Dreaming Death

by J. Kathleen Cheney

  “Is Kirya around?” she asked Cook. Kirya Aldrine was actually an army lieutenant the colonel had placed within their household to ensure the family’s safety, but the young woman spent most of her days working as maid for Shironne’s mother and her sister Perrin.

  Since Mama was in mourning, her garb wasn’t complicated. Until a year had passed, her tunic, trousers, and petticoats would all be of undyed silk and wool. She didn’t wear any jewelry save for the bracelet that helped Shironne hear where she was. That made Kirya’s assignment as maid easier. Perrin, on the other hand, was to be presented to the elite of Larossan society at the turn of the year in the hope of contracting a brilliant marriage. She got to wear bright colors, the cuffs and hems of her tunics and petticoats were heavily embroidered, and Mama had given Perrin the jewelry she no longer wore. Working on Perrin’s wardrobe did keep Kirya busy.

  Cook’s worry spun about her at the mention of Kirya. “I think she’s up with your mother. Should I send for her?”

  Shironne realized that Cook must think something was wrong. “No. What about Messine?”

  Filip Messine, another lieutenant, primarily watched over Shironne. He escorted her to her various assignments for the army. In his false identity here, though, he served as a groom in the mostly empty stable. The Anjir family had limited funds at the moment, so there were only the two old carriage horses there. They could spare Messine for an errand or two.

  Cook’s worry faded to relief. “Oh, you want a messenger. I’ll go call him.” She walked to the outside door and called out into the courtyard before returning to her cooking.

  A moment later, Shironne heard the door open again, followed by the jangle of bells and Messine’s familiar footsteps. Shironne turned her head that way to hear him better. Although she could sense where the members of their little household were when she concentrated, the various bracelets and bells each wore made it easier for her to locate them.

  Messine came closer, clutching his concern tight about him. He was trained not to bother others with his emotions. For Shironne, that made him pleasing company. “Miss Anjir, did you need me?”

  “I need to send a message to the colonel,” she explained. “I had a dream. Someone died, and the Angel of Death dreamed it.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Hard hands pulled at Mikael Lee’s arm and hauled him to his feet. “Where the hell have you been?”

  Mikael blinked up at Kai’s stern features. He concentrated on breathing as the room spun about him. His lungs ached. It felt like someone had jammed a knife in the base of his neck and a spike through his head.

  He didn’t dare answer Kai’s question the way that came to mind, but the rumpled bed behind him should have made it obvious. He’d been there all night. He’d been dreaming.

  He was at the Hermlin Black, his favored tavern in the Old Town. The clumsily carved bed with its faded yellow bedding looked familiar. An icon of the Larossans’ true god sat in the corner, the statue’s lap draped with a trio of grains for luck. Mikael had seen that one before. Synen, the inn’s owner, must have dumped him in this room to sleep off his intoxication and keep him away from the other patrons.

  Mikael rubbed his aching temples. At least he was alone this time, something to be grateful for. Synen understood that he came to this tavern to get himself drunk, not to find a companion for the night. That was why he ended up here most nights that he dreamed. Since Mikael always promptly paid his bill, Synen took good care of him.

  Kai waited, arms folded over his chest, a pillar of inky blackness. Like Mikael, Kai had mixed heritage, part Lucas and part Anvarrid. That wasn’t uncommon, since the two peoples had formed a close relationship two centuries before, when the Anvarrid invaded the country. Most children born between the Six Families and the various Anvarrid Houses tended toward the fair appearance usually associated with the former. Kai had come out of the womb looking like an Anvarrid. He was tall with dark hair and dark eyes. His pale skin was the only trait he’d inherited from his Lucas mother, and that only served to make his hair look darker. It was hard not to see him as Khandrasion of the House of Valaren, even though Kai never answered to his full name. Or he never had in Mikael’s presence.

