The King's Blood

by S. E. Zbasnik

  Aldrin shifted, feeling like a noose was tightening around his royal neck. Being beholden to a witch was probably one of the first ten things they teach future kings to not do, but he'd missed out on all the important training.26

  "What's your name?" Ciara cut in, tired of feeling off balance on the witch's territory.

  The witch's wrists jangled, the polished bones clattering upon the smattering of bells as she folded her arms. "Names are something for conventional people. People who don't live on the outskirts of society. Names have power," the air grew colder as she talked, each syllable another chunk of ice dropped into the middle of the room.

  "Seda," a small voice piped up from the corner, "most folk who don't walk around talking about the mystical streams of energy call her Seda."

  Seda shook her head at her daughter, "Isadora, don't you have something better to be doing with your time?"

  "Building a new bed comes to mind," Isa muttered, but gathered the threat from her mother and lapsed into criticizing silence.

  Aldrin tried to rise up to his full height, causing a draft from the door to sting his exposed ankles, "Madame Seda," the younger witch snickered at that, "I have come to repay the debt you are owed. What is it that you want of me?"

  Seda smiled again, her eyes crinkling at the edges as she slowly washed her hands in the last of the clean water, "A want?"

  "I have a little coin," Aldrin offered. Ciara tried to not snort herself at that. No witch worth her hemlock was going to accept a few Eagles when she had the possibility of an entire treasury at her disposal.

  "A life can be a very expensive thing if used properly. That young babe in there could become anything her parents pour into her."

  "Or she'll be some brat breeding sow tied down to another muckraker," Isadora muttered.

  "A life can also be very cheap, if its potential is wasted. Not just in the sins of the gods, but in failing to achieve its destiny," Seda continued, ignoring her daughter as she usually did.

  The witch rounded on the boy, staring deep into his wandering eyes, "Now tell me, how much do you think the future king of Arda is worth?"

  Aldrin gasped. Him, King?

  "Him, King?" Ciara voiced his own thoughts, perhaps a bit less dispiritedly than he'd have.

  "The sands are always shifting," Seda said, "As you know well daughter of the dunes."

  Ciara took on the witch's glare, having faced down her own overpowering female influence from time to time, "I am no daughter of the dunes."

  "No, but you could yet be."

  Aldrin waved his hands, trying to get everyone back on track, "This is all very well and good, but it doesn't make much difference what any of us are supposed to be if we spend our lives talking price in this shack in the woods."

  That earned him a glare from the shack's current owner who'd gone through most of her scraped coin trying to get the place up to code. If his mission was to avoid pissing off a witch tonight he was off to a great start.

  Seda templed her fingers and said simply, "I require only one thing from you, son of the Ostero King."

  Ciara unfolded her hands, glancing around to see if there was anything heavy she could smash into the witch's head before making a run for it. She slowly crept behind the eldest witch waiting for the announcement. Aldrin let his hand drop away from his belt, which mercifully stayed upright, "All right, let's here it."

  "Liam."

  Aldrin blinked slowly, his mind trying to dig up why that name was so strikingly familiar. But Ciara, who spent the growing weeks with her nose plunged deep into familiar lore was ahead of him. "You can't be serious. It's just a myth," the girl said, standing her ground as the witch spun upon her. The yellow eyes followed to her hand that was mere inches from the fire poker.

  "Many things that are myths are real. And many things that are real are myths."

  "Why don't you ask for a goblin's gizzard or a seraph's wing while you're at it? We're as likely to stumble across that as we are the sword of Casamir."

  "That's it!" Aldrin shouted out, the pieces falling into place. The mystical sword granted to Casamir after he pulled it from the skull of a dragon and then planted it into the skull of a different dragon. Liam always seemed a strange name for a sword. Most called them Doomslayer, or Fateshear, or Stabby Stab Stab! Something with real oomph.

  Aldrin glanced around at the sets of female eyes staring at him condescendingly, "I have no idea where to find that."

  "These are my demands. A life for a sword. Of course, if you'd prefer, I could always take that life and you can keep the sword."

