Warrior

by Jennifer Fallon

  Captain Grayden shook his head, clearly unhappy with the idea of them putting themselves directly under the power of Fardohnya’s notoriously unreliable king. “I say we pull up anchor and leave while we still can, my lady.”

  “And go where?” Luciena asked, just as concerned, particularly for her children. “We can’t go home while the plague still ravages Greenharbour.”

  “What about Medalon?” Xanda suggested. “We could sail upriver to Bordertown and wait out the plague there.”

  “Not with the draught of this ship,” Grayden advised. “The Glass River’s not that deep.”

  Luciena looked out over the city of Talabar, torn with indecision. The morning was typical of Talabar—a flawless sky resting on a calm, sapphire sea. Curving around the harbour and built from the pale pink stone of the neighbouring cliffs, the city glowed softly in the late winter sunshine. On the left, at the end of the wharf district, a series of carved stone steps led up to the paved road that circled the harbour. Flat-roofed villas belonging to the wealthy and the powerful were perched at random intervals across the distant terraced hills surrounding the bay. The city itself was interspersed with countless palm-shaded emerald parks and the tall edifices of the many temples that dotted it, the numerous spires aiming for the sky, as if each one was a finger pointing to the clouds—the home of the Primal Gods—trying to reach out and touch the divine realm to see if it was real.

  Talabar was a deceptively beautiful city, Luciena thought. It appeared warm and friendly. On the flat roofs of the houses closest to the docks, a few people had even gathered to watch, probably wondering why there was a contingent of the King’s Guard waiting to meet a Hythrun ship. Further along, near the warehouses on their right, the wharves were crowded with cargo ships, irate-looking merchants and bare-chested, sweaty stevedores shouting at each other as they unloaded their wares.

  She looked at Xanda and knew what he was thinking. Had it just been the two of them, he wouldn’t have hesitated to accept the King of Fardohnya’s highly suspicious offer, content they could handle him and his un-trustworthy hospitality. But with the children here . . . they could all too easily become pawns in a game that might turn deadly at any moment.

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m all for pulling up anchor and getting the hell out of here while we still can,” Xanda admitted,

  “but as you said, where do we go?”

  “With the supplies and water we have left on board,” Grayden informed them, “we’d be lucky to make it to the Isle of Slarn.”

  Luciena shook her head at the impossible decision. “I think, that if it came to a choice between returning home to face the plague in Greenharbour or the colony of Malik’s Curse sufferers on Slarn, I’d rather face the plague.”

  Xanda nodded in agreement. And then he smiled thinly. Luciena assumed he was trying to be encouraging. “The offer may be genuine, you know.”

  Even Grayden nodded his agreement. “Your husband speaks the truth, my lady. I doubt Hablet of Fardohnya would be foolish enough to harm the niece and nephews of Hythria’s High Prince.”

  She nodded reluctantly. “I suppose we don’t really have much choice.”

  That was as close to saying yes to Hablet’s offer that she could bring herself to articulate. Xanda didn’t object to her decision, which meant he also acknowledged they had little choice in the matter.

  “I’ll go down and inform the captain that we’ll be happy to accept his offer to escort us to the palace then.” He turned and headed for the gangway. Then he hesitated at the rail and suddenly laughed.

  Luciena looked at him curiously. “What?”

  “I was just thinking, Hablet would have found out we were arriving today from your shipping agent, wouldn’t he?”

  “Probably,” she agreed, not getting the joke at all.

  “But you only told your agent our approximate arrival time and the reason for our visit, not who was on board, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “So Hablet probably doesn’t know we have the children with us.”

  “I suppose not. But I still don’t see what’s so funny.”

  “I was just wondering . . . how long do you think it’s going to take Jarvan and Geris to totally destroy the Summer Palace?”

  Even Luciena couldn’t help smiling at the thought of her two rowdy sons running amok through Hablet’s palace. “Given their past history, I’d say no more than an hour. Two at the most.”

