by Rex Jameson
It was the first time in Jandhar’s life that he had ever seen fear in his father’s eyes.
“Father!” Jandhar cried again as he lunged forward and jammed his hand against Jofka’s open wounds along each side of his neck.
“It’s going to be OK,” Jandhar promised.
He grabbed the silken sheets and pressed them against the wound.
“Somebody, help!” he cried.
The flat side of a cold blade pressed against Jandhar’s throat and pulled him away from his father. He felt a hand against his waist, and then his leather belt with the two small knives at his sides tumbled onto the bed before clanging to the floor.
Jandhar looked around the room, hoping for aid. He saw a disrobed guard bleeding onto a bed in the corner. Three more lay on the floor nearby. Dozens of dead women had died cruelly, just like his father. The purple floor was completely red.
“You and your men are dead,” Jandhar said.
“I’m alone,” the man whispered.
“You’ll soon be dead like your friends, then,” Jandhar said, struggling against the blade to show his attacker that he was not afraid.
“You misunderstand me,” the man said. “I came alone. Your father could have lined the room with a hundred guards, and he’d still be dying on that bed.”
Jandhar shook his head as he continued to survey the carnage around him and confusion of the man’s voice and what he could perceive. He felt sequins and silk press against his back. Firm breasts. Locks of stray yellow hair tickled his face in the breeze from the balcony. He tried to turn, but the blade kept him in check.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Theodore Crowe,” the man said. “I am the Spymaster of Surdel, a man of the shadows.”
“I know who you are!” Jandhar replied.
He stared at his father, whose eyes and mouth were wide. The pulse of blood had ebbed and stopped. His father had bled out. Jandhar’s eyes flooded.
“No,” he cried. “No!”
“Listen to me, young prince,” Theodore said. “My king has spared your life so that you may know the penalty for treachery, and a lesson will be learned by your family. Your father raided our shores, took women and children, and killed forty fishermen and simple traders. I’ve cut equal shares from this room, not counting this great man on the bed. Look at him and know. Know and learn—for your life and the life of every member of the Rasalased family depends on what you remember and learn from this room.”
“I will not bow—”
“No, you will be a king,” Theodore whispered in his ear, pressing the blade hard against Jandhar’s throat. “You will accept the patrols of the Surdel fleet in the Small Sea. We will keep the peace that your father would not. We will ensure that trade is fair. You will accept what has happened here or—”
“I will watch you die,” Jandhar promised.
There was a dangerous pause. He blinked a few times, waiting for the man to reply. Perhaps the man had expected less resistance and more compliance.
“You will not,” Theodore whispered.
“I will find your family,” Jandhar said, “and I will make this room look like a child’s birthday fete.”
Jandhar turned against the blade enough to see the Spymaster’s blue eyes and shaved face beneath a purple cowl and stylish dress. Theodore grabbed Jandhar’s white turban and pushed him forward with it. The blade left his skin and then the sharp point dug into the side of his neck. He felt a piercing pain and then a trickle of warmth flowed down his skin.
“Your father tried to impose his will on Surdel,” Theodore said as the blood continued to drop, “and he failed. Our navies will not be destroyed. Your men will not rape, pillage, and murder the Surdel people. I leave this mark on your neck as a reminder. You are alive at the mercy of King Aethis. If you follow in your father’s footsteps, if your armies land on my shores uninvited again, I will find you. And after I find you, I will watch you bleed out just like your father did. No army will stop me. No man or beast can protect you. Look around you and know that I am death. Observe and learn, young one. For your life and the life of every member of the Rasalased family depends on it.”
Jandhar closed his eyes as tears mixed with rage, frustration and fear drained down his cheeks and into the blood on his neck. The cold blade left the side of his throat. The hand on his turban let go, and the sequins and soft silk retreated.
He heard only the sound of his own breathing and the noise of the market just outside the veranda. No nearby footsteps. No rustling of silk or beads. He turned, expecting to see Theodore, but the man was gone. Jandhar rushed over to the balcony overlooking the bustling center of the market district in Scythica. He scanned for blond hair and a purple cowl and top. He saw plenty of purple. The markets too were decorated in his father’s favorite color. But he did not see Theodore Crowe. The master assassin had escaped.
3
A Lesson Unlearned
Prince Jandhar sat on a down-feather mattress in the master suite of the harem. Weeks had passed since the assassination, and the bed his father had been killed on had been replaced. Four-poster but different design. The drapes had been changed. The floor had been re-carpeted in purple, but all Jandhar could see was red. He looked down at his hands. He expected them to be bloody, and he didn’t understand why they were so unblemished. Nothing should be so clean—not in this room.
But everyone and everything kept moving forward, as if nothing so momentous as the death of Jofka had happened. In his opinion, the entire nation should have remained in mourning for months—not days.
He heard a noise, and the door opened inward. His mother Queen Sabarna stood at the portal, her arms folded across a purple and white satin gown. Not black. Even she had moved on. Her head was uncovered, and her dark hair pulled back. She wore a small golden tiara above her thin, manicured eyebrows and light blue eyes.
