The Black King (Book 7)

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  If it were to happen now, the effect would be even more devastating as the Fey Empire covered half the world.

  He swallowed. “I won’t attack my sister.”

  “It is more complex than that,” Xihu said. “I am seeing your great-grandfather.”

  “Rugad’s dead. He’s been dead for fifteen years.” But Gift’s voice shook a little as he said that. He had Seen Visions of his great-grandfather as well—had been seeing them since his great-grandfather died near Blue Isle’s Place of Power. “Maybe you’ve been seeing my uncle Bridge. He’s on the Isle now.”

  At least, Gift assumed he was. That was where Bridge had been heading six months ago, according to Ace.

  “Yes, I’ve heard the argument,” Xihu said. “It could be you as well. There is a frightening similarity of features among the men in your family.”

  The Navigators had finished pricking fingers and pressing their own hands against those of the Sailors. The Sailors were assuming their positions against the rail. Gift looked past them. The mist was almost a rain now, but not worth troubling the Weather Sprites over. He could see the Stone Guardians in the distance, growing larger as they came closer.

  “Tell me the Vision,” he said.

  Xihu folded her hands together. She looked toward the Stone Guardians, but seemed strangely unaffected by them. The mist dotted her face, and caught in the wrinkles, like dew.

  “I heard voices first,” she said. “Voices whispering that you’d come to destroy Blue Isle. Then I Saw arrows covered with blood, and I heard a woman’s laughter. Then I Saw someone who looked like you, only it was a woman.”

  “Arianna,” he said.

  “With your blue eyes and a birthmark on her chin. She had a cruel face.”

  He frowned. Arianna did not have a cruel face. She had been impulsive and difficult, but she had never been cruel.

  “Then she turned and sat in a throne that had a crest above it: two swords crossed over a heart. And she laughed. She said, ‘Gift will never rule the Empire.’ Her eyes were cold.” For the first time since he met Xihu, Gift thought he saw real fear in her face. “It was as if she had no soul.”

  A breeze rose, sending shivers through him. That didn’t sound like Arianna at all.

  “What else?” he asked. He knew there had to be more because Xihu was too silent.

  “Assassins,” she whispered. “I heard the voices of assassins, looking for you, trying to kill you to protect the Isle.”

  “Fey Assassins?” He had heard of them, but thought they were a myth.

  She shook her head. “I could not tell.”

  “Who would hire assassins? Arianna, even if she has gone crazy, can’t do that. And neither could my uncle. The Blood against Blood would affect them. They know that.”

  “Have you ever thought,” Xihu asked softly, “that the messages you received were false? Perhaps your sister is fine. Perhaps someone only wants to kill you here, on the Isle.”

  He shook his head. “No one would want to do that.”

  “Why?” Xihu asked. “You’ve been to both Places of Power. Maybe someone is afraid you’ll find the third.”

  Gift crossed his arms. The breeze had given him a terrible chill. “Who does that threaten?”

  “All of us. Whoever finds the third Place of Power will create the Triangle of Might which is supposed to reform the world. None of us knows what that means. There are ancient stories that say it means only the greatest of us will survive.”

  “And someone thinks I’m arrogant enough to place myself in that category?” Gift wiped the water from his face. “I set guards on the Place of Power here on Blue Isle. I lived near the Place of Power in the Eccrasian Mountains for five years. I never once tried to arrange a meeting between someone in Blue Isle’s Place of Power and myself so that we could find the third Place of Power.”

  Xihu was silent for a long time. Then she closed her eyes. “It was merely a suggestion.”

  “Because of your Vision?”

  She shook her head. “Because that is the second greatest thing to fear about you, Gift.”

  “What’s the first?”

  She didn’t answer him. She stood in front of him with her eyes closed, the mist beading on her face, and said nothing.

  “What’s the first?” he asked again.

  She opened her eyes. There were tears in them. “That you will kill your sister.”

  TWO

  ARIANNA SAT on a small stone bench overlooking the Cardidas River. It flowed red here, almost as if there was blood in the water. She knew that the color came from the stones beneath the surface and from the reflection of the Cliffs of Blood above. But she found the water eerie anyway, considering how many people had died near here.

  It was sunny, but the sunshine was not warm. Strange that she could know the temperature but not really feel it. She didn’t feel much of anything these days. Not outside, anyway.

  Coulter and Seger had built her a body, and she had put her consciousness inside it. The body was built out of the same stone that made the river turn red. Only the body didn’t have red skin. Its skin was slightly grayish, very smooth and cold to the touch. At least, that was what Coulter told her.

  From inside, it felt like her body, only wrapped in cotton and unable to move with any speed. But it didn’t function like her body. She was a Shape-Shifter, and even though she still remembered how to Shift form, this body wouldn’t change.

  Six months ago, she had thought being in the body would be temporary. Now she wasn’t so sure. Rugad, the Black King, had tried to take over her mind. He had made the assault on her when she was fifteen. He was a Visionary like she was, and he traveled across her brother Sebastian’s Link into her mind. First Rugad had tried to take over her body by force, and when that hadn’t worked, he had left a tiny bit of himself inside her brain.

