A River of Royal Blood

by Amanda Joy

  Insufferable immortal bastard.

  “Your amusement is leaking into the bond, Baccha,” I muttered as I bent to pull the long-handled knife from my boot. It gleamed in the moonlight, as wide and as long as my forearm. Made to butcher and pull through layers of fat, muscle, and bone. Not meant to saw off horns.

  I rolled the antelope’s head so its eyes faced away from me. My hands brushed down the length of both horns and a pulse of energy went through me. I took a deep breath before laying the knife along its left horn; then I clenched my teeth and set to sawing. I didn’t realize I’d closed my eyes until Baccha called out, “Princess, look.”

  The white tattoos on my arms—bone tattoos, animal silhouettes winding in a chain from the tips of my middle fingers up past my elbows—glowed brighter than the moonlight. I gasped, jarring the knife away from the notch I’d created on the horn. I began again, watching the light intensify with every stroke of the knife. The glow the tattoos emitted twisted around the horns, outlining them in a misty white effulgence.

  With one hand at the base of the horn and the other sawing back and forth below it, it didn’t take me long. Still, the muscles in my arm burned even as I reached halfway and sweat stung my eyes. I stopped and started a few times, worried I would lose my balance and bury one of the horns in my stomach.

  As I sawed through the last edge of it, the light flared and pain exploded in my mind. It was so sharp that I bit my tongue. The light was gone. Baccha moved close to me and lifted the horn from my hands.

  “Thank you,” I whispered as he gave me a waterskin. My headache started again and I clenched my teeth against the pain.

  Baccha bowed and gave me a cloth to wipe my face. “Do you want to take a break?”

  I peered at him. Something like respect rested there, in the straight line of his eyebrows and the flat set of his mouth. It was always worth noticing when Baccha wasn’t smiling. “I can finish.”

  He bowed his head again and backed away when I returned the water. As soon as I wrapped my hands around the horns, the headache started again. Sharper this time, pressing at my thoughts like needles boring into skin.

  But I had to endure this. Baccha was expecting me to claim both of these horns, and I refused to give him another reason to question my commitment to magick. As long as I told myself I could live with the pain, I would be fine. There was the binding to consider, but if I’d claimed one already, that meant this was one of the magicks the binding allowed.

  Instead of that burning starburst of pain in my head, I focused on the pinching ache between my shoulders. The smell of blood and rotting leaves clogged my nose, and the only thing I could see was the mingling of the light my arms emitted and the silver moonlight reflecting off the blade. Once I was halfway through the next horn, I sucked in a breath and stood up, shaking my head. Baccha called my name and I waved him away. As soon as I wasn’t touching the horn, my mind cleared.

  I would be fine—I could finish—I just needed a moment of not breathing such death.

  I closed my eyes and counted until I stopped feeling faint. I fell to my knees, too tired to crouch. The still-warm blood from the antelope’s neck soaked into my pants. I didn’t even feel the pain of the headache anymore, I just knew I needed to be done.

  When the knife bit through the last inch of the horn, I sagged with relief. Baccha was there before I had to ask, lifting it from my hands.

  “Some bones are harder than others to claim,” he murmured as he took the horn. “Horns are the most difficult.”

  “And we had to start with the most difficult?” I crawled away from the dead antelope, in the opposite direction of where he placed the horns, and collapsed at the base of a nearby tree.

  “Your nameday is soon, too soon for me to regret pushing you.”

  I glared at him, hoping it might relieve some of the pressure behind my eyes.

  “I know it was difficult, but I couldn’t help you. You can only create a lasting bond with a bone you claim, a bone you remove yourself.” I watched as Baccha wrapped the bones in coarse brown cloth. A sense of relief eased through me. Half of me never wanted to be near them again. “If you don’t properly claim the bones, their usefulness runs out in less than a year. I have bones that I’ve been wearing for well over a century. That ring you wear is one hundred ninety years old.”

