Return of the Guardian-King

by Karen Hancock

  Kitrenna was so amazed and thankful she went so far as to credit Abramm for his most excellent judgment in leading them to such a fine place, which did not make her husband very happy.

  As the others bustled about getting settled and starting the fire, Abramm did a quick scout of the area. He’d been thinking all day of how to protect them should the tanniym pay a nighttime visit. Laud had suggested last week that he might conjure a Light shield, and even taught him how, though his success had be sketchy at best, Instead of just making the net and throwing it into place, he had to lay out a ring of kelistars first, using them as a primer from which to build the shield itself. Since any wind at all would send them rolling, or put them out entirely, it was not the best method for outdoor use. Thankfully there wasn’t any wind yet. Even better, the terrain was rough and steep, good protection in itself. He saw quickly enough that his best approach would be to lay the kelistars around the outside of the ledge and simply enclose the immediate campsite.

  Though he fully intended to climb back up to the ledge and begin, somehow he found himself on the narrow footpath that followed the snowmelt stream down to the river. And it was only when a dense mist closed about him and snow once more blanketed the ground that he came to his senses and stopped. He stood in utter silence, nape crawling with the realization that the tanniym were indeed out there, and thankful he’d had the wit to bring his staff with him.

  At that point the cliff face had flattened out into a ledge, thick with leafless, prickly berry bushes, clotted with ice. The path disappeared into their midst, where no doubt his enemies lurked. Now his awareness of them suddenly intensified, as gravel rattled at his back. He whirled, bringing up the staff—

  And froze. “Marta! What are you doing down here?”

  Marta Brackleford stood on the path behind him, cloaked in fleece, staring at him with mild alarm. “I cam to help you lay the kelistars.”

  That’s right. Laud and suggested she do so and even had her practice with him. “You shouldn’t be out here alone,” he said.

  She cocked a dark brow. “And you should?”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  Again the twang of the tanniym’s presence stroked him, and it seemed she sensed them, too, from the way she stiffened and focused her gaze on the bramble patch behind him. “You should go back to camp,” he said quietly, turning from her to face the patch.

  “And you?” she asked.

  “I’ll be right behind you.”

  A twig snapped loudly in the silence, and something rustled in the brush downhill.

  “Go!” he commanded. And heard the receding scrape and rattle of her footfalls as she compiled.

  He brought the stick around. A thought set it flaring with Eidon’s Light as slowly he backed up the path. But after a few moments of nothing happening, he relaxed and turned to hurry after Marta.

  Only to stop in his tracks again.

  A silver-haired woman stood in the path ahead of him, blocking his way. Her figure-hugging leathers seemed immensely inappropriate in the swiftly chilling twilight, but they undeniably revealed her considerable feminine endowments. Her hair was twisted into hundreds of tiny ropelike strands that fell to her shoulders in a constantly shifting tumble. The light from his staff showed black eyes fringed by thick dark lashes and highlighted by glittering gold face paint across cheekbones, brows, and temples.

  She stepped toward him like a great cat on the prowl, and he fought the urge to back away, afraid of her and drawn at the same time.

  “Who are you?” He paused. “What are you?”

  She cocked her head at him, the slender cords of her strange hair rippling distractingly over one another. “You don’t know, my handsome, handsome pup?”

  His nape prickled. “Tapheina.”

  “Ah. You do know me.” She tossed her hair over her shoulder and stepped closer. “You didn’t think I’d let you get away that easily, did you?” Her thin lips quirked in amusement. “We could make such beautiful offspring.”

  He gaped at her, hoping his disgust was obvious. “No, we could not!”

  “You scorn me, yet I feel your interest.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m interested.”

  “Mmm.” She smiled. “Already she is courting again, you know.”

  He regarded her uncomprehendingly as the dark eyes bored into him.

  “Already there is one who scents her desire and seeks to fulfill it,” she said.

  “What the plague are you talking about?” he snapped.