  That bit had been the equivalent of an infant then. In fifteen years, it had grown into the equivalent of a young man. It wasn’t supposed to awaken inside her for another ten years, but something triggered it—a bright light with black threaded through it, a magickal sending that had come from far away. If Rugad had waited another ten years, he would have subsumed her entirely, holding her body and her consciousness hostage forever.

  Coulter, who was an Enchanter, had tried to kick Rugad out of her and failed. But Coulter did manage to carry Arianna’s consciousness out of her body and away from the palace before Rugad could stop him.

  The problem was that she lived inside Coulter’s mind while her Golem body was being built. And, much as she cared for Coulter, the lack of privacy had driven her crazy. Just as this non-responsive body was driving her crazy.

  All of the people around her—Seger, Coulter, Con, Matt, and the other students at Coulter’s school—treated her as if she were an invalid. She wasn’t. She simply didn’t have the mobility she’d had in her natural body. Or the power. Right now, all of Blue Isle—all of the Fey Empire—thought that she was still ruling the country. Her body was, but it was being guided and powered by Rugad, the most ruthless Black King of all.

  She put her hands on the edge of the bench and leaned forward. It seemed to take forever to make the movement. She had to concentrate on speeding up these commands. She didn’t want to move like Sebastian for the rest of her life.

  Sebastian was a Golem too, but he had been formed as an infant. He had his own personality that was originally composed of bits of her brother Gift. Sebastian was a special type of Golem, one that Seger said was maintained by the Mysteries and Powers, a creature that had a life of its own. Whereas if Arianna left her Golem’s body, it would remain immobile until she entered it again. Eventually it would revert to the stone it had once been.

  Sebastian was the only one who seemed to understand how she felt. Sometimes he would sit with her and hold her while she wished she could cry.

  Most of the time, though, she found herself on this bench, staring at the Cardidas. It was hard for her to believe that this river
bisected all of Blue Isle. Yet right now the river seemed to be the only constant in her life.

  And somehow, every time she sat here, she felt threatened. She knew that the capitol city of Jahn lay only a few days from here by ship. She and Coulter, in making their escape from the palace, had left an easy-to-follow trail. Sometimes she thought Coulter did it on purpose. She thought Coulter wanted to lure Rugad to the Place of Power in the Cliffs of Blood and either kill him or trap him there.

  Arianna wasn’t so sure it would be that easy, but she was surprised that Rugad hadn’t come. For all his power madness, Rugad believed in the Fey way. And the most important tenet of Fey Leadership was Vision. Arianna had it, and so did her brother Gift. That was how they were able to create and sustain Golems, how they were able to move their consciousness across Links between people, and how they were able to survive outside of their own bodies as long as their consciousness had a place to reside.

  Rugad had had Vision when he was alive, but the bit he had left inside Arianna had none. He had told her, while they were sharing her brain, that he would force her to use her Vision to help him lead. Only she wasn’t there any more, and he was leading Blind. She couldn’t believe that was something he would do for long. He had to find another Visionary or else come after her.

  Maybe he had been sitting in Jahn for six months planning his attack. After all, he had waited twenty years after his son’s defeat on Blue Isle before trying to take over the Isle himself. Rugad was known for his strategy, his cunning, and his patience.

  She shuddered—or at least, she thought a shudder. All of Rugad’s schemes looked at the long term. He had back-up plan after back-up plan. Rugad acted and schemed and took his time until he got things right.

  Arianna had not planned anything in her life. Her decision to become Black Queen had been impulsive. She had even governed with short term goals. First she had gotten the Fey Empire to accept a half Fey half Islander queen. Then she had gotten them accustomed to peace. Then she had gotten them to develop the resources they already owned instead of conquering new ones.

  She hadn’t foreseen the problems that policy would bring, but she would wager that Rugad would have analyzed every aspect of it, from the results of success to the reactions of his own people. And he would have known the price of failure.

  It was ironic that in many ways she had been reduced to little more than a brain. She was the one who was always active, physically as well as emotionally. She always made the final decision—weighing options, examining cost—but she left the actual work of analysis to someone else.

  Rugad never had. And right now, he stood poised to rule the Fey Empire for the next hundred years.

  “There you are.”

  She didn’t turn. Turning would have taken too much effort. She recognized Coulter’s voice.

  He sat down beside her. She envied his graceful movements, his unconscious fluidity. He was thoroughly Islander—short, round featured, blue eyed—and yet he was the strongest Enchanter she had ever encountered. In the fifteen years they had spent apart, he had learned how to control that magick and how to make it work.

  He folded his hands together and studied the river. “Thinking of jumping in?”

  He’d asked her that the first time he found her here, months ago. She smiled and said what she had said back then. “I’d sink, but I wouldn’t drown.”

  That was the nice thing about Golems. They couldn’t really be killed.

  He smiled at her. Whenever he looked at her, his expression was filled with a love so strong that she could feel it. Sometimes she wondered why he was still interested. She clearly wasn’t the woman she had been.

  Then his smile faded. “You’re spending a lot of time here lately.”

  “I’m trying to learn how to think.”

  “You’ve always had an agile mind.”

