“Damn batty,” Kaun agreed.
Elaya started toward the stairs, sacks and satchels weighing down her shoulders. “Come on. We have a long few weeks ahead of us.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Bastion Rook sat at one end of the long council table and Olyssi Gravendeer at the other. She fingered through a bowl of grapes, making faces until she found one firm and plump enough to her liking.
I despise you, he thought. He thought this often. Mostly every day—mostly every time he saw that blond hair and pasty face. But Olyssi would serve as the catalyst to every plot he’d conceived.
“So,” Olyssi said, juice spilling out of her mouth as she chomped down on two grapes at once, “how did the meeting with Maya go?”
“One could say it went well.” Bastion’s lips opened up into a wide smile. “You’ll be wining and dining her in six days, maybe seven if this rain doesn’t go away.”
Olyssi had another grape cocked between her thumb and forefinger, but she didn’t launch it into her gaping maw. “Truly? You convinced the Plorgus’s queen to come here? Under what pretense?”
“She wants to forest what she considers Plorgus’s rightful half of the Emerald Grove.”
The Emerald Grove, a small forest of emerald trees, which were highly valuable and sought after for the unrivaled hardness of their wood, lay between Plorgus and Haeglin. Under Raegon Gravendeer, Haeglin had pushed Plorgus out from the southern half of the grove years ago. But a new queen had come to the throne in Plorgus, and she wasn’t the sort to be pushed around.
“Yes, and?” Olyssi expected a better answer than what Bastion had given her. “Everyone in Haeglin knows this. I bet you my crossbow that an eight-year-old little girl playing with her dolls right this very second knows Maya Plommen wants to forest the Emerald Grove. Haeglin will not budge. So if she comes here expecting us to do just that, then—”
Bastion held up a pacifying hand. He wanted to tell her to shut her mouth, but that would undo all the little generosities he’d offered her thus far to advance so deep into her inner circle. Why Raegon Gravendeer had ever marked this daughter as the rightful heir to the Grateful Throne… well, that was a question that had driven Bastion to damn near madness.
“Maya Plommen,” Bastion began, “is threatening war over this bloody grove. And it’s no bluff. I have it on good word she was prepared to send foresters accompanied with several levies to the southern edge of the Grove. She would have forced Haeglin out, temporarily.”
Olyssi snarled. She crushed the grape in her fingers and pounded a fist on the table. “If she wants war, I’ll give it to the batty bitch! Haeglin and her bannermen will erase Plorgus from memory. From memory! Do you hear me?”
Bastion calmly spread his hands out on the table. “How do you think the people would react to that?”
Her face scrunched up with annoyance. “They will support their queen in whatever she does.”
“Maybe outwardly.” He rolled his shoulders, thinking of a few diplomatic words. Olyssi appreciated bluntness about as much as a fish appreciates its river being sucked dry. “I lorded over the Roost for two decades and was close friends with your father for nearly as long.
“Over that time, I watched the citizens of Haeglin grow more militaristic each year. Most are trained in combat. Almost every one of them has swords or daggers or axes hanging from the walls of their house. An uprising isn’t unthinkable.”
She angrily threw a grape into her mouth. “What are you suggesting?”
“I’m suggesting a war over a bloody forest is stupid.” He paused. “And you know it.” It was important to offer Olyssi slight criticism, he held, so long as you followed it up with immediate praise. That was how you not only endured as her adviser but also moved up in the game. It also helped if you were a former king.
“I won’t cede the grove to this woman,” Olyssi said, face set in determination.
“For free, or for a price? I wouldn’t expect the former. But the latter….”
“It’d have to be a very good price.”
Bastion smiled. “That’s the point of negotiations, dear Olyssi. First, you reel them in with the promise of fortune, and then they leave paying you in gold. The best part is, if you do your job well enough, they won’t even know they’ve been had.”
Olyssi snorted. “I’m happy you’re here, Bastion. Much as I dread knowing this—and I would admit it to no one else but you—being queen isn’t as easy as I had assumed.”
