“The fork in the Absu that will take us closer to the monastery is just north of Haradis.” She visibly flinched when he spoke of the Kai capital. “If you wish it, we can sail a little farther south so you can reconnoiter the city and report its state back to Brishen. It will be a simple thing to bring the barge around and sail north again to the river’s fork. We’d lose a day at most, and the monks haven’t specified an exact date for when they want Megiddo.”
She stilled next to him, deep in contemplation. Her eyes were pools of firefly light when she fixed her gaze on him, a hesitancy in her expression he’d never seen before. “You wouldn’t mind?”
“No.” A whisper of memory grazed his mind. Sibilant laughter formed of ancient malice. “I wouldn’t have offered if I did.”
“Then yes, and I thank you for it.” She gave him the Kai salute of rank and file to a commander. “I won’t linger, and the Khaskem may find what I learn useful.”
When they finished with their planning, he invited her to join him on the balcony that led off the large solar at the other end of the corridor from the study. “The view is worth suffering my company,” he said and winked.
She sniffed. “I find you annoying, not insufferable. Yet.”
Serovek stopped a servant with a request that wine be brought to the balcony. He pretended not to hear her faint gasp when she stepped onto the balcony and the expansive view of the mountainside from High Salure’s towering perspective.
A clear night and a bright moon cast the landscape into sharp silhouette, turning the tops of the evergreens covering the slopes into claw tips that jutted skyward. Torches lit in the bailey below flickered like jewels. To the north, the snow-capped Dramorins fenced the lands that separated the kingdom of Belawat from the flat plains of Bast-Haradis’s hinterlands in the east. The liquid ribbon that was the Absu slithered through the landscape, the umbilicus of trade between three kingdoms and numerous cities and towns.
Serovek never grew tired of this view. If he actually lived to old age, he hoped his last days would be spent here, looking out at such grandeur, as glorious in the darkness as it was in the daylight. “What do you think?” he asked his silent companion.
She didn’t answer him right away, and he took the time to admire her profile. The frosty moonlight sharpened the angles of her face so that her facial bones looked as if they had been carved from the shards of a dark mirror. Her long nose complimented the curve of her cheekbone, and the hollow below it. She wore her hair shorter than the waist-length tresses Beladine women favored. Hers fell just below her shoulders. Fly-away strands caught in the wind that scoured the slopes to partially obscure her jaw. A few strands stuck to her lower lip before she pulled them aside with the flick of a claw tip.
Sha-Anhuset wasn’t beautiful. Not in the way of Beladine women or even human women in general. Not even in the way of Kai women. But she was sublime, as majestic and unyielding as the distant Dramorins. And just as unconquerable. The first time Serovek had seen her at Saggara, he’d been awestruck. He was no less so now. Maybe even more as he learned more about her and had glimpsed the stalwart heart that beat beneath the armored breastplate.
Her lamplight gaze shifted to him. “Impressive,” she finally said. “And easily defended.”
He snorted. “Planning an invasion, madam?”
“Hardly. Brishen keeps me too busy at Saggara to make plans for conquering High Salure.” A worry line marred her smooth forehead for a moment, though she said nothing more.
“I’ve no doubt of that. We’ll all be experiencing ripple effects of the galla infestation, the Kai kingdom most of all.” He didn’t envy the Khaskem. That the kingdom of Bast-Haradis hadn’t yet disintegrated was a credit to Brishen’s even-handed rule as regent.
A statuesque study in light and shade, she turned to face him fully. “All the Kai owe you a debt of gratitude for fighting alongside the herceges. You sacrificed much. Suffered much.”
Her voice echoed with memory. He knew what she recalled in her mind’s eye because he saw it in his own. Her steady grip on his sword pommel, the resolute horror in her face when she’d skewered him on the blade and embraced him in her strong arms so he wouldn’t fall. A shared intimacy of purposeful savagery in the service of a man trying to save a world from destruction. Nightmares of that moment still plagued Serovek. He suspected they plagued Anhuset as well.
“Not nearly as much as some.”
“Megiddo.”