  “Maybe. But now I need more than that.” She leaned against the back of the bench and heard the grating as stone met stone. She winced, but Coulter didn’t seem to notice. “Why do you think Rugad hasn’t come for me?”

  Coulter brought his legs up and wrapped his arms around them. He rested his chin on his knees. “I’ve been wondering that same thing for some time now.”

  “And you haven’t come up with an answer?”

  “Oh, I have.” He continued to stare at the water. Sunlight reflected off of it, creating diamonds of red light that played across his pale skin.

  “Then why you haven’t told me?”

  He shrugged.

  “Coulter,” she said. “I could cross our Link and find out anyway.”

  They had originally designed the Golem as a place for her to go and be private. But Coulter had assumed, and perhaps she had as well, that she would keep up her residence in the corner of his mind he had set aside for her.

  She couldn’t tell him that she found it claustrophobic. Much as she cared for him, she became nothing when she was inside him. She had no control, no body, no freedom at all. At least in the Golem she was half a person.

  “I wouldn’t mind if you crossed it,” he said, so softly that she almost didn’t hear him.

  She took his hand in her own, wishing she could feel more than the pressure of his fingers. “Why do you think Rugad hasn’t come?”

  Coulter closed his eyes, briefly enough to seem like a long blink, but Arianna knew better. “I think he no longer perceives us to be a threat.”

  The words hurt. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you could be right.”

  Coulter didn’t respond. That seemed to be his way of dealing with the topic of Rugad. Saying nothing. Letting time handle it.

  She stood slowly, so that she didn’t overbalance and fall into the water below.

  Coulter opened his eyes and looked up at her.

  “I think we have to act before Rugad does,” Arianna said, “and we have to be smart about it. We have to have a plan and a backup plan, and another plan after that. Fifteen years ago, we defeated him mostly with surprise. We can’t do that anymore. He knows what the Isle is capable of. He knows what I’m capable of. Now’s the time to be smarter than he is.”

  Coulter made a small snorting sound. “He’s the greatest tactician your people have ever known and you believe that we can best him?”

  “I do. My father beat him. We can do it if we need to. We can’t hide here anymore.”

  “We can wait for him,” Coulter said.

  “How long? Months? Years? Until he finally decides to come to us?” She shook her head once. “I can’t live like this that long, Coulter. He has conquered me.”

  “No, he hasn’t. You’re right here.”

  “I’m more than just my mind, Coulter. In my own body, I can feel things. I can change form. I—.” She stopped herself. She had almost said that she had a place of her own. She had said that to him once before, and he hadn’t understood. He had thought the Golem was enough.

  “We can’t rush into this,” Coulter said.

  This time she did turn, and as she did, her foot slipped on the bank. She tried to catch herself, but the body didn’t respond fast enough. She slid along the grasses and would have gone into the water if Coulter hadn’t caught her.

  She let him pull her back up. He cradled her against him.

  “I can’t even feel you touch me,” she whispered.

  “Sure you can,” he said. “I’ve touched you from the back, and you felt it.”

  “Not like skin against skin. Not in any meaningful way.” She sat up, making him release her. She brushed the dirt off her legs and back. Even that took longer than it should have.

  When she finished, the words she’d been holding back for months finally came out. “When did you stop believing you could make a difference?”

  He turned away, but not before she saw the look of pain cross his face. He stood up and ran his hands through his blond hair.

  “I do make a difference,” he said. “I teach children how to control their magick. Sometimes I’m the only
parent they have.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  He didn’t answer her. He stood with his back to her, his head bowed.

  “It must have taken something pretty powerful to convince you to leave here, to come to Jahn and confront Rugad.”

  “That worked well,” he said sarcastically.

  “It did.” She spoke quietly. “You saved my life.”

  Coulter shook his head. “He’d have let you live.”

  “While he controlled me. I couldn’t break free of him. You got me out.”

  “And now he controls the Empire.”

  “As he would have whether or not you came. At least this way, he does it without my help. Without my Vision.”

  “Yet you want to go back there.” Coulter spoke just as softly as she had.

  “I don’t want him to win.”

  “He did rule the Fey for seventy years, Arianna.”

  “He was a ruthless man who sacrificed thousands of lives, maybe millions, for a glory that no one needed.”

  “I’ve heard some of the Fey around here,” Coulter said. “They want to go back to fighting. They think that peace robs them of their identity.”

  She clenched a fist. “And most of them, like Seger, are happy the generations of war are over. Why are you arguing for Rugad? Have you forgotten what he is?”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” Coulter said.

  “Then why?”

  “Because—” Coulter’s voice broke. “That way you stay here. You stay safe.”

  She felt the breath catch in her throat. Coulter had stayed safe ever since she had become Black Queen. What had he said to her then?

  You can’t have everything you want, Ari. Sometimes it’s better to wait.

  “See?” she said. “Safety. You said it again. If I listen to you, I give Rugad control over two Places of Power, the one in the Eccrasian Mountains and one in the Roca’s Cave. He’ll find the third. He’ll own the Triangle of Might, and if the Fey are right—if the world reforms when someone creates that Triangle—then it’ll be created in his image. Do you want that?”