by Kira Brady
Kai felt his stomach roil. He needed to know whom Constance was protecting, but she shamed him; Tiamat was the real threat. “I’ll do what I can, but distracting Tiamat will only put it off.”
“You have to get more people out of here.”
“Lady be damned, can’t you see I’m trying?” He schooled his features before he pushed past Constance into the throne room to find a sobbing Lady Acacia being held back by two Drekar thugs. Resplendent in red and gold silk, Tiamat sat on the throne looking like the Virgin Mary in a Russian icon. A shaft of sunlight illuminated her head and golden crown, and Acacia’s angelic toddler sat on her lap. She was dangling a diamond necklace worth a small fortune in front of the girl. The toddler gave a nervous glance at her mother, but the lure of the rainbows through the jewels and Tiamat’s seductive coos kept her quiet.
“You are a very lucky little girl,” Tiamat told her. “I’m going to give you this pretty, pretty”—the toddler reached for it, but Tiamat pulled it away—“and something even better: in my blood there is power. How would you like to be like me, little poppet?” Tiamat bared her nipple and drew a claw down her breast to scratch a long line of blue-black blood. She took a gentle hold of the back of the toddler’s head and guided her forward. “There, there, my pet. I’ll be your mother now.”
The jungle gave way to mudflat. A slick plain of endless brown. The sky was an inverted bowl of thick dark clouds, which butted together like a herd of black sheep. Corbette almost missed the obstacle course of the woods, but at least here there were no caged souls. There was nothing: no trees, no plants, no houses or people to break the monotony of mud. It sucked at his boots as he walked. A long, slow slog. He was better off than Lucia. She’d lost one slipper in the mud. The brown seeped up her new blue coat and into her long, tangled hair. She should look bedraggled, like something tasteless the mountain lion had dragged in, but her white hair shone against the dark sky and the bright feathers she’d twisted into her hair were a beacon of color in a gray world. The blue of the coat brought out her gorgeous eyes. She was covered in mud, exhausted, hungry. She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
And also miserable. He’d been less than friendly to her since she’d surprised him in the caves. Punishing her when he was mad at himself was beneath him. “Penny for your thoughts?” There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?
She cast him a sidelong glance. “Have you ever been in love?”
Good gods. Never a dull moment with Lucia. “I gave my heart to the Kivati long ago.”
“Seriously? In over a century you’ve never had a romantic relationship? I don’t believe you.”
He grimaced. He owed her honesty at least. “Nothing significant.”
“What about the insignificant ones? Why didn’t you get married long ago? Isn’t that what you’re always saying is the duty of the Kivati? Procreate so we don’t die out?”
“Do you always ask so many questions at once?”
She pulled the cloak tighter around her shoulders. “We’ve got time. Endless mud in every direction. Or when you asked for my thoughts, did you think I’d been pondering the weather all this time? ‘Lovely weather we’ve been having, isn’t it?’” she joked. “‘Ripping day for a hike.’”
He kind of liked this sarcastic version of her. She’d been hiding for too long. “There were two,” he admitted.
“Two what?”
“Women whom I thought of marrying.”
“Oh.” She sounded almost disappointed. He glanced at her expression. She was biting her lower lip. “What were their names?”
“Evangeline and . . .”
“And?”
“Lucia.” He sped up, suddenly tired of this conversation. He kept his eyes on the flat horizon, the line between black-brown and black-gray so thin it could cut butter. He was half afraid it would disappear on him, leaving this strange dark sky and dark land in a looming fishbowl of mud. At the corner of his eye, Lucia was a bright splash, like a winter rose that cut through the snow. He didn’t want to know what she thought of his admission. Relief that she’d narrowly escaped a lifetime shackled to him? Or disappointment? He wasn’t sure which would be worse.
“So what happened?” she asked.
He raised an eyebrow.
“With Evangeline.”
“Same thing that always happens. War. Blood. The safety of the Kivati comes first. It’s too much for most women to come second.”
“The world is too dark a place for happily ever afters?”
“When Tiamat is defeated and the Drekar driven out, maybe then there will be hope for me.” He let a smile he didn’t feel curl his lip.
