The Eternal Kingdom (The Children Trilogy Book 3)

by Ben Peek

  Did he plan to drag it up from the ocean? He had once told her that he had dived deep into the ocean to lay the original foundations. ‘The bridge doesn’t look that damaged,’ she said. She stepped out of the cart, approaching the stone arch.

  Eidan followed her. ‘Cracks run all the way through it, but the real problem is on the other end, on the second bridge that connects to Ghaam. Chunks of stone have been torn out there. I’ll have to break the bridge between the two before we start work here.’

  ‘Isn’t that what is holding Ghaam in place?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She could imagine the sound of stone grinding against stone, could see the churning black water devouring it. ‘When do you want to do that?’

  ‘Within the week,’ he said. ‘Before the Saan leave.’

  ‘Do you plan to leave with them?’

  ‘Do I look as if I want to fight Aela Ren?’ He chuckled and it was a low, dark sound, one that surprised her and appeared to contradict his earlier statement to Se’Saera. ‘No, that will simply be when I am ready. We will have to tell Wagan and Alahn. They should let everyone in the camp know before it happens.’

  Maybe he’s just stating the obvious. Ayae found that easy to believe, but she was not sure that Eidan would admit to it being more than a joke. In many ways, he was no different to Zaifyr. In fact, both his brothers were, at times, very similar to him. They would pass off dangers with a shrug and little more. But in other ways, both Jae’le and Eidan were strikingly dissimilar to Zaifyr. He would have asked her what Miat Dvir said, for example, while Eidan’s mention of the Saan was the first he had made since she picked him up from his camp. He gave no thought to it because the Saan did not interest him, either as a threat, or a friend. Zaifyr would have asked because it had happened to her, and she would have told him in order to share that experience.

  ‘Come,’ Eidan said, climbing up onto the cart. ‘It is time to go back.’

  ‘Already?’ She was surprised: the morning’s sun had not yet begun to rise. ‘You don’t want to go into Mesi, or work on the bridge?’

  He frowned. ‘Do you not feel it?’

  ‘Feel?’

  ‘Paper, in your hands.’ He lifted up his good hand and rubbed his fingers together. ‘An urge to write words you do not know?’

  ‘I—’ She paused. ‘I had a dream about writing a letter.’

  ‘And you thought nothing of it?’

  ‘Should I?’

  He nodded, but said nothing else. As Ayae drove the cart through the streets of Neela, broken stone gave way to the clean streets where work had been complete. Throughout the journey, Eidan stared out at Leviathan’s Blood and the sensation of paper in Ayae’s hands increased. After a while, she began to smell ink. If he had been Zaifyr, she would have pressed him, to find out who was sending her this vision, for more details, but he was not his brother, and she remained quiet. She knew it was an immortal like the two of them and she tried to recall what it was that she had experienced when she had been in the presence of the Keepers. Quite often, she had felt a rush of sensations, because she had rarely been around one by herself. Being in the presence of all of them had made it difficult to separate who was who, but she could remember the calm of Aelyn Meah and the coldness of Eira. It was not them that she felt, that was certain. She tried to remember Kaqua, and was confident that it was not he whom she felt, either. Jaysun was surprised to see the two of them when they returned. He did not ask why they were early, but Ayae knew he watched them intently as they made their way out of the stables to the western edge of the camp. There, the fires burned strongly, and the tents where Sinae Al’tor kept his business were a small hub of men and women. The guards he employed took Jaysun’s place as watchers as Eidan led her out of the camp and along the shoreline.

  The sky was beginning to lighten when they reached the shore and Ayae could see a ship out there. Unlike the ships of the Saan, this one was much smaller, and much older.

  ‘Who is it?’ she asked, finally.

  ‘My sister,’ he said. ‘Tinh Tu.’

  10.

