“So,” Eithne said, “what do you think?”
“He has a gentle hand and a cultured tone, unlike his father.” Ogden sighed. “I don’t need to tell you how depleted our coffers are of late, and we’re already in debt up to our eyeballs with House Oberon and Phyra. It might be worth the risk. I can’t think what danger a single delegate party could present.”
Eithne nodded. “Rachman must realize that his men would be watched like hawks.”
“That, and let us not forget that his need of grain is real. Your father often mused that the potato famine that struck Ittamar some twenty-five years ago may have been the driving force behind their incursion into southern lands. It is reasonable that he would seek a diplomatic way to feed his people before resorting to another bloody conflict. If he can’t feed his people in times of peace he will have next to no chance of doing so during a campaign. No, I don’t think that Ittamar can risk another war with Galacia.”
Eithne snorted. “Nor can we,” she said, though Ogden knew it as well as she. They had turned back Ittamar in the quarter-century war, but only just.
Twenty years after the armistice Galacia still recovered from the cost of the lengthy conflict, both in coin and the virtual loss of a generation of men. The Galacian Regulars had yet to fully rebound, and was almost entirely populated by youths barely out of adolescence and veterans who should have, by rights, retired years ago.“We have to consider that this may be a ruse,” Eithne said. “This trade delegation could be nothing more than a deft ploy to sow dissent in our court, or to gather intelligence. A divided Galacia is easy pickings, and if Ittamar has forged an alliance with Aradur, giving them leave to case Peidra could be disastrous.”
Ogden offered his queen a broad smile. “Your father instructed you well—to question everything.” Ogden spread his hands. “It could be a cunning gambit, but it seems unlikely that Rachman would be willing to sacrifice his cousin as he, to our knowledge, has no heir. Since the Ittamar royal line passes only along the male bloodline, and Baruch has no living brother, Vundi as his first cousin is heir to the throne. As a token of good faith he sends a man who, for all intents and purposes, is a royal prince.
As for the possibility of a military alliance between Ittamar and Aradur, such a campaign, for Aradur, would mean marching a thousand miles across Erastes, or else up through the Spine of Agia and into the northern climbs of Ittamar, only to march a thousand miles south again across the Sheer and into Galacia. Again, it seems unlikely, particularly considering the Aradur doesn’t want for wealth as it controls the eastern ports of Agia and the spice trade.”
Eithne grunted in concession to Ogden’s reasoning and he continued. “Istvan was a hard, merciless ruler, but perhaps his son is a different man, as your father was a gentler ruler than your grandfather. If Baruch intends foul play he is sending his heir on a suicide mission. At this point the other seven nations of Agia pose a greater threat to Galacia than Ittamar. Weakened as we are economically and militarily, how long will it be before one of our southern neighbors decides we’re easy pickings? We could use Ittamar gold, and iron. My advice, Eithne: proceed with the meeting, albeit cautiously.”
Eithne looked hard at her chief counselor. She read only candor in his sagacious countenance. She expected nothing else, but seeing it written in the wrinkles of his face gave her strength.
She stood, slowly, and walked toward the window. Throwing back the curtains the queen looked out upon her lands. Lush, verdant hills rolled lazily into fields of grain that undulated and gleamed like a golden sea.
“How will the court react to this decision?” said Eithne.
“Most of the houses will balk at first, but many will find their outrage tempered by the promise of gold and precious ore. We have never had an abundance of either, and Phyra and Erastes charge us a heavy price in grain for coin. Much of the gentry have deep pockets but they know how much two reigns of bloodshed drained our coffers and armaments. They fear a raise of taxes more than war. If we can trade for gold bullion from Ittamar we can mint more of our own currency, instead of relying on foreign coin and debt notes. If you appeal to their greed, you may earn the support of the influential houses.”
“Very well, Ogden. In any case it will be an interesting palaver come tomorrow.” Eithne Denar smiled thinly and continued to gaze out her window. Trepidation held her heart in its icy grasp, while her stomach felt like it contained a smoldering ball of lead. Eithne knew it essential that she retain her tenuous control over the court. She would have to draft plans on how to handle each House and Lord of consequence. She offered a quick prayer to the One God and an invocation to her ancestors and father.