She peered into the room, obviously uncomfortable. She beckoned him to her, but he shook his head.
“Fine,” she said moodily.
She strolled into the room as if it didn’t bother her being here. Just another room in yet another Rasalased holding.
“They told me you’d be in here,” she said with animated hands that accentuated her frustration. “The servants say that you sit here and stare at the floor all day. Moping. A prince doesn’t cry and pity himself, Jandhar! I’ve taught you better than this!”
His brother Roshan shuffled into the room. He wore all black, except for his white turban, a gold band tied around his head and another along his waist. Jandhar nodded toward him in appreciation for wearing proper mourning attire.
“I’m not moping,” Jandhar said. “I’m thinking.”
“Your father’s gone,” she said. “It’s time we took charge of the kingdom.”
“I’m not thinking about father,” he said.
“Then what are you thinking about?”
“The man who took him from us,” Jandhar replied.
She sighed deeply. “Please do not go down this path.”
“A man came into this room,” Jandhar said. On the surface he was calm, but he could feel the agitation rising. “He killed forty of our subjects, and he put a knife to my throat.”
“And I will not lose you or Roshan to the same nonsense,” Sabarna said. “You will wait like a snake, deadly and unseen. Then, you will strike!”
“Father waited to strike Surdel,” Jandhar said, “and look where that got him.”
“Your father harassed every country within a thousand miles,” she said. “He had plans to sink the entire Surdel navy and to solidify the Small Sea, and he wasn’t particularly quiet about it!”
“Then perhaps that’s what we should do!” Jandhar said, pushing himself from the edge of the bed and onto his feet.
His mother shuffled backward, surprised by his sudden movement.
“You are to be king,” she said. “You must think, and you must do so clearly.”
“My mind is not mud
dled, mother,” he said. “I’m thinking as father would have wanted me to!”
She grabbed him by the jaw and stared into his eyes. He shrugged free and turned away to pace in front of the bed.
“Do not treat me like a child!” he said.
“Then stop acting like one! Be a man!”
The verbal jab landed softly. He was not acting irrationally. His mind was full of purpose.
Jandhar looked to Roshan, who bowed his head in respect. Jandhar assumed he did so in deference to their mother, for Jandhar was not king yet. She rubbed her hands against her arms, but the room wasn’t cold. She wasn’t warming herself. Maybe the room bothered her more than he had thought.
“If you do not wish to be here where it happened—” Jandhar said.
She scoffed.
“My loathing of this room has nothing to do with his death,” she said, turning to him, “I don’t wish to be here because this is where he whored! I didn’t want to come here before he died; I don’t want to be here afterwards, either.”
Jandhar’s head sagged. He looked at the bed, thinking he might see the place as a brothel again—as his mother saw it. It didn’t work. The bedding was replaced, but he still saw the pooled blood and the crumpled sheets of the man who had bled out there.
“What’s your plan, then?” Jandhar asked.
Sabarna looked toward Roshan. His brother raised his head for the first time.
“We arrange your coronation,” Roshan said, “The people need to see you. We take you on a tour of the Raveaduin. We visit every city around the Oasis. We even let you walk into the Crelloni lands with an armed escort, just as father would have done.”
“You want me to go into the desert?” Jandhar asked incredulously. “Perhaps I will contemplate life in the glistening reflections of a dune? A man came in here, and he murdered our father. And you’d have me impress dirty rebels with my stoicism—?”
“Brother,” Roshan said softly, “we will make them pay.”
“When?” Jandhar asked. “How?”
“When we’re ready,” Sabarna said, “and when they’re not.”
“You wish to wait like a snake in the grasses? Just watch the enemy consolidate his advantages and swell with pride at the damage he has inflicted on us?”
Sabarna stopped pacing and rubbing her arms.
“No,” she said, taking measure of her son. “I know you are not a snake. I know you will never mimic one. You are a lion, just like our namesake. But a lion, too, hides in the grass—not because he is weak but because he is smart. He doesn’t leap from the rushes because he can’t kill the zebra in a contest of strength. He leaps from the camouflage because he knows that when the antelope gets close enough and lulled into carelessness, the lion’s prey cannot escape.”
Jandhar raised his head and looked at her. She pointed around them at the walls, reminding him that spies were likely there—and not just ones from their rivals within the Empire. Surdel may still have assassins here too. Her implication was that he should wait until they could find a more secure place than his father’s personal harem.
For the briefest moment, he thought he might let the conversation linger as just some nebulous lesson between mother and grieving son to anyone eavesdropping. But then he remembered his father’s lessons about what kind of man he should be. If the Surdel spies were still here, then he would rather challenge them and let them know that he was not cowed or afraid. The man with the knife was no antelope. The assassin had infiltrated a well-guarded harem. He had cut the throats of forty people in the same room, including armed men.
In his youth and defiance, Jandhar didn’t see himself as the lion in his mother’s teaching scenario. He saw himself as the zebra.
“This prey has fangs, Mother,” Jandhar said. “Where you see an antelope, I see a tiger dressed as an antelope.”
