Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4)

by McPhail, Melissa

  She saw understanding in his grim expression. “My brother loved Arion too much, and in that love refused to warn him of his path. I loved him too much, and in my warning doomed him to walk an immutable one. Arion died for his part in these mistakes. I must live with mine. I cannot yet decide which of us is paying the heavier cost.”

  Sebastian drew her into his arms. “Isabel…I’m sorry.”

  “These are old wounds.” Her eyes as she withdrew found a shadow of humor. “But you must be a glutton for punishment, receiving me as often as you do, knowing the darkness of my dreams.”

  He touched her arm. “You’re my brother’s wife. I would weather any storm with you for as long as I must to keep you safe.”

  One corner of her mouth curled with a smile. “I can take care of myself, Sebastian, but I appreciate the chivalry in your offer. To that end,” a different light manifested in her weary gaze, “an emissary of mine will be visiting you soon to retrieve something I left in your care—”

  *—*

  A pounding on his door roused Sebastian from Dreamscape with a startled inhale. He sat up in bed, still hearing Isabel’s last words.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  “All right, I’m coming.” Sebastian threw off his covers and staggered through the darkness to the door, only to fumble to find the latch.

  Whereupon the impatient door became amorphous, and a shadow stepped through the wood.

  Sebastian drew stiffly back.

  Every lamp and candle blazed to brilliant life, illuminating a countenance he’d seen only once from afar, and even then too close for comfort; a face that had haunted his steps—never mind his dreams—for weeks thereafter.

  “Rhakar,” Sebastian choked out.

  Rhakar arched a brow. “Prince Sebastian.” He moved past him into his chambers without further invitation. “The Lady Isabel requests her staff be returned to her.”

  Sebastian pushed both hands through his hair, trying to get a grip on the startled apprehension that was making his insides squirm like gelatinous goo. Perhaps, as Isabel had claimed, Rhakar held no grudge against him for releasing the Labyrinth on him during their first meeting in the Kutsamak, but Sebastian’s guilty conscience wasn’t so sure. It made a strong case for his departing the room instantly and without explanation.

  Rhakar finished looking around and turned his yellow-eyed gaze on Sebastian.

  Sebastian stared at him.

  “Her staff, Prince of Dannym?”

  “Oh…right.” Sebastian grabbed a robe and motioned towards the door. “Its, um, this way.”

  He led Rhakar through the moonlit halls of the Moon Palace, his every step dragging the memory of an earlier life, an echo of the days when the drachwyr had dogged his trail, following him from node to node after their altercation in the Kutsamak. The path of the man called Işak’getirmek had ended at the Castle of Tyr’kharta. That’s where Sebastian’s path had merged with Ean’s—at least according to Isabel—and forever shifted the course of his life.

  But Rhakar had been in the Kutsamak, and he’d been at Tyr’kharta, and here he was now…

  Perhaps he was being overly sensitive to paths and foretellings after Isabel’s Dreamscape speech—certainly she’d made her opinion clear on the matter—but he couldn’t help remembering the look in her eyes as she’d said it.

  Sebastian trusted Isabel, but he didn’t entirely trust Epiphany’s Prophet. If she had looked down his path—especially after what had happened with Arion—she certainly wasn’t going to tell him about it.

  He glanced to the drachwyr. The moon was setting in the west, shining angled light between the pillars of the arcade and limning Rhakar’s strong nose and brow in silver.

  Sebastian swallowed and turned ahead again. “I just have one question I can’t get past.”

  “What’s that, Prince of Dannym?”

  Sebastian glanced at him again. “You’re not holding that Labyrinth business against me, are you?”

  “Why would you expect me to?”

  Sebastian frowned at him.

  Rhakar shifted his gaze back to the moonlit passage ahead. “In our youth, my sister Mithaiya and I flung the Labyrinth on each other more frequently than mud. And if I didn’t take care to ward my dreams, I would wake to find myself trapped in the maze.”

  “I take your point.” For all Sebastian had felt an awkward guilt over wielding such a vicious trap as the Labyrinth on Rhakar, the drachwyr clearly viewed it as a child’s game.

