by JA Andrews
He frowned. “From what you say, the government isn’t strong there.”
“People here”—she flung her arm at the sprawling palace—“already know that.”
“Undoubtedly. But I did not. Beginning tomorrow, help me fix it.”
Sini let out a small laugh, part at the ludicrous idea, part at the commanding tone. “You’re too proactive. You’ll never make a good politician.”
“I have no interest in being a politician. I’ve been put in a position where I can help the people of Queensland, and I intend to do it.” He faced her stiffly, his hands closed neatly at his side as though he stood at attention. “Will you help?”
He was pompous and irritating and far too formal, but he seemed sincere. And helping the Lees was a worthwhile cause.
She curtseyed. “My undereducated mind is at your service.”
He scowled. “I didn’t mean—”
Sini waved it off. “But the Lees needs a way to mend its broken heart. Or everything else you do will be in vain.”
She leaned back on the wall and watched the smoky torches in the Lees. A broken heart. Their food was too hard to get, their wages too low, every part of their day was a struggle.
The idea snagged in her mind. She shoved herself away from the wall. “That’s what Lukas is doing. Trying to break Queensland’s heart. It was Mallon’s goal, to bleed the heart of the land dry so it could be easily conquered. He started at the edges and destroyed it bit by bit until everyone despaired. And now Lukas is following the same plan. He’s cut off our gold and troubled Queensland along the border.”
Roan turned toward her, his eyes wide. “And wants to destroy the Keepers.”
“But for a different reason. That’s his final goal. He believes that he’s saving Queensland from the evil influence of the Keepers. Every other thing he does to hurt the country is focused on harming the Keepers.”
“But it amounts to the same thing for us. It is bad for the country if the Keepers are hurt.”
Sini pressed her lips closed for a moment before she trusted herself to speak. “You’ve just pointed out that the Keepers aren’t much help.”
He shook his head. “The Keepers are the soul of this land. If I’m frustrated, it’s because if you fade, the kingdom fades. You hold our stories and our trust. The wisdom of the Keepers and their books stretches back to times the rest of us don’t remember. We need you. You are too full of your own humanity right now, and we need you to be more.
“We need you to remind us of our history and tell us our stories matter. We need you to council queens and future queens—and future lord consorts.” He stopped and ran his hand through his hair in the first unsure gesture Sini had seen him use. “If we’re frustrated, it is because we all look to you. And we’re wondering if you’re strong enough to save us.”
Chapter Twelve
When Sini returned to her room, the maid building the fires gave her a nervous head bob.
“‘Scuse me, m’lady. The night promises t’ be chilled,” the maid said with an apologetic smile.
Sini knelt next to her and handed her another piece of wood from the stack. The maid took it with a wary expression. She was older than Sini and her deference felt awkward. “It’s already chilling. I’m Sini. How are you keeping this so clean? I always manage to send clouds of ash out into the room when I set the fire.”
She gave a quick grin. “I’m Dalia, and I only make clouds of ash if an overfriendly nobleman goes and get too close when I’m working.”
Sini laughed. “Have you worked in the palace long?”
“Forever. Haven’t worked the Keeper’s wing in years, though. We don’t usually have so many Keepers. Since the intruder and the other things, they’ve brought some of us more experienced folk t’ help.”
“What other things?”
Dalia shifted. “Both Keeper Alaric and Keepers Will think someone’s been in their room, goin’ through their things.”
“Has anything been stolen?”
“Not that they know of. The steward was furious at first, thought it was the woman who cleans their rooms, but she’d never bother their things. The reason she’s here is she cleans well but leaves Alaric’s work alone and don’t tidy his papers.” Dalia’s voice lowered. “The Keeper doesn’t like it when people move all his papers, and he always has lots. Spread out on the desk, the floor, sometimes stuck to the walls.”
“That sounds like Alaric. If it’s not the cleaning woman, then who?”
Dalia shook her head. “Didn’t no one see nothing.” At Sini’s skeptical look she continued earnestly. “It’s true. Got everybody nervous. There’s no way into that garden ‘cept over a guarded wall or from inside. It’s nearly impossible to get through this end of the palace w’out being seen. If he’d been near the kitchens or washin’ rooms, that’d be different. Those places are busy with strangers. But all the way over here, everyone knows everyone. Anyone new stands out like a pig in the throne room. We all knew Keeper Will had brought you before you’d even reached your room.” She shook her head and added a last piece of wood. “It’s unsettlin’ that someone got to Keeper Alaric’s balcony without being seen. Then disappeared like a ghost.”
Dalia struck a match, lit the fire, and stood to leave.
“It was nice to meet you Dalia.” Sini held her hands out to the small flames. “Thank you for the fire.”
Dalia smiled. “Always feels a bit silly lighting a fire for a Keeper when you could probably just pop one out of the air.”
“I assure you,” Sini laughed, “I have great respect for the skill of fire starting.”
