A Court of Lies

by Kate Avery Ellison

The dragonsayer crept forward to stare at the floor where the shafts of iron had once stood, and he looked at the ground she was examining. The stones were smooth now. No sign of the sockets that had once contained the bars. Tendrils of her dark hair fell in her eyes as she ran her fingers over the place they had been. Her chest rose and fell.

  “What’s next?” she asked. “The walls?”

  So, her thoughts and questions were the same as his. He felt a sense of closeness to her in this confusion, although he pretended he did not.

  He pressed a hand to the stones. They felt solid.

  If this dungeon disappeared, would they cease to dream of each other?

  “Let’s make some ground rules,” she said. “You stay against your wall. I’ll stay against mine. No crossing the middle, or we’ll find out if we can kill each other in this dream.”

  “I’m not going to try anything,” he assured her.

  “As if I’d believe a Seeker,” she snarled. “Though you all seem to think I will do whatever comes out of your mouths as of late.”

  The fury in her voice gave him pause. Her words hinted at something else. Someone else.

  This was about more than them. “What is it?” Auberon asked. “You want to ask me something. The need for it is written all over your face.”

  Her forehead wrinkled. She let out a breath and glanced down at the knife in her hand. She leaned back against the wall, spinning it in her fingers again.

  Auberon’s pulse stuttered. He waited for her to ask if he’d saved her life. Did she remember?

  “What do you know about seeing the future?” she asked.

  “What?”

  This was not what he’d been expecting.

  “The future,” Briand repeated. “Seekers who can see visions. What do you know about it? Is it real?”

  “That is your question?” he asked angrily. Angry at himself for his foolishness. She only wanted to know information that would aid her precious Monarchist cause. “Why do you want to know?”

  “There’s a Seeker who claims he can.”

  “What Seeker?” Auberon said sharply.

  She pressed her lips together. “Marl.”

  “Who?” The name sounded vaguely familiar but did not immediately call anyone to mind.

  “The one with the lion tattooed on his wrist. The one you’ve interrogated me about, the one who… who hired me to kill Kael.”

  Auberon blinked at her even as a place within him felt cold and tight. Those of the lions were rogue Seekers who believed chaotic, foolish things. He had once sought their help in his plans to infiltrate the highest order of the Citadel, but no longer. They could not help him now, and he had decided they were all madmen.

  “And what exactly does this Seeker-traitor claim to have seen? Why does it have you so obviously distressed?”

  Briand’s face closed up like a locked door at the question.

  Auberon waited.

  Silence ticked between them.

  “Dragon girl?” Auberon purred.

  She exhaled. “He sees me killing someone very dear to me with a knife. Well, he sees them dying at my hand. Dying because of the knife I’m holding. I’m not sure if the distinction is supposed to matter.” She bit her lip. “I refuse to believe I’d ever do it. I’d die first.”

  “And who is this doomed person?” Auberon asked, squelching the jealousy he felt at such devotion.

  She pinned him with a stare. “You can hardly expect me to tell you. You are the enemy.”

  “Hmm,” Auberon said, tipping his head back to rest against the cold stones of the wall behind him. “Perhaps you already did. I’d wager my life that it’s that commander of yours, the Monarchist Kael.” His mouth twisted as he said the traitor’s name.

  Her expression smoothed, giving nothing away, but he knew he was right.

  “You mentioned in the prison below Aron Kul’s estate that that this rogue Seeker hired you to kill Kael, which you did not do. And now he tells you he’s seen a vision of you killing someone dear to you—” Auberon’s voice dripped disapproval. “—and it seems rather obvious. But Kael seems like a man with a, ah, keen survival sense. Why do you think he will so easily succumb to your blade?”

  “I’m an excellent markswoman with my blades,” Briand said with a sharp look at him. Her expression fell. “But that’s not it.”

  “Is there some sort of reason?” Auberon prodded.

  “I don’t want to discuss that. I only wanted to ask about the visions.”

  “Well,” Auberon said, “to answer that question, I can’t really say. I put no stock in them. But some do.”