  He leaned forward and kissed her cheek. “See? Already things are looking better. If Hablet is up to something, he may soon find himself reassessing his plans when he realises he’s invited the two most fervent disciples of the God of Total Chaos to stay in his palace.”

  Luciena shook her head, wishing she had Xanda’s ability to joke about the direst situations. It was a trait he shared with his brother, Travin, and his cousin, Damin, who was even more adept at making light of everything. In fact, the more life-and-death the circumstances, the more the cousins seemed to want to find some sort of black humour in it. She wasn’t sure if it was a family characteristic or just a foolish male tendency. “That’s supposed to make me feel better, I suppose?”

  “The idea warms the very cockles of my heart.”

  She scowled at him. “Tell me again why I married you, Xanda Taranger?”

  “It was that or be hanged, as I recall.”

  “I knew I couldn’t have done it willingly.”

  He must have noticed the concern on her face. After twelve years together, there wasn’t much she could hide from him. “Cheer up, Luci,” he ordered as he climbed onto the gangway. “Worse things have happened to us.”

  Not lately, Luciena thought as she watched Xanda walk the narrow, bouncing plank as if it was a solid walkway half a mile wide. When he reached the dock, she leaned over the rail and called out to him. “Xanda!”

  He turned to look up at her. “Yes?”

  “There’s no such thing as a God of Total Chaos.”

  “Tell that to your sons,” he called back with a smile, and then he turned and walked the short distance to where the Fardohnyan captain was waiting, to inform him that he, his wife and their three children would be pleased to accept the King of Fardohnya’s hospitality.

  Chapter 46

  It was close to midnight before the ball to welcome Damin home concluded and another hour or more after that before Starros was able to seek his bed. He was exhausted and worried, for Leila’s sake more than his own. Damin’s casual dismissal of Mahkas’s plans for the parade that afternoon had infuriated the regent and although he had fixated on Starros as the author of all his woes, Mahkas obviously suspected his daughter was deliberately undermining his plans for her future and seemed dangerously angry with her, too.

  The evening had been very unpleasant for Starros, watching Mahkas do everything he could to force Damin and Leila together and being helpless to prevent it. The only bright spot in the whole sorry spectacle was the knowledge that Mahkas was leaving for Walsark in the morning and would be gone for several days, leaving them in relative peace.

  Leila had suffered through the ball, stiff with embarrassment. Even Lady Bylinda looked as if she was cringing on occasion. The only one, in fact, who seemed oblivious to Mahkas’s unsubtle hints was Damin. Six years of playing politics in Greenharbour had obviously taught the young prince a few things.

  He deftly kept the conversation away from anything remotely matrimonial, and whenever Mahkas tried to point out Leila’s beauty, or grace, or accomplishments—like an auctioneer listing the assets of a particularly fine racehorse—Damin would counter with some anecdote about Leila from their childhood which shattered the illusion Mahkas was trying so hard to create.

  Damin Wolfblade was a far better politician, Starros realised this evening, than anybody suspected.

  Knowing the education Damin had received as a boy—and having been the beneficiary of much the same education himself—Starros knew what Damin had been expos
ed to. But he’d never seemed to pay that much attention to it when they were children. In fact, he would have bet money on Damin not having learned much at all. Perhaps it was the practical lessons he was learning in Greenharbour that had honed his awareness. Or perhaps Marla’s sharp political instincts were just that—some inexplicable hereditary trait passed from mother to son.

  If that was the case, Starros hoped Damin had the wit to conceal his ability until he was forced to reveal it.

  The Warlords of Hythria want a High Prince they can look up to as a noble figurehead, not one who might actually be strong enough to rule them, he thought, tossing his shirt across the high-backed chair in the corner of his room.

