Aly replied with a rude invitation not commonly offered to a god, startling a peal of laughter from Kyprioth. “Whatever else I may say of you, and I’m sure there will be plenty, at least you have a sense of humor,” she added.
“I am a trickster,” he replied in a modest tone.
Gods, Aly thought. They always insist on having the last word.
All too soon the journey was over. They settled into the king’s bedroom in the palace at Rajmuat. The curtains over the terrace doors were drawn against the night air, cooler here above the harbor. The chamber was dark except for one small lamp by the door to the outer room and another by the door to what looked like the privy. Servants slept on pallets all around the room, ready to jump up to do the king’s bidding if he needed anything in the night. On the bed King Hazarin slept alone, pouting even in his dreams. He labored to breathe, releasing the occasional snore.
“He ate richly tonight,” Kyprioth observed in a tone of mild interest. “Venison in wine sauce, pork with a pineapple and honey gravy, buffalo coconut curry, sticky coconut peanut rice with currants and almonds, five different wines from the Eastern Lands . . .”
“He always eats like that?” Aly wanted to know, awed.
“The richer, the better,” replied Kyprioth. “He insists on at least five coconut dishes at every meal, though healers keep telling him a lighter diet would be better. It’s really a toss-up as to what kills him first, his heart or an apoplexy of the brain. Actually, I have a bit of a wager on with my cousin the Graveyard Hag about that.”
He went quiet. Hazarin bolted upright in bed, his eyes open and staring as he fought to breathe. His plump hands went to his head. He uttered a strangled noise loud enough to wake two of the sleepers around him. As they struggled to their feet, Hazarin fell back on his pillows, eyes wide. He stared blankly upward as his hands flopped down. He gaped endlessly as the anxious servants felt his throat and his wrists. The woman who held his wrist looked at the man who touched the big veins in Hazarin’s throat. The man shook his head, then cocked his head to put his ear over Hazarin’s open mouth.
The woman turned to look at the other sleepers. “Wake up, you fools!” she snapped, her voice low and cutting. “Something’s happened to the king!”
Blankets flew as the sleepers roused in a panic. Within moments they had silently lit more lamps. One man thrust a blanket under the edge of the main door, to keep the light from showing outside. Aly understood what was going on. These were the acts of people who might die if anything questionable took place in the room where the king slept. They all gathered around Hazarin, some making the star-shaped sign against evil when they saw the king’s face.
“He’s dead,” the man who had listened for the king’s breath told his fellows. “I don’t know why, but he is.”
“We must call a healer,” said a young maid. As she turned toward the door, one of the men grabbed her arm.
“Idiot!” he snapped, keeping his voice low. “What if it’s poison? Who will be blamed? He was fine when he rose from supper, fine when he came to bed—”
“He mentioned a headache,” interrupted the woman who’d been the first to wake.
“Not a headache bad enough to call the healer,” retorted the man who had stopped the younger maid. “Now he’s dead. If it’s poison . . .”
“They’ll say it was one of us,” murmured someone else. “They always do.”
None of them said another word. Silently they collected their belongings and fled through a door to the servants’ stair hidden behind a tapestry. The last to leave blew out the lamps.
“They’ll have gone to ground in the city by dawn,” Kyprioth remarked to Aly. “And they’ll escape Rajmuat by noon, if they have any sense. Stay here. I have a wager to collect from the Graveyard Hag. I told her it was folly to bet on a Rittevon king actually having a heart.”
“Wait,” Aly said. The god bent his glowing head down to listen. “Why don’t you tell those poor people his death was natural? That they can’t be blamed?”
“I could, if you want them to return and be tortured anyway. The new regents will want to make sure his death was accidental. Healers make mistakes, after all. Actually, since I’m in a good mood . . .” He touched a finger to Aly’s forehead, sending a small shock through her. “Find the king’s healer. Tell her this would be a good time to catch a ship for Carthak.” Then he vanished.
The magic he had placed on Aly told her where to find the healer on duty. The woman slept in a nearby chamber. Aly tried to grab her by the shoulder and shake her, but her hand passed through the healer’s flesh.