  “So I won’t have to claim another pair of horns for the rest of my life?”

  “That’s right, unless you live as long as I have, and at that point, you’ll have greater things to worry about than a new pair of horns.” Sorrow flowed through the bond. “Come on. Let’s get you back.”

  “What about the antelope?”

  “It’s too far for us to carry. Jackals roam these woods. They’ll make better use of it than we can.” Baccha stuck out his hand.

  I ignored it, pushing up to my knees first, and then used a low branch on the tree to pull myself up.

  On the walk back, he told me the next story.

  * * *

  Once more, the realm was irrevocably changed—when twenty ships arrived on the shores of the Fair Sea.

  The voyagers had left their homeland, a vast Empire across the Fair Sea, and become lost on the vast ocean. They called themselves human, and in form they were plain, shaded only with the colors of the earth. But strangest of all was that they had no magick.

  Myreans had long known of lands beyond the realm, where there was no magick, but these were the first people from there to arrive on their shores.

  The humans approached the current Queen and requested refuge. She told them they could stay in Myre for five years, to recover from their long journey, and in exchange, the humans would build ships so that her people could explore the realm by sea.

  When their work was complete, the humans sought the Queen again. They had forgotten their home, they said, in the decade sailing across the sea, and Myre had taken its place. They wanted to stay but knew that without magick, neither the land nor its people would accept them.

  “What would you have of me?” the Queen asked.

  “We ask that you make us Myrean in blood, in exchange for our loyalty and craft,” a Lord among the humans said.

  The Queen was shocked by the boldness of their request, though the trade on the sea with the help of the human-made boats had already yielded much wealth. But a gift of magick, on such a scale, had never been done before. She considered her decision for exactly one year and then called the humans back to her Court. She offered them an elixir made from the blood of khimaer, fey, and bloodkin. It would not give them all magick, but it would make magick grow in the blood of their children.

  When the humans learned of the elixir’s contents, half fled north to the mountains and eschewed magick. The rest drank it and pledged fealty to the Queen, swearing upon her Ivory Throne.

  A generation passed and the first humans with magick were born. Their powers were as vast and varied as the sea, most given multiple gifts. There was magick of water, magick of fire, magick of speed, and magick of foretelling. There were magicks of the mind and of healing and of blood.

  But their magick was cursed and impossible to control. When human magick was loosed, it killed.

  The Queen of the next generation—who believed her predecessor had been a fool to give the humans this gift—declared that they would have to leave the realm if they could not restrain their abilities. However, she was not cruel. It was not the humans’ fault that the previous Queen had been foolhardy.

  She assigned the task of conquering this magick to a group of human men who’d learned to use their magick through sorcery and ritual. To aid in their task, she created a council of the most powerful magick-workers in Myre.

  This was a mistake.

  Together the council and the human men, who by now called themselves the Sorceryn, found a way to link magick to symbols emblazoned upon their skin.
Human magick became the most potent and feared across the realm.

  It was this power that convinced the humans that they should rule.

  CHAPTER 18

  WHEN WE RETURNED to camp, Aketo was waiting outside my tent, smelling of mint soap.

  “Do you . . . Can I have a word?”

  I stared at him. I’d never heard Aketo stumble over his words. He rocked back on his heels and smiled. “If you aren’t busy, that is.”

  “Just, ah, a moment.” I pulled up the flap and ducked into my tent. Blessedly Falun wasn’t inside. I washed my face with a towel and the last of the waterskin Baccha had given me and invited Aketo in.

  Once Aketo crawled into the tent and sat across from me, the space seemed to shrink. His horns brushed the top of the canvas and his legs were so long. I flushed when his knee touched mine. My eyes traced the straight line of his broad shoulders, winding up his throat until I noticed the slight depressions in his bottom lip, from his fangs.

  Staring, again.

  Someone, one of the guards, had set out tea. I busied myself with pouring us a cup. “Honey?”