“If you want to throw caution into the wind, then stop speaking in riddles!” Sabarna said. “You think every thought that goes through your head is some novel insight into life—some premonition of your own fate. You’ve barely lived! This man is but a man, and the Kingdom of Surdel is not this man. You need to think larger than him or even yourself. You will be king. You must be above this tit-for-tat. You must have patience!”
“Surdel is not a man,” he replied nonplussed, nodding in agreement. “It is a viper. It slithered into our kingdom and attacked us at the center of our power. Silent. Unknown. Deadly. You do not wait in the grass for a snake. You find where it lives, and you kill it.”
“They say this man is more beast than man,” Sabarna said. “They say he can change shape—that he can become anyone and be anywhere.”
“Wives’ tales,” Jandhar said. “I saw him. He’s just a man.”
He walked over to the balcony where Theodore Crowe had jumped down. Jandhar peered down.
“The serpent believes it has killed the pride with a single strike,” Sabarna said from behind him. “It glides across the sea and slithers back to its lair. It feels it is safe because a lion does not pounce over an ocean.”
“No,” Jandhar agreed. “It does not.”
He thought of creatures that might attack over such vast bodies of water. The water made him think of the river barge and the Raveaduin. The pops of baby dragons bursting near the boat. The majesty of a small adult dragon flying alongside him, wings dipping into the waves along the surface.
“Brother,” Roshan said, “mother is right. The Empire needs a king. You must take the crown, and the people must see you leading them. We must show strength. It’s what our father would have wanted. Our people cannot see the royal family as weak. That’s when rulers are overthrown. We must not be complacent.”
“Have the Visanthi nobles become so bold?” Jandhar asked. “Are our enemies at our gates? Are our navies and armies not holding our borders?”
“The Crellonis have not harassed us in untold centuries,” Roshan said, “but the Surdel navy has exerted themselves in the Small Sea. They caught our navy unaware as it anchored off Fohora harbor. We lost a quarter of our sea fleet. The ocean fleet to the east is still intact.”
Jandhar held his hands together behind his back and raised his face to the ceiling. It would have been a simple thing to accept the coronation, but he had no interest in being king—not while his father’s killer walked free. Not while the nation that sent the assassin went unpunished.
I must mimic the snake to find its lair. I must crawl on my belly until the enemy across the sea feels comfortable and safe.
“The Surdeli believe we are wounded—” Jandhar said.
“We are wounded,” Roshan said.
“The navy will be rebuilt,” Sabarna said. “There’s no reason to exaggerate our situation. You’re only feeding into your brother’s bloodlust and mania.”
“We will make them feel comfortable in their keeps across the Small Sea,” Jandhar said, “and when the time is right, we will strike them down. Theodore Crowe. Aethis Eldenwald. Any who took part in this heinous act.”
He imagined a fire spreading across the Small Sea. Its flames snaked across Shirun and up through Surdel, all the way to Kingarth.
“You do not go into an enemy’s base of power to kill him,” Sabarna said sagely. “You must flush him out.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “but not every base of power is an impenetrable fortress. Besides, everything burns—even the stone walls of a castle, if it’s hot enough.”
She nodded and sighed. “Out with it, then,” she said in exasperation. “If you’re planning something and not just moping, then let’s hear it. Go on. Out with it! Be a king!”
He sucked in his lip, trying to think of a diplomatic way to tell his mother that he didn’t want the crown—not yet.
“I will not take the crown for a few years,” he said. “We will appoint you as regent and form a council that governs until I assert my rights. I will feign weakness, so Surdel will suspect nothing. You will govern wisely and justly, and the snakes will slither back
to their grasses, thinking us wounded. Surdel will probably send one or two of its daughters to woo us into a permanent alliance.”
“Is that a bad thing?” Sabarna asked, but Jandhar pretended to not hear her.
“I will go south, and our treasury will secretly fund an army.”
“We have plenty of pikemen—enough to overwhelm Surdel in force,” Roshan said. “What we don’t have are boats capable of ferrying them.”
Jandhar shook his head.
“I need weapons capable of striking across the ocean,” Jandhar said, turning toward his brother and walking back into the shade.
“You want to attack across the Small Sea?” Roshan asked. He brought his hand to his chin and brooded. “And you wish to go south to recruit an army? The Crellonis don’t have a navy. You don’t really believe the legends, do you? You’re not trying to recruit the fabled sorcerers of the south, are you?”
Jandhar shook his head. “I have no interest in legends and fables… The last time an army of sorcerers marched across our lands, our ancestors snuffed them out, didn’t they? I need neither man nor magic.”
“In the south?” Roshan asked. He thought for a moment, then narrowed his eyes, and finally rolled them. “You’re mad.”
“Let them think so,” Jandhar said.
“Brother,” Roshan said, “it’s not what they think that I’m worried about.”
“They tell tales about these creatures,” Jandhar said. “They say they used to be as big as houses…”
“Those are fables, brother,” Roshan said.
“What creatures?” Sabarna asked. “What is he talking about?”
“My brother wants to raise dragons,” Roshan said.
“He’s already raising dragons,” she said. “I’ve swept up their ashes and scales myself!”