The Fiery Crown

by Jeffe Kennedy

  I still wasn’t sure what had happened the night before. We’d never not had sex, and the lack of it put me in a surprisingly foul mood, especially considering I’d spent my entire life until Lia without it. Now it seemed I couldn’t fall asleep without the release I found in her arms. Her cool rejection had put me oddly off balance.

  Like a lovesick fool, I’d ended up sidling as close to her naked body as possible without waking her, breathing in her fragrance, feeling her sweet warmth. When I’d finally fallen asleep, I’d slept like the dead—and Ibolya had to shake me awake. Lia hadn’t moved, but I felt sure she feigned sleep. I’d have liked to ask her why, but I sat on that question, too, uncertain how to navigate this terrain.

  Instead, I rode in the carriage with my wife, the Queen of Flowers, wearing my crown and playing king. I felt like a Sawehl-cursed fool, even more out of place than I’d been in the gardens. But I went along with the best graces I could dredge up. I could tell by Lia’s sideways glances that my efforts fell short of her standards. At least she seemed vastly entertained by making me as miserable as possible.

  She’d dressed in some fantasy ideal of rural splendor, abandoning the sharp edges of her usual court appearance for something like a cross between a country milkmaid and a hothouse flower. The wig was sunshine blond, with dangling ringlets, her dress another confection of pink, light blue, and white lace. Even her eyelashes and eyebrows were pink—the same light shade as her lips, permanently curved in a merry smile that didn’t touch her keen gaze. I didn’t think I imagined that she’d made her eyes be even more gray than before, extra compensation for her slip in the tower. She looked beautiful, as always, and this costume should’ve made her seem soft and approachable, but she’d coated herself with a layer of forbidding ice.

  Her ladies followed in a carriage immediately behind us, all dressed in flouncy, flowery gowns, too. Their laughter and chatter billowed up occasionally. Ambrose rode with them, wearing his rainbow wizard robes and apparently regaling the ladies with outrageous stories and sometimes sending up fountains of sparkling colors to the applause of the crowds. Sondra had been pressed to ride with them, but refused so firmly that Lia had crooked a pinkie and summoned a horse for her instead. When I suggested I could ride a horse also, the look Lia gave me was so cold it might have given my balls frostbite.

  So I sat like a lump in the carriage, rock hammer at my feet and bagiroca on the seat beside me, riding backward, while Lia smiled and waved at the people gathered to see us off. Pelting us with flowers. Of course. At least I’d held firm and wasn’t wearing the light-blue ruffled silk monstrosity of an outfit her ladies had brought me. I was more than half certain she’d had them dig it out entirely in a vengeful attempt to knock me down a notch. She probably watched through a spider’s eyes or something to enjoy her joke. Zariah and Nahua had taken it away so fast, and brought me garb in my usual black so immediately, that I knew Lia had to be behind it, though she hadn’t said a word about it.

  Hopefully she’d get over being so royally pissed at me. I’d made a mess of that meeting, though she had, too. Two bulls in a small pen. It made me wonder if she was right, that she and I would never be able to work well together. And then I’d remember that we only had to make it a few more days and it wouldn’t matter, because all of this would end. One way or another.

  “Are you going to brood for the entire journey to Cradysica?” Lia inquired with a pretty smile that no doubt looked good from a distance. She lifted the hand with the orchid ring, waving gracefully to a knot of cheering subjects.

  Oh, are we talking now? “Actually I thought I’d brood for an hour or so, then take a nap.”

  “Funny.”

  “I thought so.”

  We fell silent awhile. She smiled and waved. I watched the crowd for signs of danger. Finally she huffed out a sharp sigh. “You could make an effort to acknowledge the people, maybe look like you want to be doing this.”

  “I don’t want to be doing this.”

  Her smile chilled into place. “You wanted to go to Cradysica.”

  “Go, yes. To plan a battle. Not … make a party of it.”

  “We’ve been through this. You do understand, Conrí, that this is My realm and I know how to do things here.”

  “You do understand, Euthalia,” I growled back, “that we are at war.”

