“It’s all right,” Baern said, tapping the toe of his boot into Lavery’s ankle.
Lavery looked at the old man, all the hatred he felt for him dissipating in the face of a woeful danger that felt so much more real than it had even two minutes ago.
The mind is funny that way. It protects and soothes you from the terror of certain peril up until the point that avoidance is mathematically, logically, and realistically impossible.
Lavery had held out hope, however slim, that this was all an elaborate dream. Or if it was real, that it could be stopped—Elaya would find a way. She always seemed to find a way. Or Baern would save the day, like he had countless times before when Maren O’Keefe had come barking and growling.
I guess not, Lavery thought, the finality of it all striking down his optimism. As he sat squished between Baern and Elaya, Lavery realized for the first time in his life that big people—as he and his friends used to call adults—are vulnerable, too.
This scared him, much like it would scare any eleven-year-old. But he had little time to dissect this feeling as he enjoyed doing with his emotions, because the heavy clunks of jostling breastplates and greaves and gloves approached like a blacksmith’s furnace coming to devour an ingot.
“You gonna stand there lookin’ at me like you wanna fuck me?” said one of the Jackals, his voice brutish and old. “Or are you going to give me a name?”
“Funny bastard!” cried Jocklun, clapping his gloved hands. “Funny, hoo-ha-hoo-ha. Yessums, Mr. Guard, I’ll give you a namey-name. Jocklun, proprietor of misery!” He stuck his finger in the air and whirled around, facing Lavery and the others. “Oooh, I like that. I just made it up. Sounds good, don’t it?”
Lavery imagined the faces the Jackals were making behind their brushed steel face guards: probably the type of face Maren O’Keefe made when Lavery asked to go play outside instead of studying.
Jocklun twirled back around. “Olyssi Gravendeer tasked me with a super special job of finding and—oooh, most important, I’d say—capturing the Eyes of Aleer and, and, and—and!—Lavery Opsillian. I’ve done that, and I’m here for my promised reward.”
Silence drifted between the Jackals and Jocklun.
“Which one is Lavery Opsillian?” asked the brutish-voiced Jackal.
Jocklun clicked his tongue and wheeled about yet again. “Ummmm, that one.”
“Grab him,” ordered the Jackal. “And stay with the others until I find Lady Gravendeer.”
Jocklun leaped out of the wagon, landing on bent knees and springing back up. “Uh-uh,” he said, with the wag of a finger. “Those were not the terms.”
“Terms change. Get the Opsillian boy.”
“Lads!” Jocklun howled, snapping his fingers. “Lasses!” Another snap. “Weapons, pah-leeze.”
The miscreants of Grim who’d traveled with Jocklun and his prisoners—some twenty in all—withdrew crossbows.
“What are you doing?” the Jackal asked.
“Uh,” Jocklun said, “threatening you? It’s not personal. Oh, believe me it’s not. See, thing is, I made a very tiring journey here. Raced like the wind! Barely any stops, barely ate. I’m hungry and I want to sleep and, well, I’d hate for all those little maladies to come without a nice, juicy reward. I see you don’t understand. Allow me to word it another way: I don’t trust you. I want to speak to Olyssi herself.”
The Jackal flipped open his face guard. His globe-like eyes stared out over a crinkled and crooked nose. “I want a whore to suck my cock on the hour every hour, but we don’t always get what we want.”
Jocklun smiled. “It would be a shame if Olyssi heard her guardsmen were meddling in a deal she personally made. Oh so sad it would be, do you think? She’s got a lovely temper on her, don’t she?”
The Jackal closed his face guard. He murmured something to his fellow guardsmen, then hiked it back up the windy ramp and through the portcullis. When he returned some twenty minutes later, a woman with blond hair drawn up in a tight ponytail followed.
Wearing fire-gilded armor cobbled together with thick wrappings of fur, Olyssi Gravendeer crossed her arms and grinned like a witch readying her cauldron for boil.
“Look at the poor boy’s arms,” she remarked. “So bare.” She fussed with the fur around her shoulders and said, “Are you cold?”
