Sacrifice: The First Book of the Fey

by Rusch, Kristine Kathryn

  He had not seen Jewel, even though he searched for her. He hoped she had gone to her quarters on the Eccrasia, but he had not yet had a chance to search.

  “Sir, another!” a Weather Sprite called to him from her position near the prow of the ship. He stiffened. This Shadowlands had been a creation of haste and confidence, meant to house ships and perhaps fifty of the invading force. The strain on his creation was showing. Corners were breaking, sending bits of light and glimpses of the ships to anyone who was observing. He was glad for the dark. Otherwise, the Islanders would find them.

  He tugged at his caked clothing, wishing for a moment—just one moment—to search out his missing daughter and to bathe himself. But he was the only one who could repair the Shadowlands. He crossed the deck, his footsteps echoing in the hollow nothingness that made up the Shadowlands. Soldiers, unwilling to go into the darkness belowdecks, crouched against the railings, leaning against each other for comfort. He nodded to them, trying to reassure them, faking a confidence he didn’t feel.

  This failure had caught him off guard. He had prepared himself for a quick battle, and a quick victory. Another mistake. If he had known that the invasion would become a long, drawn-out series of attacks, he would have slept more. He would have prepared himself for the strain on his own resources.

  As it were, he would have to work with the Spell Warders on finding a counterspell to the Islanders’ magick poison. He would also have to keep repairing the Shadowlands while his scouts looked for a new opening. Then he would have to create another Shadowlands, a firmer one that would withstand the presence of his entire fighting force. No one had built a Shadowlands like that since the Black Queen at the battle of Ycyno two centuries before. He only hoped he had the strength.

  The Weather Sprite stood near the railing at the edge of the prow. He pointed to the hole in the Shadowlands, but he didn’t need to. The sound of water lapping against the dock was clear, as was the cool breeze, filled with the scent of death. He peered at it and saw that it faced the far side of the river, near the ghastly palacelike religious building where the destruction had started.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I can tend to it now.”

  But he stood for a moment, gazing through the hole at the crispness and clarity of the real world. He didn’t relish living in a Shadowlands, not even for a few days. Its grayness was depressing; it dampened the spirits instead of raising them.

  Then he reached up and gripped the soft edges of the Shadow with his fingers. He closed his eyes and, with his Vision, closed the hole, made a seam, and willed the seam away. When he opened his eyes again, the hole was gone. Only grayness faced him. A never-ending grayness.

  And silence. That disturbed him the most. None of the soldiers talked as they returned. They found a place to collapse and remained there, nearly motionless.

  The Fey had lost battles before, but this was different. In the past the enemy had had greater numbers—as this one did—but those numbers had been trained. The enemy had also had more advanced weapons. The advantages had always been in the physical world, not in the magickal one. The Fey had been seduced into thinking they were the only ones who had conquered that realm. The shock of discovering the truth, and the horridness of the deaths visited on them, affected him profoundly—yet he was the one who had to revive their spirits.

  He hurried along the deck until he reached the connecting bridge built especially to link ships hidden in Shadowlands. Nothing natural occurred in the Shadowlands—no water, no ground, nothing except air that a Visionary poured into the hiding place. The walls of the Shadowlands were porous, an invention of an early Black King, and allowed the air to filter through. Nothing else did filter through, not even sound, which made the Shadowlands dangerous to leave.

  Since this was a simple Shadowlands, the walls were tight and spare. As he crossed the bridge, Rugar could feel the damp coldness brushing against him. The next Shadowlands he built—the one built for a longer fight—would not have this design flaw.

  He crossed quickly and stepped onto the bridge of the flagship, the Eccrasia. Here the soldiers conversed in low voices. He heard only snatches:

  “. . . black robes . . .”

  “. . . never would have believed that something so ungainly . . .”

  “. . . on horses . . .”

  “. . . entire room full of bodies . . .”

  “. . . no faces . . .”

  “. . . most still alive . . .”

  He had seen the destruction himself. The thought of identifying the dead filled him with a different anguish. And he couldn’t get his father’s words out of his head.

  No one has conquered Blue Isle before.

  And his own cocky response: No one has tried.

  But he had checked only Fey and Nye records. Perhaps Blue Isle had been attacked from Leut, even though it was farther away. He had thought Leut had no real history of trade or warfare this far north from its land mass, but he had not checked. Perhaps all that he had known about Blue Isle was wrong. It certainly seemed that way after this morning.

  On the way to his own cabin, he stopped at Jewel’s and knocked. The portal was dim, and he heard nothing inside. “Jewel,” he said softly.

  No one answered.

  When he came back from his cabin, he would open the door and see if she was resting inside. But he doubted it. She was always at his side during a crisis.

  He put his hand against the door and leaned his forehead against his knuckles. If she was dead, he would never forgive himself. Jewel, the brightest of all his children. But he had seen her, walking through the Islander palace as if she owned it.

