Jev couldn’t claim to miss the war, a war he’d never believed in, but he had felt… competent there. He’d known his job and how to do it. Here, in this new position for the king, he worried he wouldn’t be sufficient for the task. He wished he had some of Zenia’s confidence.
“Will one of you move over, or do I have to stand here all day?”
Jev turned to find Lornysh waiting by the head of the table. How long had he been there? In his green woodland clothing, he blended in with the fake vines twining all over the walls and ceiling of the tasting room.
“If you stood more loudly, people would notice you,” Cutter grumbled, sliding over while keeping a hand on the open map.
“That wouldn’t be good for my health.” Lornysh took the seat beside him.
He wore a cloak, the hood pulled up, but even so, Jev worried someone in the busy tasting room would glimpse the pointed ears thrusting out of his silver hair. Fortunately, most of the people here had been tasting all afternoon on this last official day of the coronation celebration before the city returned to normalcy. Some of them had likely been drinking all three days of the affair.
“I’m seeking to fill in this map,” Cutter informed Lornysh, “but Jev won’t go sleep with a criminal for me.”
“That’s selfish of him.”
“Exactly. Jev, what if I help you make a gift for Zenia? Something good that she’d like. Then will you sleep with this Iridium?”
Jev leaned back, draping his arm over the back of his booth, and noticed Lornysh’s eyebrows arching.
“Is that logic strange to elves too?” Jev asked.
“Most of what comes out of Cutter’s mouth is strange to elves.”
Cutter scowled at him. “I’m regretting sharing my bench with you.”
A waitress wandered past, and Jev held up a finger to preemptively order a drink for Lornysh, more because he didn’t want the woman coming over to engage him and his ears in conversation than because he thought Lornysh would enjoy it. His friend had snooty tastes when it came to alcohol. And food. And art. And everything else.
“Do you have a pencil or charcoal?” Lornysh asked.
“Yes…” Cutter squinted at him but dug into his pack again and pulled out a charcoal stick.
Lornysh wordlessly took it and bent over the map.
“What’re you doing?” Cutter gripped his forearm. “I had to pay a grubby overcharging human for that map.”
Lornysh looked coolly at the hand on his arm before shifting his icy blue gaze to Cutter. “Filling in the missing tunnels for you.”
“How would you know where they are?” Cutter asked, but he released his grip. “You haven’t been here any longer than I have.”
“I have been using the underground passages to get into interesting places around the city since my hood is not typical of spring fashion here, it seems, and has made many people suspicious.”
“Imagine,” Jev murmured, leaning out to take a glass from the waitress before she came close enough to look at Lornysh. He laid a dragon-headed kron coin on her platter.
She smiled shyly. “Thank you, Zyndar.”
“What counts as an interesting place in a human city?” Jev set the glass in front of Lornysh, though he’d already bent his head to sketch tunnels on the map.
Lornysh glanced at the glass, sniffed without reaching for it, then wrinkled his nose and returned to the map. “The Museum of Exotic Creatures, the orchestra hall, the Fourth Garden Amphitheater, and a business with a ceramics tour.”
“We’ve been here less than a week.” Cutter leaned his elbows on the table, watching the drawing intently. “How have you had time to see all that?”
“I don’t think Lornysh sleeps much,” Jev said, voicing a suspicion he’d long had.
“I meditate.”
“I don’t think Lornysh meditates much,” Jev amended.
“It is sufficient for my needs.”
“If I went to a theater of human plays, I’d certainly fall asleep,” Cutter said.
“But not if you went on a ceramics tour?” Jev asked.
“Ceramics can be interesting. It’s working with materials from the earth.”
“Do you know anything about medicine, Lornysh?” Jev asked. He didn’t expect the answer to be yes, but he’d found in the past that Lornysh had an ecumenical education. It would be convenient if he could offer some insight into his case.
“Human medicine? Little.”
