An Heir to Thorns and Steel

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  God, I thought, my hands going cold on the drake’s reins. God save me. I am going to put a king on the throne of an unwilling people.

  We acquired another pursuer sometime that afternoon, but he did not tail us for long before turning back and dashing up the road.

  “Gone to tell the others where we ride,” I said. “We switch direction, and we don’t stop until the horse does.”

  Amhric nodded, grim, and followed me.

  Our flight across Kesína, tearing through its perfumed fields and forging through its few tangled copses... I barely remembered it afterwards, save as a thickness of terror and mounting pain, a bloody sunset, an oppressive darkness, a long, gasping strain. Pushing, always pushing, hoping to reach the coast before our trail betrayed us to our enemies, on a desperate quest to find the source of the wind, the tang in the air.

  My body gave way before the horse’s, and the genets kept me upright. When the king made as if to halt us, I rasped, “No.”

  We rode on...

  ...and on...

  Over rills choked with grass, skirting plantations and vineyards, up paths scraped from the sides of mountains, still scattered with pebbles.

  On until I could barely see or smell or feel.

  On until the beasts found the cliffs and we lost ourselves in the crumpled folds of old and tired mountains and their shelves.

  When the king arrested our motion I felt it as a shock through my entire body. He had reached over and pulled back the reins of the drake.

  “Enough,” he said. His saddle creaked as he dismounted and the two genets helped steady me as he drew me from my own, down, down to fall against him, so weak and so raddled with pain I could barely move. My face pressed against his shoulder, his arms around me... and oh, oh, the smell of salt and the moving wind! I opened eyes crusted with layers of dried tears and croaked, “You got us here.”

  “No,” Amhric said gently, “You did. We followed you.”

  “Are they still behind us?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then we go on,” I began, struggling to right myself.

  “No,” he said. “It’s too much for you.”

  “I can’t die,” I said. “I’m an elf.”

  “You can die,” he said. “If your enchantment consumes more than you produce to fuel your immortality.”

  “You make immortality sound artificial,” I said with a huff of a laugh.

  “It is.”

  I drew back enough to meet his eyes over the rim of my dirty spectacles.

  “Later for that story,” he said. “We have to find a hiding place.”

  “No,” I said. “We swim.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Kelu said from the back of the drake.

  “There’s a small island,” I said. “We can hide there.”

  “How do you know!” Kelu exclaimed, painted ears flattening.

  How did I know? I wasn’t sure. But I could see the map from Thameis’s study, every line and crease, and somehow I knew how it should look imposed on the land we traveled now.

  “We are exhausted,” Amhric said.

  “It has to be done,” I said, reaching blindly back until my hand grasped at the saddle’s stirrup.

  “Master!” Almond whispered.

  We all looked up then and saw the silhouettes at the cliff’s edge. Even from this distance I recognized the one in the center, and my fingers tightened on the leather until it squeaked.

  “If we swim now they’ll know where we’ve gone and follow,” Kelu said.

  “The thought occurred, yes,” I replied, eyes still fixed on the three on the cliff. “Amhric, can you call for Kemses?”

  “He won’t get here in time,” Amhric said, voice low.

  “I know.”

  His hand settled on my shoulder, squeezed, and then he backed away toward the sea. I forced my recalcitrant arm to reach for the staff, and my too-sensitive fingers walked the laces, unknotting them. Almond helped pass it over the saddle and I dug its pointed tip into the sand, then leaned on it.

  There was no way to win this confrontation, but it was mine to bar the way, and so I was waiting. Waiting for them to come down. Waiting to find out how it would end for me at last. Waiting to see what shape the end would take. I wondered how it would feel to become the Fount of a new generation of innocent slaves. How long it would take me to die, torn between their draining of my magic and my magic’s draining of my body.

