by G. A. Aiken
“I need to talk to you,” she said, grabbing him by the sleeve of his bright yellow robes and beginning to lead him off until Keeley pulled him away.
“What are you doing?” Keeley demanded.
“I need to talk to him.”
Keeley, taller than her sister, leaned down a bit. “Can’t this wait? We’re burying his dead.”
“This is important,” Gemma replied.
“So’s this.”
“Back off.”
“You back off!”
“What is going on?” Laila barked.
“I need to speak—”
“And I said it can wait.”
“You can just ask,” the monk said softly.
And Keeley actually looked as if she wanted to wring her younger sister’s neck.
“The artifacts of the monastery,” Gemma asked, “where are they?”
Staring at Gemma, the monk blinked. Once, twice. “We . . . we have no artifacts, my lady.” And they all knew the monk was lying.
Gemma had no patience these days for poorly told lies, and she rolled her eyes in exasperation. Keeley, however, tried her ridiculous honesty.
“Brother, you can tell my sister anything.”
“Keeley, stop.”
“She’s one of you,” Keeley explained.
“One of us?” the monk asked.
“Keeley, stop talking.”
“Aye! She’s a monk from the Order of Righteous Valor.”
The monk began to blink more. Actually, he blinked ten or twelve times in a row before he stumbled back, slamming into Caid.
“You . . . you’re a . . . a . . . war monk?”
“Brother, please . . .” Gemma raised her hands, palms out. “Before you panic—”
“War Monk!” he screamed hysterically before running away.
Gemma briefly closed her eyes before turning on her sister. “Why did you say anything?”
“Why do you belong to an organization that terrifies people?”
Fair question.
A fair question that Gemma didn’t bother to answer. Instead, she ran after the monk.
“Well, don’t chase after—”
When her sister ignored her, Keeley threw up her hands and charged after Gemma.
The Amichais looked at each other. Keeley was queen. Gemma was eldest sister to the queen. A princess. There were at least three units of soldiers burying bodies that could chase the monk from here all the way back to the Amichais’ mountain home. And yet . . .
Laila and Caid focused on Quinn.
“Oh, come on!” he argued. “Why do I have to do it?”
“I don’t feel like running,” Laila replied.
“I don’t want to,” Caid growled.
“And you know what will happen once they catch up to each other. And that poor monk will die of a heart attack once he sees what those two can do to each other. We’ll never find out the answer to Gemma’s questions. So go,” Laila ordered, gesturing with both hands.
“Fuck.” He shifted to his natural form and took off after the sisters.
It wasn’t hard to find them. The monk’s yellow robes were as bright as the two suns. Gemma was nearly on him when Keeley tackled her from behind, the pair going down hard.
Quinn kept going, reaching the hysterical monk and grabbing him from behind. By the time he had the man under control, he was back to two legs so that when they were facing each other, the monk wouldn’t be any more frightened.
“Breathe,” he ordered the poor man. “Just breathe.”
“She’s a—”
“Yes. She is. But she won’t hurt you. I promise. On my life and the life of my people. Understand?”
The monk gawked at him for a long moment, but finally nodded.
“Now, she’s going to ask you questions, you’ll answer them . . . yes? You’ll help?”
“I will.”
“Good. Now . . .” Quinn looked over his shoulder; shook his head. “Give me a moment.”
He released the monk and returned to the sisters, grabbing them by the collars of their blood-encrusted chainmail shirts and pulling them to their feet. He yanked them apart and shook them for good measure.
“Stop it! You’re scaring the feeble monk!”
“I told you not to say anything!” Gemma felt the need to remind her sister, yet again.
“I still don’t understand why you’re part of a group that sends terror into anyone who even hears the words ‘war monk.’ As soon as they’re said, people piss themselves and run. Does that not concern you?”
“No! It does not concern me. Because our reputation was earned—”
“On the backs of dead babies?”
The slap across the queen’s face rang out through the land like the warning of a town bell; Quinn could actually feel it in his back teeth.
The women were at each other once more and he wasn’t even sure he wanted to attempt to separate them again. He didn’t want to risk important parts of his body. It was the monk who decided to intervene. Not with words or pleas, but a burst of bright energy that sent both females spiraling in opposite directions until they landed facedown in the dirt, gasping for breath, eyes wide in startled panic.
“My brothers are dead!” the monk nearly screamed. “And you two royals attack each other like feckless harpies!” Tears began to stream down his face but they seemed more from despair and frustration than fear. “Both of you, stop it!”
He looked away and wiped his tears with the sleeve of his yellow robe. “Now ask me your question, War Monk.”
Panting hard, but not from her fight with her sister, Gemma got to her feet. She brushed off her knees and asked, “Where did your order keep your artifacts? Your true artifacts.”
The pacifist monk studied her hard before replying, “There are several locations in the monastery—”
“I could be wrong, Brother, but I’m almost positive they’re not there anymore.”
“What?”
When Gemma took a step forward, the monk took a step back, so she stopped.