  She couldn’t die.

  He would have known.

  He tried the door. It opened easily, and he stepped into the darkness. He lit the lantern she had stored in the traditional place beside the door, finding it odd that the thing did not sway as it would have if the ship had been resting in water.

  The cabin was small—and empty. The cot still bore the indentation of Jewel’s body, and a nightdress lay across the mattress as if she had expected to use it later.

  He sat on the edge of the cot. She could be a hundred places—with the wounded in the hold of the Feire or working with the Warders herself. She might even still be outside, helping the rest of the stragglers to Shadowlands.

  Next time—next time after a campaign—he would ask her to come to him first so that he wouldn’t worry about her, so that he could fight with a clear mind. This was the reason the Black King’s advisers had suggested that family members not fight in the same unit. But no one had listened because Fey tradition called for family to remain together.

  It was not like him to worry like this.

  Perhaps this rout was just a test, and a reminder of his own arrogance. The Black King’s son, the best commander in the entire Fey military, suffering a defeat at the hands of nonwarriors. Far enough away, though, that the majority of the Fey people, and his own children (except for Jewel), would not need to know of it if he turned this victory around.

  He picked up the nightdress and clutched it in his hands. The cotton fabric came from the base of the Eccrasian Mountains. It was rare and expensive. It was also warm, not from the fabric itself, but from the dream spell woven into it. Jewel loved the nightdress and had worn it for a year. She had had it made, she said, especially because she had no special magick.

  “Rugar?” The voice was soft, and male.

  Rugar looked up slowly, unwilling to be caught in this moment of vulnerability. A young Fey stood in front of him. He was slender and tall, and wearing the tunic of the Infantry. His left sleeve was ripped, and his arm hung free and useless. A stained bandage was tied just above his elbow.

  He took a step into the light. His face was smeared with blood, not like a Red Cap’s, but like a man who had been spattered in battle.

  “I’m sorry,” Rugar said. “I can’t place you.”

  “Burden.” The boy’s name seemed to weigh him with even m
ore sadness.

  A friend of Jewel’s. One who had served with her and had cast an interested male eye at her. The one Rugar had hoped she would pursue first, before she decided on her mate, thinking an Infantryman would be good training for the life ahead. A chill ran down Rugar’s spine. He twisted the nightdress around his fingers.

  “Were you looking for Jewel?”

  Burden shook his head. “I was looking for you.”

  The fabric wound around Rugar’s thumb and forefinger, trapping them. He clenched his fists around the material and pulled it to his chest, as if it could protect him from anything Burden might say.

  “You were serving with Jewel.” It was not a question. He remembered that much of Jewel’s unit.

  “Under Shima.” The boy clutched his bad arm with his good. “Shima is dead.”

  “I pray she died as a warrior.”

  “She died telling us to retreat.” Burden’s words were clipped. There was anger behind them. “Then the poison hit her. I saw her after. It took her a long time to die.”

  Rugar untangled his fingers from the nightdress. He should stand and take control of this conversation from a lowly boy who had no powers at all, but he could not. He heard the blame and felt it was deserved. Shima had warned him she would die on this mission. She had said he was making a mistake.

  “And Jewel?”

  “Jewel led us into the palace.” The boy leaned against the door frame. He was pale from blood loss.

  “Is she dead?” Rugar asked.

  “I don’t know,” the boy said.

  “You didn’t stay with her?” Rugar stood, finding a direction for his anger, a direction away from himself.

  “I nearly died defending her.” The boy pushed away from the door frame, rising to his full height. He was standing up to the next ruler of the Fey and knew it, but that did not deter him. His anger was that great.

  Rugar recognized the emotion. He had seen it on hundreds of battlefields. “Then what happened?”

  “They captured her.”

  “Captured?” Rugar stumbled over the word. “They took prisoners?” He had heard nothing about it. It seemed a sophisticated thing for nonwarriors to do.

  “They took a prisoner. Only one.”

  The most precious one. Jewel. Rugar sat back down. The cot was hard against his buttocks. All the aches rose to the surface, along with a panic he had never felt before. “How did they know who she was?”

  “She seemed to know the man who captured her. She spoke to him in Nye and spared his life.”

  “She spared his life?” None of this was making any sense. Jewel, acting contrary to orders. Jewel, who understood better than most the necessity for rules on the battlefield. “And she allowed him to take her? You allowed him to take her?”

  “The Black Robes came into the place, and she told us to retreat. I tried to get to her, but the man hustled her away.” Burden was swaying ever so slightly. If he did not get care, he would collapse there from the lack.

  “You need to tend to yourself, son,” Rugar said, his voice tender. This boy, this Burden, had tried to save Jewel. That in itself should count for something. “I am grateful that you came to me.”

