The Exiled King

by Sarah Remy

  “You’re a marvel, Corporal.” Mal dipped his head in grudging acknowledgement. “Were I you, I would have gone to ground as soon as I realized I was trapped behind enemy lines.”

  “That’s just it.” She spoke to Mal but continued to look Renault’s way. “There isn’t any enemy line, so to speak. As far as I can tell they hit the ground hard and scattered, one by one or in small groups. They’re there and then gone and leaving fire behind.” She indicated the bandage on her arm. “Some sort of resin, my lord, sticky and flammable and difficult to stomp out. If you ask me, the sea lords are in finer place, safe behind their walls and the water close at hand. They’ll not burn so long as they can keep the bucket brigades going. It’s the rest of us I’m worried about. Up in a gout of fire like Whitcomb and the sea too far away to save us.”

  She sat down suddenly, taking the lowest step on the dais, and stretched out her legs. Her hands trembled. Mal retrieved her cup and filled it again, but only halfway. He doubted she had thought to eat since she’d ridden west with Lory and Martin a day earlier. She wouldn’t thank him for getting her wine-drunk.

  “Whitcomb was brick and clapboard,” said Renault from the oriel. “We are stone and mortar. There are two thousand good soldiers between us and conflagration.”

  “From what I’ve heard the sand snakes are five times that, Majesty,” Russel replied. “They don’t intend to fight honorably, if the desert even has notion of virtue on the battleground. And there’s more.” She hesitated, frowning at something only she could see.

  “Speak,” prompted Mal.

  “A creature in the air.” Russel’s scowl deepened. “On the wing, flying above the smoke. A monster with a colossal serpent’s tail. Black as the night sky and difficult to know for sure, but I think—” Now she did look at Mal, a quick, speculative glance “—it plucked soldiers randomly off the ground, Kingsmen and kilted warriors alike, ripped them to bits with no rhyme nor reason nor allegiance that I could tell.”

  “Wyvern,” suggested Arthur, sitting up all at once. Parsnip sighed and snuffled. “A dragon, my lord!” His eyes shone.

  “There are no such things as dragons.” Renault left the darkened oriel for the brighter light near his throne. “A wyvern is only a fanciful creature used by mothers and fathers to frighten young lads and lasses into good behavior, like the basilisk or the unicorn.”

  Arthur’s face fell. Russel rose to greet her king.

  “Even so, Your Majesty,” she said. “I saw it with mine own eyes, whatever it was, tearing men to gristle and tossing their parts at the fires.” She swallowed. “The things, of late, in the forest—the reports of wolves and giant owls and six-legged hogs—”

  “Sidhe beasts grown daring,” agreed Mal. His heart sank. “Mayhap wakened by the sounds of war. Too much to hope we’d escape their attention, what with the desert riding rampant through their realm.” A half-remembered dream surfaced suddenly, a recollection of barrowmen standing on an island beneath the earth, surrounded by a dark lake, and overhead a ceiling of false amber stars.

  “Am I to fight sidhe and the desert both?” demanded Renault. “If so, we are indeed lost. It took a company of magi and a continent of iron to beat the barrowmen into the ground. Mayhap, if we were not already divided by sand snakes, but even then, Mal is only one man.” He pulled at his beard, distracted.

  “The one god will provide.” Brother Tillion limped around the side of the throne. He walked tall, Mal noticed, and did not make use of his heavy staff for balance, though his step was short and uneven. “One way or another.” He smiled at Mal, thin-lipped and solemn. “So long as the correct sacrifices are made.”

  Mal wished Baldebert was not already gone to battle with his band of bloodthirsty sailors. The infantry would improve for having the admiral and his cohorts on hand, but Baldebert knew how to cow the temple’s overt xenophobia with a sharp word or snide grin. Mal, who would very much have liked to knock the theist off his pedestal, real or imaginary, was constrained by court protocol.

  Renault dropped onto his throne, knocking both fists restlessly on the gray stone seat. “Send for Masterhealer Orat,” he decided. “If he thinks the one god can yet save us, I’m willing to listen.” He lifted a finger, forestalling Mal’s protest. “Roue has become a moot point. If Orat truly believes our survival depends upon my choice of bride, I am desperate enough to be convinced.”

