A King's Caution

by Brennan C. Adams

  In the known world, no other nation could contest Auden’s sovereignty. The ruins to the north suggested that, at some point, a country may have existed and thrived beyond the mountains. Auden’s former neighbor, Lyzencroft, had also gone the way of that supposed ancient civilization, nothing but dead cities and wild forests. The small corner of the continent where the Esela had carved out a haven was nothing but a desolation as well. That left only one significant player on the board: Doldimar.

  With the Dark Lord disappeared and no way to track him, however, Oswin was at a loss as to how to proceed with his investigation. One of Ring's contacts had found their only clue in the gardens, the one portion of the palace grounds which had been both unmonitored and crowded the night of its discovery. Learning who’d dropped the flask from all who’d visited the gardens would be impossible.

  Given that, Oswin had been forced to lay low and watch for suspicious activity. Activity such as what Eledis, Gistrick, and Marcuset currently displayed.

  “Can we help you, spymaster?” Eledis asked.

  He’d been silently staring for far too long. Tiredly blinking, he resisted the urge to rub his eyes.

  “Do you have designs on the palace spires, Eledis?” he asked.

  “Not currently. The stairs to the spires’ lowest rooms would play havoc on a potential resident’s legs. Why?”

  “I need them for the King’s latest pet project. I wanted to ensure they’d be vacant when our guests begin to arrive,” Oswin answered. “If I require anything else of you, I’ll let you know.”

  He made to depart.

  “Guests?” Eledis asked behind him. “What guests?”

  Oswin fixed him with a stern stare. “It’s not my place to say.”

  It really wasn’t. He carried out the King’s will in whatever way Raimie decided to utilize him and didn’t need to explain his actions to those who chose to question them. Let Raimie explain to those three magic phobic men how he planned to gather, house, and train who knew how many primeancers at the palace.

  First unpleasant task completed, Oswin proceeded to the much more anticipated chore. He knocked on Ring’s door in the maid’s quarter and stepped back, prepared to wait, but it opened much more quickly than he’d expected. An unknown man scurried out and away, only briefly pausing at the sight of Oswin glaring at him. Ring soon followed, hair disheveled and makeup smeared. Oswin’s guts twisted into a knot, and he folded his arms behind his back to hide the fists.

  “Learn anything useful?” he asked.

  “Not in the slightest.” She yawned. “He was boring in the sack too. What a waste of time!”

  Oswin said nothing, afraid of what might emerge if he opened his mouth.

  “Would you like to come in?” she asked, leaning forward so he could look down her blouse if he desired.

  “I’ve a new assignment for you,” he said, eyes firmly fixed above her head.

  She straightened, arms crossing. “But I was so enjoying tracking our spy,” she pouted.

  “Ring…”

  “Fine. What is it?” she snapped.

  “You’re aware of the list of potential primeancers Thumb and Pointer have comprised while on their search?” he asked.

  “You mean the hunt for the Dark Lord we’ll never find? Yeah, I know all about the silly quest and their extra duties,” she replied. “At least they’re keeping track of potential threats while on their tryst.”

  “Ring, those are your-”

  “-family, I know.” She grimaced. “I’m jealous, Oswin.”

  His heart fluttered at his name on her lips, but he forced his mouth to frown.

  “Middle,” she corrected with an eye roll.

  “I want you to go to these potential primeancers and invite them to the palace,” Oswin informed her.

  “Oo….” Ring breathed, eyes lighting up. “What’s the King want with them?”

  “Not your concern,” Oswin told her. “You have your orders. Sweet talk the people on the list to come here. It should prove an interesting challenge for you. They won’t want to come, and you can’t force them if they say no.”

  She beamed, the last of her early morning hostility vanishing with the gesture. “I look forward to it.”

  “Good. If you need any further explanation, I’ll be in my office-”

  “Middle?” she interrupted. “When was the last time you slept?”

  “What do you mean?” Oswin asked with a fake smile.

  She stepped closer, sending his heart leaping like a rabbit from his chest, and wiped her thumb under his eyes.