  “I don’t want my people alarmed.”

  “They’re sure as hell going to be alarmed when Anure bombards them with vurgsten.”

  Her smile fell away entirely. “Can we call a truce, at least for the duration of this ride? Otherwise it’s going to be a miserable journey.”

  “You’re the one who’s pissed at me.”

  She gave me an astonished look. “And you weren’t at all angry at Me, Conrí?”

  “Not any more than usual. We’ve been pissed at each other before and we still had sex.” I fumbled to a halt, feeling I could say something more, but not sure what it would be. I’d hurt her somehow, and I had no idea how to deal with that. Sex was the one thing we had that worked, and if I’d screwed up even that …

  She lowered her gaze, but I still caught a flash of real surprise in her eyes before she did. “I was exhausted.”

  And she was lying. I knew it in my bones. Something else was going on with her—besides all the ways her life had been gutted. I supposed I could cut her some slack. “I’m glad you got some sleep then,” I said, meaning it sincerely. “You look well rested.”

  Pink crystals glittered as she glanced up. Then she smiled, something both sad and sincere in it. “Thank you. Though I—”

  Just then, a group of children ran shrieking up to the carriage. One climbed the side, quick as a monkey, and flung something at Lia. I had only a moment, but it was enough. I swung my bagiroca without thought.

  In slowed time, I saw the weapon on target, the wide, terrified eyes in a panicked face, Lia’s horrified expression beyond, the flowers in the kid’s fist. Before I could pull the strike—if I even could have—my arm went numb and I found myself reeling back against the lavishly soft pillowed seat. Staring up at the cloudless blue sky.

  Only when a flock of birds with red, yellow, and purple wings flew over, did I realize I’d been staring at it a while.

  With effort, I lifted my head. Lia sat across from me as before, only now she held the bouquet of flowers. Ribbons that tied it together trailed colorfully over her skirt, her trim ankles crossed neatly below all the white lace. My skull pounded in a way I remembered from the one and only hangover I’d ever had. Maybe Lia had cracked my skull because only a head injury would explain my imagining that she looked contrite.

  “How do you feel?” she asked, sounding almost as if she cared.

  I rolled my head on my neck and realized we’d gone some distance, winding up out of the basin of the harbor and the low cliffs the palace sat on, and into the steep streets beyond, still lined with pretty cottages and cheering people. Narrowing my eyes at her, I rubbed the back of my skull. “Like I did when your ladies put that punch of a hex on me when I first tried to talk to you.”

  She arched one brow, expression cool again, the pink line crisp and bordered with tiny sky-colored jewels that matched the ones in her crown. “When you tried to attack Me on My throne, you mean.”

  “I was provoked,” I grumbled. I tried shaking my head, but that only increased the pounding.

  “Here.” She held out a hand, huffing in exasperation when I eyed it dubiously. “Trust Me,” she added with a malicious smile. “Truce, yes?”

  Right. But I took her small hand—amazing how delicate she felt to me when she was anything but—and the ache in my head subsided, a feeling of well-being replacing it. “Thank you,” I said, bemused, still holding her hand. “What did you do?”

  She tugged her hand away with a secretive smile. “I couldn’t let you harm that child. Your crown is there beside you, and your bagiroca, too, though you might reconsider using it to bash the innocent children of Calanthe.”
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  I snatched up the bagiroca from the rocking floor of the carriage, testing its weight. Satisfied, I set it on the seat next to me. Only then did I put the crown back on, wishing I could skip that. Lia watched it all with a gaze as alert and interested as a cat.

  “What were you checking?” she asked. “With your bagiroca.”

  “How did you knock me out?” I returned the question with the one she still hadn’t answered.

  “Those are hardly equivalent levels of information.”

  I shrugged as if it didn’t matter to me. “We don’t have to talk. There’s always brooding for me.”

  She very nearly smiled at that, mastering the twitch of her glossy pink lips with a stern stare.

  “I get used to a particular weight,” I explained, figuring I might as well share. If that’s what she wanted to talk about, then fine, we could start there. “If you took any of my rocks out, I’d have to replace that one or practice to learn the new heft of the whole thing.”

