And he hadn’t heard the last part of what he’d said. Or the first part. Or most of the middle, really.
Cedric looked up for help, and the first face he saw was Kat’s. She stood about ten feet away from him in a long green gown. She looked regal and calm, the picture of a soon-to-be queen—that is, a soon-to-be queen with two swords tucked into her belted sash and a look of pure annoyance on her face. She widened her eyes at Cedric.
The room was silent. Everyone expected him to speak now.
“Um,” Cedric said, borrowing an expression from Liv without even realizing it.
The wispy-haired man continued to stare at the ground, while Kat continued to shoot disapproval across the room using just the power of her eyes. Cedric shifted in his seat.
“It’s almost all gone, you say?” Cedric finally asked, grasping onto the one part of the appeal he remembered hearing.
“Yes, sir,” the man said, his eyes still on the ground. “Not cut off or anything like that, just dying away, like’s been poisoned almost. But who would poison trees?”
Cedric opened his mouth, but was at a loss to find words. Dead trees? That’s what this man had come to him about? He supposed it was better than the last two appeals, which had both been about land disputes, but still. What was he supposed to do about dying trees?
“The wraths, maybe?” the man asked.
Cedric sat up straighter in his chair. “Wraths? Did you see any?”
The man clutched at the hat in his hand before braving a glance up at Cedric. “Not myself, sir. But some o’ the children at the edge of the village say they saw two wraths just last week, at the border of the trees. Or, what used to be the trees.”
Cedric gripped the edge of his chair. Ever since the Guardians had taken back the city, driving out or killing all the wraths inside, the creatures had all but disappeared. Their organization had fallen apart after losing the castle, their deal to get more territory, and their leader. They were less threat than they’d ever been before Malquin.
Malquin.
Just thinking the man’s name made every muscle in Cedric’s body clench. White-hot anger coursed through him, and from there, he couldn’t stop picturing a knife sliding across the skin of his father’s neck, images of Malquin slipping into the corridor, images of the portal hanging empty in the pink light of the dying day, and of Cedric falling beneath it, knowing already that he’d failed.
He couldn’t think about Malquin, not now, not ever. Not without falling apart.
But he could think about the wraths.
Those who hadn’t already gone to the other world had scattered, retreating back even farther into the lands at the outskirts of Caelum. In the two months since, most of Cedric’s time had been taken up with repairing the damage done to the city and the surrounding villages, restoring the army, and catching himself up on all of his father’s edicts and rulings. He’d rather have spent that time personally chasing away as many wraths as he could from his people’s land, but sightings of them had been few and far between.
So now, Cedric was all attention. His hand went unconsciously to the sword hilt at his side, fingers tapping lightly against the silver handle that had once belonged to his father.
“I will look into this wrath threat personally,” Cedric said, his voice echoing out through the room. “Oh, and . . . the trees as well.”
A murmur rose up throughout the audience chamber. Cedric looked over at Kat and saw her lips were pursed, as if she were biting back words. She’d have a lot to say to him about this, he knew. After all, kings weren’t supposed to go off alone into the woods to investigate threats. They were supposed to send soldiers to do that work for them, while they sat safe on their thrones and worried about matters of state.
Kat and Cedric had been having the same argument for weeks. After Merek had failed to return to Caelum, Cedric had been sure of the worst. That Merek’s injures—the ones Cedric had helped to cause—had been too severe and he hadn’t recovered. Or that Malquin had found Merek, Liv, and the others in LA. Every part of Cedric had wanted to travel through the portal to check on them, but he knew he was needed here, in his own world. Being king was supposed to come before everything else. That’s what his father had taught him, what Kat kept reminding him every day.
If only being king didn’t involve so much sitting around, listening to people complain.
The itch on Cedric’s knee returned with a vengeance. “That is all for today,” he said to the audience chamber at large.
The nervous man bowed once before retreating from the room with the other townspeople and villagers. Once they’d all left, Cedric leaped from his chair. Kat was by his side in a moment.
“Do you really think that was wise?”
“I have no idea, Kat,” Cedric said, running a hand through his hair. “But I finally have the opportunity to go out into our land and do some good. Or at least do something.”
“You are doing good. Right here. You are helping to heal a country that has been torn apart by war for the first time in centuries.”
“You are doing more on that front, I think.”
Kat sighed, but she didn’t deny it. She and Emme had together made sure that the villagers, townsfolk, and even castle servants had been fed and clothed and able to start putting their lives back together after the wrath invasion. Though Cedric’s mother was still the queen regent, she had been unable to get out of bed since the king’s death. While Cedric had caught up with his father’s advisors and planned how to strengthen the remaining army and rule the country, Kat and Emme had been doing all the real work of putting things back together again.
“You are the king, Cedric. Just you sitting up in that chair and listening to your people talk does more to restore this country than almost anything else.”
“Yes, I know.” Cedric sighed. He didn’t want to get into this argument again. But still, he felt useless and weak sitting up in that chair, and if he owed his life to the people of Caelum, he still longed for something he could do, something he could fix with his hands, something he could track or fight.
