by Jenna Rhodes
Her heart pounded so hard in her chest she thought it might burst through. She wanted to drop the scythe knife, but her fingers white-knuckled about the grip and she had to pry each one away. The blade fell to the ground with a dull thud, the only noise she could hear in the night-cloaked forest. She quickly bent and picked up the knife, scrubbing it dry on the grasses. The thing at her feet bled very little, as if its desiccated flesh absorbed all that it had devoured earlier and still found it inadequate. She prodded it. It felt . . . light. Not absurdly light, but insubstantial. She could drag him, she thought, to the fire pit. She could burn the evidence. Not that she wanted to, but she didn’t want to leave this undead and rotting thing here, so close to camp, where it might attract other predators, hunters that did not mind eating spoiled carrion.
Her netting of threads itched. She put a hand up, as if she could bat away a spiderweb even though she knew she could not. Her hand snapped on a single thread, a thread that felt cold in her hands, its color gone to gray, its life pulse shuttered. She tugged it. The headless body twitched again.
Rivergrace secured her knife and bent to do the unsavory, and it was not until she stood by the burning corpse that she realized Sevryn had not yet returned. She could not leave a fire raging on the cliffside; she dared not draw attention. She pulled on her anchored string to the dead man-thing’s soul and fed it to Cerat. The demon swelled in the body in victory, and its own fire burst open, eating through the remains far quicker than even a brisk stack of logs could. She watched sadly, knowing that she could not have saved this one, no matter what she had done, but a part of her hated that she’d let the demon claim him, after all. What would Sevryn think of her?
Rivergrace hugged her arms about her torso. If Sevryn did not return by dawn, she would have to go down into the city herself. If one of the rogues from Quendius’ army could make its way up here, the possibility that the man himself might be in league with the powers down there had grown much greater. She couldn’t leave Sevryn to an unknown fate. Her hand, unconsciously, settled back on the grip of her scythe knife.
Sevryn felt the shadows shred away from him reluctantly as his assailant marched him forward. His Voice halted in his throat. Much as he wanted to use it, if he were ever to be among Trevalka’s more powerful and elite Vaelinar, this would not be the time. It would not be prudent to reveal his nature before these two. He could feel Trevilara’s gaze slide over him, casual at first, and then a narrowed, close examination, as if she could see through his very skin. His eyes would not reveal him, but his ears most definitely showed that he had Vaelinar blood, if not strong, somewhere in his lineage. She would underestimate him because he did not have the multihued eyes of a strongly Talented Vaelinar.
Or so he hoped.
Their gazes locked just as the knife point in his kidney relaxed, ever so slightly, and he came to a stop in front of the queen, the heat from her barrier washing the front of him to stop at his throat. He could feel her weighing what she examined, shadows of thoughts chasing each other like silvery clouds in eyes of jewel green. Forming judgments and thinking of tests. He’d never seen eyes of her color, cold and warm at the same time. Her smooth face showed no sign of any decisions she had made, but her eyes gleamed with a vivid alertness. Let her think anything but eliminating him out of hand. He watched her puzzle over him as if he were made of pieces she could glide back and forth over a table while she put him together—and undid him.
This was what a good ruler did, although she had been far from a good ruler. Perhaps he meant strong ruler, he thought to himself, letting himself flinch under her assessment as a lesser man would. If she had any inkling of what she faced, of his birthright, of his training on Kerith under both the Vaelinar and the Kobrir, she’d drop him on the spot, no questions asked.
He had to live long enough to determine what weaknesses and strengths Trevilara might hold, and then escape to Rivergrace.
“Come here,” she said.
Her soft tones wound about him, seductive and dark, sweet and savory, but he did not hear Talent in them. Merely the self-assured and sultry confidence of a woman who knew just what she had to work with, and how a man would respond to her. He thought of Tressandre ild Fallyn and that same tone and assurance. It hadn’t worked on him for her, and it wouldn’t work on him for Trevilara, but why not let her think it did?