  “Why would I steal one of your rocks?” She seemed genuinely perplexed, even a bit indignant.

  Habit, I realized, just assuming that stuff would get stolen when I wasn’t watching. “In the mines, we—” I coughed to clear my throat. Not something I liked to talk about, but maybe this would prime the pump with her. I untied the knot on the bag and poured its contents onto the seat, laying out the stones. “They fed us because they had to, or we couldn’t work, and they had to give us the tools we needed, but they didn’t have to be generous about it. You know. Desperate people stop being human and get to be more like animals. You didn’t watch your stuff, it got stolen. I forget sometimes, that I’m not in that world anymore, not on Vurgmun.”

  I glanced up to find an arrested look on Lia’s face, her lower lip caught in her teeth. She realized it the moment I looked at her, and deliberately relaxed, closing her lips again in a serene smile. I guess she never did smile showing her teeth. Must be something else she hid—though from what I’d seen of her teeth they looked like regular ones.

  “Didn’t you have guards to keep order?” She sounded partly like the queen annoyed at someone’s incompetence, and also dismayed for me.

  I laughed at that, a harsh sound I shook off. “Oh yeah. We had guards, all right. Bored and angry ones. Vurgmun was hardly a prime posting, so the lazy and disobedient got sent there. They’d get bored. Fucking with our heads was pretty much the only entertainment in that barren place. They liked to pit us against one another, bet on the outcomes.”

  “Con…”

  To stop whatever pitying thing she’d been working up to say, I held up a rock. “This one is from Vurgmun. The first stone I collected.” I laid it in her palm, the egg-shaped gleaming black stone filling it.

  “It’s … pretty,” she ventured, stroking it with her other hand, the orchid on her ring billowing and fluttering.

  “Yeah, there’s lots of that stuff on Vurgmun. Something to do with the volcanoes. I found that one and wrapped it in a piece of shirt.” My father’s shirt, but I knew I’d never get through saying that out loud. “I kept adding more rocks to the bag, reinforcing the cloth, until it had a heft that worked for me. After we escaped, I picked up this rock, from the beach where we landed on the Shwem coast.” I handed her a plain gray stone, washed smooth by the tides. “And left one behind. To keep the weight right.”

  She stroked that one with a fingertip, crystal-blue nails flashing, then glanced at the pile beside me. “Do you know where all of them are from?”

  “Yep.” I took the two back from her and replaced them in the leather sack, selected another and handed it to her. “I picked up this one at Keiost when Anure’s ships docked to retake the city.” I grinned at her. “That didn’t go as the Imperial Toad planned.”

  “You mentioned on our wedding night that the rocks are from places you conquered—do you have one from every battle you’ve won?”

  “That would be too many. Just from key places I wanted to remember.”

  “Is that one from My palace?”

  I should’ve known her sharp eyes would pick out the faceted purple stone. With chagrin, I handed it to her. “Sorry. I pried it out of the decorations on the window in the prison tower. I’ll put it back.”

  “No.” She tried to hand it back. “Keep it. You have a stone from every other place you conquered.”

  I wouldn’t take it. “We didn’t conquer Calanthe,” I reminded her.

  “Didn’t you?”

  “You won that battle, took us prisoner.”

  “Sometimes I wonder,” she murmured.

  “I’m not your captor, Lia. I’m your husband. You can talk to me about stuff. I thought we’d gotten past some of this.”

  She studied me. “I’m not good at this, either,” she finally said, and I realized that she was thinking of what I’d said the night before. “I want you to have this. Call it a gift.” She held out the purple stone.

  Taking it from her, I brushed her fingers, watching her eyes for a glimmer of color. “I’ll keep it always,” I said.

  10

  At least Con had stopped brooding and started talking—though I supposed if anyone could do both at once, he could. He held the flat and faceted amethyst oval I’d immediately recognized from a familiar floral relief in the palace, remembering how when he’d stormed my chambers he’d carried a bag made from the pink silk of the Lady Sondra’s borrowed gown. Con must have pried many stones from the window border to make a bagiroca hefty enough to replace the one my guards had confiscated. When he regained his leather one, and kept only the amethyst, he would’ve had many left over.

