Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles)

by Robert Brady

  “Perhaps I overestimated my well-being,” she sighed.

  Three Wolf Soldiers stood by her side faster than she would have expected. With strong but gentle hands they helped her into the sidesaddle. She expected a hand on her breast or buttocks, but they respected her dignity. For criminals, killers and rogues, the Wolf Soldiers kept their discipline.

  She sat the side-saddle and pretended to swoon. “If we may, your Imperial Majesty?” she asked.

  “At whatever speed you can manage,” he said, and turned the great stallion to hover protectively over her.

  They returned to the palace in good time, making no conversation along the way. Glynn found her way to her bed, claiming to be best fit to take care of her own needs. She would rather sail back to Trenbon than submit to a local healer, although she doubted she would be given the option.

  Once alone in her chambers, she stripped off her dress, her Uman serving girl sponging her wounds clean and then washing her body and brushing out her hair.

  She fell asleep just as she realized how relaxing it all felt.

  * * *

  “If that’s what I get, you should ride every day,” Melissa said, her face buried in his shoulder, his bear arm wrapped around her.

  “Maybe it’s all you,” he said.

  She bit his nipple. “Maybe,” she said.

  They lay quiet, naked, buried deep in another goose down mattress, in another palace, in another person’s custody. The gilded cage, Melissa thought. I’m a Raven in a gilded cage.

  “You thinking about dinner?” Bill asked her.

  She kissed him. “Yeah.”

  “Lupus told me she came back okay,” he said.

  “I was there,” she said.

  “Oh, right.”

  She kissed him again. “Its okay, Buh—Mountain,” she said. It killed her to call him that. It was like she’d lost part of him. “I’m not freaking out, and it didn’t hurt me at all.”

  “What does it feel like?”

  She shrugged. She ran her fingernails over his belly, and said, “The first time, I got the pins and needles in my arm. You know, like when you sleep on it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This time it was—hmmmmmm—it felt like when you hit your funny bone, how it starts at one point and jolts through your whole body? I felt that until she flew out through the window.

  “I’m not crying for the rude bitch,” she finished. “You know Shela is going to have her scrubbing dumpsters tomorrow?”

  He laughed. “I heard Lupus threaten that. She liked the idea, huh?”

  “She smarted off to Shela in the wagon,” Melissa said. “Glynn seemed so nice, too.”

  “At least we know the magic here can’t hurt you,” Bill said.

  “Do we?”

  * * *

  Shela found her White Wolf where she knew she would find him, where he always went when he felt troubled.

  She saw it as a comment on him that this gave him solace.

  “If you stand the ritual, Nina will feel as if she isn’t needed,” she said to him in Andaran.

  “I don’t care what Nina feels right now,” he said to her. His eyes flashed stormy, his jaw set. He wore his house robes and sandals, his arms crossed over his chest. He stood in the doorway to the children’s rooms, his shoulder on the jamb, watching them sleep.

  “Where is she?”

  “Not here. Somewhere else.” His scar twitched.

  “She left?” Nina didn’t leave Lee for any reason.

  “She had a few bruises she needed to tend to.”

  Shela watched him quietly.

  “I wasn’t in the mood to discuss it; she wasn’t in the mood to listen. I won.”

  “Nina has been a loyal—” Shela began.

  “You want some, too?” he asked without looking at her.

  “No, my Emperor,” she said, and pressed her body up to his, his good slave girl, his loving wife. “I do not.”

  “It isn’t like I can take it back now,” he said.

  “If she misspoke, then she is lucky to be alive.”

  “That she is.”

  They stood quiet. The children breathed, Lee and Vulpe in their separate beds, little Angry at the Sun in her basinet. Shela had seen him watch them until the sun rose. After certain battles, after attempts on their lives, after he had personally carved his way through a troop of Confluni at the second Battle for Thera, he had found comfort here with his children, his woman at his side.

  She had kept them inside of her for ten months. They were of her. He had kept them inside of him since.