He nodded. “And others. I’ve heard rumors. The Kai unable to capture the mortem lights of their dead, a loss of magic. All of that has something to do with the galla.”
She’d gone stiff as a spear shaft while he spoke, and her expression closed as tightly against him as the door he’d barred to the kitchen earlier.
“I suppose so,” she said in a flat voice. “If you’re inclined to believe rumors.”
He didn’t press her to expound upon his commentary, and the tightness around her mouth warned him he’d find the endeavor a futile one if he tried. She had, however, confirmed what he’d begun to suspect. The galla were defeated and once more imprisoned, but that triumph had come with more than the price of Megiddo’s sacrifice. The demons spawned by the ancient Gullperi had left their mark on the Kai in ways beyond the razing of Haradis.
She caught him by surprise when she abruptly changed the topic. “You’re a wealthy margrave with influence. Why haven’t you married?” Her sharp teeth gleamed white in the darkness at his wide-eyed stare.
He recovered quickly enough and matched her smile with a wry one of his own. Subtle verbal deflection wasn’t her strong suit. “Who says I haven’t?”
His question took her aback. He saw it in the way her fingers tightened on the stem of her wine goblet and the slight jerk of her shoulders. “Well then, are you or aren’t you?”
Tonight was obviously a night for recollection. None of it cheerful.
He stared into the black pool of wine in his goblet, seeing the vision of a sweet face and brown eyes. He had cared for but not loved the woman he’d married. He’d instantly loved but never had a chance to know the daughter she bore him. He still grieved them both. “I was,” he said. “A decade ago. She was proud. Beautiful. Long hair that she wore tied back with silk ribbons.”
Anhuset’s features eased, and she tilted her head to consider him as if he were suddenly a brand new enigma to her. “You like soft women.”
He chuckled, welcoming her comment. “I like strong women. Soft…” He bowed to her. “Or not.”
They were both quiet for a moment, staring at the shadow-shrouded mountainside that even the bright moon no longer illuminated.
“I’m not sure I’d know what to do with a hair ribbon,” Anhuset finally said, addressing the stars above them.”
“Probably strangle someone with it.”
She choked on the wine she’d just sipped, and Serovek thumped her on the back until she quieted. Then she laughed, and he was lost.
There was the magic of the Kai, and then there was the sorcery of Anhuset’s laughter. The purr of a cat mixed with the promise of a warm fire and the sleepy seduction of a satisfied lover, all bound together into a sound that rolled out of her throat and rasped past her lips to bewitch him.
“I will take that as a compliment and bid you good evening, margrave,” she said, setting her half empty goblet down on the balcony’s railing cap. “I'll see you at dawn?”
He remembered to nod, even as all the blood in his body rushed toward his groin. He’d bless the darkness for its concealment except for the fact his companion saw better at night than she did during the day. “Shall I send a servant to fetch you?”
She declined the offer and wished him a peaceful sleep. He watched her until she disappeared from sight.
Serovek groaned under his breath. “Peaceful sleep. Not likely,” he muttered. He drained the contents of his goblet and did the same with Anhuset’s. He didn’t remember the last time he’d indulged in such a luxury as r
estful sleep, but maybe this time his dreams wouldn’t be of a doomed monk but of a silvery-haired woman of imposing gravitas and firefly eyes. One could always hope.
Chapter Four
No voices, no nightmares, no lights.
“Pluro Cermak’s farmstead.” Serovek gestured to a stretch of fallow fields sleeping under a thin blanket of new-fallen snow, the treeless landscape dotted by a large house and several barns. “Megiddo rests there.”
Shielded from the sun by her hood, Anhuset still squinted for a better look at the place where the monk’s body, alive but soulless, slept protected by ancient Kai magic. Her horse’s breath streamed out in misty clouds that hung in the cold air, obscuring part of her view. A year ago, Anhuset might have sensed the presence of sorcery. No longer, and the reminder of what she—and all the Kai—had lost in the galla war deepened the hollow inside her.