  “You will break your word?” Mal demanded. “Does not your god counsel equally against faithlessness, Brother Tillion?”

  “His Majesty’s faith is between himself and the god,” Tillion returned smoothly, ignoring Mal’s snarl of disbelief. “I will send for the Masterhealer. He will gladly hear your concerns, Majesty.” He descended the dais slowly, smiling again as he passed Mal.

  “Malachi,” Renault cautioned Mal. “Attend me. Russel. To bed with you, until dawn. In the morning, I’ll have need of you again.”

  Mal stood one step below the throne, head bowed, as Russel trailed Tillion from the room. He spread his gloved hands before him in the air, flexing fingers one after another in a bid for patience until the heavy doors boomed shut and liveried Kingsmen took up their places in front of the double portal. But for the guards ranged about the long room, and the two children on the hearth, the king and his vocent were alone.

  “Speak to me about faithlessness, brother,” Renault said after a beat of silence. “Specifically, yours.”

  Mal caught his breath, lifting his head. He’d not expected discovery so soon; he and Baldebert had been careful and clever, and the one flaw in his plan—the capricious link he and Avani had forged, her window into his head—seemed to have been solved for him, if without his consent. He both resented and admired the cage Avani had woven around her mind and heart. It was not dissimilar to the wards conjured to protect physical body or royal keep, a sparkling net around the core of her that kept invaders out and her private self contained. Reaching across the link now was like grasping a hot coal with bare hands; he was allowed an instant of connection before pain struck. He knew that she was alive and well and yet with Wythe, but more than that was denied to him.

  Not once in all Mal’s study had he any indication that external wards could be made internal, nor that the stolid protection cants Andrew so relied upon to shield his mind from angry, intrusive dead were but ineffective, primitive fencing compared to Avani’s silver net. Given the chance, he very much would have liked to learn the way of it.

  That chance, he knew, had passed.

  “Mal,” Renault prompted. “Do not pretend ignorance. I know you too well. Confess—” He leaned forward in the throne, elbows on knees. “You intend to break faith with me the moment my back is turned.”

  “I—” Mouth dry, Mal cleared his throat. Renault did not look as though he intended to have Mal’s head immediately on a pike for the treason of reviving ferric soldiers. Instead his expression was one of profound regret. “I would not—”

  "I understand you would far prefer a chance at proving yourself as my champion on the field,” Renault continued quietly. “That as my vocent you suppose you belong on the front line. I can see how you chafe at this confinement. But, brother, if Baldebert has taught us anything, it’s how easily you can be snatched away. I will not lose my most precious asset to death or, worse, captivity. If we outlive these sand snakes and their ambition, Wilhaiim will need your particular faculties.” He sat back. “Even more so now that Avani has refused allegiance.”

  Mal bowed his head for fear Renault would glimpse his anguish. “It is true, Majesty,” he said. A lie spoken seemed crueler than a lie of omission. “That I believe a magus may indeed be more useful amongst the troops than in the palace.”

  “And if I had more than one at hand I would send you out,” Renault assured him. “But you are, despite my best efforts, still the last of your kind. Like Parsnip and Arthur, you are most valuable here, at my side. I, also, would prefer to ride to glory, sword in hand and Kingsmen in my wake. And if I
had an heir, mayhap—” He shook his head. “I expect we, the four of us, have the most difficult job of it, the waiting and wondering.” He rose. “Join me before the windows. The sun will rise soon enough. Shall we watch and wait together? Would you like that?”

  “Aye, Majesty,” Mal replied, “I would like that very much.”

  With the dawn came a messenger bird, a black-beaked peregrine from the west. Renault and Mal watched the falcon fight the wind, skewing this way and that as it strove to reach the royal mews. Behind it the sky was gray and orange with soot, storm, and sunrise. Wilhaiim’s white walls were smudged black in the falling ash. It was a grim panorama. Renault stood with his hands clenched at his sides as he had for most of the night. Arthur and Parsnip had left the hearth for an apple shared out between them near the throne. Brother Orat was yet to pay His Majesty a visit. Mal wondered, cynically, whether the man was in deep communion with his god or if he was afraid to leave the temple’s shelter for fumy streets.