“Not all Drekar are evil.”
“Don’t start. I’ve heard it all from Alice, and even my sister can’t convince me that my entire life of war has been in vain because ‘not all Drekar are evil.’”
“Not all Kivati are good.” Her voice broke him.
He steeled himself against the memory of her blood spilling down her wrists and across the white robe. “I’m sorry. I would eliminate Rudrick from existence, beyond either world, Living or Dead, if I ever got the chance.” They trudged on in silence. Something about this place made him attribute emotions to the landscape. If the last forest had been fear, this mud plain was despair. The Aether was gone from him; he could no more send a thunderbolt to dry this damnable mud than he could light a match.
He hated the thought of Tiamat raging through his territory while he slogged through the mud, unable to do anything to stop her. Had she reached Kivati Hall yet? Was Will managing to hold her off? Had Asgard and his Drekar joined her yet? Or did the Drekar Regent oppose his Dragon Mother, as Lucia hoped for? It seemed too good to be true. He hated this feeling of impotency being so far away from the action. He could do nothing to help his people but trudge on until he claimed the Scepter.
Glancing over at Lucia, he was struck again by the picture she made: skin and hair the color of the Lady Moon, the feathers in her hair a bright shock of blue, red, and yellow. Such odd coloring for a Kivati. Too fair, too Scandinavian, and the name—Lucia—the patron saint of light venerated by the Drekar’s followers. What had her parents been thinking? He’d always preferred her naturally dark hair to the blond she’d dyed it as a teenager, but the white it had turned since the Unraveling brought out her otherness. Now she matched her totem. He couldn’t look at her and not see the Crane.
He’d watched her wriggle in her wet, lacy drawers for hours. No blue cloak—however fine—could banish the memory. Without the Raven, he was just a man. Fallible. Weak. His fingers itched to throw the blue wool from her shoulders and take her down into the mud to breathe some life back into this weary land.
A dangerous daydream, but a happier one than imagining what his people were facing back at Kivati Hall without him. How many familiar faces would fly past him on his long trek through the Land of the Dead?
“Is that a house?” Lucia woke him from the endless slog. He snapped his gaze to where she pointed, and there, on the horizon, a bump poked up, a darker shadow against the dark horizon. House might be too generous a term, but it was shelter and it was something other than endless mud.
He felt a quiver of foreboding when he saw smoke coming from the chimney. “It might be a trap.”
“It looks dry,” she said. “It’s getting dark.”
He glanced up and saw that she was right. She had a better feel for this land than he did. His brain was too tied to the orbit of the living sun, but here in the dimness it was harder to tell that this thing that passed for day was coming to a close. “Stay behind me,” he ordered. “If I say run, run. Let me do the talking.” She made a low noise that sounded suspiciously like a crude insult. He let the edge of his lip twitch. How had he ever convinced himself that she was delicate?
The shack was scarcely bigger than an outhouse, with a comically long stovepipe chimney and three sagging stairs that led up to the front door. A window on one side was blocked by a shade, but
a thin band of light showed at the bottom sill like a streak of yellow paint. The smoke drifted out without a wind to move it. He caught the scent of sage and myrrh and thought of the burial rites of the Kivati.
“Be ready to run,” he said. She lifted her chin. The red feathers braided into her white hair gave her the coloring of the Crane. Even stripped of her totem, she couldn’t ignore her birthright. But he had to look past her attractive outer appearance if he wanted to know more about the hidden mind inside. She marched on without complaint. He knew few pampered Kivati ladies who would have done the same in her shoes. She had the heart of a warrior.
He made himself mount the stairs before he could do something foolish.
The stairs creaked under his weight, a sigh of giants. His boots left muddy footprints on the cedar steps. The owner must fly in and out through the window, because there wasn’t a speck of mud on any of them. Corbette knocked. After a long moment, the door was pulled open. A man stared back at him. A mirror, only this reflection was older. Black hair unruly to his nape; hooked nose and carved cheekbones; the thin build of a flier; the familiar large eyes, crinkled at the sides. Wrinkles like the ghost of laughter. The reflection’s eyes in death were blacker than jet, more like absence of color, a hole in his eye to another dimension. Corbette felt the floor drop out beneath his feet.