  “We need to get her back.”

  “Yes,” Rugar said. “We do.”

  Burden stared at him for a moment, then touched his good hand to his forehead and backed out of the light. His footsteps, uneven but firm, echoed as he made his way along the deck.

  Rugar gripped the edge of the bed. They had Jewel. And their poison. They could torture her. They could kill her and lie to him about her death. Somehow they had known the quickest way to defeating Rugar’s spirit.

  They had captured his heart.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Alexander leaned against the closed door. He was shaking. The girl had had an odd beauty, with those upswept brows, high cheekbones, and dark eyes. Her height had been imposing, and she had known how to use it.

  I am a soldier. I have been trained to die all my life.

  But Alexander hadn’t, and her closeness had unnerved him. The War Room seemed empty without her.

  “She’s stunning, isn’t she?” Nicholas said.

  Alexander brought his head up. His son was standing in front of the table. He was covered with blood, and his hair had fallen out of its ponytail. Yet he stood with his right foot on the bench and his right arm resting on his thigh. So casual, so comfortable, for one who had come so close to death.

  “She is our enemy.”

  Nicholas shrugged. “Better to have a magnificent enemy than one we are ashamed of.”

  Like the bunch of peasants King Constantine had defeated. The words fell unspoken between them.

  Alexander pushed away from the door. He had thought the blood and terror of the day would have cured Nicholas’s romanticism. Instead the girl seemed to add fire to it.

  He walked over to his son and put his hand on Nicholas’s shoulder. Flecks of blood dotted his cheek and neck. Nicholas looked up at him, and finally Alexander saw the boy hidden inside the man’s frame.

  “You could have died,” Alexander said.

  Nicholas shook his head. “I was fine.”

  “I would not have been able to bear it if you had died.”

  Nicholas smiled awkwardly at his father. “You mean the Kingdom could not bear it if I died.”

  Alexander shook his head. His hand was now covered with blood. “No,” he said softly. “I could not bear it.”

  Almost two decades ago Alexander had held Nicholas the night the boy was born. Only then Nicholas had been so tiny that Alexander’s hand covered the boy’s back and bottom. The baby had been fragile against Alexander’s shoulder, his tiny head soft and wobbly. For those first few years Alexander had gone into the boy’s room and watched him sleep, marveling at the tiny miracle he had helped create. His wife had never known of Alexander’s nocturnal roamings—she had asked him to leave her bed when she was swollen with Nicholas, and she had made it clear that he did not need to return unless something happened to the boy. His second wife had never given him children, and this overgrown child, still fragile in his flesh-and-blood shell, was all the future Alexander had.

  Alexander sighed and wiped his hand on his pants. More than anything he wanted out of that room. But not yet, not until his advisers told him all was safe. “You should have stayed here with me,” he said.

  “But, Father, they were fighting below.”

  Alexander nodded. “And dying.”

  “My place was with them.”

  “No,” Alexander said. The girl’s words still echoed in his head. Our leaders fight. “We don’t fight. I don’t know what their system is, but ours relies on you and me as thinkers, as leaders, and as figureheads. If you died, it would demoralize Blue Isle. And that would be the last thing we need.”

  Nicholas snorted. “You don’t think they would fight for their homes?”

  “We are part of their home.” Alexander patted a spot beside him. “Sit, Nicky.”

  The childhood name. Nicholas looked at the place Alexander indicated, but did not move.

  “Nicholas,” Alexander said, “you are tired. Don’t let pride get in the way of allowing your body to rest.”

  Nicholas smiled—a small, fleeting grin of acknowledgment—and then sat beside his father.

  The blood had stained Nicholas’s skin. The boy was slender and more muscled than Alexander had ever been. The sword practice with Stephen had given him strength.

  Alexander sighed. He had to get through to Nicholas, because if he did not, he might lose the only thing he truly valued. “I know,” he said, “that you need to be different from me. I am more of a scholar. I prefer talks with Matthias to exercise. I prefer examining Kingdom reports over riding a horse. What you don’t see yet, Nicky, is that you are different. You are stronger and smarter, and you have your own concerns. If you would just finish the last bit of your education, I would be able to use you as an adviser.”

  �
��I don’t see why books are important—” Nicholas started, but Alexander raised his hand for silence.

  “I need you now, Nicky,” Alexander said. “I need you to understand what it means to be King and to stand by my side. We know little about these creatures that have invaded us, and what we do know could be wrong. Even touching that girl could have got you killed. Just breathing the same air—”

  “She wouldn’t hurt me.”

  This time Nicholas’s words stopped Alexander. He ran a hand through his hair. He, too, had seen the girl’s odd attractiveness but knew it for what it was—a temptation. Nicholas was young and at the age when anything female attracted his attention. Alexander almost said so, then didn’t. He had to keep his son on his side.