  Aldrin turned to Ciara who threw her hands up. Most of the tales spoke of Casamir either returning his sword to the dragon's skull, tossing it into a lake because he thought he saw a spider (this was the non-canon tale) or it being entombed with his corpse.

  The boy prince walked over to his companion, brushing aside the witch who hadn't uncrossed her arms or made any threatening moves. Yet. "What now?" he asked her.

  "I've no idea where we find a dragon's skull, I'm not a very good swimmer, and no one who's claimed to have seen Casamir's tomb wasn't blitzed out of his mind. Unless you have some divining rod set for swords up your ass, we're up a creek."

  "I don't want to die," Aldrin said plainly. Through all the running, the crying, the stabbing, the running some more, and the partying he'd never felt so certain that death was staring him in the eye as he did hunched over in a kitchen decorated with oversized serving spoons.

  "I do not wish to interrupt your little commune, but there is one more caveat to my request. You must find the sword of Casamir with my daughter."

  "What?!" a spoon clattered against a cauldron. Aldrin prayed it wasn't the blood pot.

  "Isa, do not argue with me," Seda towered over the girl, but Isadora still reached up on her tiptoes, pointing an accusing finger at her mother.

  "What gives you any right to a say in my life?"

  "Anata wa, kore ga anata no unmei o shitte imasu," Seda muttered under her breath, trying to not look at Aldrin or Ciara.

  "Unmei wa anata ga kimeta," Isa spat back, uncaring there was an audience for what seemed like a long simmering feud.

  "We do not choose our destinies, our destinies choose us," Seda said, switching back to Ostero and glancing back at the boy prince.

  "Atsui sekitan no ue ni suwaru," Isa muttered under her breath, which must have been a major witch curse judging by the sharp look Seda turned on her.

  The younger witch glared at her hands that seemed sharper in the light, more real than anything else in the cabin. She raised them to her mother, the lines crackling with an invisible power. But it must have been a simple trick of the light. As she shook her hands they slipped back into the real world full of killer witches asking for imaginary swords.

  "Very well, I will accompany you on your mission to find the lost sword of Casamir," Isa said, her voice toneless and ages away.

  Ciara looked at Aldrin, who now had an impossible quest and a spare witch dumped in his lap. He wanted to run and hide in the deepest shadow he could find and melt through the floor. It shouldn't be him making these choices, these decisions that put so many at risk. Where was his brother in all this? He was supposed to be King. He even wanted it. All Aldrin wanted was a...he didn't even know anymore. But it didn't involve witches, that was for certain.

  But it was his job to give an answer and a slimmer of hope appeared, "This quest will take time, yes? We will require at least a few months to find an imaginary sword."

  Seda nodded, "Yes, I will expect delivery upon the first turn of the summer sun."

  "Could you translate that to less witchy please," Ciara said.

  Her tiger smile showed more teeth than warmth, "You call it a vernal equinox I believe."

  "I call it the start of spring, actually," Ciara said, refusing to back down.

  Seda rounded upon her, growing even larger at the teenage insolence pouring off the dune crawler. The soft curves of her form grew hard a
s flint at the girl poking out her bottom lip.

  "I'll do it."

  "What?" the magic fled from the room like someone flipped on a light switch and the witch returned to her normal six foot 'could easily toss a bear' size.

  "I'll do it," Aldrin repeated. "I'll find this sword, I'll take your daughter, and I'll deliver it to you on spring day."

  "Excellent," the witch clapped her hands in excitement and dashed through the two parted teenagers.

  Seda reached into the dusty bookshelf, crammed with remnants and scraps of vellum, and extracted a single scrap. She laid it upon the drying table and flipped it over. Removing a feather from the table, she slit the edge with a small knife in her pocket and dipped it in ink.

  While the witch scribbled furiously, Ciara leaned into Aldrin's ear, "What in the hell are you doing?"

  He grimaced a bit at her tone but also shivered at her warm breath, "Keeping us alive."

  "'Til the Vernon Equinox at least," she muttered.