He pushed a foot forward as if spellbound, but did so cautiously so that the kidney stabber would not spring back into action and careful of the wall of flames the queen kept so vigilantly ignited around her. He did not expect her to quell the barrier and she did not, although she opened a tiny pathway through and as he stepped into it, the Raymy began to hiss and wail at him, a warbling of belligerence and misery. Sevryn had to believe she had a bit more in mind for him than simple contamination but even if that resulted, he also had to believe Rivergrace could take care of him, as long as he got back to her.
Flames licked up the side of him as he passed through, close but not close enough to ignite his clothes though the heat brought beads of sweat to his forehead that ran like raindrops down his face as he slowly moved toward his goal. Closer, he could see lines of age about the corners of her mouth, in her gracefully arched neck, and in her hand which she held out to him in a half-beckoning gesture. Air sucked up from the ground in oven temperatures, passing over him and whirling upward, drawing faint wisps of smoke with it. Whatever she burned, it left little behind—no debris or ash and only the faintest trace of smoke. He felt on the edge of suffocating. Did she burn the air itself?
Whatever Trevilara did, it effectively kept everyone back, and those other prisoners cowed and on their knees as they awaited being called to her as well. It would not eat a well-placed bolt or arrow, but the updraft might well carry the instrument so far off target as to make a hit near impossible. Anything else would be defeated. She protected herself well. Perhaps she told her advisers and those close to her that it was to keep the plague burned away, but he had little doubt she used it against assassins as well. Poisoning? All she needed were food tasters kept close. This woman would be near impossible to kill. He wondered what she did for lovers. The corners of her eyes crinkled faintly as she observed him. Yes, she took lovers, the expression on her face clearly wondering if she might do that with him. She tilted her head and gave a ghost of a smile.
“Who are you?”
His throat closed for a second, parched dry, and his nose stung with the heat, before he managed, “Dardanon.” He wouldn’t, couldn’t give her his first name. Names had power and power in this or any other world could be spun into great, life-losing, consequences. He felt his heart pinch tightly as she caught onto that part of his name he did give her and tested it for its truth. It passed. And still the flames swept near him, close enough to embrace, and Sevryn felt himself drying inside out, as though he’d been staked out in the sere Kobrir desert and left to die. He realized then that the fire consumed him. Not her, but himself and anyone else who might step within its perimeter. He put a hand out, certain that if he touched her, he would find protection, but Trevilara pulled her hand back, ever so slightly, and he could move no closer.
“Do you know what beasts these are?”
Sevryn froze. Did the population here know of the Raymy or had she bred them only to send into Kerith? And even if the population were familiar, what would they be called? He had no clue. He licked chapped lips. “They are death, my queen.”
She shook the vial she still held. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. Are you brave, Dardanon?”
“Middling.”
That brought a throaty laugh out. “Indeed? Not too brave, but honest. I might find a use for you, better than this.” She extended her hand then, catching him by the cuff of his sleeve and drawing him to her side, and as she did, a coolness swept him. So this second layer was how she protected herself and so like his own Rivergrace, the gift of water and fire in one person. Only she seemed
far more in command of her gifts than his love was of hers.
They must never meet.
He let Trevilara have a crooked smile. “However I can serve.”
“Pick one, then. I have a mind to fill the rest of my evening more pleasantly.”
“Pick . . .” She wanted him to choose a subject for her experiment. He wanted to do no such thing but now, next to Queen Trevilara, he seemed to be the center of attention. He jerked a thumb toward one of the faces he could see through the flames.
“Good.” She nodded at her guardsmen and opened the breach in her barrier wide to let all three men through. The subject in question would not get to his feet and began sobbing into his palms as they dragged him forward on his knees. Trevilara tucked her vial inside her bodice and bent over the cage, a steely silver blade in her hand. Both Raymy were dead before Sevryn could blink, the knife going in the eyes of the one and the ear of the other.