“Excuse me,” she said.
The healer twitched.
“Excuse me,” Aly said loudly into the healer’s ear. The woman sat up with a yelp, passing through Aly.
The healer glanced around.
“Right here,” Aly told her. “Don’t I glow, or something?”
The healer gasped. “I meant no offense, Goddess—”
“I’m not a goddess,” Aly interrupted. The gods hated it when someone who wasn’t a god took the title. “I’m a messenger. King Hazarin just died. I think it was ap—ap . . . that thing where blood vessels in the brain explode.”
“Apoplexy,” muttered the healer, scrambling out of bed. “If I warned him once . . .”
“He’s beyond warning now,” Aly informed her. “Perhaps this would be a good time to leave the country. Before they find him.”
“I must warn his servants,” protested the healer, going to her door. “We’ll all be questioned, to ensure he wasn’t poisoned.”
“His servants are warned,” Aly said flatly. The healer turned and stared at her. “They’re leaving right now, and they didn’t think to tell you. Grab your essentials and run.”
As the woman scrambled to pack, Aly returned to the dead man’s bedroom. Kyprioth was still absent, but Hazarin’s ghost sat by his former body, smiling. She could tell it was the king: he looked as if someone had painted his complete portrait on sheer cloth, except that no painter would have done a picture of Hazarin in his nightgown.
“You’re very cheerful for a man who’s dead,” Aly remarked.
The ghost looked at her. “But I’m well out of it,” he explained. “All the plotting, never knowing who’s a friend and who isn’t, wondering if the food I eat is poisoned or if someone’s buying grim spells to use against me. It’s done. Are you the Black God?”
“No,” Aly replied, “I’m a mortal. The god I—” She hesitated, not wanting to say it, but she had to give some explanation. “The god I serve brought me here, to see what happens.”
Hazarin shook his head. “It’s a bad business, meddling with gods,” he told Aly wisely.
“I know,” Aly said ruefully. “If it helps, you died a natural death. That’s what my god said, anyway.”
“I would have died of something,” Hazarin replied. “Really, I suppose I signed my death warrant the day I made Dunevon my heir, with my sister Imajane and her husband as regents, should I die before Dunevon came of age. My spies told me this afternoon that Imajane’s looking for death spells. This was a much better way to go, and probably everyone will think she had me killed anyway.” He grinned at the thought.
“You don’t sound upset,” Aly remarked. “If my half sister looked to have me killed, I’d be very upset.”
“Not at all,” Hazarin replied. “We weren’t raised to like one another. My father thought that if we did, we’d band together and get rid of him.”
“It doesn’t sound like a happy way to live,” Aly murmured.
“Now you know why I’m glad to be out of it,” Hazarin told her. “It’s—” Abruptly he stood and bowed at the door. Aly glanced at it over her shoulder and turned. A tall shape, robed and hooded, made all of shadows, was standing there. “I am ready to follow you, Great One,” Hazarin told the shadow that was the Black God. “This girl says she’s mortal.”
Though Aly couldn’t really see much of the god’s form i
n the dark room, she was convinced he looked her way. She didn’t want to die with so much left unfinished. This god could take her now if he wished to do so. Trembling, Aly knelt. She felt a warm, comforting pressure on her shoulder, as if someone had squeezed it. When she looked up, Hazarin’s ghost and the god were gone, leaving behind the shell of Hazarin’s body.
Time passed. Kyprioth finally returned at dawn with a glowing chess set. He and Aly played until a guard, concerned by the lack of activity in the royal bedchamber, cautiously opened the door. He cried the alarm. As Kyprioth and Aly watched, people came and went. Other guards were called to search for the missing servants and healer.
At last another healer arrived, a blond, cross-looking man. He was rumpled, as if they had dragged him from bed to see to the dead king. He was just finishing his examination when the icy princess Imajane and her husband, Rubinyan, arrived. Like the healer, they looked as if they had rushed to pull on their elegant clothes.
“Well?” demanded Imajane sharply, her blond head high. “Was it poison?”