  She opened her mouth to say something else, but then the dream went dark, and Auberon woke.

  He lay still for a long time before rising, thinking.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Off the coast of the southern continent, near Mammet

  THE PIRATE WOKE in darkness.

  He lay still, trying to place the reason for his waking. It was after midnight. The remains of the evening’s revelry lay scattered around the room: his boots, discarded by the door. His clothing, crumpled beside the bed. A few empty bottles, lying on their sides. The moon shone through the open window and pooled on the dirty blanket that covered him.

  Open window?

  He lunged for the knife he kept beneath his pillow, but a blade was already pressed against the delicate skin beneath his left earlobe, and he froze. A low voice purred, “Don’t move.”

  He could barely make out the shape of the man in the moonlight. Dark clothes, dark hair. Face in shadow. Movements like a panther, liquid and smooth. The man’s accent was Austrisian, but only faintly.

  The pirate trembled.

  “What’s this about?” he demanded.

  “You have something that belongs to me,” the man with the knife said. “I have come to get it back. I promised you I would.”

  The pirate racked his brains for who this could be, and what it was he could be looking for. In truth, he had many things that belonged to other people. Gold, jewelry, books. A wedding dress. But he’d never had anyone come to claim their goods before. Who was this dark stranger?

  He concluded that he had no idea what the man was after specifically.

  “I’m a pirate,” he rasped finally when his mind came up empty. “You’ll have to jog my memory.”

  The shadowy stranger chuckled lightly. “Come now,” he said. “Have you forgotten us already? We blew a hole in the wall of your fortress only two weeks ago.”

  Prince Jehn and his right hand, Kael, the man who’d been called traitor by some! The pirate hissed a curse. He tried to rise, but the point of the knife pressed into his skin.

  “Don’t get up,” the man said in a pleasant voice. “Just tell me. Where is the medallion?”

  The pirate hesitated. “In the chest,” he muttered, nodding at one corner of the dark room.

  He wasn’t about to tell his attacker that he was wearing the medallion around his neck.

  The pressure of the blade lessened some, and that was when the pirate grabbed his own knife and slashed at the other man. The steel collided as the pirate leaped from the bed, and he shouted hoarsely for help, but his cry was cut off as the man pinned him against the wall with an arm against his throat.

  The pirate grabbed the man’s wrists, but his arms were too strong to pry away.

  “Is it really in the chest?” the man asked. His face was close enough that the pirate could see a faint outline of his features. He looked both angry and amused.

  “I had it melted down and made into a tooth,” the pirate snarled.

  Kael looked down at the pirate’s fingers, still curled around his forearm, and then the man’s throat. He smiled as his eyes fell on the medallion.

  “Ah,” he said, and put the knife to the pirate’s neck.

  The pirate’s eyes widened as the blade bit into his skin. Blood seeped around it, spilling down the pirate’s collarbone.

  “Mercy,” he whimpered.
>
  “Mercy?” the man called Kael mused. “That’s more than you showed my prince.”

  “T’wasn’t me that cut his finger off!”

  Kael’s blade twisted, cutting the string that held the medallion instead of the pirate’s throat.

  A sigh escaped the pirate’s lips.

  Kael tucked the medallion in his pocket and twirled the knife in his hand.

  “I can’t have you sounding the alarm,” he said thoughtfully, and looked down at the handle of his weapon.

  Then he swung it at the pirate’s head, and everything went black.

  ~

  Jehn stood at the mouth of the Nyrian queen’s gardens with his eyes on the sky. It looked as though it might rain. He hoped it would.

  He’d always felt safer in the rain for some reason.

  His hand throbbed as if someone had driven a knife through it. He reached into the inner pocket of his coat with his non-injured hand, his fingers going still at the last second before he touched the glass vial nestled safely inside.

  He’d promised Kael only days ago that he was no longer in possession of them. That had been a lie, naturally, and they both knew it.

  He just couldn’t seem to shake this pain.