“Ogden, send for drink and food. I have a feeling it’s going to be a long day.”
Chapter 6
Strange Awakenings
Elias woke with a start, fists clenched and a scream on his lips, as he emerged from the shadowed depths of a surreal dream-world characterized by the ringing of steel and the dark glow of fell magic.
Lar, who sat by his friend’s side through the night, flinched. His chair tipped as he lumbered to his feet on legs numbed from having sat too long. He thought to fetch the doctor, but Phinneas appeared in the doorway, alerted by Elias’s cry. The two men exchanged glances before turning their attention to Elias, each unsure how to proceed.
Elias sucked in ragged breaths and his eyes darted back and forth, heavy yet with the fog of sleep, before realizing he was safe at Phinneas Crowe’s homestead. He blinked away the fleeting shreds of the nightmare, which yet lingered—a place where someone called for him from a dark dungeon, their voice shrill with fear, but the threads already eluded him, dissolving in the light of day.
Elias’s face crumpled as myriad emotions tore through him. To Phinneas and Lar his expression was one of bewilderment, and while it was true that he felt overcome, Elias knew one sure and abiding compulsion: he had to go, and now.
Elias surveyed his surroundings as he recovered his equilibrium. He lay abed in one of Phinneas’s spare bedrooms. As he sat up a twinge lanced through his shoulder. He saw that the arrow had been removed, the wound bandaged, and his left arm placed in a sling.
Elias looked up and his eyes fell on Lar. “How are you here?”
“The Doctor sent for me yesterday,” Lar said, feeling somehow guilty as Elias fixed his penetrating eyes on him.
“Yesterday,” Elias said, his anxiety consumed at once by fury. “What time is it?”
“Almost noon,” said Phinneas, taking a step into the room. “You lost a lot of blood and needed to rest. It was touch-and-go for a while there.”
“Noon. Son-of-a-crow. Do you realize how difficult it is going to be tracking those bastards down now?” Elias threw back the covers and made to rise.
“Not so hasty now,” Phinneas said and placed a restraining hand on Elias’s good shoulder. Elias shot him a dark look, black eyes bright and hot, that would have withered a lesser man, but Phinneas, who was all too familiar with Padraic Duana’s piercing gaze, did not so much as blink. “Boy, I saved your life. You owe me, and Lar here, the courtesy of seeing that my handiwork and a sleepless night were not spent in vain. Considering how long you’ve been out, you can spare me a moment to check your stitches, son.”
“I am son to no one now,” Elias said, but tolerated the doctor’s ministrations.
“The stitches are holding,” Phinneas said, ignoring Elias’s cryptic comment. “The wound looks good, and you don’t have a fever. How do you feel?”
“Fit as a fiddle.” Phinneas arched an eyebrow and frowned down at him. “A little stiff,” Elias conceded, some of the fire going out of him, “but considering…everything…I feel remarkably well.”
Phinneas grunted. “You’re like your father in that way. You’re both quick healers. If I could bottle that, I’d be able to buy a dozen head of cattle.”
“Good, then. We are in agreement. I’m ready to go.”
“Elias,” said Lar, “be reasona
ble.”
Elias fixed his eyes onto his friend, but when he saw how the giant man trembled, his retort died on his lips. “I must go after them,” he said in a soft voice. “Can’t you see that?”
Lar’s eyes brimmed with tears as he looked into the black iron of Elias’s glare. He glanced away and studied his feet.
Phinneas sat on the edge of the bed. “You are fortunate, to be alive, Elias. That arrow missed your heart and major arteries by a hair. It’s a miracle, really, and the one grace we can salvage from this tragedy. Don’t throw it away, I beg of you. Stay here until you are well.”
“If I’ve been spared, whether by grace, fortune, or fate, then I must believe it is for a purpose. If it’s not to see justice done, then I would have rather died with them.”
