The Tenets in the Tattoos (The King's Swordsman Book 1)

by Becky James

  “She knows where they are.”

  “Where who are? Who, Aubin?” Tuniel soothed.

  “My family.” His eyes hardened, giving a sharp tug on Evyn’s wrist. She cried out, and I felt her pain as a throbbing blow.

  Roaring, I grabbed his wrist and squeezed hard to make him let go. Tendons gave and snapped in my fingers. Aubin’s hand went limp, releasing her, and I threw him to the floor with a crash. Teeth bared, I stood over Evyn.

  “Waker must have done something,” Evyn sobbed, cradling her broken wrist. “She’s put something in his head.”

  “You’re the one spinning falsehoods around me,” Aubin spat, getting to his feet, holding his own arm to his chest. “Lies of friendship, fake memories, and false feelings. Tuniel, they are manipulating your mind.”

  Shaking her head, Tuniel lifted her hands to placate him. “That’s Waker. That’s her doing. You’re back with us, you’re in the real world. You are no longer in the dreamlands.”

  My chest hurt, the back of my head aching. I nearly fell to my knees next to Evyn, but I had to remain on guard against him.

  Aubin rounded on us. “Tell me where she is!” he bellowed at Evyn. “You’re evil, how can you do this to the children, how can you live with yourself?”

  I couldn’t take anymore. Grabbing his shirt, I shook him to shut him up. “Don’t,” Evyn croaked. “He’s not himself.”

  “You think I can’t see through you? You think I don’t know who you really are?” Aubin snarled at me. “Tuniel, they have you under a compulsion. Free me now, we need to leave!”

  “Aubin, that makes no sense. I am the magic user here, not them.”

  Aubin spoke rapid Dinahen. “She can use necromantic energy,” I heard, and then could only pick out some of the rest, “trickery”, “children” and a word I didn’t know.

  “Morven?” Tuniel repeated it, incredulous. “She’s been dead for turns, Aubin, murdered by her soul companion Dorcas Earthmancer.”

  “That’s what they say, but I have seen her. I lived with her.” Aubin said more, but I couldn’t catch it.

  Evyn levered herself up, distracting me with her pain. Evyn panted, “Thorrn, take a few deep breaths.” I stared at her, and she deliberately breathed in and out slowly a few times. I found my chest matching hers, and the ability to focus swam back to me.

  I held my head as nausea tipped into me. I had nearly… “Evyn, wait there.” My jaw creaked and popped. I swallowed to ease my tight throat. “I’ll secure him, and I’ll be right with you.”

  Facing Aubin, I held my hands out, flat and open. “Calm down.”

  “You try being calm, berserker.” Aubin drew his blades. Tuniel’s eyes narrowed, and Aubin hissed, dropping them. They sizzled on the floor. “Tuniel, no, I’m trying to save you!”

  “Can you put him out without hurting him?” Tuniel asked me, her eyes cold and brittle as mountain shale.

  “I know about three different ways.” Lunging for him, I managed to grab his shoulder, pulling him close and reaching for his neck. He strained hard, in danger of dislocating his own shoulder, screaming obscenities, but I got my hand to a pressure point in his neck. A few heartbeats of squeezing and he went limp.

  I held him suspended in my arms, my heart hammering in my chest. Tuniel put her face in her hands.

  Laying him down, I knuckled his chest, a pain point; if he was pretending to be unconscious, he would not be able to help reacting to it. But he really was out, and I left him to go to my soul.

  Folding her in my arms, both of us shaking, I said, “I’ll kill her. I promised I’d kill her before, but I’m going to kill her even more now.”

  Evyn’s face was streaked with tears, her eyes still wide with shock. “What happened to him? What did she do?”

  “I thought Waker was torturing him in the traditional sense,” Tuniel said, leaning against the wall of the barge. Her voice took on the cadence of reporting, of speaking without feeling. “She can create dreamlands with their own rules of time. I have no idea what she did, but I recall her abilities. She changes people entirely, she changes who they are loyal to, everything.” She let out a low breath. “I don’t know how she did it, so I don’t know how or even if I can do anything to change it back.” She tipped her face up, the light of the glowstone glittering in the corner of her eyes.

