Broken Lords: Book Two of the Broken Mirrors Duology

by A. F. Dery

  Thane sighed and continued in a quieter tone,“It does get…stressful, being surrounded by people who never stop talking, always at you or about you, but never quite to you. That is what Court is like, Kes. Nonstop chattering by people too stupid to use whatever sense the gods gave them.”

  They sat a moment in silence, and Kesara felt steeped in remorse. His words were so contrary to her understanding of the world that she wasn’t even sure what to think about it. She wished now she had not asked to come. She knew how much his country and his people and his duty meant to him, and that he was willing to take any risk on behalf of her, a foreigner…it was too much to take in. She thought of his eyes when they bonded and felt herself flush again, suddenly grateful he was no longer looking at her. Perhaps he did feel it, too. I don’t understand him at all.

  “I didn’t mean to cause you trouble, Thane,” she ventured at last. “I will do what I can to prevent that. Just because I am yours, that doesn’t mean you are weak. It makes you stronger, actually. Where I am from, it is a sign of prestige to be bonded to a Mirror. Nobles bond who are in perfect health, if they have the money and reputation to obtain to do so. It never occurred to me anyone would interpret it any differently in your case.”

  “They might not have, if it wasn’t me. But don’t worry about it, Kes. If there is trouble, it is for another day. All will be well,” Thane said kindly, tapping his pipe against the log to empty it. “And it is all theoretical, anyhow. There’s no telling just how exactly your presence will be taken, but I’m not really worried about it. My point was simply that appearances matter a hell of a lot more at Court than you seem to realize. I am repulsive to them, and that alone is enough for them to justify their antipathy amongst each other. They will try to veil it, in their pathetic way, because I am in favor. But I am not taken in, and somehow I doubt you will be, either, when you see it.”

  “There is no need for me to see it, though,” Kesara protested, then brightened as an idea occurred to her. “And that would solve all the trouble, wouldn’t it? You can just keep me in your quarters. No one even need know I am there, except maybe the servants. And if it gets out through them that you have some fetish for small foreign women, whose business is it, really?”

  Thane choked on nothing at all.

  “Shall I thump your back for you?” she asked politely.

  “Good gods,” was all he said, pressing a hand to his chest. “You’re going to kill me if you keep coming up with things like that. Next you’ll suggest I keep you chained to the bed for authenticity.”

  “I don’t mind if you leave enough slack for my muscles not to cramp,” Kesara volunteered bravely.

  “Are you insane?” Thane’s voice sounded a little high.

  “But you wouldn’t have to worry about people thinking you’re weak for having me there. A little perverted, maybe, but that’s taken differently among nobles than most people, isn’t it?”

  “Absolutely not! Whatever happened to your maidenly virtue you were so keen on defending? Eh? Remember that?” Thane rolled his large shoulders, appearing uncomfortable.

  “Needs must,” Kesara said resolutely, lifting her chin.

  “No.”

  “But, Thane-”

  “Oh please, gods, tell me I’m not sitting trying to talk a woman out of chaining herself to my bed,” Thane muttered, raising his eyes and hands to the heavens. “It’s like some sort of nightmare. Or dream. Or nightmare. I can’t decide just now, but whatever it is, it isn’t reality. It isn’t even sane.”

  “Oh, fine, milord. Have it your way. Risk Eladrian interests for the sake of a foreigner’s reputation, which incidentally, I really doubt anyone there is going to care about in the slightest anyway,” Kesara huffed, crossed her arms.

  “I’m so glad my prayers have been answered and you have seen reason,” Thane declared, ignoring her utter failure to do any such thing and lowering his hands to his knees.

  Kesara sighed, fighting a smile. She would not be amused, not when he was being so…difficult. It seemed like such a clean and simple solution, she couldn’t believe he was arguing with it.

  “It’s going to be fine, Kes,” he continued, “without any…fetishism.” Thane rose to his feet. “Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to bed, and I think you ought to do the same.”

