The Throne of Amenkor

by Joshua Palmatier

  “How did she smuggle it into the city? How did she find the contacts? How did she get the wine into the defunct stablehouse without me knowing? She’s barely left the palace for the last three years. She can’t leave the city.”

  I pulled up short. I couldn’t tell what bothered Avrell more: that Eryn had managed to smuggle the wine into the city, or that she’d done it without his knowledge. But that wasn’t what had brought me to a halt.

  “What do you mean she can’t leave the city?”

  For a moment, Avrell looked puzzled, too intent on Eryn’s betrayal, but then he realized what he’d said and his eyes widened. “Nothing. It’s not important now.”

  Some of the anger I felt toward Eryn shifted to Avrell. I took a small step forward, my hand dropping to my dagger.

  Avrell flinched, then, with a small shudder, took control of himself. His back straightened and the poise he usually showed erased most of the rage from his face. He became the diplomat I’d seen when guarding Borund, except now that I knew him better I could see flickers of the rage he’d suppressed in his eyes.

  “The Mistress is tied to the throne,” he said stiffly, “and the throne is tied to the city. Because of this, the Mistress can never leave the city.”

  “What happens if I try?”

  “You’ll die.”

  I clenched my jaw, nostrils flaring. “Of course.”

  I didn’t understand why being trapped in the city turned my stomach. I’d never been outside the city streets, had lived on or near the Dredge until I was fifteen, and after that I’d lived in the lower city, guarding Borund. I’d never even been close to the city’s outskirts, had never considered what lay beyond except in a vague way. What lay outside the city couldn’t help me on the Dredge. Even Avrell’s discussions of other cities, other places, seemed unreal—nothing more than words or stories.

  But now I couldn’t escape, even if I wanted to.

  I shoved the thought aside and spun, continuing down the corridor to Eryn’s chambers. After a moment, I heard Avrell trying to catch up. At least now he was quiet.

  Eryn had kept to the rooms Avrell had given her after I’d taken control of the throne, and I’d had no urge to seek her out. I still felt too unsettled around her, too off-balance. I didn’t know if I could trust her after she’d manipulated me onto the throne, and so I’d ignored her, shoved her to the back of my mind, where she was a constant nagging threat. The only other time I’d seen her had been on the rooftop after I’d dreamed of Corum, and that confrontation had been strained.

  I didn’t slow as I came up to the outer doors to her chambers. I jerked them open before the guards could reach them, stalked into the waiting room, scanning it with one swift glance. A forest of potted trees, a few scattered chairs and tables, a settee, a door to the inner chambers.

  With barely a pause, I headed toward the door. At some point, I’d slid beneath the river.

  “Varis, wait—” Avrell began, but with a surge of power I shoved him back without turning, heard him grunt as the eddy struck, and then I was through, into the inner bedroom, the door cracking sharply into the wall.

  A servant shrieked, dropped the linens she was holding with a soft fwump.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  With a trembling voice, the girl said, “The garden.”

  I frowned, but she pointed toward a curtained doorway, the door open, a slight breeze pushing the curtain out into the room.

  I shoved aside the curtain and stepped out onto an open veranda of white stone, a little larger than my own balcony, with a small table and chairs. A wide stone balustrade lined with fat pots separated the veranda from the small private garden beyond. In the evening sunlight, the trees and trellised vines of the garden were vibrant, the white stone of the curving paths harsh to look at. I hesitated, let my eyes adjust, then stepped to the three stone steps leading down to the garden.

  I didn’t feel the wall of force at the top of the steps until I ran into it, too blinded by rage. I hit it hard, staggered back with a barked curse, tasted blood on my lip.

  “What is it?” Avrell asked, catching my elbow to steady me. The guards fanned out behind us, eyes sharp, hands on swords.

  I ran a hand across my mouth, grimaced at the smear of blood. “Eryn.”

  “I felt you coming.”