  “Yes.” I glanced up and found him watching me. Even when I noticed him staring, he didn’t seem to care.

  He was far too confident, far too beautiful to be anything but horrible.

  And that smirk.

  I pressed the tea into his hands and gulped down half of mine. A bit of honey slid down the side of his cup. He caught it with his thumb and then tasted it.

  Gods damn it. What was I thinking, inviting him in here? “What did you want?”

  In the same moment, he asked, “How was your lesson?”

  “Fine—”

  “I—” He chuckled softly. “You first.”

  “It went well. We hunted an antelope. I brought it down.” I glanced up to find Aketo leaning forward. He nodded for me to continue. “I . . . it was strange. Every part of it, my magick, I mean.”

  I hadn’t talked much about my lessons with anyone other than Falun, and then only briefly. No one else had asked. Aketo wasn’t whom I would have chosen.

  Khimaer magick was used from a young age. Every tribe had a different power. All khimaer from the lami tribe, like Aketo, could read and control emotions. And all the khimaer from Anali’s tribe could manipulate shadows and darkness. Skill grew as they aged, of course, but there were no tattoos. No Sorceryn delving needed to find the power within. Magick, Anali had told me, was as easy as breathing for her.

  Aketo nodded slowly. “Do you like it?”

  “No, I don’t. Maybe if I could learn slowly, maybe if I’d started when I was a child, but now? No.”

  He sat back, tucking his curls behind his ears. “I used to hate my magick. For a long time, I couldn’t understand where my feelings ended and everyone else’s began. It was overwhelming. I spent most of my time alone until I was ten.”

  “What changed?”

  “My mam decided it was time to start taking me on her visits around the Enclosure so I could watch her work.”

  “What does she do?”

  “She’s the head Steward of the Enclosure, which just means that all the Governor’s orders are filtered through her to the rest of us. But her most important work is in helping the heartsick. She visits with people, sometimes she uses her magick to soothe them if they ask, and other times we bring food and see that their homes are cared for. At first I would do anything to get out of the visits. I’d just started controlling how much I felt other people’s emotions, but it was so much harder around people who were in pain. We can’t just soothe them for the sake of our own comfort. We only do what they want. Besides all that, I always knew things I wasn’t supposed to and . . . I was put out to learn we were lucky. I had Mam and my brother, Dthazi, and my granna. A lot of the people we help have had their families split between the Enclosures, not to mention the ones the soldiers kill. They kill anyone who makes trouble. That trouble could be as little as being drunk or out past curfew. Or talking back.”

  I swallowed. “How did you stop hating it? The visits and your magick?”

  “I saw the good we did. That and my mother made it clear hating my magick was the same as hating myself. She’d say, ‘You can’t cleave you and your magick in two. Doing that will kill both.’”

  “Oh. That’s why I . . . struggle with my magick. If me and my magick are one and the same, I am nothing but a murderer. The most well-known person with this magick was Queen Raina.”

  “I know.”

  Did it disgust him? Did it gall him, defending me when I’d inherited magick that killed his ancestors? It would have burned me up inside.

  Aketo shifted. We’d been drifting closer all this time. My legs were folded beneath me, my knees pressed against his shins, and one of his hands was half resting on my thigh. I shivered. I wore thick calfskin leggings, but I felt his touch as if against bare skin.

  I inched back, putting some distance between us. “What was it you wanted to discuss?”

  “Since we’re just a few days’ ride from Asrodei, I wanted to tell you that I’ve met your father.”

  Of course he had. My father knew every member of my guard. Other than Anali and Falun, who’d both been my choice, he’d chosen them all. “I knew that when you came to Ternain.”

  “What I mean to say is that I know him well. He visited the Enclosures and—” He broke off and canted his head like he was hearing something from afar. The color drained from his face, and his eyes went round.

  “Aketo?”

  He shook his head, and then covered my mouth. Half a second later, I went cold.

  How long had our voices drowned out the screaming?

