By K.S. Villoso
Annals of the Bitch Queen
The Wolf of Oren-yaro
The Ikessar Falcon
The Agartes Epilogues
Jaeth’s Eye
Aina’s Breath
Sapphire’s Flight
The Black Dog
Birthplace
Blackwood Marauders
Blackwood Marauders
K.S. Villoso
The Ikessar Falcon
Book Two of Annals of The Bitch Queen
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogues, places, events, situations, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental.
Liam’s Vigil Publishing Co.
633-255 Newport Drive
Port Moody, V3H 5H1
BC, Canada
Copyright © 2018 by K.S. Villoso
Cover art by Ash Navarre
ISBN: 978-1-7752356-0-6
www.ksvilloso.com
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of very brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For more information, address Liam’s Vigil Publishing Co.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Items of Interest, Salvaged Over The Years
ACT ONE
Chapter One
The Price of Innocence
Chapter Two
The Massacre at Dar Aso
Chapter Three
Where The Shadows Lie
Chapter Four
Rivers of Blood
Chapter Five
The Flight to the Crossroads
Chapter Six
The Ruby Grove
Chapter Seven
The Featherstone Mines
Chapter Eight
Village of the Damned
Chapter Nine
Slaves of Shimesu
Chapter Ten
Son of the Ikessars
Chapter Eleven
The Holy Bluffs
Chapter Twelve
Folly of a Fifth Son
Chapter Thirteen
The Forgotten
ACT TWO
Chapter One
An Mozhi of the Cliffs
Chapter Two
Sightseeing
Chapter Three
Lo Bahn’s Conquest
Chapter Four
Ni’in
Chapter Five
The Hidden Aberration
Chapter Six
Bargaining with Demons
Chapter Seven
The Rice Merchant
Chapter Eight
The Sougen Royals
Chapter Nine
The Dragon-tower
Chapter Ten
The Yu-Yan Ridge
Chapter Eleven
Dragon Queen
Chapter Twelve
The Belly of the Beast
Chapter Thirteen
The Prevailing Symphony
ACT THREE
Chapter One
The Coin of Pride
Chapter Two
The Man With Two Souls
Chapter Three
The Road Back Home
Chapter Four
The Warlord of Kyo-orashi
Chapter Five
The Kyo-orashi Arena
Chapter Six
The Coin of Loyalty
Chapter Seven
The Coin of Love
Chapter Eight
Picking Up the Pieces
Chapter Nine
The Bowels of Osahindo
Chapter Ten
The Jin-Sayeng Dragonlords
Chapter Eleven
River Agos
Chapter Thirteen
The Wolves of Oren-yaro
Chapter Fourteen
The Coin of Sin
Chapter Fifteen
The Lone Wolf
Chapter Sixteen
The Coin of Sorrow
About The Author
Other Books By K.S. Villoso
Items of Interest, Salvaged Over The Years
To Conrad,
this faint attempt
at piecing together these stories
to a world that will never
know how to listen.
Try, anyway.
The Story So Far…
They called me “bitch”, the she-wolf, because I murdered a man and made my husband leave the night before they crowned me.
So begins the story of Queen Talyien, daughter of Warlord Yeshin, a man who declared civil war on the ruling clan years before her birth, and who only accepted a truce on the condition that his daughter be betrothed to their heir and be crowned Queen.
Or so the books might say. She herself is convinced of it; that her moment of failure began at the point where she could not hold her marriage together. Five years of unstable rule followed Prince Rayyel’s departure, and the land could no longer utter the queen’s name without a hint of sarcasm and more than a shred of anger. She fought back, retreating behind an armour of barbed words and threats. To them, Warlord Yeshin, the mass murderer, and Talyien, Yeshin’s bitch pup, are one and the same; with Yeshin dead, Talyien took the brunt of their hatred.
But Queen Talyien and Tali are different edges of the same sword—one a mask, the other a woman. Tali, who grew up motherless in Oka Shto, whose only family was a frail old man who could be both terrible and kind at once, tried to seek solace in her betrothal to the indifferent Prince Rayyel. Initially rebuffed, later gradually accepted, her world is shattered when she learned of her would-be husband’s relationship with another warlord’s daughter. She, in turn, found comfort in the arms of her oldest friend. Afterwards, she resolved to put everything behind her and embrace her responsibilities, rendered bitter by reality.
Rayyel, however, abandons her three years later. And she doesn’t hear from him again until five years into her rule as Queen, when a message comes asking her to meet with him across the sea, in the Empire of Ziri-nar-Orxiaro. Her eagerness to reconcile is mixed with her anger, and she travels with a handful of guards and her adviser, relying on political goodwill to carry them the rest of the way.
She is sorely disappointed when she realizes that the power of a Queen of a small nation is hardly recognized by officials of the mighty Empire. A deputy, Ino Qun, shelters her and insults her almost in the same breath; Qun’s wife drops cryptic words.