“You’ll get there. Sooner than you think. You have your father’s wisdom and hunger, and your mother’s beauty and stubbornness.”
“And my sister? What of hers do I have?”
Bastion leaned forward. “Absolutely nothing.”
Olyssi flashed a serpent’s grin. “I hope she dies in Torbinen.” She sunk her teeth into her lip, began gnawing. “I hope the sea swells and drowns her. I hope she burns alive. I hope barbarians come down from the Crags and flay her. I hope they beat her too, and make her scream and cry. I want to hear her cries.”
Her lip was bleeding now. She kept chewing. “If I could hear her moans and whimpers and bottle them up, I would. And I’d keep the bottle beside my bed so I could uncork it every night and listen to those sweet, lovely sounds.” She tilted her head back and sighed pleasantly.
While Bastion indulged her with a gracious nod of his head, he couldn’t decide if her madness was more sad or disturbing. He wished for Oriana’s end too—for his own reasons—but Olyssi’s ideal scenarios in which her sister would depart from this world were a smidgen too sinister. A simple knife across the throat would do well enough.
“Well,” Olyssi said, flicking a mushy grape off the table, “if that’s all, I have… things to do.”
Bastion stayed seated. “That’s not all.”
“Oh?”
“I’m surprised you haven’t noticed the lack of one Horace Dewn.”
Olyssi remained standing, hand in the bowl of grapes. “I have. But you two are close. Friends, I think. Just as I don’t confess every secret and conversation I have with my friends, I wouldn’t expect you to do so, either. I imagine he’s off somewhere.”
“In Torbinen.”
Olyssi’s eyes widened. “To kill my sister?” The question came with equal parts enthusiasm and giddiness.
Bastion swept his tongue along his teeth, twitched his brows upward seductively.
“Oh, tell me! Tell me!” Olyssi said, jumping to a crouch and slapping the table, then springing back up. She looked like a toddler overwhelmed with excitement.
“There’s some truth that he’s there to kill her.” Olyssi steepled her hands and offered a prayer of thanks to the gods. “But he won’t be the one to kill her.”
“Of course not. You can’t chance him being implicated.”
“That’s not it. Rather, he won’t be alive to kill her.”
That unexpected clarification made Olyssi’s head swerve in surprise. “I… don’t understand.”
Bastion pursed his lips. He looked like a disappointed father, all the pride he had for his son now gone, forever. “Horace was crafty. He always carried with him furtive plans for bettering his place in the world. I learned of one such plan through his squire.”
Olyssi hung on his every word. “What did it involve?”
“My death.” He didn’t find it terribly difficult to keep his face straight for this little lie, for it wasn’t a plot too devious to believe. Horace Dewn was many things, including a capable man of enigmatic aspirations.
Disbelief washed over Olyssi’s pallid face. She stroked the ponytail of her blond hair. “So often our friends are demons, aren’t they?”
He wondered where she had heard that saying, because Olyssi Gravendeer was not equipped with the wit to think of it on her own. “So often they are. In regard to your sister, he was to convince her to come here.”
“Here?” Olyssi said, with a downward point of her finger. “To Haeglin?”
Bastion lea
ned back, fixed himself a smug appearance. “I thought you’d relish in the news.”
Olyssi stood like a statue, finger still pointing downward. Her eyes swung to this side and that, darted diagonally away from Bastion and then back. She was thinking, connecting the dots that Bastion had so elegantly laid before her.
It amused him that she behaved like his niece when she was eight and on the verge of completing a puzzle.
“You’re bringing her here,” Olyssi said, “for me to kill her?” She clapped excitedly. “Am I right? Is that what you’re doing?”
“That’s the idea. But check your excitement, because her arrival is far from certain. Your sister may be a thorn—”
“I prefer her proper name.”
“Which is?”
“A pile of shit.”
“Whatever you wish to call her,” Bastion said, “she’s not stupid.” Olyssi went to interject, but Bastion raised his hand to silence her. “She’s not. A stupid person doesn’t get close to Farris Torbinen. But the offer Horace gives her may be enticing enough.”
