“Why Kelu,” I said. “I do believe you’ve grown fond of me.”
“Don’t wager on it,” she said.
We sailed directly for the port town of Mene, the city where Captain Gant had delivered me to this misadventure... for as Kemses said, standing near the prow with the wind in his face, our enemies would expect us to return to our stronghold and retrench. Erevar was not safe. “We’ll put you on the first ship to the mainland,” Kemses had said, “and only then will I breathe clear. Would that we could send you through a Door! But the magic to make such a thing is barred to all but a sorcerer in these days, and we dare not ask.”
“And you?” I’d asked. “You speak as if you will stay. Will you be safe?”
He shook his head. “I can take care of myself. I always have. But to guard a king and a prince against a nation alone...” He glanced at me with a quirk of a smile. “That is not in me.”
The days blurred, swift and redolent with the scent of brine and wood, and I remembered little of them save my urgency and the growing ease I felt in the presence of my brother, even when I suffered... for I did suffer. Sometimes he kept the convulsions at bay, but when he could not I sensed him just beyond my reach, watching, guarding, and even in the deepest throes of my pain he soothed me, and I took comfort in the knowledge that pain had not transformed me into someone who could sacrifice such a man to save himself. And always, when I woke, I found him there, and I thought I could bear all the vicissitudes of fate and body with him to gentle them away.
As the genets listened in silent curiosity and the elves bent over the table where I sketched maps of the mainland, I told them all about home, about the university, my friends. About my family and the portrait hanging above our mantle. I wondered how I’d been brought to the mainland and the doorstep of a human family, and how I’d been discovered by Amoret from so far away, and this was a riddle for which neither elf had an answer. But in that short voyage, I gave them more of my life than I would ever have thought to give any casual acquaintance, and by that I knew I had decided that there was something worth saving in Serala. That I could be the Archipelago’s Red Prince, who found surcease in the arms of a King with whom he knew himself to be trapped in a story larger than himself.
But that brought me to a separate matter, one I did not understand at all.
“The legends of the Red Prince,” I said. “And the constant war between him and the King. Were those derived from the elves?”
“It may be,” Amhric said, petting Almond where she curled in his lap. Her short white hair was splashed like milk across his knee, gathering light from the proximity of his fingertips. “They did not understand well that relationship. It is as you said... to have the heir be the king’s shield is not a thing that would occur to humanity.”
I thought of the myriad variations of the tales about them, blood and betrayal and sorrow and in that one shining vignette, the remorse, the love. “That would seem obvious. But... always there is a conflict between them. And the King is always bleeding.”
“The King does bleed,” Amhric said. “We call it the landheart. Where demons injure the land, there the king bleeds.”
I said, “Ah, so I should only worry then if you develop inexplicable rents in your flesh.”
“If I develop such rents,” Amhric said, “It is well past the time when you should be worrying.”
I lifted my eyes to his and acknowledged the gravity of that matter, then returned to the puzzle. “Still, one would think there would be cause for the legends. Stories do not appear without reason. They serve a need.”
“Perhaps they served the need of humanity to justify the guilt they felt over the betrayal of their benefactors,” Amhric said.
I started from my reverie. “Was that censure?”
His smile grew sad. “Did it sound that way?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “In anyone else... but you say so little against others.”
“Perhaps it is you who saw censure where none was meant,” he said. His voice gentled. “I observe that you are not entirely sure to whom you owe your allegiance, brother mine. At times you are elven... and at others, human. That is a situation that cannot remain long unresolved... and we about to go to your home, where the conflict will be drawn in stark relief.”
“Sooth,” I said, touching the side of a hand to my aching brow. “I came here hating elves for all they are and thinking humans blameless. But to find that we were complicit in history’s evils?” I shook my head. “Nothing is as it seemed.”
“It rarely is,” he said. His golden hand rested gently on Almond’s head, and the genet looked at me with drowsy, lilac eyes.
So briskly competent was my liegeman Kemses e Sadar that we had no sooner stepped foot onto the pier at Mene that he had us across the dock and boarding another vessel in the company of a small contingent of elven guards, detached from his own business offices in the city. Beneath a clouded afternoon sky, our shadows long and violet against the plank the genets were walking to reach the ship, I turned to him.
“I’ll have extra supplies loaded,” he said, the bustle of the harbor surrounding us. “Clothes. Food. Money, though your passage is as good as paid... you’ll need it to make the journey inland. Trust in Last, who heads your guard. He’s a good man, I’ve known him many decades now. Smart with a sword and his men will follow him beneath the shadow of a demon’s wings.”
“God forfend,” I said and then laughed, dizzied. Behind me a dockhand led the drake up the gangplank. “You have put together an entire expedition from scraps of gold and a few words!”
He grinned at me. “Did I not say it was my talent, Morgan Locke? I make much of little.”
“That you do,” I said, “And we are in your debt.” I clasped his hands. “That staff you gave me. Promise me you’ll teach me to use it when I return.”
He laughed. “I promise to help you undo the bad habits you are about to learn while traipsing in the wilderness, for I’ve no doubt you’ll have need of that staff long before I can teach you to wield it properly.”
“Still,” I said.
