The King's Blood

by S. E. Zbasnik

  The witch blinked in surprise before her eyes narrowed in rage, "That's the greatest steaming pile of horseshit I've seen since we passed the barn."

  Kynton laughed heartily at that, as he released the witch's grasp, "I said exactly that to my Master and was rewarded with a sound booting up my backside."

  "Then why..."

  He gazed down at the witch, so cocksure in her convictions, begging for him to either agree with her worldview or volley back another blow. He still remembered when he clung desperately to always being right, to his unshakeable beliefs. It felt like an age. "These people need a doctor, and yet they wanted a priest," was all Kynton said as he walked away from a fuming Isa.

  A calloused hand thudded onto Aldrin's shoulder as a third mug of fermented barley water shuddered down the table. With the priest and the witch off providing succor, the prince did what he did best and found himself entrenched deep in one of the now rare gatherings of the locals.

  Rotting grain breath breathed onto his face as one of the heartier of the men clanked his mug against Aldrin's and raised it high, "Salon!"

  The prince smiled wanly while raising his mug, uncertain if that was a call to drink or for a haircut. But his new friend grinned manically and poured most of his draught down an enlarged gullet. Aldrin feigned a few sips, before tossing most of the brew behind him where it landed on a very inebriated houseplant.

  "Wha' do you call thees stuff again?" Mitrione slurred, his overabundant backside having trouble remaining in the pair of children's stools he crouched over.

  "Poison," Kaltar muttered, taking as much care as Aldrin with his share.

  They were camped out in what the locals affectionately called the Mayor's house, though no one had been able to pinpoint exactly who the Mayor was or why his home had so many small cat figurines scattered in every corner. Men, freed from their duties of keeping their overwrought wives chained to dying stoves and coughing offspring, flocked to the gathering.

  It was about five minutes before a belching contest started up. "Excellent work, my good sir," Kaltar said as if he were grading a term paper, "there was quite a reverberation within that gas blast."

  "Ooh, wait 'til ya see what I can do!" Mitrione said, tossing his mug into the wall and trying to rise.

  "NO!" Kaltar shouted, trying to stop his old friend, but it was too late. Unstable legs were unable to find purchase and, tumbling hard, the man and his wide ass took out the pair of chairs as well as a rather old hunk of floor.

  But the inebriation haze enveloped Mitrione in an anesthetic fog and he simply rolled up to his knees and asked for another one. "He's going to get someone killed," Bartrone muttered, unhappy to be placed on royal babysitting duty.

  "The locals seem to enjoy it," Aldrin whispered back, unhappy to be on Bartrone babysitting duty.

  The sharp eyes of the wronged man met the princes and their unfinished rage came flooding back as it did any moment they were forced together. It was a fight that could never come to a head unless someone landed the first blow. So far, neither was willing to risk it.

  "So...you're all what, again?" Tumbler End's ambassador asked as his meat hook dug into Aldrin's shoulder.

  "Clowns," the prince said in all sincerity.

  The ambassador and head of the tourist board tried to narrow his beefy eyes but couldn't get the hang of it. Instead, he settled for covering one with his hand and inspected the young man, lanky but with a string of muscles popping up, in a tunic more drab than what the locals wore. Aldrin raised his hands up to his ears like antlers and went "Wooo!"

  "An' you're here as part of a..."

  "Traveling circus," Batrone interjected, earning a glare from the boy as he did every time he spoke. But that was the Historians cover through any town where most of the residents couldn't find their bottoms with both hands. Chance and Chase even had a rather convincing lion suit.

  But this man was proving to be a more difficult sell, "An' you travel with a priest?"

  "He can swallow hot coals!" Aldrin piped up quickly.

  "Shoo. I'd hate to be on the other side when that comes out," one of the other men in the dining room added. His face was mostly buried under a giant sack hat, only a cleft chin poked free.

  "Why come to Tumbler's End, ain't got no circuses before?"

  "We heard there was an army camped here," Aldrin started, hopeful to finally wedge his foot into a useful conversation. But this had a rather untoward effect.