“It was the poison of rich gravies, fatty meats, and too much cursed coconut, as he was warned time after time, Your Highness,” retorted the healer. “He died of apoplexy. Don’t think you can torture another answer out of me, if you please. Not only am I the head of the guild, but he was not my charge. The healer who had him in care is gone. Fled, I should imagine.”
Imajane glanced at the captain of the guards. “The servants fled as well?” The captain bowed. “Find them and the healer,” Imajane ordered in a crisp, elegant voice. “Search wherever you must.” She looked at her husband. “My dear?”
“All things seem plain enough.” Rubinyan spoke firmly in measured, deliberate tones.
Aly shook her head in pity for Hazarin. Except for Dunevon, these people were his only family, and they obviously didn’t sorrow over his senseless death. “We must ensure that the servants do not gossip,” Rubinyan continued. “Until we can make certain that the change of rulership is complete. Dunevon must be crowned as soon as possible. We need the Mithran High Priest. He can do it quickly now, and we can stage a ceremony with all manner of pomp later.”
“Certainly Your Highnesses can and must crown the new king before all else,” said the healer, drawing a sheet over Hazarin’s face. “But it is well past dawn. There has been too much coming and going here. By noon the whole city will know the king is dead.” He flung the terrace curtains wide and yelped, staggering back, eyes wide with terror. “Who needs servants to bugle the news?” he cried, pointing.
Imajane and Rubinyan moved forward to see what had frightened the man. Stormwings perched on the terrace rail, males and females alike, their bare, human chests streaked with filth and caked with dark fluids, their steel wings and claws gleaming in the early-morning sun. They grinned broadly, steel teeth glinting, and spread their wings, sending darts of reflected sunlight and an unspeakable smell into the room.
“Got something for us?” one of them asked. “Dead kings always mean trouble, fighting in the streets, with plenty of hate and dead bodies. A meal for us.”
“Not today,” Rubinyan said firmly. “Order will be preserved.” He yanked the drapes shut.
“You’ve trouble at your backs, mortal, and you’re too full of yourself to notice!” shrieked a female, her voice cutting through the heavy brocade drapes. “If I were you, I’d watch for the Trickster’s choice!”
Aly looked at Kyprioth. “Do they mean me, or just the changes you’re setting in motion?”
“They’re Stormwings,” replied Kyprioth evenly. “They’re just stirring things up.”
Aly raised an eyebrow. “Somehow I don’t believe you.”
Kyprioth shrugged. “And that hurts me,” he said in a blithe tone. “You have no idea how much that hurts me.”
Time passed. The Mithran High Priest and his acolytes hurried to the palace. There, in the throne room, Aly and Kyprioth looked on as the three-year-old Dunevon was prompted through a brief coronation. Aly felt bad for the little boy, who was just Elsren’s age. Dunevon looked thoroughly terrified. He obeyed Imajane’s orders, acting his part like a trained pony in front of as many nobles and guild leaders as his regents could find. At last he sat perched on the immense teak throne that dwarfed him, a small, pearl-bedecked crown on his dark curls. On his right, his half sister and regent, Imajane, held Dunevon’s diamond-crowned scepter. On his left, his co-regent, Rubinyan, held a pillow with the bared sword of the king’s justice on it.
Bronau stood in the third rank of the nobles before the dais. He was unhappy, the look in his eyes murderous as he stared first at Imajane, then his brother. This was not the laughing, charming man who had spent so many days with the Balitangs. Looking at him now, Aly saw him as a volcano on the edge of explosion. Imajane and Rubinyan saw it, too. Their eyes continually flicked to Bronau throughout the proceedings.
Once the last hymns were sung, Imajane stepped forward. “We have a new king, to ensure our safety as we take our beloved former king to his resting place,” she proclaimed, her voice ringing through the stone hall. “Now must His Majesty, and his subjects, give way to the condition of mourning, in honor of our beloved Hazarin, and to cleanse our souls of sorrow.”
Imajane beckoned the Black God’s High Priest forward from the first rank of notables. It would be his duty to see to Hazarin’s burial. As he stood before the dais and proclaimed the order of the funeral rites, Aly turned to Kyprioth. “It just occurred to me: if it’s afternoon here, it’s afternoon in Lombyn. I have to get back, before they bury me.”