  “If not for your assurances,” Renault said as the peregrine found its way out of the wind and into the mews. “I would believe we were the last living things in an inferno.”

  “Nay,” replied Mal. If he let his concentration slip only a hairsbreadth he could see them all in his head, flashpoints of life struggling to continue, the ordered stars that meant most of Wilhaiim’s lines still held, and the less disciplined swirl and strike of some ten thousand warriors rampaging between coast and forest. A map of vitality, it was more efficient even than being midst-war, and more dangerous. Each time he took stock it was harder to come back without first sampling that bright energy.

  If he swallowed the desert army in one gulp, he wondered, would he survive the experience? Would he be raised to godhood in the consuming, or be scorched in gluttony and fall, yet more gray ash, from the sky?

  “What losses do you see?” Renault pressed. “What numbers? What do you see?”

  “At this distance I cannot count the dead,” Mal confessed. “Only the living. And there is no way to differentiate Kingsman from sand snake. One mortal life is as beautiful as the next.” He licked his lips, parched, and turned abruptly away. “Too many to know for sure even if they would consent to stay still for me to enumerate.”

  “What about the wyvern?” Parsnip asked around a mouthful of apple. “Is it there?”

  “If there is such a thing,” Mal said, “I cannot sense it.”

  “Here comes a man from the mews.” Renault left the windows for his throne but did not sit. “I don’t expect it will be good news.”

  They waited without speaking until the double portal split and the runner burst through, out of breath, eyes streaming from the smoke. Ash dulled the man’s dark hair and scarlet livery. He clutched a scroll. He barely had the time to essay a bow before Renault snatched it from his hand. Breaking the seal—black wax stamped with Knotcreek’s Three-Masted Ship—the king unrolled the message and began to read.

  “Whitcomb is destroyed, as we feared,” he reported. “Michaelmas writes that the first wave came up out of a hole in the ground near Bracken Keep and decamped east and south from there, lighting fires as they went. The grape fields are gone, the town leveled. God willing our people were safely evacuated in time. Michaelmas has some thirty survivors in hand and hopes that Bracken has the rest, but there’s been no word yet from Kingsmen Weatherford who holds it yet for the throne.” He crumpled the missive in his hand, regarded the runner. “Nothing from my more southern holds?”

  The runner, down on one knee, was still trying to catch his breath. “Not yet, my liege. But the wind is dying, some. The birds will have a better time of it. My mistress has sent up more just this morning, to Wythe and Burl, and the rest.”

  The king nodded. He walked another circuit from his throne and around the oriel, before making his decision.

  “I mean to go and inspect the battlements until those birds return with news,” he said. “From there, at least, I’ll have a better grasp of whether the tide turns with us or against. And it will do the infantry good to see me; mayhap I’ll walk amongst them if there is an ebb in battle.”

  Mal refrained from chastising his king in front of children and soldiers, but with effort. Renault grimaced in his direction as he descended the steps.

  “I will avoid flaming arrows and well-thrown pikes and even Russel’s flying monster,” he promised. “Will you walk with me, brother, or stay?”

  “Go,” Mal hedged, “I have other things to attend.”

  “Do not wander far,” His Majesty advised. As he crossed the long room Kingsmen peeled from the walls and fell behind all in a row. “I will have need of you once I’ve seen how things stand. Tell Orat when he comes to meet me on the battlements.”

  Mal, who knew very well how things stood, bowed from the waist. Renault took the obeisance as expected. Mal meant it as farewell.

  Mal left Parsnip and Arthur sitting on the steps beneath the throne after extracting promises of good behavior. Parsnip was not as easily fooled as Renault.

  “You can take my ax, if you like, my lord,” she offered quietly. “I don’t expect it will do you much good against dragons, but it’s got a strong iron blade and that’s all a soldier needs against man or sidhe.”