“I think whoever attacked your monastery tortured your elders because they wanted your artifacts. Not your gold. Not your silver. They wanted your power.”
“How powerful could pacifist monks be?” Quinn asked.
“Well,” Gemma grudgingly admitted, glancing down at the dirt and scrapes she’d gotten from her tumble across the ground, “consider the power we just experienced from this monk, who I’m guessing worked in the”—her gaze locked on him and the monk quickly looked away—“stables? He probably managed to survive by hiding in the tunnels that are built under all monastery stables, and he does smell of horse and sheep shit. So he’s not an elder. Nor is he important enough or powerful enough to work in the library. But he was still able to toss us across this field like kittens.” She nodded. “We need to get back to the monastery and find out if the artifacts are still there.”
“And if they are?” the monk asked.
“They’re yours,” Keeley said, also standing now. “We’re not going to take what belongs to your monastery, Brother. We’re just trying to help.”
He nodded and began walking back toward his monastery and the others. The sisters followed and Quinn brought up the rear. As they walked, he noticed the sisters begin to jostle each other. Then the slapping began. When they took hold of each other, he leaned down and reminded them, “Don’t think for a moment that I won’t drag both of you back there, by your ankles, in front of your entire army. Because if you’re wondering . . . yes, I am that big a dick.”
“We are aware,” Gemma muttered.
“Great!” he cheered, slapping them both on the backs. “I was worried you didn’t know what my father truly loves about me!”
CHAPTER 2
The bodies were buried while the suns were still in the sky, but the monk was not there. He was inside the monastery with Keeley, whom he seemed to trust, and Gemma, whom he didn’t trust at all.
While they watched,
he went to every space within the walls that had, at one time, held the order’s artifacts. None of them remained. Not one.
Unable to bear the weight of such loss, he sat down on the first bench he came to in the kitchens and didn’t move. Gemma didn’t sit beside him. She knew he wouldn’t like that. So Keeley did.
“I’m so sorry, Brother,” she said in that way she had. The way that told you she meant it more than anyone else in the world could ever mean it. Because she did. She felt others’ pain in a way no one else did.
“I have nothing.”
“There are other pacifist monks you can go to in the Chessly Hills,” Gemma reminded him. “I’m sure they will take you in.”
“Or you can come with us,” Keeley offered.
“What?” Gemma asked, trying not to sound as annoyed as she felt.
Keeley glared at her sister. “We can’t just send him off to people he doesn’t know.”
“He doesn’t know us.”
“He knows us now.”
“He hates me.”
“He doesn’t hate anyone.”
“How do you know?”
“I know!”
“Can I speak to you in private for a moment?”
“No.” She smiled at the monk. “Please. You can stay with us until you decide what you want to do and where you want to go. It will also give my sister more time to look into what happened to your order’s artifacts.”
“They’ve probably been destroyed.”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Gemma knew she should have waited to say that to Keeley in private. Especially when both of them looked up at her in horror, the monk’s eyes filling with tears and her sister’s eyes filling with rage.
“Excuse us a moment, Brother,” Keeley said before standing, grabbing Gemma’s arm, and yanking her from the kitchens.
“What is wrong with you? Do you need some ale?”
Gemma yanked her arm away. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Isn’t it time for you to meet Keran at the pub? Are you angry because we’re holding you back from a good drinking session? Is that why you said something so ridiculously cruel to that poor man?”
“I do not need a drink,” she bit out.
“Since when?”
“Since ever! I am not a drinker!”
“Oh . . . Gemma.”
Gemma scrubbed her hands across her face. She decided not to have this discussion with her sister in a monastery. She simply wouldn’t.
“Can we just go?”
“So you can drink?”
“No.” She barely stopped herself from slapping her sister... again. “Because there is much we need to discuss.”
“Fine. But he’s coming with us.”
“I don’t care. But you’ll need to find a place where he can greet the suns every morning.”
“And where you won’t terrify him every day?”
Gemma shrugged. “Yes.”
* * *
By the time they’d returned to what the locals liked to call “Forgetown,” the horses and equipment had been unloaded, hunger and thirst sated, and the majority of blood and gore removed, it was late into the night. The small core of Keeley’s “advisors,” as she liked to call them, found themselves at the hall table discussing the sobbing monk and his dead brothers.
“I don’t understand what the problem is,” Laila admitted after Gemma gave a very short and not very helpful explanation about the monastery’s artifacts. “Thieves stole their artifacts. Perhaps they stole them on order.”
“Why would anyone do that?” Gemma flatly asked.
“I don’t know. Why would anyone keep the bottom jaw of a dead man?” Laila asked, referring to one of the artifacts the monk had described.
“A dead monk.”
“You say that as if it’s supposed to mean something to me.”
“There’s power in religious artifacts.”
“Including a jawbone?”
“Yes.”
Quinn rested his elbow on the table and his chin on his raised fist before asking Gemma, “What artifacts does your order have?”
“None of your business.”
“Jawbones?”