  Everyone turned, the guards closing in tighter as Eryn stepped away from a trellis full of wide white flowers I’d scanned a moment before. I suddenly recalled the throne room, how she had hidden right in front of me, emerging only after I’d refused to play her games. Or rather, the throne’s games. A trick of the river that I didn’t know how to use . . . or see through.

  Eryn stepped into direct sunlight, turned a hard gaze on the guardsmen. “You can leave now.”

  The guards turned, then hesitated, uncertain, confused. They’d taken orders from Eryn for years. The instinct to obey was automatic.

  After a moment, Avrell gave them a short nod and they retreated to the inner rooms.

  I frowned in annoyance. They should have waited for a signal from me, not Avrell.

  As soon as they were gone, Eryn turned to me. “Why have you come here? This is my retreat, my private garden. I want nothing to do with the throne now. I don’t want to be disturbed.”

  I stepped forward, halting at the edge of the wall of force. “Why didn’t you tell me about the wine?”

  Eryn frowned. “What wine?”

  “The Capthian red you had smuggled into the city without my knowledge,” Avrell said, his voice acidic. “The wine stored in the stablehouse in the middle ward.”

  Eryn didn’t answer at first. “Are you certain it was me?”

  “Who else could it have been?” Avrell countered. “None of the merchants would have dared hide illegally obtained wine in a building owned by the palace, let alone a building containing a passage beneath the palace walls!”

  “Some would argue such a building would be the perfect place to hide goods,” Eryn said. “Why would we search our own buildings?”

  “But they wouldn’t have known of the passage,” I spat, “wouldn’t have stacked the wine so that the entrance to the tunnel would remain open. And if they had known of the passage, they wouldn’t have risked the wine being found if the tunnel were used.”

  A troubled look passed through Eryn’s eyes and her poise wavered, her gaze dropping to the stone of the garden’s path. “I see.”

  Before me, the wall of force on the steps shuddered, then unraveled, rigid currents sliding back into their regular flows.

  I relaxed, felt my pulse begin to throb in my cut lip now that my rage had been blunted. It hurt like all hells. “Why didn’t you tell us about the wine?” I asked again, my voice calm but still laced with anger.

  Eryn sighed and glanced back up, her eyes worried, watery and red, as if she were on the verge of tears. “Because,” she said in a stern voice, “I don’t remember smuggling in any wine.”

  Neither Avrell nor I moved.

  “But you told me about the wine,” I said, incredulous. “You showed it to me!”

  “How?” Eryn said, stepping forward to the edge of the steps, so that Avrell and I were looking down at her. “How did I show you?”

  “I dreamed I was coming to the palace with Borund, to meet with Avrell. We were following a dock boy, who led us to the stables and the tunnel. The first few times that was all it was, as if I were reliving the memory. But this last time, after we’d seen the crates of wine, the dock boy changed into you.”

  Both Avrell and Eryn seemed confused, staring at each other with furrowed brows.

  “Could you have influenced her dream somehow?” Avrell asked, voice tinged with doubt. “Perhaps without knowing? We’ve never had two Mistresses alive at the same time before. Is that possible?”

  But Eryn was already shaking her hea
d. “No, I don’t think so. The Sight doesn’t work that way, and none of the previous Mistresses trapped in the throne had any knowledge of such a thing that I remember.” She turned to me, frowning. “However . . .”

  I shifted beneath her gaze. “What?”

  Eryn sighed, her shoulders sagging in uncertainty. “It could be the throne itself. Or at least one of the personalities in the throne.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, but I thought I already knew. The older woman who had smelled of oak and wine.

  Eryn hesitated, glanced at Avrell, then moved up onto the veranda to the table and chairs, taking a seat. After a studied pause, Avrell moved to join her. I shifted to a place near the table, sitting back against the stone balustrade, arms crossed over my chest.

