Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4)

by McPhail, Melissa

  He blew out his breath. “And Dareios and I will continue working on this task you’ve given us meanwhile.”

  She took his hand and squeezed it with gratitude in her gaze. “Thank you, Sebastian.” She kissed his cheek and murmured, “Thank Dareios for me also…”

  *—*

  Sebastian roused to dawn’s lambent kiss upon the world…and Ehsan, stirring a curl in his hair with her finger. He rolled onto his back to better enjoy her beauty in the soft morning light—in any light, actually. Or no light. Ehsan was light enough in his heart.

  She had her head propped in her hand while her lush, dark hair hugged her bare form. Her repose was as perfectly poised to elicit his desire as if an artist had positioned her for painting.

  Sebastian let his eyes wander from the tattoo of the Khoda Panaheh on her forehead—sacred declaration that she’d worked the Pattern of Life—along her lovely nose, straight and slightly rounded, to her lips, full and soft, then lifted to her large blue eyes and dark eyebrows, perfectly formed with a hint of irreverence in their aspect.

  Ehsan arched one of them in that moment. “Well…what did she say?”

  “She said…” but he paused the automatic answer on his tongue and shifted his head slightly. “How did you know I was in Dreamscape with Isabel?”

  She twined his hair tighter around her finger, taut, like the cords of his heart. “Whenever you converse with the Lady Isabel, your sleeping lips assume a particular shape.” Her gaze conveyed affection, but also challenge, her silent way of saying she was his…but only so long as she willed it.

  “What kind of shape?”

  Ehsan’s blue eyes gleamed with secretive amusement. “A peaceful one, Prince of Dannym.”

  A peaceful one. He supposed that was fair. He always slept better when Ehsan slept beside him—that is, in those times they were actually sleeping—but there were still just as many nights when he woke in a cold sweat, dreaming he was back in Tambarré, bound beneath goracrosta and Dore Madden’s malice.

  His thoughts must’ve bled into his expression, for she leaned and kissed him beneath a curtain of soft hair. Against his lips, she murmured, “Some wounds take longer to heal.”

  Sebastian swept her hair back to better admire the heart-shaped curve of her jaw. “I told Isabel about the matrix. She was grateful, and pleased.”

  “Rightfully so. You and my brother have proven yourselves many times over with this achievement. Any news of Ean?”

  Sebastian exhaled a sigh. “He still hasn’t contacted her.” They had no new word of him either—nothing since he’d left for Tambarré.

  Ehsan tightened her finger within the curl of his hair, a tiny torment, shades of the desirous ones she compelled out of him during their nights together. She eyed him amusedly. “I’m not sure how I feel about your entertaining another woman in your dreams.”

  “Princess,” he grabbed her around the waist and pulled her atop him, “my dreams belong only to you.”

  Much later, after they’d pleasured each other, fed each other and bathed together, Sebastian stood naked before a standing mirror, frowning at his reflection.

  Ehsan had been using her Healer’s gifts to repair his damaged leg, encouraging the bone to straighten by meticulously mending the frayed threads of his life pattern. Beneath the corded muscle of his thigh, the bone still seemed slightly askew, but his leg no longer pained him, and he was walking now without a limp. He supposed, in the end, it hardly mattered what the leg looked like so long as it worked properly.

  Ehsan came up behind him, dressed in a jeweled sari the same shade of royal blue as her eyes. She wrapped her arms around his chest and trailed kisses along his neck. Sebastian watched her reflection in the mirror.

  Her lips reached his jaw and the thin white line traced there, all that was left of the scar that had once marred his face. She smiled at his reflection. “It is become hardly visible since our last Healing.”

  Sebastian’s eyes tightened. “It’s the first thing I see.”

  “Yet you grow no beard to hide it.” Her eyebrow challenged him as much as her tone.

  Sebastian frowned at her reflection.

  Ehsan laughed at him with her eyes. “I know the scar means something to you—I see that in your responses. But what can the past mean that the future cannot overwrite?”