“Listen,” said Lar, “Constable Oring has been to the Manor. There’s no sign of the men who attacked you, but he’s working on tracking them down.”
Elias snorted. “Oring couldn’t track a stampeding bull through mud.” He took off his sling and flexed his shoulder with a wince. “Now, hand me a shirt.”
“Oring is no Marshal, true, but he is a good man,” Phinneas said. “He has a posse twenty men strong, and has been scouring the countryside for the last twelve hours. Those brigands don’t know the land like these good ol’ boys. The posse will bring them in.”
“Not likely. Those fellows don’t know what they’re going up against. Not that it matters. They won’t find hide nor hair of them.”
“What do you mean?” asked Phinneas. “You said there were only two men.”
“I don’t remember our conversation, but, yes, there were two—Slade and an archer. My last memory is of driving the horses through the Lurkwood. Frankly, I am amazed we made it.”
“As am I,” said Phinneas, “but from what I saw the horses were the ones doing the driving. They were maddened and half dead when you arrived. They must have sprinted the entire way.”
“My father put some kind of spell on them. I could do nothing to turn them back. Go on.”
Phinneas shrugged. “You were still conscious, although I don’t know how, frankly. You were screaming like a…well, quite loud, really. You grabbed me by the collar and told me that you had been attacked at the Mayfair Manor by two men, one a merchant you met last night, and that your father and Danica had fallen. Then you passed out. That’s when I sent for Lar and the constable.”
Elias swallowed, his throat thick with emotion. “Where are they? Where have they been taken?” he asked in a small voice.
“I had Asa taken to the Chapel in Knoll,” Phinneas said.
“What of my father and Danica?”
“Elias, there is something you need know,” Lar said, exchanging a meaningful glance with Phinneas. “We haven’t found Danica, or your father.”
Elias blanched. “What?!”
“Although,” Phinneas said slowly, “the posse did find a patch of scorched earth at the Manor. Elias, what happened there?”
“This means it’s possible they’re still alive,” said Elias. He threw off his blankets, stood up, and paced the room. His heart hammered against his ribcage. “He may be holding them hostage.”
“But to what end?” said Phinneas, not unkindly. “This ambush had two likely purposes. One, to steal four barrels of knoll—a tidy profit for any highwayman—or, two, to take revenge on your father. As a dispatcher of Crown Law, your father had no shortage of enemies.”
Elias ceased pacing and grew still. He looked out the window. “This was no robbery.”
“How can you be sure?” said Phinneas, but a sinking feeling stole over him. His every instinct told him that something about this entire situation was very, very wrong.
“Slade—there was something off about him. Unnatural.” Elias shook his head. “I can’t explain it to you. It’s like there was some kind of stain on him. He’s no highwayman. No, he’s something else all together.”
“Oh,” was all the response Phinneas could muster, for he knew exactly what his best friend’s son meant. Elias had just summarized the dark aura that surrounded a fell wizard better than most veteran arcanists.
“And for all that,” said Elias as he continued to gaze out the window onto Phinneas’s land, “my gut tells me that Macallister had a part to play in all this.”
“You’ll get no argument from me that Macallister is one scrupleless son-of-a-bitch,” Phinneas said, “but a murderer? I don’t know, Elias.”
“One does wonder where Macallister would find men like that,” Elias said. “But the day before last Macallister rode out to the distillery and made yet another offer to buy our land and whiskey recipe. We had refused Macallister time and again, so why ride all the way out to our homestead to make yet another offer? I’ll tell you why—guilt. He hired those men to ambush us, but figured he’d give us one last chance to sell.”
Silence hung heavy in the spare bedroom in the wake of Elias’s words and the red rage that radiated from him. Elias could feel both the doctor and Lar’s eyes on his back. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, willing his mind to slow. He turned from the window to face them. “I must go and find him before it’s too late. I need answers and I need to find evidence of Macallister’s involvement, and the only way I’m going to find any answers is to track Slade down and bring him to justice.”
“How can you think to succeed where the posse has failed?” Phinneas said.