  “The throne is a malevolent thing,” Eryn said, her voice tired. She made a small motion toward the door and in the darkness behind the curtain I sensed the servant I’d startled before moving away. “All of those women—and a few men—all of whom at some point touched the throne and thus became a part of it, they all want the same thing: control. They know that they’re dead—some of them have been dead since the throne’s creation almost fifteen hundred years ago—but there is always the temptation to gain control, to seize it if necessary. If they can overpower whoever sits on the throne, then they can live again through that body. It’s happened before. Someone ascends the throne, someone weak. Then the throne takes control, claims the power. In most cases, the person doesn’t survive long after that. The throne itself overwhelms the inhabited person’s body, destroys it.”

  I glanced toward Avrell, his mouth pressed into a tight, thin line. I had heard him talking to Nathem in the waiting room, had heard him describing how the women he’d tried to seat on the throne before me had died. I’d lived their deaths, in the moments when the throne threatened to overwhelm me, and I shuddered at the screams, at the memory of clawing my eyes out, of biting off my own tongue, of having my heart beat so hard and fast that it finally burst in a white-hot, searing explosion of pain.

  And I remembered the meeting with the merchants, heard again the voice of the woman sliding through the currents of the river. She’d removed herself from the rest of the throne, fought her way free. And she’d wanted control, wanted me to give her control.

  “But not all of those the throne took control of died,” I said.

  Eryn shook her head. “No. A few of them survived, overpowered by one or all of the personalities. In those cases, the new personality is subsumed, lost in the storm, and someone else takes over.”

  I thought of the throne room, recalled the voices echoing in its chambers the night I attempted to kill Eryn. A girl’s voice, perhaps twelve, and an elder’s voice, rough with spite and anger.

  But in the end, Eryn had regained command. It was Eryn who had pushed me onto the seat of the throne. It was Eryn who gave me the choice to take control . . . or let the city die.

  Eryn continued, “All of the women who have sat upon the throne before—and there have been at least two hundred—have had the Sight . . . what you call the river, Varis. And when the throne was first established, the Sight was enough. The Mistress could use it to build a barrier between her own personality and those within the throne. But as more and more people became part of the throne, that barrier had to be stronger and stronger, each new Mistress more powerful than the last. Not everyone who was seated on the throne had the power to master it, and those that didn’t died. Close to a hundred have died in this way, most of them within the last few centuries. But we’ve reached an impasse. The throne has become too powerful for even the strongest of us with the Sight.”

  Eryn leaned forward, her eyes intent. “But there’s something different about you, Varis.”

  I shifted uncomfortably.

  “I sensed it in the throne room,” Eryn went on, voice soft. “A Fire. A White Fire, like a small ember of the Fire that burned through the city six years ago. It burns inside you, protects you from the voices when the Sight cannot.”

  Avrell stirred. “Is that why you chose her to be the Mistress?”

  Eryn shook her head, never taking her eyes off me. “No. I didn’t know about the Fire until the throne room. I only knew that Varis was the only one with the Sight in the city strong enough to have a hope of controlling the throne. None of the Servants here would have survived, not even Marielle. You know. You tried the strongest—Beth, Arrielle, Cecille—” Her voice grew rough and she halted, swallowed hard. “You watched them die.”

  I suddenly understood the fear I’d sensed in Marielle weeks earlier. She was a true Servant. If Avrell had not shifted his attention to me, she might have been thrust on the throne herself . . . and killed.

  No wonder Marielle feared him.

  My gaze fell on Avrell. “So you knew,” I said.

  He looked at me blankly. “Knew what?”

  My back straightened. “You knew that I was never supposed to kill Eryn, that it was a trap, the assassination just a ploy to get me into the throne room.”

  “Yes.”

  I snorted in contempt, even though part of me was relieved. At least now I knew he’d wanted me to be the Mistress, that my ascension to the throne wasn’t a complete surprise.

  “It wasn’t his idea,” Eryn said. “But he did bring your presence to my attention. He noticed you when he first met with you and Borund, told me of his suspicions that you used the Sight. It was my idea to have you attempt to kill me.”