  Ean had told him much of Ramu and a little of Rhakar, and the Kandori practically seemed to worship the Sundragon Náiir, sire of their princely line, but Sebastian’s only experience with immortals came from his limited interaction with the Prophet, who Rhakar, at that moment, reminded him of too nearly. Were they not both cut from opposite sides of the same cloth, the drachwyr and the Malorin’athgul?

  Feeling unsettled by the comparison, Sebastian walked the rest of the way in silence, which apparently suited Rhakar just fine.

  Dawn had taken over her watch by the time they reached Dareios’s laboratory. Sebastian walked through the early grey light and retrieved Isabel’s staff from its place in the corner. Holding it, realizing he was about to relinquish it into the care of another, gave him a strange and awkward sense of loss, as if he’d failed somehow. Whether that failure related to Isabel, his brother, or Captain Rhys val Kincaide, who was still healing from an ordeal Sebastian was entirely responsible for causing, he couldn’t say.

  He handed the staff to Rhakar.

  The Sundragon gave him an acknowledging nod and flipped the staff over his shoulder into some kind of holster on his back.

  Perhaps it was a trick of the early light, but Sebastian got the sense of the drachwyr’s greatsword looming there also, with its hilt fashioned as a dragon’s wings. Upon this thought, a memory flashed to mind—his first sight of Rhakar in human form as he’d come striding towards him across the desert.

  He played the Labyrinth as a child’s game!

  Sebastian crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. “You could’ve ended my path in the Kutsamak without a second thought.”

  Rhakar was securing Isabel’s staff firmly behind him. He arched a brow that said clearly, And?

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I saw from the first you were a Player.”

  Sebastian straightened off the wall. “How could you possibly see something like that?”

  Rhakar looked at him like he couldn’t be seriously asking this question. “You all have auras about you, the First Lord’s Kingdom Blades.”

  The familiar phrase gave Sebastian pause. “Kingdom Blades? As in—”

  “It is his epithet for all of you.”

  Something in this knowledge made Sebastian feel oddly warm, and…unexpectedly empty. The phrase reflected a part of his life he hadn’t yet restored—if indeed it could be restored at all, Ehsan’s claims notwithstanding. He accepted that people called him ‘prince,’ but he made no claim to his father’s throne.

  Verily, even if he survived the coming conflict, which was a very big if, Sebastian couldn’t see himself back in Dannym. The years lay too long between them—that youthful Prince Sebastian and the man he was now—too long and deleterious; acid years that had etched away the fine marble exterior of Gydryn val Lorian’s firstborn son, leaving a pocked slab that hardly resembled the original.

  Rhakar’s yellow eyes narrowed upon him. “The First Lord doesn’t waste time with broken pieces, Sebastian val Lorian.”

  Sebastian wasn’t sure how to take this comment—had it been spoken in reassurance or warning?

  “You each have your roles to play, the four of you—”

  Sebastian raised a hand to pause him. “I beg your pardon—did you say the four of us?”

  “Your brothers and another Player whose name would be meaningless to you.” Rhakar held his gaze with his startling yellow eyes, so like the sun when it burned low in the west. “Your threads in the tapestry have
never glowed so brightly, nor your paths been so closely entwined. The four of you are like the Nodefinder’s Seam, a starry core of strands packed so tightly that your light outshines all others. What each of you do now will inevitably affect the others’ paths.” Rhakar headed for the balcony. Sebastian followed as a matter of course.

  “You called us Kingdom Blades, which implies…” Sebastian shook his head, tried to clarify his question. The Sundragon’s words had…well, they’d wakened something in him—not unease; rather, a sense of necessity, something of perilous importance, an action he suddenly felt compelled to take. Only he had no idea what it was. “What can you tell me of my brothers?”

  “Of Ean, I know only that his thread is tangled among darker strands.” Rhakar stopped at the railing and turned to him. “Trell, I left not long ago in the hands of the Akkadian Emir and your King Father.”

  Sebastian stared at him. “Say that again?”