  Unlike Kai, Mikael had inherited a muddy mess of Lee Family and Vandriyen House bloodlines, with hair slowly darkening over the years from blond to brown, and eyes of a bright shade of blue particular to his father’s ancestors. He’d also inherited his father’s tendency to freckle, but not the man’s height. While most Larossans might consider him of average height, he was short for either a man from the Six Families or an Anvarrid. No one but his father had ever called him Mikoletrion; he simply didn’t look Anvarrid enough.

  As Kai towered over him, Mikael took in a shaky breath and in a voice that sounded papery and thin asked, “What time is it?”

  “Where are your boots?” Kai snapped in return. He didn’t wait for an answer. His dark eyes flicked toward the room’s bare wooden floor and he swooped down to retrieve something. A second later he jammed Mikael’s boots against his chest. Mikael clenched his jaw to keep from gasping. He managed to grab the boots from Kai and sank back onto the rumpled bedding to put them on, a flare of nausea making him break out into a cold sweat. He hadn’t registered that he’d carried injuries out of his dream until that moment.

  Lowering his head to lace his boot hurt, but Mikael did so anyway. While he worked a knot out of the leather laces, Kai towered over him like a dark storm cloud. The sensitives up at the fortress actually referred to Kai that way behind his back.

  Still kinder than anything the sensitives say about me, I’ll bet.

  “Where’s your overcoat?” Kai asked.

  Mikael had his uniform jacket on still, halfway unbuttoned and horribly wrinkled since he’d slept in it. His overcoat was nowhere in sight. “I don’t know,” he answered truthfully. “I’m sure I wore it down here last night.”

  Without waiting for further explanation, Kai turned to the room’s other occupant, Elisabet. She’d stood at the open doorway the whole time, a silent presence. Mikael hadn’t actually seen her there, but he’d never questioned her presence either. He’d known she was somewhere close. As Kai’s primary guard, Elisabet went wherever he went. Or should.

  “I’ll go find it,” Kai said. “Stay with him.” Before she could argue, he swept out the narrow door, the skirts of his hooded overcoat swirling dramatically behind him. Drama was one of Kai’s inborn skills.

  For a moment, Mikael just breathed. He’d never known why Kai disliked him so intensely, but mornings like this one didn’t help their working relationship. A hand touched his boot and Mikael realized he must have closed his eyes again. He opened them to see Elisabet kneeling before him. She lifted his foot onto her black-clad knee and began lacing his boot for him as if he were a child. “I can do it,” he insisted.

  “You’re too slow,” she said in her low, rusty voice. “He’s in a foul mood. It’s not quite ten.”

  When is Kai not in a foul mood? Mikael watched Elisabet lace his boot, hoping fervently that Kai didn’t return before she finished.

  Elisabet was truly one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen. High cheekbones hinted at some Anvarrid blood, but otherwise she looked Family-born: pale eyes and pale hair, tall and broad shouldered. Her features were calm and even, her neat braids falling forward as she worked. He caught the faint smell of oil from at least one gun on her person. Dressed in her formal blacks, she was the perfect guard, never letting her emotions get the better of her, never reacting to the vagaries of her charge.

  Life is simpler for those who know where they stand in the order of things.

  Unlike Mikael, Elisabet knew where she stood. She was Lucas, which meant automatic acceptance among the Lucas Family. He was an outsider, sent to the Lucas elders by the Lee elders four years before in the hope that they could tame his dreams.

 
She was a First, which meant she oversaw her yeargroup and thus had companionship. He was alone, forced by the elders to live up in the palace rather than in the fortress below, because they hadn’t found any way to tame those dreams.

  She was a guard. She watched Kai’s back during most of her waking hours, and when other duties forced her away from him, her Seconds, Tova and Peder, took over. It was a simple calling. She need only keep her charge alive.

  Kai had no business walking away from her. If she was annoyed with him for that, it didn’t show. It said something that she’d let him go alone—both that she felt this tavern was secure at the moment, and that Kai needed to be alone.

  She lowered Mikael’s foot to the ground and rose, setting one hand under his arm to help him up again. Too fast. Mikael swayed, and Elisabet laid a hand against his chest to steady him. She drew her hand back with a film of red staining her palm.