He lifted a silver brow. “Why, my liege. I believe you are trying to extract from me an assurance that I’ll still be here when the two of you return.”
“And if I am?” I asked.
“Then I would tell you that no one can know the turn of fate,” he said, and at the sight of my frown, “And I would also tell you that it is very hard to kill an elf, and even harder to kill Kemses e Sadar.”
I smiled and threw my arms around him in a rough embrace. Against my gaunt frame his vitality, the smooth, bright living life of him warmed me like a hearth after too long a winter. I thought suddenly of Chester, who had seen me off on this fool’s quest, and was grateful both for Kemses and for the opportunity to return and make apology for my abrupt departure, and for everything that had happened since.
“Come home safely, prince of elves,” Kemses said. “And keep your charge.”
“I shall,” I said. “Give my regards to Galen and Basilia.”
And then I mounted the plank with the help of the Black Pearls and joined my brother there beneath the cloud-softened sky, in the embrace of the calling sea. I heard the whisper of the mainland in the susurrus of the waves and I was consumed by a longing to be gone. How interminable, the time between our boarding and when they threw off the ropes! I held the rail and stared out toward the horizon as the timbers beneath my feet creaked and the wind kissed my lips and my brow and it was... oh, it was a benediction to at last be gone. To be free of Serala and the elves.
“You love it, then,” Amhric said. He was a warmth, a knot of gold and copper against the gray and blue and storm-salt white of the world around him.
“Yes,” I said simply.
He came to stand beside me and we watched.... for how long, I know not. Only that I came to lean on him, after a time, for that my body was weak and as resigned as I’d grown to my pains they still ruled me.
“Will they pursue us?” I asked at last.
“They would have to learn that we’d left,” Amhric said. “God willing, they will go to Erevar first... and by the time Kemses allows them to know that he is not our shelter, we will be too far gone for them to find us... if indeed, they could conceive of us fleeing. Recall that these are people who love power; they would think us gone to ground on some island, not sped over the ocean for the nation of our enemies.”
“Then... we have time,” I said.
“To recuperate, to plan. Yes.”
“To learn a little of one another,” I said. My voice grew husky. “I have never had a brother.” And then, thinking of it, “God above. My mother will be... surprised.”
He laughed his quiet laugh. “A good surprise?”
“She wanted children so badly,” I said. “I have to believe it will be. Only...”
He glanced at me.
“Only we aren’t precisely human,” I said. “I forget that part.”
“You will still be the son she has loved since she cradled you in her arms,” Amhric said. “Don’t doubt it.”
I smiled a little, but held onto the thread of concern. “You are the king of elves and I the prince. Should we... shall we remain hidden? Or do you think it’s past time we healed the rift between the peoples?”
He sounded surprised. “You would have us arrive on a diplomatic mission?”
“We could,” I said. “We are the government.”
“A government without power with a nation in rebellion at our backs,” he said.
“We could ask for help.”
His brows lifted. “Would they grant it? Or would it please them to have their ancient enemy at war with themselves? We would be delivering ourselves to their mercy. You know them better than I, but....”
I wanted to assure him that his fears were groundless, but... I sighed. “I’m not sure.”
“Let it be,” Amhric said, voice gentle. “There will be time enough to make those decisions when we have the tenor of the city.” A hesitation, then: “Your skin is cold.”
I nodded. “I should probably retire. Except—”
“Except that you love the sea,” Amhric said.
I did not reply. When he left my side I thought nothing of it. But then he brought me thick blankets, a pillow. That he arranged me carefully so that, even stiff and pained as I was I could remain as we sped before the swelling night, into the sun-stained waves...
I did not yet know how much I loved him. But there, wrapped in wool and with the wind in my face, I began to understand.
Our captain was a taciturn man, not given to conversation and even less easily impressed. His expressionless face seemed to regard both catastrophe and good fortune with equal disinterest. I found it a curiosity, that the sea so often bred men of such stoicism and unyielding character, for when I looked into the waves I wanted nothing more than to flow with them, to become as limber and adaptable as they were. But I accepted that our captain had no such impulse, and in fact was so gruff as to make Gant look garrulous.
When I found him standing at the prow a week later, squinting into the clot of clouds gathering on the horizon, I felt a frisson of unease... for his attention betrayed a concern that in any other man would have been a gasp or a shudder.
“A storm?” I asked.
“Shouldn’t be.”
I followed his gaze. “Shouldn’t be?”
“Not normal.”
For several heartbeats I felt nothing, heard nothing but the winding tension in every blood-bearing vessel in my body. Nothing at all. And then I flung myself back toward the cabin where we slept, ignoring the awkwardness of my body in the sudden blinding need to be armed. I almost crashed into the king and Almond.
“Morgan?” he asked.
I grabbed his shoulders and shoved him back toward the cabin. “Go! Go now!” And then to the captain of my meager, too meager guard, “Last! To me!”
There’s no place to hide, something whispered in me. Turn around.
“No!” I cried to the voice, despairing... but I turned slowly, oh slowly, gripped by dread.
