Catali crossed her legs, more intrigued than frightened. She’d gotten used to the putrid smell somewhat—about as well as one could expect. “What’s in the box?”
With a snap of his head, Nape regarded her like a twit. “Spice! That’s what’s in the bloody box. And I can’t open it. I can’t bloody open it.”
Catali should have guessed that. Spice was an herb that grew among rolling arid mountains in Southern Baelous. It made you feel warm. Made you smile. Happy—that was what it made you. It also turned you mad if you went too long without it.
“What if I tell you I can get you spice?”
With an open mouth full of crooked, uneven teeth, Nape pounced toward Catali. “Where? When? Now? Here?” He straightened himself. “Excuse me. I just… I’d very much like that.”
Catali stood. “It’s not free, of course.”
He made a guttural noise. “Of course, of course…”
“What happened here? I want every detail and every rumor you’ve heard.”
Nape pulled at his thin wisps of lemony hair. “Ah, mm… mind’s foggy. Some spice, that’ll clear it up a bit, I think.”
“No spice until you pay my price.”
He grimaced, looked away and muttered something. Then he fixed his eyes on Catali and said, “Fine. Fine.” He made an inexplicable thip, thip, thip sound with his tongue. “I worked here in the palace, see. I cooked, built, cleaned—anything that needed doin’, I did. Not a slave. Not a servant. A worker.”
He’s proud, Catali thought. But also embarrassed that his cravings for spice have led him down the path of madness. She enjoyed scrutinizing people; it was a hobby for her and one that she often used to manipulate and exploit.
“See here,” he said, scratching at his throat, “I was privy to the whispers of barons and ladies, even sometimes the hush-hush discussions of Emperor Maevich.”
Catali lifted her chin sagely, pretending to be impressed. “Anyone can hear those whispers, but it takes a wise man to listen to them.”
Nape smiled, grateful someone recognized his wits. “Months ago is when the emperor grew weary of the Conclave. Lots of villages had been conquered at this time, see. But no one knew why. The Conclave had never acted aggressively before.”
Not unless you had something they wanted, Catali thought.
Nape continued scratching an itch that couldn’t be satisfied. “The emperor got his gooses in a row—”
“Ducks,” Catali interjected. He looked at her curiously. “Ducks in a row. Not geese. Or… gooses.” An unhelpful correction to be sure, but she couldn’t help herself sometimes. Syntax, articulation, phrasings—she despised their misuse.
Nape chewed on a dirty nail. “Ducks, gooses, cows, pigs—what’s it matter? Point is, see, the point is Emperor Maevich prepared to flex Emyrth’s muscle. He mobilized the army, even legislated inscription.”
Catali cupped a round bedpost cap and rapped her nails against the wood. “The Free City forcing its citizens to fight. It seems freedom is fickle.”
“Bah,” Nape said, flicking his hand outward in disgust. “It’s not that, see. The emperor was a good man. A good man. Kept only a small standing army, had no levies. Assaulting these walls… no, it should have never happened. Emyrth is neutral. Always been neutral. You don’t wage war on a neutral party, do you?”
Catali shrugged. “It seems the Conclave does.” Probably she should have felt a pang of empathy for Nape, for all those who had been swept up in the Conclave’s warpath. But her concerns were with Oriana and her sorcerers—dragons too—not with those who had the misfortune of becoming the Conclave’s playthings.
Nape edged a thumbnail beneath a scab and pried it up. He hissed in pain. “You should’ve seen ’em. Be glad you didn’t. They… just appeared. Jumped out of the air itself, is what they did. Scores of sorcerers filling the streets, flagbearers too.”
Illusionists, Catali thought. The cornerstone of every Conclave offensive. Forming a sound strategy against sorcerers is difficult in and of itself. It’s infinitely more difficult when you can’t see them coming.
A fat red ant hiked across her knuckle. She flicked it into the clutter of boxes and shattered glass. “It didn’t look like much sorcery was used when I arrived.”