  “I don’t want to have to kill Raven and the Mountain,” he said, finally.

  “Nor should you,” she said, wrapping her arms around him.

  He still didn’t look at her. “You saw the girl,” he said. “Glynn barely challenged her, and she went airborne. Nina was completely knocked out. When we move, that girl is going to be standing right in our way, and if you challenge her—”

  “If I challenge her,” Shela said, daring to interrupt him, “it will be with a dagger in my hand. Let her try to counter that.”

  “Her ‘Mountain’ might,” he said.

  “He’s no match for you,” she said.

  “He was today.”

  She pressed her chin into his upper arm and gazed up at the side of his face. “Is that what is bothering you?” she asked. “Are you worried for your stallion?”

  He looked at her across his shoulder with cold, blue eyes.

  “You and I both know we tried a snaffle in Little Storm’s mouth,” he said. “That horse couldn’t be ridden.”

  “In honesty, Yonega Waya, he just couldn’t be ridden well.”

  “I doubt this Mountain has any magic touch,” Lupus said.

  “I sense no magic in him,” Shela said. “Raven brings that.”

  He thought about that. One of the things she loved best about him—he looked to her opinion. All her life, her breasts and body had brought in suitors. She’d won this man with her mind.

  She held him, and she waited. The children breathed, and he watched them. Her feet grew tired and she ignored them. Her knees and back had stiffened before he finally decided he would sleep.

  She could have used her power to relax her muscles, but he wouldn’t, so she didn’t. She made it another of the many gifts of herself she had given him, and of which he would never know.

  Chapter Fourteen:

  A New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

  Melissa awoke before Bill, as she usually did, and slipped quietly out of from between the goose down mattress and the pile of quilts on their bed onto the green, thick pile rug that bed sat on. Past that, more towards the door, lay another, more ornamental green-blue rug with a sofa by it, a few leather over-stuffed chairs and the armoire where they kept their clothes and their few possessions. Bill had carved a little wooden figurine on the voyage between Outpost IX and Galnesh Eldador, for example, and she’d painted a couple pictures she wanted to keep.

  She padded naked to the armoire and found a robe she liked—white terry cloth with red tooling on the hem and cuffs. She slipped into it and belted it around her waist, then stepped off the carpets onto the cold, wood floor, to their window.

  The window didn’t have bars but it had to be fifty feet from the ground, set in stone with cherry-colored shutters banded in black iron. There would be no escape from here, if she wanted to escape. If she wanted to say, “Screw it,” and head out on her own, not that she would, she’d have to ask permission, and frankly that took the fun out of it.

  She watched the morning breeze roll the long winter hay on the fields to the west of the capitol city. Once again something seemed ‘not-right.’ There was something there to see, and she knew she was missing it, but missing something she couldn’t identify was like craving food she’d never eaten. Even if she found it, how would she know?

  If she didn’t watch it with Bill then she might have to deal with that, too. Shela had warned her it wa
s her fertile time just five days ago, and Bill had been so excited and passionate last night she’d nearly forgotten herself in their mutual climax. It wasn’t like she could run out to Ye Olde Drugge Store or whatever passed for it here, either. She’d have to either have more caution with Bill or the Mountain was going to have some hills.

  The thought made her smile. Seeing Shela with her children lit something off inside of her. Shela had confided that she thought she was around seventeen when she birthed her first (Andarans weren’t big on calendars). Melissa could be a spinster by local standards.

  She had to ask Bill about this subject, she resolved.

  Beneath her, on a walkway along the palace walls which connected the tower where they were staying to a different tower, she saw Karel of Stone scurrying away from her. She wanted to think the other tower was what was called ‘the family tower’ where the Emperor and his wife slept. Their children resided in a whole, separate wing of the palace, under heavy guard and with Nina of the Aschire in the next room.

  She’d been told this but she hadn’t seen any of it.

  Because she was a prisoner. A pet. She was a Raven in a gilded cage and, no matter the gilding, it was still a cage. She was waiting to find out what a song meant, and what it could mean was that she’d just be staying here forever, if she was lucky.

