I still didn’t really know.
We never talked about Margaret. Whether or not he had killed her, I knew one thing: neither of us wanted to talk about her.
She was the first. We went six years before there was another when we caught the Elders keeping a delicate, dark haired girl in the temple. She hadn’t found any of her guardians and she was a very lowborn girl from Bastel. Leonidas ordered me to storm the Elders’ temple and collect her. He said she wouldn’t be harmed, and in fact, that it was a mercy to save her from that fate. She didn’t look like a girl who could handle the sexual demands of a priestess, to be sure. She was twenty-three but so shrinking and nervous around men that she seemed more like fifteen. Leonidas even gave her a pleasant room with a female attendant.
She, too, was found dead. A different poison, that left her unmarked, but I heard whispers that the body was mutilated in some way. Leonidas said that was the talk of gossips who wanted to stir up sentiment against him and sent her attendant into exile. This was also somewhat believable. Like every emperor, Leonidas had a lot of jealous, conniving enemies. He said the Elders had killed her to make him look bad.
And so it went, and every time I wanted to believe him, even as a part of me slowly accepted that Leonidas had a hard streak that grew harder every time he conquered one of the prizes his father and grandfather had failed to capture.
All thanks to me and the powers I never spoke of. I could sense and smell things before anyone else, I was the fastest swordsman in the Black Army, and if I was up against a wall, I could freeze a man’s heart and kill him without a scratch.
I couldn’t remember a time when I had not felt a loyalty to Leonidas. It had been born and bred into me, or so I thought. I had never considered leaving. There was nowhere else to go, no other identity I could claim. I had always felt…fortunate…that he accepted me.
I had never been able to remember as far back into my childhood as other people, though. What was I like at five years old? I couldn’t recall. It all blurred in my memories until I started training to be a soldier…
The sigil on my skin flared and the feeling was almost painful. Phoebe saw me brush my fingers across it. “Does it hurt? Abel? My sigils hurt when I’m near you, though not as badly as before…”
“A little.”
“Liar,” she said gently. “You’re such a liar.”
“I am not.”
“Let me see it,” she said. “Your sigil.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. You know what happened last time.”
She sighed, drawing her hand away, pulling both of them behind her back. “I wonder if you could control it, now that you know.”
“I won’t risk it.”
“Why did you come here?”
“Leonidas told me to win your favor.” My mouth twisted, betraying my increasing unease. “I’m not lying now. He tempted me with the idea that I could claim you for my own, and he would have me retire with you to a manor. I refused to help him but I’m not sure I can stop him. I’m…questioning even the standing I have.”
“Why?”
“Do you know how old I am?”
“Older than you look, I know that much.”
“Yes…that’s what everyone says now.” I crossed my arms. “Leonidas has been implying I need to retire before too many questions are asked. And you’re looking at me like…almost like you pity me. I’m not really a du Lac, am I? I’m like that other guardian of yours. The tall smug one.”
She nodded. “You’re a shadow guardian. Although…you’re not really like him at all. You’re not actually smug at all. You’re…not happy, are you?” She reached for my sigil, now, without asking.
I should have stepped back, and pushed her away.
I craved her touch like I craved a feast at the end of a battle, when I was spent and starved. My hands remained still as she slipped a hand under the edge of my shirt. Instead of fighting her, I fought whatever was inside of me. That thing I had become.
Her palm pressed against my bare skin, and my sigil calmed, and I found that there was nothing to fight anymore. Last time, I transformed against my will, from the shock of it all. Now, I felt the stirrings of a power I had always known was there, but I retained control.
“I could try to heal the burn,” Phoebe said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“But I want to…” She kept her hand there and the warm feeling grew stronger, with pinpricks of pain.
I remembered.
Strong arms holding me back. The man who would become my father, standing over me, watching. A stone that blazed like fire, searing my skin, in the hands of an Elder. He sounded disgusted. It will be here when it appears, just above his member. I will burn the skin here and he will never be able to draw power from the priestess.
Don’t say such vulgar things in front of him, my father said.
It’s all right, the spell will take his memory of this.
I remembered how I screamed and thrashed and how my father suddenly said, That’s enough!
I was clutching Phoebe’s shoulders, I realized, and she lifted a hand and stroked my cheek. “Abel…I keep losing you. What are you thinking? You look like you’ve had a vision.”
“Memories. Just memories.” I felt as much ashamed as alarmed. How could I be losing control like this? If I had remembered these things in the past, I’m not sure they would have even affected me to this degree. What mattered to me then was my command.
Maybe it was a bad thing for me that Gaermon had fallen as well. Maybe Leonidas wasn’t the only one who needed new cities to conquer.
“Everyone’s afraid of you,” Phoebe said. “I was, too. You’re so strong. I’ve seen what you can do. But…that doesn’t mean you can’t ever let go of it all. If you tell me what’s hurting you, I could help.”
“They never wanted me to take power from me. An Elder burned me. Maybe a former Elder, now that I think of it. I think he was one of Leonidas’ father’s advisors… But all these memories are useless. It doesn’t change anything. Do you think I love you for throwing my life into question?”
