by Grace Draven
He hadn’t been any more thrilled than Ildiko when a messenger from Haradis had arrived a week earlier to warn them of Secmis’s visit. “At least she is only here for two nights.”
“Those will be the longest two nights of our lives.”
He couldn’t agree more.
They helped each other dress in the quiet of the chamber. The halls below them were a hornet’s nest of frantic activity in preparation for the queen’s visit. Brishen had wanted to tell his servants to leave Saggara and visit family, friends, anyone for a few days. Secmis could fend for herself. Ildiko had met that suggestion with an expression of nostril-flaring indignation.
“I will not be known as a rude, unwelcoming hostess,” she said in a voice that Anhuset told him later sounded exactly like when she ordered his captors’ executions.
Brishen had hidden his smile and backed quickly away from the idea.
He paused in lacing his tunic when Ildiko handed him the eye patch he wore outside their bedroom. “I thought you didn’t like it when I wore this.”
The first time he’d tied it on, Ildiko had stepped back, alarmed. “It makes you look vicious,” she said with a scowl.
He still hadn’t yet figured out how a mouth full of fangs or claw-tipped hands didn’t bother her anymore, but a harmless eyepatch did. But he wished to please her and wore it only if they hosted guests or visited the villages and townships.
She shrugged. “This is your mother. She’ll approve.”
While Brishen had acceded to Ildiko’s wishes of tearing the fortress apart and putting it back together again for the queen’s visit, he refused to plan a greeting of great fanfare when she arrived. If he didn’t think Secmis would try and take his other eye, he’d make her sleep in the stables. Instead, his soldiers lined up in two parallel rows and saluted the queen with their swords as she rode through the gates with a modest entourage.
Brishen waited at the end, Ildiko on one side of him, Anhuset on the other. His cousin spoke under her breath. “If you order a dance and command me to attend, I will gut you in your sleep.”
Ildiko’s muffled laughter lightened the moment, and Brishen quirked a smile at Anhuset. “No worries. If I didn’t have to feed her, I wouldn’t. Dancing would just invite her to stay longer.”
The visit was as excruciating as Ildiko predicted, but his unflappable wife persevered under Secmis’s contemptuous scrutiny and critical remarks. In fact, she mostly ignored the queen, except when spoken to or to ask if her accommodations were comfortable. Her focus centered on Brishen who counted the minutes until his mother finally left Saggara and left them in peace.
He didn’t ask her if the Beladine had tried to negotiate his release with her by forcing an annulment of his marriage. And Secmis remained silent on the matter as well. Her curious gaze took in his altered features and the way he’d balance a pitcher of wine against his glass before pouring.
The loss of his eye was not without consequence. He was completely blind on his left side. No flickers of movement or changing shades of light. The first fortnight had been the most frustrating. He couldn’t get out of the way of his own nose. It filled his vision, large as a crane’s beak. That had faded over time, but he still struggled with a sense of depth.
Walking up stairs presented a challenge with the first step, but the angle of his shadow aided him in sensing the changing depth and height of the steps. Walking down was another matter. His shadow fell straight in front of him, and the steps were nothing more than a smooth, sloping descent to his compromised vision. He still kept one hand on the wall until he adjusted to the regularity of the treads’ rise and fall.
He refused to be an invalid, and as soon as the healers pronounced him well enough to leave his bed, he’d donned light armor and joined Anhuset in the practice arena. His cousin treated his appearance as nothing out of the ordinary. Her patience was long and her sympathy non-existent as she helped him to relearn the skills of combat as a one-eyed fighter.
Brishen mentioned none of this to Secmis. He had no doubt she’d laughed when the Beladine had presented their threat to her. Her younger son’s death was of little importance, his survival and recuperation even less so.
Patience finally worn away by Secmis’s constant haranguing, Ildiko had excused herself well before dawn and fled for the sanctuary of their chamber. Brishen had let her go with a polite nod and cool bow. If Secmis even sensed his affection for Ildiko, she’d make things difficult for them.