  “I thought you didn’t want me to go to your bed,” Kesara said sweetly, offering a demure smile.

  Thane rolled his eyes and walked away, but not before Kesara saw the red spreading up his neck.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Graunt watched the red sun beginning to melt into the clouds, disappearing behind the hulking magnificence that was the High Lord’s palace.

  And a fine palace it was, too. Not made of fine old Eladrian stone like her lad’s Keep, of course, but made of the darker, grittier stuff that flourished in profusion in the High Lord’s domain. It rose up in a crown of many spires that were actually elaborately designed towers, ringing around a massive, glass topped dome that reminded Graunt strongly of a bald man’s pate, reflecting in its gleam the darkening sky and drifting clouds rather than the ceiling, and the first dim stars of night rather than lit wall sconces. Heavy, lush green vines dripped from the towers and ran down the outer walls, somehow contriving to look as they belonged there rather than being invaders spawned by the waters below.

  For the palace was hemmed in with a traditional moat, so fathomless and deep that even Graunt’s canny eyes could not discern its bottom, and only Graunt’s sensitive ears could perceive the distant threatening ripple of what those waters homed. What lived there, she could not say, but it was most certainly not uninhabited. Whatever swam within, she sensed, was as old and hungry and strange as herself, and she felt an odd kinship to the stranger in the dark waters.

  She cackled a greeting to it that would be indecipherable to human ears, and was gratified to hear an answering ripple, just before the drawbridge was lowered at the Eladrian entourage’s approach. She stifled her annoyance at the interruption in this unexpected communion as the drawbridge groaned its heavy way down to the dark-paved path before them, effectively drowning out anything more the stranger may have had to tell.

  There would be many more annoyances, and far more grating ones, before this little trip was through, she thought wearily, narrowing her dark little eyes as the High Lord’s emissary approached with a formal greeting for her lad. It was not unusual protocol for the High Lord to initially greet everyone in this manner, before greeting them more personally himself, in his own chambers within, but it still gnawed at Graunt’s nerves, the endless stiff prattling and obsequious bows, the eyes carefully diverted from her lad’s deformity, lest they be interpreted as offensive. No matter how many times Thane came to call- and it had been about once every three years since he had assumed his worthless father’s throne, if she was not mistaken- they never knew him any better. They never cared to know.

  She didn’t even have to look back at Thane from her spot in their formation, towards the front and to the western side, to know how he was reacting, his studied look of neutral composure, lips smoothly compressed, the carefully practiced respectful incline of his head towards the emissary. It made her vomit a little in the back of her mouth to see him displaying such artificial courtesies to those of the Court. In her opinion, he gave the High Lord and his minions far too much respect, but she supposed that was what came of things when a man with even an ounce of backbone acted more paternal towards a vulnerable youth than his own negligent and dissolute father had ever bothered to. Graunt, of course, had been suspicious of such solicitousness in an instant, but Thane had been starry-eyed.

  He was starry-eyed no longer, of course- or at least, not as much as he had been two decades before- but his exaggerated sense of regard for the High Lord lingered on, and still managed to pique her. He usually did not invite her along to Court, knowing well her feelings about the place and its endless array of empty headed buffoons with too much power for their own good, but she
was oddly pleased to have managed to end up coming this time, though she could never tell Thane this. He would not understand. He knew nothing of Mirrors, beyond what he had been told, and although his little rabbit had all the appearance of transparency, she had none of its taste. She took much for granted, and Graunt could hardly wait to see those granted things unfold. Her bark-brown folds of flesh quivered in excitement and her tongue darted out to lick her lips as she contemplated it, a low chortling rising up in her chest.

  “Something amusing, old mother?” Thane asked gently, riding up alongside her wagon.

  “Oh, all done with your bowing and scraping to the High Lord’s lick-spittle, are you?” Graunt said too loudly, curving her mouth into a satisfied smile as she saw the emissary, who was already moving back across the drawbridge, stiffen his shoulders as her words reached his ears.