Lavery shook his head, despite his pimply arms and the chills that seemed to sink deeper into his bones with each passing whistle of the wind. He wasn’t shivering yet, though, and he’d hold off as long as he could—giving in would only grant this woman satisfaction, he figured.
“Well, that’s good. I don’t have extra fittings for little boys. We have to take care of our own here in Haeglin, not outsiders. Oh, don’t worry! You won’t be here long. I’m sure Valios will be eager to have you back.” That grin again, like the mouth of a stitchwork doll whose teeth were made far too sharp and crooked and mouth too wide—the sort you find in the woods at night, alone and lost and far away from civilization. “We’ll find out just how eager they are. And you, Elaya. The world doesn’t know a lot about you. And I intend for it to remain that way.”
“What about me?” asked Jocklun, pointing to himself with both thumbs.
“You?”
Jocklun laughed. “A jester! Ha! I like to see royalty with a sense of humor. It warms my cold soul. Where’s my reward?”
Olyssi opened her hand, revealing a small coin purse. She threw it to Jocklun. It hit him in the chest and fell to his feet.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“Your reward.”
After opening the purse, Jocklun flicked his eyes toward Olyssi. “Where’s the other part?”
“There is no other part.” The touches of a smile and the subsequent clamping down on her jaw made her lips flutter. “When you work for others, you should be happy with what you get. Now get out of my kingdom; miscreants aren’t welcome here.”
Jocklun poured the contents of the purse into his palm. There were twenty gems, maybe thirty, none particularly gleaming or illustrious. He juggled them in his palm for a moment, then hurled them at Olyssi.
The Jackals stepped forward, but Olyssi idled them with a raised hand. “Leave him.”
Jocklun clapped. “My dear, dear Ooooolyssi! You, my lady, ought to choose your enemies more carefully. When you need us next, we will not be here, and—”
“I won’t need you,” Olyssi said.
“Right. Well, that wasn’t the important bit. The important bit, which I hadn’t gotten to before you interrupted me, was that when you don’t need us, we will be here.” He winked and clicked his tongue. “Take that however you will, you fucking whore.”
He motioned to his miscreants, mumbled something to the effect of throw ’em out, and took his seat in the lead wagon.
Lavery found himself hefted into the air, a pair of dirty hands beneath his pits. He was dropped onto his feet, where he promptly lost his balance and tumbled onto his face. The dust of parched dirt made him sneeze and wheeze. It got into his eyes and burned, too. He would have rolled onto his back, but such movements are difficult to perform when your hands are bound behind you.
The Eyes of Aleer joined him, grumbling and cursing as they were unkindly dropped off like a shipment of lumber.
“To the Peak,” Olyssi said.
Lavery didn’t know what the Peak was, but he figured it wasn’t a place with warm baths, hot towels and platefuls of berries waiting to be devoured.
A Jackal hooked an arm around Lavery’s and hauled the boy to his feet. Elaya and her Eyes received the same treatment, and together they were forced to walk up the ramp, through the portcullis and into the guts of Haeglin.
Lavery heard a Jackal suggesting they should hood him. Olyssi disagreed. She said no one would recognize the boy-king of Valios, that he was hardly noteworthy in appearance.
He wondered if she knew he could hear her, or if maybe that was the point: degrade him, mentally abuse him. Break him. But he wasn’t a pr
isoner in the traditional sense. He didn’t have any information to give her. What could be gained by punishment and torture?
Maybe, he thought, she was heartless. He’d heard of those people before. They beat kittens just for the fun of it. They didn’t need a reason to be heinous, they simply were.
That seemed unlikely. After all, he wagered, someone as powerful as Olyssi Gravendeer wouldn’t be allowed to act in such a manner. Her father, the Gravendeer Council, all those who surrounded her… they wouldn’t tolerate madness.
Would they?
No, he told himself. No, he reassured himself.
The ascent through Haeglin’s many rungs went by fast. Lavery couldn’t remember much about the city, what it looked like, what it sounded like, what it smelled like. It was as if he blinked and suddenly there he was, standing before desolation.
The Peak, Lavery knew without being told.