Olyssi lowered herself into the chair. She threw her elbows up onto the table, eager to hear more. “What’s the offer?”
“The Grateful Throne.”
Beaming like she’d just been told I-love-you for the first time—or in Olyssi’s case, like she’d been handed a greatsword and been told to go murder a nest of baby bunnies—she wagged her finger at Bastion. “That’s good! She’ll fall for that, I know it.”
Suppressing his happiness and joy—and he had plenty of both—Bastion said without emotion, “Let us hope she will.”
“But Horace,” Olyssi said. “How will he contact her if he’s assassinated?”
“The hired assassin is to wait until three days after Horace arrives, which coincides with when I ordered him to leave Torbinen. He’ll have had Oriana’s ear by then.”
Olyssi slapped the table and pushed herself to her feet. “She killed our father, you know?”
Bastion brought his hands together. “Why would she do that?”
Olyssi jabbed a set of knuckles into her temple. “’Cause she’s batty, that’s why. Ungrateful, too. She killed him because she thought he chose her as the heiress.” She smacked her lips and added, “But father always preferred me. I was the good daughter. Well, anyway, I have meetings today. I hope no one bores me too much, for their sake.” She plucked the trigger of her crossbow.
With a wink, Olyssi departed the council chambers, leaving Bastion alone.
His eyes were transfixed on the now-empty chair Olyssi had sat in. She was, for all intents and purposes, a mirror—someone who projected upon others the very qualities she herself possessed. Those types made for some of the worst and most predictable leaders. But a crummy queen made Bastion’s task all the easier. His meeting with Olyssi had shown she trusted him, which meant he could go ahead with his plans.
He yawned and rubbed his eyes. A couple catnaps every day for a month doesn’t do the body good, or the mind. But sleep strangles ambitions, and Bastion Rook had no appetite for failure. He had met failure nine months ago. Gotten up nice and close to it, nose-to-nose.
Nine months ago, they’d called him the King of the North and Lord of the Roost. He’d earned the moniker “the Immovable Wall” as well, having never lost a battle that he’d commanded. But now Bastion Rook was far away from the biting winds of the North and from its snowfalls.
And all because of mythical beasts that he had been certain no longer existed. Beasts he had known without doubt had been expunged like a disease from this world. It was funny, then—in a morbid sense—when dragons had swooped down from the heavens and engulfed his kingdom in plague and fire and ice. They’d crumbled his walls, melted the steel in his armories.
At first, he had looked to the gods. And when they hadn’t answered, he’d looked for revenge. Rumors had brought him to Haeglin, to the Grateful Throne upon which Olyssi Gravendeer sat. Gossips had brought word from Torbinen that her sister, Oriana, had been seen there with dragons of her own.
Bastion had convinced himself this was all, in some form or another, the fault of Oriana Gravendeer and Farris Torbinen. They would have their punishment, and thanks to Olyssi Gravendeer, it would come sooner than either of them could possibly imagine.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Nape shaved a strip of flesh off his nose and ate it.
“Stop that,” Catali said. She thumbed off beads of sweat from her brow and lumbered on across an expanse of sand and wiry, dead-brown grass, the bag of vials and needles slung around her shoulders.
They’d crossed the Krolton Desert the evening prior and now found themselves in the Lonely Lands.
True to its name, the Lonely Lands were short on company, lacked almost every necessity for life to thrive, and offered few vistas besides unrivaled flatness that emptied out into a straight-edged horizon that seemed to drag on forever.
Worse, Nape had run out of spice.
“See here,” Nape said, flicking his tongue, “I need just a little bit more. I’ll be fine after that. I’m, uh, what do you call it?”
Catali uncapped her skin of water and drank. She only had three skins left. “I don’t know what you call it, and I don’t really care.”
“Tapering,” Nape said triumphantly. “Yeah, that’s it. I’m tapering. Know what that means?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care.”
Nape gasped and dropped to his knees. He ripped apart tufts of sinewy grass, then slapped his thighs. “Ah. Thought I saw some spice down there.”