I had to push her away and hurt her for her own good. But for my own as well. I was not allowed to love her, and if I couldn’t help but lust after her, well…surely I had the strength to fight that.
“Nothing has changed,” I said. “I don’t want to see you again.”
“You came here! And scared me half to death, too!” She slapped her palms to my chest and shoved me back. “Fine. This was all pointless, then. But nothing has changed for me either. I’m not running away. Maybe, when your best buddy the Emperor finally gets bored and kills me, I’ll see you in the afterlife.” She pounded on the door. “Let me out!”
“Let us out,” I called. “I’m done here.” I put a coin in the girl’s hand as she swung open the door, looking nervous as a baby rabbit in the presence of a circling bird of prey. “Tell your mistress thank you for obliging.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Phoebe
Boy, I was not feeling Emmaline right now. How dare she spring Abel on me like that. But I didn’t get a chance to talk to her until morning. The other girls said she’d gone to bed. So much for partying all night, huh? Why did I get the feeling she was avoiding me?
I was offered a fairly nice bed all to myself in a room with the other girls, and their chatter over the party probably would’ve delighted me in better circumstances. This really did remind me of the Strawberry Girls, and I missed female company.
But I missed my guys, and Abel had rattled me, and instead I just pulled a pillow over my head and laid there, waiting until morning.
I’m sure Niko would have preferred me to be subtle, but after a night of freaking out over worst case scenarios, I had decided that if I was going to seal my doom, at least it ought to be fast. I just wanted to know what Emmaline was about. When we came in for breakfast, rather than sitting down, I walked up to her and said, “We need to talk right now.”
&nb
sp; “Excuse me a moment, Mr. Milo…,” she told a well-dressed man pouring coffee. Butler? The table was spread with fine china and flower centerpieces, similar to Niko’s table but much more girly. She had a faint flush in her cheeks as she stood up and pulled me aside into a hallway. “My dear, I’m sorry, I couldn’t very well refuse the Commander of the Guard, whatever I might think of him. He insisted he wait for you. He knew you’d be at that party, somehow.”
“You must know he’s—“ I wasn’t sure what to call Abel. Dangerous? More like torturous. “You know something about what’s going on. Seeing the commander sitting there in the dark scared me half to death and Niko didn’t know Abel was waiting for me, did he?”
“No.” She put a hand on my shoulder. “Abel swore you wouldn’t be hurt but said I should tell no one. I might have some clout, but refusing a direct order would be unwise. I know you’re the priestess,” she added. “And…I know priestesses usually die…”
“Why is everyone so eager to tell me how I’m about to die?”
“But Niko explained to me that you have a tie to Abel himself. So you have a chance, I think.”
“How? I need to know how. I need your help. We need some guards to get us to the gate.”
She smiled. “Niko didn’t tell you to be that blunt, did he?”
“Absolutely not. But I’m just tired of playing around. Niko said our only chance to escape is to get your help. Well, I don’t know that I have time to become your attendant and your best friend or whatever I’m supposed to do.”
Emmaline laughed. “All right, Miss Priestess. What’s in it for me?”
“I’m really just a country girl. I keep hearing the Elders are bad, the Emperor’s bad. What do I know? Just that people used to be able to farm the countryside and even tiny cities used to get entertainment and better stuff to trade, and all the old people in my home town say things were good back then. So…I could shut the gates and you and your family could trade freely, or…bank freely, or whatever.”
Emmaline plucked a flower from a nearby vase and twirled it between her fingers. “Yes…my grandfather says that he used to hear all about the old days from his grandmother. Circuses, and carnivals, and Gaermoni silk traders…and the priestess and her guardians, occasionally coming into town for a great feast. His grandmother used to tell him we were related to them.” Emmaline looked down, biting her lip.
“Are you?”
“Well…”
“Your cousin Priscilla knows something about it—”
“Oh, Priscilla is half out of her mind. She probably does know something, but it’s hard to say. She swears Percival was killed because he was a guardian, but if he was, he told no one else in the family. It wasn’t that hard to believe he just overdosed on something; he was a very indulgent boy. We all felt Priscilla just needed to tell herself something, to make up a story so she didn’t have to face the truth…”
I sensed curiosity building in Emmaline, and I pounced on it. “Did he sleep with a lot of prostitutes?”
“Oh, goodness, of course he did.”
“My guardian, Gilbert, his mother was a prostitute. He resembles Priscilla…she noticed it too.”
“Hmm.” Emmaline stopped and held my face still, and tucked the flower behind my ear. I felt like this was a weird gesture of acceptance. “Priscilla doesn’t like me either.”
“She was at your party. You can’t insist on talking to her?”
“Maybe I’m the one who doesn’t like talking to her,” Emmaline said.
“I can do the talking, if you get the door open.”