While the architecture of Haeglin had been born from the earth itself, the Peak was a man-made construction. It involved lots of stone, plenty of wood and countless deaths from poor planning and impossible designs. In the end, Lord Percy Gravendeer, Raegon’s great-grandfather, had overseen the Peak’s final construction. It was, in two words, an island.
Attached to Haeglin’s fourth disc by a sixty-foot bridge, the Peak seemed to float two hundred feet in the air, its anchors hidden. It looked like a tiny city made for a population of no more than twenty—a city that had felt the wrath of an apocalyptic god.
Its cobbles lay in jagged chunks sunk into mud and overgrown weeds. Stone foundations lay half-intact, wooden window frames mostly gobbled by termites. Some buildings still had partial roofs and standing doors, but mostly they were open floor plans that had invited vines and creepers to wriggle and crawl up their damp, moldy walls. Clover carpeted the floors, strangling wilting shrubs, competing with thriving weed beds.
A Jackal cranked a winch, which opened a portcullis that had been built into the bridge. Lavery, Baern and the Eyes were taken into the Peak, where they were promptly separated.
“Right here,” Olyssi said, cutting through swaths of jungle ahead of Lavery.
“Duck,” the Jackal said. Lavery did as he was told. A firm push from behind made him stumble into a room with crumbled walls high as his chest. An anvil sat in the room, along with an old furnace. Holes had been drilled into the anvil, and through them passed an iron chain with heavy-looking clasps at either end.
“Sit,” said Olyssi, tapping her boot on a flattened wad of mud before the anvil. Lavery sat, carefully—his hands were still tied behind his back, after all. “Scoot back. So cooperative! Excellent. We take this”—Olyssi grabbed the steel clasp and opened it—“put it around your ankle here. Take this pin out, make it a little smaller. There we are. Pin back in and… close. Too tight?”
Lavery shook his head.
“Good. I wouldn’t want to hurt you.” She pinched his cheek as she said that, then clasped his other ankle.
Lavery looked up. The sky was above him, gray and unfriendly. He hoped it’d stop raining, but it smelled like it wouldn’t. Felt that way too.
Olyssi crouched before him. She reached out, touched his knee. “Tell me the truth, Lavery. Were you kidnapped, or—” She paused, frowning. “Let me put it this way. Did anyone tell you that maybe you were leaving Valios for a little while?”
“No. I was playi—I mean I was—”
“You were playing. That’s okay. You’re allowed to play. I still play sometimes, when I’m alone and I feel sad. I play with dolls.”
“You do?” he asked, doubtful.
“Of course. So you were playing…”
“And I hit my head. When I woke up, I was lying beside a creek. Elaya was there.”
Olyssi stood. “I see. Well, don’t you worry. I’m going to get you back to Valios, okay? Are you afraid? It’s okay to be afraid.”
Lavery balled his hands into fists, dug his nails into his palm till it hurt real bad. It was the only way he’d found that he could stop from crying when he was upset.
“What will you do to them?” he asked.
“Them? They’re not very good people, you know? Don’t worry about them.”
“Why are you doing this? You wouldn’t do this to me if you wanted to return me to Valios.”
Olyssi smiled. “Now you’re using your brain. I will return you. I swear it. I will return you to your rightful throne, from which you’ll rule your people for the next sixty years. But before I do, I want you to witness what I’m capable of, Lavery Opsillian, for I will be a queen and I don’t want you to ever forget the power Queen Olyssi Gravendeer wields.”
She bent down, pinched his cheek again, then stood and began walking away. As she ducked beneath the crumbling doorway, she paused and looked back. “And you won’t ever forget. I’m sure of it.”
Chapter Nineteen
Oriana’s cocksure attitude lasted approximately as long as the flight duration of a brick. One moment she faced off with a dragon from the clutch of Evanescence, proclaiming she would change the world, and the next she was running into the den, whirled into a frantic mess of nerves, doubt and fear.
“What the hell was that?” Rol asked, chasing after her.
“We need to leave,” Oriana said, her breath shallow and rasping. She sped down the twisting ramp of rock, deeper into the cave. “We’ll need makeshift cages for the smaller whelps. And wagons… I don’t know how we’ll ever acquire all the wagons we need. Shit!” she swore as her feet got tangled up. She stutter-stepped in attempt to reestablish her balance, but momentum wasn’t on her side.
