Embers of Empire

by Michaela Strauther

  “Don’t you lay a finger on my friends,” the girl hissed.

  The door opened. It was the medic, a tall, dark man wearing an all-black uniform, save a red-and-white circle on the sleeve of his shirt identifying him as the medic. He’d been the kings’ special medic for years now—had come in after Anya died. He had medicine that was quick healing, as it was all derived from rare dragon venoms and special herbs that, when combined and taken properly, didn’t have the adverse effects a normal dose of pure venom would have, but rather healed serious wounds.

  The medic saw the red-haired girl on the table and strode over to her to get to work. She let him.

  The medicine made the girl drowsy as it healed her, and within a few minutes, she was asleep on the table. Sutra picked her up and laid her on the bed as well—it was a very large bed—as the medic finished on the young man and the other girl, cleaning them both in a tub and providing them with spare clothes.

  And Sutra waited for them to wake even after the medic left, even after their gashes sewed themselves together, healing but also leaving scars on their mortal skin where there would have been clear skin on any one of the brothers.

  The young woman with dark-colored hair and the young man were the first to wake. Sutra had been dozing in a chair by the door when he heard the blankets shuffling, and afterward, he felt wide awake.

  He dared to walk closer to the beds, drawing his chair up nearer before sitting back in it. The young man and woman awakened, and the torchlight around the walls of the room allowed them to see Sutra. They froze from where they were and just stared at him in fear.

  “I—I had my medic heal your wounds,” Sutra said.

  They both looked down at themselves, checking for any blemishes but only finding scars. Then, they looked right back at him.

  Three cups of tea sat on the table beside Sutra. The medic had left the cups and told Sutra that the intruders should take the tea as soon as they woke. So Sutra stood, both cups in hand, and walked to them, offering the cups.

  They leaned away.

  Sutra took a sip from each one. “See? The tea is good—no . . . poison . . . or anything like that.”

  But they wouldn’t take it. So Sutra set the cups on a table near them.

  “What are you trying to do?” hissed the young man. “Are you trying to trick us? Deceive us? Make us believe you are trying to do good deeds? It’s a shame I see right through you.”

  Sutra looked anywhere around the room other than either of their faces. His eyes were drawn to a pile of items in the corner. He walked to them. “Is there anything I can do to convince you that I’m trying to do good deeds?”

  “You can put a silver blade to your throat and slide it through your skin until you fall dead on this stone floor.”

  Sutra tensed at his words.

  The pile consisted of many of the items Sutra had found earlier: the black weapon bags, the weapons themselves, the coats. It was strange, because Sutra had told the men from KH4 to leave the items in his room. But sitting atop the items was something Sutra never thought he would see again.

  When Sutra had been no more than six years of age, the brothers’ father was in the prime of his reign—a prime that did not last long due to his illness, but it was his prime nevertheless. Sutra had been closer to their mother and Uncle Ketru than he had to their father, which had always been a regret of his after their father fell from his prime and became the sick, weak man he was for the next two years foreboding his death.

  Sutra was disconnected from his father because of their drastic differences. Father was very sociable—he liked big parties and attention, and had a large circle of friends that he loved as much as family. His interests were also none of Sutra’s interests. Brute fights entertained Father most—not ones that ended in death, but he did enjoy swordplay and hand-to-hand combat shows. Sutra was always content with reading a book by himself somewhere—as these were the days before Nya was old enough—or going to a musical show with his mother. So while all of his brothers ran off and went to fight shows or parties with their father, Sutra stayed off by himself.

  But then, he found that he and Father did have something in common: they both loved to be outdoors.

  It was a simple joy that Sutra had not realized Father liked as well, but once, Father asked him to walk with him one beautiful, summer evening, and Sutra felt closer to him, even if it was only for the two or so hours they spent strolling through the gardens of the castle or throughout the streets of Kingsland.

  Then, Father introduced him to hunting.

  His father had brought a bow and arrow with them on one of their walks through the woods. He had told Sutra that he never hunted for sport—that meant an animal would die in vain. Instead, he hunted for food. His father then shot down a plump, red-and-yellow bird with a single arrow and brought it home for dinner that night.

  Sutra loved the bow and arrow. It seemed so fierce, yet so elegant at the same time, and he learned to use one so well at the teachings of his father that by the time his birthday came, he was shooting plump, red-and-yellow birds of his own.

  When his father got sick, he couldn’t walk through the woods anymore. He couldn’t walk the streets of Kingsland or the castle gardens during summertime. He could hardly walk from one side of his bedroom to the other. The illness Father had made him lose his appetite, which made him lose weight and muscle until he was nothing more than a twig lying in bed rather than the tall, strong, muscular king he’d been during his short-lived rule. He was degrading so quickly that Sutra had accepted the fact that the next few years—or months, or weeks, or days, or hours—would be his last, that he never would spend more time with his father outside of the room he lay sick in.

  But then, on the last birthday of Sutra’s his father would ever see, his father called Sutra to his room. His lips were dry and cracked; his usually thick and wooly hair was thin and falling out; his dark arms were no longer thick and strong, but wiry and frail. Regardless, he was smiling.