  The wind sifted my hair across my face, breaking my field of vision into panels of gray stone, luminous sand, purple sky. I felt it as a caress, damp and heavy with the scent of salt and living things. And on it... oh, something rode, brushing past me, warm and reaching, so intense an invitation that even though I knew it was not meant for me I had to turn.

  Amhric was kneeling in the sea, head bowed. Between his cupped hands glowed a copper star that touched the waves with needle-thin rays, brightening them to a sun-lit green even as all around him spread violet waves touched with starlight’s silver glimmer. Such a look of serenity he wore that almost, almost it made me miss the slowly forming crown of light above his head. The lazy wind that teased the ends of his hair and lifted the water up his hips had nothing to do with the water and everything to do with him.

  “The King lives,” Seven whispered.

  I turned from him and not all the agony I had learned too well in all my years could keep me from standing between him and the evil descending the cliff.

  “What do we do, Master?” Almond said, ears flat in distress.

  “You will do nothing,” I said. “In fact... you and the others, draw away. Down the beach... away from all this.” I looked at Nine and Seven. “You also. Take the drake, the horse, and the cats.”

  “But Master,” Almond began.

  “No,” I said. “Go.” I smiled at her wearily. “Please. It will make things easier.”

  “You’re just going to get yourself killed,” Kelu said, ears slicked to the back of her head.

  “I thought that was the fate you wanted for all elves?” I asked. “Or are you admitting to some finer feeling for me?”

  She snorted. “You’re only part elf.”

  I smiled without humor. “I’ll see if I can’t manage to stay part-alive, then.”

  She huffed and said to the other three, “Come on.”

  I resumed my vigil as our antagonists clambered down the steep cliff. As they drew closer I could pick out their features, all similar... these, then, must be the brother and sister Thameis spoke of before he trapped me in the Black Pearl cage. My aching fingers curled tighter on the suede wrap around the staff. When I’d accepted it from Kemses I had thought only of how unnatural the deaths of elves were, how much torture and ugliness this weapon had seen in the bonfires of the arenas across the Archipelago... but now, waiting for Thameis, I knew its rightful use. If the execution of elves required torment, then I would see it to its bloody, bitter, shrieking end.

  “Shall I go also?” said the low voice at my shoulder.

  “No,” I said as the three reached the ground and started across the sand toward us. “But stay behind me.”

  “If it will make it easier,” he said.

  “Yes.” I inhaled, a long slow breath through my nose. “Tell me there’s some power we can use against these three. Some magical solution. A proper thing out of the folktale we’re living.”

  “All that I have is yours,” Amhric said. “But it is for you to craft into whatever shape you choose.”

  “God be with us, then,” I said.

  “Morgan,” he added. “The call. It didn’t go far.”

  Before I could ask they were in earshot: three stars come to earth in the dark, scattering their light on the white sand, muted golds and ivories, their skin nacreous as pearls. Thameis’s sister had a bronzer cast to the waves of her hair; his brother, slightly taller, had a mane so light it evoked the bleached bone of the dragon spine in the Suleris study. All of them wore arrogance so casually the
ir garments were afterthoughts, barely noticeable.

  They carried no visible weapons, but they hardly needed them with the power I sensed rising off them and snapping into the dark like the flames of an invisible fire.

  “You gave us a merry chase, servant,” Thameis said. “Or should I call you bastard prince?”

  “Only if it means you’ll bend your knee to me as you ought,” I said, and found that I meant it... if power I was to have with this title, then I would use it to break the backs of my enemies and tear them asunder to scatter, forever dead. How far I’d come to arrive here, and in such a short time! But I would give nothing, nothing to tyranny… not even mercy. In that, at least, I was a son of Troth.

  “This is what our legends have come to,” the taller brother said, shaking his head. “This is the king of elves and his heir. Worthless.”

  “If we are so worthless,” I said, “why do you pursue us?”

  “We don’t need a king’s mischief in the world,” Thameis said.

  “A king’s mischief,” I said. “To prevent the rise of demons?” The wind tugged at my battered clothes—I was dressed still in the livery of Suleris, still marked with their sign on my throat. “What exactly is it that you fear?”