Rol’s arm leaped out from the shadows behind her just in time, snatching her by the wrist and saving her from eating a faceful of unforgiving rock. He straightened her and firmly clenched her free arm. “You need to slow down and tell me why I just saw a—” He breathed deeply, in and out. “Calm yerself, Rol. Easy in, easy out. Count to five.” He counted to five, then said, “Count to ten. Right. Okay. Let’s start from the beginning.”
“Rol,” Oriana said desperately, tugging her hand away from his. “We can’t stay here any longer. We—”
Rol tried to put a hand on her shoulder, but given the obliterating darkness that stood between them, he accidentally slapped her atop her skull. “Sorry. Er, here.”
He produced from his pocket a tiny foot-long torch, a piece of flint and a chunk of steel. Or, as any sellsword worth his salt called them, things-that’ll-save-yer-ass. He struck the flint a few times, flicking a spark onto the straw-wrapped torch. A couple well-placed and well-timed breaths later, flames engulfed the straw, burning through it and reaching the oil beneath.
“There we are,” he said, holding the torch so it lit Oriana’s face. “Now, as I was saying—”
“As I was saying, we must leave. Now.”
“Perk up, girly, and listen to me. I understand you wanna haul ass outta here. Frankly, I do too after seeing whatever the ominous fucking apocalypse thing was that just happened outside. But you want all of us to evacuate, yeah? Your sorcerers and your dragon tamers or speakers or whatever fancy title they prefer? Your farmhands, servants, etcetera?”
A strand of auburn hair fell across Oriana’s eye. She didn’t bother swiping it away, which seemed to make her creased-brow, clamped-jaw appearance all the more unsettling. “Everyone, Rol. If anyone stays here, they’ll—”
Rol placed a single knotted finger before her nose. “My point exactly. If you don’t calm down, get your bearings here, and tell us what’s going on—no one’ll follow you. You sound damn batty right now.”
“You don’t understand,” Oriana said.
“Then help me to understand. Look, if we don’t pack our shit and get in five minutes, are we lookin’ at a future from six feet beneath the dirt? Or do we have more time than that?”
Oriana understood where Rol was going with this. If their doom would come any minute now, evacuation was impossible, so panicking was useless. If they had a fair amount of time
, they could abandon the estate successfully, but only if they had an orderly approach, which panic never allows for.
She’d known one day she’d have to tell him the truth. But she’d hoped it wouldn’t be this soon.
“I lied to you,” she said. “My father, he did give me this land—”
“The estate?”
“Yes. He gave it to me for my eighteenth birthday, like I told you. But it hadn’t always been a place of, you know.” She fought for the words and battled with her emotions. “It wasn’t always magical. It wasn’t a stronghold for the last bastion of sorcerers on Avestas. It’s just… it was some beat-down, battered estate of a long-dead uncle.”
Rol took this all in stride, nodding. “Then who changed it?”
“I did.”
That remark slowly cracked his unflappable demeanor, like the strike of a chisel that finally chips an unblemished stone.
“You?” he said.
She swiped that fallen strand of hair out of her eye, tucked it behind her ear. “I’m not Oriana Gravendeer, Rol. Not by birth at any rate. And the dragons here are not whelps of extinct clutches, and they weren’t caught in the wild, and they would have never perished had I not brought them to this den. And I never intended to raise them as the great equalizer to end all wars for when I am sworn in as queen of Haeglin. I intend to use them to change the world.”
Rol ran his tongue along his teeth. “Right. You’re going to need to back up there, girly.”
A lukewarm smile touched Oriana’s lips as she dipped her head and stared at her feet. She’d known embarrassment before, but this time it hit her so hard she wanted to cry. She hated lying, hated keeping up with the long, unwinding spool of deceptions and fabrications.
But if she’d told the truth to begin with, no one but the sorcerers she’d recruited would have joined her. All the farmhands, the laborers, custodians—the people who kept her estate clicking along—none of them would have dared.
The Dragon Thief (Sorcery and Sin Book 1) Page 19