“None at all,” Nape said. “There was this man, big guy. A bit flabby, if you ask me. He asked to talk to the emperor. Wasn’t an hour later ’fore the Emperor Maevich came toddling out of this here palace. He makes a big speech. Tells everyone the Conclave came here as a shield, not a weapon. King Fahlmar approaches, he says, and we must all flee. The Conclave will protect us, he claims.”
“Emperor Maevich was never one to lie, see. Few doubted him. And those who did, he offered them the opportunity to stay behind. Some did.”
“Like you.”
Nape shook his head. “No, no. Not me. I sensed something was wrong.”
“Wise men often do.”
He smiled and gave a curt you-know-it nod. “I took refuge in a larder initially.”
Catali white-knuckled the bedpost. “Not an ideal place to go,” she said, jaw nearly clamped shut. The memories of those long nights and inescapable days in her aunt’s larder… why did they have to hurt so badly?
“Bit dry and dark,” Nape agreed. “But it kept me safe. I waited for a while, till I heard the orders to evacuate. Then I crept out, slowly, see. Peeked through a window, I did, glimpsed some sorcerers who stayed behind.” He chewed on a knuckle, shaking his head. “I knew they were up to no good. I could—I just felt it.”
Catali knew what was coming next. The sorcerers murdered Emperor Maevich’s doubters, the ones who refused to depart the Free City. She wasn’t prescient, but this was a story that had been told many times before. Maybe not involving the Conclave, but the purging of rebels was as old as life itself.
“They injected the poor souls,” Nape said, teeth marks gouged into his knuckle. “I saw only two men, but I heard the screams of more. Women, children… even the cry of a newborn.”
Catali found herself tongue-tied. “Wha—inje—what do you mean injected?”
“Just as it sounds. The men I saw, they had their hands bound, got lassoed to a signpost. Then the sorcerers—or maybe these weren’t sorcerers. They came with the Conclave, that’s all I know. And they had these big vials and needles. They stabbed the pointy bit into the arms of those men; that’s when I heard the first cries.”
Catali tried to dissect this information to frame a coherent picture of what had transpired. And she failed. She didn’t understand. “Did they live?”
“I’d say so, though you wouldn’t know it by the looks of their faces. I saw their chests rising and falling, but their eyes were closed. The sorcerers, or whatever they were, hefted their bodies into a wagon. And that was it.”
“That was it?”
Nape licked a droplet of scab-picked blood from his lip. “The city was empty after that.”
“Yet you chose to stay.”
“Spice…”
Catali rolled her eyes. “Of course.”
“Where else would I find it? You promised me—”
“I know what I promised. Come on, we’ll find some together.”
I could go for some myself, she thought. Her suspicion that the Conclave had come to the Free City had been confirmed. That wasn’t surprising. And neither was their forced evacuation of the city’s populace. She somewhat expected all of this. The needles, vials, the injections… that was unexpected.
And deeply concerning. If the Conclave wanted those men—and all the others who stayed behind—dead, they’d have done so using sorcery or a freshly whetted blade. If they wanted them as slaves, they wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of binding their hands, tying them to signposts and injecting them with a mystery poison to make them sleepy.
Catali feared—knew, she knew—there was a far more sinister reason behind this. The Conclave was dabbling in something more dreadful and more powerful than sorcery.
The last of Oriana’s heavy breaths had passed. The warmth in her loins faded, and she pulled the satin sheets up over her bare breasts.
“I talked with Farris this morning,” she said, an edge to her voice. “She claims her gambit of bringing the North into her circle is going well.”
Rol was rummaging about the mess of blankets and sheets. “I lose ’em every time,” he said. “Every bloody time. It’s like my skivvies sniff freedom the second I pull ’em off, and they’re gone, out the door, down the steps and toward wherever it is skivvies go.”
Ignoring Rol’s meandering thoughts—something she had gotten used to over the past several months—she continued. “Have you noticed how much time she’s spending with the whelps?”
Rol’s head was now under the sheets. He poked around down there for a moment, then came up. “Found ’em. Anyways… they’re dragons, Ori. Of course she wants to see ’em, play with ’em, talk to ’em. She’s interested.”