  Oh Hel. Heat prickled through Mikael’s body, nausea welling in his empty stomach. He’d bled through his uniform jacket. He could smell it now that he knew it was there. Fortunately, there didn’t seem to be any blood on the yellow bedding.

  Elisabet glanced down markedly at her red-stained hand, and her eyes flicked up to meet his.

  Mikael shook his head. He didn’t want Kai to know he was actually bleeding. Kai would see it as weakness. “Don’t mention it to him,” he asked of her. “Please.”

  One of her gull-wing brows arched upward, but she wiped her hand on her black trouser leg. It wouldn’t show there any more than it did on his uniform. She gestured for Mikael to precede her out of the room.

  He obeyed, walking along the narrow mezzanine above the floor of the tavern and trying to button his jacket and then tighten the sash about his waist. At this hour, the tables below were all empty. That explained why Elisabet thought it was secure; the tavern’s outer doors must be locked.

  Mikael made his way down the stone steps, doing his best to move normally. All of this would pass: the tightness in his lungs, the pain in his head and neck, even the blood seeping through his garments. It would be gone in a matter of hours. That was one reason he needed to get back up to the palace. He needed to see his spontaneous injuries for himself.

  And change into a clean uniform. That too.

  The main serving room below smelled stale, scents of flat beer, sweat, and spicy food making his stomach heave. Lit with tallow candles—this building predated the piping of gas out to this part of the city—the yellow plastered walls were marked with soot from the great wrought-iron sconces. Like the majority of buildings in Noikinos, this one was white outside but brilliantly colored inside, with bright tapestries on the walls, red cloths over the old tables, and golden temple pennants bearing the sigil for fortune hanging over the doorways.

  Synen was notably absent; the man avoided Kai, having heard enough snide commentary on his tavern from him. Mikael made his way down the stairwell, not touching the rail. It was always a bit sticky. As they reached the base of the stairs, Kai strode through the swinging doors from the kitchen with a mass of black wool over his arm. He barely spared Mikael a glance, just tossed him the coat as he passed on his way toward the heavy exterior door.

  “Wait,” Elisabet ordered.

  Kai actually did as he should this time, moving to one side of the doorway. She drew her pistol, unbolted the door, and surveyed the street to make certain the area was still secure. A large unmarked coach waited outside, a driver in royal livery sitting atop the box and a groom on the tail. Since the coach took up most of the narrow street—they were in the Old Town—the morning traffic had to find another way around.

  Once satisfied with the safety of the situation, Elisabet had Kai climb into the coach first. Mikael followed, and she entered last, settling on the forward-facing bench next to Kai. Once she shut the door, it was dim inside. The shades were drawn, likely to keep Kai out of strangers’ lines of sight. Elisabet sat erect on the bench, pistol across her lap, her eyes closed. She wasn’t here to interact with them; she was listening to the situation outside. The groom riding the coach’s tail surely had a rifle with him, but Elisabet was the one who was ultimately responsible for Kai.

  Long ago, before the Anvarrid had come, the Six Families had been pacifists, living quietly in their buried fortresses. When the Larossans migrated onto their lands, the Families welcomed them and taught them how to farm in the colder climate. The Anvarrid invasion, a far more brutal introduction, forced the Six Families to change just to survive. Now they served to protect whichever Anvarrid House ruled each province. Here in Lucas Province, that meant the House of Valaren, the king’s household.

  Following the Anvarrid invasion of Larossa, assassinations had run rampant as different Houses fought for control of the new senate and, thus, the country. Two centuries later, the Houses predominantly used other means to seize control, usually legal maneuvering. Instead, the rising strength of the Larossan citizenry—who made up the majority of the country’s population—was now seen as a greater threat to the Anvarrid. A Larossan “nationalist” had taken a shot at the king late in the previous year, evidence that there were those who had anti-Anvarrid sympathies and were daring enough to act on them. Although Kai hadn’t been confirmed as the king’s heir yet, as a member of the House of Valaren he still made an excellent target and thus was not permitted to leave the palace without at least one guard.