  CHAPTER 19

  I DUG THROUGH the weapons in my bags and pressed a sword into Aketo’s hand.

  His eyes flashed to mine. “Stay here. I’ll guard your tent. If anything happens to me, you’ll have to run.”

  I let him go, my heart pounding like a drum in my chest. The only other sword I’d brought with me was the blade with the carving of Khimaerani on the hilt. I unsheathed it, the bone handle fitting perfectly into the contours of my palm.

  I waited, peeking through the tent flaps. Someone, a man from the look of his boots, appeared. He and Aketo moved away from the tent and began to exchange blows.

  His sword whistled through the air, and then two more attackers stepped from between the shadows. I crawled out of the tent and ducked just before a sword could take my head off.

  I jumped to my feet and swung without hesitation. My blade connected with the forearm of a veiled fighter, jarring against his bone.

  He hissed and uttered a curse. I didn’t understand his words, but I felt the venom of them.

  The slight curve and single edge of his sword marked him as a northerner, from Dracol. I had only a moment to consider this as he attacked. I blocked him twice, and then froze at Aketo’s grunt of pain.

  I glanced to my left.

  Twenty feet away, three men circled Aketo, blades whirling. Blood spread from a cut on his upper thigh, soaking the leg of his pants. The sound of steel slicing the air caught my attention just in time to duck another blow aiming for my head.

  I backed away and the Dracolan’s sword caught me across my stomach. I was barely aware of the pain, but I could feel blood soaking into the waistband of my pants.

  I tried to find the music, but it was all chaos and discord in a storm around me. All I heard was the clang of steel as swords met. I jerked up my sleeve and found the tattoo of a sword on my arm.

  I swiped the veiled man’s blood across it. My magick reared up within me, and I wrapped the power around my blade and swung, aiming for the man’s heart. A wound spurted blood in his chest, seeping through his clothes. It wasn’t a killing blow, though it worked well as distraction. As his eyes jerked from my sword—still cloaked in crimson magick that moved like f
lames in the dark—to his blood drying on my arm, I swept my sword in a long arc, cutting his neck.

  When he fell, I’d already turned toward Aketo. He was fighting two men now, as one had fallen. I watched as his blade lashed the air, swift and dangerous as a snake. Even while beating back their strikes, Aketo’s eyes met mine. His were telling me to run.

  I lifted my sword above my head, waiting for the right moment. Then finally one of them stepped back, dodging Aketo’s blade, and I struck. My sword bit into his shoulder and he turned toward me, growling in pain.

  I scrambled backward and wiped his blood from the blade and rubbed it on my arm. I lashed out at him with the magick, this time cutting his neck so that blood gushed from the wound, splattering me. He staggered for a moment and then dropped.

  I retched at the feel of his hot blood on my face, reminded of the assassin’s blood and Dagon’s. Pain stabbed at the back of my head, worse than it had ever been for blood magick.

  When I looked back toward Aketo, the last man had fallen. Aketo limped toward me. I ran and caught him just before he fell. The wound in my stomach tugged painfully as I lowered him to the ground.

  “You said . . . you would . . . stay in . . . tent,” Aketo wheezed. His head rolled back with the weight of his horns, and his skin was ashen and cool to the touch.

  “Hush now. I had to leave it, you were being overrun.” I needed to stop the bleeding. Then I could find Baccha. I tried cutting a strip of fabric off the bottom of my tunic, but my hands were trembling too hard. I poured all my fear into the bond, praying Baccha would come.

  “I had things,” Aketo whispered, eyes fluttering shut, “well in hand.”

  I froze at the flash of movement behind the nearest tent and then sagged as Baccha stepped into view; one of his wolves walked beside him, its muzzle red with blood. In one sharp glance he took in Aketo, the bodies of fallen men around us.

  Baccha dropped to the ground next to me. “Guard us,” he said to the wolf as it prowled behind him, growling with pink-tinged spittle hanging from its lips.