During Tali’s chaotic meeting with her husband, they are attacked by assassins. Tali finds herself alone and without her guards in the slums, where her position matters even less. She encounters a gambling lord, Lo Bahn, and barely escapes being made into his whore; the only sympathetic soul she meets is a con-artist, Khine Lamang, whom she initially distrusts.
But Khine is persistent, and she slowly grows to trust him, sharing what she can of her life, or at least what she feels she is allowed to. With him, she finds it easy to be herself, to drop the queen’s act and be seen as she is, unjudged, with no expectations.
They are separated on the road, and Talyien finds herself trying to seek aid from the Emperor’s Fifth Son, Prince Yuebek, to save Rayyel. But Prince Yuebek is mad. He offers to marry Talyien and kills his own wife as a show of solidarity. And because Talyien continues to refuse, he throws her in prison.
Months later, Tali wakes up in a strange room, where she encounters the ghosts of her brother and her fat
her. Yeshin berates her, telling her she has failed because she fell in love with Rayyel. This confuses her, because she thinks her duty was to love him—her zealousness came from both her own feelings and her loyalty to her father. She realizes she is still being chased by assassins and narrowly escapes. She finds a note on the assassin that tells her they were sent by her husband.
She returns to Khine, but the comfort of his company is short-lived as she finds herself reunited not just with her guards, but her old friend, Agos. She also learns there is an embargo preventing travel from the empire to Jin-Sayeng.
She instigates a plan in order to infiltrate the governor’s office and confront Rayyel. But here, she comes face-to-face not with her husband, but Prince Yuebek, who reveals to her that he planned everything, including the assassins, in order to convince her to fall for him and discard her husband. Because none of his tricks worked, Yuebek threatens her son, telling Talyien he knows the truth—that the boy could be a bastard whose life is forfeit if the rest of the nation finds out. He also tells her that it was Talyien’s own father, Yeshin, who promised her to him first; her betrothal to Rayyel was a sham. Her own men had betrayed her to deliver her to Yuebek.
Talyien manages to escape Yuebek’s clutches yet again. Still reeling from everything she has learned, she receives a note from Rayyel asking for another meeting. Even though she is aware it might be another trap, Khine convinces her to go, as she is still holding on to the hope that somehow she can still salvage her marriage.
Tali finally meets Rai, who confesses he has always loved her. The reader learns that it is the knowledge of his wife’s affair, and that her son may not be his, that caused him to walk away; already damned by the politics that gave birth to their lives, their actions and reactions, their mistakes, hastened the ruin. He swears to make things right, that he is seeking mages that will help reveal the truth, and that if the boy is not his, he will kill him himself.
The novel ends with Tali trying to grasp to the last shreds of her father’s rhetoric: a wolf of Oren-yaro does not beg. A wolf of Oren-yaro suffers in silence. But her downfall is just beginning…
ACT ONE
The Road to Jin-Sayeng
Chapter One
The Price of Innocence
A thousand hooves trampled the sky the night my father died.
No words can describe what it feels like to gaze at the man you looked up to—a man you respected, and loved, and feared—and realize that somewhere along the way, he had turned into a shadow of his former self. That he had, in fact, been fading for years, and was simply doing a remarkable job of pretending the world wasn’t falling apart. Where there was once power, presence, and might, now there was only sickness and the stench of death: not yet the sweet-stink of a rotting corpse, but a moldy, urine-tinged scent, one that seemed to crawl away from his stiffening body and up the walls to fill the entire room.
The storm started with his last breath. I found myself sinking back into the chair, frozen in terror as the lightning flashed over his shadowed face, revealing the hollows under his eyes, spidered with black veins. Deep green bruises, cracked lips, yellow-white skin, wrinkled as parchment. I had been instructed to inform Lord General Ozo first should my father succumb to his illness, but I couldn’t even find the courage to stand, let alone look away from the withered image of the man who used to be strong enough to lift me on his shoulders. You’re alone now, my thoughts whispered, a thin thread that sought to wrap itself around my heart. You will no longer be able to depend on him. From now on, everything falls on you.
The sobs stopped at my throat, settling inside my chest and wrenching the breath out of me. My eyes were burning, but I was forcing the tears not to fall. What if one of the soldiers walked in and saw Yeshin’s heir red-faced and bawling away like a child? The other warlords would think us weak, that they all made a mistake when they bequeathed the Dragonthrone to an Orenar. To an Oren-yaro. Would I let it all turn to dust after everything my father had sacrificed?