  “As I thought,” she mumbled, inspecting the powder on her finger. “Come on.”

  Snatching his wrist, she dragged him into her room.

  “Ring,” Oswin hissed as the door thumped closed behind them, “this is highly inappropriate! We can’t-”

  Shoving him onto her mussed bed, she sternly pointed at him. “Stay.”

  With that, Ring fled behind the screen separating her room in twain, and Oswin considered bolting. His thoughts whirled, confused by her sudden initiative. Most of him found escape through the unblocked door incredibly appealing, but the insignificant part of his heart he’d kept concealed from Ring paralyzed his limbs.

  She quickly returned, a small bottle in her hand.

  “This will work much better than whatever shitty powder you’ve currently using,” she informed him, placing the bottle on the bed’s edge. “Now, remove the vest and shirt and lay, belly first, on the mattress.”

  The request terrified Oswin. Sure, he fancied Ring, more so than he reasonably should, but a string of lovers’ murders trailed her. Did he want to put himself in such a vulnerable position with the female member of Raimie’s Hand?

  Making an exasperated noise, she straddled him, hands reaching for the top button of his vest.

  Alouin, she was close! With her eyes focused on her task, he could inspect the cascade of her red hair, breathe in her musky, sweat-tinged sweetness, and imagine caressing her flawless skin.

  “Arms up,” she commanded.

  When he followed instructions, clothing lifted from him, and by the time it was over his head, Ring had climbed from his lap.

  “Face down,” she demanded, pointing at the pillows. “Now.”

  Upsetting her further would be unwise, and if Oswin was honest, murder by her hand wasn’t the worst possible way to die. Once he'd arranged himself, she perched on the small of his back. Her fingers commenced rubbing and stroking his shoulders and neck.

  “So many tensed muscles, Middle. That’s bad for your health,” she admonished. “Try to relax.”

  Calming was an exceptionally challenging assignment when the woman he desired pinned him to her bed, but Oswin did his best. He focused on her fingers and the heels of her palms, on where she placed them and how she moved them to release strain from his body. Fairly quickly, he drifted, not quite asleep, not quite awake. Ring moved to rest on his thighs, beginning her work on his lower back, and he moaned.

  “Ha, figures,” she mumbled. “You would carry your tension here.”

  What she did was pure magic. Muscles he hadn’t known he possessed loosened at her touch.

  “Why do you refuse to call me by name, Oswin?” she asked. “You did when we met, but ever since then…”

  She trailed off. Well did he remember the moment of which she spoke. Even beleaguered as she’d been at the time, Oswin had beheld Ring as beauty’s purified essence. The way she’d faced the men who wished to murder her, the defiant tilt of her chin, the glint in her hazel eyes: a memory which clearly blazed in his brain. He often wondered if he’d fallen for her then or if it had been in the subsequent years spent working together.

  “Did you know you were my first mission as a member of the Hand?” he asked, voice muffled by a pillow.

  “I always thought so. You were very inexperienced at the time.” She laughed.

  “I should never have tried to fight so many guards at once,” Oswin groaned a
t the recollection, “but you were desperate, and I couldn’t let them kill you. Using your name as I did was a slip. Even if we know each other’s names, the members of a Hand are never to employ them. We can’t have a strong personal attachment to anyone.”

  Ring silently released the pressure on his legs, and Oswin thought she might have completed her self-imposed task, but then, she removed his boots. While she began to work her magic on his feet, Oswin propped onto his elbows and retrieved Little’s report. He’d yet to finish it.

  “Do you ever stop working?” Ring asked with a strained laugh.

  “No,” Oswin muttered. “Maybe I’ll get a break when I’m dead.”

  The fingers on the balls of his feet paused for several seconds before resuming, and Oswin started the report from the beginning once more.

  “You know Raimie will never remember you, right?” Ring whispered. “Marcuset told us the accident did something to his head.”