So, one point for Niko’s dice after all. This seemed to be the right course of action. As soon as breakfast was over, we were riding to drop in on Priscilla, just me and Emmaline, and I think she liked how direct I was. We were actually kind of similar after all; we both liked to talk and we could both be kind of silly. But she was older and wiser than me, and she thought of things like bringing a notebook to the meeting with Priscilla so I could take notes, and all that detective stuff. You might say that was obvious, but I was a girl who once struggled to write a paper for school on the history of the empire, the longest paper I’d ever tried to write, set it down on a stone wall while chatting with my friends in the morning, and forgot to bring it to school. The whole thing had blown away when I went back to the wall. So people who were slightly organized impressed me. By the end of the carriage ride I had a slight mentor crush on her.
Priscilla lived in a much smaller house than Emmaline, a four story row house in a fancy district rather than an outright mansion. A servant showed us in reluctantly when he saw it was Emmaline. It was fairly dark and gloomy inside. Sheer curtains hung on all the windows, filtering the light, like she preferred privacy, and furniture was covered in black ruffled dust covers for mourning.
“This place gives me the chills,” Emmaline said. “She moved in when he died and she hasn’t changed anything since.”
Priscilla walked into the foyer after an awkwardly long wait, maybe ten minutes. She was wearing a black gown and a delicate lace cap over her perfect blonde curls. Seeing her up close, the resemblance to Gilbert was strong. She had his clear blue eyes and his beautiful skin and delicate mouth. “Cousin,” she said, with obvious displeasure. “I don’t want to talk to that girl.”
“What happened to Percival?” Emmaline asked, like she was already tired of it.
“I have been trying to tell all of you for the past twenty years what happened to Percival and you don’t want to hear it.”
“I want to hear it now.”
Priscilla’s eyes cut to me. “It’s a hopeless cause if that’s what you’re thinking. We’ll help this girl, or try to anyway, and then she’ll die, and the Emperor will be furious with the family. That’s why Percy never told anyone what was going on.”
“Please, Miss du Barien,” I said. “I just want to know. I’m not asking for anything else. I think my guardian Gilbert might be Percival’s son. Even if he isn’t legitimate, doesn’t it mean anything to you that your brother’s blood survived? That there is some tiny chance he could actually be a guardian?”
Priscilla’s lips pinched. “Come in.” Her slender hand twitched in reluctant invitation as she turned her back on us and went into a parlor.
A huge portrait of a man who had to be Percival hung on the wall. He looked like a smug version of Gilbert. Very pretty man, but even his portrait smile said, I have money and you don’t. Of course, even money hadn’t saved him. When I considered the idea that he might have died because the Emperor killed his priestess, a chill ran down my entire body. Emmaline looked up and chose a seat that didn’t face him.
“I know Percival would want me to tell you,” Priscilla said. “But I have never wanted anything to do with any of this. He collected all the information he could find on the priestess and guardians. And when he died, I burned it all so it wouldn’t fall into the hands of the emperor. So you will have to take my word for it. Once, I had proof, but Leonidas wanted those papers, so I had no choice.”
Well, that was a bummer. But I was getting excited despite myself. “Okay…”
A tiny, arthritic white dog trotted into the room and looked at us dolefully. “C’mere, baby,” Emmaline cooed. “Oh, look at this poor thing’s sad little face.”
Priscilla gave her a Look of Death. I could see why these two didn’t get along. “Have you heard of the Arsons of the Archives?” she asked.
I scrambled to think back about my days of book learning. Like most kids in Istim, especially kids with only one parent and no siblings, I only went to school if my mom didn’t need help around the house and garden. And even when I wasn’t losing my papers in the wind, I still didn’t pay much attention.
“Yes,” Emmaline said. “The Elders used to have libraries and someone targeted them and burned them hundreds of years ago, a great loss to our knowledge of the ancient past.”
Priscilla nodded. “Paper also used to be made out of a grass that degraded
over time, so old libraries were too fragile to read within a couple hundred years. Percy said this was an important point, because it allowed the Elders to get control of the priestess. He didn’t think they actually set the original fires, but in the aftermath they grew opportunistic, and they used the loss of the libraries to gain more control. The Elders were the scholars of the realm so everyone turned to their memories. They decided what was remembered and written down in the aftermath.” She paused. “There was a map…before I burned everything.”
“Couldn’t you have hidden them somewhere instead of burning them?” It was starting to sink in what a heavy loss these papers must have been. There was no way Priscilla could just tell me everything they had said.
“It’s too late for that, isn’t it?” Priscilla said. “I don’t have to tell you anything, if you’re going to criticize decisions I made as a terrified young woman.”
“Please, continue,” Emmaline said, like she was getting annoyed with Priscilla.
“Percy told me that the gate doesn’t lead to a world of monsters,” Priscilla said, “but to the world of dragons, the shadowy realm beneath our land. And we used to live in peace with them, and trade with them, for millennia. The priestess was the one who kept both worlds at peace. No one could go to the dragon’s realm without her permission, and vice versa, and she mediated all disputes. She had ancestors from both worlds, and she had two dragon lovers and two human lovers. She would produce one child by each of them and one of them would be the next priestess, with the blood of humans and dragons. It was said that all the guardians were of the same blood line as the first four.”
Priestess Bound: A Reverse Harem Fantasy (Guardians of Sky and Shadow Book 2) Page 15
