by Peace, Cas
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Other titles in the Artesans of Albia series:
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Albian Characters
Andaryan Characters
Realms of the World
Terms
Artesan ranks and their attributes
Artesans of Albia Fantasy Series:
Praise for the Artesans of Albia series:
“Cas Peace’s Artesans of Albia trilogy immediately sweeps you away. The series propels you into a world so deftly written that you see, feel, touch, and even smell each twist and turn. These nesting novels are evocative, hauntingly real. Smart. Powerful. Compelling. The trilogy teems with finely drawn characters, heroes and villains and societies worth knowing; with stories so organic and yet iconic you know you’ve found another home—in Albia. So start reading now. I, for one, can’t wait to find out what will happen next.
~Janet E. Morris, author of The Sacred Band of Stepsons series;
the Dream Dancer series; I, the Sun.
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“I have just loved this entire series. Cas Peace is a master storyteller, providing a depth and breadth of information about her worlds and their people that is just staggering. Her characters are complex and multi-dimensional, and I have very much enjoyed reading this series. I am also looking forward with great anticipation to her next novel in this series. I heartily recommend this series to anyone who enjoys epic fantasy, strong world-building, and beautiful storytelling. Highly recommended!”
~K Sozaeva, Amazon Vine Voice and Top 1000 Reviewer.
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“As a fan of the late great David Gemmel I think I have finally found an author who is similarly inspiring. It’s how fantasy should be written. Less about the world building and more about the characters. I didn’t want to stop reading.”
~ML. H, Amazon reviewer.
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“A superb read. Non-stop intrigue and action. I literally could not put it down. Anyone needing a good series to read should take up Book 1 and get started. Cas Peace has created an unforgettable hero(ine) in Sullyan, and a world that ranks alongside Middle Earth and Westeros.”
~David C Snell, Amazon reviewer.
Published by Albia Publishing 2015
First American Paperback Edition
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control and does not assume responsibility for author or third party websites or their content.
Copyright ©2015 by Caroline Peace
Editing by Diane Dalton
Cover art by Mikey Brooks, www.insidemikeysworld.com
Author photo by Dave Peace
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Visit Cas Peace at her author website: www.caspeace.com
ISBN-10: 1-939993-68-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-939993-68-7
Dedication
To Becca, many grateful thanks for all your hard work!
Acknowledgements
As always, my very grateful thanks to everyone who has helped me with, or who has read (and especially left a nice review of) my Artesans of Albia series. I could not have done it without you.
To Dave; to my parents, Barbara and Dennis; to my brother Dave: I love you all!
To Milly and Milo: thanks for all the cuddles and walks.
To my editor Diane Dalton: special thanks for your expertise and for saving me from potential embarrassment.
To Mikey Brooks: I do believe that this is your best cover yet! I adore it.
To NTN (David Snell, David Shepherd) and to Susan Mallett: many grateful thanks for the music and the fun.
To Bob Watson: for website advice and maintenance.
To Janet Morris: special thanks for that wonderful endorsement.
To anyone who has reTweeted, posted to Facebook, or otherwise helped spread the word through social media, and to anyone who has taken the trouble to write and post a review.
I hope you enjoy this book!
Other titles in the Artesans of Albia series:
Trilogy One: Artesans of Albia
Book One: King’s Envoy
Book Two: King’s Champion
Book Three: King’s Artesan
Trilogy Two: Circle of Conspiracy
Book One: The Challenge
Book Two: The Circle
Book Three: Full Circle
Trilogy Three: Master of Malice
Book One: The Scarecrow
Chapter One
Lerric, aging client-king of Bordenn, stood in the dark doorway. A damp, noisome smell assailed his nose, the drip of water reached his ears. Lerric shivered, his reaction not wholly due to the chill in the air.
Deep within the lightless room he detected a hint of movement. Creaking leather, a hiss of pain. Lerric stepped one pace farther from the door’s protection and raised his lamp. As soon as the faint yellow light touched—and flinched from—the dark form huddled on the truckle bed along the far wall, a vicious curse sounded. A crooked hand flew up to shield eyes that could no longer bear good, honest light.
“Put that out, you bloody fool! Would you blind me entirely?”
“Ah … your pardon.”
Lerric shuttered the lamp and gloom reclaimed the cell. When his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, the king assessed the cell’s lone occupant.
Habitually dapper and well-fed, his body had assumed scarecrow proportions. A parody of his former self. The fastidiously clean and expensive raiment was replaced by a thin, shabby robe of dusty black. A darker blot amid the shadows, it barely disguised the gaunt frame it covered.