  Sebastian exhaled a slow breath and considered her point. He knew why he didn’t hide the scar he so hated. Because doing so would be to admit it had defeated him—it and all it stood for, the horrors he’d endured in N’ghorra, Dore Madden’s torments… everything that had happened to him since Viernan hal’Jaitar sent Raliax of Saldaria to kill him.

  Ehsan pressed her cheek against his. “The first thing you see, Prince of Dannym, is any perceived failing in yourself.” Her blue eyes chided him more gently than her tone. “Yet in truth, this imperfection only adds to your perfection.”

  His brows assumed a dubious shape. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to explain that one, Princess.”

  She held his reflected gaze with her very blue eyes. “Only a man who has endured hardship can know true compassion. What you endured as Işak’getirmek may have changed you, but not necessarily for the worse. Ostracism breeds humility, and out of loss blossoms tolerance. All men are born bold, but they cannot know courage until they’ve learned fear. In his failings, a man becomes more ideal.”

  He took her hand and pressed a kiss to her palm. “Who is this man you keep going on about? I worry I should count him a rival.”

  She laughed as he turned to face her. “He’s the one you would see if you but listened less attentively to Doubt’s ill mutterings.”

  Sebastian slipped his arms around her. “Very well, Princess, I shall endeavor to make you proud. How else am I to win your hand?”

  “A decidedly relevant question you should be asking yourself daily.” She cupped his face and kissed his mouth, trailing her fingers along his chin as she withdrew.

  Sebastian admired her hips as she walked away.

  Ehsan paused in the portal and glanced back at him, her gaze full of promise—the sort of gaze that implied they had only just begun exploring the delights of their courtship. She nodded with the hint of a smile. “Prince Sebastian.”

  “Princess Ehsan.”

  Then she glided from the room.

  Dareios was already at work in his laboratory when Sebastian arrived. The rising sun had cleared the Dhahari range and was now a too-bright ball in direct line of sight of Dareios’s lab. The Kandori prince was shading his eyes with one hand when Sebastian entered.

  “Ah, Sebastian, sobh bekheir.” Good morning. “What excellent timing you have. Come, stand there,” and he pointed to a position across his workbench.

  Sebastian dutifully planted himself in the indicated spot between Dareios and the sun, whereupon his host returned to etching a small leather scabbard he’d been holding. “What news from Isabel?”

  Sebastian pushed hands in his pockets while the sun warmed his back. “She’s happy with our progress.”

  “And Ean?”

  “She hasn’t heard from him either.” He eyed Dareios humorously, wondering, as he had many times, if their discussions served more formality than function. Surely the truthreader had gleaned all of this already from his thoughts.

  Dareios’s lips hinted at a smile. “If one presumes to know all, Sebastian, it severely limits the opportunity for conversation. Ah!” He held up the scabbard with a look of triumph. “Let’s see how we’ve done. Hold this, if you will.” He handed Sebastian the sheath. Then he picked up a Merdanti dagger and threw it through the open balcony doors. It soared across the terrace and vanished beyond the railing.

  “I really hope no one was standing in the courtyard,” said a voice from the doorway.

  Sebastian turned to see Dareios’s cousin, Bahman, leaning against the door frame. Dark-haired and caramel-skinned, with the Khoda Panaheh marking his forehead, Bahman often seemed a leaner, less bejeweled ref
lection of Dareios, save that his large brown eyes ever harbored an irreverent gleam. This morning he also wore an insouciant smile.

  “Prudent as ever, Bahman. Would that you’d been here but twenty seconds earlier to offer your wisdom.” Dareios held a hand towards the leather scabbard Sebastian was holding. “But, as you see, your cautions were ultimately unfounded.”

  Sebastian looked back to the scabbard to see the Merdanti dagger that Dareios had just thrown suddenly sheathed there.

  “It worked.” Bahman sounded mildly surprised.

  Dareios shot Bahman an amused smile as he retrieved the dagger and scabbard from Sebastian. “I basked in your confidence as I was preparing the pattern, Bahman.”

  “It shouldn’t have worked.” Bahman sauntered into the workshop with hands in his pockets. “There’s no precedent for electromagnetic induction in a bonded pair.”