Dalia curtseyed her way out and for the first time in hours, Sini was completely alone with no noise beyond the cracking fire
She collapsed back onto the couch. Her conversation with Roan annoyed her like a wrinkle in her sock. He’d been right about the Keepers. As much as she hated to admit it, by midwinter the twins would be gone. The remaining Keepers were few and not particularly strong. Alaric and Will had their own strengths, but they weren’t what she’d always pictured Keepers to be. They weren’t single-minded in their service. They were more human than that.
She thought of Will’s words in the Stronghold. The amount of humanity we reveal to each other is one of our great strengths. Will had been talking about Keepers and the Wellstone, but it felt like more than that.
She spun her ring. The fire had grown large enough that the thin trails of amber light from the stones was almost impossible to see.
Roan had been right, but he’d been wrong too. The country didn’t need the Keepers to be more than humans. It was their humanity that was essential.
That wasn’t what was really bothering her, though. What was really irritating was his comments on her map work. She did not see Lukas merely as a brother. She had spent months considering all the information they had.
Sini heaved herself off the couch and took her pack into the study. This would be easy to disprove. She shoved the desk against the wall and spread out her map on the floor. Grabbing all the candles she could find, she set them around the map, seeing how quickly she could flick her finger past the wicks and still light them.
Then, putting aside fire games, she pulled out her stack of notes. Instead of placing them back in their original piles, she flipped through them again.
The night’s conversations swirled in her head. Roan was right. Before, she’d been using these notes to track Lukas, to figure out where he was going so he could be found. But maybe she shouldn’t be looking at where he was acting, so much as why.
It wasn’t about what he was doing. It was about his goals.
Piles of notes built up slowly along the southern border of Queensland according to the type of problem instead of its location. Troubling news that affected crops or herds in one stack. Problems with water sources in another. Unusual illnesses affecting people, game, or livestock each separated out.
A disturbing pattern emerged.
Three dif
ferent incidents of game dying from an unknown illness. First a few elderly sheep in the Black Hills collapsed and died. Then a sickness making the dairy goats in Marshwell collapse caused a shortage of milk. And finally the breeding sows in a small town in Greentree were almost wiped out. The report on the sows mentioned large, festering blisters on their skin before they collapsed and died. She hadn’t noticed the collapsing. She’d been too focused on what sickness could have caused the blisters. But what if the sheep and goats had had blisters too, hidden under their wool and hair?
And then the water sources. Small streams all along the southern border had either dried up or turned bitter. Each incidence was slightly different, sickening people or animals until the most recent one, in which the tainted water had killed a child. None of the larger rivers these spilled into had been affected, as they surely would have been if the cause was natural.
And then the wildlife. In the woods of Marshwell four deer were found dead of a wasting disease. In Greentree three moose were found dead of the same. On the border between the two, in rural hills, three dozen wild turkeys were found emaciated amidst perfectly rich food sources.
Sini knelt next to the map and laid out the last of the notes. She sank back onto her heels, the truth of it washing over her. Lukas had been systematically looking for the best way to hurt Queensland. Similar attacks had been spread so widely apart from each other, she hadn’t connected them when she’d been merely tracking his location. And each of the type of attacks had continued until one sufficiently severe happened. Then nothing.
Everyone else had been right.
All this time Lukas hadn’t been pestering the southern border of Queensland like a frustrated child. He’d been systematically formulating ways to harm farm animals, water supplies, crops, and wild game. It reminded her of the jackals in Gustav’s book about Mallon. Lukas was nip, nip, nipping at the edges of Queensland, figuring out which nips hurt the most so he could attack and weaken her.
With a dull ache in her chest she pushed herself up and blew out the candles, taking the last one with her, leaving the notes in darkness.
Tomorrow in the council she’d have to tell them that they’d all been right. They should be ready for him to unleash his worst, as soon as he was ready.
She climbed into bed, grateful that she didn’t have to explain it yet.
Once she was settled, her thoughts swirled between diseased animals and tainted water. She tried to picture Lukas’s face the way she’d known him years ago. His easy smile. She could picture the way his hair had looked—light brown, hanging a bit past his shoulders. His beard, never quite coming in as thick as the Roven, still braided like them. She could picture his limp; how bad it could get if he were too far from Killien.
Had his solution to that worked? The limp, suffered when a stonesteep attacked him, had never healed. The pain from it, somehow based in magic, had lingered. For years Lukas had had to stay close to Killien to deaden the pain, since no magic worked near the Torch.
But he’d discovered that Killien’s power came from his blood. And before escaping the Roven, Lukas had stabbed Killien, bottling up as much of his blood as he could and leaving the Torch to die. Alaric and Will were the only reason Killien was still alive.
Lukas had worked so closely with Killien, always scheming secret ways together to strengthen the Morrow Clan. It had been almost impossible to believe Lukas had tried to kill him.
Almost.
That had been the first day she’d had this feeling. The knot in her gut that knew Lukas was capable of the things people said he was doing. No matter how much she wanted to believe differently.
She’d forgotten that—or maybe refused to remember it. Whenever she’d thought of Lukas coming to the Stronghold, it was as she’d first met him.
But tonight she couldn’t picture his younger, happier face. All she could see was him at the end: angry, and driven to destroy his enemies. Whoever he deemed them to be. He’d betrayed Killien, tried to kill him, stolen his sword, and flown away on a dragon.