“Emory,” the man said.
“Hello, Father.”
Chapter Eight
“Reached the end of your rope, have you?” Halian Corbette asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Nonsense. No one comes to the Land of the Dead unless they’re all out of options. Don’t bristle at me, boy. It’s the truth, ain’t it?”
Corbette forced himself to relax his shoulders. He needed a moment to collect his thoughts. His father. Here. In the Land of the Dead, in a field of mud. He’d never thought to see the old man again. After more than a century, he should be able to meet his father man to man.
Hello, Father, how have you been? Pleasant weather we’re having.
Hello, Emory, so good to see you after so long. I’ve missed you.
But nothing had changed. The first words sent him back to being nothing but an angry adolescent. He tried to find something polite and neutral to say, but the only thing that rose on his tongue was the old accusation: You should have killed the Drekar when you had the chance.
“Let me take a look at you.” Halian turned him by his shoulder as if he were no more than nine. His father’s black eyes dug beneath Corbette’s skin, where the old resentment festered. “You’ve grown into your nose, I see.” Halian nodded and released him.
Corbette tried to unclench his teeth. He would usually give a look that leveled his opponent, even better than a cutting remark in response to such a backhanded compliment, but he only managed a tight-lipped smile.
Then Halian caught sight of Lucia. “And who is this beautiful creature?” His critical gaze smoothed out between one blink and the next, replaced by a radiant smile. Charm oozed from his pores. He dropped into a deep bow and swept Lucia’s hand to his lips. “My lady, you grace my humble abode.”
Lucia smiled in return, and her look cut Corbette like an arrow. Did she ever smile like that for him? It was genuine. An ease in her shoulders and warmth in her eyes that she never showed him. For him, her smiles were all polite, her spine and shoulders stiff as a whalebone corset. He could taste her fear, even when she tried to hide it behind a saucy swagger.
“Well, don’t leave the lady out in the cold, boy. Didn’t I teach you better than that? Come in, come in,” Halian said. He ushered them through the door. Corbette hesitated only a moment. His first instinct was to flee, but he needed to find out what his father was doing here and one look at Lucia told him that she needed the warmth and food offered even more. He couldn’t drag her back in the mud just to assuage his own pride.
Inside, the little shack was a twist of perspective; what looked like one room from the outside was, in reality, a large, well-appointed lodge in the old style. Though from the outside the building seemed square, inside the walls were smooth and round. A fire burned in a pit in the center, and the smoke drifted up through a hole in the roof. Cedar boards trimmed the roof and thick woven rugs of red and green covered the dirt floor. On the walls hung ceremonial masks of Kivati totems: Crow, Coyote, Bear, Wolf, Fox, Owl, Eagle, Thunderbird, Whale, Cougar, Frog, and Hummingbird. They hung at regular intervals, broken by two empty hooks.
Corbette forced himself to make introductions. “Lady Lucia, may I present my father, Halian Corbette. Father, Lucia—” He broke off, unwilling to tell Halian what totem she wore. He needed to protect her. Once Halian figured it out and made the connection to the prophecy, he would tangle her in his ridiculous schemes. He couldn’t fail to see it, with her white and red decorations in her human form, in the swanlike grace of her body, in the tilt of her long neck as she studied him. Her presence had always moved him, but in this land her natural self became deeper, somehow, like sand settling in the ballast.
If Halian noticed his omission, he didn’t mention it. “Come, come. You look wet through. Come sit by my fire. Tea? Bread?”
“Yes, please,” Lucia said. “I’m starving.”
“Starving the lady, are you, boy?” And his father gave him another one of those looks that said he’d measured the weight of his soul and found it wanting once again. Coal dust on the scale instead of gold.
Corbette tightened his smile. He tried to stand between Halian and Lucia. He had to protect her from his father’s lures. Halian had always been a good old boy, a charmer. He would whittle out every secret until she felt as exposed as the riverbed at the end of a long, hot August. Corbette knew she didn’t have anything to be ashamed of, but he also knew she didn’t believe that.