  “Thank you.” He gave her suggestion the same serious consideration she’d taken before making it. “But I hope to stay out of range of man or sidhe.”

  “His Majesty will be very angry, my lord, once he realizes you’ve run off.”

  “He will,” confirmed Mal. “But only because he’s a good man who confuses heartache with temper.”

  “Shall we tell him you’re sorry?” Arthur wondered.

  “Nay. Never lie to your king,” Mal said. “Not even to save his pride.”

  In his room, he dressed for war, though in truth he did think he would have no need of sword or helm or iron cuirass over Hennish leather. For practical reasons, he eschewed the vocent’s cloak. He tucked a capsule of Curcas seed up his sleeve in case he survived long enough to see his own execution and courage failed him at the end. Until recently he had not thought of himself as a coward, but Holder’s burned magus had struck him to the core, and he could not quite shake a creeping horror of his own death.

  Baldebert’s sapphire-and-bone pin was on his mantel. Mal picked it up, turned it over, then set it back in place. Baldebert had no need of the brooch any longer and eventually, when Renault thought to search the tower, he would find it there. He left it on the mantel next to the jeweled knife that was a wedding gift from Siobahn and a single inky raven’s feather.

  He snuffed the candles in the colored glass lanterns he’d carried with him all the way from childhood, then took one last look around the tower room: the four-poster bed with its green hangings beckoned, the old wooden desk and his beloved leather chair. His journal sat, closed, next to the silver inkwell and ebony stylus he’d used to record a life spent in the service of the throne. There was a letter for Avani there, too, written in the loneliest hours when sleep was elusive. He expected she knew his sentiments as well as her own, no matter how she pretended ignorance, but selfishly he hoped she would keep his words by her always after, and think of him fondly.

  At the last moment, he eschewed the helm, disliking the way it constrained his line of sight, and left it on the desk.

  The corridor outside was quiet. He locked the chamber door with a key instead of the usual cant. His boots made no sound on thick carpet as he walked the empty hall. The tower stairwell was cold and filled with haze blown in through the loopholes. He could hear the clash and cry of battle outside the city. War did not stop with the sunrise.

  He stopped outside the throne room to deliver his key to the Kingsman on guard.

  “See that His Majesty gets this when he returns from his walk,” he told her.

  “Yes, my lord.” She was too well trained to ask questions and for that he was grateful. She folded the key into her sleeve, awarding him a bow. “Of course, my lord.”

&
nbsp; The great hall was deserted except for a handful of servants left behind to care for the king and those members of his court too elderly or infirm to take up sword. They stopped to gawp as Mal swept past, unused to seeing their magus in armor. He exited the palace by way of the front doors. The men and women standing guard outside clicked their heels together in his wake. The haze in the bailey was not yet so bad as it had been during the Red Worm plague when for days the temple had burned corpses right outside the city walls, but it would soon become worse, he thought, if the wind did not let up and fields and flatland continued to burn.

  As Mal walked desolate castle streets in the direction of the Maiden Gate, archers aligned on the battlements let loose red-fletched missiles into the horizon or called down encouragement to their compatriots below. From their jovial shouts and friendly taunting he guessed that the brunt of the battle had not yet reached Wilhaiim proper and that the cavalry line continued, for the moment, to hold. If the sand snakes had come up all together west of Whitcomb and through only the one gate, then the flatlanders had enjoyed a stroke of luck beyond any Mal could hope for.

  Too good, he surmised, to be true. The day was only beginning. Mayhap the enemy was waiting on better light to begin anew.

  He crossed in front of the royal temple. Its louvered roof was closed, its doors shut tight. A group of refugees from outside the city huddled against the building, seeking relief from biting wind and the raining ash. They looked down on Mal and, recognizing his face, called frantic questions.

  “My lord, Lord Malachi! The temple is full to bursting, my lord, and every tavern and inn! Where are we to go when the walls come down? My lord, who will protect us if not the god and his theists?”

  They were only a small group, lately arrived. Vineyard workers, he deduced, from the dark stains on their hands evident even from a distance. Five men and six women, they were soot stained and frightened, and by all appearances had come into Wilhaiim with only the clothes on their backs.