On the water walked a single figure, dragging behind it the tangle of clouds and anger in the sky. It seemed to coruscate as it approached; with every footfall, it changed shape and form. Now a golden-locked man, now a willow-green woman, now a creature without sex or name, defying the mind’s ability to cage it with sight or understanding, on and on through a kaleidoscope of shapes and forms and light-stained colors. The eye touched on the figure and slid off in denial: it flowed across the sea with the inchoate malleability of a storm. No single person should be so chaotic, as if their soul had no shape, no core. The gorge rose trying to hold it in the mind.
It walked until the bow of the ship obscured it... and then, with the lightness of a dancer it leapt atop the bowsprit and balanced there, settling on a single shape: bleak dark hair falling past epicene hips, sensual and cloaked with menace. His skin developed ice’s pallor, and his eyes... his eyes were a flat and utter black from rim to rim, without iris, pupil or white. The lashes over them glittered like a feathered extension of the uncanny ivory of his eyelids.
Nude but clothed in power and madness, Sedetnet said, “You have something you promised to me, Morgan Locke.”
I put myself between him and Amhric, shaking. “No.”
He lifted an arched black brow. “No?”
“I don’t want what you offer,” I said. “And so I will not pay your price.”
“Oh, come now,” Sedetnet said. “It’s unbecoming to lie. You wanted what you asked me for very badly and still do. Do you think to have it for nothing, then?”
“I don’t want it at the price you ask.”
“You agreed to it,” the sorcerer said. The storm wind tugged at the groaning ropes, caressed him with his hair; he remained unmoved, exquisitely balanced at the edge of the wooden spar.
“That was before I understood—”
“Ah.” He held up a hand. “I am not to blame for your naïveté. We made a bargain, you and I... a king for your salvation. And here I find you escaping with no... no intention at all... of fulfilling your end of it.”
“I’m not done with him,” I said, extemporizing with a racing mind. “Elves live such long lives, Sedetnet. You may have him when I’m done with him, and then I’ll accept the payment. That’s fair, yes?”
“You’re lying again,” Sedetnet said with a sigh. “What have I done to you to deserve such duplicity? Or is it merely that you are inconstant?”
I put my hand back to touch Amhric, to hold him behind me, for the reassurance that he remained unharmed. I could sense just beyond us the trembling readiness of my few elven guards, but I knew that if they dared move the sorcerer would destroy them—or not—or worse, depending on what whim moved him. “Sedetnet, there is no shame in a mutual decision to break an agreement.”
“No,” he agreed. “But this is not... at all... mutual.” He lifted a hand and I felt Amhric shudder. “I think I’ll take my prize and be gone.”
I threw myself at him then, not with the weakness of my body, but with the desperate strength of my magic. He was an elf and one of our subjects; I was the prince, who could compel. I reached for him to drain him of what was his and grant it to my king—
—and was batted aside with such casual authority that I found myself sprawled on the deck without remembering how I’d fallen.
“And you resort to violence,” Sedetnet said, shaking his head. “So crude.” He walked down the bowsprit and hopped onto the ship, almost as if dancing, and there he went to Amhric, passing the silent human captain and ignoring the seething guards. He gathered the king’s small hand in his and brushed his sensuous lips over those golden knuckles.
“My liege,” he said, and the subtle mockery in the word goaded me to leap for him, only to be yanked back against the deck. I fell twisted and bared my teeth, straining against the thorned vines that rose in lazy eddies around my wrists. This a
gain! Had all I learned been for naught?
Sedetnet glanced at me over his shoulder, coquettish. “Do not presume to best me, little prince,” he said. “I have been wielding magics far more potent than yours for longer than your pretty human kingdom has slept without nightmares of elves.” He turned back to Amhric. “And now we go.”
I closed my eyes, preparing for one last effort.
Said the king in his low, gentle bass: “No.”
Sedetnet sighed. “Must you make this difficult? You know how it must end.”
“Perhaps,” Amhric said. “But I will not have it said that the king was parted from his brother without a fight.”
Sedetnet laughed. “The King-Reclusive wants to defend himself!” He glanced at me with a poisonous smile. “How poor a job you are doing, O Prince, to have reduced your king to this. He has to fight his own battles.”
Our elven guards moved then, before I could command them to stillness—with a flick of a finger,Sedetnet froze them in place. “Tsk,” he said, shaking his dark head. “This is a matter between royalty.”
“Sedetnet,” I hissed, “Leave it be. Leave us alone!”
He tilted his head. “Should I?”
“Yes!”
“I could roll dice,” he said, thoughtful.
Anything would be better than the certainty that he would drag my brother away and leave me helpless to follow. “That you could,” I said. “I would obey the dictates of the dice no matter the outcome.”
“Of course you would,” he said. “You have no choice. Ah—” He lifted his hand at the ship’s captain, who’d taken a step toward him. “Don’t even consider it, mortal. Your death lies at the end of that thought. Humans mean even less to me than my own kind... if such a thing could be conceived.”
The captain glanced at me and I shook my head.
“Nor you,” Sedetnet added to Almond, who had fallen to a miserable heap at their feet. “I would hate to destroy you by accident. Destruction is best done willfully, enjoying all its many consequences.”
An Heir to Thorns and Steel Page 34