by Jenn Lyons
“Mark!”
Sir Rabbit put a hand against my chest, a silent plea for me to bide for a moment.
“Draw!”
The whole world held its breath.
“Loose!” A wall of light sailed up into the air. The Manol vané’s arrows had been poisoned.
Ours were on fire.
Sir Rabbit and my guards began running.
They used the arrow fire as cover, hoping to make more distance in the moment the other side was forced to raise their own shields. There was a long way to go, and we had an enemy that was still in the fight.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I hesitated too long. Presumably this was a practiced maneuver, but I hadn’t practiced. I lagged.
A black-hafted Manol vané arrow took me in the shoulder, cutting right through my mail. The pain was extraordinary, a burning fire spreading out through my arm as the poison coursed through me. I dropped to the ground as my heart seized, like being kicked in the chest by a horse.
A bright flash of light followed.
I was back at the start of the bridge. Sir Rabbit put his hand out to make sure I didn’t start the run too soon.
What had just happened?
“Draw!”
I looked around. No one acted like anything was odd or unusual.
“Loose!” The Kirpis vané arrows flew into the night.
They started running.
This time I was ready. I started the run in time with the others, careful to keep myself under the shields. The Manol vané didn’t have the Kirpis vané’s organized, regimented groups of archers who made orchestrated volleys of attacks. They had free agents roaming the trees, archers who could be silent and attack when and if the right opportunity presented itself.
Assassins, I thought. Naturally.
Another group of Kirpis soldiers waited for us on the next tree support, although more of them were dead than alive. The bridge had been cut, even as they had won the day, leaving them to hold the position on their own until reinforcements arrived. They had fought valiantly, and very nearly to the last man or woman.
All of them, no matter how injured, went down on one knee as I passed.
I wanted them to stop. If the Manol vané archers hadn’t realized I was someone important before, they sure as hell knew now.
A mass of twisted plant matter burned in front of us, hacked at with some weapon. Sir Rabbit nodded at it in a way I think was supposed to be meaningful.
That’s when the Manol vané attacked.
It took a while to realize the things moving in the shadows were not forest animals. Their dark colors blended, helped by clothing that was not a single color but slices of green and gray and bitter violet. Teraeth once told me the Kirpis vané want to be seen, but the Manol vané don’t want to be seen until it’s too late. I wondered how the Kirpis—with their rigid formations and their bright colors and their visibility—could possibly win enough to make a final push into the heart of their enemy’s defenses.*
Then I saw how.
If the Manol vané attacked with silent precision, each nick of their weapons a deadly touch of poison, they rarely drew close enough to deliver that threat. Every Kirpis vané on the platform was a sorcerer. As the Manol vané attacked, our side summoned dancing blades crafted from violet fire, or called lightning. A figure ran toward me, coming to within a few yards before he dissolved into bright yellow pollen and scattered on the winds.
But I didn’t see the figure behind me. A cry alerted me and I turned, but I didn’t even have my sword out. I was wearing one. It had banged against my leg as we ran across the bridge. I fumbled to free the damn thing before one of the Manol attackers closed with me.
I failed.
I looked up in time to meet a pair of wine-colored eyes and feel the icy coolness of a sword slicing across my throat.
Light flashed.
I was back at the start of the platform, the Manol vané seconds from revealing themselves.
“Ambush!” I called out as I drew my sword.
This time I batted my attacker’s sword out of the way so she missed the deadly strike. While she was out of alignment, I made a clumsy swipe across her middle that made her scream. It did not, however, stop her from lashing back at me with a dagger that pierced glove and flesh. Fire screamed up my arm before darkness and that bright flash of light started everything over.
I died three times getting past that Manol vané assassin, and another five making it out of the ambush. Every fatal misstep was followed by a bright flash as I restarted far enough back to figure out where I’d gone wrong. A swing of the sword this way, a step to the side, the realization that being too timid in the wrong circumstances was as bad as rushing forward in others.
I learned by dying, and every death carried me further forward.