Smoothly reaching around him, Halian hooked Lucia’s elbow and brought her to the fire. Corbette bared his teeth. “What a beautiful cloak, my dear,” Halian said. “Might I exchange it for a blanket while it dries out?” And he swapped a woven blanket for the blue wool, elegantly draping it over Lucia’s shoulders while she slipped the cloak off beneath. Corbette sat next to her and put one hand on her knee. Everything Halian touched turned to ash. He didn’t want his father anywhere near Lucia. Don’t tell him anything, Corbette would have sent through the Aether, but he had no supernatural gifts left to use.
Her hair was mostly dry by this time, but Halian pulled out a mother-of-pearl comb for her to work the snarls out.
Corbette’s heart gave a lurch when he saw it. “Mother’s comb.”
“She’s not using it,” Halian said. “She had the most beautiful hair, Liluya did. Black as a Raven’s wing with faint wash of red, like the sunset had fallen into her hair and gotten tangled in it. Alice got it, lucky girl. How is your sister?” His voice softened even more, the fondness palpable.
“She’s . . .” Corbette took a long breath through his nose. She was directly in the path of the Babylonian Goddess of Chaos. Please let her have escaped. But he couldn’t tell his father that. “When I left, she was in good health.”
Halian cocked an eyebrow. “Still with that dragon? Brand, was it?”
“Yes.” A deep, loaded word.
Halian hung a kettle over the fire and pulled out a loaf of bread. He offered it to Lucia first. “He’ll protect her from whatever it is chasing you.”
“Nothing is—”
“I know you screwed up, boy. Now tell me all about it.”
Lucia still watched them; back and forth, her wide eyes darted. “It wasn’t his fault.”
“No?” Halian gave her another smile. “It rarely is, my lady. No one person can bear the responsibility for the whole world. It’s arrogance to try. Takes a village to succeed, takes a village to fail. But try telling that to Emory. He won’t hear it. Believes the ruler is the people, isn’t that right, boy?”
“The ruler is responsible for leading the people. You let the enemy in through the front do
or.”
“Can’t keep them out,” Halian said. “Can’t spend a lifetime fighting. That’s no kind of life. Peace isn’t an abstract concept; it’s a discipline we choose to apply to each and every decision. Whether we find it or not, what we can’t do is wage our wars and then curse the gods for not bringing us peace.”
“I hardly curse the gods for the Drekar decimating our people and creating endless war,” Corbette said.
“No, you just blame me,” Halian said.
“We could have fought them when they first arrived and finished it. We had twice as many numbers as Norgard did.”
“Our ancestors tried that, didn’t they? Wiped out the local Unktehila, but the dragons came back. Maybe we could’ve gotten rid of Norgard’s Norse Drekar, but dragons live all around the world. There will always be more to take their place. We’ve got to learn to live together.”
Corbette closed his eyes for a long moment. How could he explain to his father what his death had wrought? It would just sound like more blame, and they’d never get out of this circle of bickering. All of a sudden, he was tired. He listened to the snap of the fire and took a deep breath of cedar-scented air.
“Corbette kept the Kivati safe,” Lucia said. “He made us strong.”
Her defense touched a vulnerable chord in him. He cared too much for her good opinion of him. “Why are you here, Father?”
“Waiting for you, boy. What do you think?” Halian pulled the boiling water off the fire and poured it into three ceramic mugs filled with elderberry bark. He put the kettle to the side of the fire pit. Taking a flask from inside his coat, he added a generous helping of amber liquid to his glass and offered it to Lucia. She declined.
Corbette took a mug. “What, waiting for me to screw up like you did? That’s a long time to wait for a chance to gloat.”
“Gloat? No.” His father held his gaze, eyes hard as flint. Corbette looked away. “You think you’re in control, boy? The Spider holds the world together with her web. You think you could have prevented what happened? You think anything you did could have stopped your feet from leading you right to this door?” He jerked his glass toward the thick round door cut into the cedar wall. A bit of amber liquid sloshed over the side, and Corbette felt his lip curl. Halian couldn’t see what Corbette had accomplished. Of course he couldn’t. What had Corbette thought? That his father would change? He saw only that his son wasn’t the life of the party, didn’t resemble him in the slightest except that damned beak of a nose.