Secmis tapped a claw on the rim of her goblet and watched Ildiko disappear into the stairwell. She turned to Brishen. “So, has she taken your Beladine neighbor as her lover yet?”
He had wondered how long it would take for her to fire the first volley. “No.”
She arched a doubtful eyebrow. “Are you sure? I’m told he is handsome to human women and even to some of the Kai. And of course he has both of his eyes.”
Second volley, this time dipped in malice. “I’m sure.”
Secmis frowned at his lack of reaction to her insults. “You haven’t yet asked me why I’m here.”
Brishen shrugged. “Saggara is part of your kingdom. I’m its caretaker. I assume you’re acting as the king’s emissary.” Whatever reason for the visit, it wasn’t good. He just had to wait until she revealed her purpose and brace for whatever impact it had.
She stretched in her chair, reminding him of a great cat—lithe, hungry, and ready to disembowel anything that moved. “Maybe I just wish to visit my younger son.”
He gulped down a swallow of wine to prevent breaking into guffaws.
Secmis continued their one-sided conversation. “Your claws are growing back. You don’t seem any worse for your ordeal—other than the scar and being half blind.” She spoke as if he’d taken a walk through the woods and stubbed his toe. “I bear strong children,” she said.
When you’re not snapping their necks, he thought but stayed silent.
Her self-satisfied smile changed, becoming something that sent a crawling chill down his back. It took everything within him not to shrink away or leap from his seat when she stroked his forearm in a slow caress. “It’s a shame you’re my son,” she purred. “You would have made a magnificent consort.”
A surge of bile burned up his throat. Brishen grabbed for the pitcher, braced it against his goblet and poured wine until it touched the brim. He emptied the cup in two swallows. “Why have you come, Your Majesty?” Never before had he struggled so hard not to reveal his loathing for the woman who bore him.
Her knowing gaze warned he might not be as stoic as he hoped. She reached into a pocket of her tunic and brought out a small decorative box. She placed it on the table and slid it toward him. He squelched the urge to push it back.
“I came to bring you this. It’s yours.” The queen gave a nonchalant shrug. “I have no idea why it was sent to me. It isn’t as if I would do anything with it.” She stood, and he scrambled to stand with her and bow. “You can wait to open it when your wife is with you.”
She swept around the table and signaled to the two handmaidens who hovered nearby, ready to serve her every whim. “I’m not staying a second night,” she announced. “Saggara lacks the most basic creature comforts. Uncomfortable beds, boring food and even duller company. No need to accompany me to the gates. I’ll leave sooner without you and a dirty troop of soldiers following after me. I’ll tell your father you send your regards.”
Two hours later, Brishen breathed a sigh of relief as Secmis and company disappeared into the horizon. The journey would be hard-going for the riders. The queen would shelter in a wagon shielded from the sun by dark curtains. Her escort would have to ride hooded and squinting for several hours before they found relief. He didn’t envy them.
He found Ildiko still dressed in her finery and standing at one of the windows in their room. She turned to greet him with a smile. “She chose not to stay? Thank the gods!” She literally skipped into his welcoming arms. “I will never believe you are that woman’s
son, bred and born.”
Unfortunately he was, but he’d succeeded in his endeavor to be nothing like her when others expressed their disbelief that they were in any way related. His skin crawled again at the memory of her words. “Too bad you’re my son. You would have made a magnificent consort.”
“I’ve called for a bath,” he said. “I need a good scrubbing. Will you join me?”
Ildiko nodded eagerly and spied the box he held. “What is that?”
“She said she came here to bring me this.”
Ildiko backed away from him. “Maybe you should don your armor before you open it.”
He had a notion of what might be inside. Secmis’s idea of humor was usually someone else’s idea of horror. “I’ll open it later.”
Unfortunately, his wife’s curiosity couldn’t be quelled. “Won’t you let me see?”
He sighed. “I don’t think it will be pleasant, Ildiko.”
She frowned at him. “Then you should definitely not open it alone.”
She had stood beside him through events far grimmer than opening a gift from Secmis and held her own. She’d do so again.