  Jehn withdrew his hand with a muttered word of exclamation and descended the steps into the garden instead. Overhead, thunder grumbled. The foliage was the bright green color it always turned right before a storm, and the air was charged with energy that made Jehn’s blood buzz and his head feel like a thousand voices were whispering ideas to him. He ran his gaze along the path, noting the changes the gardeners had made that morning. Nyrian gardening was all about focal points and vantage points. Every garden was a puzzle, a mystery to be discovered. He adored it. He’d once told the dragonsayer that if he weren’t a prince, he would want to live in a tower and read until the end of his life. He now knew that wasn’t true. He wanted to be a gardener. A Nyrian gardener.

  Jehn paused to brush aside a few low-hanging branches from one of the firethorn trees beside the path. He studied the view of the lily-studded pond beyond, then shook his head and continued his walk.

  This, at least, took his mind off the pain in his hand, which despite doctors’ assurances otherwise, had lingered even as the wound where his finger had been healed into a bony nub. The pain throbbed worst at night, when he was tired, radiating up his hand and into his wrist as if tendrils of fire had sprouted inside his bones and were consuming him from the inside out. Nothing extinguished it except for a tantalizing mixture of medicines that the Nyrian doctor had given him. A concoction that he knew was dangerous.

  The queen’s garden was always empty except for a stray gardener on occasion, and almost always so during the morning hours. Most of the Nyrians preferred the central gardens, with their vast hedge mazes and viewing towers, which allowed the viewer to easily decipher the puzzle the arrangement of trees and shrubs presented.

  But he did not like the central gardens nearly as much as this one. The central gardens might be intricate and clever, but they were gaudy. Obvious. The queen’s garden, on the other hand, was intimate. It took careful study to conclude what the gardener who’d chosen its configurations intended to say with the design.

  He had, Jehn thought, determined at last the proper vantage point from which to see the secret image. There was a small grove of trees at one end of the pond, and he headed there now, climbing a curving path of stone steps littered with fallen blossoms. The air was heavy with the scent of flowers and coming rain, and it felt thick and warm as a damp blanket.

  So intent was Jehn on his walk that he nearly collided with the queen as he rounded a corner.

  “Excuse me,” Jehn said. “I thought I would be undisturbed here.”

  The queen’s eyebrows flicked at the sight of him. It was her only indication that she might be surprised to see him here in her garden. She was not alone. A Nyrian was with her—Jehn recognized the man as one of her spies, although the man pretended to be a casual love interest of hers in public. He doubted they had any real relationship between them. The queen seemed to use a perception of promiscuity to mask all sorts of activities.

  Jehn had caught the queen’s elbow to avoid either of them falling into the lake from the narrow path, and the Nyrian spy put a hand on the knife at his hip. Jehn lifted his fingers from the queen, and the spy relaxed.

  He was not to touch, he surmised. She was not his, anyway. Theirs was a political alliance. He was a step on her planned path to power. Nothing more.

  Jehn bowed low. The queen bowed back, but not as low. She dismissed her spy with a flick of her fingers, and the man vanished as silently as if he had evaporated in the morning sun.

  They were alone now. The cool of the garden enveloped them both.

  The queen was wearing only a silken sleep robe, tied with a sash the color of sunset, her hair falling in black waves around her face. She looked vulnerable and soft without her mask of face paints, impossibly young except for her eyes. Once, when Jehn was young, a tutor read to him from a poetry book in the evenings when Jehn was too frightened to fall asleep on his own. One of the lines from one of the poems always leaped into his mind when he saw the queen’s eyes.

  Centuries hide within the minutes of the lives of those who suffer much, the line claimed.

  The queen’s eyes held an age within them.

  Her gaze pierced him like a blade.

  “You are in my garden,” she said.

  “Aren’t Nyrian husbands usually allowed in their wives’ gardens?” Jehn asked.

  A corner of her mouth lifted.

  “If their wife allows it,” she said, turning her head toward the water. “Nyrian husbands usually wait for the wife to extend an invitation.”