Oriana held Rol’s silvery blue eyes. She forced out a fragile smile and said, “You’re right. I suppose I’m protective of them.”
Rol scratched his wiry scruff and lifted his brows in a manner that said her suggestive body language and weak assent was not lost on him.
She hadn’t intended it to be. The subject of Farris had been at the forefront of their conversations recently. Oriana wasn’t exactly distrusting of the Torbinen queen, but her enthusiasm for the old lady’s liberal and optimistic views had faded.
“I’m going for a walk,” she said, slinging her legs out of the bed. She stepped onto the wooden floor, searched with her toes for her slippers.
Rol sighed. He slid up higher on the headboard. “It’s been nine months. What’s the good word… patience is a virtue?”
Oriana threw on a loose-fitting cotton smock with a hood and went to a wooden coffer. She lifted the lid and stuck her head inside. “I have patience,” she said, coming out with a pair of pants.
“Where do you hide it? Your patience, that is. ’Cause I’ve never seen it.”
She stepped out of her slippers and pulled on her tights. “I’ve stayed in this kingdom for nine months, haven’t I? All the while watching my hopes of changing this world slip farther from my grasp.”
“Farris is working on it,” Rol said. “These things take time.”
“What things?”
Rol waved a hand above his head, as if trying to stir the air. “Er, you know. The things that, er”—he snapped his fingers—“the winds of change. Takes time for those to blow through.”
Oriana rolled her eyes. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Soft power, and alliances, and—”
She walked to the base of the bed, put her hands on the mattress and leaned forward menacingly. “Where are your strings, Rol? You must have them, being Farris’s puppet and all. You swallow everything she says and regurgitate it back. I’m going for a walk.”
Oriana pushed off the bed and plucked a necklace off the dresser. A silver whistle dangled from the chain; she’d trained her dragon, Sarpella, to respond to its sharp call.
Oriana clasped the chain around her neck and turned. She gave Rol a long, downcast glare before marching off. A few hurried and heavy strides later, she was out the door, down a coiled set of stairs, and into the wet air of a summer morning on the coast.
The pewter sky spat and dribbled an unseasonably cool rain. Oriana pulled her cowl up and set off for nowhere in particular. The best kinds of walks are those with no destination. Unless you’re trapped in a desert without food or drink, then those tend to be the worst kinds of walks.
But Oriana was in the freest and wealthiest city on Avestas, not some arid plain without an oasis in sight. Sometimes she wished it was the other way around. She wished that often recently.
Torbinen angered her. Oh, sure, it had everything a woman could ever want and more: exotic foods, pristine sights, exquisite clothes, friendly faces—the perfect place for the sort of person looking to live their life in the closest match to a real, honest-to-goodness utopia. But those very luxuries served as the catalyst for Oriana’s fury.
One small pocket of bliss and paradise in the entire world was not enough. Every land in Avestas, every inch of this world, would share Torbinen’s freedoms and liberties. Oriana would make certain of it.
Or at least that was the idea. She hadn’t gotten very far in executing it since the fall of the dragon clutches nine months ago. And she blamed Farris Torbinen for that failure.
The dominating peaks and spires of Torbinen looked grim and morbid in the stormy sky. Oriana felt trapped by them, as if hemmed in by some monolithic beast. She took an alleyway to the West Shore. There resided a coterie of folksy people who dressed simply and lived modestly, who preferred wattle-and-daub cottages to the high-rising monsters in the heart of the kingdom.
Oriana needed that right now. She didn’t want to be angry anymore.
“’Scuse me, miss,” said a man who approached her from behind. “Do you have a moment?”
She turned and saw what was perhaps the most ordinary person she’d ever seen. He was the personification of average, someone who you couldn’t possibly recall even if you had a three-hour conversation with him.
He was dressed in trousers and a wrinkly midnight-blue tunic. Bags had formed under his eyes.
“I’m not interested in buying or procuring,” Oriana said, figuring he was a merchant. Merchants in Torbinen were rather annoying, she’d come to learn; they did not know the meaning of personal space, and they excelled at pestering.
“I’m not in the business of selling, Miss Oriana Gravendeer.”