“Medicine in general. I imagine that what applies to elves applies to humans for the most part. We can’t be that dissimilar since we can have offspring together.”
“We?” Lornysh lifted his eyes from the map.
“Well, not we specifically. You and I would have trouble in that department. But our races. There are all manner of mixed human-elves wandering the world.”
“Yes,” Lornysh said, his tone cooling.
Did he not approve of such mixed bloods? Likely not. He did seem to be a purist. Jev had always been surprised he’d managed to talk Lornysh into joining Gryphon Company during the war—especially since his introduction to the army had been when soldiers captured and brutally interrogated him. And now, with the war over, Jev kept expecting him to offer a parting and return to his elven homeland. Or, if he wasn’t welcome there, head off on travels to parts of the world he hadn’t yet seen. Lornysh couldn’t find the ceramics museums of Korvann that exciting.
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
“Targyon has asked me to investigate how his cousins all came to die last month and to figure out if he could be in danger for the same ‘disease of the blood’ as it’s been called.”
“As your kingdom’s new monarch, he’ll likely be in constant danger from many sides. I assume bodyguards and food testers flank him most of the day.”
“From what I’ve seen, yes. But the princes must have had those things too. Dazron, the eldest, at least. He was all but running the castle and the kingdom while Abdor led us around Taziira.”
Lornysh set down the charcoal and steepled his fingers. “I have only passing familiarity with the medical sciences, but I suppose even that’s more than what most humans have. I can offer a few thoughts, but I anticipate you’ll want to find a human expert.”
“I do plan to visit an expert, but go ahead.” Jev had long since stopped being offended by Lornysh’s arrogance and belief in his own superiority.
“As I’m sure you know, there are afflictions that affect some races and not others. Only dwarves, for instance, can contract mynoresta and get serious infections from it. It’s not that the fungus doesn’t get into all of our bodies when we inhale spores, but humans and elves aren’t bothered by it. It’s believed that dwarves, because they left the surface long ago and spent so much of their evolutionary history underground, didn’t need to develop an immunity to many of our above-ground microscopic nemeses. That can make dwarves more susceptible to illness when they travel among us. Meanwhile, they are unaffected by the methane that one often encounters underground, a gas that is deadly when elves and humans are exposed to too much of it. Presumably, it was so advantageous for dwarves to be immune to underground gases that those with a tolerance were more likely to live into adulthood and reproduce. Those without a tolerance may have died before having children. Thus, immunity became more prevalent than not in the species as a whole.”
Jev nodded, though he was getting far more of a lesson on spores and gas than he had wanted. “That explains why one race might be more susceptible than another, but what about specific bloodlines within a race?”
Cutter snapped his fingers to get Lornysh's attention while frowning at Jev. “You’re distracting my elf from what’s important here.”
“Your elf?” Lornysh asked. “Did you not once say you wanted nothing to do with me until I learned to grow a decent beard?”
“That was before you started drawing tunnels on a map for me.” Cutter picked up the charcoal stick and thrust it between Lornysh’s fi
ngers.
Lornysh sighed and accepted it, pulling the map closer so he could continue drawing. “Your people, Jev, spread out long ago from the jungles of Izstara where we all originally evolved from Grellan apes. Humans, elves, dwarves, and orcs all did, of course, but we grew into very different species hundreds of thousands of years ago.”
Jev set his wineglass down with a clunk. Evolved from apes? What did that mean? That he shared ancestors with some furry primate? And was cousin to some tusk-mouthed orc?
Was there any human science out there to back up what sounded like ridiculous claims to him? Jev would ask Targyon what his books said about this the next time he saw him. He knew not everyone believed the Order origin story that the dragon founders had hatched in the cosmos and been instructed by the universe to create this world and all its species, but he hadn’t heard any of this before. Zenia and all her Order friends would stomp up and down on Lornysh’s ears if he shared the ideas in public.