Her guardsmen opened the cage door and pushed the sobbing man inside, where he tried to roll into a ball in the one clear corner.
Trevilara shook her head. “It’s not done that way.” She jerked her hand and the other three were pitched inside quickly, the cage filled body to body. She motioned for her men to set it on its rounded side and begin to trundle it like a wheel. The dead mixed with the living with bloody, mucus-covered efficiency as they rolled the cage out of their sight, the men wailing and begging for her mercy.
“Tomorrow,” Trevilara promised with a great deal of satisfaction, “they ought to be contaminated enough to try the elixir and see what, if any, effects it has.” She swept her appraising gaze over Sevryn again. “In the meantime, I have another test for you, I think. One of great stamina.”
“My Queen,” protested a man outside the flame’s shadows, one he could barely see but who was undoubtedly the kidney sticker.
“I know what I’m doing,” Trevilara answered him loftily. “I suggest you go about your business. Pay the town guards and return their wagon. Set guards up for the night. Retire to your rooms.”
She pulled Sevryn’s arm up over her own and swept away down the lane toward an enormous manor house that emerged from the night. “The Lord Mayor is indisposed, I’m told, so we have the run of the second floor tonight. You won’t mind, I’m sure.”
Actually, that would make things a great deal more convenient for him. As they passed the first soaring threshold, she quenched her flames and the night suddenly became a good deal darker as she drew him inside.
“Tell me how you did that bit with the shadows?”
“Oh, lady, that was nothing. A trifle. The only bit of anything I inherited besides the point of my ears. It does help me earn a living, however.”
“You’re a thief.” Pleased, Trevilara chuckled. A wing of her dark, silky hair fell over their arms and he could smell the scent of her shampoo and oils, with a strong underlying smell of burning. “I might let you steal a bit of something from me tonight.”
“You’re too gracious.”
She took the curving staircase. “I am bored. I am never gracious, and you would do well to remember that.” She took the stairs quickly, familiarly, and he practically had to run to stay in step with her. No one followed them. Another stair or two and he would see how many men awaited ahead of them.
She moved onto the landing, out onto granite flooring. Soot marks stained its polished beauty. Banks of windows looked upon them like a multitude of mirrors. He sent a quick glance about them. Alone, save for himself. Trevilara turned on him with a sudden look of triumph in her expression. “And now,” she said, “we shall see what you are truly made of,” and dropped her hold on him. Flames roared into being, and he caught within them. She meant to test him, and he had no intention of giving her the satisfaction.
Red-hot, he opened his Voice and shouted, “Arise!”
His Talent hit the barrier and fueled it in answer. The fire answered with a roar. Its flames soared up, to the vaulted ceiling of the corridor, driving Trevilara back and he turned on heel and dove headfirst out of the nearest window, an inferno licking at his heels.
“And that’s how you got away from her?”
“After her, the few guardsmen below were relatively easy to deal with. And I was able to steal not one but two horses.” He nodded at the two horses cropping contentedly on grasses while the dawn clouds began to shred on the horizon.
“Clever, using her own fire against her.”
“Oh, not against her, she’s too well shielded. But she hadn’t a chance of seeing me or what I was up to until she gained control, and all I needed was a moment or two.” He paused. “She’s dangerous, Grace. Without a conscience and powerful.”
“We’ll have to keep that in mind.”
• • •
Rivergrace tucked her heels close to her bottom as she sat next to him. He passed a quick kiss over her cheekbone. “And that’s what I was up to. Mind telling me what we’re burning at the old campsite? It stinks to cold hell.”
“A body, although it should be done far quicker than regular flesh and blood.” She pointed at the second fire, a clearing away.
His eyebrow rose.
She shrugged. “Time for me to explain,” and so she did. He watched the desiccated body burn, sparks crackling and spitting skyward.