She and Serovek had departed High Salure just before dawn, accompanied by a half dozen of his soldiers as they descended from the mountain fortress to the flat plains at its feet. They had ridden a half day, finally stopping on this small hillock overlooking the farmstead. The rattle of a bridle and occasional creak of a saddle as someone shifted in their seat mingled with equine whuffles and the far-off call of the first birds returning north in anticipation of spring. Otherwise, their party was silent, waiting for their leader’s next instructions.
Serovek’s face was grim as he gazed down at his vassal’s holdings. Anhuset had seen the margrave flippant and teasing, an unabashed flirt who never failed to raise her hackles with his glib wit. She’d also seen him brave and self-sacrificing, displaying more nobility than sense on occasion. He was charming, ruthless, and calculating. A man of many facets who’d dug an arrowhead out of her shoulder with gentle hands, executed a murderer with those same hands, and ridden into battle alongside a man his own king considered a possible enemy. She’d never seen him like this: remote, forbidding, as if the task of returning Megiddo’s body to the Jeden monks was a trial to be endured.
“Is the monk’s brother willing to give him up to his order? Or is this a thing he’s obligated to do?” She’d assumed the first, but the death of a loved one, especially an unnatural death like this, sometimes made people react in strange ways and hold on to that which had already left them long ago.
Serovek maneuvered his mount to start down the slope. Anhuset stayed abreast of him as the others fell in behind. “My impression from his letter is that he welcomes the monastery’s willingness to take over guardianship of his brother’s body. He simply needs someone else to take Megiddo there.”
A man bearing a strong resemblance to Megiddo, only older, met them at the door. A woman, coiffed and layered against the cold, stood next to them. Both bowed stiffly, and their gazes shuttled back and forth between Serovek and Anhuset, lingering on her the longest.
“Welcome, my lord.” Pluro Cermak offered a second bow. “We’re most pleased to have you guest with us. Come in from the cold.”
Anhuset didn’t follow Serovek across the threshold. The invitation had been for the vassal’s lord, not his escort, and she considered herself part of that group. They would wait outside until Lord Pangion had spent time with Cermak in courteous fraternization.
Serovek was having none of it. He half-turned, scowled at her and the soldiers with her, and motioned them forward. “Hurry it up. You're letting all the heat escape just standing there.”
Cermak’s wife gaped at them like a caught fish, eyes wide as she huddled behind her husband while the margrave and his party hustled into the hall. Anhuset entered last, using her heel to shut the door behind her.
Pluro motioned to the fire roaring in the hearth at one end of the room. As startled by the twist in social protocol as his wife, he still managed to remember his hosting duties. “Please warm yourself by the fire. I’ll have food and drink brought.” He turned a severe look on Lady Cermak who fled for the kitchen.
Soon, a parade of servants, led by Lady Cermak, brought out cups of warm ale and hot tea, along with boards of bread and dried fruit set on a table not far from the hearth. Anhuset nursed a cup of the tea, warming her hands around the heated ceramic.
“I hate it when he does this,” one of the soldiers closest to her muttered. “We’re better off in the kitchens flirting with the maids.”
Another elbowed him. “Stop complaining. It’s a sight better than standing outside freezing your balls off, and the ale isn’t half bad.”
Not part of their conversation, Anhuset kept her thoughts to herself, but she agreed with the first soldier. Every state dinner or social gathering she’d ever been forced to attend at Saggara had been an exercise in awkwardness. Brishen and Ildiko, raised among the intricacies of court machinations in Haradis and Pricid, navigated those dangerous waters with effortless finesse, and she’d witnessed Serovek do the same when he visited Saggara. She, however, lurched and stumbled her way through such interactions. The humble kitchen seemed a much more inviting place to her as well, even if it was in a human household, where the gods only knew what horrors lurked in the stew pots suspended over the cooking fires.
She grumbled under her breath but adopted a neutral expression when Serovek waved her to where he stood with Cermak and Lady Cermak. The woman’s eyes grew wider with every step Anhuset took, her face paler. Had Serovek’s master-at-arms been present, Anhuset might have put a wager forward over how long it took for the lady of the house to bolt, certain if she didn’t, she’d be eaten.