Ildiko did wobble when Brishen opened the lid to reveal the box’s contents, and she clutched his arm. “That bitch,” she breathed. “That vile, horrible bitch. She came all this way to sink a knife.”
Brishen had guessed correctly and didn’t flinch when he saw what lay inside Secmis’s gift box. His eye, shriveled to a withered, ocherous orb, rolled back and forth inside the box like the carved pebble in a child’s game of Heckle Stones. He put the lid back on the box and threw the entire thing into the fire built in the hearth. Flames devoured the container, shooting hungry sparks against the grate.
“She must have been bored in Haradis.”
Ildiko scowled at him, her tone waspish. “How can you not be angry? I want to punch her in her smirking face.” She fisted her left hand and smacked the palm of her right hand with a hard thwack.
Brishen turned her so that she fully faced him. The silk sleeves of her shirt rode smooth under his hands as he stroked her arms in a soothing gesture. “Because she’s predictable. She has yet to do anything I didn’t expect.”
Tears turned Ildiko’s eyes glossy, and she blinked hard. “She would have let you die. Perched on that throne like some great bloated spider and let them kill you!”
“Remember, wife. I’m the spare of no value.”
She lunged for him and wrapped her arms around his waist. Her soft breasts pressed against his chest as she hugged him as hard as she could. “You are of great value to me,” she said into his tunic. She raised her head, her eyes narrowed and still teary. “I wish I could kill them again, Brishen. I wish I could kill her.”
He threaded her hair through his clawless fingers before bending to kiss her forehead. “I love you, my blood-thirsty hag.”
Ildiko sniffed and offered him a watery smile. “That’s a good thing, because you’ll have to suffer through dinner later. I thought your mother would be here another night, so I ordered potatoes to be served.”
Brishen threw back his head and laughed. He lifted Ildiko off her feet to spin her around.
She was breathless when he put her down and managed to wiggle out of his embrace with a dizzy stumble. “I have something for you as well,” she said. “And it isn’t a body part.” She retrieved a velvet pouch from the chest at the end of their bed and handed it to him. “The jeweler from Halmatus township delivered it along with my necklace while you were healing. I’d forgotten about it until Sinhue and I were checking the wardrobes for hidden scarpatine.”
Brishen opened the satchel and upended its contents into his palm. His breath caught at the sight of a cabochon half the size to the one Ildiko’s mother had given her. This one was cut from citrine quartz and as bright as a Kai’s gaze at midnight. A spark of deeper orange pulsed within the stone’s depths. A recolligere. Ildiko had managed to find a memory jewel. He glanced at her. “How did he come by one of these?”
Ildiko shrugged. “He said they were rare.”
“They are.” If this stone held what he thought it did, he was going to revisit Halmatus township and the visit wouldn’t be friendly. “Ildiko, the spell used to make these work is dangerous, unpredictable. You didn’t...” She nodded, confirming his fear. “I’m going to kill that jeweler.”
Ildiko huffed. “It was perfectly safe for me. Memory madness only affects the Kai, and I’m not Kai. Neither one of us thought the spell would work. I think he was as surprised as I was that it did.”
Her fingers drifted over his, over the stone, hesitant, unsure. Her strange eyes pleaded with him to accept her gift. “If I die before you, I have no mortem light for you to carry to Emlek. That recolligere holds one of my memories. You can take that instead—a paler light.”
She made him strong; she made him weak, and in that moment, she nearly put him on his knees. Brishen gathered her into his embrace, the recolligere clutched in his hand. He kissed her cheeks, her temples, the corners of her eyes wet with tears. When he reached her mouth, he paused. “Not a paler light,” he said. “A radiant one, from a woman in whose presence I will never be blind.”
“Love me,” she whispered against his lips.
“Always.”
EPILOGUE
In chambers far below the public rooms of the royal palace, Queen Secmis cut the heart out of her latest lover’s dead body and dropped it into a pewter basin
Blood still pumped in sluggish streams from the severed arteries to half submerge the heart in a crimson pool. Secmis dipped her fingers into the bowl and sketched arcane symbols on the body stretched across the gore-soaked bed. She spoke words, neither bast-Kai nor Common, but ones that lacerated her tongue with every syllable uttered. The flavors of iron and salt filled her mouth and she spat between sentences so as not to choke on her own blood.
