The King's Blood

by S. E. Zbasnik

  "And beating helpless prisoners within an inch of their life is part of the 'will of the Triad?'"

  Taban's honeyed voice grew cold, which caused a stiffening of Aldrin's back as he continued to drop eaves, "You saw the man yourself. Pain was the only source that could break the religious fog he swaddled himself in."

  Ciara rolled her fingers and jumped into the question that'd been eating her up, "So you waste your time beating mad prisoners instead of rescuing good men burning to death?"

  "I am not paid to risk my life for landless clerics."

  This was the wrong flippant response to a girl whose still raw nerves plucked every time her mind drifted back. Anger that festered like an old wound finally burst.39 Ciara rose, her eyes burning a hole into the assassin's carefully blank face.

  "You cower like a child while a better man goes to his death trying," tears stung her eyes but she didn't notice.

  "If he were a better man he wouldn't have died."

  Ciara's hand flew across the assassin's hard jaw, crooked inward from an old mistake, before she realized it. Her shoulders shook as she raised her hand, stinging from the slap, and looked at the red welt matched by another rising upon the dark flesh.

  Taban for his part, made no movement towards any of his weapons, his hands laying across his knees. He looked into the hot glare of the girl, and felt the cold one of the boy king upon his neck. Picking words as if he were dressing for battle, he said, "Contrary to the rabble of fishwives, my skin is no more fireproof than the snow men. As you well know. I'd have died as surely as your 'Historian.'"

  "But you didn't even try," the cry was strangled and helpless, as if she were asking it of a neglectful god and not the mortal man before her.

  "No," his eyes broke from hers, unable to watch her cry, "I did not. The mission must take precedence always, often before many lives. We are gifted only one chance at this world. To toss it away on frivolity and emotion is an affront to the breath of God."

  Slowly, the assassin's hand rose from his knee and he held it out towards her still smarting one. She let him turn her palm up so he could look at the throbbing skin. "Tsk," Taban said, lightly scooping a bit of snow up and placing it in the open palm, "that was quite the slap. I must say you have the spirits within."

  "Call me sassy and I'll slap you again," Ciara warned, but almost on reflex, as if it were a response she issued often.

  Taban laughed at that as he closed her fist around the snow before scooping up some to hold to his own face, "The spirits are our...there is no proper term. Ancestors, our first ones, the beginning of us? They embody the forces of humanity. It is...an acolyte would explain better."

  She looked at her closed fist, beginning to freeze around the snow and asked in her still broken voice, "Is there nothing you'd gamble your life for?" Ciara, after losing so many father figures to war, tactics, and fire, needed to find a sliver of hope in perhaps the most despicable man she'd ever trusted her life with.

  The assassin smiled sadly, his entire face softening as if the hard years melted away, "There is. Three in fact."

  "Your precious Triad," she mumbled.

  "No," Taban shook his head at misty memories that drove him on. A pair of small faces clinging to a beautiful woman in lands he wished he were in every moment of his days. His brown eyes rolled up to the girl as she dropped the melting snow, "You are correct. Some things are worth dying for."

  A flock of birds burst forth from the trees, screeching for freedom away from whatever monsters invaded their home. Ciara stared at the ruckus as the priest burst from the treeline followed quickly by a very angry witch, a thick branch in her hands. Taban snorted at the scene but lapsed back into his traditional silence, his words already scraping at the edges from such unexpected overuse.

  Ciara watched as Kynton failed to take into account his much more ragged robes, as the dangling edges caught under his boots and rolled him ass over end through the slowly melting snow. Isa paused, her branch poking into the priest's backside. A small gurgle answered back.

  "He's still alive," she shouted to the others as if it were a warning.

  Turning from the scene, Ciara walked over towards the slowly rising fire and the boy king hunched over it. The Historians had offered him a fresh change of clothes for his lone ride but Aldrin waved it off, favoring that itchy formless brown tunic they'd traded for a lifetime ago. He rose and wiped his hands across his far too thin breeches, leaving black hand prints behind.

  "The warmth will be nice," Ciara said softly.