  “As your paths are interwoven, so accordingly are the workings of the wielders Dore Madden and Viernan hal’Jaitar, the Duke of Morwyk, and your father.” Every name spoken off Rhakar’s tongue pulsed with power in the saying, as though each was a portent of future events. “Against all odds, your father found his way to safe harbor with the Akkad’s Emir, who is a good man, as mortals go, and very much in the Mage’s service. Your father withdrew his forces from M’Nador and sent them to the fortress of Nahavand, behind Akkad-held lines, where they await his return ere they all depart for Dannym.”

  Sebastian spun beneath this news. “And Trell?”

  “Your middle brother forges towards the Fortress of Khor Taran in Abu’Dhan to rescue a thousand of your father’s forces tricked into captivity by Viernan hal’Jaitar. He draws and binds many threads to him. His pattern through the tapestry grows thick.”

  Sebastian wondered with an uncomfortable twinge how Rhakar would describe his own thread. He nodded wordlessly, hoping his gaze conveyed thanks enough.

  The drachwyr gave a nod in reply. Then he planted a hand on the railing and slung himself over it.

  Sebastian rushed after him. He caught the railing with both hands and sort of hung there, squinting painfully against the rising sun as he watched a gilded dragon flying away into the dawn.

  Fifty-four

  “Not even the purest soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.”

  –The Adept Socotra Isio, Sormitáge Scholar

  Ean stepped off the node and felt a pattern flare and expire—a ward of some kind. He didn’t notice its exact purpose, for his attention went immediately to the rainbows of light enveloping him.

  The afternoon sun was casting long rays through the dome and crystal columns of the gazebo where he’d arrived, so that Ean stood amid a monument of light. Beyond the too-bright columns spread a lake, whose stone retaining wall mirrored the scalloped shape of the structure at its center. Fountains sprayed out of statues set at each petal point in the wall, making a dance of shifting rainbows across the lake.

  At Ean’s feet, inscribed in Old Alaeic in the marble floor, were the words: ‘I’ci anu eliannae. I’ci anu terrae.’ Here began the light. Here began the world.

  Ean’s Adept senses, as well as his own memory, told him that the words were not carved into the stone; rather, the entire marble slab had curled itself to form the shape of each letter, such that the inscription existed all the way through.

  —‘Make this promise to me, Arion, here upon Epiphany’s Altar, and I shall believe you.’—

  Isabel’s words, suddenly and unexpectedly recalled, brought an immediate ache to Ean’s eyes and an even greater one to his chest, for he remembered then that she’d said those words to Arion when last they’d stood together in that place.

  He could still feel the energy of that moment, the expansive sense of their minds bound and entwined, elae flooding them both; Isabel’s disconcertion woven through with love, and Arion’s thrumming anticipation…. Ean had no idea what promise she’d been requiring him to make on such sacred ground, but for some reason, he didn’t think it was one he’d kept.

  Who had raised the gazebo from the lode of crystal far below it? This was one of the Sacred City’s most enduring mysteries. According to legend, the gazebo had been standing long before Emperor Hallian the First built his palace overlooking the hills and sea and pronounced the lands ‘faroe qhar’ or fairest view. It was easy to understand why the Agasi believed Epiphany must’ve been birthed on that very spot.

  No path led from gazebo to land, so Ean made the water hold his weight and walked across it. The ripples of his passing bled into waves from the fountains, making new patterns where they joined.

  Beyond the lake, a sculpture garden bordered a boxwood maze. The individual shapes cut into the hedges were new to Ean, but he remembered every twist and turn in the maze’s design. And past the towering boxwoods, he knew what he would find—flower gardens alternating with orchards and promenades, trellis-lined paths dripping roses or fruit, temples hiding beneath clusters of wisteria; and all of it forever blooming, there in the endless spring of the Sacred City.

  The path he took through the maze led him to the private gardens of the imperial family. Arion had walked those grounds often during his years at the Sormitáge, when Isabel had maintained residence at the palace.

  The Empress’s Praetorians were waiting for him when he emerged from the boxwoods.

  A score of swords descended towards Ean in a steel fan of deadly points. A dozen archers stood in a staggered half-moon behind the first line, crossbows loaded and aimed.