“We believe in the power of steel. Not in the power of a dead man’s teeth.”
“Oooh,” Quinn teased, “such a tone about other religious orders. Such a snob.”
“Shut up, Amichai.”
“Don’t get snippy with him because you haven’t had your nightly drink yet,” Keeley snarled.
Gemma slammed her fists on the table, and the power of the blow vibrated up through Quinn’s elbows, up his arms, through his fingers, and into his head. It was one of the most intense things he’d felt in ages. There was so much strength behind the motion.
“I am not drinking!”
Laila and Caid simply blew out breaths but Keeley rolled her eyes in disbelief.
“Oh, come on!” the queen cried out. “No one believes that for a moment! You’re at the pub every night with Keran!”
“I go there to think.”
“At the pub?”
“I like the noise.”
“And the drink.”
“I get a pint. I nurse it.”
“Then why have you been acting so strangely?”
“I have a lot on my mind.”
“Like what?”
“Everything!”
“Think you can be more specific?”
“Can we get back to the artifacts?” Laila cut in before the sisters began rolling around on the ground again. “I really just need to go to bed and I am not in the mood to figure out if Gemma’s in denial about her drinking problem.”
“I do not have a drink—” Gemma cut herself off, shook her head. “I’m not doing this with you lot. I’m not.” She took in a breath. Let it out. “Every religious order has artifacts of its own. They all have their own power. Some more than others. Some can barely heal a spider bite. Others can destroy the countryside between here and the Baleful Forests.”
“What could the pacifist monks’ artifacts do?”
“I don’t know. They’ve never been very friendly with the orders of the war monks.”
“How shocking,” Keeley said with great sarcasm. “Considering how that brother ran from you screaming.”
Gemma raised her forefinger toward her sister. Telling her with that one finger to stop talking.
That’s when Quinn chuckled a little.
Fed up with everyone, it seemed, Gemma turned her glare on him.
“What’s so funny?” she practically snarled.
“Well . . . it’s not funny as in funny. But funny as in terrifying.”
“What’s that?” Laila asked.
“The thought of Beatrix getting her hands on something that powerful.”
He’d spoken without much thought but it was as if he was in his horse form and had lifted his tail and dropped a load of shit into the middle of the dining table.
Laila leaned forward, her gaze locking on Gemma. “Beatrix . . . She wouldn’t toy with the gods like that, would she? Going after their people?”
Gemma and Keeley, no longer bothering to be angry at each other, exchanged glances.
“Well,” Gemma began, “Beatrix was never one for religion.”
“What does that mean?” Caid asked.
Keeley shrugged. “She never involved herself in the harvest rituals or the festivals.”
“Does she believe in the gods?” Quinn asked.
“She believes,” Keeley said.
“But,” Gemma quickly added, “she doesn’t really worship any god.”
“At all?”
“Not really.”
“She went through a research phase,” Keeley explained. “Read lots of books on many gods, but when she was about fourteen, I think, she finally said she didn’t find any that she agreed with. Or liked, for that matter, and she wasn’t about to cut a bull’s throat because all that blood was just messy.”
“Do you have to sacrifice a bull to all your human gods?”
Gemma shook her head, clearly annoyed. “No. That was such a horseshit answer.”
“So this attack could have been Beatrix.”
“This could have been something Beatrix ordered,” Gemma clarified. “But why that particular religious sect . . . ? It’s not like they’re well known for their power.”
Quinn shrugged and again, without much thought, simply suggested, “Maybe there are others.”
“Maybe what?”
“Other sects. Other orders. That she wants artifacts from.”
And again, it was that “he’d-just-shat-on-the-dinner-table” look.
Gemma focused on the table for several long seconds before she said to her sister, “I’ll get a list together.”
“I’ll get the horses. You three meet us out front in five minutes.”
Laila let them get about ten feet from the table before she called out, “Oy. What are you two royal idiots doing?”
When it was just the five of them alone, she never bothered with the niceties of court. Not anymore. These days they often didn’t have the time.
“We’re going to—”
“You two aren’t going to do anything,” Laila said. “Do you know why?”
“Because we’re tired after a day of butchery?” Keeley asked.
“No, my luv. Because you’re queen. And you,” she said, pointing at Gemma, her eyes rolling before her sister could even finish, “are the princess and a very valuable general. The two of you need to be”—and both Quinn and Caid leaned away because they knew what was coming—“here!” she bellowed, most likely waking up the entire household.
And with that, she stood. The chair she’d been sitting in flew back and hit the floor hard.
“We continue to go through this every few weeks! You two think you can just saunter in and out of the queendom that you rule! Do you see my mum roaming around here? Hanging out with the children she adores? No! Do you know why? Because this is not where she rules! She stays with her people! So, no, my dearest human friends! You can’t go traipsing off in the middle of the night to check on some random list of religious orders to see if your sister has attacked them too! Because your work is here! Is there a chance, possibly, that you—finally!—understand what I am telling you?”
The two royals looked at each other and, slowly, made their way back to the table.