“Your human ancestors traveled from their jungle origins in search of food and because of competition with the other species. They soon settled on other continents, even the already populated, and claimed Taziira.” Lornysh’s lips thinned, and he glanced up from his tunnel drawing, as if Jev was to blame.
Cutter snapped his fingers again at the pause and pointed to the map.
“Over countless generations,” Lornysh continued, “your people continued to evolve, adapting in small ways to better fit into their new environments. This didn’t occur uniformly to the whole species. Different clans and tribes changed depending on where they settled. Some of those changes were in the blood and were passed on to children and grandchildren and so on. Today, with the advent of steam power, it’s easier for humans to travel around the world and create vast kingdoms and empires, so many of the old clans have dissolved. But the quirks of their blood still exist, manifesting in their descendants.”
“By the founders, I’m going to need a lot more alcohol if he’s going to keep talking.” Cutter groaned and eyed Lornysh’s untouched wineglass.
“He’s drawing your map while he does it,” Jev said. “What’s the problem?”
“When he lectures, it’s like having nails pounded into my skull.”
“To sum up,” Lornysh said, “your king’s ancestors may have come from another continent or an area where they developed a mutation that allowed them to thrive there. Maybe it’s useful here, or maybe it isn’t, but it continues to exist, passed on from father to son through the generations. It’s possible that an intelligent doctor or scientist may have found a blood-borne pathogen that is deadly to humans with that specific mutation. I don’t believe anyone—human, elf, or otherwise—has the scientific understanding and tools to create such a thing, but to exploit something that exists in nature would be a possibility. Perhaps, if you were to pore over genealogy reports, you would find that this happened to your royal family in the past.”
“So, it’s possible that what they say is true, that there’s a disease that only affected the Alderoth family?”
“Possible, though for it to be completely family-specific would be unlikely. It probably affects a small subset of the human population, and the Alderoths happen to belong to that subset.”
“Could it have been an accident?” Jev asked. “Or do you think someone would have had to deliberately introduce the princes to this… pathogen?”
“Unless there are others dying in the city after displaying the same symptoms, the latter seems likely.”
Jev’s head was starting to hurt. This was a lot to take in. “Here’s the problem with your hypothesis. The Alderoths are a very old family, as old as my own, and they’ve been here on this land since before Kor was a kingdom.”
“That doesn’t negate my hypothesis. It’s possible your Alderoth family has carried this mutation for millennia. Since your royal families are known for inbreeding—marrying cousins and such—it makes sense that such a mutation would have stuck around and remained dominant among them.”
“So, I should be digging into their genealogical history, you say?” As if Jev didn’t have enough to do. At least what he’d expected to be a simple meeting for drinks had turned informative.
“To see if this has happened to the family before and if premature deaths were the result. Perhaps someone even found a cure centuries ago.”
Jev nodded. “If we had a cure, Targyon wouldn’t have to worry so much. Not about this specifically.”
“Indeed. Though you might warn him not to marry any distant relatives, so he’s less likely to pass the trait along to his children. Inbreeding, as it’s taken humans a long time to realize, tends to cause a lot of trouble and mutations, not always advantageous ones. A greater diversity in the blood is ideal for health.”
More science Jev had not heard about. As far as he knew, the royals and the zyndar had always believed their blood was superior and it was ideal to marry others from royal or zyndar families. Jev wondered what Zenia would think of all this. Perhaps that inbreeding was the reason for zyndar arrogance, a malfunction in the blood, no doubt.
He started to smile, but Lornysh was gazing gravely at him, and his lips froze.
“What?” Jev asked.
“If I were you, I would be very careful with my investigation.”
“Why?”
“You know more about your own genealogy than I do,” Lornysh said, “but given your family’s standing in Kor and your estate’s proximity to the capital and Alderoth Castle, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of your ancestors had married Alderoths at some point in history. Or multiple points.”
“They have.” A tendril of worry wormed its way into Jev’s stomach as he realized what his friend was implying.