  Thane winced slightly himself and said in a quieter tone, no doubt in hopes of inspiring her to emulation, “I wouldn’t call it scraping, exactly, but yes, we are to cross now and be shown to our rooms.”

  “Do we get our own tower? Or will we be placed out in the courtyard with the other beasts?” Graunt wondered, somewhere near the top of her lung capacity.

  Thane smiled tightly between compressed lips and said, “No, in a tower, old mother.”

  “Did you say anything to the emissary about your rabbit?” Graunt knew he had not, and was unsurprised when he gave a slight shake of his head.

  “No, I thought to introduce her myself, if she will be introduced.”

  “Oh?” Graunt would have raised her eyebrows, if in fact she had any to raise. Too much time around humans, she chided herself.

  “She is concerned about the possible implications of her appearance here, and has been devising all manner of insane schemes to avoid being identified as…well, what she is,” Thane said in a low voice. “It’s my fault, I never should have mentioned it to her, but I didn’t realize she would take it so personally, or be so determined about it.”

  “Oh, dear me, no! That, we cannot have. That, she cannot do,” Graunt murmured, drumming long, pointy fingers against her thigh.

  Thane looked askance at her, his brows knit together in bafflement, but she waved him away with her other hand. “Go on, lead us to victory, or subjugation to powers too great for us to comprehend, or whatever it is you mean to do in this stuffy hole in the wall,” she said absently, her mind already mulling over the situation at hand.

  She vaguely noticed Thane giving her a bow before he moved on, and she followed the forward motion of the entourage while scarcely noticing what she was doing, twirling and un-twirling the reins distractedly around her spindly fingers as she drove alongside all the rest. The Mirror could not simply be tucked discreetly away, covered with a drape or hidden in a closet. Thane would be obliged to impart word of her value to the High Lord when he discussed her abduction, after all; he could hardly hope to keep what she was to himself. Did the Ytaren really hope it would go no further than the High Lord’s ears? Ridiculous! She never would have thought of one from Ytar’s soil as being so damned naive, even if politics in this part of the world probably mattered very little where the girl was from. They were embroiled in their own scandals over there, their own feuds, their own wars, where Mirrors existed as a matter of course, as handy tools for the powerful and wealthy and sadistic. They didn’t care what the unwashed heathens beyond their own borders and that of their allies did. Even Lyntara had not dared reach so far, with the High Lord’s Union standing betwixt them, and she suspected he would not meet with much success even if he managed the crossing. He did not expect what lay across those rivers and through those dense jungles, teeming with life, and hate.

  But one little Mirror, all alone, had managed the crossing, and had made it as far as Eladria! Graunt wondered that Thane had never expressed curiosity about that. It would have been the first thing she had asked, if she had been him. But the poor boy had been too hung up about sorcery. Graunt clucked her tongue to herself, wagging her pointy head as she disembarked from the wagon before anyone could warily approach to offer assistance. She would accept none anyway, except perhaps Thane’s, and she made a point of avoiding him these days. He couldn’t think she was too interested in being here with them, or be deterred from confiding in the Mirror. The Ytaren would need to know his mind if she was to do all she could do for him, and he was not one to open up so readily if he had a more comfortable alternative near to hand.

  Ah, my lad, one day I won’t have to coax and herd and heckle you into your own best interests. Odds are, it’ll be because one of us is dead, but that’s neither here nor there, Graunt thought, chortling a little to herself.

  “You’re having quite an evening by the sound of things, old mother,” Thane observed mildly as he walked up to her.

  She showed him her teeth. “It’s nothing like the evening you’re going to be having with the High Lord, I’m sure, my lad. Help a poor old woman to her room, won’t you? And mind you don’t rush me along, I haven’t your long legs, you know.”

  “Of course,” Thane said, offering his arm. She hung onto it a little more heavily than absolutely necessary, knowing her weight was nothing to him anyway but figuring it couldn’t hurt to play the age card a little.