  “I fear nothing,” Thameis said. “I only covet power, like any man of ambition.” He grinned lazily. “I also resent the needless expenditure of effort, little prince, so I would appreciate it greatly if you didn’t resist your capture.”

  “And if I refused to accommodate you?” I asked, resting my cheek against the staff.

  “Then we’ll bring you along all the same,” Thameis said. “It may just be in pieces that we don’t allow to reassemble until we reach the compound.”

  They did not lunge for me. They did not attack. While their tension was palpable, it did not seem linked to any preparation for action. It puzzled me—they outnumbered us and yet it almost seemed as if they were awaiting our consent before capturing us. Almost as if they needed our consent.

  As if they knew something I didn’t.

  “Of course,” the woman said, “there is an alternative.”

  I quirked a brow at her.

  “The king has no interest in temporal power, of course,” she said, and with a wave of a hand dismissed Amhric altogether. “He needed a keeper and we kindly kept him safe from the casual abuse of other parties.” Almost, almost I struck her then, the near-paralysis of my body notwithstanding. “But now that you are here, if you are indeed the prince, you may speak for him. Claim the rightful position you are due. And, of course, we can help you.”

  “Is that so,” I said.

  Ignoring my flat tone, she said, “You may know that Serala is a land divided. With our help, you could unite the Archipelago once more. Impose order on its populace.”

  “A service for which you would expect reward.”

  She smiled, a mocking smile that seemed to say that she shared a secret with me. “Of course. That’s how it works, yes?”

  “And why should I choose you?” I asked. “Why not, say, blood-flag Nudain?”

  “Because we have more to offer,” she said. “More land. More elves. More magical stores.”

  “Magical stores?” I asked.

  “The genets,” the taller brother said.

  My gaze flicked to his face, found him attentive, almost eager. “The genets,” I repeated.

  “Of course,” he said. “They hold power, more power than humans... and it’s easier to draw it from them. They’re cheaper to feed, live only as long as their magic lasts. A few drops of blood of sufficient power and you can produce several litters. They’re very economical.” He drew himself upright. “Only Suleris had the foresight to buy the spellcraft that makes them possible. The sorcerer would have thrown it away had we not offered.”

  “The sorcerer,” I said past the sudden grip of nausea.

  “Sedetnet,” he said. “Of course.”

  “Of course,” I said, grateful, so grateful for the support of the staff. Without it I would have swayed at the magnitude of the atrocity that blossomed in my mind at this explanation. Legions of slaves, bred to feed the magical thirsts of a race of madmen and thugs. They had secured the king in their jail to fuel their insane scheme—

  —to fuel their—

  My God.

  “I think I’ll take my chances elsewhere,” I said.

  “Excuse me?” Thameis said. “Did I hear you correctly?”

  “I believe you did,” I said, forcing myself to straighten and not bothering to hide what it cost me. “I have no desire to ally with you. In fact, I find you despicable.”

  “You know we can’t allow you to go free,” Thameis said, almost conversationally.

  “Yes,” I said, understanding at last. “I do.”

  He lunged for me then, not with his hands, but with his grasping aura, with the magical claws I recalled with the intimacy of a wound. I had no time to pray that I had understood the puzzle, no time to plan, no time even to duck.

  “Amhric!” I cried, and a warmth like an embrace enfolded me; from its stable base I reached for Thameis—reached—

  —and drew him into that embrace, opening the road between him and the king. Take him, I said to our monarch, who balanced the energies of the world, and give what is his to the earth.

  “No!” Thameis cried and tried to jerk back, but I was the Prince, and while the King could only request, the Prince compelled. Thameis writhed against my will, but at last I had found an arena where my physical body was no impediment, and in this arena all my suffering, all my constant struggles not to surrender to pain, to hopelessness, to weakness and suicide, all of it had been my conditioning... my preparation to fight on this field, my training, my helpmeet. Thameis could not begin to imagine the strength of will it had taken simply to rise to face each day... and here, where at last it counted, he could not compete. He rejected me, but I commanded his obedience, and inevitably, inexorably, he relented.

