“I wish we had the time to do his memory justice,” Damin told his stepbrother sympathetically.
“But there are other things that demand our attention and, in the end, we’re probably better off doing what we can for the living rather than the dead.”
Adham nodded silently in agreement. Kalan reached across and took his hand comfortingly, but said nothing.
“To that end,” Damin said, turning his attention to the two sorcerers, “I need you two to do whatever you must to save Starros. Even if that means selling his soul to whatever god is willing to come to his aid.”
Wrayan and Rorin exchanged a worried glance, but it was Kalan who answered him. “Damin, you can’t make that sort of decision for Starros without—”
“I can and I have, Kalan,” Damin announced. “I’ll take responsibility for it.”
Wrayan shook his head. “Damin, I think you should consider—”
He turned on the thief impatiently. “You told me your only choice was to sell his soul or let him die, Wrayan. If you’re not willing to do the latter, then speak to the gods and get it over with. There’s a war coming. I can’t afford to have the only two real sorcerers in Hythria tied up tending the former assistant chief steward of Krakandar Palace, even if he is my best friend.”
“What war?” Tejay asked suspiciously.
“We think Hablet is taking advantage of the borders being closed to gather his troops for an invasion,” Adham informed the Warlord’s wife, before Damin had a chance to explain. His voice was dull and emotionless, but it was clear he wasn’t incapacitated by his grief.
“You didn’t get that intelligence from Sunrise Province, did you?” she asked.
“Mostly it came from the Fardohnyans,” Adham agreed, looking a little puzzled. “Why do you ask?”
“Terin wouldn’t know if his arse was on fire unless somebody was there to point it out to him,”
she remarked sourly, confirming Damin’s suspicions that all was not well in the Lionsclaw household.
Tejay looked up at the young prince with a frown. “That’s where you’re going, isn’t it? To Sunrise?”
Damin nodded. “With as many Krakandar troops as I can muster. I plan to swing past Byamor on the way and collect Narvell and all the Elasapine troops Charel Hawksword can spare us, too.”
“Then I’m coming with you,” Tejay announced.
“Is that really a good idea, Tejay?” Luciena asked with concern. “If we really are facing a war—”
“It’s a war that, more than likely, will be fought in my province,” Tejay pointed out. “There’s no way I’m going to let Terin deal with this on his own. Assuming he’s capable of dealing with it in the first place.”
Damin studied her with concern. “We’re going to have to have a little chat about your husband fairly soon, aren’t we?”
She nodded, looking resigned. “Yes, Damin, I think we are.”
“What about your children?” Luciena asked.
“They can stay here. Krakandar’s by far the safest place in Hythria, at the moment. Bylinda may even welcome the distraction.”
“Even if Aunt Bylinda’s not up to it, you’ll be here to keep an eye on them, Luciena,” Damin told his adopted sister. “There’s still too much plague about for you and Xanda to risk heading back to Greenharbour with your own children, and I want Xanda here to keep an eye on things while I’m gone.”
His cousin looked at him doubtfully. “What exactly am I supposed to be keeping an eye on?”
“A month or so from now, Mahkas is probably going to get some news from the High Prince that will drastically affect the length of his tenure as regent here. I have a feeling he’s not going to take it very well. I want someone in the palace I can trust—and someone who can take charge if need be—so that when we’re through dealing with Hablet, I still have a province to come back to.”
Xanda glanced at Luciena to see if she had any objections before he nodded his agreement.
“We’ve been away from Greenharbour for so long now, a bit longer isn’t going to make that much difference. We’ll stay.”
“Thank you,” Damin said, greatly relieved his cousin hadn’t balked at the suggestion. He turned to Adham with a questioning look. “What about you?”
“Rodja will have everything under control in Greenharbour. I’ll tag along with you, if you don’t mind.”
Damin spared him a thin smile. “Just the answer I expected from a man corrupted by Almodavar into following the God of War.”
“What did you want me and Rorin to do?” Kalan asked.
“I’m sending Wrayan back to Greenharbour. I want you and Rorin to go with him. Mother will need your help, and if ever there was a need to have a couple of insiders in the Sorcerers’ Collective, it’s going to be in the next few months as we prepare for war.”
“No,” Kalan said flatly.
Damin stared at her in surprise. “What?”
“I’ll go back to Greenharbour with Wrayan, but Rorin is going to Sunrise Province with you.”
“Why?” Damin and Rorin both asked at the same time.
“Because you’re Hythria’s heir, Damin, and we can’t afford to lose you in battle. Rorin is the only magical healer in the world that we know of. The most useful place for him in any battle you’re involved in is at your side.”
“She’s actually got a very good point,” Wrayan agreed.
Damin hadn’t thought about the advantage of having a sorcerer at his side in battle. The idea had a lot to recommend it. He glanced at Rorin, who shrugged. “I’m fine with it if you are.”
“Then I guess you’re coming to Sunrise with us, Rorin,” Damin said.
“When do we leave?” Adham asked.