“Then it’s possible you may share this mutation that makes you susceptible to whatever this affliction is. And if whoever brought it into the castle is still there…”
“I see your point.” Jev thought of the dead doctor, the man somehow having been warned of the investigation before it arrived on his doorstep. Yes, someone was still around who’d been involved. Or who had been responsible. “I see your point,” Jev repeated softly.
“Lower your hood,” a man growled, walking up to the table behind Lornysh. It was unoccupied, but other tables beyond it held crowds of people, and several were looking their way.
Jev should have known someone would find Lornysh suspicious sooner or later. He stood up and gave the man a steely gaze while noting the dagger and a one-handed hatchet belted at his waist. Clad in coarse, dirt-spattered clothing, he looked like he’d come in from someone’s field. Or perhaps the winery’s field.
“Is there a problem?” Jev asked.
“You’ve got suspicious companions, Zyndar,” the man growled.
Jev flicked his fingers toward the door, the gesture only for Lornysh and Cutter. He didn’t want a fight to break out. There was nothing to be gained from it except a bill from the owner and the need to carry people to a hospital.
“How boring would it be if my companions were mundane?” Jev smiled and stepped forward, effectively blocking the newcomer from Lornysh. He hadn’t yet tried to touch Lornysh, but he was glowering hard enough to wilt flowers.
Lornysh hadn’t turned around or acknowledged the man, but he appeared tense, his head up and alert. He slowly set down the charcoal stick.
Cutter sighed, though his expansive map appeared nearly finished.
The hatchet man glanced over his shoulder to comrades at a nearby table, and they all nodded encouragingly.
“If you’re loving elves,” the man told Jev, “your father’s name won’t help you.”
“If I were loving elves, my father would beat me black and blue.”
If he still could. Jev liked to think he could handle himself against the old man these days.
“As he should.”
More head nods.
“We insist that your suspicious companion leave.” The man slurred the word suspicious. Neither he nor hi
s buddies appeared sober.
“We’ll all leave if that’ll make your evening more comfortable.” Jev pulled out his purse and dropped a few coins on the table.
His self-appointed harasser seemed surprised, as if he’d been readying himself to spout more threats.
“Why don’t you sit down, friend?” Jev offered as Cutter folded his map and returned it to his pack.
“You think I’m afraid of you because you’re zyndar?” the man snarled. “World’s changing. People got used to not bowing so much during the war, when there weren’t so many zyndar in the streets. Zyndaring.”
“I imagine.” Jev continued to block the man as Cutter and Lornysh slid out of their seats and headed for the door.
Lornysh kept his hood up. Jev didn’t see how the hatchet man could have seen his ears and known for certain he was an elf. Unless it had become common knowledge that Jev was roaming the city with an elf and a dwarf. If so, as much as he hated to contemplate it, it might be better for his friends if he parted ways with them. At least for a time.
The man’s fingers twitched toward his hatchet as Lornysh walked out the door, his cloaked back to them. Maybe he wouldn’t have attacked, and maybe Lornysh would have sensed an attack coming even if he did, but Jev didn’t take the chance.
He stepped forward, his hand darting for the man’s forearm. His foe tried to jerk it back, but Jev was faster. He clamped down, keeping the man’s fingers from touching the hatchet.
“Don’t do anything foolish,” Jev murmured, glaring into his eyes for a second before sharing the glare with the man’s companions.
“We’re not the foolish ones here. We’re not drinking with an elf.”
“He didn’t drink,” Jev said, then promptly gave himself a mental kick for admitting what they could have only suspected.
The man growled and tried to pull his arm away. Since Cutter and Lornysh had left, shutting the double doors behind them, Jev let go. He issued another baleful glare to the table, for all the good it did with drunk men, and strode toward the exit.
A thud came from beyond the doors, followed by a crash.
Agents of the Crown- The Complete Series Page 31