“But if there are wraths out there on the borders, is that not something worth investigating? What if they are planning another uprising? Or a retaliation?”
Kat just looked at him steadily. He knew his reasoning was thin. The wraths had been pretty effectively crushed, what small number of them remained in this realm. They likely would not try any type of retaliation for some time.
Finally, Kat sighed. “At least let me put together a guard—”
“No,” Cedric said, cutting her off. “I have not had a moment away from guards and advisors in months. I will be careful, stick to the main roads.”
“What if Rafe went with you?”
Cedric thought about it for a moment. Rafe had been just as busy as Emme and Kat in these past few months, mostly adjusting to his new position as captain of the guard. He’d been rebuilding the broken regiment and training new soldiers, working night and day although it was a time of peace. Cedric secretly suspected that Rafe was expending his energy to keep from thinking about his missing brother. Guilt over how his own actions might have forced Merek to stay in LA indefinitely clawed at Cedric every single time he saw Rafe’s face.
“No,” he said quietly. “Rafe is busy. I will go alone.”
“And if something should happen?”
“Then I will fight. Or run. Just as I did before I became king. Of course . . . you could always join me.”
For a moment, Kat looked on the verge of saying yes, and Cedric grinned. Just imagining it—being out in the woods with Kat, hunting stray monsters together like they used to do before the weight of the whole realm was on their shoulders . . .
After a beat, she shook her head. “There is too much to do here.”
Cedric tried not to let his disappointment show. Instead, he kept his grin firmly in place, trying to inject lightness into his voice as he sauntered backward away from her with a confidence he didn’
t really feel.
“Your loss, Katerina.”
Kat narrowed her eyes.
“Do not call me that if you know what is good for you, Cedric James Bartholomew the Third.”
He tipped an imaginary hat to her before turning to leave the audience chamber, happy to know that a few things, at least, would never change.
It was three days’ ride to the outer village where the nervous man said wraths had been spotted. As Cedric rode, he took stock of the land around him. Some of the villages still looked mostly abandoned, while others looked like nothing had happened in the past six months at all. Villagers rode horses and mended fences and hung laundry out to dry. Cedric kept clear of all of them; he wasn’t in the mood to stop and chat.
He slowed his pace when he reached the outlying village of Quincy, located about halfway between the base of the Westing Mountains and the start of the Southern Hills. It wasn’t far, Cedric noted, from the portal Liv had opened from a beachside in Los Angeles, the one he had come through with her and Kat a few months earlier. Cedric felt a pull to go and see the portal once more. To know that such a doorway existed, and that Los Angeles was on the other side, that Liv was on the other side . . .
But such temptations were for regular men, maybe even princes. Not for kings. He kept his horse moving.
Quincy itself looked relatively intact. A group of men worked to rebuild a pen, and Cedric asked them about the rumors of wraths nearby. They pointed to the children who’d spotted the wraths, who were less helpful than Cedric was hoping. They seemed so equally excited and terrified to be talking to a king that some of them could barely stand still. Eventually, Cedric got one child to point him in the right direction and headed off into the forest.
Immediately, he noticed something was wrong with the trees at the edge of the woods. The changes weren’t so big that someone would see them unless they were looking for them, but there was something . . . off. At first, it was just a tree here or there that seemed different from the others. One would be bent at an odd angle, its branches all reaching toward the ground like arms trying to pick up something that had fallen. Another would be a strange, light gray shade, as if all color had been bleached from it. The trees just seemed . . . weaker somehow, less than they used to be. Cedric remembered how he’d had the same feeling riding through a different part of the forest on his way to find Liv and Rafe months earlier. At the time, he’d brushed it off, but here . . .
The odd trees grew in number, until Cedric looked around and found himself surrounded by gray and white, bent and broken, stunted and shorn trees. He knew that trees weren’t living things in the same way that men and animals were, but still, he couldn’t help but think these trees looked to be in pain somehow.
Cedric gripped the reins of his horse as he rode onward, more slowly now. The wispy-haired man had not exaggerated about what had happened to this forest. If anything, he’d been too light on details. Something had gone very wrong here, and Cedric had never seen anything like it before. Was the forest sick?
At one particularly distressed-looking tree, Cedric stopped to get a closer look. It looked less like a tree than like the ghost of one. Cedric reached one finger out to the bark and touched it. When he pulled his finger away, it was covered in a crumbly powder, like clumped ash.
As Cedric examined the dark ground around the tree’s roots, some movement in the distance caught his eye. He whipped his head up to see a few branches in the distance snap in the air, as if something—or someone—had run past them in a hurry.
Cedric weaved between the trees and was soon only moments behind whoever was in front of him. Branches slapped backward through the air as the person moved quickly through the woods. Cedric caught a glimpse first of a gray elbow, then a horn. Not a person, then.
The wrath was big, but not as fast as Cedric. He drew closer and closer, reaching one hand out to try to grab on to the wrath’s shoulder—when the creature bounded through a final layer of white-gray leaves and into a small clearing.
Cedric crashed through after it. He jumped from his horse and reached for his sword just as the wrath turned around to face him. It was a foot taller than Cedric, and it had not one, but two maces tucked into its belt. But instead of the customary wrath expressions of contempt and rage, Cedric saw only panic in the monster’s craggy face.