“Desert dry. It took nothing to set it alight.”
“I don’t want to think about it.”
She became quiet. She reached for him and tugged his shirt off without protest, then took his leggings and put both in a pannikin of water and began to scrub the sticky blood and soot off them, moving more by touch and smell in the darkness than by sight. When she finished, she hung them over nearby branches where they dripped to the ground. Then she cleaned her own clothes and shivering, lay down next to Sevryn, holding up a blanket for them both.
“We have to make plans for Quendius,” he said to her ear, his breath tickling the fine, loose hairs about her face.
“We are doing nothing until our clothes are dry.”
It seemed they had the beginnings of a plan.
Chapter
Ten
Kerith
TWO YEARS GONE. Bistane slowed his horse as it moved down the inner slopes leading to Larandaril’s innermost valleys, and he rubbed a hand to the back of his neck. He didn’t know if he could actually smell the smoke and blood hanging in the air as he rode down, but he couldn’t be sure—the battle which had been fought here stayed that crystal clear in his memories, as did its consequences. Two years since Lariel fell in his arms in a drug/poison-induced coma for which he had no antidote but had been promised there would be one. Time he had spent watching the Warrior Queen whom he loved look more than dead but far less than in peaceful slumber. Did she fight the betraying ild Fallyn in her unconscious state? Rail at Sevryn for saving her life even as he put the poison that still consumed her into her system? And yet, for all the days he spent taking care of her and her kingdom, and his own, he could hardly believe the count of days into years.
If Sevryn Dardanon were about, Bistane would gladly throttle him because he had trusted the man and then Sevryn had disappeared beyond any knowable reach. Rivergrace had gone after Quendius through the portal to the old world and taken Sevryn in hot pursuit with her. Had the young half-blood who had been Lara’s faithful Hand before being accused of betrayal even survived the transit between worlds? Bistane had found no clue. No word sent back by any means of the welfare of Sevryn and his ladylove, Rivergrace. It was not a journey Bistane would have recommended, not following upon the heels of an Undead army and its head Reaper, but Sevryn had always had a destiny that Bistane could not quite fathom. Perhaps crossing the Bridge had been part of it. He would look again, today, for signs of life beyond the portal but hadn’t much hope. The rip into the fabric of their world remained open, if only barely so. No one had managed to close it. And, by the grace of whate
ver Gods had awakened on Kerith, neither had anyone been able to force it wide open. He prayed that he would find it unchanged this day.
His horse sidled down off the last gentle slope and broke into a canter, without urging, over flatter ground. He settled more easily into the saddle as the site of the battlefield came into view.
His mount pranced aside from the great, black gashes across the meadows where pyres had burned for days, grass still not growing back, not even the slimmest yellow-green stalk. Perhaps there was something inimical in Raymy blood that poisoned the soil. The inside of his nostrils stung, as if he, too, could scent whatever the horse winded that upset it. It would get worse the closer he rode. The wind shifted, imperceptible particles floating across his line of sight that ought to be pollens or small insects wafting above the flowers and grasses but looked almost like ash.
He brushed the back of his hand over his nose to abolish the stinging and, taking the horse in hand, guided him wider around the expanse than he’d intended. It mattered little. He would cross the tent city which had sprung up on the edge of the meadow whether he wished to or not. Squatters determined to worship the anomaly which might or might not lead them back to a world that the traitor Daravan declared had been their original home. They’d no proof of it, but it was clear that the gap had opened to and from a somewhere, and why not home? Why not a paradise that malcontents everywhere invariably hungered for? He had issued orders for the Returnists to decamp and return to their own lands; he had been studiously disobeyed with every order, no matter how forcibly presented. Lara would strike him down for letting squatters flourish in her realm, especially Returnists who quoted Tressandre ild Fallyn from dawn till dusk. He held a certain authority but not one that went unchallenged. He could keep the city from growing but not enough to sweep them altogether out of the valley.