  “What do we do now?” I tried pacing the room but butted against the narrow sides of the barge as soon as I turned. “Damn and blast!” I swore, nearly thumping the low ceiling. “I don’t want Evyn anywhere near him if he’s hell-bent on hurting her.” I bit down on my knuckle.

  “We can’t abandon him, Thorrn!” Evyn said.

  “And we won’t, but I need you safe.”

  Evyn curved over her arm. “Waker can create dreamlands, right? She created something for Aubin that made him feel that way about us. Apparently, I did something to him or to someone he cares about. His family, he said. Who is his family, Tuniel, and we can show him that they are really okay?”

  But Tuniel shook her head. “He has no family of his own, not anymore. He is part of my family, of course, but they never accepted him and never became friendly with him, as the soul of a mage, and I could never be associated with him, for his own well-being. It’s just him.” She touched his cheek. “We might need Ellesmere to Read what happened to him.”

  “A fair idea, as long as we can keep the queen safe from him,” I said. Seeking out healing supplies which Evyn said were underneath the water faucet, I focused on tying Evyn’s arm into a makeshift bandage.

  I put Aubin back in the bunk we had only just levered his unconscious form from. This time at least his heart beat with purpose, his eyelids flickering in sleep. As I cast about for something to tie him down with, Tuniel asked me, “Do you have any spare metal?” She scowled at my frown in reply. “To make something that will hold him fast until we can get to the queen at Tergue Hall.”

  She must have read the surprise in my face, and her eyes dropped. “He is clearly not himself. Waker has twisted his mind. Until we know what has been done and the extent of it, the queen represents our best chance of helping him, and we should contain him until then.”

  I nodded. “Very well. Thank you.”

  “There will be fly-tippers around here somewhere,” Evyn assured us. Tuniel and I exchanged glances but decided to refrain from asking what sort of metal that was.

  True to her word, Evyn pulled the barge over and we found some metal in a pile crumbled on the side of the canal. Tuniel formed blocks around his wrists and ankles, along with metal links to hold him fast. I checked over the arrangement, resting my arms on the bunk to conceal how my shoulders shook.

  I didn’t realise I was holding in sobs until later, when I wondered why my eyes burnt and my ribs hurt.

  Aubin woke up a few turns of the glass later, shouting; the blocks holding him down incensed him. Tuniel tried to soothe him, but it took six turns of the glass. Evyn and I stayed abovedeck at the helm through drizzling rain and stared straight ahead, as if we could block out his rant.

  That night, Evyn went to somewhere called Ay and Ee. I sat next to her in a blindingly bright room where people wept, sniffled, or bled, while Evyn continued staring straight ahead. She had the break put into a better brace than I could fashion, and then signed a great deal of papers to get back out of the building. By the time we headed back to the barge, it was the early hours of the morning. We knocked on the bow door where Tuniel slept, and she let us in from there so as not to disturb Aubin.

  “He’s awake,” she whispered. “He’s staring at the ceiling, plotting. I tried talking to him. He didn’t make any sense.”

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “He told me Morven was alive. That he lived with her, and he has a family with her. A family that you have taken, somehow, in order to get to me.” Sighing, Tuniel lowered herself back on the rumpled bed, and Evyn sat next to her. The ceiling brushed my head, so I took a knee. Tuniel watched my movements, h
er lashes thick with tears but her face set.

  “Who’s Morven?” Evyn asked.

  “Morven was my cousin, my father’s sister’s child. She was the soul companion of a mancer, Dorcas. Either Dorcas killed her or she killed herself, but she is in the family tomb either way.” She turned a handkerchief in her hands. “Aubin is convinced she’s alive. It’s her he’s trying to find.” Tuniel’s lips twisted. “Nothing I said seemed to get through. He is blind to the truth.”

  Evyn kneaded the bedclothes with her hale hand. “He really, truly believes she’s alive because he saw her. Like Waker did for Ben and my dad.” Evyn took a deep breath. “We can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. He lived through something, and we need to find out what that was before we do anything else. Then we need to win his trust back.”