Then we were moving, running, driving our enemies back with spell, bow, and sword. We crested a platform strung between two giant branches.
Before us lay the Mother of Trees.
I didn’t understand what I was seeing. I couldn’t comprehend. It just seemed like a humongous wall at first, one that had been built up with palaces and verandas, graceful pavilions, and stained-glass windows glittering like jewels. Only when I looked up could I perceive the sweep of branches, the distant velvet of green leaves. This was a tree to hold up the whole world, the sort of place where Galava must live, if any place were consecrated to her. It seemed ageless and immortal, a tree that had always and would always exist.
Naturally, we were setting it on fire.
I swallowed bile as I saw the fires scarring its bark, the signs of violence burning those beautiful forms. The metal bridge formed in front of us, making up for the one that had been cut away in a last-ditch effort to defend this bastion.
But we could not be stopped.
I wanted to ask questions. I wanted to say something. Could I order them to turn around? Who was right here? Was anyone right? I felt my sympathy sliding toward the Manol vané purely because I found myself flinching at the destruction of their homeland. I didn’t know what the Manol vané’s Khaevatz had done to so upset the Kirpis vané’s king. She had never, as far as Surdyeh had taught me, sided with Quur or aided Kandor. She had slain the Quuros Emperor, not helped him.
This was all wrong.
My companions shared none of my reservations. They plowed through all opposition. There were a few more bright flashes, a few more restarted narrations, as I failed to stop attacks. I was certain these would have been no problem at all for the Kirpis vané king I pretended to be. Never had I been so aware of how little Darzin had taught me of fighting techniques. Six months of training with Kalindra and Szzarus was not enough to make up for a lifetime where I had never touched the hilt of a sword, except to steal it.
My guards pushed open massive doors carved with jungle animals and hunting birds, all surrounding an enormous carved tree whose inspiration needed no explanation. The halls were empty, but any vané who might have guarded them had already thrown themselves into defense of the palace elsewhere. We walked through unimpeded.
Finally, we reached a hall deep inside the tree itself. At the far end of the hall, branches from the main tree had been sculpted and trained until they formed a chair. A woman sat in the chair, composed and calm.
Her skin was black, so dark it looked blue at the highlights, and her hair was a dark green fall of silk that reminded me of the underside of a fern. Her eyes were green and brown and all the colors of the hallway they reflected. She wore a gown of green silk and feathers that looked like it had been woven from dreams.
“Khaevatz,” I said, the word escaping my lips so thoroughly without my intention that for a moment I thought someone else had said her name. She was a figure out of legend, a name whispered even in Quur with reverence, fear, and awe. She was as old as the world itself, alive to see the rise of every nation, god-king, and monster.
Surdyeh used to say that when Queen Khaevatz finally died, the whole wor
ld wept at her loss.*
She tilted her head, regal and almost painfully gorgeous. “Terindel. Shall we finish this at last?”
I nearly choked. Teraeth’s father, Terindel? That was the wrong name . . .
Sir Rabbit made a gurgling sound as a Manol vané revealed himself and sliced open the white-skinned vané’s throat.
They had one last ambush prepared for us.
I shouted and swung at the assassin, but he was obscenely fast. Closing in on him was suicide, but I managed to distract him with the hilt of a thrown dagger while one of my men took care of him with a spell. More Manol vané appeared, more defenders giving their lives for their queen. Which they did, but the Manol vané took everyone they could with them.
I wouldn’t have survived. A dozen times over I wouldn’t have survived. Although each time I died I began again, free from injury, my body felt like I had swung every blow and dodged every arrow. I was tired. No, that was too light a word. I was exhausted.
At last I was alone in the throne room with Khaevatz, who had not moved a hair’s breadth from her seat the entire time.
“Surrender!” I called out. Surrender was the proper thing to ask, right? She didn’t die here. I knew Khaevatz didn’t die here. It would be centuries yet before she breathed her last.
“Poor little king,” a man’s voice mocked. “How bitter the gall must taste, to have traveled so far, conquered so much, and yet still lose.”