  “I’ve accepted that fact,” Oswin acknowledged, “but he’s Raimie. I know you two didn’t spend much time together before his exile, but he was my best friend. In my entire life, pretending not to know him upon his return was the most difficult deception I’ve ever-”

  “Middle, you don’t have to explain to me,” she said. “I had two reasons for joining this crazy quest to Auden. One was for Raimie, and the other was-”

  Oswin’s entire body stiffened, Ring’s hard work destroyed in an instant.

  “What is it?” she asked from a far distant place.

  He checked the report’s date. Two weeks ago. How the hell had he slipped so badly? Scrambling from Ring’s bed, Oswin hastily redressed.

  “Middle! What is it?!” Ring demanded.

  “Read it for yourself,” he growled, shoving the report into her chest, “and begin your assignment, Ring.”

  Before he left, Oswin stumbled to a halt. “And thank you,” he told her.

  She tossed the bottle he’d forgotten at him, and he stashed it while he ran.

  This haste was stupid! What would he do? Sprint toward Qena and hope to encounter them on the way?

  Oswin laughed, startling a maid. Maybe he couldn’t help at this exact moment, but he could prepare the palace for their arrival. His preeminent task would be to find a room which would provide better rest than a bedroll perched on glass above a chasm.

  He should visit the study to retrieve said bedroll so Raimie could find something familiar in his new room. The fastest route to the study was via a shortcut through the service passages. The path would require a turn onto the steadily nearing hallway on the left.

  Something hard and fleshy impeded his progress, and Oswin lost his balance. He went down in a tumble of limbs, landing on whatever had caused the fall. Even with the breath knocked from his lungs, long drilled instincts took over.

  He rolled to his feet, dagger in hand, before groaning and clutching his chest. A pained wheeze responded from the ground, and while searching for threats, Oswin’s rapidly roving gaze tracked over Little’s stunned and scarred face. Taking a shuddering breath, the youngest of the Hand followed his spymaster’s example.

  If Little was back, then-

  Weak laughter drifted down the hall.

  “Gods, that hurts,” Raimie groaned. “I’m sorry to laugh. Two members of the Hand collapsing so spectacularly was too much for me to resist. Did you two hurt anything?”

  Alouin, how could he ask that?

  A crutch kept Raimie upright, its support unmistakably necessary considering how heavily he leaned on it. He’d tried to lessen the severity of the damage, walking on his own and pleasantly smiling, but the act wouldn’t fool anyone.

  Ele’s light thickly clung to him like a halo which engulfed his entire body. Raimie never used his powers so blatantly. He wasn’t afraid to display primeancy, but that he relied on it simply to stand told Oswin how unwell he truly was.

  Even with Ele’s help, however, Raimie looked like death warmed over. His skin, where it peeked from his uniform, was pasty white, veins painted in stark relief underneath, and a sheen of sweat coated him.

  Oswin tried to breathe or move, but alarm had locked his body in a vice. He hadn’t see Raimie court death so fiercely since the accident which had robbed him of his friend.

  The boat pulled into dock, and he impatiently shifted while they weighed anchor and lowered the gangplank. How he managed to stay where he was instead of sprinting onto the ship’s deck, he couldn’t explain.

  Marcuset debarked first, head hanging low. He managed to catch the commander’s eye, and his wiggling prompted the other man to approach.

  “Did you find him?” he asked.

  The ocean was vast, so much so he couldn’t wrap his head around it. Finding one boy floating on its endless surface was incomprehensible.

  He’d run for help as soon as Samantha had fallen into water, but Aramar hadn't finished organizing a search party until what felt hours later. In cases where the sea had dragged someone away, rescue depended entirely on how quickly the hunt for the victim began.

  “We found them,” Marcuset confirmed.

  “That’s great news!” he exclaimed, clapping his hands together. “Why do you look so unhappy?”

  “I’ll explain, Marcuset,” Aramar said behind him.

  He didn’t jump, which was a testament to his years of training, but the man’s approach had been undetected AGAIN. Spymaster Aramar’s lack of presence was enviable.

  “Spymaster!” He stiffly saluted.