  “Why not just have me brought to the throne room? Order me there?”

  “Because of Captain Baill,” Avrell answered, voice thick with derision. “He would never have allowed it. His position was too strong with Eryn on the edge of madness. He would never have given that up.”

  “And because you would never have accepted the throne unless you were forced to,” Eryn added. “No one willingly takes the throne. Not now.”

  I thought about entering the throne room that night, of feeling the presence of the throne stalking me, hunting me as if I were prey, and shuddered. No. No one would willingly take the throne. Not once they came into the throne room and felt its presence anyway. Even those trained for it, like the Servants.

  Silence settled, interrupted by Eryn’s servant bringing a pitcher of chilled water and a set of glasses. As the girl poured three glasses from the pitcher, she glanced toward me and I sensed her relief.

  Relief that someone else had assumed the throne.

  I frowned as the girl bowed her head and left, slipping silently through the curtain to the darkness of the inner room. I wondered if she would have been next.

  Avrell took a sip of water. “How does that explain your appearance in Varis’ dream?”

  Eryn sat back with a small sigh. “Everyone is vulnerable when they sleep. Our defenses are weakest, our protective barriers thin. I think that one of the personalities in the throne penetrated Varis’ defenses, enough to influence her dreams. At first, whoever it was probably triggered her memory, hoping that would be enough for Varis to realize that the wine was in the stable. But when that didn’t work, they used something more direct.” She paused. “They put my image in the dream.”

  “But why your image?” Avrell asked. “Why use you?”

  Eryn grimaced. “I don’t know.” She gave me a long, considering look. “But maybe we can find out.”

  I straightened, a thin coil of unease uncurling inside me. “How?”

  Eryn look a thoughtful sip of her water, set the glass down carefully.

  “You have an advantage that none of the previous Mistresses have had, Varis: me. I know how to use the throne, know how to manipulate its powers as well as the Sight. I could show you how to search for whomever is influencing your dreams, perhaps even show you how to protect yourself from them using the Sight. None of the previous Mistresses had a living Mistress to aid them, to guide them after
they took the throne. We all had to rely on the voices, had to determine which voices we could trust to help us and which to ignore. All on our own. And there are voices within the throne that you can trust, Varis.

  “Let me help you,” Eryn said, her eyes imploring, a tinge of desperation entering her voice. All signs of the regal, imperious woman I’d seen on the roof had vanished. “I could help you with the Sight, as well as the throne. Please.”

  Beside her, Avrell nodded to himself, his face intent, as if a problem he’d been wrestling with had been solved.

  I hesitated, the coil of unease sliding deeper into my chest. If I allowed Eryn to get that close . . .

  But I already knew my answer. I didn’t want anyone influencing my dreams. The thought itself sent shudders down my back. It made me vulnerable, weak. And I did need help protecting myself from the voices in the throne. The Fire wasn’t enough. The woman who had smelled of oak and wine proved that.

  “We can try,” I said, and I saw relief flash in Eryn’s eyes. She smiled. The first real smile I’d seen from her.

  “Good,” she said, relaxing back into her chair as she took a sip of water.

  “But first,” Avrell said, suddenly all business, “the wine. You said you don’t remember smuggling in any wine, but obviously you did. Did you smuggle in anything else? And how did you do it without anyone knowing?”

  Eryn glanced toward me, her smile widening. “Now, Avrell, you don’t expect me to reveal all of the Mistress’ secrets, do you?”

  He grunted, not finding it humorous. “Of course not. However—”

  “No.” A trace of steel entered Eryn’s voice. “I won’t tell you everything, Avrell. You’ve learned enough about the Mistress’ powers today.”

  Avrell drew breath to protest but caught himself, stiffening beneath Eryn’s gaze. “Very well.”

  Eryn turned back to me, her face serious now, the smile gone. “I smuggled in some food and had it stored in various places throughout the city.”