  "There," Seda held up the quill and passed it to Aldrin, "sign here, date here, and initial here," she said pointing to the tiniest text he'd ever seen. Her handwriting could put the Llamdon monks, forced to write the entire War of the Gods psalm on a handkerchief, a run for their money.

  "In servitude...if the party of the first party fails to...roasted eyeballs but no greater than 600 degrees...all before sundown or when light fails to crest the horizon..." Aldrin tried to read aloud.

  "It's a standard witch contract," Seda said simply.

  "What happens if I fail to deliver the sword?" Aldrin asked turning the contract sideways, hoping sense would fall out if he shook it.

  "The usual; I get to roast your body, eat your soul, and sell your eyeballs to an herbalist."

  Aldrin looked at the deadpan witch, who still had the quill dagger lightly clutched in her sharp nails. He gulped and, without looking, swished something approaching Bonaventure Ostero onto the scroll. He expected it to glow and vanish with a pop of magic, but instead Seda took it from him, blew upon the ink and then rolled it up.

  "Best get packing child," she called to her daughter who muttered more of that foreign tongue and did throw a spoon into the pot of blood.

  Ciara turned to Aldrin, her face deadly serious and said, "I only promised to get you to Tumbler's End."

  "And I'd never ask you for anymore," he replied honestly.

  She looked over at the witch who was carefully placing Aldrin's soul into an oversized book stuffed full with other contracts. A chill, like nothing the biting winter air could ever cause, crawled up her spine. Ciara felt like she'd just sealed her own fate without picking up a pen, "Just so long as we're clear."

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  "Under no circumstances will we suffer a witch to travel with us."

  Despite his lack of eyesight, Medwin turned to face Isadora who patiently blinked her white eyes. She was overladen with a pack containing what meager supplies constituted her entire life and leaned upon a small walking stick, perhaps three feet long and carved from some exotic crimson wood.

  Things hadn't been going well since Ciara and Aldrin left the cottage with a new passenger in tow. Isadora fell a few paces behind them and kept sniffling her small nose as if she smelt something in the harsh winter air. Otherwise, she remained silent, letting the teenagers dictate her life. It was a nice change of pace from her mother.

  Hoping to look as nonchalant as possible, Chance and Chase sat near the clearing trying to play an ancient game. Half of the pieces were scattered onto the snow when a particularly good shot took out most of Chase's armada.27 But as the "witching" hour turned into the "wandering home drunk out of your mind and trying to eat an entire jar of cloves" hour, the brothers grew nervous. Most of the game was forgotten as hits got little more than an "oh you sunk something, jolly good," as their eyes scanned the trees.

  As Ciara and Aldrin burst through the trees, neither looking very dead or frog like, Medwin approached the two, a warm jug in his hands. Then the woman followed behind and the snowy clearing grew as deadly quiet as boots crossing thin ice. Aldrin began to explain how he had to find the sword, get it to a witch and, oh yeah, take this other witch with them. What's for breakfast?

  At the Chancellor's proclamation a few other historians wandered out of their own caravans, dressed in underwear so long it needed to be rolled up at the cuffs to fit properly. A few thought it proper to grab robes while most just jammed a hat on their head and called it good. They all reared up like a horse coming across a snake at the short woman dressed in fading black radiating enough energy to fry an egg on her head. Surprisingly, no one had ever tried.

  The others nodded in agreement. A boy prince was one thing, and they'd even been able to find a loophole around the no woman rule by reclassifying Ciara as his luggage, but "No Witches" was underlined thrice in big bold letters. There was no getting around it.

  "And I shall suffer no lecherous old men," the witch piped up, her narrow eyes turning to each man who cowered under her evil gaze. "I need not travel with you. I will travel beside you."

  Aldrin looked at Isa, suddenly very concerned about that scrap of paper he didn't read, "Will...does that work?"

  She took him to be questioning her fitness in the wilderness alone. "I have traveled across all of Arda twice over in my lifetime, a little winter will not harm me."