  Since Elisabet was required to watch only Kai’s back, not his, Mikael appreciated her earlier show of consideration. He was equally glad that Kai hadn’t seen it; Kai would have taken it the wrong way.

  Mikael rubbed at the sore spot on his neck with fingers that tingled. The throbbing in his head had eased some already, and he was breathing better now. “Did they feel the dream at the fortress?”

  Kai leaned back against the coach’s leather squabs and folded his arms across his chest. “Of course they did.”

  Kai hated all of this. Kai disapproved of Mikael’s drinking to mute his dreams. He disapproved of the fact that Mikael had dreams in the first place, and that he inflicted the horror of his dreams on the sensitives—those who could feel another’s emotions—in Kai’s yeargroup. Kai hated coming down into the city to find Mikael and drag him back to the palace, and he made no secret of his low opinion of Mikael’s discipline.

  Mikael shifted his heavy overcoat off his lap and onto the bench next to him. Getting himself thoroughly drunk might blur his dreams, further reducing the effect they had on the sensitives, but the hangover afterward never helped his disposition.

  As the coach began to move through the streets of the Old Town, Mikael lifted the shade with one hand and peered out the window. Most of this part of the city dated back to the days before the Anvarrid, old buildings with simple slanted rooftops made to shed snow. Many were in questionable repair. The Larossans had favored plainer designs than the fanciful buildings the Anvarrid introduced on their arrival, but these were constructed of the same pale granite seen all over this part of Lucas Province. In some lights the city of Noikinos gleamed pink, at other times white or gold.

  Elisabet shifted on the bench, drawing Mikael’s attention back inside the dim coach. She was trying to reach a compromise with her coat; he recognized that movement from personal experience. While on duty, a guard usually stood. The steel plates in a guard’s overcoat made it nearly impossible to sit comfortably—not to mention the knife digging into her back. Usually she carried a rifle while on duty as well, but she’d left it behind at the palace. It would have been ungainly in the coach. And while he didn’t see her pistol in her sash, Mikael had no doubt that every time she left the palace, Elisabet went well armed. He didn’t even have his knife with him.

  Mikael preferred the sword himself, a tidy weapon, and the reason he identified as Hand-to-Hand. Very few guards chose a rifle as their principal weapon; in close quarters it could become problematic. But Elisabet was an expert marksman—she�
�d won marksmanship prizes at the summer fairs before—so he didn’t question her choice.

  Like both Mikael and Kai, she wore the Lucas uniform, with a high-collared jacket and trousers and vest all in unrelieved black. Swirls of black soutache trim on the sleeves and chest of her jacket marked her rank and assignment, the designs meaningless to most outside the Six Families. Mikael’s rumpled jacket shared one of those markings, the swirl for First on the right shoulder, but he had the pattern for Daujom—the king’s private intelligence service—on the left cuff. Elisabet and Kai both had the chest pattern for Rifles, compared to Mikael’s Hand-to-Hand, marking them as among the Lucas Family’s distance shooters.

  The one thing none of those trim patterns reflected was that Kai would take off those simple blacks most afternoons, shedding the Lucas side of his bloodline. He would don an Anvarrid over-tunic—the ankle-length tunic that the Houses favored, usually fitting tight to the waist, but left unsecured below to allow room for the full trousers or skirt worn with it—and become the king’s heir. Kai’s tunics were heavily embroidered in the burgundy-and-brown hawk pattern that belonged to the Royal House, the Valarens, making it clear that he was the king’s heir, even if not yet approved by the senate.

  The coach slowed and then stopped. Mikael glanced out again and saw that they were at the edge of the palace grounds, waiting to pass through the sentry post at the fence line. After a moment, the coach’s door was pulled open and a sentry stepped up onto the step to peer into the gloom.

  She was an older woman, her blond braids threaded with gray. The trim markings across her chest identified her as a sentry. She leaned into the coach to get a better look at them, her eyes likely slowed by the dimness inside. She nodded once to Elisabet, then surveyed Kai. Like all sentries, she kept her face expressionless, even when she turned her eyes on Mikael. Even if he didn’t recognize her, Mikael suspected she knew exactly who he was.