  The Undertow was a small bar. It was wedged into a corner that had been formed when Vaeasa had expanded, decades earlier. Built from thick timber, it was a simple building with a sloping slate roof. Its door was made from heavy wood and was held open by a plump purple bag filled with sand. Inside were two moderate-sized rooms, divided not by a step, as in other bars Heast had seen, but by a long counter with a door’s-width gap in it to allow people to pass between the two rooms. A fat middle-aged man with dark olive skin stood behind the counter, cleaning glasses. When Heast and Anemone entered, he glanced up once but with no interest. It was more attention than those around him paid: the chipped and nicked chairs and tables were half filled with soldiers, and not one of them raised their heads as the two walked past.

  Heast found the guard in the shaded garden out back. There, a handful of soldiers sat quietly at tables around him and, like those inside, did not glance up as the new arrivals made their way to where the guard sat.

  ‘Mind if I sit?’

  ‘I was hoping that you’d be another fifteen or twenty.’ Beneath the foliage of the tree, the guard looked older than he had on the gate, the lines across his face deeper. ‘The night is a long shift.’

  ‘I’d buy you another drink, but the one you have is already bought, is it not?’ Heast pulled back one of the chairs, while beside him, the witch took her seat. Earlier, he had told her that she did not have to come with him to The Undertow, but she had shaken her head in response. No, she had said, you will need me. Heast said now, ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Seon.’ The guard stared at the half-filled, dirty glass in his hand. After a moment, he said, ‘You’re right, it is paid for.’

  ‘And the guards?’

  ‘Lord Tuael said nothing would fool you, Captain.’

  Heast stretched out his steel leg but did not drop his hand to it. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Across the road, waiting.’ Seon stood and drained the glass in two long gulps. ‘After I refill this, I’ll walk across and he’ll walk back. He’s not real happy with you and he won’t be so happy to hear that you brought your witch with you.’

  ‘I have a name,’ Anemone said evenly. ‘I can tell it to you, if you want.’

  ‘I already know it,’ the guard said sourly.

  The atmosphere in The Undertow changed after Seon stepped through the door. The pretence of being off-duty fell away and the half-dozen men and women who had been sitting across from Heast rose from their tables and chairs. They tightened the straps of their scabbards before reaching for their cloaks. Not one of them wore a sign of rank on their uniform, which Heast took to mean that they were all part of Lord Tuael’s private guard.

  ‘How many warlocks?’ he asked casually.

  ‘Four,’ the witch replied. ‘They are across the street with their lord.’

  Heast had told her, before they entered the bar, that they would not be greeted warmly. He had told her that they would be met with a display of force and that they would be under threat from the moment they entered The Undertow. That is why you will need me, Anemone had said to him. It is my job to protect the soldiers of Refuge.

  Heast heard the door at the front of the inn close, the key turning in the lock. A moment later, the Lord of Faaisha, Jye Tuael, stepped out of the bar and into the garden.

  He was a handsome man who carried himself with a comfortable authority. He did not wear a sword, nor did he wear leather and chain. Instead, Tuael was dressed in simple, lightweight brown pants and a long-sleeved shirt of hand-spun green that bore no hint of sweat or stain upon it. With a carefully manicured hand that bore only one simple ring of gold, he took the chair that Seon had sat in and, without waiting to see if either Heast or Anemone would rise to honour his presence, sat. He looked at them both silently until, with a hint of self-deprecation, he said, ‘It is a pleasure to see you again, Aned.’

  ‘You look well,’
Heast said.

  ‘It is early in the day yet,’ the Lord of Faaisha said. ‘At the end, I may feel much older than I am. If I do, I will lay the blame squarely at your feet.’

  ‘It was you who wrote to me.’

  ‘Did I ask you to kill Kotan Iata and steal his soldiers?’ He shook his head. ‘The other Lords of Faaisha have been urging me to deal with you, despite the fact that we are in the middle of a war. They said that I have invited a second invasion by Muriel Wagan. Most of them didn’t even like Iata, but he was holding out against the Leerans. Tell me that he at least raised a sword against you, Aned. That he threatened you. Give me something that I can take back to the Lords.’

  ‘You have a traitor,’ the Captain of Refuge said.

  ‘I have at least half a dozen,’ he said without pause. ‘Come now: I did not like Iata, but you will hang from a gallows for what you have done if you—’

  ‘Your traitor is a Marshal Faet Cohn.’

  That, Heast saw, had not been expected.