  “That is precisely why our efforts are called experimentation, Bahman.”

  “What’s a bonded pair?” Sebastian asked.

  “The items are bonded much the way Adepts are,” Dareios replied, “with a strand of elae pinning them together. Which strands of elae are used determines the type of symbiosis the two items share. In the case of this dagger, the bond engenders second-strand magnetic connectivity with its sheath.”

  Dareios pulled the dagger from its sheath and eyed it circumspectly. “What isn’t clear is why the induction on this one only works when the dagger is unimpeded. Lodge it into wood, like so…” he flung the dagger into a chair leg, which caused the chair to scrape loudly across the stone floor, and the wildcat Babar, who was sitting on it, to flatten one ear and hiss at him, “and voilà…”

  The dagger remained pinned in the wood.

  Dareios sighed. “Do you see, Bahman?”

  “The laws of physics in action. A miraculous proof, cousin.” Bahman wandered over and yanked the dagger out of the chair, eliciting another affronted hiss from Babar. He shooed her off and sat down in her stead, which did not improve his favor in her eyes.

  Bahman twirled the dagger through practiced fingers while the wildcat observed him indignantly from the floor, her ears flattened and tail twitching with a decidedly vindictive rhythm.

  “It must have something to do with motive force.” Bahman crossed a sandaled foot over one knee and balanced the dagger on the back of his hand. Unlike his cousin, who never left his rooms without enough jewels on ears, fingers and clothing to furnish a small kingdom, Bahman wore an embroidered blue kurta and shalwar, their only jewels his flashing smile. “Second-strand induction technically can’t override inertial velocity.”

  Dareios leaned both hands on the worktable and frowned at him. “Somehow a bonded pair overcomes this.”

  Sebastian thought he had the gist of what they were talking about. “If there’s already a pattern to produce a bonded pair, and with that pattern the dagger returns to its sheath in every situation, why not simply use that pattern?”

  “Because it already exists as its own proof, Sebastian.” Dareios shifted his gaze to him. “The focus of our scientific inquiry is in reproducing the effect to understand why the bonding pattern works.”

  Bahman was spinning the dagger around his hand and balancing it each time on the back of his fingers. “I can run a few velocity tests.”

  “That would be a start.”

  Bahman flipped the dagger, caught it as he stood, and pointed it at Dareios as he started out of the room. “And the arrows are ready.”

  The truthreader flashed a smile and looked meaningfully to Sebastian. “How’s your arm for archery, Prince of Dannym?”

  The three princes, Sebastian, Dareios and Bahman, were trying to find a way to cast their matrix broadly across many eidola at once—that is, for someone other than Ean to do so, and assuming, of course, that the matrix had the intended effect of disrupting the eidola’s connection with their master. All those things being equal, this problem still wasn’t enough to fully occupy Dareios’s industrious mind. He was generally pursuing at least a dozen different projects simultaneously. In this spirit, the late morning saw Sebastian on a practice field testing another of the Kandori prince’s hypotheses.

  Bahman, a skilled metallurgist and bladesmith, had layered patterns into hundreds of arrows, each pattern slightly varied from the next, to find the most effective patterns for penetrating eidola flesh. Since they didn’t have any eidola for target practice, Bahman had set up targets of Merdanti stone in one of the Moon Palace’s archery yards.

  Sebastian hadn’t practiced archery since leaving Dannym, but he found his rhythm again easily enough. After firing off a score of arrows, his arm was warming and he was hitting the bull’s-eye each time—that is, when the various patterns on the arrows enabled them to penetrate the enchanted stone.

  As when Sebastian was occupied with any display of skill, Dareios’s sisters collected like colorful birds in the shaded arcades to watch him. Although he more perceived than heard their whispers, he definitely heard their light laughter—or at least Ehsan’s, whose voice more than once distracted him enough to make him miss his mark.