  Aldrin looked over at her, then quickly to the fire. No words had been exchanged beyond small instructions of when to leave, what to take while leaving, and why they were about to leave Kynton if he didn't stop braiding daisy chains. Aldrin was afraid any of his words would draw her back to the night.

  "It'll give away our position," the prince mumbled to himself.

  "Oh, I am certain our witch and priest have done a spectacular job of that already," she responded, gesturing to the pair having a gallant row about Grace, of the gods. Kynton insisted that any soul could be saved if a person only put his faith in Grace. Isa called her the concubine of the fat men sitting on a cloud in the sky.

  "We'll know we're in actual trouble when someone brings up noodles," Aldrin said, trying to hide his shudder.

  For the first time since the fires Ciara smiled, a tiny one, and a ping shot through Aldrin's heart. He'd been uncertain what to say to her, if there was anything he could say, to cut through the cloud of grief hanging over her silent head as they trudged deeper into the Ostero lands. So he favored the least form of possible action and said nothing, only making the occasional note of how someone needed to really repair the roads, and in a few cases actually finish one after Kynton, in his own mental fog, followed a forgotten path straight into a tree.

  "I...how are you, um, holding up?" he asked, finally dipping a toe into the mass of swirling emotions between the two.

  "Why?" Ciara asked, afraid to let anyone through her shield.

  But Aldrin had no use for bravado, he barely had any idea what it meant (it was a kind of pungent cheese, right?), and rubbed his still smoky eyes, saying, "Because I'm a fornicating mess."

  The boy sagged to the empty ground, his gaunt hindquarters landing in a patch of mud. Ciara's armor wavered dangerously as she watched the young man pull his knees up to his chest and hug them tight. His suddenly over extended and lean legs. When did he get almost as tall as her?

  She lowered beside him, sitting on her hip, with one hand on the cold ground. Her finger picked at the snow still hiding amongst the dead weeds and said, "Spent too much time with Ch...with the brothers?"

  Aldrin's watery eyes broke free of his kneecaps as he traced back over what he said and grinned, "They're...they were an unforgettable influence."

  "Yeah," Ciara looked deep into the fire, "they were."

  A silence fell, one of many, as they both mourned the man who took a chance on both of them. Only their actions here on out would determine if it paid off. Aldrin dropped his knees and extended them out, his eyes watching his feet as they knocked into each other.

  "And I'm...I'm sorry if I, if I pressed my advantage that night." He'd tried to forget many things from the night of flames; the smoky visage of Pajamas watching his home burn to cinders, the charred face of a man who'd been the warmest guiding hand he'd ever known, the sight of Ciara sobbing as if the entire word turned its back on her when she thought she was alone. But their one foolish moment of hormones...well maybe some pleasure could be found in pain.

  Her eyes didn't break from her fingers as they still picked around the grass, but a very small flush broke her cheeks that Aldrin tried to ignore. "A great many things happened that night. Things I would give years of my life to take back," she said to the grass, "but that wasn't one of them."

  A wry smile wandered across her face as she thought back over the screaming, over the smoke and flames, to a boy and a sunset. When her world crumbled int
o ash, it was a small comfort to think there might be another in the world to hold her hand. Her eyes turned from the grass just as she got the blush under control.

  "But..." she began, breaking the fairytale.

  Aldrin nodded with her, "But we still have a sword to find, and an army to find, and an Empire to stop."

  "Yeah," she agreed. And you're still a prince of Ostero, Ciara thought, while she was a homeless sandworm.

  The prince ruffled through his splitting pockets and extracted the cookbook, stuffed with a handful of maps. He'd been checking it regularly, as if the lands could shift uncontrollably under him at any moment. The assassin would eye him up every time the book appeared but say nothing, which Aldrin appreciated. As Kynton kept unhelpfully pointing out, this was the prince's backyard. How could he possibly get lost in it?

  But an iota of fear gripped his intestinal tract that there was a growing chance they weren't headed in the correct direction. Admitting it however...

  Ciara inched towards him and looked down at the book splayed across his lap. "Are there any landmarks it points to?" She noticed the uncertainty rising off the prince whenever anyone asked if they should turn left or right, but didn't want to shatter his slowly rising self-esteem.

