Kings of Ash

by Richard Nell

  She could convince Farahi tomorrow once she had results. When she had Orang Kaya blubbering and pointing fingers at neighbors and allies he would agree with her methods as usual.

  Then she was standing at a thick, hidden door made to look like shelving. She unlatched the painted metal lock and pushed through, closing it behind to shuffle in near darkness for an opening beyond. It smelled like old sweat.

  “Loa, Kikay.”

  She no longer liked how her lover said her name—so familiar and unafraid.

  She stripped off her underclothes and found him with her hands, pushing him down to the floor with her mouth on his to straddle him. He was strong, and dangerous, and she knew she could only do this because he allowed her to.

  A shiver raced up her spine at the thought. She wanted her knees scraped to blood on the wood floor; she wanted nails digging paths through her skin and iron hands groping her flesh. She bit his lip hard and put his hands up her dress, reaching back to grab his crotch. She massaged till he was ready, then stripped down his pants just far enough.

  She rode him and clawed at his face, choking his neck and shoving her fingers in his mouth as she thrashed and bucked against him. When the release came at last she stood without a word to lay on the small, spartan bed against the wall.

  He slipped beside her in silence. Then he was spreading her legs with one iron grip on each thigh.

  She’d never been so aggressive with him before—so, honest—never once taking off the mask of a princess who needed protection in their encounters, which were frequent and not unpleasant.

  Instead she’d been sweet and gentle, acting more for him than her as she finished the seduction. In the past she had moved as he wanted, looked in his eyes and whispered and asked to be held in the night as he wanted. Perhaps she had ‘made love’ like Hali and Farahi.

  Now though she clenched her jaw and took a fistful of his hair as her mind drifted through the names of Pyu lords whose children she would take.

  She writhed against him, then reached for a half-empty wine bottle she knew would be on the nightstand, wrapping her lips around the mouth to gulp down swallows.

  Her spies would know schedules and favorites, tutors and nursemaids. The children would all need to be taken at once before word spread and families hid them. But it was possible.

  That Hali was unimportant made no difference. What mattered was that she was family, and by all the gods and spirits, Kikay vowed that every man and woman in Pyu, innocent or guilty, would learn the price of dead Alakus or their families.

  Time had passed and she was slick with sweat and shaking. She pulled her lover off, utterly spent, and drained the wine. Mentally she went over all her agents and how many would be needed and across how many islands, knowing with such a grand scheme and risk some would fail, or disappear, and others defect. The cost to her network would be immense.

  A lantern lit and Arun looked down at her face.

  “What do you need?” he said. She saw there some mix between pirate and Ching master, lover and protector, victim and addict.

  “I want you to kill Ruka,” she said, curling herself around him again. She was surprised to see resistance in his eyes.

  “Why should you want that?”

  “Because he’s a monster, and because he frightens me.”

  The pirate said nothing, gaze moving back and forth across her face. Then he reached out and seized her hair, pulling her down as he moved back on top of her.

  “He should frighten you. So should I, Princess.”

  Kikay almost gasped as he took her again, harshly, violently, every thrust a slap of flesh that bounced off stone walls.

  “I know what you are,” he said, much later, staring into her eyes. “I want you anyway.”

  She said nothing but turned gentle again, drifting fingertips down the lean, fatless length of his muscled back while he rested.

  “I need you,” she said later, when the time was right. “I have no one else I can trust.”

  He smiled and stroked his fingers down her cheek, soft as a Bato breeze.

  “Remember that,” he whispered, picking dried blood from her hair, and moving a knife she hadn’t seen from under a pillow to drop on the floor.

  Her heart beat faster, and she kissed him, no longer sure if it was for him, or her. In truth, she didn’t care.

  If this dangerous man killed Ruka—if he stalked the shadows of the palace and obeyed her, becoming her eyes and knife and iron fist that made men vanish and fear, or butchered children on her word— well, she’d be whatever he pleased. Nevermind that she liked it.