  Ean slowly raised both hands and said in Agasi, “I mean no harm. My name—”

  “Prince Ean?” A female voice preceded a veiled figure pushing her way through the line of guards. “Can it be?” She grabbed onto the arm of the nearest one. “Lower your weapons! I know this man.”

  The leading Praetorian turned her a defiant look. “Princess—”

  “Lower your weapon, Lieutenant.” Nadia’s command warned that she would be obeyed, while a higher harmonic of the fourth cast a feather-light encouragement to comply quickly.

  The Praetorian lowered his sword, but he looked severely defiant about it.

  Ean held a shield of the fifth and would’ve let them keep their weapons where they willed, but he didn’t want to offend the princess after such a valiant rescue.

  Nadia pushed through the line and came towards him. She wore an opalescent veil bound by a circlet of emeralds, and a dress the color of shaded grass, but even had she been wrapped in muslin, Ean would’ve known her by her signature on the currents.

  She stood before him with astonishment raising a momentary barrier between them, her gaze full of bewildered wonder. Then she threw her arms around his neck and hugged him fiercely.

  The Praetorians instantly restored their weapons in aim at Ean’s head.

  The prince raised both hands while Nadia hugged him. “Please…I have no intention of harming anyone here.”

  The lieutenant motioned with his sword. “Be it so, lower your shield.”

  Ean smiled meaningfully at him. “Lower your weapons.”

  Nadia turned stiffly to the Praetorian. “Lieutenant di—”

  “Princess, come away from this man.” The Praetorian’s face was as stone, and his eyes were harder still.

  “Lieutenant di Corvi, this man is the Crown Prince of Dannym and personally responsible for my rescue from Tambarré. You will treat him as my honored guest!”

  At this statement, declared so emphatically by a ringed truthreader who could not lie, the lieutenant clenched his jaw and lowered his sword. The rest of the Praetorians followed suit. Sheathing his weapon, the lieutenant murmured, “Our apologies, Your Highness.” He neither looked nor sounded the least apologetic.

  Ean nodded soberly. “And mine, Lieutenant. You attended your duty well.”

  “The Princess’s wishes notwithstanding, Your Highness, I must ask how you came to be in the private gardens of the imperial family.” It was more a
ccusation than question. None of the Praetorians seemed of a mind to budge their semicircle of containment.

  “I used the node at Epiphany’s Altar.”

  Silence descended. The Lieutenant exchanged an unreadable look with another of his men. He might’ve doubted Ean’s veracity, but he couldn’t doubt the truthreaders among his company bearing witness to it—never mind the Princess Heir.

  The lieutenant clasped hands behind his back. “For now, Your Highness, I must ask you to remain with the princess.”

  “It is my only aim, Lieutenant.”

  Nadia gave Ean a wondering stare by way of Come with me and led him away on the path. The Praetorians followed a dozen steps behind, heavy steps clinking of suspicion.

  When the guards were presumably far enough behind, Nadia swept her veil back from her face and turned to Ean. “When the alarms sounded from the gardens, we thought…” but she swallowed whatever she’d thought. “You must know the entire city is on high alert since the Danes’ invasion.”

  Ean blinked. “The Danes invaded Faroqhar?”

  “It’s a long story.” She looked him over with her colorless eyes, a truly lovely girl with a hint of the fey in her makeup. Her expression revealed amazement, but her gaze held shadows that Ean recognized too nearly; they were the footprints of Players whose actions had forever changed her.

  Perhaps perceiving this thought, Nadia turned profile to him. “I worried we would never see you again.”

  “I feared the same myself for a time, Princess.”

  “But…clearly you escaped.” She searched his gaze, seeking explanation.

  “Or he let me leave.” Ean arched brows. “I’m still uncertain which.”

  Nadia stopped at the base of a staircase and considered him with her lips pressed together. “Your Highness…” but whatever she’d wanted to say, the Praetorians’ clomping arrival dissuaded. Nadia gave him a constrained smile instead and murmured, “This way.” She started up the stairs.