  “He knows her as you never have,” she went on sweetly, “and is even now making her forget all about you. You are dead, after all. What else is she to do?”

  Maddie. She’s talking about Maddie. The realization stole his breath and set his heart racing with alarm. Courting already? No. She’s just trying to rattle me.

  “Our black-feathered friends have brought new tidings for you,” Tapheina said.

  The dark eyes snared him, and the forest disappeared. He felt her residualized spore come alive in his flesh as he gazed into the courtyard of some fine residence, kelistars festooning a vine-covered arcade, a lighted globe bobbing in the fountain, and a couple walking together. He recognized his wife at once, and saw that she was again with the same Sorite lord the dragon had shown him.

  His gut clenched as the vision dissipated.

  “She’s alone in the world now,” said Tapheina. “And she is First Daughter. They will want her to marry.”

  Knowing she was goading him didn’t stop him from reacting, but he didn’t have to stand there and listen. Staff held firmly before him, he started up the path.

  “To bolster the war effort,” she said, stepping aside.

  “She won’t.” He continued past her.

  “And the one they most want her to be with is the one she will most want, as well.”

  He whirled, swinging the stick in a smooth, expert arc that would have struck her soundly at the side of her head—if she’d not dodged out of reach with a speed that was not human. Leaping from the path to a streamside boulder, she stopped, put her hands on her hips, and threw back her head to laugh, the sound full and throaty and as charged with sensuality as the rest of her.

  “You are such a sorry man, Alaric.” She laced his assumed name with sarcasm. “Once you ruled a realm. Now you can’t even rule that pathetic company of shield-bearers with you. They don’t want your rule any more than those in Kiriath wanted it.”

  She jumped lightly off the boulder and aproached him tauntingly. “But I want you—”

  “Plagues! I knew it!” barked a sharp male voice. “He’s down here. With her, as I said.”

  Oakes Trinley came barging down the path from their camp to rescue him, his stick alight with Eidon’s power as he strode right up to Tapheina. She held ground and transformed back into her wolf form before their eyes. The marvel froze Trinley midstride, his jaw dropping open. Then she exhaled and a white plume of her breath undulated from her mouth. As it drifted up toward Trinley’s face, he swung his staff and Light blazed out of him, burning the spore-infused breath to nothing.

  Seeing her attack repulsed, Tapheina snarled and bounded down the lower trail into snowy darkness.

  Trinley tilted his bearded chin to look down his nose at Abramm. “That’s the way you’re supposed to do it. Now come on back up to the camp before you get us all killed.”

  She wasn’t gone, of course. Abramm could sense her out there, as he sensed the others, lurking in the shadow. And as he led the way back up the trail, her laughter sounded in his head.

  “Lay out your little balls of light and make your shields if you like. . . . I’ll have you in Ru’geruk, my handsome pup.”

  Trap had reported Brookes’s startling revelation to Maddie the morning after the coronation ball—“He says the king has Abramm’s scepter, madam”— but it was two days before she confronted Leyton with it.

  One day to calm down and talk herself into doing it, one day to actually see h
im. Or rather, to realize she wasn’t going to see him if she didn’t get pushy about it, for he was consumed with his preparations for returning to the front and believed she had nothing of importance to say to him.

  “How could Brookes possibly know it was Abramm’s scepter?”

  “Because he has seen it before, ma’am. He was at Graymeer’s when Abramm used it to drive off the Esurhites after they attacked Springerlan. Prince Leyton was with them, too.”

  Thus, early in the morning of the third day after the coronation, Maddie marched into the antechamber of the king’s apartments and demanded audience. He made her wait an hour, during which time her mind skittered between doubt, outrage, and plain cold fear of how his reaction to her possible overstepping might affect her and her children.

  Still, she had to know if the accusation was true. And if it was . . .

  Oh, please, Father Eidon, let it not be so.