I blinked. The image of Khaevatz wavered, then broke like a stone tossed into the reflection on a pond. The stone in question was a Manol vané man, stepping through the illusion of the queen and walking down the steps toward me.
It was Teraeth.
“Ter—” The word died on my lips. No, this was not Teraeth. They looked enough alike to be brothers, yes, but the voice was different, the posture, the manner. This was a man with the green-gray eyes of a hurricane-tossed sky and hair as black as the ocean depths. He held a single sword in his hand, and his open shirt gave me a glimpse of the emerald-green tsali stone around his neck, the very same stone Doc wore.
“Queen Khaevatz sends her apologies, but she can’t be in attendance. She’s meeting with your brother, Prince Kelindel—soon to be King Kelindel, I believe—over what should be done about the whole Emperor Kandor business. He’s quite willing to put the entire vané race to the torch to make up for your crimes.” The man strode down the steps toward me. His smile was malice. “I’ve been honored with the privilege of ensuring that Prince Kelindel’s path to the throne is clear. Congratulations. You’ve united our peoples after all, if not in the way you had in mind.”
I had no more chances to protest or ask questions. Whatever my role in this weird reenactment of ancient vané history, this man was coming at me with a weapon.
He meant business.
He swung at me. I ducked while I tried to bring up my sword. I felt a razor-hot burn against my arm, his sword sliding down to nick at a weak spot in my armor. Normally that would be enough to start the scene over, since the Manol vané seemed so fond of poisoned weapons.
It didn’t.
I rushed forward, hoping I might throw him off by attacking. He took a step to the side, swung at me, and I saw my opening.
I stabbed for it, seeing the feint too late. His look was contemptuous as his sword ran me through.
My vision went black.
There was no flash of light that time.
48: FAMILY DINNER
(Talon’s story)
Aunt Tishar (technically Kihrin’s great-great-aunt) peered at him from across the table. “Darzin mentioned you’re a musician.”
She looked younger than Therin—in her mid-twenties, surely—and Kihrin reminded himself that she was old enough to be Surdyeh’s grandmother. The vané traits were pronounced on her; it wasn’t difficult to believe her mother had been pure-blooded. Her hair sparkled golden and her eyes were so pure a blue they seemed unnatural.
She looked a lot like Kihrin.
The resemblance wasn’t as close as that painting of her brother Pedron, but it was there. In her appearance, Kihrin traced the origins of his own blue eyes, his own yellow hair. She was, like her long-dead brother Pedron, proof that claiming Kihrin as a D’Mon wasn’t a mistake.
Dinner was the only meal that brought the whole family together, eaten in a grand dining room large enough to swallow armies. Kihrin had been dismayed to realize how large his new family was. There were easily a hundred people present with some right to the D’Mon name, spread out over a dozen tables whose position indicated their proximity to the heights of favor and power.
Kihrin would have rather sat at one of the back tables, shielded from Darzin’s glare, but Taja’s luck was not with him. Kihrin was expected to sit at the table with his father, Darzin, his grandfather the High Lord Therin, and their immediate family. Even so, he doubted he could name half the people at the table, uncles and aunts he had rarely, if ever, seen.
Kihrin nodded as he ate. “Yes, my lady. I’m better at singing than playing though.” He picked at the food on his gold-rimmed plate. He still wasn’t used to the way the nobility ate their meals: the current course, one of a half dozen, was a small piece of rare salmon in a delicate cream sauce. Kihrin didn’t think it was bad, but it was very bland to his taste, and he wished the dish had come with a selection of pepper relishes or voracress sauce.
“How droll.” Alshena D’Mon snickered as she finished her third glass of wine. “Though I suppose it’s better than the skills you might have picked up in those slums, with that pretty face of yours.”
Kihrin gritted his teeth and glared.
Darzin’s wife giggled as if she scored a point.
“Mother, please . . .” Galen whispered from next to her.