I slowly let go of Yeshin’s hand, curling mine into a fist, before I reached up to plant a kiss on his wrinkled forehead. It was still covered in a layer of cold sweat. I wanted to say something, to utter a prayer or words of farewell for a man whose name carried a weight that could break the world. But silence seemed to be the only fitting poetry for someone who had lived as Warlord Yeshin had. So instead, I swallowed, and murmured an oath that I would do everything it took to make his dreams become a reality. A united land, prosperous in the way the Ikessars couldn’t make it, with the discipline and the ideals that made the province and the people of Oren-yaro stand head and shoulders above the rest. And so even if it meant facing my fears, if it meant walking the road laid out for me…if it meant becoming someone I was not…
He was dead and yet I still carried on in my head like he was listening. It started there; it never stopped. And there was never a time since that I didn’t find myself carrying out my duties to the echo of his voice—to that sharp, lightning-like roar of it, the one that could crumple my very soul.
It was that same voice that reached deep into me and forced me to consider my failures the day I lost my husband. My quest for Rayyel was a twisted reflection of the turbulence around me, a lighthouse in a stormy sea. I was accused of blindness, of obsession, of allowing my love for a man to become the center around which my life spun. I hardened myself to it. Embraced it. Call me what you want—irrational, careless, an idiot, even—every name you can think of. I know. I’ve told them to myself for years. When you internalize such thinking, allowing it to settle into your bones so deeply you know your own weaknesses to be a fact, it becomes a kind of foolhardy strength. Make of that what you will.
So when the bitter truth came—when my husband declared that he had loved me after all, when I had long convinced myself that I was the one holding our marriage together—my world came crashing down. For the longest time, to hear those words were all I ever wanted. He loved me, but because three days before my wedding, I had fled from his ancestral city straight into my friend Agos’ arms, he could no longer be certain if our son was his. There is nothing worse to wash down anger than the taste of your own mistakes.
A just reaction, so many others will say. Rayyel deserved it after what he had done—after his own betrayal, his own languid affair with another warlord’s daughter. But they don’t understand. They don’t understand that it was the kind of emotional reaction my father used to warn me against, proof enough to remind me that I was not what my father needed me to be, that I did not deserve to be Warlord Yeshin’s daughter. What strength I thought I had was laughable—I needed to be more than this. Jin-Sayeng needed me to be more than this. Thousands had lost their lives to get me to where I was. If I faltered, thousands more would follow.
It was as if I had taken a sharpened knife and stabbed my father’s dreams over and over. The worst part was that I didn’t do it to rebel. I didn’t do it out of spite. I did it because I was frightened, for comfort, because Yeshin could’ve done better than to pin all his hopes on someone like me. A brilliant mind, but he was wrong about the one thing he couldn’t afford to be wrong about.
~~~
Ignorance—yes, that’s the word. Only an ignorant woman would willingly swallow a vat of poison in the hopes of finding a cure. Maybe another would have been allowed the mistake, but I was Lady of Oren-yaro, future Queen of Jin-Sayeng. I was supposed to understand the significance of my every move. My father had drilled these things into me the moment I was old enough to know my name was Talyien aren dar Orenar. I was the Jewel of Jin-Sayeng, a symbol of peace, a double-edged sword. I wielded enough power to send men running for the door or falling at my feet—an army of ten thousand, my father’s bloody legacy around me like a shawl.
But in those moments of my mistake, I had dropped all trappings and left behind a girl of eighteen. Old enough to know better, but still too young to understand the nature of the world, the pitfalls that could open up and trap you. I remember the
rain, the lightning across the sky and the thunder that followed, pounding against the glass windows of the inn. The smell of mint and beeswax candles, the ringing of wind chimes spinning with the storm. The hollow sensation of loneliness, of broken illusions and dreams disappearing rapidly, like a bucket of water upturned into the sea.
I cranked the door open and called for Agos. In crowded inns, he usually slept in front of the doorway by the hall, refusing to get his own room. I had long stopped insisting. I heard him stir from the shadows at the sound of my voice.
“Princess,” he said, stepping inside with the surety of a beast stalking through the night. “Do you need something?”
“I’m frightened of lightning,” I blurted out, forgetting whatever excuse I had planned to give.
He looked at me, a puzzled expression on his face. “Lightning,” he said evenly. “Not thunder?”
“Lightning,” I repeated. “The flash, the crackle. Not the rumble.”
“You.” He didn’t sound like he believed me.
Almost as an answer, another flash of lightning lit up the sky, and I cringed involuntarily. His eyes widened, as if he had only just realized I meant what I said. A few moments later, the crack of thunder broke through and I felt the tight grip of fear loosen itself around me. I was able to breathe again.
“Do you want me to make it go away?” he asked, a hint of laughter behind his voice.
“Could you?”
He was still wondering if I was serious or not. “I could ask around for the nearest temple…” he started.
I sighed. “I didn’t mean…I am joking, Agos. Partly.” A third flash, another cringe.
Agos continued to stare at me. “I can’t tell, sometimes.”
“Really? After all these years?”
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