  ‘You have proof?’ Lord Tuael asked, after a pause.

  Slowly, Heast pulled the letters out from where he had stuffed them in his belt, careful not to startle the soldiers who watched the exchange between their lord and the foreign captain carefully. The ringed hand that took the parchment did not tremble and the gaze that read the lines did not lift from the words until the end.

  ‘A lot of people have questioned what happened in Celp, but no one suspected him of losing the city because of simple greed.’ Tuael began to fold the letter along its creased lines with slow movements of his index finger and thumb. ‘All that we face right now, all that we struggle with, and he indulges in avarice. Some men simply do not understand the virtue of restraint.’

  ‘Did you suspect him?’ Heast said.

  ‘Of this? No. I am even surprised. Do you know how rare it is for me to be surprised?’ He let out a sigh, as if something had been drained from him. ‘I knew Cohn pushed for the slave trade with Gogair to begin again. His family made their money in flesh two generations ago and the pot has long smelt sweet to him.’

  ‘I’m surprised that he became a marshal, then.’

  ‘Tactically, he is quite an interesting man, but personally, he struggles to acknowledge that the world has drifted away from what it once was. He does not see that people do not want slavery. He does not see that freedom has become a currency that they want to indulge in and that they are happy with any rule that allows them this. I would not have thought it before this moment, but it appears that Cohn is so divorced from reality that he cannot see one of the horrors of this war is to be sold in Gogair. If this was to get out, he would be torn apart – literally, I suspect.’

  The if of the last sentence had not escaped Heast. ‘He can’t remain a marshal, surely?’

  ‘No, he can’t. But the question is, can I allow this to be made public?’ The letter folded, Tuael laid it on the table before him. ‘Cohn has his supporters, even after Celp. He did not become a marshal without them. They will stand beside him, especially if it is revealed that the captain who killed Kotan Iata delivered this.’ A note of resignation entered Lord Tuael’s voice. ‘But I imagine that you already knew that. My father had the greatest respect for you, Aned. Years ago, when we first met, when you had ridden into Vaeasa as no more than a simple mercenary and I hired you, he took me aside. He knew who you were. He had heard of both you and Refuge. He told me that you were not a man to be treated as anything but an equal. My father said that! I know it means nothing to you, but he viewed no man as his equal. Yet, he said I was to treat you as one.’

  Heast made no attempt to reply. Jye Tuael’s father had been a man whose dreams had been of expansion, of owning the entire continent that the Kingdoms of Faaisha sat upon. He had known it was an impossible idea, but in the final years of his life, it had turned him bitter. In a meeting that Muriel had attended in Faaisha, two years after he had taken the position of Captain of the Spine, Heast had seen that resentment for himself. The meeting had been to introduce Muriel to Jye, who was succeeding his father, but the old man had asked for a private meeting with Heast. There, he had stared at him with eyes that had turned yellow with the final stages of his cancer and had spoken of campaigns he had not ordered, his bitterness sharpened by his closing death.

  ‘I will do you the honour,’ his son said, ‘of assuming that you do not mean to reveal this in public.’

  ‘A weak Faaisha does not help me,’ Heast said. ‘But I have need of a few things.’

  He laughed. ‘I am letting you live.’

  ‘My life was never yours to take.’

  ‘Look around you, Aned.’ Behind him, the soldiers in the garden waited, their hands on their swords. ‘Your life is the payment I offer.’

  ‘Do you know what was drawn on that letter you sent me? Did Baeh Lok explain that to you before he left?’ Heast still had the letter, hidden at the bottom of his pack in the hotel room. It was a letter with a simple badge drawn upon it, its background half red, half black, with a colourless globe of the world over it. ‘You called for Refuge.’

  ‘Yes, but there is no . . .’ The Lord of Faaisha paused. ‘The Captain and the witch,’ he said softly. ‘The sergeant said that to me, before I crossed the road. Seon. I thought it a peculiar phrasing and nothing more.’ He turned to the young witch, as if seeing her for the first time. ‘You do not look like your grandmother, Anemone. Tell me, are my warlocks still alive?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Do you fear them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I once offered your grandmother a position here,’ Tuael said. ‘Would you like to hear what I said to her?’