  “Not going to be easy,” I muttered, flexing my fingers. The way Aubin had attacked Evyn was colder and more clinical than even his work as the apothecarist. As if violence was the cure against her.

  Evyn drew her knees up to her chest and I nearly reached out to her, suddenly filled with a need to take her away, somewhere far away from this man who had it in him to kill her, the motivation and the means. “I never said it would be easy,” she said quietly, her voice carrying. “We can’t talk to him or try to reason with him right now because he can’t trust anything we say. We need to show him every day who we are and what we’re really like.” Evyn glanced at me. “Kind of like you doggedly staying by my side on Earth, even though I wanted nothing to do with you.”

  I shrugged, my heart warming even as it clenched like a fist. My compassionate soul companion. “If all it takes to win Aubin’s trust is fight a few footpads, I’m up for that.”

  Evyn smiled thinly. “With Ellesmere back, we can also help him out in the dreamlands when he sleeps. I just know Waker will be there fanning the flames of whatever she put in his head.” She smiled sadly at Tuniel. “How are you feeling?”

  “Sick. Angry,” she admitted, pushing her hair back from her face with stark white fingers. “I am going to kill Waker for this.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I would be gracious and say ladies first, but I would be honoured if we can do it together.”

  “It almost sounds like you are proposing we walk out with each other, Shardsson,” Tuniel said archly.

  “No, no, that’s not what I meant at all!” I gulped.

  Evyn shot Tuniel a small smile, but then her brow dipped. “What did you both think of what Waker said, just before Aubin was restored?”

  Tuniel closed her eyes briefly. “I understood little of it, except that we are dancing on the edges of something monumental. It would have to be, to risk war.” She opened her eyes and scowled at me. “Not every mage or mancer chafes against the Accords and wishes all mundanes were mindless slaves, you know.”

  I held up my hands. “I haven’t ever said as much.”

  Tuniel sniffed, turning back to Evyn. “Waker risks much for her ambitions. I cannot even begin to guess at them. She is the most powerful mage in Oberrot, matched only by the MasterMage of Dinahe – Sinjorina Majestica there, currently Liara – and the Sultan of Rush. Although I have heard tell that his magic is lacking, his daughter, Princess Sabatha, shows promise in her magical abilities. Waker said ‘she’. I am minded to wonder…” Tuniel sighed. “First we must restore the Accords, and for that we need the true king.” She glared at me again. “Are you going to scream ‘treason’ and run me through if I disparage the current ruler and his attitudes toward the magical population?”

  “Gough or Torgund? If it’s the latter, go to, and when you run out of words, I have more for you.”

  Tuniel’s lips twitched, and the soreness in her eyes eased somewhat. “This usurper king has placed sanctions on the Academy. That is where children who realise they have aptitude with magic are sent,” she explained to Evyn. “Children who are nervously learning to control the forces surrounding them and themselves with the threat of oafs wielding swords directly above their heads. Literally.” Tuniel glared at me again.

  My stomach dropped. What if these people, magic users, yes, but only going through their day-to-day lives, saw danger instead of safety when they saw the reds? Suddenly my reluctance to enter the place seemed ridiculous. I cleared my throat. The reds were avoided in the Academy, skirted around and watched with suspicion. Probably each time I had entered, towering over the grown mages and mancers, let alone the children, I had left a blazing impression of a blunt brute, when in reality I had been nervous of the enclosed space and the stares of suspicion, and professionally wary of magic users.

  Could I truly be blamed for that reticence to engage with them? I hunted down the ones that went rogue, encountering the ones who were dangerous, not those living their lives, but I wondered what it would feel like to have a contingent marching toward you knowing these men and women would not hesitate to kill you.

  Because all swordsmen could be brutes to mages and mancers, just as all mages and mancers were after power in my perception, but innocent civilians were the people I strived to protect. All of them.

  I straightened up, resolving to sort through these thoughts later. “The current ruler of Oberrot is Gough,” I asserted. “He is alive, and we will restore his spirit and work on re-establishing the Accords. Then, should a larger conspiracy abound, we will be in a strong position to search and stamp it out then.”

  Tuniel rolled her eyes at me. Evyn chuckled, a small but heartening sound.