“Why would—” Catali stopped herself. You don’t want to know why. You don’t care. She wondered how cold-blooded murder would make her feel. Probably bad. But would it be worse than continuing to listen to Nape’s rambling?
“Anyways,” Nape said, jumping to his feet and jogging to catch up, “I’m tapering. That means I’m slowly going, uh, back to normal. You know? I’ll be someone who doesn’t even think of spice before long. Just need a bit to tide me over until I reach that point, that’s all.”
Catali stopped. She stood straight and puffed herself up with a deep breath. Then, like a statue being rearranged to face from north to east, she slowly and rigidly turned.
Nape looked at her. “What’s the matter?”
“Look around,” she said quietly. “Take a look,” she said louder. “Where are we?”
“No man’s land, I figure.”
“That’s right,” Catali said, lowering her face to Nape’s. “We’re in no man’s land. So tell me how you plan to procure spice in no man’s land.” Her eyes had the look of a wild, carnal animal.
Nape rubbed the raw red flesh of his nose. “Well—”
“I’ll tell you how,” Catali said, her voice rising. “You can’t!” She was yelling now. “Do you hear me?” Screaming. “There is no fucking spice here, or over there”—she pointed wildly in all directions, spit flying from her mouth—“or there! Nowhere, Nape. So pinch your lips or bite them or cut them off. I don’t really care how do you do it, but keep yourself quiet? Okay? Do you think you can do that?”
Nape scratched his neck. “Er. See, I—well, yes. I guess I can do that.”
“It’d be greatly appreciated.” She spat out an irritated breath and marched off toward the horizon once more. They’d been walking for fifteen days now since leaving the Free City. Nine days since encountering the two poor saps who’d had their skin boiled right off their bones and the two idiots who were responsible for that mess, Gram and Emrik.
Gram had told her the Conclave had staked its capital in Fennis Valley, which served as a narrow pass between the Arching Bluffs. A city—not belonging to the Conclave—had been built there, but it had changed hands dozens of times over the centuries.
Now, if Gram could be trusted, the Conclave had claimed it as its own.
Catali guessed they were four days out. Four more days of traveling with a spice-addicted Nape. That prospect excited Catali so much. How much fortune could o
ne girl be blessed with?
On the second morning, they came upon a copse of trees. Their branches were thick and sprawling, forming a dense crown of green petals at the very end. A small creek ran through the trees, its water dribbling rather than flowing.
“Strange place for water, I’d say,” Nape observed. “Looks, uh, artificial. Yeah?”
Catali said nothing, but it did look artificial. All of it. A small patch of trees with a creek and rocky bank pinned down in the middle of a lonely, desolate landscape? But she wasn’t going to complain. Though the creek was almost dry, it still had enough water for her and Nape to fill their skins.
“Hey,” Nape said, wagging a skin at the creek bed. “See this here?”
Catali refused to look. She didn’t care. She uncapped two skins, lowered them into the creek and waited for the slow-running water to fill them.
“Cat,” Nape said, “I ain’t pulling a farce here. Come have a look at this.”
“Just tell me what it is.”
“Looks to me like feetprints.”
“Footprints,” Catali corrected. “Not feetprints. And I doubt it. They’re probably hooves. Animals need water like the rest of us.”
From the corner of Catali’s eye, she saw Nape begin moving down the creek bank, his head down. She almost asked him what he was doing, but caught herself in time. You don’t want to know. You don’t care.
She placed two filled skins on the outcrop of rock she was perched upon, then filled two more. Several minutes later, her bloated bags carried enough water to hold her over until she’d reach Fennis Valley. Nape, on the other hand, had no water. Because Nape had up and vanished.
Catali considered leaving him. He knew where the creek was, so he wouldn’t croak. At least not because of thirst. He had some food to tide him over another week, at least. After that, he could forage. Might even be good for him, she thought, starting a new life out in the Lonely Lands. That kind of thing would toughen him up and build character.
“Cat,” Nape called from beyond the tree line.
Catali sighed. Damn. “I’m leaving, so you should probably quench your thirst while you have the chance.”
Reign of Gods (Sorcery and Sin Book 2) Page 12