Gone were the arrogant swagger and confident poise, replaced by a savage desire for revenge, a thirst for retribution. Three years of incarceration and hopelessness, of nursing raging grievances, hadn’t lessened the pious fervor and deeply-held beliefs. Thirty-six interminable months of imprisonment and deprivation had served only to deepen his determination to rid the land of those to whom he owed his life. Those without whose mercy he would have suffered a horrific and agonizing death.
His eyes, damaged and unable to focus, peered peevishly at his visito
r as he levered his skeletal frame upright. The tortured creature that had once been Baron Hezra Reen stood, leaning on a wooden cane as gnarled and lined as the liverish skin of his face, and bared his yellow, decaying teeth at the well-dressed man by the door. His host.
“Well? Are you going to stand there all day gawping, Lerric?”
His harsh tones lashed the older man. Lerric winced and pried his eyes from the cane clasped so tightly in the other’s hand, thinking—hoping—it must be a trick of the gloom that made it glow a gory red.
His daughter had convinced him that this withered being held the key to avenging her disgrace, yet Reen’s shocking physical aspect and aura of menace eroded Lerric’s confidence in the wisdom of allowing Sofira her way. How could she still profess to love this ill-tempered, wrinkled shell of a man, this ranting, obsessive bigot? He only had her word that the scarecrow’s mind was still sharp, undamaged by years of incarceration. After all, Sofira only had his letters on which to base her assertion.
It suddenly crossed Lerric’s mind that those letters could have been written by someone else purely to convince Sofira of the Baron’s sanity. Although who on that gods-forsaken island—or was that a contradiction in terms?—Reen could have found to write them for him, the aging king could not imagine. It was nothing less than a miracle he had even found a carrier for his messages, given his status as prisoner and traitor. But gold was gold, and there was always someone willing to risk the High King’s wrath for a price.
And even though he had played his part, Lerric had yet to learn the full story behind his unwelcome guest’s liberation.
Despite his curiosity, Lerric had been reluctant to make this visit. His own men had retrieved Reen from captivity, brought him south laboriously by boat and by land after plucking him, half-dead and raving, from the sucking arms of the sea. The operation had gone off without a hitch, yet something about their eyes and manner had alerted Lerric to the possibility not all was as it should be. His men had been unwilling—or unable—to speak of what disturbed them, and it had not escaped the king’s notice that none of them had come near him since. Two of them seemed to prefer the uncomfortable duties of the watchtower, while the third had not been seen at all. Remembering their furtive looks and uneasy shifting as they reported Reen’s arrival, Lerric experienced a shudder of unexplained fear.
Placing the shuttered lamp on the floor, he advanced into the cell. The scarecrow watched him approach, peering myopically, beckoning Lerric closer within range of his failing eyesight. Almost mesmerized, Lerric obeyed.
The unimaginable tortures Reen had suffered during his exile, agonies which had warped and twisted his body and rendered his skin painfully sensitive to daylight, had turned the once-arrogant little man into a human mole. Reclusive, given to fits of ranting interspersed with hours of religious chanting, he was a figure of nightmare. Lerric wondered what his daughter’s reaction would be when she finally saw the man she professed to still love. The man for whom Lerric had agreed to pawn his kingdom—and maybe, he thought with an icy shiver, his very life.
Sofira had assured her father she and Reen had long since forgiven each other their mutual betrayal at Reen’s sham of a trial. Reen understood she had only been trying to protect her position and her children. He knew she was only posturing when she had insisted upon his execution; she would never have let it be carried out. She would have rescinded the order had she retained her crown. And she knew, she avowed—although her father heard the hidden note of outrage quivering just below the surface—that Reen’s impeachment of her that was the cause of her losing her husband, her children, and the crown that was rightfully hers, had been forced from him under severe duress by their powerful and scheming archenemy. The enemy who was still riding high on the triumph of that success, and who still held the High King in the palm of her hand.
“Sit, sit,” grumbled the scarecrow, waving a bony claw toward the only chair in the room. Lerric sat, his aging bones aching in the moldy damp, feeling far less a king and more the supplicant under the fervid light in the other’s dark-gray eyes. Casting a look at the leather-sprung truckle bed as the wasted man sat once more, Lerric summoned the courage to speak.
“Are you sure this is what you want? Wouldn’t you be more comfortable in the palace, or even a private house? I have plenty. I could vacate one for you. No one need know you were there—”
“Fool!”
The cane’s heel struck the stone floor with such a violent crack it made Lerric jump. The word was spat with force and Lerric fell silent. The wizened claws gripping the cane turned white with the preternatural strength of their grip, and the lined, hawk-like face thrust close. The all but useless eyes, their whites now yellow and veined, snapped with anger and a thin line of spittle hung from the cracked lips.