  His brother lunged forth with his own magical assault; I gave him to Amhric also, ignoring the weakness of his inaudible protest. I felt a giant among them, as if I had developed muscles on a body of which I’d had no awareness and against which neither of them could prevail. They tried—oh! How they tried! Whipping themselves against me, bucking, desperate to withdraw, hoping to loosen my grip with their strikes. And in this maelstrom of magic and compulsion, I felt myself strangely anchored, at peace; I was the rock at its center and the waves crashed against me, but they had no power over me.

  So deep was this conviction that I didn’t believe Thameis’s sister had struck me until the earth knocked my glasses from my nose and jarred me from shoulder to hip. She rolled on top of me and ground my face into the sand. “Breathe dirt, bastard,” she hissed as I flailed under her, all the weakness of my body given abrupt relevance by the supple strength of hers.

  “Nicely done,” Thameis said. “Damn him, he almost had us.”

  “Idiots!” The woman knotted her hand in my hair as I gasped for breath and sand coated my tongue. “Answering magical insult with magic. You should know better.” When I managed to drag in a wheezing breath she lifted my head and smashed it back into the sand. “You, shut up, you hideous cripple.”

  I fought despair and pain and weakness, but the first stole my will and the remaining two made short work of me. I did not want to believe in this ending, but its indignity destroyed me. I could feel her thighs on either side of my ribs: how little she regarded me to straddle me so! And the weight against the back of my neck created a growing strain as I fought against the wheeze of my starved lungs. How close we had come to victory, and yet how could I have believed myself capable of it? Hideous cripple, her voice whispered in my ear, becoming the siren duet of demons. hideous, hideous cripple, useless prince, useless, hideous cripple

  And then I heard the choked gasp behind me and the sound of knees striking sand, heard the thick sound of a fist against flesh and the resulting huff of breath leaving a body.<
br />
  They had their hands on Amhric... as they had had their hands on him before. I could see it against the black field behind my eyes, their smug and possessive stroking, their leering faces. Their neat answer to the problem of a king who could upset the balance of power: to suck it from him and put it to use creating magical stores they could use against him. They had neutralized me, and now they had him at their mercy again, to rape and starve, to mock and belittle and destroy.

  “Much better,” Thameis said, voice a purr.

  I stabbed for the energy that I knew was rightfully mine. I stabbed for it and bled it free from the air, from the world around me, from my very veins. I ripped it loose and made it mine and I flung the woman from my back... and at last, as in all my dreams, I moved without counting the cost, with the grace of an ending, scooping the staff from the sand and putting it through Thameis’s belly with all my rage, my rejection as lubrication. The point of the staff drove into the sand beside Amhric’s ankle, spattering it with blood and viscera.

  Thameis gaped at me, grabbing the staff with both hands. I brought my face close enough to his to see it with my myopic eyes and hissed, “You will never touch him—or anyone else—again.” And then I poured all the magic I’d ripped from the world down the staff and into him, like molten metal, and he howled and was extinguished, eaten from within.

  His brother stared at me, jaw hanging open. To him, I said, “You’re next.”

  “Temeret!” the woman said, scrabbling backwards. “On the sea!”

  The other male looked up, hissed, and with one mad glance for me and Thameis, fled. His sister followed in his wake. I did not wonder what had driven them off; I had the energy only to shake the corpse off my staff and then collapse beside my brother.

  My brother.

  “Prince of elves,” the low voice said, heavy with regret and gentle with reassurance. An arm slid around my midriff as I began to fold. “Help comes.”

  “Amhric,” I whispered. “I feel sick.”

  “I’m here,” he said, and held me while I vomited... and cradled me as I wept.