  Somehow Lupus didn’t strike her as someone who’d keep her around if he had no use for her, or that he’d let her go if she could hurt him. No, that didn’t sound like the Emperor of Eldador at all.

  Bill slipped up behind her and wrapped his arms around her middle, saying nothing. She pressed her body back against him and closed her eyes, feeling the warmth of his body through her terry cloth, then the reason for his affection against the small of her back. She unbelted the robe and let it fall to the ground. His hands ran over her breasts, down her abdomen to her thighs. She sighed a little sigh as he pushed against her.

  Yes, she thought—there was a conversation that needed to be had with this man.

  * * *

  Nina looked into the mirror and didn’t like what she saw.

  Mirrors. The first time she had seen her own face was in Galnesh Eldador, at the armoire in her personal chambers, in the room alongside the Emperor’s before there’d been a royal nursery. It had amazed her how much like her father she looked.

  Like him, but softer. Soft body, soft face, soft look in her eyes, the softness would be what she fought from that point in her life to this. Nina of the Aschire, like her father Krell before her, became a person of decision, and she’d decided to be the first of her kind to make her mark upon Fovea, not just on the forest called ‘Aschire.’

  An Uman called Drekk had told her once that she had the hands of a thief. Long, dexterous fingers that never shook—perfect for picking pockets, locks or fights if she wanted. Shela had informed her that she had the natural gifts of a plains witch, a sorceress. The Aschire considered both gifts uncommon. She could find no one there to teach her, to help her, to guide her in developing or at least controlling her power.

  She looked into the mirror and she saw the eye swollen shut, the puffy lip, the purple swelling at her jaw where her long hair wouldn’t hide it. What she saw didn’t look soft, neither did it look very pretty.

  She had come here to have Shela Mordetur teach her something of sorcery, in return for protecting the girl Lee, her daughter, from all harm.

  For twelve years she had done so. For over a decade she had been the last voice in the safety of the children. She ruled the nursery and, if she said, ‘Go away,’ then even the Emperor went away.

  She stood naked at a basin of cold water at her toilet stand in her spare room in the nursery wing. She dabbed her lip with a clean, white cloth and winced. Last night the Emperor had wanted to be alone with his children, and for a reason even she didn’t understand, she had told him, “No.”

  “No?” He had looked right into her eyes.

  Many said, “Fear the Emperor in his anger, be terrified of him in his calm.” He hadn’t shouted, he hadn’t scowled, he had just…looked at her, and she had held her ground and stared defiantly into a storm coming over the Iron Mountains.

  “I need to talk to you about—” she had begun. She hadn’t finished the statement. She’d been caught entirely off-guard when the back of his heavy hand caught her underneath the jaw and flipped her head-over-heels. The back of her head had hit the stone floor before she even realized she had been struck.

  A natural acrobat, she had leapt to her feet, to her defense, and looked the Emperor back in the eye.

  A Man would not put down the daughter of Krell so easily, she’d thought. However Rancor Mordetur was no regular Man.

  She went for her knife. A fist took her in the stomach, another in the eye, and sent her back down to the floor. She raised her hand to exercise her power, and she spoke the words to raise fire.

  He had picked her up like a rag doll from the floor, taking her by the belt, and heaved her against the stone wall. That he could do so with one hand spoke of might that no one Man could have, but again, Rancor Mordetur was no regular Man.

  She used her power instead to cushion the blow, to survive. In that moment, for some reason, she remembered the first day she had lived here, the only Aschire, missing her father, missing her forest, surrounded by cruel stone and hard beds. The Emperor had held her all night, listened to her, let her cry, let her hold him, pressed his lips to her forehead for hours. She had not been born his daughter, but he had fathered her from that moment on. When he spoke of ‘his kids,’ as he did, Nina of the Aschire felt herself included.

  She thudded against the wall, fell to the floor, and lay still.

  “More?” he had asked her.

  “No, my Emperor.”