When had she forgotten that was who he had become? When had she started to believe that just because she and Rett were happy and safe away from the Sweep, that Lukas would be too?
Killien’s sword reminded her of the Wellstone. Why had the Wellstone connected Lukas and the sword to Chesavia?
She blew out her candle in irritation and rubbed at her face, trying to clear her mind. Trying to think of anything else.
The closeness of the Lees nagged at her. Was her family still there? Did the boys spend their early mornings trying to steal bread? What did they look like now? She tried to picture the faces of the little boys that were left in the Lees when she had been taken to the Sweep. They’d been so small. After eight years, would she even recognize them?
The last time she’d been in Queenstown, right after she’d escaped the Sweep, she couldn’t bring herself to look for any of them. Will had offered to go with her, but the thought of facing the father who’d sold her, the mother who’d let her go—she’d never wanted to see them again.
And yet her mother’s face in the Wellstone—it hadn’t been contempt that she’d thrown at Sini when Vahe dragged her away. It had been pain and regret and terror. Her mother had been broken by too many years of hardship. And thinking of her now, Sini found her feelings had shifted from bitterness to pity. She wasn’t that frightened child any more. She wasn’t frightened of the Lees, of her parents, of hunger.
Tomorrow morning, early enough that most of the Lees would be quiet, she’d go.
A large part of her protested the idea, but she paid it no heed. It was time.
Sini raced through the alleys of the Lees, the ground twisting and heaving. Heavy footsteps pounded behind her. Her legs were too short and moved too slowly, as though they dragged through mud. She darted into a grimy street, her bare feet slapping the hard ground, her breath coming in gasps. Behind her the footsteps stayed close, but all she could see were leering faces leaning out of windows and doorways.
A hand shot out of the black, clamped down on her arm, and yanked her into the darkness.
Sini jolted awake, shoving herself up in bed. Her room in the Keepers wing was dim and silent.
She pressed her eyes shut and breathed deeply, trying to slow her heart. Her feet rubbed against the soft linens of the bed, not the hard, cold ground.
It had been years since she’d been plagued with dreams like that. Always chased and vulnerable.
Outside her window the world was just starting to lighten with dawn. Everything in her room had been drained of color and lay in muted greys. Too much like the dinginess of the Lees. Her trip there could wait for another day.
She reached over to the candle on the bedside table and lit it with her ring, brightening her spirits and the room.
Even this early, noises floated in from beyond her room.
She lay back down and cast out. Will still slept in the room next to her. Evangeline and Alaric further on. Guards in the sitting area outside. The floor below her was filled with people; the garden outside held several more.
As far as the wave rolled out, she found echoes of people.
It would have been handy to have been able to do that when she was little. If she could have sat in her hiding places in the Lees and cast out to discover if she was as safe as she felt.
The fear lingering from the dream sparked a new anger. She had been a child, and no one had protected her. She clenched her fists against the familiarity of the fear.
She wasn’t that child any longer. Nor was she a slave. She’d spent four years at the Stronghold unlearning that fear, and she wasn’t going to let it control her now.
She was perfectly capable of walking into the Lees so early in the morning that the most volatile parts were still sleeping. Mornings there had always been more peaceful than the rest of the day.
She pushed the covers off and hurried over to the wide wardrobe. Ignoring the dozen dresses that had appeared yesterday,
she found her own warm pants and light blue linen shirt.
The deep green brocade cloak hanging on the side of the wardrobe would be a stupid choice to wear into the Lees, even if it was warmer than her own simple red one. Her fingers lingered on the Keeper’s robe. What would the Lees do with a Keeper?
Whatever it was, it would involve more attention than she wanted. She pulled her own rustic cloak on and tugged on her boots. She glanced in the tall looking glass. Nothing about her said she’d spent the night in the queen’s palace. The garnet on her ring was small enough it shouldn’t be noticed. She was too clean for the Lees, but it would have to do.
Outside her door a guard stood watch over the empty sitting room. He wasn’t one of the young fresh-faced men usually assigned tedious guard jobs. He was fifty at least. The grey at the temples of his short-cropped hair was spreading to the rest of his head. He didn’t stand at stiff attention, as though inviting scrutiny. Instead he stood relaxed, but watchful, his arms crossed. He managed to look capably intimidating, even standing next to a table with a large vase of summer flowers. Identical sorts of guards stood at each of the other Keeper’s doors.
“Good morning, soldier.” She stepped up next to him and peered across the room. “Are we expecting an onslaught from the chairs?”
His expression did not change. “Good morning, Keeper. We are not concerned about the chairs, no.”
“Please just call me Sini.”
The guard kept his attention on the room. “That will not be possible.”
Sini considered him. “Can I order you to?”
“You’re free to do what you like, Keeper, but my orders to treat you with the respect due your station will override any such requests.”
Sini tapped at her lips. That was annoying. “You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”
“Captain Liam of Ravenwick, Queen’s Guard, 3rd unit.”
“Captain?” Sini glanced at the other two. “The queen sent captains to guard us from the chairs?”
“These are Lieutenant Torrne and Lieutenant Branley. They are under my command.”