Elias closed his eyes. In his mind’s-eye he saw the Manor looming at the edge of the Lurkwood. The front door opened. A narrow staircase wound into the bowels of the earth. Elias gasped and his eyelids snapped open. The details of his dream had returned to him with a chilling certainty.
“Slade’s waiting for me,” Elias said. “He’s at the Manor.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Lar. “It doesn’t make a lick of sense. The posse searched every inch of that house. There’s nothing there.”
“I told you, Slade is no normal man. He is an arcanist of some sort. Oring and his posse don’t have the means to find him. But I can feel him.” Elias stepped toward them and rapped his index and middle fingers on his sternum, hard. “Here. He’s close, laying in wait for me. I just know it.”
Lar paled and looked to Phinneas who shook his head and studied the floor.
Phinneas knew that look in Elias’s wild eyes. He had seen it before. “Elias,” Phinneas said, “you sound—“
“I know, crazy, but—“
Phinneas held up a hand. “I was going to say, you sound like your father.” Phinneas walked to the closet and produced Elias’s boots and a fresh shirt. “During my long friendship with your father, I learned to trust his instincts. His intuition saved my hide on more than one occasion.”
Elias took the bundle from the doctor and quickly dressed while Lar looked on, stymied. He usually couldn’t think of anything to say under the best of circumstances, and now his mind went blank with a nameless, pervasive fear. A feeling of dread radiated from his stomach, like he had a gutful of poison berries. Lar couldn’t remember feeling so terrified, even when his father took yellow fever. So much had been lost in the bizarre circumstances of the last day that he didn’t know how much more he could handle. Lar was about as superstitious as the average farmer—which was to say very—and he knew in his bones that if Elias rode off to this ranch and returned to Mayfair Manor, something awful was going to happen.
“If you’re dead set on this, you’re not riding out alone,” Phinneas said when Elias finished dressing. “If you ride hard or get into a fight that wound may open and it will go poorly for you.”
Elias offered Phinneas a thin, grim smile. “My sword arm is good. I must do this. I must do it alone. And I must do it now.”
Phinneas looked hard at him, and tugged absent mindedly at his nose. “If your mind can’t be changed, then I may as well help see that my doctoring doesn’t go to waste.” Elias responded with a quizzical tilt of his head, and Phinneas felt a shiver run up his spine, for
he saw so much of Padraic in his son at that moment. “I have something that can help you. Wait here a hot second while I go fetch it.”
“I wouldn’t want your doctoring to go to waste, would I?” said Elias in an attempt at levity, although the gesture felt stale even to him.
Phinneas scurried out of the room and Elias returned to the window and looked out on the doctor’s land and tried to clear his mind. He could feel Lar’s eyes on him but ignored him. He didn’t want to scorn his old friend, but he could ill afford a tender moment that might threaten his resolve.
Phinneas whisked back into the room. “Here Elias,” he said and held up a vial of murky liquid the color of coffee.
“What is it?” asked Elias, eyeing the strange brew suspiciously.
“Don’t worry, it’s no trick. If I gave you a sedative and you succeed in locating Slade, it might mean your death, and I don’t want that on my conscience. It’s a tonic made from rare herbs. I learned the recipe during the war and it came in handy more than once. I must admit, I am applauding my foresight in brewing a batch.”
“What will it do?”
“Take it no more than an hour before you expect trouble—otherwise it might wear off. It will dull your pain without dulling your wits. Rather, it is a stimulant and will focus the mind and supply you with a rush of energy. It might give you the edge you need. Also,” he said as he produced a small, round loaf of bread from a pocket, “Eat this barley bread. You have been fasting for almost a day and will need your strength.”
“Thank-you, Doctor, for everything. You’ve been a good friend to us. Please stay here so I know where to find you if I need you.” Elias took the vial and bread, and without further ado made to walk out of the room, but he looked up to discover Lar barring the door with his six-four frame.
Lar crossed his thick arms over his chest and said, “You know I’m coming with you.”
Reckoning (The Empyrean Chronicle) Page 7