  After his third such miss, Sebastian dropped a smile to his feet, drew his next arrow, fixed his gaze on the bull’s-eye and shut out all perception except the tension in the bow, the position of his nocked arrow, and his sight along the shaft. He envisioned the arrow’s spinning flight all the way into the stone, where several earlier arrows were crowded in the center, their fletching like the tail-feathers of a hawk, and he recalled another time he’d sighted down an arrow towards a target…

  *—*

  The blue-fletched arrow thocked into the center of the target beside the dozen Sebastian had already lodged there. He reached for another from the quiver at his thigh and nocked a new arrow to his bow.

  The Calgaryn air held autumn’s crisp bite, but the sun was yet high in the west and the sky clear. It was one of those glorious days destined to become fond recollection after the grey skies of winter set in.

  Sebastian had the yard to himself that day because the bulk of his father’s men were down at the harbor receiving a ship of Avataren dignitaries. Solitude of any kind was rare in his father’s castle—most of the time it had to be hunted out and hoarded like mice stockpiling corn kernels in the walls—and it rarely lasted long enough.

  As case in point, as Sebastian strode to retrieve his arrows from the target, rapid footsteps caught his ear. He glanced over to see their languages tutor heading his way along one of the yard’s bordering arcades. The tutor still wore the flared, knee-length coats of his Agasi homeland despite living in Dannym for nearly fifteen years.

  Reaching Sebastian, he bobbed a bow. “Good afternoon, Prince Sebastian.”

  “Master di Falco.” Sebastian pulled the last of his arrows out of the bulls-eye. “Have I confused the days for our lesson?”

  “No, no.” The tutor dropped his gaze to his boots. “No, I was wondering if you’d seen your brother…” he glanced up with a pained expression, “or if you knew perhaps where he might’ve gone?”

  Sebastian returned his arrows to their quiver and headed back to the firing line. “That very much depends on which brother we’re discussing.”

  “It’s Prince Trell, Your Highness. He’s…missing.” The tutor muttered something in his native Caladrian—one of the few languages he hadn’t been teaching the princes of Dannym. Sebastian suspected this was so the man could swear at them unrestrainedly when they pushed his patience beyond its limits, which Sebastian admitted was probably often, especially with Ean. But what nine-year-old wanted to be conjugating verbs in five languages when the sunshine was calling?

  Yet their tutor was asking him about Trell, who actually excelled at languages.

  “I haven’t seen him.” Sebastian eyed the tutor inquiringly. “Did something happen?”

  The Agasi gave a pained wince. “Ah…it is my fault.” He pushed his thumb across his opposite palm as if trying to press ink out of his flesh. “We’v
e been working on a greeting for the Avataren delegation that will be arriving shortly. Prince Trell presented it to His Majesty about an hour ago. The presentation went…poorly.”

  “That hardly sounds like Trell.”

  “It’s my fault. I never should’ve let him attempt one of the High Court Orations.”

  Sebastian arched brows. “He actually asked to present an Avataren Oration? You used to make me memorize those damnable speeches to punish me.”

  The tutor frowned at him. “Learning is never punishment, my prince, but I take your meaning.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Prince Trell accidentally substituted the gesture of loyalty for the Sign of Denial and then lost the meter of the speech, resulting in many flubs. Then he mistook His Majesty’s gesticulation—” The tutor pressed clasped fingers to his lips and shook his head.

  Sebastian was starting to get an idea of how things must’ve devolved from there. “Father was angry?”

  “Oh, he had every right to be. If Prince Trell had presented before the Avataren delegation, they would’ve taken grave insult. His Majesty’s anger was rightly directed at me,” he exhaled a slow breath, “but you know your brother. He took His Majesty’s censure as his personal failure. The moment the king dismissed us, Prince Trell bolted away beneath a black dispirit, and I haven’t been able to find him since.”

  Sebastian considered the tutor quietly. “I think I have an idea where he might’ve gone. I’ll try to talk to him.”

  “Thank you, my prince. Please help him understand this was my failure, not his.”

  Sebastian aimed him a half-smile. “I doubt Trell will accept that, but I’ll see what I can do.”

  Half a turn of an hourglass later, Sebastian climbed out a window and inched his way around the side of a tower with bare toes and fingertips clinging to parallel strips of stone barely wide enough for a raven’s perch.

  That was the easy part.