As if a Kai warrior accompanying his entourage was an everyday event, Serovek casually introduced her to his vassal. “This is Anhuset, the Kai regent’s second, what they call a sha, similar to Carov, only with more power and more responsibility. She’s agreed to accompany us to the monastery as a representative of the Kai kingdom.”
Anhuset pushed back her hood so their hosts might have a better look at her and gave a short bow. “I am honored,” she said, careful not to expose too much of her teeth. Usually, she made extra effort to grin at any human she crossed, just for the sport of eliciting a reaction. That had no place here, especially since the lady of the house was twitchier than a rabbit and on the verge of banking off the walls at the merest ripple of her own shadow.
A small meeping noise escaped Lady Cermak, and though her throat visibly worked to exhale breath or words, nothing else escaped her mouth. Her husband had better luck. As pale as his wife and shackled to her by the death grip she had on his elbow, Pluro still managed a polite greeting. “Welcome to Mordrada Farmstead, sha-Anhuset. We appreciate the regent’s acknowledgment of my brother’s service to him.”
More dull pleasantries passed between them until the tea was gone and the food eaten. Anhuset hoped they wouldn’t linger much longer. They’d come for Megiddo, not to while away the day in stilted conversation with his brother. They still had several hours on horseback ahead of them before they stopped for the night at a riverside village Serovek had pointed out on his map the previous evening.
He set his cup down on the table. His men followed suit as did Anhuset. “I thank you for your hospitality, but we’ve a long journey ahead of us. If you’ll take us to where Megiddo rests, we’ll place him in the wagon we brought and be on our way.”
A quick, silent conversation passed between Pluro and his wife, words conveyed only through long looks and fast blinks. Lady Cermak, still mute, still nervous, finally spoke, and only to excuse herself from their company. Anhuset had the impression she’d just abandoned her husband to a fate of which she wanted no part.
Pluro straightened his quilted tunic and flexed his shoulders if he prepared for a confrontation. Serovek’s eyebrows crawled toward his hairline though he said nothing. The vassal motioned to the hall’s entrance. “If you’ll follow me please.”
Whispers of inquiry exchanged between those in Serovek’s escort reached Anhuset as they all trailed the two men out of the manor and back into the cold outdoors. Serovek fell back a step or two until Anhuset came abreast o
f him. Pluro didn’t wait but strode ahead, skirting a flock of roaming geese and a pair of hay carts parked nearby. Lines of wash flapped in the cutting breeze.
“What do you think?” Serovek asked her, his voice quiet.
She tried not to dwell on the pleasurable warmth that coursed through her at his request for her opinion. “I didn’t expect the monk not to be in his brother’s house.”
“Nor I.” He signaled to the rest of his men. “Wagon,” he said. They saluted and broke away to retrieve the wagon they’d brought transport Megiddo.
When they approached the smallest of the farmstead’s three barns, Serovek’s harsh “Surely, he’s jesting,” echoed her own thoughts. There was no possible way Pluro had stashed his own brother in a barn with the livestock. However, the man never changed directions, and soon they entered the dark, pungent structure.
Occupied by a few head of cattle, two mules, and a small number of sheep, the barn was a little warmer than outside, but their breath still steamed in front of them. Weak sunlight bled through splits in the building’s cladding and flooded the entrance, illuminating the space enough for the two men to see without too much trouble. Anhuset saw everything clearly, including the ominous thunderhead that had descended over Serovek’s countenance.
Pluro led them to the very back of the barn, past the stalls, hay racks and shelves of tack and tools, to another closed door partially covered in an array of webs spun by busy spiders. The webbing spread across the hinges and surrounded the latch and handle, signs that it had been some time since anyone had disturbed their labor by opening the door.
Anhuset and Serovek waited as their host paused to light an oil lamp before brushing away the webs and freeing the latch. Hinges squealed as he pushed the door inward. The newborn flames inside the lamp stretched fingers of light into the ink-dark room. Shadows fled at their encroachment, and soon the flickering illumination spilled onto a bier on which a man lay in peaceful repose.
The Ippos King: Wraith Kings Book Three Page 6