For a moment, Cedric hesitated. He wondered if it would be possible to ask this wrath if it knew anything about what had happened to the forest. But before he could try, the wrath composed itself. It snarled, jumping out at Cedric claws first.
Cedric’s sword was fully unsheathed in an instant, and he lunged at the creature. Instantly, his arms and legs—his entire being—was filled with a purposeful energy. He dodged left, then right. He swung out with his sword, blocking a blow from the wrath’s mace and managing to get a swipe in himself. He moved on instinct, almost without thinking, and it took him a moment to realize the expression on his own face was a smile.
It had been months since he’d been able to do this, to get up off his throne and go do something. He felt good. Better than good, he felt like himself.
The wrath barely knew what hit it.
Only after its body fell to the ground did Cedric look around at the clearing. Like the trees surrounding it, the grass here was a gray-white, leached of color. It stretched out around Cedric, looking almost like fallen snow. And in the middle of all that grass was a small cabin, nearly perfectly square, with a thatched roof and a red door.
The door opened, and another wrath emerged. It ducked its head to keep the horns from catching on the door frame. It looked once from Cedric, sword out, still in fighting stance, to the dead wrath on the ground.
Its eyes narrowed. Cedric smiled again.
It took even less time to dispatch this one. Three minutes later, Cedric stood heaving over the second wrath. He wiped the black blood from his sword onto the dull grass.
“Well, you’ve killed them, then.”
Cedric whipped around at the sound of the voice. Standing in the open cabin doorway was a thin old woman with graying hair. She wore a fraying shift and looked at Cedric with calm bemusement.
“Which means either you’re here to free me, or to kill me at last.”
The old woman looked from the dead body of one wrath to the other, then shook her head. “Violent, angry things. And absolutely no sense of humor. But still, they were all that kept me company these many years. Old Smelly and the Nut.”
Cedric couldn’t hide his surprise. “Those were . . . their names?”
“It’s what I liked to call them when they were bothering me, which was every day. Ah well, they’re gone now, aren’t they? Locked me in here for years, and then one quick jab of some pointy metal and”—the old woman clapped her hands together—“that’s that.”
Cedric’s head was spinning, and he wondered if the battle had worn him out more than he realized. Or maybe it was just the disorientation of finding this old, strange woman out in the middle of the dying woods.
“Who are you?” Cedric repeated.
“Mathilde. And who are you?”
“I’m Ced— I’m the king. King Cedric.”
“A king? My, this is a big day. Well, come on in, King Cedric, and have a bit of tea. All this unexpected violence has rather tired me out.”
Cedric stayed rooted to the spot. The old woman turned around and rolled her eyes. “If you aren’t here to kill me or to free me, I’m guessing you’re here about that?” She pointed off into the woods and then disappeared through the red door into the cabin. Cedric cast one more glance at the dead wraths at his feet and followed.
The cabin was small inside, and clean. If Cedric hadn’t known the old woman had been kept prisoner there, he wouldn’t have guessed it. In one corner of the room was a bed, neat and tidy with a quilt pulled tight around its edges. A worn thatch rug was on the floor, and a wooden table under a window had a vaseful of flowers in its center.
Mathilde directed Cedr
ic to take a seat at the table, then started fussing around with a pot near a small fireplace.
“Why were those wraths keeping you prisoner here?” Cedric asked. “Does it have something to do with what’s happened to the forest?”
“In a way, yes,” Mathilde answered, setting a pot to boil. “And in a way, no. A bit, I suppose.”
“So what did cause it?” Cedric asked
“Hold your horses,” Mathilde said. She opened up a small cupboard in the corner. Inside were two cups; she took out both.
Hold your horses? The expression was a strange one, Cedric thought. It almost sounded like . . .
“And use your brain,” Mathilde added, interrupting Cedric’s thought. “You’re the king, after all. What do you think is causing the forest to die?”
Cedric sighed. When he’d seen the damage to the trees, only one thing had popped into his mind, one thing that had changed in Caelum, one thing that could have led to such destruction.
“Is it the portal?” he asked.
“Portal singular? Isn’t there more than just one out there these days?”
Mathilde finally came and sat down at the table with Cedric, leaving the pot to boil on its own. She looked at him steadily, her brown eyes clear and sharp.
“Yes,” Cedric said, on guard. How did this old woman know about the other portals?
“You’re not one for idle chitchat, are you?” Mathilde sighed. “Which is a pity, because I’ve had scarce opportunity to carry on a real conversation for a while now, let alone exchange anything like banter with a handsome young man. Pardon me—a handsome young king.” Her eyes glittered as she smiled at Cedric. “If I were just fifty years younger, you know—”
“Mathilde,” Cedric interrupted the old woman before she could finish that sentence. She gave him a sneaky grin, and suddenly it clicked in Cedric’s mind, what was so strange about the woman . . .
“The way you talk,” he started, leaning back in his chair. “The words you use, the things you say . . . you remind me of someone. Someone who’s . . . not from around here.”
The Broken World Page 18