  "None that are familiar. There is talk of a 'really good fish shoppe that my Nell got the boiled squid from and I ordered the chips though they were a bit soggy.' But the rest is quick pen scratches of rocks, trees, and I believe a small man in a top hat with a cane." Aldrin twisted the most ancient of the maps around, designed by Cartographer the Third, who was actually a bloody awful mapmaker, but he didn't have much choice given his name. Parent's had a terrible habit of shoehorning their children into careers. No one's gonna have their horse shoed by a 15 stone man named 'Matchstick Girl.'

  "Well, a tower shouldn't be so hard to find. They tend to stick out a bit," she said encouragingly as Aldrin slipped all his research away. In the commotion, the still poorly secured sword dropped to the ground.

  He scooped it up and tried to slot it back into place. The rusty blade was becoming his personal signature. Taban, in a moment of pity for the thing, offered to put it out of its misery, but Aldrin refused. The edge was still mostly sharp, and there was a good chance he could kill someone with lockjaw. The assassin mumbled something about 'underfed snowmen dressed in rags waving about broken farm equipment' but did not continue the discussion. Aldrin, in a pique of teenage stubbornness, began to carry the sword everywhere, even if it didn't want to be.

  "Well, tomorrow we find if we're on the right track to the Tower, one way or the other." Absently checking the hidden pommel of her own dagger, Ciara rose and returned back to the tent.

  Aldrin's mouth opened, hoping something brilliant would fill it.

  But instead an exasperated scream cracked through the woods, "...thank the heavenly bowl of noodles! It makes as much sense!"

  At the witch's outburst the two teenagers giggled. Aldrin sighed theatrically and turned back to his little fire, "Here's hoping we last that long."

  "I spy with my little eye...."

  "My fist in your face."

  "Isa, that's cheating. You've made the same guess each time," Kynton chided as he danced away from the witch.

  "And she's been correct each time, as well," Taban muttered, trying to not chuckle at the pair. Travel was tedious, even in the best of times. It was a strangely refreshing pace to add a few companions into the mix. Though he could do without the sulking prince.

  Aldrin wasn't sulking; he was brooding as a wayward patch of snow made its way towards his underthings. It was inevitable that a snowball fight were to break out; started, of course, by the priest who pranced about in the slush as if he'd never seen it before.

  "Oooh! I bet I can make a snow demon!" Kynton shouted before flopping flat on his face into a drift and turning his knees inward to mimic the hind legs of a deer.

  No one was in a rush to tell him the traditional route of snow monster making was done on ones back, instead they all paused their march through desolate fields as the priest pushed off his demonic knees to rise and take in his work. A large clump of snow pelted into the back of his cropped hair. His head snapped around, searching for the source of the snowball, just as another smacked into his chin, joining its fellow snow brethren.

  As he wiped the cold sting from his eyes he glared at the witch, whose hands were wrapped tightly around her walking stick, nary a snowball in sight. Isa glared back, making certain he knew she was above such things.

  Kynton looked just in time as the desert blossom scooped another handful of white into her black palm and took aim, a bright smile taking over her stern face. "Oh ho! Well two can play at that game," he taunted, leaning over and scooping as much of the white stuff into his oversized fists as he could.

  He lined up the shot, raising his arm high over his head, when another snowball, thrown from behind, smashed into his elbow, causing his own to crash onto his head. The princeling gave the most unroyal of snorts after his snowball hit.

  "Two against one, that is most unfair. You, assassin," he called to Taban, who watched the children the way a father supervises playtime around dangerous open pits, "Join my side. We have biscuits!"

  Taban didn't flinch his arms; he only blinked slowly at the sight of a snow-drenched priest begging for his assistance, when a blob of muddied snow splatted into the scar along his cheek. The assassin wiped the offender off and turned to Ciara, who grinned widely and threw another that lost itself in the folds of his overcoat.

  "The battle is joined," he said, dashing into the trees, Kynton hot on his heels.