  “My boy,” he said in a hoarse voice. “I know we can’t go outside and walk or hunt anymore, but I don’t want you to stop—” He began hacking out a fit of coughs.

  “I don’t want you to stop doing it anyway, nor do I want you to forget all the fun we had.” He smiled at Sutra and cradled his face in his shaky, bony palm before reaching over the side of the bed and pulling out a dark-wood bow—hand carved—and a quiver with a set of handmade arrows inside. “Happy birthday.”

  On the underside of the bow, his father had carved “SOE” for his initials.

  Sutra picked the bow up now, fully aware that the young man and woman were sitting up on the bed and staring at him as if his head had rolled from his body and onto the floor. But Sutra knew that bow anywhere—he didn’t even have to see his initials to know that it was his bow. The quiver was his too, though it had not held his own arrows in a long time.

  The last time he had seen either of the items was when Anya was still alive.

  “Why are you touching my bow?” the young man asked. He had gotten over his paralyzing and speech-stealing fear.

  Sutra smiled to himself. “Who gave it to you?”

  “Why should I tell you?” At least he was getting the boy to talk.

  “Have you ever noticed the initials carved on the bottom?”

  The boy narrowed his eyes. “Yes.”

  “Whose initials are they? Do you know?”

  “No . . . my mother said they were from a relative.”

  His mother. Sutra smiled. “Anya.”

  The young man crossed his arms. “How do you know that name?”

  Sutra ignored the question. “Anya saw the bow and quiver on display in my room and wanted to look at them. She kept mentioning how much she loved them, and I told her she could have them. My father made them for me, and I suppose he wanted me to have a son of my own to pass them down to, but that was never—is never—going to happen, so I let Anya have them. Those are my initials. My name is Sutra.�
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  Sutra set the bow back on the pile and walked back to the bed. The Ajasek boy was watching him with his brow furrowed, and the young woman was staring around the room. “What was my mother doing in your room?”

  Sutra did not want to tell him that his mother had been in love with a Dragon King. “She was cleaning it. Your mother was a servant, yes?”

  “You want me to believe you were just generous like that? That she was looking at your bow and you let her have it? Why would you give it to her if she was just a maid?”

  Why were there so many questions? Sutra sat back down in his chair and returned the boy’s prying stare. “Fine,” Sutra said. “I will answer your questions. But you must answer one question of mine. Just one.”

  “And what might that question be? Because whether I answer will depend on the question.”

  “What are your names?”

  The young man answered, “Julian.”

  But the young woman did not. Julian nudged her in the side, but her eyes, once staring around the room, now stared into her lap. Julian nudged her again.

  “What?” she hissed at him, then she peered back at Sutra with a cold glare. “You pretend to care about us—you pretend to care about anything—and then you expect me to answer your question? You have my brother locked away in here. I’m not even sure where my parents are. And it is all because of you! You don’t understand how it feels to lose everything at the hands of someone more powerful than you, and you don’t understand how one might feel when you rip all they have away, and then ask the person what their name is just because it is all part of your act. Well—thank you for healing me, I suppose, but I’m not fooled. You will not earn my trust that quickly.”

  Sutra could not look at her—too many well-deserved accusations spilled from her lips, and Sutra felt like a coward, unable to face all he’d done to so many people. Her family was locked away? Perhaps he could release them from the cells.

  It was too bad Iryse had the keys.

  “I can release your family,” Sutra said. “The keys are with my older brother, but I can get them. And yours too.” Sutra turned to Julian.

  He cursed himself at the look on the boy’s face. Sutra, for a split second, had forgotten that Julian’s mother was Anya, and was therefore dead. He wasn’t sure where his father was, however.

  “You burned my mother at the stake and drove my father from Kingsland about a decade ago,” Julian muttered. “Remember?”

  Sutra tried not to remember Anya when she was burned. He rather liked to dwell on the times when she was still alive, because, whether Julian or the girl beside him believed it, thinking of her death brought him so much pain that his eyes stung with tears and his head hurt with the strain of trying to hold them back.

  “Yes,” Sutra said. “I remember. How is your father now?”

  “I don’t know.” As Julian spoke, the girl kept sending him frustrated glares, but he continued speaking anyway. “The last time I saw him, he was hosting another hybrid party in Deadland. Before you burned the whole place down, that is. Now—I don’t know. He could very well be dead.”

  Sutra was beginning to apologize again, but something about Julian’s words stopped him. You burned the whole place down. Why had Iryse insisted on sending Beastmen to Deadland?

  He remembered now.

  Iryse and the rest had been looking for the family of a surviving rebel in one of the rebel groups. Even though most of the brothers just thought it was a waste of time, waste of energy, to go searching for families, Iryse, in need of gladiators in his Phoenix Arena, unleashed the Beastmen anyway, all of them with the intent of finding three people—a mother, a brother, and a sister—and bringing them back to the castle. When the Beastmen came back, though, all they had was one of the three people they needed—the brother. Iryse had been furious.

  But then, many days later, a few of the pests of the Red Arrow terrorists barged into the doors of the castle as if they were welcome, holding between them a half-conscious woman and presenting her to Iryse as if she were a prize horse. The mother.