  Chapter 31

  Farahi stumbled from the bedroom he knew he’d later have closed off forever.

  So much future, he thought, so much future gone in an instant.

  He felt it snuffed out like a candle in the last breath of a cold concubine who should have been a wife, a first wife, at his side with honor and respect. Even in my thoughts I can’t say love. Thank you for that, Father.

  The memories of the night were already haunting him, as if somehow they could override the now and his perception of the world. He had never seen so much blood except his own.

  He turned and loosed the contents of his stomach at the thought, but kept walking. He wanted to see his sons and then realized he couldn’t remember where they slept. He laughed, and wiped his eyes.

  “What sort of father can’t find his children in his own home?” he spoke to the gloom.

  Farahi’s children lived in the same peril he did. All their short lives they’d been trapped in the shadow of treachery, always on the move, always careful, pretending it was a game. They were innocent except for Tane. Already Tane saw through the lies and made up his own. He’ll be a better king than me, Farahi thought, if I live long enough to see him crowned.

  Even in his misery Farahi glanced down the corridors for danger. He saw the servants had not followed him, and he wept now that he was alone. He took deep breaths and imagined a white-sand beach and a fire.

  Farahi emptied his mind, just as Ando had taught him.

  He succeeded for a time but soon couldn’t focus—unable to stop the knowledge that this would be the perfect time for assassins to strike. He growled and took a clay pot from its stand beside him, throwing it to shatter against the wall.

  “Can I just grieve as a man for one night?” he shouted. He breathed again and closed his eyes, and remembered his lessons—lessons he knew had saved his life a hundred times, and saved him still.

  “Only when you can act in the now while always thinking on the future will you be safe, Farahi. That is the way of kings,” Ando had told him.

  It all felt so long ago now. They’d sat dangling their feet in salt water, practicing focus and the three spheres of The Way—learning to imagine the future and all its possibility—to see the threads so clearly they felt real.

  Meanwhile the old Alaku patriarch and all his sons except Farahi had been fresh corpses, lying on some island or floating in the sea, killed by enemies or pirates, or just strong waves.

  Half a million Pyu had waited in stunned silence. Half a million mouths had asked ‘will there be war?’ as the new boy-king wept for his family—as he tried and failed not to be terrified, sitting in a place meant to make children men as his whole world watched, and plotted.

  “Who can I trust?” he’d asked Ando—the boy-who-was-not-a-boy—the ancient thing Master Lo said was a spirit, or a God, and had taught wise men and Alaku kings since any could recall.

  “Trust yourself, trust your own strengths,” he’d said, his hand resting on Farahi’s shoulder by lake Lancona as monks pretended not to watch.

  But Farahi wasn’t sure he had strengths, save perhaps for patience. His father had always preferred to call this ‘cowardice’.

  “A prince must act, Farahi. There are never perfect plans or perfect knowledge, but a prince must act as if it’s otherwise.”

  Farahi hadn’t agreed—not then, and not now. All his br
others liked to ‘act’—to chase girls, or pick studies and tutors and officer postings like dogs with bones while Farahi waited, and watched.

  ‘Would a man sail without direction?’ he’d wanted to argue. ‘What is the purpose?’ he’d wondered, but always been too shy to ask.

  “A king’s task is to stay alive and have sons. And then it’s to keep those sons in line. And then if there’s any time left he can do something useful.”

  The king had been speaking to his heir, of course, who’d been shoving spoons in his rice bowl like flags as his brothers giggled and Farahi watched it all in silence.

  Doing ‘something useful’ seemed to father the least important; keeping his sons in line the most.

  Farahi had—rather, used to have—seven brothers, all of them older. All had wives and children and positions in the navy and court. Some dabbled in trade, others traveled the world as diplomats, or fought personally at sea as pirate-hunting swashbucklers like father as a youth.

  And then, in a single afternoon, they were dead. All of them. Gone, like a stone in the sea.