  It was not a battle the bards would ever sing of, or the poets would ever write of, or ol' Roger the Limerick Maker of Parts Unknown would ever put to bathroom stall, but for those brief hours it was life and death for the warriors. Well, life and slightly colder and wetter life.

  Isa tapped her foot impatiently, slowly melting the snow below her with the friction of anger. She tried to ignore the quartet of idiots running about the small clearing, lobbing hunks of ice and snow at each other while shouting "For the motherland!" or "From Hell's Heart I Lob at Thee!"

  They were running out of ideas and at one point a bedraggled Kynton shouted, "Shave and a Hair Cut!" catching what was supposed to be a hiding Aldrin who responded with, "Two Bites," and got pelted in the face.

  "A hem," Isa coughed quietly, finally reaching her wit's end. The assassin ran past her, his thighs struggling in the drifts near the trees, as Ciara followed from behind, her skirt tucked inside her boots. She shouted something wild and, as Taban turned to face her, she dodged to the side, catching a bemused and slightly lost Aldrin. The two plopped to the ground, disappearing into the drifts.

  It should have been the end of it, but as the prince and his servant struggled back to their feet, the vultures circled around, eyeing up their prize. Kynton and Taban wadded as much snow into their mitts as they could manage. A burst of light cracked from Isa's hand, the force of magic stronger than thunder. Every eye turned back on the witch who radiated rage like the summer sun.

  "Look upon yourselves! Each of you, wasting your time, your energy, for what?"

  "There's this thing called 'fun.' Perhaps you've heard of it," Kynton tried to break her mood but he stepped deep into a pit he had no hopes of escaping.

  "Fun?" the pale eyes somehow glared down at his, "It is fun for a man to run from his duty, from his god, from everything that makes him a man?"

  "Ah...sometimes."

  "And you," the witch turned to Taban, "You know what duty means. It is how you convince yourself you are no murderer."

  The assassin crossed his arms, a pants wetting move, as anyone in Dunner knew it meant his palms were already wrapped around something sharp. But the witch brushed it off, rounding on the prince who was still trying to steady himself on Ciara.

  "Lord Aldrin, Prince of Ostero, who spends his nights knee deep in the common muck."

  "If he's using his
knee the kid needs a few more anatomy lessons," Kynton mumbled behind his hand.

  "You look to everyone else to lead for you, every other eye to see what you refuse to, every other mind to decide what you dare not, every other vein to bleed for you. As a king, you'd watch your own kingdom crumble around you."

  Aldrin stood up and glared into the pale eyes, trying to find his own defense hiding within. Any argument slipped from his tongue as sparks of blue danced within Isa's white iris. The witch smiled bitterly, "My mother chose wisely, there are few with spines as frail as yours." She turned to walk away from the broken group slowly shifting away from each other.

  "And what of me," Ciara cut in, the only one to face down the witch and her wordy attack, "what condemnation do you have for me?"

  Isa paused, and without looking over her shoulder said coldly, "I would expect no less from a servant."

  Everyone fell into a darkened line after that, occasionally shooting their own evil eye at the smug witch. Kynton shook her barbs off first, as if they hadn't snagged, trying to get her to have a moment of joy. The assassin had walked enough of his worlds, answered to fitful nights, and risen to bloody mornings, to let the words of some barely fully woman cadî dig under his flesh. Ciara ignored her as she always did, wishing the curse Aldrin's rescue had placed upon them would magic her own ass far away. Only the princeling seethed, his steps falling heavy beside Ciara who'd watched with some concern his head sinking deep into his chest in anger and shame. It seemed a certain way to cause irreparable spine damage.

  "Smell that?" Kynton said as he took in a deep breath, "sea air."

  He thumped his chest as if he were about to charge a fellow blue back gorilla and spread his arms wide. Isa raised her stick as if she were afraid the priest was about to transform into something otherworldly. As Kynton's eyes slowly lolled open, memories of his younger days by the seaside castle flitting away, he watched the witch waving her staff about in terror and smiled. "What? You've never smelled the sea before?"

  She refused to put down her weapon, pale eyes watching the priest's still outstretched hands for something dangerous, "Enough to know that is not a reaction of normals. The sea smells of rotten fish and seagull dung."