  He received her in his breakfast room, where he dined on poached eggs and pan bread but did not ask if she would like to join him. “Ah, Madeleine. I’m glad you’ve come. I did want to speak to you before I left. . . .” He made her stand at the table before him watching his big, freckled hands as they dumped the eggs out of their cup onto the crisp-crusted pan bread and smeared the still-liquid yolks around. A long puckered, scab marred the back of his left hand.

  He stuffed a bite of bread and egg into his mouth, chewed a bit, and then said around it, “I must say you and Tiris ul Sadek made quite the couple the other night. The entire court is talking about you. There’s even a rumor he’s set himself to win you.”

  “Mmm,” she said. She’d once thought of her brother as a huge man, and she supposed he was large, but six years of living with Abramm had shrunken him in her eyes.

  He stuffed another bite into his mouth, the pan bread crunching between his teeth. His weathered face was red-tanned everywhere except on his forehead where his war helmet had blocked the sun. “You probably know that he commands vast armies of Sorites.”

  “Why, I had no idea!” she exclaimed in mock surprise. “Does he really?!”

  Leyton grimaced impatiently. “So you know how sorely we could use vast armies just about now.”

  Maddie schooled herself to patience. “I didn’t come here to talk about Tiris.”

  Leyton waved his knife at her as he stabbed his fork into the bread and eggs. “You can’t evade it forever, you know. Sooner or later you are going to have to remarry. You’re First Daughter. It is your duty. To your realm and to your children, for it is not fair they should grow up without a father.”

  Was there some sort of protocol she was unaware of dictating how one was to speak of this matter to her? Why else did everyone sound like everyone else when they did? At least having heard the same warning so many times had defused its power to annoy her.

  “You know there are people who blame you for Father’s death, don’t you?” he went on blithely, changing the subject with startling swiftness. “They say Eidon is displeased with you for the way you’ve turned your back on the rightful way of worshipping him to follow the Kiriathans’ ritual. Or lack thereof.”

  She gaped at him, surprised and suddenly wary. The matter of her method of worship had long been a source of contention between her and Ronesca, but so far as she knew, Leyton thought nothing of it. She’d long suspected he only attended Terstmeet as a matter of duty and appearances. So why was he bringing it up now. . . ? “I never took you to be concerned with matters of religion,” she said cautiously.

  “I’m not. But it looks bad. And it distresses my wife.”

  “I have been attending Kirikhal faithfully every Eidonsday. What more does she want?”

  “She wants you to stop attending Terstmeets multiple times a week in a common house, listening to the uninspired babble of a commoner who is not even a real kohal.”

  “I thought she would prefer the common house to my inviting them all to the palace.”

  He glared up at her, then drew a deep breath and let it out in a rush. “I don’t have time for this!” And with no more warning than that, he switched subjects again: “Abramm’s regalia. Do you have it?”

  His words shocked her into blankness. Disparate thoughts tumbled through her mind. How did he know she had them? She must deny it immediately! Did this mean he had taken the scepter? The last one struck and reverberated. She felt her stomach clench and the blood drain out of her face. “Plagues, Leyton! You didn’t really take his scepter, did you?”

  He smiled. “What if I did? Do you have the other pieces?”

  Horror transformed to outrage as his admission registered. “Eidon’s mercy, Leyt! You destroyed him!”

  Her brother grimaced. “Apparently not, since you seem to think he’s still alive. Do you have them?”

  And in that moment she realized he hadn’t been putting her off by denying her requests—he’d known exactly what she was up to . . . and he’d been playing her. Making her think she had the high ground, making her wait, and in that causing her to grow more and more impatient and outraged, so that when the time came her guard would be down, and he could strike . . .

  Wariness flooded her. “Why would you think I have them? I was rescued out of prison with nothing but the clothes on my back.”

  He shrugged, his gray-blue eyes watching her sharply. “I heard that your woman brought them when she came with your sons.”

  “And she would have gotten them . . . where?”

  He ignored her question. “You told us all you believed Ian was dead. Hurled against the cliff wall. Yet here he is alive.”