“Tomorrow morning,” he informed them. “At first light. As soon as we’re finished here, I’m going down to the barracks to talk to Almodavar. I plan to leave for Elasapine with all the Krakandar troops we can spare now, which should be about twenty-six centuries, and have Raek Harlen follow with the rest of them in a couple of weeks.”
“Aren’t you going to wait for Leila’s funeral?” Kalan asked.
Damin shook his head. “If I wait, Kalan, I may run into Mahkas.”
“I think, given the circumstances, Damin,” Xanda suggested carefully, “you may find him willing to forgive you.”
“I’m not really interested in whether our uncle forgives me or not, Xanda,” Damin replied coldly.
“My concern is one of timing.”
“I don’t understand,” Kalan admitted with a frown.
“It’s quite simple, Kal. The next time I see Mahkas, I will kill him, and as I said earlier, it doesn’t suit me for him to die just yet, so it’s better for everyone if I just get out of his way until it does.”
His words left them speechless. Damin glanced around the room at his family and his most trusted friends—these people who thought they knew him so well—and was disturbed to realise they were looking at him like he was a complete stranger.
To hell with it, he thought. They were going to find out who I really am sooner or later.
Besides, it was Elezaar’s final Rule of Gaining and Wielding Power.
Eventually, every true prince must step forward and take command.
And he should expect his people to follow him.
Epilogue
Marla Wolfblade had buried four husbands, but it had never occurred to her that she might one day be forced to carry on without Elezaar at her side. Watching them lower him into the child-sized grave, she felt the wrench of his death even more keenly than when he’d died in her arms. Losing Elezaar meant losing a part of herself. He had been by her side for so long, she felt incomplete without him. And afraid. Afraid of what the future might hold.
Afraid of what she had become.
It was still hard for Marla to accept that Elezaar had taken his own life. That his death was accompanied by unconscionable betrayal was almost beyond her comprehension. Nevertheless, even when she
forced herself to confront the cruel reality of his final deed, somehow Marla couldn’t find it in herself to hate him for it.
Because I am responsible for Elezaar’s death, she acknowledged silently, as surely as if I’d handed him a vial of poison and ordered him to drink it.
It devastated Marla to realise Elezaar had killed himself rather than confront her fury and, along with her unbearable grief, it made her confront the truth about who she really was. Marla knew she’d hardened her heart over the years. She’d had to, simply to survive. She effectively ruled Hythria and nobody did that by showering hugs and kisses on the Warlords. Marla had no choice but to grow hard and unsentimental. It was toughen up or die. But when did I become so heartless? she wondered. Was it the night I arranged to have Nash killed?
Was that the beginning or the end of my journey into the abyss?
Am I now so terrible? she asked herself. So cold? So ruthless that Elezaar would willingly taken his own life rather than face my wrath?
As the slaves settled Elezaar’s small, twisted body in the temporary grave Rodja had ordered dug in the small garden of her townhouse, Marla remembered the first time Luciena had accused her of being ruthless. It had come as a shock to her then to learn that people thought of her that way. It was devastating to realise even those closest to her obviously believed the same about her. Do my children fear me as Elezaar must have? Do they quail at the mention of my name? Does the whole of Hythria tremble when I speak?
Does the world fear me now, the way I once feared it? Am I the despot I so desperately tried to prevent my sons from becoming?
And how did it happen? Marla asked herself, trying to pinpoint the exact moment in time when her concern for her family had turned into a callous disregard for anyone else. At what point did I let my fear take over and turn me into this terrifying, hard-shelled monster?
No closer to an answer than she had been when she first asked herself the same question as she sobbed over Elezaar’s dying body in her arms, Marla watched, dry-eyed and rigid with self-control, as they buried the dwarf next to Ruxton Tirstone. A light rain fell, warm and sticky as blood, but she barely noticed. As the slaves covered over his small linen-wrapped body with the freshly turned earth, the princess sank down onto the wrought-iron garden seat. Only Marla and her stepson, Rodja Tirstone, had attended the burial. Nobody else understood the significance of Elezaar’s death, and even Rodja, perhaps, didn’t fully comprehend her loss. Or her part in it.
And even if anybody did understand what his loss means to me, who is left in Greenharbour to grieve for the Fool?
The family was spread across Hythria. She’d had no word from Krakandar since sending Damin the letter containing the note to Mahkas her son had requested regarding his uncle’s futile hopes for a betrothal. There had been a message from Adham, though. Unaware of his father’s death, he had sent a letter through one of Ruxton’s agents in Medalon, advising him of his success in finding somewhere to store their precious cargo of spices and containing the news that Xanda and Luciena were headed for Bordertown and that he intended to meet up with them there and then head home via Krakandar. Rodja came by to tell her about the letter the same day Elezaar returned home. He was the one who had found her with the dwarf, holding his long-dead body to her breast, tears streaming down her face, rocking him back and forth, unaware of how long she had been there, holding him, cursing him, begging him not to abandon her . . .
Fortunately, Rodja had inherited much of his father’s common sense, along with his genial temperament. He’d taken care of everything for Marla. He’d arranged for the court’esa to be laid out in the main hall—a signal honour for a slave—arranged for candles to be lit around the house and the gardens to guide his soul to the underworld, organised for the grave to be dug and then stood with her while they sent him on his way.