  Past the front gates and into the paved courtyard, their horses and wagon and carriage were taken away by the High Lord’s servants, and they entered the palace, flanked by Eladrian soldiers, through an exterior door that led into a large, circular hallway that ringed the dome, which was, as it turned out, only capped with glass. The bottom three-quarters of the thing were opaque, and covered with tapestries and ornaments that Graunt found needlessly showy and paid little attention to. A wide, shallow staircase behind the dome led up to the second floor, which was hemmed in only by an ornate iron railing and from which one could look down into the glass part of the dome. The towers led off from doors punctuating this level of the hallway, with the largest door- or pair of doors, to be precise- leading into the largest tower, which was exclusively the High Lord’s province.

  Thane led her with all due care around the dome and up the stairs, which she dawdled on as much as possible, pretending to gaze around in wide eyed curiosity and taking delight in his increasingly tense composure. Graunt paused, for the umpteenth time, and turned to him slowly. “Why are you in such a hurry, my lad? The High Lord want to see you straightaway, does he?”

  “Not just yet, Graunt. I have time still,” Thane said stiffly, attempting to nudge her gently up the next step by her elbow. She would not be nudged.

  “Then what is it?” Graunt opened her eyes as widely as she could. Thane made a face that would have been positively gruesome to anyone else’s eyes, twisting his mouth and pushing down one eyebrow.

  “I suspect you know, old mother, and you think you’re going to persuade me to say something I don’t mean or want to say, but there’s nothing unseemly about it. Kes is a bit nervous, and I just need to make sure she isn’t going to chain herself to anything now that she’s here.” Graunt did not have to feign eye widening at that, but Thane pressed on as if he did not notice, “I had a pair of my men escort her to my room, just until we figure out what her accommodations should be. I never confirmed or denied bringing her here in my correspondence with the High Lord, so it isn’t quite settled yet. That’s all, nothing odd about it.”

  “No, of course not, perfectly natural, dear. You always did like things to be orderly and sorted out,” Graunt said soothingly. Thane looked down at her with narrowed eyes.

  “Are you patronizing me?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Of course not, lad. Would I do something like that?” Graunt batted nonexistent eyelashes at him. He snorted and she feigned surprise, pressing an open hand to her chest.

  “Dear me, you’d best not behave like this in front of the High Lord, my lad.”

  “You seem to be in awfully good humor for someone who was determined to ignore, avoid, and otherwise ostracize me the whole wa
y here,” Thane observed. His voice was mild but she detected discomfort in the way he avoided her gaze as he urged her onto the next step.

  She took it docilely, and said, “Not at all, lad. I just preferred to focus on the journey. Besides which, it’s not like you don’t have anyone else to talk to now, is it?”

  Thane frowned a little, suddenly looking distinctly uneasy to Graunt’s practiced eye. “Don’t tell me you didn’t speak with me because you’re…envious of the time I’ve spent with Kes?”

  “Did you know it is very insulting to call her that? Where she’s from, given names are only shortened when referring to small children, idiots and pet animals. Which is she, I wonder? Well, I suppose she is a rabbit,” Graunt mused, tapping her chin thoughtfully. “Though I suppose she might fall into the idiot category as well. She did decide to cast her lot in with a country full of xenophobes.”

  Thane, suddenly frozen in place at Graunt’s side, hissed something in a low voice through his teeth that even Graunt couldn’t quite make out, but she decided it was probably laced with profanity anyway and chastised him accordingly.

  “Language, my lad,” she chided. But Thane was looking at her now, visibly aghast.

  “I had no idea. Why did she not say anything?” he stammered, more or less clearly.

  Graunt shrugged. “Who the hell knows. She’s a foreigner. What can you do?”

  Thane cursed again, this time intelligibly, and resumed forward motion with a decided air of distraction. They made it the rest of the way up the stairs in silence when he finally seemed to remember himself and reddened.