  Their ambassador banged his ham hock onto the table, sending all the mugs leaping and sloshing into the air. The chin grumbled low, like a dog watching an intruder in its yard. And the other fellows, even more silent in their grateful escape from the houses of the sick, mumbled and shuffled in anger. Mitrione, trying to fit in, slammed his fist onto the table as well, sending his oatmeal spoon flying until it crashed into a figure of a cat drinking tea.

  "Was it something I said?" the prince asked calmly, trying to disarm the situation.

  "That army's nothin' but a bunch of conjugators!" the ambassador cursed with the vitriol of one who caught a witch routing through their garden.37

  Aldrin looked at Kaltar, who shrugged. Their only expert in local curse words was so far gone he was trying to dribble oatmeal up his nose. Sighing heavily, the historian pulled the bowl away from Mitrione before he drown himself.

  "We feeds 'em, houses 'em, listens to that spotty brat of a king prattle on about...gods who ever cares?"

  "And boom, talk of an army rising in the east and they'd gone like rats out of Thomas's midden."

  Thomas - of the rat infested midden, raised his glass at the mention before remembering he was supposed to be grumbling about the army. "An' don't forget the darkie."

  The ambassador smirked, "Right, the trained monkey for Lord high fancy pants and his disgusting plan to launch an avalanche right down our main trade route, sealing us in."

  The grumbling grew to rabble rousing as the wrongs inflicted upon the town by the retreating army tumbled from memory. "It was a bloody miracle from Scepti we made it a month before starvation set in."

  Aldrin tried to lean away from the bear of a man who cursed his house and family, but the ambassador grabbed onto his arm, crushing his tricep, "If'n I ever see one o' them royals again, I'll make 'em feel every little pyre we burned."

  It wasn't fair. The thought tumbled through her mind for the seventh time as Ciara rose from her seat, only to walk a few paces, nudge a stack of books, then return grumbling. Sure, the priest and the witch worked elbow deep in phlegm and whatever oozed from bodies, but at least they got to get out of the caravans and do something. She glared at the same sentence she'd been ignoring as if it could turn into something more exciting. And Aldrin, he barely gave a wave as he swept up with the other historians for some "male bonding." Whatever it was, it sounded sticky and painful.

  Medwin coughed lightly from his armchair, a fresh quill etching away. Ciara asked him once how he could tell when he ran out of ink. He'd smiled and said that he counted. A two dip lasted for a line and a half, if he was careful. But on occasion, his brethren would find translations missing words or sentences. It made for a game to pass the winter. After that, she stopped complaining about being bored, afraid what his answer to remedy it would be.

  But he couldn't do much to dissuade the teenage angst of being left out of the party. Even Chance and Chase shooed her away from the porridge pot they had roasting as hungry villagers stretched a line down the road. All while they kept glancing back at Medwin, come to think of it. She sighed loudly again, knocking over a book with her kicking boot.

  Medwin's lolling head snapped up at the noise and the line count vanished from his mind. Sighing, he set his quill down and said, "You are perturbed."

  Her eyes, full of rage, swiveled up to the old man, landing on the scars that made up the texture of the right side of his face. A story full of magic and loss, one she didn't ask him about after her little outburst, which felt a lifetime ago. "That wasn't a qu
estion."

  "No, it wasn't," he smiled to himself. Medwin rose slowly, his robes were fraying at the ends. A fact she tried to correct when he slept, but somehow he seemed to keep catching the edges on every uneven surface or splintered floorboard.

  "Why are we hiding in here, anyway?"

  "Because," the Chancellor inched along his desk, his fingers searching for a familiar pot, "we would be rather obvious in an already raw and suspicious land."

  Ciara snorted and folded her arms, "I'm certain they've seen a blind man before."

  He poured a small glug of tea into his cup, until the liquid just brushed his fingertip and took a long draught before answering her, "And I have the nagging impression they have seen someone of your coloring before as well."

  Ciara looked back at the blind man, waving her hands about to see if he'd react. "How'd you..."

  Medwin chuckled a moment, "I overheard more than a few hushed conversations and pieced it together. And instructed some of them to crack the spines on Dunner culture. Their assumptions were atrocious."