  "That wasn't what I..." but Isa didn't hear him, instead she very dramatically raised her walking stick high over her head drawing the attention of every historian. Just as a few started to shift back, she slammed her stick deep into the frozen ground.

  Robes fluttered and a few hats crashed to the ground as the historians tried to dodge out of the way of...nothing. Isa laughed to herself, and, shifting about her weighted pack, wandered into the forest away from the crowd. She took no light, and only the faint rippling of a laugh gave away her position as it too faded into the wind.

  Medwin clapped his hands together. "We have much to do in the morning. I believe Dean Dean was going to present 'Life in the Times of Colic; How The Goastro Era Relied Upon Horsepower' tomorrow. And I trust you'll all have read it by now so we can have a lively discussion."

  The others muttered something about "of course I did, couldn't put it down. What the hell is colic anyway? Is that when horses get unmanageable manes?" while they wandered back to their own caravans, trying to not make impossible eye contact with their Chancellor or Dean Dean who was trying to remember if he'd even read the article.

  "You two, join me in my cabin," Medwin muttered quietly to Ciara and Aldrin. They felt the icy grip of a chewing out rippling down their spines. Resigned to their fate, because there was little chance either would survive a night in the frozen forest, they trundled behind the Chancellor who moved with an angry purpose. His hand had to barely swing past the doorframe before it found purchase on the handle, never a good sign.

  As they shook their boots, trying to dislodge whatever snow they could from it before tracking it into the warm caravan, Medwin turned on them like a scorpion hiding in their mittens, "What, by all the divines bickering in the heavens, were you thinking?!"

  Aldrin started to babble, but Ciara spent enough time with the man she could tell by the way his head bobbled towards her reading chair that he was referring to her. "There wasn't much of an option," she said calmly, folding up her scarf and burying it inside her coat.

  "There is always an option," Medwin said bitterly.

  "You're right, we could either go along with finding this mythical sword, or I could have let her kill Aldrin. So, an option," Ciara said looking at the prince who nodded bitterly. It wasn't the best corner to be in, but they were in it together. For now.

  "You have sold your life, boy. Do you realize that?" Medwin said bitterly.

  "The witch cannot claim the entire kingdom for her own," Aldrin said quietly, "the throne lies with my brother."

  But Medwin shook his head sorrowfully, "Witches care little for the squabbles of politics
and even less for land. What she wants is power."

  Aldrin tried to go back over how little power a 15 year old with pants that no longer fit and the starting of what was either remnants of crackers or whiskers actually possessed. Maybe he could command a small battalion of bastards their fathers wanted out of their houses when he was much older. Maybe.

  "Not power over kings," Medwin continued over the prince's silent monologue, "power over the fabric of the world."

  Ciara interrupted, "You mean magic? You can't believe in all that gobbilty gook about people being able to move things and create stuff with their minds?"

  Medwin zeroed in on her voice, surprised to find it so near the boy's. "There are many things in this world we cannot see. Air is invisible to the eye, yet without it the lungs deflate and the body dies. Do not be so quick to dismiss that which you do not know."

  "Oh come on," Ciara argued like a good Scepticar who never really thought upon magic, until faced with a challenger, "how can a person call fire from thin air?"

  Medwin gingerly touched the side of his face with the deep tracks from an ancient accident Ciara never asked about. She didn't think it her place to go digging about in his history and hoped he'd accord her the same. "I know it is so, because I have seen it with my own eyes," the man said quietly.

  Ciara cowed behind that quiet plea for understanding but Aldrin pressed on, "A witch took your eyesight?"

  "No, there are few witches who can command fire, even fewer who control it. This was one of those 'academic accidents,' wherein a host of men gathered around their experimental cauldron and tossed together whatever they could think of. Fear was gripping the country in the face of the witch epidemic, women holding powers no men could touch, and they believed they could find a way to mimic it."

  Medwin let his hands drop to his pocket where his ragged fingers found a familiar key, crushing it into his palm as he told his story, "But they were as children plucking away at a calliope trying to mimic a concerto they'd only heard from the rafters. It wasn't so much an accident as a major explosion. The entire library was gone in under an hour."