“Awww, my son thinks I’m being scandalous,” Alshena teased Galen with a grin, but the boy frowned and looked down at his lap.
“And how is that new, Alshena?” Uncle Bavrin commented.
She laughed and fanned herself.
“You’ll play at the New Year’s Festival masquerade, of course?” Tishar continued, ignoring the tipsy matron.
“Absolutely not!” Darzin said. “A D’Mon playing at entertainment like he was common help? Will not happen.”
“I’m not that good anyway, Aunt Tishar,” Kihrin agreed.
“Qoran wrote me a letter in which he said you were the best he’s ever heard,” Therin said. Up until that point in the conversation, Kihrin would have sworn the High Lord was paying no attention at all to their chattering. “The High General has already agreed to attend our masquerade. You’ll play a song for him from that harp he’s presented you.”
“Father—” Darzin was furious.
“He’ll play, Darzin. That’s final.”
Kihrin watched the two share a murderous look across the table. Darzin was the first to back down. “Yes, sir.”
“That gives you three months to practice.” Tishar leaned over and whispered to Kihrin. “I bet we’ll have all the royal daughters drooling over themselves.”
Darzin, who was close enough to hear her whisper, stopped and guffawed loudly. “Now I see what your game is, Tish. You want to find him a wife. Give it a rest, the boy’s fifteen!”
“You and Alshena weren’t much older when you married,” Tishar replied.
“Look how well that turned out,” Uncle Devyeh muttered under his breath.
Darzin either had the good grace to ignore him, or, more likely, simply hadn’t heard. Alshena did though, and stared daggers at her brother-in-law.
“I’d give it a little time,” Darzin said. “Give people a chance to forget that his mother was a common whore.”
“Don’t you mean common slut, sir?” Kihrin corrected.
All conversation stopped at the table.
Darzin stared at him. “What did you just say?”
“I said she was a common slut, Father. Lyrilyn was a slave, right? So she couldn’t really sell her body. It wasn’t hers to se
ll. Thus, she couldn’t be a whore. But she could be, and frankly, was probably required to be, sexually willing. And she was almost certainly a commoner. Thus, my mother was a common slut.” He stopped. “But you had to free her before you could marry her, didn’t you?”
Darzin glared. “Yes . . .”
“Then I apologize, Father. You were right. She was a common whore.”
There was silence. Family at the table stared at Kihrin, mouths open. Alshena was frozen in perfect shock and Darzin’s face had turned an unflattering shade of purple.
Lady Miya started laughing.
Her laughter was magical, a building ring of crystalline bells. Any retort, threat, or violent outburst Darzin might have planned was overturned by the sound; everyone at the table looked at her before they began to chuckle themselves. Therin gazed at his seneschal with astonishment, allowing himself the rare honor of a smile.
Only Darzin continued to murder Kihrin with his eyes.
Bavrin grinned, looked over at Uncle Devyeh, and said, “I guess that settles it.”
Devyeh nodded. “Quite.”
“Settles what?” Alshena asked, her voice dangerous.
Bavrin jerked a thumb in Kihrin’s direction. “He’s one of us, all right.”
Tishar raised an eyebrow. “Was there ever any doubt? The boy is the mirror twin of Pedron.”
Lord Therin snorted. “Let’s hope he’s less depraved.”
Darzin dropped his knife and fork with a loud clatter on his plate, and even the High Lord paused. “Son,” Darzin began. “You’re done tonight. Go to your room.”
The newest member of the D’Mon family stared back in obvious amazement. “What? But what did I—?”
“NOW! To your room.”
“You’re the one who called her a whore,” Kihrin protested.
Darzin stood then, his face still red and his nostrils flared with rage.
“Fine!” Kihrin stood up from his seat and ran out of the room. No one tried to stop him, or indeed said anything at all, to him or to each other.
Kihrin was halfway down the main hall when he heard footsteps behind him—hard, fast, angry clacks against the marble tiles. He turned just as Darzin, face contorted in anger, punched Kihrin in the jaw.