  "I..." she didn't know how to respond. It had been strangely refreshing spending time with someone who had no way to know she was marked so easily in a crowd. Someone who wouldn't assume the worst just from the curl of her hair or the shade of her skin. Knowing that he knew made it feel spoiled, a lie of omission. It didn't make a damn bit of sense.

  "Wait," the other half of Medwin's comment sunk in, "what do you mean you suspect they've seen a Dunner before?"

  He waved his hand out, skimming along an old pile of atlases Aldrin slept under after their trip to the Dead city. "People do not hate the novel, they find it curious. They may treat it as little more than a walking curiosity, but they will not actively hate it."

  Medwin placed his empty cup down, clattering the edge with a tainted spoon, "No, true hate, true revulsion requires familiarity. An idea, a cliché is not born in a vacuum."

  Ciara dropped her head down. Seemed to her people had no trouble hating her sight unseen the moment she rolled into a new town regardless of what she said or did. She wondered what it'd be like to not be an avatar of your entire race. To have your actions judged as a single person.

  As if in response to her repose about the nature of hatred in the world, Aldrin burst in through the door, a waft of burnt oatmeal following in his wake. His hair was coated in globs of the stuff and one of the cuffs of his brown shirt was ripped at the seams and dangerously dangled off.

  "What happened to you?" Ciara asked the prince as he collapsed into what became his chair.

  His fingers worked through some of the more stubborn globs, tossing oats to the ground, "Don't ask."

  "I'm afraid I already did," Ciara responded wryly, enjoying the small twist of Aldrin's face as he found himself caught in a trap.

  "Mitrione got so smashed on the local rotgut he took to throwing the oatmeal pot at everyone, ordering them to 'Let Oats Into Their Heart.' It took three of us to restrain him," Aldrin smiled at her slack jaw. "I told you not to ask."

  She grinned back at him, feeling a familiar creep of that deadly fever across her cheeks.

  Medwin interrupted the rudimentary flirting by asking, "And what have you learned, aside from the ballistic trajectory of breakfast gruel?"

  Aldrin's face fell. He'd been rehearsing how this would go since the locals brayed against the King's army and then Mitrione provided an easy distraction. He'd hoped Ciara wouldn't be there. Or that he wouldn't have to do it. "They're gone. The entire army picked up, um, swords and left about a month ago."

  "What? Where?" the girl pressed the would be king. Her father told her, promised her the army would be here. They weren't supposed to move without them.

  But it was Medwin that responded distantly, as if he read off an old script, "The Tower of Ashar."

  Aldrin nodded. His hands, running out of oatmeal to extract, he took to knotting them, "Yeah. Something about an army rising in the east."

  "I see," Medwin's tone grew cold and distant, a rare form for his normally honey voice.

  "There's more," Aldrin admitted, deciding it was best to rip that bandage off quickly rather than let the wound fester. "They say the prince was with him."

  "The prince?" in all the excitement of doing her damnedest to keep Aldrin alive, Ciara completely forgot there was another flapping about.

  "Yeah," Aldrin's eyes shifted to his lap as his face seemed to shrink in front of them, "seems my brother's fulfilling his destiny being the high King of the lands and all that." He'd refused to digest that piece of information, leaving it stored in his cheeks for later when there were less people who'd pinned their hopes and dreams upon his lapel watching him.

  But Ciara caught the unspoken words of a boy who had a dream he never knew he even wanted crushed by a bunch of local hicks so blotted out of their mind they couldn't be trusted to find the mug on their own. "I'm..." she started, unsure how to phrase her condolences. "Sorry" felt wrong.

  His grey eyes, once so sharp in the winter cold now mottled by the lack of burden hung around his neck, wandered up to hers and he shrugged. Nothing more to be said. Then, as he took in the sheen of her face he blanched, forgetting the final piece of news, "And there's one more thing. The locals say there was a black man with the army."