  Seven princes and their mothers and sisters fed the fish with their bodies, all perished on a single ship because they thought they ruled the world, and acted without caution.

  Farahi was single back then. He was childless and deedless. He’d preferred books and lessons from old men with grand stories, or afternoons on the beach with his sisters watching children play in the waves. His father had no time for him, and even less interest.

  A ‘fat boy who acts like a girl’ he’d once heard him say to his mother. Farahi had felt her shame through the study door. He’d pretended it didn’t matter, but later slept with prostitutes to prove to himself he could, and never ate to excess again.

  Then one day his father was dead. Everything that turned the world and mattered and that people said he must be or do was gone. None of it mattered, as it turned out, just as Farahi predicted. His brothers, too, were dead. His mother was dead. His sisters were dead save for the one who hated all the world.

  Now Farahi staggered against the corridor wall, swearing as he stumbled over dirty clothing left in a pile. Just the thought of his sister could sometimes disturb him.

  Kikay the ‘Unhinged’ the court had called her in whispers after their family’s death. In truth, Farahi knew it wasn’t so. Kikay had always hated.

  She hadn’t been much damaged by her family’s death. She wasn’t love-sick from her old, politically useful husband’s passing. Even as a child her words had been venom for anyone not family. When Kikay rose to power at Farahi’s side, she was finally let loose.

  In the days and nights Farahi wept and wished for anything but what was thrust upon him, Kikay gave him strength. She too had been chosen by fate, at once wielding her charm and beauty and cunning to prop up her brother and help cement his rule.

  Farahi had been too weak back then, and he knew he’d be dead now without her. In those first years he’d never asked how or why when her reign of terror began. Instead he’d given the nod to admirals, lenders and loyal Orang Kaya to follow her orders as if they were his own.

  Where was ‘control your bloodthirsty sister’ in your list of kingly duties, father? Did you forget to mention that?

  Farahi sighed, and kept walking. These were old problems, old concerns. Though she had made many enemies and sewn the isles with mistrust, Kikay was not to blame for this night of fear and blood. Farahi was.

  Hali was dead. His love was dead. And she was dead because of him.

  At last Farahi found his way to the cellars—sandaled feet stepping sure though his vision blurred with tears. He banished the guard there without meeting his eyes, descending into the cool, moist vault of wood and wine. High, curved rafters stretched out nearly beyond sight, and in the great clutter of barrels he at last felt truly alone. He slumped against one of five hundred or more of the casks, a jug in each hand, and drank.

  His father had been a dangerous drunk. Farahi had seen his sour moods and foggy memory and judged him, so as a man he’d always abstained. But not tonight. And maybe never again.

  He drank and drank without waiting, until he was hot and spitting, pushing his face against anything cold, tearing at his hair as he thumped his head on beveled edges.

  “I’m sorry, Hali,” he whispered to the dark.

  He thought of their first night together—still unofficial, her with a face already lined from laughter, body taut with silks to show a figure carved from a young man’s dreams. She’d agreed to dinner and nothing more. She’d come with no chaperone, smiling and serene like the day he first saw her in the palace grounds. No doubt she’d expected a night of kingly charm and further wooing while her father waited to sign the official papers—a royal concubine, with royal children!

  She’d been thrilled, as most any common woman in the isles would have been thrilled. But not so her old father.

  Hali’s ancient patriarch was a humble merchant with a single ship. He knew he had no power, nor any influence to meddle with a king once his only daughter left his house. Hali had been the jewel of his eye, the last remnant of a wife died in birthing, and all he could do to protect her from intrigue and court was to say no.

  And he would have, too.

  Farahi had seen it in all his visions—the different ways he’d try to convince and fail, no matter the bribe or threat. She was just one woman, of course, and so he could have done nothing and found another concubine, or been more disciplined. Instead he acted, and lost his patience, and took her honor.