Oriana went rigid. Most in Torbinen knew her birthright—or thought they knew—but they’d never address her as such. To the commoners, she was simply Oriana, nothing more.
“Walk along the ocean’s edge, will you? I’d like a word in private.”
Oriana offered him a face devoid of emotion. “You’ll understand if I’m hesitant to accept such a request from someone whose name I do not even know.”
He put an arm around her shoulders, and together they walked deeper into the sleepy West Shore, whose inhabitants had yet to wake. “My name is Horace Dewn, former spymaster of Valios. Current counsel to Bastion Rook. Allow me to preempt your concern: if I wanted you dead, you wouldn’t be out for a jaunt right now. So, how about that walk?”
An odd sense of excitement tore through Oriana. It’d been a long time since the feel of danger and intrigue had presented itself, hadn’t it? She rather missed it.
“After you,” she said, a calculated smile on her lips.
“I see you haven’t lost your graces,” Horace said. “Or your tact. And here I thought Farris would have made you soft.”
The two walked side-by-side to the outer portcullis, which remained open always, except in times of war. “The queen and I rarely speak,” Oriana said.
She had hoped to produce a tell on Horace’s face with that remark, but the spymaster—former spymaster, if he was to be believed—gave nothing away for free. He was seasoned, adept at playing this game. Perhaps far more than I am, she thought.
“I assume you’ve heard of your sister?” Horace asked.
Oriana kicked her slippers off at the portcullis, then walked through into the deep, wet sand outside the Torbinen walls. She took a moment to collect herself before answering; appearing desperate would make her look weak. “I heard she’s an ungrateful bitch and, more importantly, an illegitimate queen.”
“Perhaps,” Horace said, flicking a sand flea from his clean-shaven chin. “She’s named Bastion Rook Chancellor of Haeglin.”
“What?” The question came out too fast, too desirous. Oriana silently chided herself. She knew Bastion had survived the burning of his kingdom, the Roost, and she’d heard he had visited Haeglin, but…
Horace placed his hand on Oriana’s back and gently nudged her toward the shore. “Why would Bastion swear
fealty to Haeglin?” he asked rhetorically. “That’s probably what you’re thinking. The answer is that Bastion is an intelligent man, and a witty one too. Far more than I’d given him credit for.
“When the Roost fell, it opened an opportunity for the disgruntled Northern clans to lay claim to the throne. Much as Bastion contained them during his rule, his kingdom had fallen and with it his power. Better to abdicate than die a prideful death, wouldn’t you agree?”
Was that a thinly disguised jab at Oriana’s own desertion? You’re focusing on the wrong things, she told herself. “Well, I’m not sure about all that, but he chose the perfect kingdom in which to bend the knee. He’ll have my sister dancing when he says the word. She’s not exactly the outsmart-and-outwit type.”
A red crab skittered back and forth, raising its claws up at Oriana. She smiled at it and gave it a wide berth.
“Rash,” Horace corrected, “but not stupid.”
Oriana walked the water’s edge, a pace ahead of Horace. White spit bubbles lapped against her toes as the tide came in. “Did you come all this way to tell me my sister’s personality?”
Horace chuckled. “Olyssi said you were impatient.”
“Did she send you?”
“Not quite. I come on behalf of Bastion, with a proposal for you.” He waited expectantly.
“Well? Then propose.”
Horace interlocked his hands behind his back. “How would you like to be queen of Haeglin?”
Oriana laughed. A gust yanked her cowl back and whirled her already sweaty sex-hair into a mess of frizzy strands. “And how would you like to be god of creation?”
“I’m offering you the opportunity, Oriana. Few strings attached.”
She stopped and fixed her suspicious eyes on Horace. “And does one of those strings include getting on my knees in front of Bastion? I’m not a slave or a plaything, Horace, nor will I become one for the promise of glittering gold and high-backed thrones.”
Horace brought his hands from behind his back, steepling them. “Do you truly believe Farris has your desires and good fortunes in mind?”
Reign of Gods (Sorcery and Sin Book 2) Page 3