  "A black man...my father? He's alive!" She'd held onto that hope, that one thread keeping her going most days that at the end of this twisting road she'd find her family, transplanted and wounded, but alive. But in the dark nights, when only the wind answered back to her pleas, she felt the crushing weight of logic patronizingly mocking that he must have perished at the castle with so many others.

  But Aldrin didn't respond with the same level of glee. He looked over at the blind man, whose head was cocked as he tried to read the silence in their conversation, "He...they say that, um, he was the one who orchestrated the avalanche."

  "No, it's not possible, my father would never..." Ciara sounded near tears. Not the man who chastised her if she slipped the whitest of lies, not the man who once trudged through freezing brackish water to pull a kitten from a tree. He couldn't have damned this entire town of innocent people to this slow descent to hell.

  Aldrin looked away, afraid of a backlash like the last time her father's character was questioned, but the girl only sat there in disbelief, shaking her head. The shattering of your gods was one thing, but the loss of a living one another entirely.

  Medwin placed his gnarled hand upon her shoulder, "He ensured rather brilliantly that the Empire could not follow on their bleeding heels."

  "And because of that dozens paid their lives," she whispered back, the vision of that little girl broken under her sheet wavering through her words.

  "Dozens in exchange for hundreds or even thousands."

  "The ends justifying the means? That's wrong," she mumbled, old half heard arguments as Albrant called for culling of dissidents to chop off the Empire's head and her father's refusing arguments backed up her words.

  But Medwin sighed, "Right and Wrong are only words when you have the balance of countries hanging in the wind."

  Aldrin, raised on a less steady moral diet than the girl having a crisis of everything, stared into his hands. These were decisions better left to the ones in charge...like his brother. That thought disquieted him as he shifted in his seat.

  "How did you know they'd fled to the Tower?" Aldrin asked Medwin, his mind trying to shift the conversation away from the broken god.

  The old Chancellor smiled curtly, his fingers glancing across some of the oldest tomes in his wagon, "It is fabled to be impregnable, no invading army has ever claimed her. And..." he turned away from them, sliding carefully back to his desk as if years weighed upon his mind.

  Gnarled fingers fumbled for the key tucked in his pocket, the only relic left from his old life that ended in fire and loss. A key to a library that was nothing more than ash in the wind. His blank stare snapped up as he gazed into the distance, "There is a prophecy."

&nbs
p; Aldrin glanced at Ciara, who'd shaken off her mental destruction to cling to Medwin's words. A prophecy was little more than a way for unemployed soothsayers to pass time between their jobs flipping sausages. No one aside from the extremely crazy or the crazily bored put any thought into the prophetic stanzas flapping about inn outhouses and Soulday crackers.

  Medwin crossed back to his desk, his hand slipping down to his hidden drawer, "I should have informed you of this when your talk of Cassandra and her sword began."

  "Cassandra?" Aldrin mouthed to Ciara.

  "Her?" she asked back.

  Gently, Medwin extracted the book he kept hidden in the heart of his desk, always at the center of his research even if everyone else would pass it off as little more than fantasy. "The mighty hero Casamir did in fact exist. Or at least the meat of him did. Some of his more elaborate and recent stories seem to have been culled from other less popular heroes. But he was not as you know him."

  Ciara rose, walking cautiously towards the man who was letting her into the most guarded secret of his life. The book he pushed into her palm was missing most of its cover; only a scrap of leather coated the spine. Umber pages marked the tome as "The Death of Cas" written in a calligraphic hand overtop a faded two word phrase that was impossible to make out anymore.

  "Casamir was a woman, a very demanding woman, who preferred the name of Cas," Medwin began, synopsizing the book in her hands, "And that is how she died."

  Ciara's fingers carefully crested the pages, some of which were black and charred on the edges. A faint whiff of charcoal floated up from within. Phrases jumped out at her about a woman named Penny and an idiot named Jack. But mostly there was an as large as life woman who seemed to despise everyone she ran into, forced into situations she fought her way out of.

  Aldrin fielded the most important question on this discovery, "Does that mean Humphrey wasn't real?"

  Medwin chuckled, "No, he was mentioned quite heavily in her adventures. There are some who believed he was, in fact, her husband, but...let us say there is little evidence."