“They won’t,” Kyprioth said blithely. “Ochobu won’t let them. Just enjoy the performance. How many royal funerals have you been to?”
“Why keep me dawdling?” inquired Aly at her most patient. “The Balitangs should know they have a new king, again.”
“There are a few more things you should see,” Kyprioth replied. “We’ll just wait.”
“I don’t want to wait,” Aly said firmly. “I need to get back. If something happens to any of the Balitang children while I’m kept here, our wager is finished. You can’t say I lost if something happens to them when you have me a whole country away.”
“Nothing will happen. The wager stands,” Kyprioth told her.
“I’m bored,” she informed him. “I bore easily. I do not wish to loll about here while everyone talks and eats and does whatever other silly things these luarin pests do for fun.”
“There, at least, I can help you,” Kyprioth said. He raised a glowing arm and wrote a sign in the air. Shadows wrapped around her.
She drifted for some time. At one point she thought she was waking up inside her own body. She heard Ochobu say firmly, “I can do nothing here.”
“No more should you.” Aly struggled to open her eyes: that was Nawat’s voice. What was he doing in Inti, where she had gone to sleep? He had stayed at Tanair that day. “The god has her fast,” the crow-man continued. “He will give her up when he is done with her.” Into Aly’s ear he whispered, “If he does not give you back, my flock and our kinfolk will make him suffer.”
Aly struggled to reassure him, and to say his breath didn’t smell of bugs in the least. In the end, the darkness in which she floated pulled her back into its depths.
Finally her awareness returned. Now she was standing in a luxurious child’s room. Expensive gilded and painted toys lay on the floor. A pair of hounds barely out of puppyhood wrestled for control of a silk table runner. Dunevon, clad all in black velvet, giggled and clapped his hands as he watched. Half-eaten marzipan fruits, candied violets, and raisins lay scattered on the rug around the boy.
Aly didn’t like that. From her own experience with Elsren and Petranne, she knew it was bad to give a child so many sweets. Didn’t the little king have a nursemaid, someone to look after him properly? Aly thought very little of those who dressed a little boy in expensive velvets, then left him to play on the floor. She looked around for the god, but Kyprioth was nowhere in vi
ew.
Wood creaked. A tapestry bulged. Someone pushed it aside to enter the room: Bronau. He was holding a wooden marionette in one hand.
“Uncle Bronau!” cried Dunevon, running to him. “How did you come in? Was it magic?”
“No, just a secret door,” Bronau replied, catching the boy king up in one arm. “It’s our secret now.” He jiggled the marionette invitingly for the child. “I told you I would bring you a present. I wanted it to be a surprise, just between us. Is Your Majesty pleased?”
“I’m not a majesty,” replied the king, pouting. For a moment he looked much like his dead half brother. “Hazarin’s a majesty. I’m a highness. I keep telling them, and they keep doing it wrong.”
Bronau chuckled, that rich, seductive sound he had so often lavished on Sarai. “Don’t you see, Hazarin had to go away. Before he left, he made you a majesty,” he explained. He looked around nervously.
Aly didn’t like Bronau’s manner. His charming mask often slipped, to reveal tension-bright eyes and tight jaw muscles. He was up to no good.
“Where’s your cloak, Dunevon?” he asked.
The boy pointed to a clothes press. “But it’s summer. I don’t need a cloak in summer.”
“We’re going sailing,” Bronau told him, offering the child his best smile. “I have a wonderful ship waiting in the harbor.”
“Sailing?” asked the boy, clearly delighted. “Can we go see the howler monkeys at home and winged horses and maybe a kraken?”
Bronau crossed the room, still holding the boy. “I’d prefer to avoid the kraken, Your Majesty,” he said, fumbling one-handed to open the press. “But there will be monkeys, even merpeople. Perhaps, if you’re very good, a herd of winged horses. There’s one on Imahyn Isle, did you know that?” He scrabbled through layers of clothes until he produced the cloak. Once the press was shut, Bronau stood Dunevon on it and put the cloak over the child’s shoulders, tying it securely.
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