  Iryse had taken her to be tortured, as he still had not found the sister, and he intended to force information from the mother and brother until they snapped and told him. But they still never found the girl.

  What were the names again?

  Bassira?

  “Bassira?” he asked the girl. It was a last name, though, so he still did not know her first name.

  The girl’s eyes widened in surprise, but she said nothing.

  The redhead stirred.

  “Julian?” Sutra asked.

  Julian looked up.

  “Why did you all raid the castle?”

  It wasn’t as if Sutra did not already know. Anyone who raided the castle had the same intent—killing the brothers, or at least one of the brothers. He just wanted to hear what the boy would say.

  “Because everyone’s tired of your rule,” Julian muttered. “Because you’ve caused too much devastation.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  Both Julian and the Bassira girl glanced up. “Help us what?”

  Sutra smiled. “I’m not stupid. I know your intent was to kill us—if not now, then eventually. I will not help you kill my brothers—they are my brothers, and I could never do that to them—but I will help you escape, alive, from the castle. I suppose it is the least I can do.”

  Now the red-haired girl was fully awake and sat up in the same slow-motion manner as the other two, giving him the same suspicious and hateful stare. She eyed Julian, who nodded to her. She relaxed a bit, but Sutra could still see her watching him.

  “Why would you help us?” Julian asked.

  It was a question Sutra had been asking himself the minute he’d made up his mind to help them. Was he doing it for the people’s sake, or was he just trying to right his past wrongs for his own sake? Or was it to rebel against Iryse and the rest of his brothers?

  Instead of revealing the fact that he was unsure of the answer himself, Sutra responded, “My brothers have all gotten a bit harsh in their ways, and I do not agree with them. I don’t believe in their torturous methods, and I would rather you all get out alive than stay here at their whim.”

  “Once we leave—if we leave—what makes you so sure we won’t come back?”

  Sutra laughed bitterly. “Well, none of you looks like the stupid type. If you were wise, you would not even venture into Kingsland again.”

  “And let the five of you rule forever?”

  Sutra supposed he should have thought this through on his way down to the prison, because now, he was stuck. He had three options, one of which being that he kill the three intruders right then and that would be the end of it. Though that option would be quick and easy, it did not interest him at all. His other option was letting them go and formulating an intricate lie to tell his brothers, one that they could believe, one he could somehow prove. If he told them that he killed them, they might all want to see the bodies. If he said he sent them all to prison, they would want to call them out and see them. If he said he banished them to a poor refugee village, they would unleash the Beastmen on them with the intent of killing them and bringing back their heads, and when the Beastmen brought back no heads, the brothers would know something was wrong.

  His third option was to join them.

  It was something that seemed so impossible and insane that Sutra almost foreclosed the idea without another thought.

  Almost.

  Nya had been right earlier, to some extent. Sutra never quite broadcasted any solutions. He thought of solutions, yes, but never shared them with the others. He knew that they would get shot down, so what was the point in wasting energy to share his solutions? Especially when his solution involved his own brothers stepping down from the throne and holding an election for the next king. Of course, Sutra had only considered this option after Anya had worked her magic on him and after she had died. It would never have been an option while Sutra was under the drug. But for
the past decade, it was a solution he’d been considering. He wanted to step down as well—he had ruled much too long—and hand the throne off to someone else, someone worthier of the title of king.

  Whenever he imagined his solution, he, for some odd reason, always imagined his brothers willingly retreating from the throne after speaking with Sutra and realizing the damage they had caused. His fantasy began with himself removing his crown first, then Nya, then the twins. The last person to remove his crown would be Iryse, hesitant but remorseful.

  How naïve Sutra had been.

  This was nothing like his imagination, as he did not remember three people far younger than him helping to take down his brothers in his fantasy, but he supposed the three people were the best he was going to get. And none of them looked half bad either. All three looked intelligent and alert, especially when it came to watching him. The young man—Julian Ajasek—was built with lean muscle, the red-haired girl built with the same. The other girl wasn’t quite as firm as the other two, but she was headstrong—Sutra could tell. She was still staring at him as if he were fouling the air she was breathing in by being alive.

  He was going to overthrow his brothers.

  Iryse had turned Nya into one of his own, making him more and more harsh with every passing day, which meant he’d gone too far.

  “We’ll overthrow them,” Sutra said.

  This is when the red-haired girl scoffed. “I don’t trust you.”

  “You will never be able to overthrow them on your own. And who better to be on your side than one of the kings himself?”

  Julian eyed him. “We can do it ourselves.”

  Sutra snickered sourly. He couldn’t help it. “We have been ruling for four hundred years. There is nothing that you alone can do that would make a difference.”

  “Tell me something.”

  Sutra hesitated. “What would you like me to tell?”

  “You knew my mother, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you knew she was a rebel, yes?”

  “I found that out later, yes.” Everything Sutra had said so far was true, but he feared that Julian was venturing into dangerous grounds, one of those grounds being him finding out his mother had fallen in love with another man that wasn’t the boy’s father—and even worse, one of the kings.