  She lifted her chin, fighting to keep her voice steady. “Obviously I was mistaken. Hardly surprising given the pressures of the moment.”

  “Hardly surprising for anyone but you.” His bushy blond brows drew down over his eyes. “If you thought he was dead, dear Maddie, I fully believe he should have been. Yet somehow he is not.”

  “And you think Abramm’s regalia had something to do with that?”

  “Did they?”

  It was like colliding with a cliff wall herself. How easily she had let him lead their conversation to this point . . . had, in fact, spoken the needed words herself, and her brother had already seen the truth in her eyes.

  A moment later, he confirmed it: “So you do have them.”

  “I don’t see why it would concern you if I do or don’t.”

  “No?” He exhaled a short laugh of incredulity. “They could be the key to our victory against the Black Moon. The deliverance of all Chesedh. And Abramm’s sure not going to be around to use them.”

  She lifted her chin, anger blasting through her. “No thanks to you!” she exploded, voice trembling with rage. “You took the scepter! And because of that, he didn’t have it when he needed it.”

  “Madeleine!”

  “You took what was given to him by Eidon’s own hand and in that you caused him to lose everything!”

  “I did not cause that. It was his own fault his people rose up against him. They—”

  “You know nothing of what happened. Of what is happening now. You stole what was not yours, and now you have the gall to ask for more. To think that Eidon would ever bless you with any of it!”

  He laughed again. “He already has, Mad. How do you think we held Torneki?”

  “How do you think you nearly lost it in the first place? I heard you had a big plan, a magical talisman, and it almost got you all killed. It did get Father killed.”

  Leyton’s face turned dark. “You will not lay that at my feet.”

  “I’ll lay it where it belongs. You have seen minor breezes, seasonal winds . . . small victories. Those are nothing. You were at the Gull Islands. You saw what happened there.”

  “And it will happen again.”

  She glared at him. “Eidon is giving you the opportunity to admit your error and turn from it.”

  “Abramm’s dead, Maddie. He’s not coming back—”

  “He is coming back, Leyt. And he’l
l have them all.”

  “Oh, please!” He threw the yolk-covered knife and fork onto his nearly empty plate with a clatter, then sagged back in his chair. “No one believes you, and you only make yourself sound like a crazy woman! Where are the rest of the items? Are you keeping them in your quarters?”

  “You cannot have them, Leyton.”

  “I am king. I can have whatever I want. Either give them to me, or I’ll send my men searching for them.”

  “Send your men, then, for I’ll never give them to you.”

  He went very still, eyes widening. When finally he spoke, his voice was low. “So. Ronni was right about where your true loyalties lie. I thought . . .” His pale brow furrowed, and his eyes flashed with sudden anger. “I defended you, Mad! And here you betray me like this?”

  “How the plague can you accuse me of betrayal when you—”

  He surged to his feet and cut her off: “Captain LaSalle!”

  The anteroom door opened, and an officer stepped in—tan, lean, and dimpled. He had not been there when she had come through moments before. “Take four men and search the First Daughter’s quarters and the office of her finance secretary,” Leyton said. “You are looking for a crown, an orb, a jeweled sword, a signet ring, and a white robe of peculiar fabric. Bring them to me at once. If you do not find them all, bring in more men and search the nursery and the quarters of all the Kiriathans who are staying in the palace. For the moment no Kiriathan, no member of the First Daughter’s staff, is to leave the palace grounds. And I want Meridon arrested at once, regardless.”

  Maddie erupted in outrage. “What! You can’t arrest a man for no reason!”

  “I have plenty of reason, dear sister.” Leyton gave her that infuriating look of condescension he was so good at. Then he turned to LaSalle. “Do you understand, Captain?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Nothing but ill will come to you if you do this,” Maddie said quietly as the man left. “You will get no help from the scepter, or any of the rest of it.”

  Leyton turned to her, still looking amused. “So you are a prophet now? I thought you Kiriathan Terstans didn’t hold with that sort of thing.”