The Kai’s butchered body twitched and began to flail while the exposed lungs did the impossible and bloated with air.
It was working. Her incantation was working! So many years, so many failed consecratives. Finally! She laughed, a gleeful sound as sweet as a child’s, as mad as a demon’s.
No longer would she just be queen of a fading race. She would rule all kingdoms, all people—Kai and human. And she would do so for thousands of years. Undying, never aging, all-powerful. A Night Queen instead of the weaker Shadow one.
The power she invoked had slept for longer than even the memories of the oldest mortem lights in Emlek. The spell to awaken it had killed more than its share of mages. It required blood and fear, memory and innocence. Secmis thought she held the final ingredient when she’d birthed a daughter—a child born, not made, deformed and pushed from her womb.
She growled even as she drew more bloody symbols on the thrashing body. Secmis never discovered who had taken the infant she’d marked for this ceremony, but she suspected.
Brishen had been a cheerful, congenial child. He did as he was told, never rebelled or shown any ambition to replace his brother as heir. Secmis had noted his character and promptly forgotten him. Only when he’d grown older had she caught hints of a hidden strength, an implacable will and a cold, reptilian hatred that flickered in his eyes any time she met his gaze.
His response to his new sister’s unexpected death had been a shrug before he resumed his mock battle with Anhuset through the palace corridors. He’d given Secmis a wide, frightened stare when she’d raged about the infant’s disappearance and yawned through the memorial they held for her.
Still, Secmis always wondered. Her younger son was far more layered, far more complex than she gave him credit for, and far more intelligent than the pliable heir apparent. He had cheerfully married that repulsive Gauri girl and gone about the business of settling her at Saggara without complaint. He hadn’t confronted Secmis about the scarpatine in his wife’s bedroom, preferring instead to pack up and leave. He’d outmaneuvered her by obtaining Djedor’s permission first.
His was a
quiet rebellion of strategy, manipulation and an unruffled demeanor. Only that glimmer of loathing in his gaze every time he looked at Secmis gave him away. When a Beladine messenger carrying demands for negotiation of his release handed her proof of his capture, she’d stared into that mangled eye and seen the expression stamped there in the flat, yellow gaze.
His torture had not broken him. She’d seen it herself. Scarred and half blind, Brishen still ruled Saggara with a firm hand and commanded both the respect and fierce loyalty of his followers. Secmis hadn’t lied when she told him he would have made a magnificent consort. But only if they shared power, and Secmis was through with sharing power.
She completed the last of the spell. The dead Kai, a lesser ambassador of the royal court, stilled beneath her hands. His mouth was still warm as she pressed her lips to his and exhaled. Oily black smoke poured from her mouth into his before swirling out through his nostrils. His lungs expanded, contracted and repeated the process.
Secmis stepped away as the dead sat up. “Speak the words,” she commanded.
The speech uttered was none ever spoken by the living and desecrated the dead who did. A wet coldness settled in the chamber as the dead man recited unintelligible words that tore jagged wounds into his skin and wrenched cracks in the walls and ceiling.
One crack widened to a gaping splice of darkness even thicker than what already existed in the chamber. It spilled out of the crack, thick as lamp oil and reeking of a charnel house. Secmis laughed and clapped her hands as the viscous black oozed up the walls and across the floor, spawning writhing silhouettes with crimson gazes. She’d done it! Rent the veil between worlds and brought forth an unconquerable legion bound to her commands.
“To me,” she ordered, spreading her arms wide.
They came to her as she commanded but not as she hoped. One slippery shadow twined around her and struck with a gaping maw. Secmis yelped, suffocating in the thick sludge as the entity forced its way down her throat. She clawed the air and tried to scream. More of the sinuous shapes wrapped around her, seeking gaps in her clothing, every entrance to her body until she was nothing more than a choking, dancing puppet slammed one way and then another as the shadows shrieked and laughed and cavorted.