“Have I not told you I must hide?” the dreadful voice wheezed. “Have I not told you the reason why I may never walk in daylight? Did I not tell you why I must languish like this, hidden deep in the rock of the earth? If I do not they will find me, Lerric; they will root me out like hounds on a scent and tear me to pieces. They are merciless. They are godless. They are vengeful heretics. I have told you all this, and yet you offer me your comforts? Pah!”
Lerric leaned away from the spray of spittle that accompanied this rant. There was an unholy light in the feral eyes, a sly twist to the mouth. He was surely unhinged. What had he done, thought Lerric, what had he unleashed by giving way to his daughter’s tearful pleading? Oh, but it was too late now—far too late.
“No,” the wheezing scarecrow went on, leaning back, the demonic glint fading, “I must stay well hidden. And I no longer need what you would call ‘comforts,’ not after three years of incarceration in a living hell. She saw to that. But the tables are turning. I have learned why I was seemingly abandoned by my God and left to rot. I am the stronger for it, believe me. I have learned secrets they’ve never even dreamed of. Secrets they wouldn’t want me to learn. Oh, yes.”
The emaciated form leant forward, crooking one long-nailed finger under Lerric’s nose. “I am the stronger now. Do you hear me? I have unlocked the powers granted me by God; granted me through suffering in order to do his will. I have the power to defeat them—to defeat her—and no one can stop me. With your support we can finally drive them out, rid our lands of their blasphemous ways, their unnatural powers, and restore your daughter—my Queen—to her rightful place. With me to guard and guide her, we will be invincible. No one will touch us, no one will harm us. You will see your daughter reign supreme and all Albia will revere her!
“Once she and I are wed—ah! Then, Lerric, then you will see!”
Lerric hid his face in his hands to blot out the terrible sight of this gaunt figure, scrawny arms raised high, the thin and threadbare robe falling back from limbs devoid of muscle, skin devoid of life, bone devoid of blood. Horror stole over Lerric as he listened to the creature he had agreed to champion, and to whom his beloved daughter had pledged her body. For surely it was no longer human, this skeletal, ranting fanatic; and for one redeeming moment Lerric was sorely tempted to slide his dagger from its sheath and plunge it into the breast of the treacherous creature that had once called itself Baron Hezra Reen.
And maybe it would have saved Albia, Lerric, and many, many others much misery, anguish, and horror.
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“Daughter, forgive me, but I must ask you again; are you sure, are you completely sure this is what you want? You haven’t seen him yet, you haven’t spoken with him. I have to tell you, he is not the man you remember, no matter what his letters suggested.”
Lerric was sitting with Sofira on the bed in her luxuriously appointed chamber, autumn sunlight streaming through the window. Its warmth helped alleviate the horror he still felt after his earlier meeting with the creature Sofira had begged him to save. The king held fast to his daughter’s hands, mainly to disguise the tremble of his own, but also to convey his intense unease. He looked earnestly into her hard gr
ay eyes and willed her to hear his concern. Despite his fear, he was loath to reveal precisely what had taken roost in that fetid cell far beneath the palace floors.
Sofira stared back at him, hearing his care for her, seeing his distress. But it seemed she could not understand his concern, for her brittle eyes glazed with tears. “Don’t you want me to have back what was taken from me, Father?” Her colorless face was animated with hurt. “You know how unhappy I’ve been since I was forced to return here. You know how I ache for my children.”
Lerric nodded. “I know it’s been hard for you. At least at the castle Elias allowed you access to them—”
“Access?” Sofira snarled. “What use is access to me? Never allowed to be alone with them, never to take them out of my prison, never to walk in the park with them? He doled out time with them as if giving tidbits to a dog, and kept me kenneled like one, too. And I a Queen! How could you condone that?”
Lerric thought better of reminding his daughter she had ceased to be a queen when Elias dissolved their marriage. And in light of what she had done—misled by Reen or not, she couldn’t pretend ignorance of the risks she had run—Lerric considered her fortunate not to have suffered the death penalty. Not that he could tell her that, either.
He spoke soothingly. “I didn’t say I condoned it, daughter, and you know I never wanted to see you separated from Eadan and Seline. It’s just that … Sofira, are you absolutely convinced Hezra is sane?”
Sofira froze. She stared at her father, a biting retort on her lips. But then she realized he was only trying to protect her, clumsy though he was. She relaxed her spine and smiled.
“Oh, Father, of course I’m sure. Do you think I wouldn’t know if something had affected his mind? It’s a clever ruse, a ploy he’s devised to make them relax their vigilance. Didn’t you read his letters? Didn’t you feel the sincerity in his words, his deep desire to restore all I’ve lost? And don’t forget, my restoration will also benefit you. You’ll be more than recompensed for your trouble and the support you continue to give us. We’ll not forget you or Bordenn when I am once again Albia’s High Queen.”
