make it weird, but instead you made it more normal.”
“That’s a compliment I never thought I’d get.”
His fingers wrapped around my head, and in that moment I felt so content. My sweet Forrest. The way he held me always made me feel so safe and secure; his hand was heavy and usually wasn’t entirely slack. He gripped me a little bit. Like he was ready to spring into action. I felt a little sad for him, seeing him not fitting in with his family. I thought of him as a loner, but deep down I think he wanted to be a family man.
Just as I was thinking how happy
I was that we’d made it safely through the funeral, the carriage suddenly lurched and I heard shouting.
I shut my eyes and tried to sense out my guardians, and immediately I felt the close presence of Abel.
Shit.
Chapter Eleven
Sir Forrest
“Stay put,” I ordered Phoebe, even as I knew that was probably hopeless. I opened the shade so I could see out. A horse galloped by with Abel on its back.
“That son of a bitch,” I ground out.
“I can’t believe— He swore!” Phoebe cried. “He even knew you were going to a funeral!” She bit her lip. The poor girl was learning a hard lesson—you couldn’t trust a cold-hearted bastard.
I drew my sword—well, not my sword, the one Abel stole from me, but some sword Niko provided—and leapt out, shoving the door firmly shut behind me. My feet hit pavement like it was nothing.
Last night I had gotten some incredible power out of Phoebe, and I could feel it surging through me now. I wasn’t even scared. I was ready to take him on.
Niko’s men, to their credit, were already on their feet with weapons at the ready. One of them had some kind of twin blades on chains and the other had a big club. Who knew where Niko got these guys. But I didn’t want Abel to fight them. I was ready to kill him. We didn’t need four guardians if one of them was a traitor.
“Sir Forrest,” Abel said. “Calm down. I’m not here to fight you. I’m here with a message.”
“What message?”
Abel had other three other men with him. Two regular Black Army soldiers, and then I recognized one of them; Sir Kal, an older man who led one of the regiments at the battle for Hawk Mountain. He was easily recognized by his dark purple cloak and the heraldic eagles on his armor.
“Last night, the Emperor’s advisor Homar was found dead,” Abel said. “The Emperor knows he was killed during the rescue of the priestess. Do not try to deny it.” He lowered his voice a little. “The consequences would be grave.”
Priestess Bound: A Reverse Harem Fantasy (Guardians of Sky and Shadow Book 2) Page 9