  Starros had just finished wearily pulling off his boots when he heard the sound of a door closing in the small dressing room adjacent to his bedroom. He immediately forgot all about Damin and whether or not he might make a good High Prince, or what the Warlords would make of him. The door inside the tiny dressing room clicked shut and a moment later Leila emerged from the slaveways, dressed in a nightgown, her long fair hair hanging loose around her face, rippled from being braided so tightly all day. She crossed the small bedroom in three steps and wordlessly stepped into his arms. He held her close; a moment of sheer bliss for both of them when neither said a word, so neither of them was able to shatter their fragile happiness by speaking of reality.

  After a time she lifted her head from his shoulder and he kissed her, and then let her go and wiped a stray tear from her cheek. She smiled wanly and sniffed back the rest of her tears.

  “I’m sorry,” he told her, not sure why he was apologising.

  “It’s not your fault, my love,” Leila sighed.

  “You know, I don’t think I ever really lamented the fact that I was common-born until tonight, when I realised how far out of my reach you really are.”

  “I’m here in your arms, aren’t I?” she whispered, kissing him again.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “In secret. In the dark—”

  “Shh!” she told him softly, placing her finger on his lips. “Don’t think like that. It wouldn’t matter if you were a Warlord in your own right, Starros, you know that. My father wants to be the father-in-law of the next High Prince.”

  “He’s the brother-in-law of the current one,” Starros pointed out sourly. “And uncle to the next.

  That would make most men happy.”

  “But he’s only Regent of Krakandar, my love, not her Warlord. He wants Damin to be High Prince, because it means he will have to surrender Krakandar Province, and who better to be Krakandar’s new Warlord than the man who has ruled her so diligently as her regent all these years?”

  “He can do that without you becoming Damin’s wife, Leila.”

  She shook her head. Leila might not agree with her father, but she understood his motives well enough. “He can’t be certain of it, though. If Damin married a woman with a suitable male relative, a man younger than my father, he might be tempted to appoint him Krakandar’s Warlord when he becomes High Prince. It may even be a condition of the marriage agreement. My father will not risk that happening.”

  Starros kissed her again, to stop her reminding him of all the reasons they would never have more than this—nights of sneaking through the slaveways to each other’s room, stolen kisses in a secluded garden nook, a few brief moments of happiness in the dead of night when the palace slept.

  They had been meeting like this for more than a year now and Starros couldn’t help feeling that Damin’s arrival meant, one way or another, things would be brought to a head. The feeling that his time with Leila was a finite and fragile thing was so strong it was almost a premonition.

  “I wish I could have done something for you tonight,” he told her, holding her close. “Your father was being so obvious. It must have been awful.”

  She smiled and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Actually, I think for the first time in my life, I felt a genuine rush of affection for that dreadful cousin of mine. I’ve never seen anybody handle my father the way he did.”

  “Damin’s not dreadful,” he objected. “He can be a bit flippant, at times, I suppose, but—”

  “Of course he’s not dreadful to you,” she interrupted, with a smile. “You’re a man. You look up to him. He’s rich, he’s handsome, he’s athletic . . . he’s everything other men want to be. But he used to terrify me when we were children. All of them did, a little. Damin was always so damned sure of himself and everyone but you used to fall victim to his charm. Even Kalan used to make me feel small, and she was a year younger than me.”

  Starros sat down beside her and pulled her into his arms. “You make it sound like we tormented you deliberately.”

  “It was torment,” she agreed, laying her head on his shoulder. “But I know it wasn’t deliberate.

  All the others just seemed to have so much more purpose in life than I did. I’m the ultimate useless accessory, Starros, groomed from birth to marry a man I don’t want and who doesn’t want me.” She looked up at him with that sad little smile that always worried him. It had a haunting look of utter finality to it, as if it was the last smile he was ever going to see from her. “I was never really one of them.

  Neither were you.”

  “Nobody ever treated me differently because I was the fosterling.”

  “Not then, perhaps. It’s a different story now we’re grown. Damin’s your best friend, but look at my father’s reaction today when you rode at his right hand. We’re both doomed to be forever clouded by Damin’s shadow, I fear.”