“Will you be all right, your highness?”
Marla forced down her self-doubt, her guilt, even a little of her grief, before she looked up at him from the garden seat and frowned. “I’ve been your stepmother since you were eleven years old, Rodja. How is it you never call me Mother?”
“I never realised you wanted me to.”
“I’m not sure I ever did,” she replied, thinking this was just another symptom of the woman she had become. The Tirstone children respected her, but they had never warmed to her the way her own children had warmed to Ruxton. “And I’m quite certain I don’t deserve the moniker. If anyone mothered my children, and Ruxton’s, it’s Bylinda Damaran. All of you should probably call her by that name.” She smiled wanly, hoping Rodja just thought her in a reflective mood, not tearing herself apart with guilt and self-recrimination. “It’s just . . . you’ve been such a great help since your father died . . . ‘your highness’
seems far too impersonal.”
“What do you want me to call you?”
She thought about it for a moment. “I think, given the nature of our relationship, I wouldn’t be offended if you addressed me by name.”
“As you wish,” he said, and then added awkwardly, “Marla.”
“It’ll get easier with practice, I’m sure.”
“You’re not going to stay out here in the rain, are you?”
Marla looked up, a little surprised to realise it was still spitting. “I suppose I shouldn’t waste time sitting here doing nothing. I have a lot to do. And you have a wife about to give birth any moment. I shouldn’t keep you any longer, Rodja. But I do appreciate you being here. Elezaar would have appreciated it, too.”
“Elezaar meant a lot to all of us, Marla.” He didn’t seem to have nearly as much difficulty using her name this time. “The others will be devastated when they learn he’s gone.”
“I should write to them about it. Along with everything else on my desk that I must deal with today.”
“Hythria won’t fall apart if you take the day off, you know.”
“I’d not be too certain of that.” She fell silent for a moment. Was her grand notion that Hythria would fall apart if she relaxed her guard for a day simply another symptom of her ruthless megalomania?
Stop it, she scolded herself impatiently. You’re going to drive yourself insane if you keep thinking like that!
She looked up at Rodja, squaring her shoulders a little, as if that small act would drive away her doubts. “Should I tell the others the truth about how he died?”
“As I’ve no more idea of the truth than anyone else, I couldn’t really say.”
Marla wasn’t so far gone in her grief that she missed his censure. “Elezaar poisoned himself, Rodja, because he feared me. That’s the truth you seek.”
The rain suddenly forgotten, Rodja sank down beside Marla on the garden seat, shocked to the core by her revelation. “He killed himself? I don’t understand. Why would Elezaar take his own life? Why did he fear you?”
“He feared my anger, because he betrayed me to Alija.”
Rodja shook his head in disbelief. “No. I don’t believe it.”
“You’d better get used to the idea. Things are going to change around here, now that Alija knows all our innermost secrets.”
“You must be mistaken . . .”
“If only I was,” she sighed.
He studied her warily for a moment. “You appear to be taking this news remarkably well,” he said, clearly concerned that she was sitting serenely in the rain, not pacing up and down, or throwing things, or ranting with fury at Elezaar’s treachery.
“I think that’s because, oddly enough, in his own way, Elezaar has done me a favour.”
“By betraying us? That’s a kinder way of putting it than I’m thinking, right now.”
“He’s finally forced my hand, Rodja. There’ll be no more dancing around with Alija. No more pretending. No more hiding. No more suffering her smug superiority or acting like a simpering fool, thanking her for her advice, calling her a friend.”
“I can see how that might appeal to you, Marla, but with everything going on . . .
the plague . . .
Gods! Could he have picked a worse time to do this?”
“There was never going to be a good time.”
“I still don’t get it,” Rodja said, shaking his head. “Why? Why would he betray you? Or any of us, for that matter?”
“Elezaar betrayed us to save his brother.”
“I didn’t know he had a brother. Still, it’s no excuse.”
“You think not?” she asked with a slightly raised brow. “What would you do to save Adham from being tortured before your very eyes?”
“That’s different.”
“How so?”
“Well, for one thing, Adham’s not—”
“A slave?”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I know,” she assured him, patting his arm. “And I know what Elezaar did seems unforgivable.
But when I think of some of the things I’ve done these past twenty years that are just as questionable, simply to save my brother from the consequences of his own foolishness, I find it hard to condemn Elezaar for the same crime. And that’s the tragedy of Elezaar’s death, Rodja. I never got the opportunity to tell him that. He was so certain I would turn him out once I learned of his treachery, he killed himself without giving me a chance to prove him wrong.”
Rodja fell silent. As his father’s right-hand man these past few years, her stepson was more familiar than most with some of the things she’d done. He’d even aided her on occasion, when she required the resources of his father’s intelligence network and Ruxton was unavailable.
“Do you fear me too, Rodja?” she asked, when he offered no reply.
“A little bit,” he admitted.
“It’s a very lonely feeling, knowing you’re feared.”
“You’re not alone, Marla.”
Warrior Page 63