  “What did you do with the other stones?” I asked.

  Busy gathering the rocks he’d dumped out and putting them back in the worn leather bag, he cast me a questioning look.

  “You would have pried out a number of them to make a weapon of any weight for escaping the prison tower,” I clarified. “But you only retained that one. Where are the others?”

  I’d never have predicted Con could look sheepish, but he eyed me, brushing the bits of dirt and sand off the plush seat, residue of his rock collection. “Sorry about the dirt,” he said.

  I waved an impatient hand. “Leave it. That’s hardly important. You’re ducking the question.”

  He puffed out a breath, started to scrub a hand through his hair and stopped himself, remembering he wore the crown. Zariah and Nahua had done a sterling job of grooming him, though even their best efforts created only a sheen of polish over the restless predator. I rather enjoyed the contrast.

  “I was going to mortar the stones back into place, but Ambrose took over the tower and won’t let anyone in there.”

  “I know.” I let my own exasperation show. “Not even the servants to clean. Though I’d think the wizard would make an exception for you.”

  “Nope.” He grinned at me, a different smile than that feral grimace when he mentioned Keiost, and far better than the haunted look his face had gotten when he spoke of the mines. With this smile, a dimple showed in one cheek just above his beard, a glimpse of genuine amusement. “He likes you much better.”

  Hmm. I didn’t think that was true. Ambrose had attached himself to Con for a reason that went beyond anything as prosaic as affection. Con was at the center of whatever the wizard’s deep agenda included. “So … the stones?” I prompted, morbidly curious now.

  “I tossed them in that fishpond.”

  I restrained a groan. “You threw a small fortune in jewels into a fishpond.”

  He searched my face, suspecting a joke. “Jewels?”

  “Every one.”

  “The pond had pretty rocks in the bottom already.”

  “Not precious gems, however.”

  “Why would you put jewels around a window in the first place?” he burst out, waving a hand at nothing. Several young women, thinking he waved at them, squealed and tossed flowers. One swooned dramatically, her friends catching her with laughter. Con seemed to be completely obliviou
s to his effect on them, as he had been with all the ladies—and plenty of lads—who gazed at his impressive bulk and seething sexuality with overt longing. My wolf of a husband stood out, yes, but not the way he thought.

  “In point of fact, I didn’t put them there,” I replied as drily as I could since I truly wanted to laugh. “But consider this—if you’re essentially an occupied kingdom, one that already tithes heavily to a greedy overlord who plagues you with emissaries and spies, and you’d like to retain some wealth, just in case, what’s a good way to hide precious gems in plain sight?”

  “Window decorations.” He considered that. “Your father was a clever man.”

  “Yes, well, cowardice and stupidity don’t always go hand in hand.”

  “I suspect he wasn’t a coward, either,” Con said slowly, gaze on me.

  “There’s a reversal,” I said lightly, to cover my surprise. “Not what you implied yesterday.”

  Con tilted his head, adjusted the crown. The black stones in it were from Vurgmun, I realized. He’d crowned himself with the stones he’d once mined. “Maybe I’m learning there’s all kinds of ways to fight, and not all of them include bashing things,” he added, with a twist of a smile.

  “Fortunate, as My palace would be denuded of decorations if everyone decided to make bagiroca with precious gems.”

  “When we get back, I’ll wade into the pond and retrieve them,” he answered with rueful grit.

  When we got back. A lovely fiction to believe we might return. “There’s no need. The fish probably ate them all anyway.”

  “I doubt that, and this clearly bothers you. I’ll make it right.”

  “Conrí.” At my stern tone, he met my gaze. “Now is a time that I’m teasing you,” I told him gravely.

  He narrowed his eyes. Thought a moment. “What about the blue outfit?”

  I inclined my chin in gracious acknowledgment. “That too.”

  With a look of consternation, he stared at me a moment longer. “You have a truly wicked sense of humor,” he said, dawning realization in his voice.