  “I don’t think you’re being fair to him or me,” Starros told her, wishing they could talk of something else. Even in Starros, there lurked the uncomfortable possibility that Princess Marla might just decide some day that Leilatruly was the only safe consort for her son. He loved Damin like a brother, but the thought of him and Leila . . . well, it just didn’t bear thinking about.

  “I’m making you uncomfortable with all this talk of Damin, aren’t I?”

  He smiled and nuzzled her ear, slipping the thin straps of her nightdress off her shoulders. The silk whispered over her pale skin as it fell to reveal her small, perfect breasts in the candlelight. “I could think of a few more useful ways to spend what little time we have together,” he said, bending to kiss them, “than talking about Damin bloody Wolfblade.”

  Leila threw her head back and moaned with pleasure, a sound that suddenly changed to a scream of terror as she froze in his arms.

  Starros jumped to his feet and spun around, his heart in his mouth as Leila scrambled to cover herself, thankful they were in the servants’ wing and not the main palace where her scream would have brought the guards running.

  Behind them, his arms crossed, casually leaning against the doorframe leading to the dressing room, was Damin.

  “Damin bloody Wolfblade, eh?” the young prince said. “Nice one, Starros.”

  “Oh gods, no . . . Damin, please . . .,” Leila sobbed, reaching for Starros’s hand. “Please . . .

  please don’t . . .”

  “Damin . . . I can explain . . .,” Starros began anxiously.

  The prince pushed off the doorframe and crossed the room, stopping at the foot of the bed. He studied them for a moment, his expression unfathomable in the candlelight. He must have come through the slaveways, the same way Leila had. They used them so frequently as children, it probably never even occurred to Damin to knock. Starros had no idea what Damin was thinking. Or what he was planning to do.

  “Damin?”

  Suddenly, the young man’s face split into a wide grin. “Mahkas would have an apoplectic fit if he knew about this.”

  “That’s kind of why we haven’t told anyone,” Starros said, putting his arm around Leila protectively.

  “Are you going to tell my father?” Leila asked warily as she leaned into him, still clutching her nightdress across her breasts to cover herself.

  “Dear gods, no!” Damin laughed, sitting himself down
cross-legged on the end of the bed.

  “What you two get up to after dark is none of my concern. Mind you, if you really were my fiancé, Leila, I’d probably have to kill Starros with a rusty spade or something for laying a hand on you, but as we both know there’s more chance of a demon child showing up tomorrow than you and I ever getting married, we don’t really have to worry about it, do we?”

  Starros felt Leila relax against him at the news.

  “I am curious about one thing, though,” the prince added.

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you often use my name as a curse?”

  Starros shook his head, smiling with relief. “You didn’t hear all of it, Damin.”

  “Actually, I probably heard far more than you intended.” He turned to his cousin and looked at her curiously. “Were we really so awful to you when we were children, Leila?”

  “Damin, I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”

  “Even so, I probably owe you an apology. I must have been a real little prick at times. I didn’t mean to be.”

  “Who are you?” Starros asked, as Leila sniffed back her tears through a wan smile. “And what have you done with the real Damin?”

  He grinned at them. “Can’t I have the odd moment of compassion for my poor cousin and my old friend? Doomed to be clouded forever by my shadow, as they are?”

  “You should stop now, Damin,” Leila advised. “You’re about to ruin a beautiful apology by turning into a little prick again.”

  “Then I’ll change the subject,” the prince offered. His smile faded a little and he turned to Starros, confirming his friend’s earlier suspicion that Damin was much more of a political creature than anybody realised. “I assume when you told me today that you’d fill me in at a better time, this juicy little secret was at the top of the list?”

  “Actually, I asked Starros not to say anything to you, Damin.”

  “Why not?”

  “I haven’t seen you for four years. I didn’t know if you could be trusted.”