  “No need for formality this evening, Middle,” Aramar intoned without inflection. “You’ve saved my family’s lives.”

  The spymaster’s eyes remained fixed on the gangplank, and he joined the observation. Presently, two pairs of stretcher bearers descended from the ship, and his stomach dropped. When they set foot on the dock, he leaped forward. Aramar shouted something behind him, but he ignored the message, intent on the stretcher’s contents.

  The first held Samantha, Raimie’s mother. She slept peacefully, wrapped in blankets. He quickly abandoned that inspection since he couldn’t care less what happened to the woman.

  Raimie was in the second. The kid was tied to the stretcher, and he understood the precaution when his friend flailed against his bonds. The boy’s right arm was purple and swollen from the wrist to the elbow, a symptom of a bone break beneath. His eyes stared at nothing, frantically shifting back and forth, and he incoherently mumbled, the ramble broken only by the occasional, wet cough. Despite the fact that someone looked to have dried him since his tumble into the sea, moisture soaked his new outfit, skin, and hair, and goosebumps pattered his skin.

  If that wasn’t bad enough, Ele light and Daevetch shadows fought for control of Raimie’s body. Black tendrils slapped at white vines, and the occasional bloom of light drove its adversary away. Raimie’s face alternated between an angry, bared grin and a serene stillness, the change so swift disquiet rose in him at the sight.

  Aramar gently tugged him back so the stretcher bearers could continue.

  “You did well, Middle,” the spymaster insisted, patting his shoulder.

  “I could have been faster,” he protested. “Maybe if I had, Raimie wouldn’t be-”

  He stopped short, refusing to say the word.

  “My son isn’t dying. He’s stronger than you think,” Aramar said. “Even if he were, it wouldn’t matter. I’m taking them to Allanovian.”

  “The Esela haven?” he asked. “They’ll turn you away! No humans are allowed.”

  “My family is.” Aramar grinned, the first real emotion he’d shown since his return. “Where do you think Raimie learned the fighting style you’re so envious of?”

  He’d certainly been jealous BEFORE he’d replicated the style on his own, in secret.

  “I’ve friends there,” Aramar continued, but his brow crinkled with concern. “They’ll have to see us.”

  “Allanovian is said to possess the best healers in Ada’ir,” he tried to reassure his mentor.
“I’m sure Raimie will be fine. Do you have any assignments for me while you're gone, spymaster?”

  With a mournful smile, Aramar reached over his head for the chain hanging from his neck.

  “I certainly do,” the spymaster said, handing him the key dangling from the chain’s end. “This will give you access to our records.” Reaching into his pocket, Aramar gave him a pin smelted into the shape of a hand. “And this will get you in to see the Queen, night or day. Marcuset will explain the rest. Good luck, Oswin.”

  Aramar offered a hand, and he shook it despite his growing trepidation. Then, Raimie’s father trotted to catch up with his wife and son. Marcuset sidled over while he inspected Aramar’s gifts with confusion.

  “Congratulations,” the commander said.

  “For what?” he asked, pocketing the pin and further inspecting the key.

  What exactly did it unlock? Records? Records for what?

  “On your rise to the rank of spymaster, of course.”

  To the rank of- Wait.

  “WHAT?!”

  Grabbing fistfuls of Little’s vest, Oswin slammed him into the wall.

  “You were supposed to keep him safe!” he shouted.

  His adopted son’s gaze lingered on the floor. At his miserable expression, Oswin almost ceased his scolding, almost released him and told him together they’d fix this, but this was exactly what he’d feared, a mistake which could have irreparable consequences. Pushing forward was for Little’s own good.

  “What did you do? Allow him to go off on his own again? I should take you from the Hand, make you revisit your training. How do a few months processing paperwork sound?”

  Little’s face blanched, but he remained resolutely stoic.

  “Nothing to say for yourself, huh?” Oswin shook him.

  White light zipped between them, and Oswin faced Raimie, intending to tear into him for leaving Little behind. The reproach died before he could inhale to speak it.