  Half-drunk, eager to impress, naive and still on the edge of womanhood, Hali had given in. For Farahi it was like a madness—a fall through sense with lust that had him stripping her dress off despite the weak, frightened protest. He’d undressed her right there at the dinner table.

  The servants had fled in surprised panic. Until that moment, their new king was young, but stoic. He had acted prim and correctly, with three wives he slept with rarely and properly in beds in one position said the best for making children. The servants had known only a king who did not drink or gamble or fondle serving girls or nobleman’s daughters—not a man who took commoners without consent.

  But that night he had. He’d moved in and kissed her when she’d said he was handsome, sweeping aside a dozen dishes to crash on the floor, throwing her on the table as he pawed at her clothes.

  “Not yet,” she’d begged, eyes wide, no doubt too afraid to resist a king. “Please be patient, Farahi!”

  Patient. The word itself had sent him diving off the cliff. ‘A prince must act’ he heard his father say, that disapproving face. He’d looked to the future as Ando taught him, which seemed even easier when he’d been a younger man. He saw this beautiful woman taken away because he did nothing, because he was patient, and did what was right. Or maybe that was all excuse.

  Maybe he had just smelled her skin and hair and saw her bare legs spread just so. Maybe he’d imagined a future where she sat naked and writhing against him, wet and eager, and couldn’t look away. One day he knew she would want him, and not like his wives or the women he’d paid. Perhaps he’d mixed that future into the present, ripping aside her small-clothes and thrusting as she said ‘no’ but all he heard from the future was ‘yes’.

  He’d kept her in the palace, afterward, and her father had no choice but to agree and make it official lest she be shamed.

  In his heart Farahi knew he’d raped her that night, or at least close enough. They had never spoken of it in this way, and Hali had smiled at him in the morning and stayed in his bed each night without tears. But he had done it. Yes he knew. And in so doing, he had killed her.

  The simple, wise merchant who’d had the courage to deny a king would get another royal letter. It would be solemn and sealed with royal wax, with all the same decorum and honor, and it would say he’d lost his daughter for the second time.

  That Farahi loved her and her son made no difference. Just as it made no difference that later, perhaps, sh
e had loved him too.

  Hali was dead because Farahi was a man, and a king; she was dead because he had acted when he should have thought, and because he had gambled. She had lived in one version of the future—a perfect future where all Farahi’s plans succeeded, and saved his world from death and madness.

  But now she was dead. And he wept for her, but not only her. For that greatest future died with her. Farahi wept for that, too.

  * * *

  Later, when the moon’s light mingled with the sun, and the wine jugs lay shattered on sanded wooden boards, Farahi rose.

  His mouth felt coated in dry slime, the air oppressive and thick. He felt clearer at least, himself again despite the pain. Hali’s death came back like a fresh cut re-opened, but he climbed the stairs from the cellar and pushed past the bodyguards who’d found him and stood watch.

  ‘I had some tea, Fara-che.’

  Hali’s maids were like her sisters. They went twice a year as guests to her family home when she’d visited her father. She spoiled them with gifts and time away and a hundred other things she shouldn’t have done with servants. Farahi knew they never would have betrayed her.

  He knew this almost for certain, even without his visions. But he had seen Hali die many times. Oh yes, he had seen it, and tried to prevent it—and he knew there were very few reasons for her deaths.

  The many possible futures stitched together in Farahi’s mind like the threads of a great quilt, smothering the man he wished he could be. It made him suspicious, perhaps even paranoid, for near every man and woman carried in their heart the capacity to betray.

  He knew his wives often sat for tea and fruit in the afternoon, and frequently invited Hali. No doubt this was a gesture of peace from practical women who’d seen their husband’s new-found joy. But he had never trusted them.

  Farahi’s wives were all political marriages. They were daughters of enemies or shaky allies he’d needed turned to solid friends, at least for awhile. And it was never his love they wanted, though they’d have taken it—it was his favor, and his influence.