  “That,” he said, “is different than the Austrisian way, usually. At least, that is my understanding.”

  “Are all Austrisians brutes?” she asked coldly.

  “Not at all,” he said. “I believe all of the gardens are considered mutually owned. The invitation is somewhat implicit?”

  The queen frowned. “I see.” She gazed at the lake. “This is not the Nyrian way. This garden is mine alone. Please do not trespass here without my express invitation.”

  “I apologize,” Jehn said, and he felt a stab of sorrow to lose his favorite place to be alone in Nyr. He began to withdraw, but she held up a hand. “No need to leave this moment. You are already here. My sanctuary is already disrupted today, and I have things I wish to discuss with you. But in the future, please grant me this one place where I may know I will be undisturbed.”

  Jehn paused. He gazed at the lake and realized with a small ping of pleasure that he had indeed chosen the correct vantage point. From this place, the garden formed an image of a queen—the lake was her dress, studded with lilies and flashing with glints of sunlight like jewels on fabric as the wind stirred the top of the water. The willows, palms, and conifers clustered at the edge of the garden flowed together to form her hair, and an assortment of shrubs trimmed and shaped into what looked up close like a cluster of manicured cones, spheres, and cylinders came together at this distance to form a face that was, to his surprise, a stunning likeness of the queen. A small bridge, painted red, formed a mouth, and he realized that the sweeping, bow-like curve of the rail mimicked the upper lip of the queen exactly. Two stone sculptures formed her eyes, and they were positioned just right to catch the light with a faint shimmer that gave them a spark of life, as if the garden-woman were really alive.

  As a whole, the botanical puzzle was cunning, and artful, and utterly satisfying to gaze upon. He was staggered by the intricacy of the artistry, the attention to detail. It was truly a garden fit for a queen.

  “There are plenty of other gardens,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll find one you like.”

  “Well, this one has puzzled me in a way I’ve found more enjoyable than the others,” he began, and then stopped when she smirked. “Forgive me, but I must ask,” he said. “Are we sti
ll speaking in double entendres? I would like it to be clear that I am not trying to talk about your… womanhood. Just the garden.”

  The queen’s smirk stretched wider. “Just the garden,” she agreed. “And have you seen what you came here to see?”

  She looked at his face now, not the lake.

  “It is a portrait of you,” he said, nodding at the lake.

  “Very good,” she replied, and then added, “For an Austrisian, anyway.”

  He snorted. Her casual dismissal of his discovery pricked at him, as he imagined she had intended it to. “And how long would it take a Nyrian?”

  “I can’t say, with this garden,” she said. “Few ever come here, so I have little data from which to make such an estimation.”

  “I admit it took me days to find the correct vantage point,” Jehn said. “It is a clever and cunning design. Your designer should be proud.”

  “I designed it myself,” she said after a pause. As if she hadn’t intended to tell him at first, but then she had changed her mind.

  He was surprised and impressed, but he said nothing.

  Silence swept over them for a moment. Jehn caught a whiff of a scent on the wind that he did not recognize, though it was familiar. He realized after a moment that it was the queen’s perfume.

  “And you have not seen all of the secrets of this garden,” the queen added. Judging by the tone of her voice, she expected he never would.

  Jehn looked back at the lake. The wind stirred the willows, making them flow just like tendrils of the queen in the flesh’s hair was doing as the breeze swirled around them, bringing droplets of rain with it. He could not see any additional patterns, not from this spot.

  He wanted to know the additional secrets.

  It surprised him how much he wanted to know. As if the answer might reveal his destiny in this misty, strange, beautiful place.

  He would have asked more questions, probed for insights that he might try to untangle later when his hand was hurting him and he was unable to sleep from the pain, but then the queen said briskly, “We have things to discuss.” She began to walk, and he matched her pace as they strolled through the garden, leaving the perfect vantage point behind as they rounded the lake in their approach toward the palace. Anyone watching might think they were the perfect picture of a couple preparing for their upcoming nuptials.