  “Out.”

  And she had left, found an empty linen closet and folded herself beneath its lowest shelf. Her knees to her breast, she had been there all night, weeping, wishing he would come to her, and take her into his lap, and love her like the father he had become to her.

  He hadn’t. The mirror told her why. Men didn’t like to look at their handiwork, not like this.

  “Nina!” Shela appeared behind her, Chawny in the crook of her arm. Already the child reached for her, her face alight.

  “My Empress,” Nina said, not turning. She hadn’t called Shela that for years.

  Shela knew it as well. Shela’s hand found Nina’s shoulder and squeezed it. Nina had thought herself alone in her rooms. She stood naked, but Shela was a woman and like a sister to her.

  “Yonega Waya told me he had struck you,” she said.

  “I misspoke,” Nina admitted.

  “Unless you had a knife to his throat, you didn’t deserve this,” Shela said, looking into her eyes in the mirror.

  Nina looked away, and dipped her clean, white cloth into the basin before her.

  “Oh, Nina,” Shela said.

  “I should consider myself lucky,” Nina said, and tried to smile. It hurt too much. “There are not many alive who can say they attacked Rancor Mordetur.”

  “No, I suppose there are not,” Shela said. She pushed the washcloth back into the basin, and turned Nina to face her. Nina complied. She had been mentored by Shela for over a decade and grown accustomed to her direction.

  Shela reached out her hand to Nina’s eye, then her lips, then to her jaw. Her eyebrows dipped in concentration. Nina felt the painful tingle of her skin knitting, the blood flowing freely through bruised flesh, now restored.

  “At least you won’t scare the children,” Shela said. She had other marks on her, she knew. Her shoulder where she struck the wall, her head where she struck the floor, the purple welt around her waist where her belt had cut her. Shela left them. She didn’t have to tell Nina why.

  The Emperor was her man, and Shela knew the truth of this. Nina had defied him, and gone for her knife. No one took Nina of the Aschire less than seriously, and no one raised a hand to the Emperor.

  “You
have been angry since Raven and the Mountain arrived,” Shela said to her. “I hope you don’t feel threatened by them.”

  “She could be your twin,” Nina blurted, her eyes welling. “Already Lee is certain she is an aunt, even though she’s been told otherwise. All talk is about this ‘grandfather,’ who puts his hands on Lee as if he were the Emperor.”

  “And no one took the time to explain to you what was going on,” Shela said, stroking Nina’s purple hair with her free hand.

  Nina’s gaze fell, finding her feet on the floor. The stone felt cold on her toes; the air chill on her back and tender parts. Normally she would use her magic to warm herself, but she still hadn’t fully recovered from Raven’s touch.

  “I love those children as if I bore them,” Nina said. “If I am to be replaced—”

  “You are not to be replaced, Nina,” Shela said. “I am not done with you, and Lee and Vulpe would be heartbroken.”

  She handed Chawny to Nina, and the infant immediately sought a nipple. Both women smiled.

  “Can I replace that?” Shela said. “Can anyone?”

  * * *

  Karel of Stone was waiting in the Emperor’s sitting room, just outside of the Imperial bed chambers, when his Daff Kanaar ally emerged from his sleeping quarters, his blonde hair a tangle around his head and neck, his eyes pinkish and the beard stubble barely discernible on his fair chin.

  “Got in past the guards again, huh?” Black Lupus grunted. Karel thought of him that way, as every member of the Daff Kanaar identified himself by the color of the strange hook-symbol emblazoned on his breast.

  Karel had a silver symbol on the bear skins he wore as armor. If he hung it up and wore a regular shirt for long enough, that symbol would appear there.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I wanted you to know that Xinto is bound up in your dungeons still.”

  Lupus crossed the sitting room to the small dining area reserved for the Imperial couple. Half the time he ate here, the other half in the palace dining rooms with the palace nobles and whatever dignitaries were visiting. Lupus called them ‘moochers’ sometimes—that word didn’t mean anything to Karel but he still liked it.