  ‘I have heard what you said to her.’ Anemone was polite, but within that politeness there was a coldness she did not bother to hide. ‘I am the Witch of Refuge. There must always be a Witch of Refuge.’

  ‘So there must.’ He turned back to Heast. ‘Am I to believe also that the men and women from Maosa are your soldiers?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You make it difficult for them to return home.’

  ‘They have no home,’ the Captain of Refuge said. ‘You and the other Lords abandoned them months ago. But they’re still fighting for you. I am fighting for you, as well, and what we both need is coin. Coin is the price for what I brought you today.’

  ‘I don’t have the coin you need.’

  ‘I have not even given you a number.’

  ‘Any number is too high.’ Tuael raised his hand before Heast could speak. ‘Faaisha is at war. Our finances are tied to that. But I have something else that I can give you. Something that is very fitting, in a way. I can introduce you to a benefactor.’

  ‘And who would that be?’

  ‘The First Queen of Ooila,’ he said. ‘Zeala Fe.’

  11.

  Tinh Tu did not greet her brother with warmth.

  Out on the ocean, the morning’s sun rose and Ayae watched a dinghy push itself through the surf, the ship behind it rising and falling with the swell. Both the ship and the dinghy had once been painted a dark green, but the colour had faded beneath the three suns and the ocean had stripped the paint from the lower hulls away. It looked as if clawed hands had reached up from the water to pull the ship down. Combined with the faded black of its sail, the ship gave the impression of being derelict, a description that, had not the dinghy made its way towards the shore, would have been one Ayae used for it. Yet the dinghy rode the swell and as it drew closer, as the shapes of three people became clearer, Eidan wordlessly waded out into the ocean. By the time he reached the dingy the waves had soaked through the clothes he wore and exposed the dark lines of scar tissue that ran across half his body. He looked like a creature that had risen from Leviathan’s Blood when he took hold of the boat and pulled it ashore.

  At the front sat an old woman.

  The smell of ink returned suddenly to Ayae. She could see Samuel Orlan’s shop, could see the glass pots he had kept in the workroo
m. The lids were gummed with dried ink, and when she had to open one, she had to be careful, because the ink would not flow for a few moments, before it rushed out into the small wells she dipped quills and brushes into. As quickly as the memory came to her, it left, the smell evaporating with it as Eidan emerged from the water. With his good hand he dragged the boat onto the sand.

  ‘Brother,’ the old woman said, a white raven circling down from the sky as she spoke. ‘Your new friend feels many things.’

  ‘Her name is Ayae,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, it is.’ Tinh Tu lifted a long, ash-wood staff up and stepped out of the boat. ‘Is Jae’le still looking for him?’ she asked as the raven drifted onto her shoulder.

  ‘He is.’

  ‘At least I have not missed that.’ She looked back at the boat, at the two women who had ridden with her, and then turned to Ayae. ‘Look after the witch in the boat,’ she said, the deepness of her voice cracking, as if it were a voice she was not accustomed to using. ‘She has done me a service. It would be a shame if she died.’

  ‘You seem to think I owe you something,’ Ayae said.

  ‘You do.’

  Ayae was about to ask what, if anything, she owed, when she heard her name spoken in a harsh whisper. The voice was a familiar one, but it was only when Eidan’s sister stepped away from the boat that she saw Olcea. The older woman was struggling to rise. She leant heavily on the third woman and her face was drawn, the black skin around her eyes and cheeks wan and sunken, and the bandages around her hands stained with blood. The stains, Ayae saw, spread to the rest of her clothing, though those on her hands were freshest. Forgetting Eidan’s sister, Ayae rushed towards Olcea. As she did, she heard Tinh Tu tell Eidan that she wanted to see Jae’le—

  Then Ayae reached the boat.

  ‘She piloted the ship.’ The third woman spoke quietly, her white hand taking Olcea’s left arm as Ayae took her right. ‘From the coast of Balana.’

  ‘Eilona?’ Ayae asked, the name slipping out, despite herself. ‘Eilona Wagan?’