  We pushed on through the night. Evyn took Aubin some tea with Tuniel, but he screamed at her so much that Tuniel asked Evyn to go. I decided to stay away. It was hard enough on Tuniel without setting him off every five heartbeats. I wondered if he should go without seeing us for a while to help him regain his composure around us, but Evyn tiredly insisted that we just had to be ourselves around him.

  “I can’t be myself around him. Not really,” I said.

  “Why not?” She guided the tiller of the barge with one finger, looking ahead with unseeing eyes.

  “Being myself around him would involve threatening him about getting too close to you. If I said something like that now… it’s actually true, because he genuinely wants to hurt you. It’s too close to the bone, Evyn.”

  “Alright.” She rubbed her face tiredly. “Did you do anything else other than insult each other?”

  I thought back to the Aubin I knew. Tough, capable, kept his thoughts and feelings close, and good to have at your side in a fight. “He could take it then. He can’t now. He might never again.”

  “Don’t give in to thinking like that. We can get through this. It might not look the same as it did before, but we will get somewhere.”

  “But what if the only thing we can do is leave him?” My chest felt heavy. “What if he cannot reconcile his memories? Wouldn’t the best solution be never to see us again?”

  Evyn’s lips trembled, then I saw her call calm into herself, her shoulders firm. “Once he’s in the right place to make that decision, he can make it and I’ll respect it,” she said. “But right now, he’s not in a good place. He’s trapped in Waker’s lies. We have to help him unravel them and then, if he decides he wants to go his own way, he can.” She touched her bruised cheek. “We just need to get him to a good place. We owe that to him.”

  I nodded.

  We made it to the citadel by midday, and our arrival at Tergue Hall was expected by the queen. I scouted first to make sure we weren’t going to be set upon by Special Forces, and instead of going to the King’s Hall, which I knew well from training expeditions, I went to the Queen’s Hall of medicines and remedies, where Ellesmere welcomed us and had rooms prepared for us.

  All the women revolted when I asked to have Aubin put in the dungeons. Evyn scowled. “He’s back with us now. We have to show him kindness and that it’s different. Putting him in the dungeons could set him back.”

  “Set him back? He’s made no progress.” He was
a danger to Evyn and had set out to hurt her. I could not take any risks.

  I oversaw the installation of bars on the windows and a heavy lock on the door of the room that Ellesmere provided for him, adjoining to Tuniel’s. I also got some chains that were long enough for him to move about but not get out. He raged when he saw me and I was sorry that I had to chain him up and reinforce the nightmare he had lived, but at the same time I had to protect Evyn from very real danger.

  Ellesmere prioritised helping him, settling in Tuniel’s room just outside the room he was in and gently probing into his mind. She gasped a few times, then burst into tears. “I understand now. I understand what he’s been through,” she sobbed.

  Passing her a handkerchief from a side table, I asked her, “Are you able to recount it, Your Majesty? Do you need time to recuperate?”

  She shook her head. “I want to show you.” She held out her hands, and Evyn took her right, Tuniel her left. I held onto Evyn’s hand, and found Tuniel’s open palm offered to me. Tuniel’s hand was cold but firm. I closed my eyes briefly, and opened them up somewhere else.

  I was back in the caves under Spiritshere, the heatstone throwing out steady warmth. I tried to speak but couldn’t; then I recalled this was a memory, and that I was powerless to do anything but watch.

  I rode with Aubin in his body, and felt his terror as he startled awake and could not move. He tried as hard as he could, but his limbs would not respond. He was frozen.

  A dream of Evyn sat up, stretching. Aubin’s thoughts assailed me: At least she appears hale, he was thinking, and he took comfort from that. Then the dream version of me rolled upright, leaning over Aubin’s face with a cruel twist to his lips. Experiencing the edge of Aubin’s emotions, he felt a strange combination of acceptance and anger.

  Aubin recognised that look from Special Forces, how all the men and women thought he was beneath them, just a healer without magic and therefore the poorer choice. None of them saw how he eased people into and out of the world, or how he treated those who could little afford magic. They did not carry the weight of the burden he knew, nor of what he could do for any single situation, any one life.